Page 16 of One More Christmas at the Castle
Henry, who has a sweet tooth, added three teaspoons ofsugar and a dash of milk to his coffee when she passed it to him, then began the process of winning her round. It’s almost impossible to resist him when he sets out to do this and soon she had unloosened to the point where she was chatting to him as if he was an old friend and ally.
I don’t know how he does it, but I didn’t interrupt the process, instead sipping my coffee while looking around the kitchen. It was a charming mix of the old, like the glazed wall cupboards full of copper pans and pottery and glass moulds, which I longed to examine, and the new. All the mod cons were there: a very modern double oven and hob was built into a new range of worktops, and there were cupboards along one wall, as well as a dishwasher and a huge fridge.
I brought my attention back to the conversation in time to hear Henry saying, ‘I believe you’ve worked here for many years, Maria?’
‘Nearly forty,’ she agreed, ‘which makes everything very difficult now.’ She heaved a great sigh. ‘From a child, I knew Mrs Powys and her husband, who was a very learned and famous man. Asa Powys, you will have heard of him?’
She seemed to take this for granted, for she went on: ‘My parents looked after them in Corfu, where they had a villa. But often they would visit here, for it is the Lady’s family home and she loves it. Once, at Christmas time, my parents and I came back with them because there was some difficulty with the staff at the Castle …’ She tailed off and shivered reminiscently. ‘That winter wasverybad!’
‘That must have been quite a change from Corfu,’ Henry said.
‘My parents found it too cold – they never came here again. But I met my Andy, who was the gardener, and stayed. After that, I worked in the Castle, but of course, there was always acook/housekeeper in charge. But since the last one, Mrs Hill, retired six years ago, after Mr Powys died, the Lady has had trouble finding anyone who will stay very long and I have had to take over the cooking and running of the house.’
‘That’s quite a lot for one person to manage, and especially now,’ I said sympathetically. ‘We were so sorry to hear of your husband’s illness.’
‘He is older than me, but very strong and active, so it was unexpected, yes. A stroke. Now he has had the physiotherapy and he is making a good recovery. Once I have him home again, all will be well. But … he must retire now.’
She turned to Henry. ‘You will have to do Andy’s work around the house instead: bring in the logs and see to the fires in the sitting and dining rooms.’
‘That’s all right. I can do all that,’ Henry assured her. ‘We’re here to take over all the work of the house, while you concentrate on getting your husband back to full strength. Mrs Powys told me as much in the emails she had her cousin send to me.’
‘That Lucy!’ Maria made a noise that expressed a mixture of emotions, all of them disparaging. I noted that she referred to her employer as ‘Mrs Powys or ‘the Lady,’ but the Poor Relation by her Christian name.
‘She issomekind of cousin of the Lady’s father, that is all. She has been here now almost a year, but sending emails is the only useful thing she has done!’
She expounded on this, which seemed to be a sore subject. ‘She is supposed to see to breakfast and then make the beds, but those she leaves for me to do when I come in at about ten. I tidy up and put into the dishwasher the dinner dishes she has carried into the kitchen the night before, then prepare the lunch before I go back to my cottage for a while. Before Andy was ill, he would go back to the Castle with me later to see tothe fires, and I would cook and serve the dinner before I went home again. It was Lucy’s job to make the coffee and clear the table afterwards. But now in the afternoons, I go straight to the hospital instead.’
‘That was a busy schedule,’ I said. ‘You can’t have had much time to yourself.’
She shrugged. ‘The work had to be done but it was not hard when it was just the Lady here alone. Mrs Powys had begun trying again to find live-in help, but then, she found you instead, though I understand for a month only?’
‘That’s right, we leave on New Year’s Day,’ Henry agreed.
‘But you might want to stay,’ she suggested. ‘The Lady is generous and will appreciate good service.’
‘I’m afraid we don’t stay anywhere for longer than a month, at the most. It suits us to work short contracts,’ I explained. ‘But while we’re here, we’ll take all the housekeeping and cooking off your shoulders, so you can concentrate on your husband’s health.’
‘Yes, don’t you worry about a thing,’ Henry told her. ‘And if there are any household emergencies, like dripping taps and blocked loos, then Dido’s ace at sorting them out.’
She looked at me doubtfully, as if wondering if he was joking.
‘Henry’s a dab hand with the ironing board, if you do all the laundry in house,’ I said, whichreallyseemed to throw her.
‘A laundress comes in with the cleaners on a Wednesday morning and sees to most of it,’ Maria said. ‘I try and do some in between.’
‘Lucy told us about the cleaning service – that’s great,’ I said.
‘They clean right through and are very thorough. Also, they change the bedlinen.’
We’d finished our coffee by then and Maria looked ather watch and said she had better show us round the servants’ wing now.
‘Everything else you will need to know is in there.’ She indicated the ring binders and the concertina file. ‘The Lady likes everything organized and to run smoothly, and the old housekeeper, Mrs Hill, she was the same, so they make these. The purple one has the instructions for all the household appliances, as well as the boiler,’ she told Henry, as if he might understand these things better than me, being a man. ‘And by the way, the oil tank is in the outbuilding next to the wood store, because of the cold, but it is filled up in summer.’
‘That’s one less thing to worry about, then,’ said Henry.
Maria continued: ‘This blue file has everything you might want to know about the running of the house and the days for the collection of the recycling, and for supermarket deliveries …’
I’d pulled the blue one over and was now flicking through it. It was a complete compendium of the day-to-day running of the Castle, down to every tiny detail! I’d never seen anything quite like it before, but it would make taking over very easy for us. I shoved it across to Henry and saw his eyebrows rise as he looked at it.
