Free The Country Gentleman by Fiona Hill Page A

clever indeed, building the kitchens and dining-room so close to one another. A hot dish is a good dish, is not it, Miss Veal? At any rate, pray do not be alarmed by my little soliloquies. Merely the afterclap, the bilge if you like, of a somewhat overbusy mind. Which— Ah, down here? Thank you, Miss Veal.” The ladies descended a half-flight into a small, panelled study furnished with a large walnut library table and little else. The windows of this chamber gave onto a small, artless flower garden, beyond which a lawn, and in the distance fields, could be glimpsed.
    Miss Veal drew a chair up to the desk for Anne, then one for herself. When she had settled herself—with a brief, catlike switching of skirts—she opened, in a silence rather solemnly ceremonial, a very large, leather-covered ledger.
    “These are the household accounts,” she intoned. She began to turn over page after page filled with (Anne presumed) her own, neat hand in brown ink. “Every thing that is used in the house is written in here. If it comes from the farm, the value lost by not selling it is inscribed. If it comes from Outside”—Miss Veal’s manner of saying Outside capitalized and made it sound quite terrifying—“the price is inscribed. Household wages are similarly noted in these pages”—her old hands, wrinkled and spotted, but with the nails still white and carefully shaped, reverently turned to a different section in theledger—“here. It is the method devised and prescribed to me by Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle,” she said quietly, then looked sharply into the eyes of that gentleman’s great niece and demanded, “I do not suppose you know a better system?”
    Miss Guilfoyle, mastering an impulse to smile, meekly confessed that she did not.
    “Good.” Charlotte Veal returned her gaze to the ledger. Her eyes seemed to linger lovingly on a notation of one pound six pence paid as quarterly wages “to Susannah D.” while she said slowly, “Mr. Guilfoyle and I examined these books every Wednesday morning between ten o’clock and eleven. I do not suppose”—again she glanced abruptly up and fixed her stern regard on Anne’s face—“you know a better hour?”
    “Scarcely,” said Anne.
    “Good.” Miss Veal looked quietly down again and seemed as lost in her ledger as if it were a Psalter. Anne felt she had been forgot. She blew her nose, and when this failed to attract Miss Veal’s attention asked (mostly to assert herself about some one thing at least): “Is not one pound six pence rather a high wage for a country maid?” She pointed to Susannah’s name in the still open book. “I seem to recall that at my friend Lady Drayton’s seat in Hereford the maids are given—”
    Charlotte Veal stood. Her brow was dark, her hands clenched. “Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle set that wage,” she declared, the grey locks on her neat head trembling with suppressed indignation. “Mr. Guilfoyle believed in high wages. Of course it is high. Mr. Guilfoyle believed that a labourer lives up to the value put upon him by his employer. I do not suppose…” She paused; Anne perceived there were tears of anger in her eyes, “I do not suppose you know a better wage?”
    After a moment, “No,” Anne said. “A higher or a lower one, perhaps I do know. But not a better. Pray sit down, Miss Veal.”
    Miss Veal obliged her.
    “Now I must speak to you about Mrs. Dolphim, and my own staff,” said Anne, already thinking how she would describe this comical scene in a letter to Ens—well, perhaps to Celia. “As you are surely aware by now, I have brought a whole household of my own servants—”
    But Miss Veal had popped up again (“A perfect Jack-in-the-Box,” Anne wrote in her imaginary letter) and was freshly a-tremble. Her frail hands clutched each other; her voice shook as much as her curls. “Miss Anne Guilfoyle,” she commenced, and it was clear from her tone she thought that to be Miss Anne Guilfoyle was a pretty mixed honour, “your