Mrs Bertha Henderson had been in a state of growing excitement all afternoon. She managed, with great difficulty and considerable pain, to make a small cake. The effort involved in beating the mixture to the proper consistency exhausted her. As the cheap clock on her little mantelpiece moved on towards early evening she consulted it more and more often. Half past four. Quarter to five. Mrs Henderson was doing mental arithmetic in her head. Ten minutes to the station in Kent, forty-five minutes or so to Victoria, half an hour, maybe less, to their own little station in Acton, five minutes’ walk and Sarah would be home. Five o’clock passed and half past. Mrs Henderson was torn now between excitement and worry. Had anything happened to the trains? Had there been some delay at Victoria, always notorious for inefficiency at peak hours? Had anything happened to Sarah? For today was the day of Mr Dauntsey’s funeral and her Sarah, along with all the members of his chambers and the benchers of the Inn, had gone down to see him off. And, in Mrs Henderson’s excited imagination, not only would she hear the details of that poor Mr Dauntsey’s funeral and burial, but she should receive some intelligence about the treasures of Calne, the fabulous house where the Dauntseys had lived since time immemorial. Mrs Henderson had looked the family up once in the Dictionary of National Biography in the big reference library in Hammersmith but there were so many entries for so many different branches of the family that she had given up, overwhelmed by the available knowledge. One or two Lord Chancellors, back in the seventeenth century, she remembered, a Dauntsey who became a key figure at the Restoration Court of Charles the Second, a libertine involved in the foundation of the Hellfire Club.
From her vantage point in the window Mrs Henderson could see the local residents making their way home. It was ten to six before she finally caught sight of Sarah, wearing her new black coat and hat, looking rather tired, Mrs Henderson thought, as she let herself in and sat down by the fire.
‘I’ll just put the kettle on,’ Mrs Henderson sang, as she made her way to the kitchen. ‘I’ve made a cake. I’ll bring it in with the tea. It’s only a little cake.’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ said Sarah, wondering how much effort must have gone into that fairly simple domestic activity. She felt that her mother might be disappointed with her tales of the day. She suspected that her mother had been building up her hopes for days, looking forward to tales of magnificent drawing rooms and ornate long galleries, with possibly – Sarah felt her mother was perfectly capable of this – some young scion of the Dauntsey clan, of remarkable beauty and even more remarkable wealth, on hand to fall in love with her daughter and carry her off to marriage and glory, a sort of Kentish equivalent of Mr Darcy, as Sarah had put it to herself on the train.
‘Well then,’ said her mother, setting the tray with the tea and cake on the table between them in front of the fire, ‘how was your day, my dear?’
Sarah took a large gulp of her tea. ‘It was all rather tiring, mama,’ she began. ‘Just before midday the carriages came to take us to the station. Mr Kirk, he’s the Head of Chambers as you know, had arranged all that.’
‘I hope you didn’t have to pay for that, dear,’ said Mrs Henderson, concerned lest her daughter’s inadequate wages should be frittered away on the cost of carriages.
‘No, no, Mr Kirk saw to all of that, mama.’
‘Who did you sit next to?’ said her mother eagerly. It was this hunger for every detail that Sarah found irritating, dearly though she loved her mother.
‘I sat next to Mr Kirk, actually,’ said Sarah, helping herself to a slice of cake.
‘Next to the Head of Chambers himself,’ said Mrs Henderson proudly. ‘Remind me, dear, is he married, Mr Kirk?’
‘He is, mother, he has four children and he is very old, he must be nearly fifty.’ That, Sarah felt, should put paid to that particular fantasy.
‘And the train?’ her mother pressed on. ‘Had Queen’s Inn organized a special train to take you all down?’ Mrs Henderson had heard of special trains. She herself had never had the privilege of travelling in one. Now, perhaps, her daughter could remedy the situation. That would be a good piece of information to pass on to Mrs Wiggins next door, always boasting of the progress her son was making in the Metropolitan Railway. As far as Mrs Henderson knew, he sold tickets at Baker Street station.
‘No special, mama,’ said Sarah with a smile. She knew the way her mother’s mind worked but there was one piece of news which, while not having the knock-out punch of a special, did have a certain weight of its own. ‘But Mr Kirk had reserved three first class carriages.’
‘Three first class carriages,’ Mrs Henderson repeated, awe and wonder in her tones. ‘Three.’
‘I was still talking to Mr Kirk, mama, about this big fraud case that’s coming up soon. There’s a great deal of work I’ve got to do over the next few days. In fact I talked to him all the way to Calne.’
‘Do they have a station of their own, the Dauntseys?’ asked Mrs Henderson hopefully. The Dauntseys of Calne, she said to herself. How well it sounded. And her own daughter, borne there in splendour from Victoria station in a first class railway carriage, conversing with the Head of Chambers himself.
‘I think they used to, mama. Somebody told me that they owned a lot of the land used to build the railway. But the station is only ten minutes’ walk from the house.’
‘You didn’t all have to walk on a day like this, Sarah? There was a terrible wind up here at any rate. It could have wrecked people’s hair.’
‘But you wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the park, mama,’ said Sarah with a smile, ‘it starts very near the station. Thousands and thousands of acres of it. And deer, lovely little deer, trotting all over it. I was told there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They’ve been there for hundreds of years.’
Mrs Henderson smiled quietly to herself. Thousands of acres and hundreds of deer should be able to flatten anything the Metropolitan Railway and Mrs Wiggins might have to offer.
‘And what was the house like, Sarah? Big, was it?’ Sarah suspected her mother imagined a building three or four times the size of Buckingham Palace.
‘Well, we didn’t see a great deal of it, mama. It’s enormous. They say there’s a room for every day of the year and a staircase for every month.’
Mrs Henderson was overwhelmed by this news. Three hundred and sixty-five rooms? It was scarcely credible. She wondered what they did in the leap years. Perhaps they had a room with open double doors in the middle. In leap years they would just have to close the doors to add on the extra room. But she mustn’t divert herself. More intelligence was coming from Sarah.
‘We went across two great courtyards, mama, one called Brick Court, I think, and the other one Reservoir Court.’
Funny, Mrs Henderson found herself thinking, there was Mr Dauntsey leaving all these courts at his home to go and work in a whole lot of different ones in London.
‘Just inside Reservoir Court there is the Great Hall, mama. That’s where Mr Dauntsey’s coffin was until just before the service when the pall bearers came to take him away. It’s a huge room, with great portraits of previous Dauntseys all over the walls and dark oak panelling everywhere. It’s where the servants used to eat in the seventeenth century when most of the house was built. They had an enormous oak table in there, about the length of our road I would say, where they all used to sit.’