JOHN HELPED SUSAN UNPACK THE DOLLS’ HOUSE, which was wrapped in sacking and blankets and secured with string and leather strapping. It was not really a dolls’ house, Susan learned from a note in the wrapping, but something called a ‘baby house’, never meant to be a plaything for a child but instead a woman’s precious possession, where she might showcase miniature furniture and paintings, tiny silverware and exquisite needlework. This note was written by the antiquarian who had sold it to Robert, and in turn he had discovered it mouldering in the damp and dirty attic of a great house, when visiting to value some pieces the family wished to sell to meet their death duties. He said the family maintained it was a copy of the real house, but it was clear to anyone with eyes in their head that this was not the case. They believed this was why it was called a ‘baby house’, but the antiquarian said this was nonsense. He said that in the last century and the one before, little girls called their poppets ‘Flanders babies’, while a ‘doll’ was a word for a strumpet. This baby house dated from that time and so could not have been named so, its Mistress would not have countenanced such a thing.
Whatever it was called, the house stood five feet tall and four feet wide. It was built of wood, painted to resemble pale stone blocks, and modelled as a three-storied house of perhaps six score years before. The door was situated strangely in the middle of the second floor, with a twelve-paned window either side, and a fanlight above. Two pillars flanked the door, and two others each side of the façade. On the upper floor were three windows, quite ornate, and on the floor below were three more, quite plain, with only nine panes apiece. The bottom floor was painted with closer blocks than the others, and Susan thought perhaps it was a basement, like those in the New Town, although the steps from the doors there led to little bridges to the street, and this door led to thin air only. Along the top was a balustrade, with great sections missing, and underneath the house itself was a drawer with much-worn paint that showed the ghost of a place in the Orient.
The façade opened by a strange mechanism – Susan was glad of the antiquarian’s note – which required that the tiny front door first be unlocked with a key, a hand inserted, and a catch unclipped. It took all Susan’s courage to reach inside, for it had been untouched for so long that the dust had taken on a furry, clinging quality and she thought at first she had touched the remains of a mouse or a bat that had died inside. Then the whole front swung outwards with an alarming creak so Susan thought it might fall, but the hinges seemed sturdy enough, and she could see there were no corpses, only dust in the webs of generations of spiders that had lived there, festooned with great ropes of moth eggs, thick as the roes of fish.
There were six rooms, on three floors, but Susan could see no details past the swags of filth and while she gathered her courage to sweep them out, she turned to unfastening a separate box that had been delivered with the house, wrapped in paper and bound up in string and seals. This contained various pieces of furniture and chattels. There were a number of small pewter plates, embossed with pictures of fish and fowl and vegetables, and two larger plates made of earthenware, glazed in cream and modelled to seem to hold a leg of mutton, with a great slice cut out, and an enormous mound of peas. There was a dainty basket containing a dozen bone fish game-counters, far larger and cruder than the tableware but pleasing nonetheless with their staring eyes and incised scales. A birdcage, an assortment of bottles, and a number of other small pieces were also made from bone, finely worked – a label hanging from the cage said that it was made by prisoners from Napoleon’s armies, using the lamb bones from their meals. There were four wooden pieces only – a dresser with ivory pull-handles, a little table with flaps to either side, a corner washstand with no bowl or ewer, and a little chair. A tiny needlework rug with a lion on a red ground and a gaily-coloured fringe had survived the moths’ attentions, although it seemed nothing else had, even the seat of the chair was more than half gone. There were two brass items and one of steel she did not recognise, and set to one side, and, lastly, a dark metal chandelier, quite beautiful, and a curious item with four prongs pointing upwards from a round base, standing on three little legs.
Once she had examined these pieces and noted the many repairs required – the table was missing a leg, the pewter plates were curled here and there, and everything wooden needed reglued – Susan fetched a great apron from the kitchen and a scarf for her hair and set about the filthy task of clearing the rooms of dirt. Under the heavy wreaths of dust and debris, she found the mouldering remains of carpets and curtains, eaten by moth and rotted by damp. In one room a mouse appeared to have taken up residence, leaving its droppings in what seemed once to have been a finely worked carpet – perhaps it had come down the chimney. Susan ripped out the horrible things and deposited the lot in a bucket for John to empty outside.
Gradually the rooms appeared from the filth, dingy and grey but with charming mouldings visible now, and pleasing proportions. There were two low-ceilinged bedchambers on the top floor with curious corner fireplaces, and two taller rooms on the first floor, with panelling, heavy chimney breasts, and pretty mantelpieces with overmantels. She recognised then, that the mysterious metal items were grates, and she wiggled two of these into place in the first-floor fireplaces. There was no staircase, but each room and its adjoining fellow shared a little two-panelled door, with neat triangular pediments above both sides of the one on the first floor. Susan liked the ground floor best of all, or the basement it might be; it had one room with nothing in it at all but a corner cabinet with a glazed door to the top fixed on with too-large butterfly hinges, and the other was a kitchen, with a dresser fixed to one wall, a large fireplace in the centre with a spit rack on the wall above, and a copper off to one side. She fitted the steel grate into the fireplace; it was a strange, old-fashioned thing but it looked very fine when it was in place.
Mrs Scott bustled in then, clearly desperate to see Susan’s progress, and she startled herself, it seemed, as much as Susan by giving a barking laugh in her shock at Susan’s appearance. Susan went to the mirror and saw that she was as dirty as any chimney sweep’s boy. She swept her hand across her face and felt the grime smear greasily under her fingers – the attic where the house had stood must have been a sooty place. She said she would do no more today, she would need to bathe before she tried to clean the house any further, or she would make it worse. Mrs Scott peered inside and said it was a wonder, just like a real house in miniature. She picked up the strange silver item and smiled at it, saying it had been many years since she had seen such a thing or thought of it, and even then it had been very old-fashioned, and ten times larger, of course.
Susan said she didn’t recognise it, and Mrs Scott said it was a plate holder, so a serving man or woman could carry a great number of heavy plates to table all at once, metal plates made from pewter. She offered to take it and the chandelier and shine them herself – they were silver, she said, and the tarnish would come away so that they shone once more – and she would polish the brass grates and the steel range while she was at it. Susan thanked her, and Mrs Scott said she would have the bath brought up to Susan’s room and filled and get John to clear away the dirt and close the house, but it seemed to Susan she really wanted to go back to her room with the miniature metalwork and admire it.
The next day, Susan didn’t even have to ask for buckets and bowls of warm water, and soap and cloths, all were ready and waiting for her after breakfast. She set to cleaning the rooms of the house, beginning at the top and working towards the bottom. The grime on the walls of the top rooms came off slowly, and revealed pale green paint in the right-hand room, with cream panelling and delicate painted veining on the fire surround to simulate marble. The left-hand room had been papered, with a garish design of blue and white stripes with coral spots – the sort of thing Jessie would like, too modern for the house – and slowly Susan soaked and peeled, and soaked and peeled, until the whole of one wall came off and she could see the pale blue paint underneath. She had to leave the rest of it for another day, it hurt her neck to lean so far into the house and her thumbnail was blunt. Instead she began to wash down the exterior of the house, changing the water again and again until at last the soot was gone and the glass in the windows shone. Mrs Scott came in with a plate of cold pie for her in the early afternoon, although it was clear that what she really wanted was to see the house. She proclaimed herself amazed at the difference in its appearance, she said it was as though the stones had been wet and now were dry, so much lighter did they appear, and she offered to polish the outside walls with beeswax so that it would shine.
In the afternoon Susan got a little more of the wallpaper off in the upper floor, and the next day she got the middle rooms cleaned. The paint in there was a kind of distemper and washed off, but she could see what the colours had been clearly enough, and Mrs Scott went off to ask John to bring her fresh distemper mixed to the right shades, pale pink in one room and a rich middling blue in the other. John had done much of the decorating of Lillypot, it seemed, when Robert had bought it, and he had a good eye; the colours looked too dark to Susan but he promised they would dry lighter, and indeed they did. Mrs Scott had somehow become Susan’s assistant in the task of rescuing the house, and she wanted to know which was the drawing room and which was the dining room so they would know what furniture would go where. They didn’t really know the answer, so they decided that the dining room should be above the kitchen for ease of serving, and then Susan suggested the empty room with the corner cupboard should be the housekeeper’s room, since it was by the kitchen, and Mrs Scott seemed delighted at the thought of that.
As it happened, the housekeeper’s room was the first to be furnished. Robert had commissioned two boxes of furniture for Susan, which came down by cart in the middle of the next week with a note to say he hoped they would be of use, and enclosing a list from a toy-man’s shop with drawings of the things he supplied that Robert thought she might wish to order. By then they had finished the cleaning and the stripping of the bright wallpaper, and the repainting of the rooms where the distemper had washed away. They had left the drawers on the stand alone; they did not see how they could paint the Chinese motifs in gold, but Susan thought it looked well with the marks of age on it. She had placed the house’s own items back inside, the chest and the washstand in a bedroom and the little folding table in the dining room with the creamware food on top, the pewter on the dresser in the kitchen, and the plate rack and the fish basket on the floor. Mrs Scott offered to mend the seat of the chair, and until that was done they placed it in the dining room behind the table, which was in turn propped up against the wall so the missing leg did not matter. John put a hook in the ceiling of the drawing room so they could hang the chandelier, and Mrs Scott found some tiny tapers they cut into even tinier slivers to fill it.
Susan and Mrs Scott opened the boxes of furniture together and looked over the items. Mrs Scott clucked over them like a broody hen, but Susan found most of them wrong; they seemed too recent in style and too bright for the old house, and some were rough in their finish – a bead of blood rose on her thumb as a splinter from a sofa pierced the flesh. In the end she selected a small number of items – two four-poster beds, an inlaid table, a second washstand and chest, a little settle, and a plain dining table – and placed them in the bedrooms and the dining room, saying she would redress the beds in time to match the colours of the rooms, but she would like to choose her own furniture for the drawing room from the toy-man’s list. Then she asked Mrs Scott to make her own selection from the remainder for the housekeeper’s room. Mrs Scott selected a little round table, and two matching chairs, a sturdy wooden bed dressed with an eiderdown, a washstand and a linen press, and she arranged and rearranged them until the room was exactly to her liking.
‘We’ll need to find some bonnie things for your cupboard,’ Susan said. ‘And a basin and ewer, and candlesticks, and a picture for the wall.’
Mrs Scott was delighted and immediately offered to sew a sampler with a Bible quote. She left Susan with the toy-man’s catalogue and said she would arrange for John to go and order the pieces she wanted when she had made her choice, and then she took herself off to design her wallhanging. Susan packed the pieces of furniture she did not want in the Chinese drawers and then she began to peruse the pages of precious things: pewter pressed into the shapes of chairs with rush seats and carved stretchers, or painted to resemble bamboo, tin moulded and painted with lacquer to resemble wooden tables and clocks, and white glass made to appear like tiny tea sets, so fragile that you might think they would shatter with a breath.
Once she had made her lists and received her items, Susan was less satisfied than ever with the furnishings Robert had procured for her. She said to Mrs Scott that she would like to make her own: did she think she could write to Robert to ask for some tools capable of producing finer pieces to her own designs? She was worried Mrs Scott would say no, files and chisels and the like were not suitable, but perhaps Mrs Scott knew fine that Susan would not have the skill to prise open a lock, and surely she knew she would do herself and the children no damage? Indeed, she agreed readily enough, and in a few weeks Susan had a fine set of equipment she had no idea how to use. Mrs Scott told John to show her how to cut wood and metal, and how to mix up glue and make a joint and brace it. John did so well enough, although without much enthusiasm, he was a man of few words who liked his own company best of all. Even after his tuition was finished, Susan remained less than proficient, but there was no rush, she could practise to her heart’s content.
It was a curious thing, the house. Susan’s world had narrowed so completely to Lillypot, the handful of humans who lived there, that she had imagined the tiny house would somehow imprison her even more closely. Instead, it had worked an uncanny magic and made Mrs Scott an ally, if not quite a friend. Somehow, too, it had opened up companionship of a different sort to Susan. As she lit tiny tapers in the wall sconces, she felt herself in the company of a century and more of other women, and their friends, and their children, all of whom had performed the same ritual of lighting the little candles and peering through the green, bubbled glass, to see the little house come to life. As she reached inside to nudge a tiny treasure this way or that, she felt their hands, heard their laughter echo in the little rooms. The signs of them were everywhere, from the soot marks on the ceilings to a miniature shell in the chest of drawers, a tiny print pasted above the fireplace in a bedroom upstairs, a tin pot jammed up the kitchen chimney. It had been theirs and now it was hers.
Oddest of all, the house gave her a sense of freedom, as though it took her back again to the time when she was young and hopeful, waiting for her life to begin, wondering where she might make her home, and with whom, and what sort of place it might be. There was no doubt left now in her world, of course she knew that she would only ever have Lillypot, on and on and on until she died. But the little house gave her back that sense of having a future, as though she were waiting for something to happen but knowing not what it might be, and thinking after all that there might be wonder, and beauty and comfort and care.