Синтия Хэррод-Иглз - The Founding

‘Dinner is over, mistress, and supper is at five. You will have to wait.' He turned as if to leave, and then turned back again. 'I will tell my cook when he comes back from the field that your man is now in charge, It is a duty he will be glad to give up. And, mark ye, I like spirit, but I will not brook insolence, so curb your unruly tongue, or I will beat you, like any beast that disobeys.’

And with that he left the hall by the way he had come. Eleanor stood erect and proud, biting her lip in anger. She said nothing, but as she watched him go she thought, ‘Someday I shall be mistress of this house, Edward Morland, and then we shall see who does the beating.’

Gaby touched her arm anxiously, and brought Eleanor back to reality. It was good, at least, when one was downhearted, to have others depending on one. It made it easy to be brave.

‘Job,' she said, ‘do you go and see if the horses have been properly cared for. They still belong to my lord Edmund. Stay — give me the whelp, I'll look after it for now. Jacques, go you to the kitchen and see if you can find anything for us to eat — any scraps, milk, anything. Well for these northerners to wait for supper, but I need something now. If anyone tries to stop you, come straight to me. And Gaby, you come with me. We'll go up those stairs and see what there is above. It's my guess the bedchamber is above here, and perhaps there may be a solar as well.’

Together the women passed through the screen at the other end of the hall and found themselves in a tiny lobby from which the stairs ran upwards. There were other doors in the lobby: she guessed that one of them must lead to the cellar, but where the others led she could not tell. At the top of the stairs was a door leading on to the balcony, and a door leading into what did, in fact, turn out to be the bedchamber.

‘Oh my precious child, do they expect you to sleep here?' Gaby wondered as she looked round the dark room. Light filtered in through the cracks in the shutters which were closed against the rain, but when Eleanor opened the shutters on the other side of the room — the balcony side — they saw a very dismal, bare room. There was no decoration of any sort on the plaster walls — not so much as a painted rose. A garderobe in the corner had no curtain to cover it. There was a large bed with woollen hangings which might once have been red but were now a blackish brown with smoke and dirt, a small truckle bed under the far window, and a crude wooden chest pushed against the wall, and that was all.

‘It must be changed,' Eleanor said grimly. 'I can't understand it, Gaby — they surely cannot lack money. Surely Lord Edmund cannot have been deceived about their wealth? And yet, with all their gold, they are content to live like animals with never so much as a spot of colour to brighten their lives.'

‘It is the lack of a mistress to the house,' Gaby said. ‘Men can be strange cattle when left alone.'

‘I never knew any man who did not want to be as fine as a peacock if only he could afford it,' Eleanor said, perplexed.

‘Only when there are women around to play the peahen, mistress,' Gaby said. 'Depend upon it, when there is nothing but men in a house, they do not care a plucked hen what they or their house looks like.’

Eleanor shook her head. 'It seems strange to me, all the same. However, as soon as I am properly mistress of the house, things will be different.’

The rest of that floor consisted of one long room which had been divided by screens into store rooms. Here the two women saw one or two pieces of furniture amongst the other stores that suggested there had once been a solar and even a guest room up here.

‘I should say that this was once the great hall,' Gaby said, looking at the high beamed roof that stretched the whole length of the wing. 'You often see in old houses, mistress, that they had the great hall on the upper floor. I expect they turned this into chambers when they built the bigger hall down below.’

Eleanor nodded, and shivered, and Gaby, noting it, was about to suggest that they went back down and tried to coax some life out of the fire when they were found by Robert.

‘Ah, there you are,' he said nervously. He shifted from foot to foot in his embarrassment as he plucked up courage to speak to his betrothed, for he felt that she had been slighted, and would be justly angry, and while he wished to apologize for the oversight he did not know how to do it without seeming to criticize his father.

Eleanor looked at him contemptuously. What a ninny! she thought. Like an overgrown bull-calf.

‘Well, sir?' she prompted him tartly.

‘I have come to tell you — to ask you —' he swallowed. 'I have come to make you comfortable.'

‘It will take more than you can do to make me comfortable,' Eleanor snapped. 'I cannot find any accommodation made ready for me — or do you Yorkshire men expect your women to sleep in the hall with the servants?’

Robert flushed. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Instructions were left to prepare the guest chamber for you, but there was trouble with the sheep and everyone had to go out and give a hand. They're still out there now— that's where my father has gone. He sent me to —'

‘To make me comfortable,' Eleanor sneered.

Robert felt he was being baited. 'I will do what I can,' he said in mild protest.

‘Well, where is this guest chamber? Perhaps my own servants can do what yours have failed to.’

‘ This is it,' Robert said, indicating the store room they were standing in. Eleanor looked around her. She said nothing, but her face was expressive.

Robert felt compelled to explain. 'Since mother died, you see, we haven't used all the rooms. We live mostly in the hall. This was the guest chamber then, and there were others beyond there, too, but now they're all store rooms. I'm sorry that nothing is ready for you — but if I had been here —’

Gaby felt sorry for him in his obvious discomfort and said, 'Never mind, sir — if you've a couple of men to shift out these stores, we'll soon have the room in order. Mistress, why don't you go down to the fire, and send me up young Job, and we'll make a start?'

‘Have you men free now?' Eleanor asked Robert. ‘They will be in from the fields soon. Father has directed two of them to bring up your baggage from the stables.’

‘That's right, sir. Now you take my mistress down to the fire before she starves of the cold, and I'll see to things. I suppose —' she said in sudden doubt, 'I suppose you have got a bed for her?'

‘The guest-bed is in store for you and she to use until —'

‘Until?' Gaby prompted.

Robert's face was afire, 'Until the wedding.'

‘Ah, yes,' Gaby said. 'Well, do you go down, mistress, and take that poor perishing puppy with you.’

Eleanor smiled her thanks at Gaby and made her exit, followed by Robert, like a Queen followed by a page. But she was a chilled and hungry Queen in mud-draggled clothing, an unhappy Queen who saw nothing in her immediate surroundings to compensate for the home she had left behind.

2

The date for the wedding was set for just under a month's time — the day after All Souls, it was to be, the third of November — and that gave little enough time indeed to do everything that Eleanor felt needed doing. The house had to be cleaned, the bedchamber prepared with new hangings and covers for the bed and new decorations for the walls; the new clothes had to be made, and the bridal feast prepared. In the meantime, Eleanor had to find her way round the house, learn the names of the inmates and some, at least, of their language, and begin to learn the duties that would finally be hers when she had married Robert and become mistress of the house.

From her first day she took over the ordering of the meals, in which Jacques helped her enormously. With his help she made up lists of what was needed by way of stores, and these were got from the city's markets. Morland like good food, and the improvement in the meals brought about by the advent of Eleanor and her cook caused a corresponding improvement in his temper so that he was ready to agree to almost anything Eleanor or Robert suggested for the cleaning or decorating of the house.