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, and how much - despite my newfound love of company - I still wanted it. It was there for the taking and I got better at finding it and bolder at taking it. The best times for going alone were just before or just after supper: two of the busiest times but coming when everyone’s energy was running low, and so there was a slipping and sliding, the household unravelling a little, a hint of abandon in the air and, later, a resignation. A lurching and drifting towards nightfall. A good a time as any for cutting loose.
I’d cross the drawbridge and head for the gardens. That first autumn of mine at the duchess’s was wonderful, a St Luke’s Little Summer. Crusty sea-green lavender heads bobbed under burly bees, and everywhere was strung with barely visible spider webs of improbable spans, individual threads turned into tiny lightning bolts by the low sun. The air was somehow always cooler than I’d anticipated, like water, and moving through it gave me the pleasurable sensation of being dowsed. High above me and above the indignant rooks, birdsong tweaked at the sky as if pulling it flat in readiness for lowering it down, and dusk rose around me as rich as woodsmoke. Secluded at the far end of the flower garden was a banqueting house where, in the grand old days, favoured guests would have retreated after feasts for confectionery and spiced wine. It had long since fallen into disrepair, and my friends avoided it. I, though, found myself drawn to it. Its oak pillars and posts - now woodbine-clogged and fringed with tatty blossoms - were carved with sprightly little fleur-de-lys, sinuous vines and bold bunches of grapes; it had once been really quite something. It was even glazed, and, sometimes, having eased open the door and braved the cloth-like webs to climb the ladder-staircase, I’d peer through those sea-green diamonds of glass at the duchess’s house: buildings that, despite their decrepitude, didn’t look in any danger of falling down, not least because there was nowhere much further to fall. I used to fantasise that over the years I’d furnish that banqueting house with a cosy bed and carpets and no one would know. It’d be for me alone and I felt something of a princess, I suppose, to have even the faintest possibility of it.
Evenings were nothing much at the duchess’s. Apart from on the eve of an important feast day and then on the day itself, she eschewed the dancing and masques that were popular in most noble households and instead we had to be content with card and board games in the company of Polly and Mrs Scully and whichever Scully-children had yet to be put to bed. Later, though, in the privacy of our own room, gazing up at roofbeams barely visible in the glow of the solitary wick, and ignoring Mary’s snores (mercifully, she fell asleep as soon as her head went down), the rest of us talked about boys. We discussed our future husbands: what we hoped they’d be like and what our lives with them might be like. It was as if we imagined those husbands - whoever they were - waiting patiently for us; as if, by having to take our time to grow up, we were inadvertently keeping them waiting. My mother might not have despaired, because there was nothing silly in our talk. We were careful to speak respectfully of those men: it was a serious undertaking even to speak of them, these men to whose selection our parents would give so much consideration. There was nothing resigned in our attitude towards the marriages for which we were heading. We had expectations of which we spoke spiritedly understanding ourselves to be taking them along with us into the future - if not meeting our spouses halfway, then at least part of the way.
We all pitied Mary’s future husband.
We didn’t only talk, at bedtime: sometimes we sang. Or Dottie, Maggie and I did; Alice was no singer, she maintained a dignified silence. Dottie, Maggie and I sang love songs that we’d filched from the adult world and which we didn’t fully understand, but we’d picked up threads from visiting musicians and from Polly and managed to make something
