Free Ravenscliffe by Jane Sanderson Page A

to be daring and primin equal measure. She made everything herself at the Singer – for Eve and the children too – and she could look at the weather at eight in the morning and be wearing the perfect, seasonal outfit by ten. Today’s garment was an earlier model, adapted for the Indian summer: the leg o’ mutton sleeves now lay folded in her bag of scraps, waiting for their certain reincarnation. She’d offered to do the same for Eve, but her friend had demurred: skirts cut on the bias and scoop-necked blouses were quite avant-garde enough without unpicking and removing sleeves as well. She looked at Anna now, her bare arms turning pink in the sunshine, and she smiled.
    ‘You should watch yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re pink as a boiled shrimp.’
    Anna shrugged. She didn’t mind the heat of the sun on her skin: soon enough, she’d be wrapped up against the autumn cold.
    Silas delved into a pocket in his jacket, which he had slung over the back of the chair. ‘Keys,’ he said, and he passed them across the table to Eve, though it was Anna who took them.
    ‘When can we move?’ she said.
    ‘Just as soon as Mr Blandford has finished cleaning it.’ Silas’s face was a study in solemnity, but at his words Anna and Eve erupted into noisy hilarity, so that the ladies at a neighbouring table turned to stare and Ginger came out from the kitchen wondering what on earth she had missed.

Chapter 8
    T he secret – or one of them – to entertaining the king was to create an illusion: that the levels of comfort and luxury he encountered were entirely standard and, had he dropped in unannounced, there would have been no discernible difference in hospitality. This was Lady Netherwood’s belief, but two days before the monarch’s arrival it seemed less than certain that her aim could possibly be achieved. On the upper floors the detritus of recent renovation – the paint pots, brushes, ladders, wallpaper remnants and dustsheets – were still in the process of being removed, and the great house’s interior was redolent with the smell of freshly applied paint. Mrs Powell-Hughes was near demented with the demands being made upon her and her staff; the countess had taken to her room with a cold compress and had made it clear that by the time she emerged she expected perfect calm and order to have been restored; and now one of Mr Motson’s team of lads had carried his equipment out of the house from the upper floors with white paint on the sole of one of his clogs. The evidence of his crime – a regular series of ever-diminishing stains from a second-floor landing to the main staircase – was currently being attacked by an under-housemaid armed with aturpentine-soaked rag and this method, though effective, did nothing to improve the prevailing aroma.
    Mrs Powell-Hughes had the unpleasant and unusual sensation of being not quite in control. Her reputation for running an immaculate house hung by a thread: if Edward VII arrived to paint fumes and dark patches of turpentine, then she might as well hang up her keys, pack her trunk and go and spend the rest of her days with her sister in Filey. She was rushing through the kitchens on her way to the stillroom when she ran full tilt into the butler. The shock of the impact threatened to overcome her as if here, finally, was the last straw she’d known was coming. She stared at Parkinson white-faced and wild-eyed and he was profoundly moved by her evident plight.
    ‘Now, now, Mrs Powell-Hughes, come and sit down for a moment,’ he said, responding to the extraordinary with the ordinary. Then, turning to the nearest kitchen maid, he mouthed ‘tea’ at her, before opening the door to his sitting room, his inner sanctum, and ushering in his unlikely charge. In itself, this act of kindness underlined the gravity of the situation. Mr Parkinson’s private quarters were so rarely breached by anyone other than himself; the trappings of his solitary leisure hours – a pipe, a