A Pirate Takes His Soup

Wednesday, June 5, 1816

“Fire lit,” Crispin read. “That is five days out of five, Aunt Linnea. I began the column on the first, because Nurse said nobody would believe it afterwards.”

“Nurse is right. What was the glass at eight?”

“Forty-six. And thirty-one hundredths of rain in the funnel.” He turned the ledger on the schoolroom table so that she could see. There was a new column, ruled in red, and the word Fire stood in it five times, one under another. “Papa never lit the schoolroom fire after May Day. He said it made us soft.”

“Your papa never saw a June like this one. I shall want to copy those figures into my father’s book, if you will lend them.”

The boy went pink with pleasure and bent over his bread and milk.

Linnea had been coming up to the schoolroom breakfast for a week. Nobody had asked her to. It was the one half hour in the day when the children were too sleepy to be on their guard, and she had learned more from it than from all the dinners. Tabitha sat beside her this morning, quite close, and was feeding crusts to the rag doll.

Mercy Onions poured the tea. Linnea put in her sugar from the basin, stirred, and drank.

It was salt. There was a full spoonful of it, and her tongue shrank from it.

She did not look up at once. She looked at the basin, where the top layer was a little too white and too fine. Then she looked across the table. Pip was buttering bread with tremendous attention. Her ears were red.

Linnea drank the whole cup. It was one of the nastier things she had done in her life. She set it down in its saucer without a rattle.

“Thank you, Mercy. No, I’ll not take another. I am wanted in the linen room at half past eight.”

Pip’s knife had stopped. She had expected a shriek, or a spitting out, or a summons to her uncle. She had plainly not planned for nothing at all. Linnea wished her good morning with the rest and went downstairs with her mouth puckered like a dried apple.
***
Mrs. Hobday was waiting at the linen room door with a baize-covered tray in her hands. A great ring of keys lay on it, polished bright.

“Your Grace asked to go over the house. I thought we should begin as Her late Grace always did.” The housekeeper held the tray out. “Her Grace kept the linen, the china closet and the still room under her own hand. They have been in my charge since the year nine, only for want of a mistress. They are yours now.”

It was said with perfect respect. It was also a test, and Linnea knew one when she met it. She had been examined by churchwardens’ wives since she was sixteen.

A rector’s daughter who snatched at those keys would be a fool, and so would one who waved them away. Mrs. Hobday was waiting to see which kind of fool she was.

“May I see inside first?” Linnea said.

The housekeeper unlocked the door. There were presses on three walls, floor to ceiling, and the smell of lavender was strong enough to taste. It was a great improvement on the salt.

“How many pair of sheets are there, Mrs. Hobday?”

“Two hundred and ten, Your Grace. Forty pair of the fine Irish, for the family and the best bedchambers. The rest is household.”

“How many of the fine are past turning?”

There was a very small pause. “Eleven pair.”

“And who decides when a sheet is to be turned sides to middle, and when it goes down to the nursery or the servants’ hall?”

“I do. Her Grace did, when she was living.”

“What did she look for?”

Mrs. Hobday took a sheet from a lower shelf and shook out one corner. It was marked with a coronet and a B in red thread, very small. Six inches from the mark there was a darn the size of a shilling.

“Would Your Grace call this fit for the nursery?”

Linnea carried it to the window. She took off her spectacles and looked at the darn close, as she would look at the veins of a leaf. The threads had been laid in one at a time and woven over and under. She could hardly find where the cloth ended and the mending began.

“I should call the darn better than the sheet,” she said. “The linen is thin all down the middle, and it will go through at the first restless child. But I never saw finer work than this. Whose is it?”

“Mine, Your Grace.”

“Then I hope you will not waste any more of it on a sheet that is ready for dusters.” She folded the corner back along its crease and returned it. “Mrs. Hobday, I shall tell you how I stand. I kept my father’s house for twelve years with one maid. We had eleven pair of sheets, and I knew every one by name. I know what clean is, and I know what waste is. I do not know how a house of this size is run, and I shall not learn it in a week by carrying a bunch of keys about.”

The housekeeper said nothing. Her hands were folded on her bombazine.

“In August a gentleman from the Court of Chancery will ask who orders the house these children live in. I want the answer to be true, and I want it to be a good one. So I shall ask you plain questions until you are sick of me. What is spent, and what is wanted? What has been let go for seven years because there was nobody to ask? I should like to see your books every Monday at nine, and one cupboard a week with you beside me.” She took the still-room key off the ring, since she understood drying herbs if she understood nothing else, and left the rest lying on the baize. “This one I can use tomorrow. Keep the others until I have earned them.”

Mrs. Hobday looked at the ring, and then at her.

“The drawing-room curtains are rotten along the folds,” she said. “I have said so every spring since His late Grace died, and been told to leave it. The nursery wants new blankets. And there’s a chimney in the east wing no sweep has been up since Lord Edmund was married.”

“Write them down in that order, with what each will cost. I will take the list to the Duke myself.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” The housekeeper locked the press. Her face was as smooth as ever, but she held the door for Linnea to go through first, and she had not done that on the way in. “If I may say so, the tea in the nursery was not as it should be this morning. Cook missed the salt box.”

“The tea was very bracing,” Linnea said. “I should be obliged if Cook did not miss it aloud.”

Mrs. Hobday’s mouth twitched. “She shall be deaf and blind, Your Grace.”
***
The glasshouse was still a floor of new brick and a stack of numbered crates, with Tudge and four men swearing gently over the sill plates. Until it stood again, her bench was in the old orangery, hard up against one of the tall windows. The heaths stood round her on their lettered shelves, and the stove ticked at her back. The light was poor, but she could work.

She took off her cloak, tied her apron and reached for her brushes.

They lived in a stoneware jar, points upward. The best of them was a sable in a swan quill, which her father had bought for her in London the last time he was well enough to go. It had cost seven shillings. Wet, it came to a point that would draw a single eyelash.

It had no point now. The hair had been cut straight across with scissors, a quarter of an inch below the tip. It looked like a tiny shaving brush.

Linnea stood and held it. For a moment she was so angry that the shelves swam.

She set the brush down very gently. She walked twice the length of the orangery and back. Then she went up the east stair, and found Pip alone at the schoolroom table with a copybook, and Mercy mending by the fire.

“Mercy, may I borrow Pip until dinner? I have work for her.”

Pip came. She came like a prisoner, with her chin up and her fists shut, and she did not ask what the work was.

Linnea set the crate before the grinding slab and put the glass muller into her hands. She shook a little heap of dark crimson powder onto the slab and added gum water from the bottle.

“That is carmine. It is made from an insect that lives on a cactus in Mexico, and it costs more by the ounce than silver. I want it as smooth as cream. Round and round, and then the figure of eight.”

“How long?”

“Until I say.”

Pip ground. Linnea took a pencil and worked at the outline of a flower, and did not speak. A quarter of an hour passed, and then another. The rain ran down the tall windows. The muller went round with a soft wet hiss.

“My arm hurts,” Pip said at last.

“I expect it does. Change hands.”

After another ten minutes the child was breathing hard through her nose. She would not ask again, and Linnea had known she would not. When the small shoulders began to shake with the effort, Linnea laid down her pencil.

“That will do. Come round here and see what it is for.”

She had a heath on the bench, a tall one with hanging crimson tubes, and a sheet with the whole spray drawn on it in pencil, grey and flat. She took her second-best brush, wetted it, and touched it to the colour Pip had ground. She laid one thin wash down the side of a single flower.

Pip watched it dry. Linnea laid another over it, and then a third, deeper, under the lip. The grey flower turned round and stood up off the paper.

“Oh,” Pip said. She had not meant to say it.

“That is your arm, there. That flower will be engraved in London and coloured by hand, and people will look at it long after you and I are dead. It could not be done with gritty colour.” Linnea rinsed the brush. “Now, this flower has hairs on it. Look close. They are finer than yours. I must draw each one.”

She picked up the swan quill, wetted it, and set it to a spare corner of the paper. It left a fat pink smear, shapeless as a thumbprint.

Pip went scarlet to the hair.

“It had a point,” Linnea said quietly. “A man in London spent a day making it, out of the tail of a small animal that lives in Russia. My father gave it to me. I cannot get another until somebody goes to town.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Your uncle? No.”

Pip stared at her. “Why not?”

“Because you did not do it to him. You did it to me, so it lies between you and me. The tea as well.”

“I’m not sorry.”

“I have not asked you to be sorry. I asked you to grind, and you ground well.” She wrung out the rag and held it out. “Wash the slab. It is ten minutes to two.”

Pip washed it. She did not say another word, and she would not look at the brush.
***
The Duke was already in the schoolroom, standing by his chair. He was always first, and he never sat until they had all come in.

He did everything he had agreed to do. He came every day at two. He sat on the proper chair that Mrs. Hobday had sent up, with his face square to the table. Yet he sat as a man sits at a court-martial, upright and silent, with his hands either side of his plate. He asked Crispin for the readings and Pip what she had learned, and when those two questions were answered he had nothing else. Linnea had watched it for a fortnight. He was not cold. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and so he said nothing, and to a child the two looked exactly alike.

It was pea soup today. Mercy ladled it out.

Tabitha had been put on Linnea’s left, which placed her opposite her uncle. She had solved this by turning sideways on her cushion, so that she faced the wall. She was eating her soup over her own shoulder.

“Tabitha, my love, sit round,” Mercy whispered.

“No. The pirate’s there.”

The Duke’s spoon paused above his bowl. He set it down and looked at the tablecloth. Linnea saw his shoulders go a little stiffer than before, and she thought that she could not watch that for another sixty dinners.

“Duke,” she said, in her most ordinary voice. “I have been wondering about something. You have travelled, and I have not. How does a pirate take his soup?”

He lifted his head. Across the table, the curls went still.

She had no idea what he would do. He looked at her for a long moment with that unreadable grey eye, and she thought she had made a mistake.

“With a cutlass,” he said gravely.

He picked up his table knife and dipped the point of it in his soup. He raised it level, with great care, and one green drop travelled the length of the blade and fell off the end. He regarded the empty knife with deep melancholy.

“It takes a long time,” he said. “That is why they are so thin.”

Crispin laughed.

It burst out of him, high and cracked, as if it had been shut up somewhere. He clapped his hand over his mouth and looked horrified, and then he laughed again through his fingers until his thin shoulders shook. Mercy Onions put down the ladle and turned her back to the table. Pip said scornfully, “You can’t eat soup with a cutlass, it’s flat,” and then spoiled it with a snort.

Tabitha had turned round. She was looking at the knife, and for one second she looked at the man who held it. Then she remembered herself and vanished behind her mug.

The Duke put the knife down. He seemed more alarmed by what he had done than anybody. His face had coloured along the cheekbone, on both sides of the scar.

Linnea felt warm right through, as she had not been warm in that house before. It was the first outright joke she had heard from him, and he had made it with a perfectly straight face for a child who would not look at him. She found that she wanted another. She wanted to know what else he had in there, behind the stiffness.

She ate her soup and said nothing more, for fear of frightening it off.
***
The stable clock had struck ten before she went up. A fire burned in the yellow bedchamber, as fires burned in every room in June, and the rain was still coming down.

She was unpinning her hair when she heard him.

It came through the white door beside the chimney. He took six steps, and paused, and took six steps back. The boards of his dressing room were old, and one of them spoke each time he crossed it. He was walking as a sentry walks, at an even pace.

Linnea stood with her plait half made and listened. She had heard it on other nights, faintly, and had taken it for Oakes putting things away. Oakes limped, and this tread was even.

He had told her that he did not sleep much. She had not thought about what he did instead.

She wondered what he walked up and down with. It might be the farms and their rotting hay, or the Master in August, or a carriage on its side in brown water. She could not ask him. It was not in the terms, and a woman who had come for a glasshouse had no claim on a man’s nights.

The key was in the lock on her side, where she had left it on her wedding day, turned back. She looked at it. She did not touch it.

Six steps went by, and the board, and six steps again.

She thought of a drop of pea soup running down a table knife, and found that she was smiling at a door.

Somebody scratched at the other one, the door to the passage. It was Mercy Onions, in a shawl, with a candle.

“I’m sorry to come so late, Your Grace. It’s Miss Pip. She’s been awake these two hours and won’t say why, and now she says she must see you or she’ll not sleep at all. I’d not have troubled you, only she’s got herself in a state.”

“I’ll come.”

The night nursery was dark, apart from a rushlight in a saucer. Tabitha was a small heap in the cot by the wall, breathing through her mouth. Pip was sitting bolt upright in bed in her nightgown, with her plaits undone and her hair standing out round her face like a black bush. She looked about four years old, and very fierce.

Linnea sat down on the edge of the bed. “Well?”

Pip put out a closed fist and opened it. On her palm lay a tiny wisp of brown hair, no bigger than a grass seed. She had kept it folded in a scrap of copybook paper.

“It’s the end of it. I saved it. I thought it could be stuck on.” Her voice wobbled, and she steadied it savagely. “It can’t, can it?”

“No. It can’t.”

“I knew it couldn’t.” She thrust the paper at Linnea all the same. “You have it. It’s yours.”

Linnea took it and folded the paper closed. “Thank you for bringing it back.”

“I’m not saying sorry.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“You drank all the tea.” It was an accusation. “You didn’t even make a face. And you didn’t tell, and you showed me the red.” Pip’s brows came down hard, and her eyes were very bright in the rushlight. “You needn’t think it changes anything. I know why you’re here. I was under the pots.”

She lay down with a thump and dragged the blanket up to her chin, and turned her face to the wall.

“You still only came for the plants,” said Pip.
***