Dottie telling me that Alice had been unwell and had an invalid’s licence allowing her to eat meat on fish days and fast days, and Alice raising her eyebrows in acknowledgement of her good fortune. That, it seemed, counted as the big news around here.
And that I didn’t mind, but when I saw the bedroom, it was all too much - or, rather, too little. My bed at home was cosy inside hangings, deep with covers and cushions, but here were five straw mattresses on the floor, each bearing a single blanket. Moreover, the suspiciously clean fireplace was clearly seldom - if ever - lit, and skimpy bolts of ox-blood-coloured fabric failed to hide bare-plastered walls. Detecting my disappointment, Dottie asked, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ Ashamed of myself, I couldn’t quite say, and merely gestured at the room. Dutifully, her big brown eyes followed my hand, but - I saw - she just couldn’t see it, the drabness. Confounded, she tried to reassure me with, ‘But we’re all in here together,’ and, giving me my first glimpse of that lovely, guileless smile of hers, ‘It’s great, you wait and see.’
My first full day at the duchess’s began no differently from how my days began at home: prayers at six. No Mrs Kent, now, though, to get me dressed. Harried by the tolling bell, we girls fumbled with one another’s pins and ribbons, Mary complaining vociferously that no one was helping her enough or not fast enough, then scrunching her hair up under her hood with the furious admission that she’d just have to plait it later. By the time we arrived at the duchess’s closet, the lady herself was already kneeling at the little altar. I’d soon learn that she was always well into her day before the opening of the house gates at five. After prayers came the basic household tasks - the emptying of chamberpots, and the sweeping of our own room and the Scullys’, the duchess’s bedchamber and her day room, the long gallery and Hall. Everywhere in the house bloomed the heady fragrance of baking bread. It was a bake day but not a Mass day, so, after a breakfast of rolls and cheese fetched to our room by Alice, we were to go to the duchess’s day room for some tutoring by Mrs Scully. She despatched her stepdaughter, Trudie - a scrappy, nine-year-old redhead - to take care of her various babies (I’d counted four, so far) before giving us a passage from Aesop’s Fables to copy. My companions began on it laboriously, each individual letter a challenge, but I plucked up courage to whisper to Mrs Scully that I already knew how to write and to ask if I could perhaps write a letter home, a request which was gladly granted. I settled to it for an hour - but then that was it, apparently, for schoolwork, for the day. No reading, no translation, no maths, no music.
What there was, instead, was dancing tuition from a well-dressed girl who sauntered into the room on the stroke of nine and introduced herself to me as Polly. She’d not been at supper the previous afternoon, she said, because she’d been locked in her room for being naughty. When everyone else laughed, I realised she was joking. ‘Kidding,’ she confirmed: ‘Headache.’ Clearing a little dance floor by kicking aside the rushes, she informed me that in the duke’s Norfolk home the rushes were scented with saffron - ‘Nice touch’ - and explained that that was where she’d lived until the previous year: she’d been a Howard ward since the age of seven, and she was now sixteen. I wondered why she’d been moved at this late stage to the duchess’s. Possibly for exactly this, though: to teach the duchess’s girls to dance. It would have to be done, but the duchess wouldn’t have danced for decades and Mrs Scully - a housekeeper, not a noblewoman - would never have learned the finer points. Polly, though, seemed very much in the know. I wondered why she was still unmarried. She’d have been a considerable catch for her quick wits and prettiness - wide-spaced eyes, snub nose and full lips - let alone for the prized Howard connection. Most likely the duke was holding out for the best price; perhaps he was in the very process of driving a hard bargain and that was why she’d been sent to the duchess, safely out of the way while her future was decided, tantalisingly beyond the reach of whoever was bidding for her. During the hour before dinner, she put us through our paces, clapping rhythms and bellowing instructions, unstinting in her enthusiasm, laughing good-naturedly at our ineptitude, until we were flushed and exhilarated and Mary had slipped over and had had to be sat to the side on cushions and wrapped in a blanket.
Afternoons at the duchess’s were mainly given over to sewing, again under Mrs Scully’s supervision but with the added good company of cheerful, know-all Polly. The duchess’s was a big household so there was a mound of patching and darning to be tackled, lots of buttons and hooks-and-eyes to be re-attached, all to be rushed through, which was a relief because I’ve never been anything but poor with a needle. During these sessions, we gossiped. Dottie’s sister was due to be married, that autumn, so, for those first afternoons of mine, the talk was of the match and the eagerly anticipated celebrations. Occasionally we’d be interrupted by Trudie and the trio of household pages with the more mobile of the Scully toddlers in tow, but they’d be sent back soon enough to the gallery or gardens.
After the daily load of repairs, we moved on to more challenging needlework, supposedly of better quality and intended by Mrs Scully to be improving for us. I’d come with something that I’d been working on: a little bag for dried lavender which I was stitching, slowly and badly, with a simple, repeating lavender-head design in blackwork. Luckily, no one even so much as glanced at it. Mrs Scully and Polly were working together on a superb altar cloth, and of my companions some were better at embroidery than others. Alice, working on a pair of sleeves, was unadventurous with her geometric pattern, but neat. Mary was stitching a whitework feather pattern on to a coif and was bitterly vocal on the subject of her own perceived shortcomings, which kept Mrs Scully and Polly busy issuing reassurances. Dottie was mired in a complicatedly florid cushion cover, but her frequent declarations of helplessness - ‘Oh, I just can’t do this!’ - gave the impression that being unable to do it made it all the more fun. Maggie loved to tidy up the sewing box of silks and needles, and Mrs Scully left her to it.
Every few days, Mrs Scully would remember that we should practise the lute and virginals and then there would be an afternoon of music. What we very rarely did was ride. My own horse had gone back home with Mrs Kent but I’d assumed that the duchess would have extensive stables. Hers was a thrifty household, though, and she didn’t travel - never going to court because, Mrs Scully cheerfully said, ‘She has no time for all that nonsense’ - and disapproved of girls riding to hunt. The only way we ever had venison on the table, unless it came as a gift, was if servants went into the parkland and drove the deer into nets. Except for gifts, I’d soon learn, we had no fresh meat at all in winter - only salted - because, to save the cost of winter feed, the household followed the old tradition of the annual Martinmas slaughter. Indeed, most of the few horses that the duchess did own were released into the woods to fend for themselves in winter, the survivors re-captured in the spring.
The duchess spent her days busy either with household business - consulting with her secretary and steward, her caterer and the cooks - or spiritual matters with a bevy of chaplains. Sometimes there were visits from her stepson - the small, wily-looking duke, who was actually older than her - or her own two sons, one of whom had a lot of her in how he swung himself down from his horse and strode smiling into Hall, but the other pallid and pained-looking. Whenever the duchess came across us, we had to curtsey, which I loved to do, having the notion that I curtseyed particularly well. Most days, she took a couple of us with her into her meetings with senior household staff so that we’d learn about purchasing and menu-planning. She’d also take one of us on visits to those on the estate who were sick or in need, delivering them firewood, milk and bread, eggs and perhaps a hunk of cheese, perhaps some cast-off clothing and her famous tonic of breadcrumbs and rose-water. I savoured those rare opportunities for a ride.
Dottie was probably my favourite of the girls: shy, spindly and sparkly-eyed Dottie with her silk-scarf rosy-brown hair. Alice was the opposite - matronly and taciturn - but she was dependable. Mary, unfortunately, was hard work: so nearly appealing, bouncy and rosy-cheeked, keen to please and quick to laugh but, unfortunately, quicker to cry, easily riled and noisily aggrieved, perpetually on the crest of indignation. Maggie was a joy, the smallest of us but the biggest character. I loved her sometimes comical efforts to keep up with us, and anyway I only had to look at her to laugh: that unruly black hair, thick and wiry, growing outwards rather than down.
Yet for all it was wonderful to have companions, I was unused to it. It was a surprise, to me, how much solitude I could find for myself in that big, busy household,