The days lead up to Christmas in a billow of frantic preparations. Rugs and carpets are dragged outside, draped over lines, and beaten with relish by the staff, who in all probability picture Mrs Pounds and her ridiculous demands with each swing of the stick.
The feather-beds in the chambers are rid of their dust-cloths. They are dressed in fine Marseilles counterpanes under bed-curtains of blue chintz, of red damask, of amber silk.
Clocks are polished and decked in holly, walls and windows in sprigs and twigs. Heavy greenery is collected from the gardens and braided with ribbons and swathed over the grand tiled fireplace in the Great Hall. Everywhere, clove-studded oranges.
In the kitchens, upturned copper moulds daubed with butter line the tables, servants’ faces glazed with sweat and grease. The kitchen and scullery maids deplume and truss fowl as they chant ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, their giggles as soft as the feathers drifting to the floor. The Christmas pudding is wrapped in a floured muslin cloth and hung on a meat hook in the pantry.
Disquieted footmen and kitchen maids anticipate difficult guests in uneasy whispers when they think nobody is listening. It is rumoured that the Dowager likes to whack servants’ ankles with her cane while claiming they have over-watered her tea or unsatisfyingly emptied her slop bucket or, apparently, once: because she was sure she could hear an echo when she slapped them that indicated they had no soul.
Every day, Drusilla is trained by Mrs Pounds and myself at the dinner table. Christmas will be her first chance to dine in high adult society, which means she is taught not to sniff the food or inspect the food or tentatively lick the food or favour one food over another or eat too much or eat too little or apologize to the footmen serving the food or chastise the footmen serving the food or appear too dull or appear too lively or voice displeasure with the meal or with the family or with anything which may offend or perturb a single guest at the table.
In the school-room, I impart lessons on propriety of speech, conduct, and dress, and instruct the children to learn, by heart, passages from ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, by Mr Quincey, that they might impress the guests by reciting them.
The guests are to stay a fortnight. They were to stay a fortnight.
THE LINE OF CARRIAGES, as shiny as exotic exoskeletons, line the drive, herded by a very pink-in-the-face Mr Pounds, galloping past the vehicles on his most ostentatious steed: his chestnut stallion.
The carriages park amid much clacking of hoofs and snorting from horses, much creaking and popping of wooden wheel spokes.
I watch from an upstairs window as the guests exit in a plumed heap of bobbing hats and twirling skirts. A couple of servants carry something human-shaped wrapped in linen from the last carriage, lifting it easily as if it bears not even a whisper of weight.
The guests enter the house. I look down from above the staircase upon the prattling mass as Mrs Able receives them wearing her best black gown and her gold watch on a chain around her neck.
Guests include Mr and Mrs Fancey and their litter (Other Baby seems to be growing an interesting nose which will be ripe for controversy in a few years). And widowed Mrs Manners in fine crepe, and her daughter, Miss Manners, who is accomplished in everything she does to absurd degrees, but alas, possesses no large fortune and so is doomed, at twenty-five, to remain unmarried forever.
And Marigold . . . ah, Marigold. My favourite of the lot. Her large, protruding teeth resting, rodential, upon her lower lip; her extravagantly lashed brown eyes wide and unblinking. She is here with her husband, who evidently loathes her, for his face says as much, as does his habit of removing her hand from his person anytime she touches him.
And who is that old curmudgeon there, with her cane and flapping jowls? This must be the notorious Dowager. Her cane pommel of carved coral depicts cherubs uncomfortably sliding off clouds.
They all possess the teeth of people who haven’t been underfed and or beaten in the face with Bibles.
‘Everything looks beautiful!’ one of them exclaims, admiring the Great Hall, to general agreement. ‘I wish we were to stay forever!’
I swallow greedily.
Mrs Able conducts them to their rooms, and I retreat to my own chamber. Lady’s maids and valets pool into the halls, the air teeming with chatter that makes its way through the air, small and squirming like a swarm of insects. All the large front chambers are occupied.
Alas, no sign of Cousin Margaret – her general misanthropy has saved her life.