The previous night, after he had returned from Cranborne Park and they had eaten supper, he’d given her further instruction about how to load and fire a pistol. On the lawn, with only the light produced by the candles in the dining room to guide her, Emily had hit a tin sconce from twenty paces. Later, he had carried her upstairs to the bedroom and now he noticed that his fingers still smelled of powder and sex.
Quietly, Pyke left Emily sleeping and returned to his bedroom, where one of the housemaids had lit a fire and Royce, his valet and butler, had prepared his washstand and filled the basin with hot water. His razor and soap rested on a shelf above the basin and, in the corner of the room, a copper hip bath had also been filled with steaming hot water. Stirred by his presence, Royce appeared at the door and Pyke dismissed him with a few words of gratitude.
Like all of the servants, Royce hated him. They hated him because one of his first acts as the new master had been to cut the household staff in half; hated him because he didn’t believe in tradition, because he’d closed down the old brew- and bakehouses and ordered the household bread and beer from suppliers in Edmonton; hated him because he wasn’t Emily’s father and didn’t come from aristocratic lineage, because he came from the same stock as they did and because he knew their tricks, knew they fiddled the books to make a little extra for themselves. A few pennies here and a few pennies there, Royce and the housekeeper between them. They hated him and he despised them; despised them for mourning a petty tyrant like Emily’s father, despised them for their small-mindedness and arcane country ways.
If Pyke had had his way, he would have closed down the hall and moved into the city, and they knew this — they had perhaps overheard his many arguments with Emily on the subject. Most of all they hated him because they feared him, feared that he would some day put an end to the only life they had ever known, a life that, under Emily’s father, must have seemed so secure.
Before breakfast, Pyke found Royce sitting at his table in the butler’s pantry and he spent half an hour going through the invoices. The expense of maintaining and running the hall never ceased to amaze him, and while the rents received from the tenant farmers just about covered the costs, more so now the costs had been scaled back, and left a little in reserve which Emily used as she saw fit (this had been one of the stipulations of the wedding contract), Pyke always baulked at the idea of spending so much money on things he barely noticed and didn’t care about: veterinary bills, repairs to cracked windowpanes and chipped stone floors, the installation of new sashes, the replacement of old mattresses and rebinding of old books, payments to chimney sweeps, vermin removers, apothecaries, marble polishers, plasterers and picture gilders, as well as the usual moneys to the brewer, butcher, fish-man, grocer, laundrywoman, blacksmith, bell-hanger, post-boy, slaughter-man, charwoman and the dung and night-soil collector. This was without the wages of the permanent staff. The butler/valet (who also acted as the house steward), cook, coachman, under-butler (who also acted as footman), housekeeper, three housemaids, land steward, gardener, groom, stable-boy, and four gamekeepers. A permanent staff of sixteen, slashed from almost forty when Emily’s father had still been alive: forty men and women serving one man.
There was one invoice in particular he queried. It was only for twenty pounds but twenty pounds to an apothecary for just a single month’s supply of ointments, diuretics and emetics. Castor oil, camphor, spirits of lavender, blistering plasters, arsenic mixtures, liniments, leeches and, of course, his own supply of laudanum, which Emily knew nothing about.
‘What are we running here? A sick house?’ He surveyed the itemised list. ‘Was it really necessary for Jones to visit ten times in a month?’
Royce bowed his head, showing off his bald scalp. ‘I believe he had an abscess, sir. Mighty painful it was too, by all accounts.’
‘And should I really be footing the bill for Mary’s lip ointments?’ Already hating himself for sounding so petty.
‘I’m told these colder days make ’em terrible dry, sir.’ Royce despised him. Pyke could hear it in his tone.
What he wanted to say was that he knew Royce was pilfering from him but in the end he held his tongue. He didn’t necessarily mind that Royce was doing so — he expected it, in fact — but he didn’t like the fact that the servant might be laughing at him behind his back.
When Emily appeared in the dining room later for breakfast she was wearing a white linen dress with an Empire waistline covered by a woollen shawl. She kissed him on the cheek and took her chair opposite him. Felix, their five-year-old son, had already taken his breakfast, Pyke informed her, and was being prepared by Jo, Emily’s maid and Felix’s nursemaid, for a walk.
‘Will you be attending to your fatherly duties this morning, then, my lord?’ Emily asked, in a mocking tone. She often teased him by addressing him this way because she knew it irritated him.
‘The boy needs fresh air,’ he said, not rising to the bait, glancing at the newspaper spread out on the table in front of him. There was nothing new about the headless corpse in Huntingdon.
Emily explained that she had some letters to write, or else she would have joined them. ‘I’m organising a charity event in Coventry next month, for the weavers there, and I want to petition Thomas Wakley to table a question in the House about the exploits of the sweaters who’ve moved into the East End.’
Pyke didn’t look up from the newspaper, but he thought about the money his bank had lent to such people.
‘Pyke?’
This time he looked up and saw her eyes were shining. ‘Yes?’
‘We should try and do what we did last night more often,’ she whispered, so none of the servants would hear her. Her pale skin reddened slightly.
‘What? Practising with the pistol?’
That drew a throaty chuckle. ‘It didn’t seem like you needed much practice from where I was positioned.’
‘Staring up at the ceiling counting the cracks in the paintwork?’
‘I got to ten and lost count.’ She was smiling now.
‘You got as far as ten?’
‘Don’t get conceited.’ She reached over and touched his hand. ‘But I just wanted to say it was… nice.’
‘Nice?’ he said, playfully. ‘A puppy is nice.’
‘I meant it just felt right. I hardly saw you in the last week.’
Royce entered the room with the morning post on a tray and placed it on the table next to Emily. He departed with a bow of the head.
‘Mrs Garner from the lodge wants to know whether we’ll be hosting a midwinter ball this year,’ Emily said, a few minutes later, looking up from the letter she had been reading.
That was another thing. Their neighbours hated Pyke, too, because, unlike Emily’s father, he refused to throw open the doors of the hall for such social occasions.
‘Tell that old harridan this year will be no different to last year or the year before that,’ Pyke said, not looking up from the newspaper. ‘If she wants a ball, she should host it on her own backside. It’s large enough.’
Emily laughed out loud. ‘Don’t you think we should, one of these years? It might be fun.’
‘What? A room full of gormless twits and giggling girls might be fun?’ This time he glanced up from his paper, just in time to see Emily pulling a face at him. ‘I saw that,’ he added.
Despite the bantering of their morning, the hall had come between them during their six years of marriage. Since Emily’s mother had died about a year earlier, Pyke had argued that a move into the city would give them more time together, but Emily couldn’t bring herself to break up the household and claimed it was their duty to maintain the old hall until Felix came of age and decided for himself whether he wanted to take the place on and adopt her father’s title. Anyway, Emily always said, making the one argument she knew he couldn’t refute, the country air was much better for Felix than the dirty, smog-filled air in the city.