The Country Gentleman (8 page)

“Speaking, yes. To someone, no,” Miss Guilfoyle said cheerfully, taking Miss Veal rather firmly by her muslin sleeve and making an inquiring gesture at random. “This way? That way? It is my lamentable habit to apostrophize myself aloud. Ah, thank you, this way after all. I cannot say, truthfully, at what epoch of my life I first fell into this custom…Oh, the dining-room is this?” she inquired, as
they passed through a spacious, airy room furnished with a stout, well-worn oaken table suitable for, perhaps, the family of a yeoman farmer. “Very pleasant, very tidy. Thank you. I see evidence of your good management every where. I take it this is a sort of pantry, and— No, thank you, the kitchens will wait till later. Yes, very clever indeed, building the kitchens and dining-room so close to one another. A hot dish is a good dish, is not it, Miss Veal? At any rate, pray do not be alarmed by my little soliloquies. Merely the afterclap, the bilge if you like, of a somewhat overbusy mind. Which— Ah, down here? Thank you, Miss Veal.” The ladies descended a half-flight into a small, panelled study furnished with a large walnut library table and little else. The windows of this chamber gave onto a small, artless flower garden, beyond which a lawn, and in the distance fields, could be glimpsed.

Miss Veal drew a chair up to the desk for Anne, then one for herself. When she had settled herself—with a brief, catlike switching of skirts—she opened, in a silence rather solemnly ceremonial, a very large, leather-covered ledger.

“These are the household accounts,” she intoned. She began to turn over page after page filled with (Anne presumed) her own, neat hand in brown ink. “Every thing that is used in the house is written in here. If it comes from the farm, the value lost by not selling it is inscribed. If it comes from Outside”—Miss Veal’s manner of saying Outside capitalized and made it sound quite terrifying—“the price is inscribed. Household wages are similarly noted in these pages”—her old hands, wrinkled and spotted, but with the nails still white and carefully shaped, reverently turned to a different section in the
ledger—“here. It is the method devised and prescribed to me by Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle,” she said quietly, then looked sharply into the eyes of that gentleman’s great niece and demanded, “I do not suppose you know a better system?”

Miss Guilfoyle, mastering an impulse to smile, meekly confessed that she did not.

“Good.” Charlotte Veal returned her gaze to the ledger. Her eyes seemed to linger lovingly on a notation of one pound six pence paid as quarterly wages “to Susannah D.” while she said slowly, “Mr. Guilfoyle and I examined these books every Wednesday morning between ten o’clock and eleven. I do not suppose”—again she glanced abruptly up and fixed her stern regard on Anne’s face—“you know a better hour?”

“Scarcely,” said Anne.

“Good.” Miss Veal looked quietly down again and seemed as lost in her ledger as if it were a Psalter. Anne felt she had been forgot. She blew her nose, and when this failed to attract Miss Veal’s attention asked (mostly to assert herself about some one thing at least): “Is not one pound six pence rather a high wage for a country maid?” She pointed to Susannah’s name in the still open book. “I seem to recall that at my friend Lady Drayton’s seat in Hereford the maids are given—”

Charlotte Veal stood. Her brow was dark, her hands clenched. “Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle set that wage,” she declared, the grey locks on her neat head trembling with suppressed indignation. “Mr. Guilfoyle believed in high wages. Of course it is high. Mr. Guilfoyle believed that a labourer lives up to the value put upon him by his employer. I do not suppose…” She paused; Anne perceived there were tears of anger in her eyes, “I do not suppose you know a better wage?”

After a moment, “No,” Anne said. “A higher or a lower one, perhaps I do know. But not a better. Pray sit down, Miss Veal.”

Miss Veal obliged her.

“Now I must speak to you about Mrs. Dolphim, and my own staff,” said Anne, already thinking how she would describe this comical scene in a letter to Ens—well, perhaps to Celia. “As you are surely aware by now, I have brought a whole household of my own servants—”

But Miss Veal had popped up again (“A perfect Jack-in-the-Box,” Anne wrote in her imaginary letter) and was freshly a-tremble. Her frail hands clutched each other; her voice shook as much as her curls. “Miss Anne Guilfoyle,” she commenced, and it was clear from her tone she thought that to be Miss Anne Guilfoyle was a pretty mixed honour, “your great uncle brought me into this house thirty-four years ago. I have prepared tea for him some twelve thousand four hundred times. Under my supervision, twenty-four thousand eight hundred breakfasts and dinners have been cooked for him. I have filled thirty-three ledgers before this one”—she smacked the open album demonstratively with a good deal more vigour than Anne would have thought was in her—“and sat across thirty-three Christmas geese from him. If you imagine he intended—”

“Miss Veal.” Exasperated, Anne stood too. “For heaven’s sake calm yourself. I have no intention of turning you off, if that is what you are building to, or of turning anyone in the house off who does not wish to leave.” She wondered as she spoke, however, just how she could retain such a superfluity of servants—for at the wages her great uncle had fixed, surely none of the present ones would go. Still, she was not about to unhouse and
impoverish an aging, obviously devoted (for all she knew, very tenderly devoted to the bachelor Mr. Guilfoyle) retainer. “I merely wish to discuss with you some means by which my own housekeeper, Mrs. Dolphim, can profitably employ herself—if there is not some means of sharing out your tasks,” she extemporised, realizing that it would sow a fatal discord to suggest the sensitive Miss Veal merely assist Mrs. Dolphim, yet knowing from long acquaintance that Mrs. Dolphim (whose greatest, and justifiable, pride was the faithful service she’d given to the Guilfoyles) would equally contemn a demotion to the position of helper to Miss Veal. “This we must consider and resolve.”

She sat, and suggested the other lady sit as well. It was clear to her now that the slight forwardness she already thought to detect in Miss Veal, and in Susannah as well, was no illusion. Her great uncle’s servants were accustomed to be treated in a wise quite different from the ordinary. Remembering his eccentricities, she was not surprised. Reluctantly, but with a sense of having little choice, she engaged the housekeeper in an earnest colloquy whose end was to discover some equitable means of sharing the responsibilities and privileges of Housekeeper at Linfield. The discussion, which must needs touch upon such details as who was to precede whom to the servants’ dining-table, who to keep the books, who to reprimand the lesser staff, who to order from the dairy, and so on, continued some hour and a half and left both participants exhausted. Miss Veal went immediately to her room to lie down. Miss Guilfoyle was not so fortunate: Quitting the housekeeper’s little office she came directly upon Mr. Rand—just on his way, he declared imperiously, to find her.

Mr. Rand, she found, was a brisk, dark, sturdy man of no great stature, well muscled, brown from the sun, and with a very noticeable pugnacity in his bearing. Whether this last was habitual with him, or on the contrary was assumed for her benefit, Anne could not yet tell. That he was suspicious of her, and (looking her over) thought her a paltry replacement for his late master, she guessed at once. “I shall be very much obliged,” he said, after a curt, rough bow, “if you will come with me.” She could hear the country in his accent, but also that he had had some education. “There is a deal of going-over to be done in the office, and then you’ll be wanting to ride out with me and see the place,” he informed her.

“Perhaps you will allow me to make that decision, Mr. Rand,” Anne replied sharply. “I can meet with you in an hour and a half, after I have had some nuncheon.”

But Mr. Rand shook his head. “In an hour and a half they’ll be gone,” he said. “You can’t expect them to wait.”

Anne counted to ten. “Who will be gone?” she inquired.

“The people to cut the hay. They want one shilling two pence and beer—six pence and beer for the women. Does that sound fair?” he asked, then folded his arms and stood back a little. He had intercepted her in the corridor between Miss Veal’s room and the pantry. Anne, worn out by her long closeting with the housekeeper, her eyes rheumy, her head heavy and thick, longed to sit down, but Mr. Rand was watching her with a gaze that glittered coldly. She knew he had no opinion of a woman running an estate—and a London woman at that—and was only waiting for her to say something idiotic. The knowledge piqued her. She straightened and rallied herself.

“Since I have never hired a man to cut hay, I can have no idea,” she said crisply. “Does it sound fair to you?”

“Middling fair,” Mr. Rand allowed after some thought. “And how many must I hire?”

“As I have no knowledge of how many acres of hay are to be cut, I can form no very good notion of that either, Mr. Rand,” she replied.

“Three hundred twenty-five,” said he at once, then returned to his speculative glare.

“Good; yet since I have no information as to how many workers it generally takes to cut a single acre, I continue in the dark. Can you inform me?”

“Depends how quick you want it done,” said the laconic Mr. Rand.

“How quickly need it be done?”

He shrugged. “If it will not rain, there is no hurry. They can start day after tomorrow, and four or five men might do. But if it will rain, then I should say ten or a dozen.”

“But since we cannot tell whether it will rain—” Anne commenced.

“Ah, there it is!” Rand answered wisely.

Trying a new tack, “How many men did you hire last year?” she asked.

“Eight men, four women.”

Starting to move down the corridor again, “Good, then, that’s settled. Hire so many this year as well.”

“But last year we had but two hundred acres planted to grass,” he called after her, arresting her.

“Mr. Rand.” She did not care to look at him angrily, for it displeased her to show he had roused any feeling in her, yet she could not help herself. “Let us hire in proportion, then,” she snapped. “We have half again as many acres,
hire half again as many workers. Twelve men, six women. Do you understand?”

Evidently she had handled herself a little better than he expected, for the man looked sulky as he replied, “Yes.”

Pressing her advantage, “Pray find me in one hour and a half in—” She faltered, realizing she still did not know the house well enough to appoint a convenient meeting place. “In the dining-room,” she finished lamely. Then she turned and walked as quickly as she could out of the corridor, lest the insolent man should attempt to precede her.

She took her nuncheon in her bed-chamber, lying down a little afterwards and even sleeping briefly. She woke from a dream in which Ensley had come to Holies Street to offer her an enormous, golden Cheshire cheese. It was painful to open her eyes on the unfamiliar windows, the white walls, the bare floor. “What time is it?” she asked the quiet room, suddenly in mortal fear lest she had missed her appointment with the intimidating Mr. Rand. She found her watch and discovered it was not so, blew her nose several times, and got up, smoothing her skirts and splashing her face with water from the blue-and-white basin. “I must get hold of some books on farming,” she murmured to herself as she hurried from the room. “I wonder whether my great uncle has some in his library. I wonder if he has a library,” she continued as she descended the staircase, thus startling Susannah, who had been trimming the wicks of the lamps in the hall below. “I must look over the house…”

But Mr. Rand had it in mind that she should look over the grounds first (“While the light holds,” he argued unanswerably), and so it was. Anne invited Maria to come
with her, the two ladies changed into riding dress, Mr. Rand ordered horses to be brought round for them, and they set off. Anne mounted grumblingly; but as they rode on her spirits lightened, soothed by the pale sky, the sunlight, the lush greens of midsummer. It was in a mild, quiet way a lovely property: The house stood on a gentle hill just high enough to command miles of flat, hedged (the estate had been inclosed for more than twenty years) field and meadow, and in the near distance, a substantial park. Sheep and cattle grazed in a dozen spots within easy view. The farm buildings, when they came to them, were new and solid. The dairy was clean and cleverly ventilated, run on principles laid down, Rand proudly noted, by Mr. Harley of Glasgow; and it was complemented by one of the new pig-sties, a quite well-tenanted one. The barn was of good timber, the granaries ingeniously set up to keep out vermin, the sheep yard sheltered and guttered (Mr. Rand further pointed out) to prevent the dilution of manure. Miss Guilfoyle would observe, in fact, that the whole pattern of the buildings had been carefully laid with manure in mind. Miss Guilfoyle was not shy of his mentioning manure, he hoped? She knew the saying, no doubt, “Nothing like muck”? Truer words were never spoke, in Mr. Rand’s opinion. Indeed, one of Mr. Guilfoyle’s last experiments had been to purchase oilcakes for the cattle. And, Mr. Rand assured her, the resultant muck had been richer than any he had known, well worth the price of the fodder in improved wheat and barley harvests. But perhaps Miss Guilfoyle would not care to keep up the experiment? Perhaps Miss Guilfoyle had some better idea as to how to improve manure?

Miss Guilfoyle, with a sidelong glance of amazement at Mrs. Insel, replied that—as of this moment at least—she
had not. “What a stench,” she whispered, as they finally rode away. “One is positively grateful to have a cold!”

As the afternoon stretched on, Mr. Rand escorted the ladies all over Linfield’s home farm. They were informed of the crop course (turnips, barley, wheat, barley, clover for three years, peas, and turnips again) favoured by Mr. Guilfoyle—and of course asked if they knew a better one; they were introduced to sheep whose complicated lineage, Anne remarked, fairly cried out for an ovine
Debrett’s
(her great uncle had been a frequent visitor to Mr. Bakewell, Mr. Ellman, and Coke of Holkham, and had taken sheep from them to cross-breed himself). They observed the clipping of the milk ewes. They learned how many pounds of wool were to be got from each, and how much more money ewes generally had fetched last year than this. Mr. Rand made some morose observations concerning plunging corn prices. He informed the ladies that several of the tenants were expecting poor crops this year—and even Linfield’s were not up to the mark. Still…and again the steward waxed loquacious, this time on the subject of seed-drills and marling and drainage. As he spoke they all rode on, and on, and on, till at last (though it went against her pride) Anne could not help asking how much farther they had to go.