The letter arrived on a Thursday, from a solicitor, and Margaret Ward knew what it was before she broke the seal. She had seen the shape of her leaving decided somewhere above the green baize door a fortnight earlier, on the night she had been the one to lock the study where the Duke’s cousin had died. There had been papers in that room, letters and a locked dispatch box, and Margaret, who had held the key, had seen enough of the outsides of things to understand the Duke would not want a housekeeper who had been alone with them. The letter was not from the Duke’s own voice but from his solicitor, offering her, in lieu of a character reference and any further wages, the deed to a property described as a small manor house of some antiquity, currently untenanted and requiring a degree of attention.
She was to sign a paper releasing the Duke from all further obligation, and she was to be gone from the London house by the end of the week. She read the letter twice, folded it into thirds, and went upstairs to pack her trunk. She took only what belonged to her: three dresses, a pair of stout boots, a copy of Mrs. Beeton that had been a gift, a small tin of savings amounting to four pounds and one shilling, and the folded deed, which she placed at the bottom of the trunk beneath her mended gray cloak.
In her pocket she kept the small bone-handled needle case that had belonged to a woman who had never once told her she loved her, but had left it to her with a note that said only, for Margaret, who will know what to do with it. She did not weep in her room that night, because weeping did not warm a room or pay a coach fare. She did not protest, because protest from a woman in her position was only another form of humiliation. She sat at her desk and wrote a careful list of everything she would need to reach Northland, and costed it out to the last penny.
In the morning, the undercook set her porridge without meeting her eye, and the housemaids who had come to her for advice a week earlier spoke around her as if she were furniture already carried out. Margaret ate slowly, drank her tea, and carried her own bowl to the scullery, a thing a junior housekeeper was not required to do. The solicitor came at eleven. He did not offer her a chair.
He laid the paper on the writing table and told her, in the tone of a man reading a railway timetable, that it released his grace from any and all further claim, financial or moral, arising from her employment. Margaret read the paper through once, noted the phrase in full and final satisfaction of all obligations whatsoever, and signed her name in the careful hand she had been taught when she was fifteen. She blotted the ink and stepped back. The solicitor gathered the paper, nodded at nothing, and departed.
No one came to see her out. A footman she did not know carried her trunk up the area steps and set it on the pavement, touched his hat, and went back inside. The door closed. She stood on the pavement of a square she had swept six mornings a week for two years, with her trunk at her feet and the folded deed inside it.
Then she picked up the trunk by its worn leather handle and began to walk toward the cab at the corner, because standing still on a London pavement in November was not a thing that improved a woman’s circumstances. She took a hansom to King’s Cross, and a third-class ticket north, and a branch line and carrier’s cart for the last twenty miles to a place called Briar Ridge. When she had paid for the tickets, and a mutton pie, and a twist of tea, she had three pounds, one shilling, and fourpence left in the tin. She watched London slide away through the carriage glass, and then the fields and the flat gray of the north road, and the country grew steeper and darker as they went north, and the stone in the field walls changed from pale limestone to a harder, darker stone she did not know the name of.
She reached a village after dark and slept sitting up in the station waiting room, with her trunk pressed against her knees and the needle case held in her closed hand inside her pocket. In the morning she found a man with a cart who was going out toward Briar Ridge and would take her the last twelve miles for two shillings. The road climbed. The hedges gave way to dry stone walls the color of wet iron, and the fields to rougher pasture, and the pasture to moor.
The carrier told her, when she asked, that the house she had come to see was somewhere on that high ground, and he said its name and shook his head once slowly, in the way of a man who has known a place for longer than he wishes to. They came upon the house at just past noon. Margaret saw it first from a quarter mile off, standing alone on a low rise above a fold in the moor. Even at that distance she could see the roof line was broken and one chimney had begun to lean.
The carrier set her trunk down inside the rusted gate, touched his hat, and asked whether she wished him to come back that way in the evening. Margaret thanked him and said she did not. She stood alone on the weed-cracked drive and looked at what the Duke had given her to be rid of. The house was of local gray stone, laid in courses that had settled unevenly, so the whole west gable leaned perhaps three inches out of true.
It stood two stories high with attics above, seven bays across the front. The roof was slate, with fourteen slates missing from the front slope alone and the lead of the valleys split in three places. Some windows were intact, some starred, four boarded with gray planks. Ivy had grown up the east wall into the guttering, and a rowan tree had taken root in the parapet above the porch.
She lifted her trunk and carried it up the drive, and fitted the great iron key into the lock. The door opened inward on hinges that groaned but held. The hall was long and stone-flagged, with a staircase of oak at the far end and a plaster ceiling blackened at one corner where water had come in. The smell was of damp lime and cold soot and mice.
She went through the house room by room that first afternoon, in her cloak, because it was colder inside than out, and wrote in her small book what she found. Eleven rooms usable with work. Four with fallen ceilings. One wing at the north end, shut off behind a heavy paneled door that would not open to her key.
The steward had mentioned that wing in a single line of his letter: closed these many years, not fit. She stood before that door in the failing light and laid her hand flat upon it, and thought, not tonight. Then she turned back to the kitchen to lay a fire. She lived in the kitchen the first three weeks, sleeping on a straw pallet by the range, which she coaxed by degrees back into service, cleaning outward from that one warm room into the scullery, the dairy, the parlor, the hall.
She swept and scrubbed and scoured the copper with sand and vinegar. She pulled ivy from the east window and glazed two panes with glass bought for a shilling from a builder in the village three miles off. She kept her accounts each night by candlelight, and every night before she slept she took the bone-handled needle case from her pocket and set it upon the shelf above the range and looked at it a moment, and then blew out the light. On the twenty-second morning, with no more excuses, she took the crowbar the builder had lent her and went to the paneled door of the north wing.
The door was locked, the key long lost, and Margaret worked the flat of the crowbar into the jam and levered gently, patiently, the way her old teacher had taught her to lift the lid of a warped chest without splitting it. After some minutes the lock plate gave, and the door swung inward into a corridor smelling of dust so old it had lost its damp. At the end of the corridor was a single room. She found a small chamber paneled in oak from floor to ceiling, a narrow bed frame without its mattress, a writing desk under a shrouded window, and a fireplace bricked up flush to the chimney breast with red brick faded pink, its mortar dry as chalk.
She stood in the doorway with the candle in her hand and understood that this was the thing. She knelt at the hearth and worked the bricks away one by one, setting each in a bucket so as not to break the hearth stone. Behind the seventh course, the crowbar met air. Set upon a slate slab within the old fire opening were three things.
An oak box banded with iron. A leather wallet tied with tape and wrapped in a scrap of blue silk gone almost gray with age. And something small and hard. Margaret sat back on her heels in the dust of a hundred years and did not reach in at once.
She wiped her hands on her apron and fetched a clean cloth from the kitchen and spread it on the boards. Then, one at a time, she lifted the three things out and laid them on the cloth. The oak box was heavy for its size. When she raised its lid, the candle showed her rows of gold sovereigns laid in tissue, and beneath the tissue more coins, and beneath those a small chamois bag, which gave into her palm four rings, a pair of eardrops set with garnets, and a plain gold locket with no picture inside it.
She counted the sovereigns twice, sitting on the floor, and made it one hundred and sixty-two, which was more money than she had held in her life. The leather wallet held two folded papers, a deed and a codicil, both under seal, and a letter. The letter was written on good rag paper folded in three. She turned it to the candle and read: To whoever finds this, and I hope with all my heart it will be a woman, and a young one.
My name is Isabelle Hartwell. I was born in 1743 and I have lived in this house since I was seventeen and I am now sixty and past mending. I was brought here as ward to the family whose name is on the front of the deed enclosed, and I was kept here quietly because the marriage that made me their kin was not one they wished the world to know of. I have understood this a long time and made my peace with it.
I have not been unkind to, I have been forgotten, which is a slower thing. I have taught myself to keep bees and to keep books, and I have saved from my small allowance every quarter what I could, and what I could not save, I earned by fine needlework sent under another name to a warehouse in Durham. The sovereigns in the box are mine, honestly come by, and the rings were my mother’s. The papers with them will be of use to the person who reads this, for they show what was done, and by whom, and they may be shown, or they may be burned as you see fit.
Only do not lose them, for they are the only proof there is. I leave all of this to you, whoever you are, and I ask only that you use the house well and be warm in it and think of me sometimes when the wind is in the north. I hoped for a daughter and never had one. I hope you will do.
The letter was signed Isabelle Hartwell in a hand very like Margaret’s own careful copying hand, and dated the tenth of March 1803. Margaret read it through twice, then set it down and unwrapped the scrap of blue silk in her lap. Inside was a silver thimble, worn smooth at its crown by long use, and marked inside the rim with the initials I. H.
Margaret held it in the palm of one hand, and with the other took the bone-handled needle case from her pocket, and set them side by side upon the cloth on the dusty floor of the north wing, and sat there a long time, without moving, while the candle guttered and the wind went over the roof above her head. In the morning she rewrapped the sovereigns in a linen square, put them into the oak box, and hid the box beneath a loose flag in the scullery. The papers she folded into oilcloth and laid at the bottom of her trunk under the mended gray cloak. The letter she folded smaller and kept in the pocket with the needle case.
Then she walked the three miles into the village with two sovereigns changed into shillings and began to spend, carefully and in the right order. She went first to the builder who had lent her the crowbar, a man named John Redmine, a slater by trade. She asked him what it would cost to make the front slope of the roof watertight before winter. He came out the following morning in his cart with his boy and a load of good slate, and spent four days on the roof, recutting slates to size and dressing the split lead of the valleys until the whole front slope shed water again as it had been meant to do.
She paid him seven pounds and four shillings. He shook her hand at the gate and told her the west gable would need underpinning before another winter, but would stand this one. Then came Annie Buick, a widow who kept three cows on the common, who walked up from the village on a Tuesday with a stone jar of milk and a loaf of oat bread and would not take payment. She said it was neighborly and left it at that, and came again the next Tuesday and the one after.
By the fourth Tuesday she was staying an hour to help Margaret scald the dairy and set the copper to rights. Then came old Thomas Ayres, a retired estate carpenter who had worked at three great houses along the border. He arrived one gray morning with a bag of chisels and mended the staircase treads, the parlor shutters, and the mantle, carving a new leaf for the missing one from a scrap of walnut so cleanly that within six months no one could tell which leaf was his and which was old. Margaret took the deed and the codicil to a solicitor in Hexham, a Mr.
Nicholson, who read the papers through twice without speaking, and then told her in a low, careful voice that these were documents of considerable interest, and that she should on no account allow them out of a strong box again. He drew up on her behalf a plain letter setting out that she was in possession of the house by conveyance from his grace, and in possession of certain further papers relating to the earlier history of the property, and he lodged copies with a firm in Newcastle and with a firm in York, so that no fire and no visitor could unmake them. Through October and November, Margaret worked from before light until after it. She plastered the blackened corner of the hall ceiling, whitewashed the kitchen and scullery, cleaned every flue, glazed the four boarded windows with new leaded panes, cleared the ivy from the guttering, cut down the rowan from the parapet, and mortared the loosened stones back into place.
She turned the small chamber at the end of the north wing into a bedroom for herself and slept there, from the first frost onward, under three blankets, with the silver thimble and the bone-handled needle case set together on the writing desk beside the bed. By December, the house was known in the village as Miss Ward’s, and the road up to it had been walked often enough that the weeds no longer closed over the ruts. Margaret went down on a Saturday to the market with a basket of mended linen she had bought cheap at a sale and made salable again with an evening’s work, and sold every piece before noon. She took an order for the altar linen of the parish church from the vicar’s wife, a Mrs.
Halstead, who paid her promptly and told two other households. By the end of January, Margaret had steady needlework at fair prices from four houses along the valley. She kept bees in the spring, as Isabelle Hartwell had done. Annie Buick brought her a swarm in a straw skep on a warm April morning, and Margaret set them in the south corner of the walled garden she had spent March clearing of nettle and bramble.
By June there were four hives, and by August honey enough to sell in the village at eightpence a jar. Thomas Ayres mended the garden gate and would not be paid, and took instead a jar of honey and a slice of seed cake, and sat an hour on the porch bench he had also mended, telling Margaret the names of the fields visible from the rise and who had farmed each one within his memory. People began to know her name without her giving it. The carrier who had brought her up from the village that first day took to stopping at the gate on his run to leave a parcel or a letter, and would drink a cup of tea in the kitchen if she offered, and would carry down her finished work to the coach for Newcastle without charging her more than the fair rate.
On Sundays she walked to the parish church and sat in a pew halfway down the north aisle, and Mrs. Halstead nodded to her at the door, and the vicar spoke her name in the greeting after service, as though it had always been spoken there. Small rituals formed. On the first Tuesday of each month, Annie came up with milk and stayed for dinner.
On the last Saturday, Margaret took her needlework to the market. Every evening she wrote in her small book the day’s takings and outgoings, in the bookkeeper’s hand her father had first shown her when she was seven, and every evening before she blew out the candle she set the thimble and the needle case side by side on the desk, and every morning she moved them into her pocket together. On a still evening in the second autumn, Margaret sat on the porch bench Thomas Ayres had mended and looked down the drive toward the gate. The gate had been rehung on new hinges and painted black.
The drive was clear of weed and edged with stones she had set herself over three Sunday afternoons. The west gable was underpinned with fresh stone that Redmine and his boy had laid in August. The house behind her was warm. The range was banked.
A lamp burned in the parlor, where a length of altar linen lay half-finished on the frame. There was no water coming in anywhere. She thought, as she often did at that hour, about the people who had put her where she was. She thought of her father, who had shown her how to rule a column and set a figure square inside it, and of her mother, who had taught her to set a fine stitch by lamplight.
She thought of Mrs. Alice Pedigrew, who had never once said she loved her, and had left her a bone-handled needle case with a note about knowing what to do with it. Margaret, sitting on the porch, two counties and three years away from that grave, believed she had at last known what to do with it. She thought of Isabelle Hartwell, born in 1743, kept quietly in the north wing for fifty-three years because a marriage had been inconvenient to a family whose crest was still cut into the stone above the porch, who had put by her sovereigns quarter by quarter and hidden them behind seven courses of pink brick, and had hoped for a daughter, and never had one.
Margaret took the silver thimble from her pocket and the bone-handled needle case with it and set them on the arm of the bench side by side, and thought that two women she had never met had between them furnished her with everything she needed to begin. She thought of the Duke who had signed the deed to be rid of her, and of the solicitor who had spelled her name correctly and turned the paper toward her without offering her a chair. Mr. Nicholson in Hexham had written her twice in the past year to say that certain inquiries had been made after the papers lodged in Newcastle and York, and that no further action had followed, and that in his professional view no further action would.
The Duke, it seemed, understood that what had been buried for a hundred years was better left in Margaret’s keeping than pulled into daylight. Now Margaret understood the same. She did not need to use the papers. Having them was enough.
It was a quiet kind of authority, and it suited her. Annie Buick came up the drive with a covered basin under a cloth and called out from the gate. Margaret raised her hand. The moor beyond was going blue with the last of the light, and a thin coal smoke rose straight from the kitchen chimney into a still sky.
And somewhere down in the fold of the ground, a curlew called once, and did not call again.
