Victoria Holt: The House of a Thousand Lanterns

“Have you ever been in the room. Mother?”

“There’s no reason why I should. I take care of the household. That’s my business.”

I looked into the fire and saw pictures there. There was a face which looked genial at one moment and as the coal burned it changed subtly and was malevolent. Mr. Sylvester Milner! I thought.

My mother showed me my room. It was small, next to her own and it had a window which reached from the ceiling to the floor. It was discreetly but tastefully furnished.

“You can look out on the gardens,” she said. “You can’t see very much now but they are very well kept. The lawns are a picture and the flowers in the spring and summer have to be seen to be believed. You can just see how the house is built—with a wing either side, like a letter E with the middle strut not there. Look, over at that wing. You see those two windows. That’s Mr. Milner’s Treasure Room.”

I looked and was excited.

“You’ll see it clearly in daylight,” said my mother.

She was very pleased with herself. She had managed her affairs admirably.

We went back to her room and talked—how we talked! She caught me up in her mood of exultation. Everything had turned out as she would have wished.

It was in a state of euphoria that I spent that evening, but my first night at Roland’s Croft was an uneasy one. The wind soughing through the trees sounded like voices and they seemed to be repeating a name: “Sylvester Milner.”

It was an interesting holiday. I soon was on good terms with the servants. It was fortunate, said my mother, that Mrs. Couch took to me and Mr. Catterwick had no objection to my presence.

I was to the fore when the gardeners cut down the fir tree and we dragged it into the house. I was there for the cutting of the holly and mistletoe.

There was a wonderful smell in the kitchen and Mrs. Couch, whose rotund figure, rosy cheeks, and cosy look fitted her name, was making innumerable pies and fussing over the Christmas puddings. Because I was already a favorite of hers I was allowed a little of what she called the “taster.” It was the happiest day I had known since my father’s death when I sat near the kitchen range, listening to the bubbling of the puddings and then seeing Mrs. Couch haul them out by a long fork hitched through the pudding cloths and set them in a row. Last of all came the small basin which contained the “taster.” Then I sat at the table and ate my small portion while I watched Mrs. Couch’s face—apprehensive, hesitating, and then expressing gratification.

“Not as good as last year’s, but better than the year before that.”

And all those who had been privileged to share the “taster” protested that the puddings had never been better and that Mrs. Couch couldn’t make a bad pudding if she tried.

For such compliments we were all rewarded with a glass of her special parsnip wine and there was a glass of sloe gin for Mr. Catterwick and my mother, which I suppose denoted their superior rank.

Mrs. Couch told me that in the old days there had been the Family and nobody was going to make her believe—not that anyone had tried to—that it was right and proper that houses should pass out of families and go to them that had no what you might call roots there.

This was an oblique reference to Mr. Sylvester Milner.

“And will he be home for Christmas?” asked the wife of one of the gardeners.

“I should hope not,” said Jess the parlormaid, who was promptly reproved by Mr. Catterwick while I felt that shudder of something between fascination and fear which the name of Mr. Sylvester Milner always aroused in me.

My mother, like Mr. Catterwick, kept somewhat aloof from the servants. One had to keep up one’s position, she told me, and the servants respected her for it. They knew that she had “come down in the world” and that I was at Cluntons’ where Mrs. Couch informed them one of the ladies of the Family had gone.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Couch, “when the Family was here, the housekeeper’s daughter wouldn’t have gone to the same school as one of its members. That would have been unthinkable. But everything’s different now. He came…” She shrugged her shoulders and lifted her eyes to the ceiling with an air of resignation.

I would not have believed I could have enjoyed a Christmas holiday so much without my father. There was not only the strangeness of it all but the overwhelming mystery of Mr. Sylvester Milner.

I tried to find out everything I could about him. He never said much I gathered, but he had made it clear that he wanted everything done his way. He had changed the house since he took over from the Family. He had even had those heathen-looking dogs put on the porch. The Family it seemed had fallen on hard times and been obliged to sell the house. And he had appeared and taken it. He crept about the place, said Mrs. Couch. You’d find him suddenly there. He talked in a sort of gibberish to that Ling Fu. They were often shut in the Treasure Room together. And Mrs. Couch thought it was a heathen thing to do, to keep a room locked against Mr. Catterwick and let a foreigner have the key.

I suppose it was helpful that our first Christmas without my father should be so entirely different. There was less nostalgia for the past. I said it seemed like a miracle but my mother explained that my father was arranging it; he had guided us here because he was looking after us. It seemed so, for everything was going well.

We were very merry decorating the servants’ hall with holly, ivy, and mistletoe, and even Mr. Catterwick smiled wryly at our antics and only gently reproved the maids for their exuberance. The carol singers came on Christmas Eve and sang by the portico, and my mother put a shilling in their tin on behalf of the house.

“Of course when the Family was here,” said Mrs. Couch, “they was brought into the hall and the Master and the Mistress and the rest of the Family served them with hot punch and mince pies. That was how it had been done for generations. It’s a pity times have to change.”

She had a rocking chair in the kitchen and she liked to rock herself to and fro after a heavy baking. It soothed her. Since I had come she liked to talk to me and as I was so interested I was glad to listen. I spent quite a lot of time in the kitchen with Mrs. Couch. My mother was pleased to see that we had become friends for there was no doubt that the cook was a power in the house.

She talked a great deal about the Family, and how it had been in the old days. “A proper household,” she said, implying that there was something rather improper about it in its present state, “they had been, the Master, the Mistress, and the two daughters. They came out,” she went on, “as young ladies should and they might well have made good matches in due course. But the Master he was a gambler, always had been… and his father before him. Together they gambled away their fortune.”

“And then they sold the house,” I prompted.

She leaned close to me. “For a song,” she hissed. “Mr. Sylvester Milner is a true businessman. He bought when the Family had no other way but to sell.”

“What happened to the Family?”

“Master died. Shock, they said. Mistress went to live with her family. One of the young ladies went with her and the other I heard took a post as governess. Terrible that were. She who’d had a governess of her own when she was young and been brought up to expect to employ one for her own children.”

I wondered fleetingly what I should do when I grew up. Should I become a governess? It was a sobering thought.

“He asked me if I’d stay on and I said I would. The house had always served me well. Little did I know…”