Prologue

She was already at the fire when the clock below stairs struck two, and whatever decisions there had been to make lay hours behind her.

She knelt on the library hearth, with the house asleep over her head, and fed the folded paper to the flame. A length of holly lay dark along the mantel, put there for Christmas and forgotten with everything else when the household went to bed. She pinned the paper flat with the poker against the draught from the chimney. In the light of its own burning she read the words again, though she had gone over them three times already that night and had them by heart.

After tonight I am done with this house and every word written in it, and I am not sorry. I have gone to some trouble to make certain.

A man was in the doorway.

The draught at her back shifted, and that was all the warning she had. She bent lower over the grate. At the edge of her eye there was a tall figure and the dark bulk of a travelling coat, and whoever wore it stood silent.

Now the hand on the shoulder, the house woken, the thing named aloud that hanging is the price of. Let it come.

He stayed on the threshold. She fed the last of the paper down under his eyes and he let her finish. When she looked round, the doorway was empty, and she had not heard him go.

The paper was ash. She set the poker straight against the fender and raked the coals over the black flakes, so that by morning the grate would show a banked fire and a housemaid’s tidiness. She brushed the grey flecks from her skirt and from the knees of her stockings, and warmed her palms at the embers before she rose.

My hands are steady. I will remember that they held firm tonight, when they had every right to shake.

They came for her at the back door before light.

“You will open your box this minute, and stand clear of it while I watch.” The housekeeper had a candle in her fist, her wrapper pinned crooked at the neck and her hair still in its night plait. A draught came in under the door and struck up through the thin soles of her shoes, and the shadows jumped along the whitewashed wall.

“It is open, ma’am,” she said. “There is only my own in it.”

The woman turned the box out onto the flags all the same, the whole poor heap of her things, and knelt to go through the lot, shaking out stockings and pulling the pockets of an apron inside out.

“The mistress’s brooch is gone from the blue room, taken in the night. And you the one below stairs with cause to be about the house after the family was down.”

“I have been nowhere near it, ma’am,” she said.

“You have been up and about in the dark, for here you stand dressed before it is light.” She shook out a folded shift and let it drop. “A decent girl is in her bed at this hour.”

“I am not a thief, ma’am.”

“They all say it, and in that same flat voice. You had the run of the sickroom this fortnight, in and out at all hours, and who watches a nurse?”

“I did right by him,” she said, “whatever else is said of me.”

“You wormed your way into his confidence, more like, and helped yourself on the way back out.” The housekeeper got up off her knees with a hand on the dresser. “All my years in service, and it is always the quiet trusted ones.”

She will turn me off for the wrong crime and leave the real one safe. I could put her right in a sentence, with a rope at one end of it and a child at the other.

“Well? What have you to say for yourself?”

She knelt and began to put her things back, the shift first, folded along its old creases. Her comb went in after, and the darned apron.

“Your sort always go dumb once the box is turned out.” The housekeeper set her candle down on the dresser. “The young master will not have you charged, out of respect for the house at such a time, with his father lying as he lies above us. You may be grateful for it from the other side of the gate.”

“Where am I to go, at this hour, in this cold?” She was buckling the strap as she asked.

“You are to be gone before the family is up, and you are to have no character from this house, now or ever. And if you have any wit left, you will go far off, change your name, and count yourself fortunate you were let go at all.”

“Is that all, ma’am?”

“It is more mercy than you have any right to,” the housekeeper said, “and you may chew on it on the road.”

She lifted the box. Behind her the house kept its lit windows, its dying man and its sleeping child, and all of it belonged to other people. One small piece of it was safe because of her, and nobody inside would ever know.

She walked out into the dark with the one box on her hip, and took the lane towards the road with her face set away from the house.

Chapter One

Six years later

The trunks came down before she did, as they had at any house Mrs Bartrum ever visited. Marianne waited on the box while the footmen handed down the heavy ones first, then the lighter, then, with both hands, the round band-box of caps. Only when the last of the luggage stood safe on the gravel did a hand come up for her. She took it and came down stiff at the knee, for the frost had got into her past Ripon and settled there. Their own horses stood steaming in the traces with their heads low, and the coachman was down already and working at a buckle with fingers too numb for the work.

Better the box than the seat inside. On the box nobody asks you to be grateful for the draught.

Aldersey Court stood over her, a long grey front with more lit windows than any one family could want, and she looked along the rows of them with a servant’s eye for the cost in candles. Grooms were running a fresh team round towards the stables, and a cart of cut greenery stood under the arch, waiting to be unloaded. Every window on the ground floor burnt, and half of those above, and the smoke from a dozen chimneys went straight up into the dusk. Somewhere inside, something sweet was boiling with spice, and the smell came warm through the open side door whenever a servant passed.

“You will be the companion,” said a woman at her elbow.

“I will, ma’am, if the band-box is anything to go by.” Marianne put a hand to her bonnet, which the wind had pushed askew.

“Mrs Denby. I keep the house.” She was upright and grey, with a ring of keys at her waist and a scowl for the weather. “You came up on the box, then?”

“The seats inside were spoken for,” Marianne said.

“They always are, for our sort.” Mrs Denby turned up her collar. “You will come in at the side, and use that door for as long as you are here.”

“I had supposed as much, ma’am.”

“You have the look of one who has done this before. Where were you last?”

“With her, ma’am.” Marianne tipped her head at the carriage, where Mrs Bartrum’s shawls were being handed down. “And before her, in houses too small for anyone here to have heard of.”

“And a character from one of those, I suppose.” Her keys chinked as she shifted her weight.

“None, ma’am,” Marianne said, and let the housekeeper look at her for as long as she liked.

“You say it with a straight face.”

“Blushing never got me a place, ma’am.”

Mrs Denby considered her, and then turned for the house with a dry laugh. “Come in out of the cold.”

Marianne followed her into a stone-flagged passage, warmer than the yard for the kitchen fires at the far end, and looked about her as she went. The floor had been scrubbed within the week, the skirting wore a month’s dust, and the candle-boxes on the shelf stood near empty. By the scullery door, a boy sat on an upturned crate, blacking a row of boots that were none of them his. The smell of roasting fowl and scorched fat came down the passage from the kitchens, and over that a woman’s voice calling for more hot water.

A house short of maids and long of rooms. They have a great doing coming, and they mean to meet it with the girls they already keep.

“You will have your hands full with the old lady, I dare say,” Mrs Denby said.

“I have had six years’ practice, ma’am.”

Mrs Denby snorted. “Six years of it? You are a saint or a fool, and this house has room for neither.”

“Merely a woman with nowhere better to be, ma’am.”

“Well. That I can believe.” Mrs Denby looked back over her shoulder. “She will ring for you at all hours and blame you for the roads. Her own drops as well, when she has taken too many. You know the sort.”

“I know this one.”

“You have the one box?”

Marianne shifted it against her hip by way of an answer, and the housekeeper grunted.

“That is a mercy, for the maids are three to a bed as things stand.” She stopped at the foot of a narrow stair. “Now attend, for I shall say it the once. You sleep in the north attic, with Nan and the still-room maid. You use these back steps, and leave the great staircase to the family. You take your meals in the hall after the upper servants have done. You stay out of the library and the gun-room and the blue saloon, you keep to the back of the house of a morning, and you carry no tales between the family and the town.”

Marianne said yes to each item, and once more at the end, to spare the housekeeper going over any part twice.

“Is all that understood?”

“Every word, ma’am,” said Marianne, who could have recited the list before Mrs Denby began it.

“You would be astonished how many say so and are lost by the second landing,” Mrs Denby said, and started up.

The back stair was bare and worn pale down the middle, where generations of feet had carried up coal, cans and covered dishes. This was a servants’ way and looked it, and Marianne liked it the better for that.

The attic under the slates was clean and bitterly cold, with one bed already claimed by a folded shawl, a truckle set close alongside, and a single hook on the wall for a gown. The ewer on the washstand had frozen across the top. She broke the ice with her knuckles and wetted her face, and the shock of the water brought the blood up into her cheeks. She pushed her box beneath the low bed and left it strapped, as she always did on a first night in a strange house. For a while she stood listening to the house below her, its fires, its voices and its errands, all of them other people’s.

“The mistress wants you the moment you are down,” Mrs Denby said from the doorway. “She has been asking after you since Ripon.”

“Then I had better go straight to her.” Marianne shook out her skirts, which had creased on the box into a set of hard pleats.

“Off you go, then.” The housekeeper’s voice came a shade easier. “There is broth downstairs when she has done with you. See that you eat it. You have come a raw way tonight.”

“Thank you, Mrs Denby.”

“You may save that. It is only what the servants left.”

Marianne went down with a hand on the rope rail, for the treads were narrow and the lamp on the lower landing had gone out. In the great hall the candles had been lit against the early dark, and a footman stood at the long table below the stairs, sorting the day’s post into a silver tray. She crossed behind him with her eyes lowered and her step light.

Then the letter at the top of the pile caught her eye, and she stopped.

The direction read Tarrant. There in the middle of the hall, in full view of anyone passing, she bent closer to check, and the footman’s head came round.

Of every name in England, that one, lying on a tray in this house among the invitations and the bills.

“Lost, are you?” the footman said. He was young and sandy, and freckled across the nose.

“Only slow.” Marianne took her eyes off the tray. “Which way is Mrs Bartrum?”

“Blue saloon, second on your left. It’s forbidden you after tonight, so have your look while you can.”

“I have had my share of rooms I was shut out of,” she said.

“Have you now. Then you’ll do very well here, for the place is full of them.” He set the last letter down and grinned. “Cobb. If ever you want a thing carried. You’ve come in the thick of it, mind. Lawyers, mostly, and a widow, and one gentleman with a very good opinion of himself, and the house turned upside down for the lot of them. You’ll meet them soon enough. Everybody does.”

“Thank you, Cobb,” she said, and left him to his letters.

As she crossed the hall, she carried her hands open at her sides, as she always held them among strangers. Across the back of the left wrist lay an old burn, pale, shining and long healed over, and she let any eye find it that cared to look. She had paid dearly for the habit of open hands, and she kept to it still.

The house was filling as she went. Corded trunks stood along the wall, a maid crossed the passage with an armful of holly, and on the floor above a door opened on laughter and closed again upon it. She had watched other families keep Christmas in house after house, from the back stairs, and she walked on through this one at a companion’s brisk pace, into the blue saloon she had been forbidden an hour before.

The room was gold-lit and close, with coals heaped a good deal higher than the evening called for. Mrs Bartrum sat by the hearth with her feet upon a stool. She had long ago settled into the belief that the world had used her hardly and must be brought to make amends by degrees.

“There you are. I have been half frozen and quite alone this hour together.”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am.” Marianne drew off her gloves. “We were held up past Ripon.”

“Everyone is delayed on that road, and meanwhile I am left among strangers, with my drops in a bag at the far side of the room.” She put out a hand for the shawl that had slipped from one shoulder, and Marianne caught the fringe and settled it back into place before it could reach the carpet.

“You see how I am placed,” Mrs Bartrum said. “You see what I am made to bear.”

“I do, ma’am,” said Marianne, and moved the fire-screen an inch nearer the stool.

“The jolting of that coach has undone me entirely. I shall be a week getting over it, and by then the party will have taken against me, for want of my being able to shine at the first.”

“You are tired, ma’am,” Marianne said. “A night’s sleep will mend it.”

“Too late to signify. These affairs are decided in the first evening, and I have missed it sitting here with my feet up.”

“You will be down among them in the morning, ma’am.”

“I shall, and you will have my grey gown pressed and ready before I ring. If I cannot shine tonight, I will at least come down in a gown fresh from the iron.”

Marianne promised, and made a private note of the hem, which had a tear in it Mrs Bartrum had overlooked.

A footman had come in with a scuttle of coal, and Mrs Bartrum waited until he was well within hearing before she spoke again. To her mind, a kindness that no servant overheard was wasted.

“I hope you know your good fortune, Prescott. Find me another house in all Yorkshire that would take a woman with no character to her name, and keep her, and carry her about the country in comfort. You ought to be sensible of it.”

“Deeply, ma’am,” said Marianne, to the coal. The footman made up the fire from his scuttle and went out with his ears gone red.

“I doubt it. But I live in hope.” She settled back against the cushions, well content. “Now. Whose roof have you brought me under? You will have had it all below stairs already. You always do.”

“Only a little, ma’am. I have been an hour in the house.”

Mrs Bartrum waved that away. “That is time enough for you. Well then. Whose house is it?”

“The Duke of Aldersey’s, ma’am. He came into the title lately, and he is young for it.”

Mrs Bartrum sat up among the cushions. “Is he married?”

Marianne picked a thread off her own sleeve. “I could not say.”

“You could, had you troubled to ask, but you would sooner talk to footmen about coal.” Mrs Bartrum sniffed. “And the party?”

“A large one, ma’am,” Marianne said. “There is a deal of greenery come in for it, and a good many rooms opened up.”

“They will hang it to the rafters and call the business Christmas, and it will cheer only those who were warm before. And I am to sit at the edge of the gaiety and be passed over, as I am in every house they carry me to.”

“You will have me beside you, ma’am.” Marianne took the empty glass from the table at her elbow before it could be knocked over.

“That is what you are for. You would be earning your wages at it, too, if I gave you any.” She laughed at her own wit. “Go and get your broth. And, Prescott, learn me whether the duke has a wife before you trouble your head with anything else.”

I could tell her whose name is lying on the post downstairs, and why it matters to me, Marianne thought. She would put me out into the cold before I had finished.

She said that she would find out, and set the glass on the tray by the door. The name that had stopped her in the hall she kept back. It was hers, and she could not yet trust her voice to say it evenly.

Chapter Two

“They are all coming, that is the strange part of it,” Nan said. “Christmas, and half the shire besides, and not one of them come to enjoy it.”

The servants’ hall was low-ceilinged and warm, smelling of mutton fat and of the broth Marianne had been grateful for. She sat at the near end with Nan’s torn apron spread across her knee, mending it by the candle they had among them. A pot of tea stewed black on the hob behind her, and the hall cat lay wedged against the fender with its paws tucked under. She liked her hands busy, and a companion who sat with them folded in her lap was soon remarked upon.

“They’d be fools to try,” said Cobb, from the bench across the board. “There’ll be precious little dancing in this house before January, and less after. You may mark that.”

“But why ever not?” Nan said. “It is a great house, and it is Christmas, and there ought to be music at the very least.”

“Aye, and a goose, and snapdragon, and goodwill all round to follow the pudding.”

“Cobb, give over,” Nan said, and threw a crust at him.

He caught it and ate it, and spoke with his mouth full. “Call it a party if you like, Nan, as the cards on the tray do. It is lawyers, with a bit of holly stuck on.”

Nan pulled a face. “At Christmas?”

“The season is only when it happens to fall. There is a day they must all be done by, and so they are to sit about in the best rooms being wretched till they get to it.”

“And how do you come to know so much of it?”

“Susan had it from the steward’s man. You may ask Susan.”

“I had it from nobody at all,” said Susan, the still-room maid, who was small and cross and up to her elbows in a bowl of oranges. “I keep my ears shut and my hands full, and I’d thank the pair of you to let me get these cloves in.” She pushed them home with her thumb in neat rings round the fruit, and the sharp smell of peel came down the length of the table.

Marianne pulled the needle through and kept her head bent over the work, as she had at servants’ tables from one end of Yorkshire to the other, and listened. Nan leant across for the mending, and Marianne moved it out of her way with her eyes on the stitch.

“You will prick your thumb and bleed upon it, and then I have the two jobs,” Marianne said.

“You sound like Mrs Denby herself.”

“I have been Mrs Denby in more houses than this one, and in one or two a deal worse.”

“Were you a lady’s maid before, then?”

“I was whatever the house had want of that week.” Marianne held the apron up to the candle. “Sickroom, still-room, the nursery. It is all one, if you are willing enough.”

Cobb laughed at that, before he recalled he was set on gloom for the rest of the season.

“Is the duke a hard master, then?” Nan asked. “For all the grandness of it?”

“He’s fair, worse luck.” Cobb leant back until the bench creaked. “You can’t so much as curse him over your beer but you feel a fool after.”

“You would grumble on holiday.”

“I should have the leisure for it then.”

Nan laughed, Susan jabbed a clove into an orange, and Marianne bent lower over the stitching to hide her smile, for she had no wish to be looked at twice.

“There is a widow in it.” Nan had dropped her voice, warming to the telling. “Coming in a day or two. A young one, Lady Tarrant, from the dower house at Threlkeld.”

Lady Tarrant, Marianne thought, her stomach tightening. She believes to this hour that I took her brooch out of the blue room while her husband lay dying upstairs.

“And she brings her little girl along with her,” Nan said.

The little one was in leading strings when I left that house, and I have thought of her every winter since.

“A widow and a small child at Christmas, set down among lawyers,” Cobb said. “There’s your gaiety for you, Nan.”

“But what is it they are all quarrelling over?” Nan said. “Money’s at the bottom of it, I’ll be bound, with all these black coats about.”

“A fund, and a house, and who is to have the both,” Cobb said. “The widow has a portion settled on her, or she had. And there is a paper come to light that says perhaps she never did. That’s the size of it, near enough, and the rest is for the lawyers to chew over.”

“To take a widow’s portion off her at Christmas! It’s a sin.”

Cobb shrugged. “The wigs have another word for it. They call it the law, and send in the bill.”

“And what has the duke to do with any of it,” Nan said, “that it must land at his door and spoil his Christmas along with everybody’s?”

“He holds the strings of it. Trustee, the lawyers say. It is his to settle, and his name upon it if it goes wrong.”

“A heavy thing to be handed, and him so young.”

“Grave with it, too.” Cobb picked a clove out of Susan’s bowl and got his knuckles rapped. “Not a laugh out of him since the old duke went into the ground, and I’ve looked.”

“He and this house are well matched, then,” said Susan, from her oranges, and set another clove.

Marianne took a fresh length of thread and let the talk run on over her.

A trustee, then, a man under this roof whose office may be to weigh the very paper I set alight. I shall keep out of his road, and out of all of theirs.

She knotted the thread too tight and had to pick the knot loose again with the point of the needle.

“A gentleman is one thing and a widow is another, and this house knows the difference,” Nan said. “You have only to look at who is given which room.”

“What do you mean, by the rooms?” Marianne asked, and was sorry the instant the words were out, for she had a strict rule against asking, unbroken in every house until this one.

Nan took the question up gladly enough. “Why, the widow is put away in the old wing, where the chimneys smoke half the winter. And the one who is coming after her has the best of all the guest rooms, with his fire lit and kept up days before he is so much as arrived.”

“What gentleman is that?” Marianne’s eyes were on the seam as she asked.

“Mr Tarrant. Mr Ambrose Tarrant. Susan saw the room made ready for him.”

“I saw a bed aired,” Susan said. “Who is to sleep in it, I never said.”

Marianne’s needle went in crooked. She drew it out again and put the point in where it belonged.

Nan flapped a hand at Susan and leant in over the table. “Pleasant, they say he is. The steward’s man swears he is the easiest gentleman in England to sit beside at dinner. Always a kind word for a servant. Not like some I could name.”

Cobb tore his bread across. “I’d watch that sort. I had a master at my last place who gave me good morning every day of the year. He sent my brother packing over a spoon in the same good humour, and it was found in the knife-box a week after.”

“Cobb, you are nothing but a raven in a livery coat.”

“I’m a footman. I carry up their hot water before they’ve got their faces on, and I know what I know.”

Marianne bit off the thread, turned the apron over and set to work upon the second tear. She put the names in order as she sewed. There was the widow with her little girl, a gentleman given the best room before he had even come, and a day by which the whole business must be done. She had asked one question too many already, and she left the day unasked.

She learnt the day the next morning, by accident, when the house had woken into a great bustle of arriving and Marianne was one more pair of hands inside it, busy and unregarded. Trunks were going up the front stairs on the footmen’s backs, and a carriage was already turning on the gravel under the windows. She had been sent round by the kitchen passage with a jug of hot water for a guest who, when she reached his door, had already been served by his own man, and so she carried it down again.

On the way, she passed the service door beside the steward’s little room, a door whose latch had been broken time out of mind. Two men were talking on the other side of it. One voice she knew at once for Mr Weller’s, the steward, a dry Yorkshire voice she had already marked and set aside, and the other belonged to a stranger.

She stood where she was, and broke on the instant a rule of her own about listening at doors. She set her back to the wall beside the frame, where her shadow would fall along the boards and away from the gap. The plaster was damp through her gown, and the jug had begun to lose its heat against her side.

“It must be settled by the first of January,” Weller was saying. “That is where the difficulty lies, and there is no getting round the date of it.”

“And if it runs past?”

A coal settled in the grate, and the poker rang on the bars. “It goes to the courts, and it may be years before anybody sees the end of it.” A drawer scraped shut. “His Grace will have it done here, before the day, and in this house.”

“And what does it turn on?”

“On a draft the attorney’s man found lately in a dead man’s office drawer.”

“Of what, precisely?”

A pen scratched and stopped. “A codicil, as they call it, from the year the old man died. It struck a fund clean out of a will, and a great deal else along with it, if it is made to stand.”

The other man cleared his throat before he asked. “And will the lawyers take a mere draft for the real article?”

“That is for the gentlemen in their wigs to say. There has been a caveat entered since the autumn, and the old will is stuck fast until it is lifted.” Weller’s chair went back. “They have till the new year to say whether the thing is good or no, and meanwhile we are all of us to smile and pass the pudding.”

Marianne carried the jug on before anyone could come upon her loitering. Her hand was steady on the handle, and she watched the water in it all the way to the turn of the stair.

She went over the words as she walked, the codicil, the draft in the dead man’s drawer, the caveat, the fund that would rise or fall with the new year. Every one of them belonged to the story she had walked away from at Threlkeld, and she could have set them in their order. She had held the thing itself down under the poker until the last flake went black, and the business had come up again out of a drawer, to be argued over by men who had been abed that night.

She took the jug through to the room where Susan did the preserving and set it down on the dresser. Susan had gone and left the oranges in their bowl, studded now with cloves. The room smelled of Christmas and of wet stone. She laid her hand flat on the lip of the sink and left it there until the chill came up through her palm.

They think a companion has come to carry shawls. What has come is the woman who read that paper and put it in the fire, while a man stood in the doorway and watched her do it. I may tell none of it, for the telling would hang me.

She had walked out of that house once before, at dawn, with a single box to her name, and had long since stopped expecting to hear of Threlkeld again. The holly for the passages lay heaped on the table beside the oranges. She took up a branch and began to strip the lower leaves from it. They were stiff and glossy under her fingers, and she dropped them into the basin at her elbow. When she pricked her thumb, she sucked the bead of blood away and reached for the next.