He was the kind of man who never expected to be questioned. That was why he chose her, a girl with no name and no protector, for the smallest cruelty on his list. Her name was Laura Brooks. She was twenty-one, orphaned, and no longer of any use to anyone.
Her father, a quiet country curate, had died of a bad chest when she was fifteen. His own brother took the small legacy, and Laura was sent to York to be a companion to a distant old aunt. For six years, she read aloud, mended linen, wrote letters, and kept the house accounts in a plain ruled book. The only person who ever gave her anything real was the housekeeper, Mrs.
Hadfield, a square-shouldered widow of sixty-three, who taught her how to bank a coal fire, how to graft a rose, how to speak to a butcher’s boy without being overcharged, and once told her: “You have a use in you, girl. ” Laura had carried those five words ever since, like a coin in her pocket. Her mother’s thimble traveled with her everywhere. It was a small blue enamel one, chipped along one edge, and it lived in a square of gray flannel inside the tin of needles.
It was the only thing her mother had owned worth more than a shilling. When the old aunt finally died, the house was closed within a fortnight. Mrs. Hadfield was pensioned off to her sister’s cottage.
Laura was left in the emptied morning room, waiting for the Duke’s man to tell her what would become of her. The Duke of Marsden, her father’s distant patron, had arranged things neatly. His secretary, Mr. Pembridge, arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, sat down uninvited, and read the paper aloud in a level voice: the Duke, in consideration of long service and affection, was pleased to grant Laura the use, for her natural life, of a property known as Weatherbe Abbey, on the northern part of the Marsden Estate.
There was one condition: she was to reside there and make no further application to the Duke for anything whatsoever. She was being given the stone in his shoe so he could set his foot down without discomfort for the rest of his life. Laura read the paper through slowly. She asked one question, whether she had the right to receive persons at the property.
Mr. Pembridge looked at the paper again. The grant did not forbid it. She signed her name in a plain, even hand.
He gave her a single sovereign wrapped in tissue, for the coach, and left before the clock had struck the half hour. She sewed the sovereign into the hem of her traveling cloak beside the eleven and six that were already there. She packed her trunk: three day dresses, one Sunday dress, a shawl, her father’s brass compass, the tin of needles, and the blue thimble. The road north was long and wet.
The coach took her as far as Thurk, and then a carrier’s cart, driven by a red-faced man named Mr. Denton, took her the rest of the way. When she said she was going to Weatherbe Abbey, he looked at her sideways and said, “That’s a wet spot, miss. ”
It was more than wet.
It was a ruin. The central range had no roof. She could see the sky through the tall window openings. The walls stood to their full height on three sides, but the floor was a shifting layer of leaf mold and broken slate.
The eastern range had half a roof, the slates missing in patches. There was a cloister, nine of its twelve bays still standing, and a broken sundial in the garden that had gone to nettles. The kitchen had a great open hearth, a bread oven, and a copper greened with age but sound. She slept the first night on her folded cloak in the driest room.
She woke before dawn with her breath showing in the air. She survived. She scrubbed the kitchen, boiled water in the copper, and bought milk and eggs and oatmeal on account at Mrs. Ridley’s farm.
In the second week, she took a hammer and a cold chisel from a rusted tool cupboard and knocked the padlock off a heavy door at the far end of the cloister. Behind it was a shuttered wing, left as if for an afternoon and never returned to. Rooms with the windows latched, a bed with its curtains still tied, a folded newspaper dated 1826. And below, reached by a stair, a run of cellars.
In the third cellar, the floor had fallen away into a shallow pit. Laura climbed down with a lantern and found, tucked into a niche hidden by the fallen flags, a tin document box wrapped in oiled cloth, and beside it a leather satchel with a brass buckle. Inside the box, papers tied in bundles with red tape. The original deed of the abbey.
A schedule of tithe rents payable from four named farms in perpetuity. An old enclosure award granting the abbey a common right on 230 acres of moor. And at the bottom, a letter addressed: to whoever finds this. It was signed Miss Honor Whitfield, Spinster of Weatherbe Abbey.
She had lived there forty-one years. She had been the last of her family to hold it. She wrote that she had put the papers where she put them because she trusted stone more than she trusted men in frock coats. The leather satchel held one hundred and eighteen sovereigns, saved from the tithe rents between 1810 and 1824.
She left it all to whoever came next to live under this roof, because, she wrote, a house that had been made small by unkindness ought one day to be made large again by someone willing to do the work. Laura sat on the bench by the hearth with the letter in her lap. She read it twice. She set her mother’s blue thimble on the slate table beside the open satchel of sovereigns, and sat for a long while with her hands quiet and the fire ticking.
In the morning, she opened the account book Mrs. Hadfield had given her. New page, three columns headed repairs, rents, visitors. Under repairs, she listed the roof, the cloister, the kitchen garden wall.
Under rents, the names of the four farms. She closed the book and tied it with red tape. She walked to Mrs. Ridley’s farm and paid what she owed in full from a single sovereign.
She hired Mr. Isaac Fenwick, a slater of fifty-eight, and his son Robert. She hired Mr. Thomas Peele, a mason of sixty-one, and a boy called Ned to sort stone.
She hired Mrs. Anne Sauerby, a widow of forty-four, who understood old fruit trees better than anyone in the dale. They worked. The eastern range roof was made watertight.
The kitchen garden wall stood square again. The beds were turned and black. Mrs. Sauerby pruned the espaliered pears against the south wall and grafted three new scions onto the strongest stock.
Laura worked beside them all in a canvas apron, learning the knife by watching. A schoolmistress, Miss Harriet Engel, came to see the cloister and brought her older girls on Wednesdays to draw the arches. Two mothers walked up with the girls the next Saturday. Then a farmer, Mr.
Josiah Metcalf, of one of the four tithe farms, came with his wife to see what young woman had taken the abbey. Laura had engaged a solicitor, Mr. Alfred Wearing of Thurk, on Mrs. Ridley’s recommendation.
He read Honor Whitfield’s papers through twice without speaking, then said in a dry voice that the schedule of tithe rents was a good document, and the enclosure award was a better one. He lodged copies with the court at York, wrote to the four named farms, and wrote separately, and with great civility, to the Duke of Marsden’s steward. Three of the four farmers wrote back acknowledging the rent. Mr.
Metcalf drove up in person with fourteen pounds in a canvas bag and said he had always thought it queer that the payment stopped. The fourth farmer asked for half now and half at Martinmas. Laura wrote back in her own hand that she would. The Duke’s steward did not answer at all for six weeks.
Then he wrote a short letter saying only that his grace was abroad and the matter would be considered on his return. Mr. Wearing told Laura this was in effect a concession. The Duke would not now contest what four tenants had already paid.
By midsummer, the gardens were open on Saturday afternoons. Admission threepence for adults, a penny for children, tea and oat cakes in the kitchen for another twopence. Forty-one people came the first Saturday. Sixty-eight the second.
One hundred and nineteen the third. Laura’s third column in the account book, once empty, ran down a whole page. She was known now, in three parishes, as Miss Brooks of the Abbey. It happened without anyone marking it.
When a woman in Bedale Market asked Mr. Denton whether the young lady at Weatherbe was the Duke’s ward, he said without pausing: “She’s the lady of the abbey. ”
The Duke’s steward wrote once more in October, saying his grace did not propose to disturb the arrangements Miss Brooks had made with the four tenants, and understood the property to be well maintained. Mr.
Wearing permitted himself a small smile. He said that was, in the language of such letters, a full surrender. Laura folded the letter and put it in the tin box on top of Honor Whitfield’s papers. On the evening of Mrs.
Hadfield’s arrival at Martinmas, Laura sat by the great hearth with the account book open on her knee and the tin box at her feet. On the slate table lay the blue enameled thimble in its gray flannel, and beside it, Honor Whitfield’s letter. Two women she had never met, her mother and a stranger dead before she was born, had between them furnished her whole inheritance. Mrs.
Hadfield sat opposite in the chair Laura had set for her, drank her tea, and said nothing, which was the highest praise she gave. The Duke, somewhere abroad, had wished to forget her. Four parishes, one carrier, one slater, one mason, one gardener, one schoolmistress, and a girl of sixteen had, without declaring it, remembered her instead. Laura Brooks was twenty-one, with eleven and six and a tin of needles, when a duke sent her north to be rid of her.
She spent that inheritance on a roofless abbey. It was the best inheritance she ever spent.
