Death at Blenheim Palace (3 page)

Combed and pinned and aproned, the ten housemaids made their way downstairs for two hours of morning chores—opening draperies, sweeping carpets with wet tea leaves to absorb the dust, dusting furniture, polishing brasses, lighting fires in bedrooms and dressing rooms and seeing that the coal-scuttles were properly filled, and carrying brass jugs of hot water to ladies and gentlemen—all this before assembling for breakfast in the servants’ hall, where the daily dish of above-stairs gossip was served up together with hot tea, cold meat pie, and a great deal of teasing and practical jokery among the porters and hall boys and pages and odd men (the men who did all the odd jobs). The six footmen took their breakfasts and other meals in the butler’s pantry, so Kitty did not often see Alfred, the chap who had been at Carleton House and Welbeck Abbey with her. Which was just as well, she told herself, for she regretted having encouraged his attentions—not because she hadn’t enjoyed them, but because one shouldn’t mix business and pleasure. And also because having once encouraged him, she couldn’t seem to discourage him. Now he was writing notes to her, foolish little love notes, which was dangerous. In some households, it could mean that both of them would be sacked.

In general, the Blenheim servants seemed to be a disorderly lot, much less disciplined, Kitty thought, than their counterparts at the other houses where she had served. Most seemed to know a great deal more than they ought about what was going on above stairs, where on houseparty weekends, the guests played musical beds with as much gay abandon as the servants below-stairs played musical chairs.

Kitty did not mind the gossip and bawdy jokes, but she did think that the lack of discipline among the servants showed how the house was managed. It was a straw in the wind, so to say, which she was (all taken in all) not sorry to see. It had been her experience that when the uppers—the butler, housekeeper, and cook—tolerated rowdy behavior among the lowers, they were less attentive in other matters, as well. This seemed borne out by the rumors she’d heard, such as the kitchen maids’ illicit trade in beef and bread, some of which flew out the back door and down to the village faster than it could be served up at table. And the coachmen were said to enjoy a profitable connivance with regard to their livery, scheming with the tailor to substitute their old livery for the new suits the Duchess ordered for them and pocketing the difference. Lax a little, lose a lot, Kitty’s old gram used to say, and here at Blenheim, Gram looked like being right.

The rest of Kitty’s day was as full as its first few hours. At nine, the household gathered for prayers in the chapel, and afterward the housemaids hurried off to the bedchambers of family and guests, where they spent the morning making beds, hanging up clothing, dusting, and emptying wash basins and chamber pots. In the afternoon, they were sent in pairs to dust the Great Hall, the Long Library, and the drawing rooms. After tea, the upstairs work resumed, as they carried more cans and jugs of hot water, laid things out for the ladies’ and gentlemen’s before-dinner baths—soap and sponge bowls, towels and mats—and made up the bedroom fires. Then the baths had to be emptied, and the beds turned down, and then there was supper at nine. And finally, just before the family and guests retired, the maids were back in the rooms, making up the bedroom fires and putting warming pans in the beds, for the rooms were cold as the grave. In Housemaids Heights, it might be two or three A.M. before Kitty could snuff out her candle and pull the blanket over her head, to catch four hours of sleep before the next day began.

Bed hadn’t come quite so late tonight, since there were no guests in the house. But Kitty’s long day was not quite over. Trying to quell her mounting excitement, she lay beside Ruth until the other young woman began to snore. Then she got out of bed, pinned up her reddish-blond hair, pulled on her clothing and her shoes, and closed the door stealthily behind her. Lighting a candle, she crept down the tower’s narrow stairs all the way to the bottom, where the outside door was left off the latch for the servants’ late comings and goings—another example of the laxness of the house.

Outdoors, Kitty extinguished her candle and tucked it behind a potted plant, where she could retrieve it on her return. The summer night was softly lit by stars and a pale sliver of moon, and a low mist rose from the wet grass. At first, she was not exactly sure which path to take, for the directions she had been given seemed confusing, and she had not yet been in this part of the grounds. And there was an owl quavering a low, ominous
whoo-hoo-hoo
somewhere in the trees along the lake—a sure portent of death, Gram used to say.

But Kitty had never let Gram’s superstitious nonsense frighten her, and she put the thought out of her mind. After a few moments of uncertainty, she found herself on the path to the boathouse, and went forward with greater confidence. She had done this sort of thing before, of course, at other houses: getting up in the middle of the night, making her way silently down the back stairs, meeting her accomplice, taking the items, and delivering them into the waiting hands. It was all part of the job.

But tonight was different. Tonight, her accomplice—that silly, romantic boy who persisted in writing love notes to her—was safe in his bed, asleep, and what she was doing was not part of the job. Tonight’s adventure was wholly her own, and she would pocket the profit herself. Tonight was
her
night, and the thought filled her with an excitement that was heightened by the sense that she was taking a rather large risk.

But of course it was a risk, Kitty reminded herself. Life itself was a risk, a game, a big gamble from beginning to end, and you didn’t gain a farthing unless you were willing to take a chance. Well, she was willing. What’s more, she wasn’t afraid . . . not very much, that is. If her lips were cold and her hands were trembling, she told herself, it was with anticipation, not fear.

She reached the boathouse, found the skiff, and clambered in. Picking up the oars, she began to row. As she leaned into the rhythms of rowing, she and the boat moved over the water as silently as a cloud shadow across the moon, all the way across the lake to the grassy slope beneath Rosamund’s Well, a magical spring that had flowed unceasingly for centuries. The spring’s waters, Ruth had told her, had wonderfully transforming powers. If you dipped your hand into them and wished, your wish was bound to come true, no matter how wild and silly it was. That was what had happened to Fair Rosamund centuries and centuries ago, Ruth said. Rosamund was just a plain, ordinary girl—a scullery maid in a Woodstock house, people said—until she dipped her hand in the spring and wished to be loved by a king. Not long after, her wish came true. King Henry fell passionately in love with her and would have married her, if he hadn’t happened to have a queen already, who was as jealous and mean as anything. But he built her a beautiful house on the hill above the spring, and himself a splendid palace not far away, and whenever he could get away from the queen, he’d come and make love to Rosamund.

Well, Kitty thought, when she finished transacting her business tonight, she’d dip her hand in that spring, too, and wish that some handsome man with lots of money and power, a duke or a prince or somebody like that, would fall in love with her and get down on his knees and beg her to marry him. But she wouldn’t have to depend on magic to have money in her pocket, or wait for some fairy godmother to wave a wand and free her from service. She was about to make
that
happen herself!

As Kitty beached the boat and went toward the spring, she thought with an almost giddy delight that it would not be long before her dreams came true. After tonight, she would have the means to leave the drudgery and hard work behind, to buy jewelry and pretty clothes and hire a ladies’ maid who would fix her hair. And she would live in London in a fine house and go to the theater whenever she felt like it. After tonight, nothing would be the same, ever again. Tonight was the end of her old life and the beginning of something brand new and different.

Kitty thought she saw a glimmer of light among the shadowy trees above the well, where Rosamund’s house had once stood. He was there waiting for her, she thought with an in-drawn breath, and she stepped forward eagerly. And then, just as she reached the spring, there was a shadow behind her, and the soft sound of a footfall. Surprised, she turned, and saw the glint of something shining in the moonlight.

Kitty was half-right. Tonight, her old life would end, but the future she had imagined would not come to pass.

CHAPTER THREE

 
 
There was a brisk traffic in stolen antiquities around the turn of the century, as a number of wealthy industrialists attempted to use the patina of antique treasures to burnish their newly acquired wealth and bolster their sense of belonging to the aristocracy.

 
The Social Transformation of England: 1837-1914
Albert Williams

 
 
 
Lord Charles Sheridan stood at the door of the Ashmolean’s Knossos exhibit, just off the main gallery, and looked around the room, shaking his head in disbelief. It was overwhelming, this immense collection of pottery, stone, and metal artifacts, all of it dug up on the island of Crete, where Arthur Evans, the Ashmolean’s chief curator, had recently uncovered a remarkable Minoan palace. It looked as if, Charles thought, the entire contents of the palace were being crated up and transported, bit by bit, to England.

Charles admired Evans’s archaeological work and hoped that the new site would open the way toward a better understanding of a hitherto unknown civilization, whose princes had once thought themselves the lords of the earth. But this wholesale exportation of artifacts—Well, some critics argued that it was little more than thievery, just another example of the British Empire’s habit of pilfering the priceless treasures of other cultures, and on the whole, Charles had to agree with them. If the precious antiquities could be safeguarded against the attacks of time and human greed, Crete’s ancient treasures had better be left in Crete, rather than put on display in an English museum.

If Charles had thought about it, he would also have had to admit that this was rather an odd point of view for a British peer. He was, after all, the fifth Baron Somersworth, patrician owner of a sprawling family estate and country house in Norfolk and holder of a hereditary family seat in the House of Lords. He should have been entirely committed to maintaining and preserving, at all costs, the long and proud traditions of his landowning family and governing class. He should have been wholeheartedly and unreservedly delighted to see the British Empire extending its influence to the far corners of the globe and acquiring the treasures of ancient civilizations to burnish its own.

But these were not traditions from which Charles took any comfort. He had the feeling, as Joseph Chamberlain had remarked in the House of Commons, that the center of power was shifting, the old order giving way to a new, founded on democratic rather than aristocratic principles. In time, he suspected, the landed aristocracy of England would find itself entirely anachronistic, every bit as extinct and forgotten as the unremembered kings and queens of ancient Minoa, and exactly as dead and dusty as the dinosaurs.

“Sheridan!” a voice exclaimed. “So glad to see you! And what do you think of our little exhibit, eh? Quite a sight, is it not?”

Charles turned. The man striding energetically toward him, hand extended, was John Buttersworth, the Ashmolean’s Curator of Classical Antiquities.

“Little exhibit?” Charles managed a chuckle. “I must say, Buttersworth, you and the museum have outdone yourselves this time.”

“Indeed.” Buttersworth beamed. “And there’s more to come, Sheridan, much, much more. The number of artifacts Evans is uncovering is simply astounding, and each of them is a treasure in its own right.” His smile became broader, the light glinting off his gold-rimmed spectacles. “And it’s all to be shipped right here, every bit of it. A real feather in the Ashmolean’s cap, if I may be permitted to say so. The museum shall be acknowledged throughout the world as the chief repository of the glories of Minoan Crete.”

“I’m sure,” Charles said dryly. There was no point in confiding his feelings about the exhibit to Buttersworth, who could neither understand nor share them. Instead, he raised the question that had been his real purpose for coming to the Ashmolean.

“I haven’t been upstairs to look,” he said, “but I take it that the Warrington Hoard has been restored to its proper place.”

“Indeed it has,” Buttersworth said warmly. “I must admit that we would have been lost without your assistance, Sheridan. To work through the usual channels would have been to risk scandal, and that was out of the question. I was utterly at my wits’ end when you came to tell me that you’d got word of the Hoard.”

By “the usual channels,” of course, Buttersworth was speaking of the Oxford police. Charles understood the museum’s reluctance to involve them in the theft of a major holding, such as the Warrington Hoard. While local constabularies were adequate to the tasks of suppressing street crime and preserving order, they lacked the tools and finesse required to perform complex investigations. And once the police were brought into a case, all hope of confidentiality flew out the window.

This was a special problem where adverse publicity—“scandal,” as Buttersworth put it—might cause just as much damage as the theft itself. The museum’s reputation would have been irretrievably ruined if the public had got wind of the theft of the Warrington Hoard, causing prospective donors to think twice before they trusted the Ashmolean with their precious collections. If the museum couldn’t safeguard the Hoard, how could it protect other acquisitions?

The Hoard—a dozen major pieces of fine jewelry and tableware, perhaps the most exciting cache of Celtic gold and silverwork ever unearthed in England. It had been one of the Ashmolean’s most popular exhibits until some six months before, when the museum had abruptly closed it—for cleaning and conservation, officials said. The truth was that the Hoard had been stolen. Suspicion had fallen on a recently hired char woman, who, it appeared, possessed a remarkable talent as a screwsman (or in this case, a screws-woman) and had made copies of all the necessary keys. Charles Sheridan, known to his friends and associates as an amateur sleuth of some reputation, had been instrumental in the Hoard’s recovery. He felt he could hardly claim any credit in the business, however, since his involvement had been entirely fortuitous.