By two o’clock in the afternoon, Temperance was ready to admit defeat. She was sure she could clean up the tenements of New York City, but the household of James McCairn was already defeating her.
The house was large, with many bedrooms and four reception rooms, and Temperance could tell that when the place was built, it had been beautiful. There was evidence of plaster ceilings, hand-painted silk wallpapers, inlaid floors. There were lighter places on the walls where she was sure paintings had once hung. Dents in the floors showed where furniture had once stood.
But now the house was a filthy wreck. Cobwebs hung everywhere, mold crept up the once-beautiful wallpapers, animals had eaten holes in the floors. Four of the bedrooms had holes in the ceiling from the roof, and the rooms were full of pigeons and, in one room, chickens. What furniture there was, was grimy and damaged.
But there wasn’t much furniture. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything in any of the rooms. And it didn’t take great skills of deduction to figure out that what had been in the rooms had been sold to pay debts.
“Even the rich can be poor,” Temperance muttered as she closed the door of a bedroom where half a dozen hens were sitting on their nests. After seeing the state of the house, she had great sympathy for James McCairn and his attempt to remain living in the wreck of the house.
She still hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before, so she went in search of the kitchen and the cook, but when she opened a door she found herself in a courtyard—and it was as though she’d stepped from hell into heaven. In contrast to the filth and neglect of the house, the courtyard was clean and beautiful. The paving stones sparkled as though they had just been washed, and there wasn’t a weed to be seen.
Frowning in puzzlement, Temperance walked the short distance to what looked like a stables and peered inside. What she saw made her blink. Under a long slated roof were six horses, and although Temperance didn’t know more about horses than that they pulled carriages, she could see that, while two of the horses were for work, the other four were for something else. The four animals were divinely beautiful: sleek, glossy, radiant with health.
In the hour and a half that she’d spent wandering through the house, she hadn’t seen another person, but here she saw three men and a tall, half-grown boy, each busy at the tasks of polishing a harness, cleaning an empty stall. One man was throwing buckets of clean water on the already clean stones. The boy was feeding apples to one of the horses.
Not one of the people looked up at Temperance, or seemed to show any interest in her.
“Excuse me,” she said, but none of the men looked up. “Excuse me,” she said louder, and the boy turned to look at her. One of the men glanced up from the harness, then spit before he went back to his work.
Temperance walked toward the boy. “I’m the new housekeeper, and—” She stopped because one of the men gave a derogatory sound that made Temperance turn toward him.
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “Did you have something to say to me?”
The man glanced up at her with a half smirk on his face. “Housekeeper,” he said. “The new one.”
Had Temperance been younger and less experienced, the man’s attitude would have made her turn away, but she’d dealt with hostile men for years. She moved to stand in front of him, and with her hands on her hips, she glared at the top of his head. “If you have something to say, I’d like for you to say it to my face.”
The man looked up at her, a smirk on his face, and he opened his mouth to speak, but the boy put himself between Temperance and the man.
“We’ve had a few housekeepers,” the boy said quickly, “and they don’t last long. McCairn throws them out.”
“Or they run away,” the man said from behind the boy.
This startled Temperance as she had been under the impression that she was the first woman to be offered the job since the former housekeeper had died. Ignoring the man behind the boy and the other men, who had now stopped working to look at her, she said, “How long ago did the other housekeeper die? The older woman? And how many have been here since then?”
For a moment the boy blinked at her without saying a word. He was a handsome child, and for all that he was nearly as tall as Temperance, she didn’t think he was much older than about twelve. Obviously, he was being fed.
“Six,” the boy said at last; but when the other men snickered, he blushed a bit and said, “More like a dozen.” He seemed to offer the words in apology.
“A dozen women have tried this and failed?” Temperance asked, eyes wide. She wasn’t going to say so, but no wonder the men in the stable yard paid no attention to her. They probably thought she’d be gone by evening.
“And what made them fail?” she asked, the anger that had risen in her now gone as she looked around the boy to the men and waited for an answer.
“The McCairn,” one of the men said.
Temperance looked at the man with a shovel full of horse manure. “Aye, the McCairn,” the man said.
The third man just nodded, then swished the water on the stones with a wide broom.
Temperance looked back at the boy. “The McCairn,” the boy said with a bit of a sigh, as though in resignation.
“I see,” she said, but she saw nothing, and, suddenly, she felt that she should defend her entire race. “This morning Mr. McCairn told me that the women he met were too soft, that the life here for them is too hard. I think I should say that I’m not a soft woman, that I’ve seen and done—”
She cut herself off because the men were laughing at her. At first they had just exchanged smiles with each other, as though they knew something that she didn’t; then they put down their shovels and brooms and harness, and flat out laughed at her.
Temperance’s anger returned. Since the boy was the only one who wasn’t debilitated with laughter, she turned to him, her brows raised in question. But the boy couldn’t seem to say anything either. All he could do was shrug his shoulders and say, “McCairn,” and that seemed to be all the answer there was.
With her hands made into fists at her side, Temperance turned on her heel and went back inside the house. And when she flung open a small wooden door, she found herself in what had once been a magnificent kitchen; but, now, like the rest of the house, it was dirty and empty.
Pulling out a scuffed wooden chair from the big table that sat in the middle of the room, Temperance collapsed on it. There was nothing like extreme physical discomfort to make a person want to give up. She hadn’t had anything to eat in nearly twenty-four hours, and her clothes were wet and cold, and the people here were set on laughing at her for no reason at all.
Hearing a sound, she looked up to see an old woman shuffle into the kitchen. Her gray hair and skin were so pale and the long plaid skirt she was wearing was so old and faded that for a moment Temperance thought she was seeing a ghost. A house like this could have any number of ghosts and no one would notice, she thought. But then, Temperance doubted if even ghosts would want to live in this dirty, crumbling heap.
“Are you real?” Temperance heard herself whisper as the woman approached.
At that the woman let out a cackle of laughter that could have cracked crystal. Not that there was any crystal in the house, and certainly not in that cold kitchen.
“Oh, aye, I’m real,” the woman said. “So you’ve seen the house, so I guess you’ll be leavin’ us now. Aleck will take you back to Midleigh. There’ll be a coach come by in a day or two.”
And do what? Temperance thought. Live with my stepfather forever? Continue to pester him with meetings that I despise? If she had to listen to another brainless woman discuss the merits of Mr. Dickens’s works, she’d go mad.
Temperance made herself stand. “No, I’m not leaving. The place is horrible, but with the staff’s help, we can do something with it. I’ll need—”
“No staff.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There’s no staff,” the old woman said louder. “Just you and me and Eppie.”
“And Eppie is?”
“My older sister.”
Temperance sat back down on the chair. “Older sister?” she whispered, looking at the woman. There were rocks that were younger than the woman standing before her.
How was she expected to persuade a respectable young woman to marry Mr. McCairn if he lived in a house like this one? If a woman had any choice at all, she’d run away from this mess.
But then, there was Mr. McCairn himself, Temperance suddenly thought. For all that there seemed to be some joke among the men, he was, as he described himself, beautiful to look at. Surely, a woman might fall for his appearance and overlook the house.
All Temperance had to do was get enough of the house cleaned up that she could invite a woman to a nice dinner, then let Mr. McCairn charm her.
If he didn’t think she wanted to marry him, that is.
Temperance looked back at the old woman standing before her. “Where is the cook?”
“Buried these last seven months,” the woman said, and seemed to be delighted at the joke.
“All right,” Temperance said as she stood up, “we’ll just have to get the men in here to help us. They’ll—”
“No, the men work on the horses. No men help in the house. McCairn’s orders. He don’t want to waste time on the house.”
“I could have guessed that. But it’s unlimited money on the horses, is it?”
“Oh, aye, anything for his horses.”
The old woman’s eyes were twinkling, and she was enjoying Temperance’s misery. “Aleck’ll take you back to the city,” she offered again.
For a moment Temperance looked about the kitchen. There was a huge old-fashioned fireplace, big enough to roast an elk whole, but from the look of the bird droppings on the hearth, it was now a pigeon roost. The floor hadn’t been cleaned since the house was built, and the table had three tarnished copper pans tied to it by inch-thick spiderwebs. Temperance really hoped she never saw the spider that could weave such a web.
“Where does he eat?” she asked, looking back at the woman. “
With Grace.”
Temperance didn’t understand. “With prayers?”
Again the old woman cackled. “No, Grace. His light-skirt.”
“His . . . ? Oh. I see,” Temperance said, then turned her red face away, but she could feel the old woman laughing at her. No wonder the man didn’t want to marry. Why bother if he already had everything that a man needed from a woman?
Taking a deep breath, Temperance turned back to the woman. She’d better stop looking on the negative. First, she had to identify the problem, she thought. Better to sort out things now. “Let me see if I understand this. To take care of this whole enormous house, there are just the two of you, but the horses have three men and a boy to take care of them. Is that correct?”
“Well . . . young Ramsey isn’t exactly . . .”
“Yes, yes,” Temperance said, still looking about the horrible kitchen. At that moment she could quite cheerfully have killed the man her mother had married. “The boy is too young to be considered of any real use, but we can get him to polish things and maybe he’s small enough to be a chimney sweep.”
Temperance’s head came up as she had an idea. “If the stablemen can’t be used to clean, can the boy be sent to deliver messages? Does he have that freedom? Do you think I could get permission from his father to, say, ride one of those horses? I can’t imagine that Mr. McCairn can give four horses enough exercise.”
The woman was looking at her with dark eyes that told Temperance nothing, but she seemed to be saying that this was a new request. None of the other housekeepers had asked such a question.
“Young Ramsey has permission to exercise the horses,” the old woman said, looking at Temperance in speculation. “What do ye have in mind?”
Temperance opened her mouth to answer but closed it. It was better that she didn’t confide in anyone. No, she was going to tell her mother the truth about the situation that that horrid man she’d married had put her in. Surely, if she told her mother the truth, Melanie O’Neil would get her out of here.
“I need pen and paper,” she said to the old woman, and when she just stood there, Temperance raised one eyebrow. “Pen and paper,” she said again, not any louder, but in a tone that made the old woman turn and leave the room.
Thirty minutes later she returned, and put a thick stack of old, but excellent quality, writing paper, a cut-glass inkwell, and, heaven help her, a quill pen in front of Temperance on the big kitchen table.
For a moment, Temperance could only look at the quill pen. A feather? she thought. A feather? It was the twentieth century and she was supposed to write a letter with a feather?
With a sigh, Temperance picked up the pen, then told the woman to find something for her to eat. “Anything,” she said over her shoulder.
Dear Mother,
This is an impossible situation, she began; then slowly, as writing with a blunt-ended feather was not something one could do quickly, she described in detail what she had been put into.
This is not something I am good at, she wrote. I think someone else would be better qualified.
Temperance put her twenty-nine years of training into that letter to her mother, using everything she could think of to persuade her that Melanie had to get her daughter out of the country. Guilt, tears, pleas, were things she used on her mother.
In conclusion, Temperance wrote on page twenty, it is my firm belief that you must send me the money to return home.
Yours in love, your only child, who loves you so very much,
Temperance.
She sealed the letter with old-fashioned sealing wax and a heavy brass seal, then gave the letter to young Ramsey and asked him to deliver it to her mother in Edinburgh as fast as possible.
Temperance had to admit that the horses were fast. And the boy, Ramsey, was no shirker. Within twenty-four hours, Temperance had an answer from her mother.
With hands that shook from anticipated relief, Temperance opened her mother’s letter.
My dearest daughter,
Use the cookbook I sent with you. Men will do anything for a decent meal. I am sending you a quarter of a cow, half a hog, and some other things. The men don’t eat until they have worked all day for you.
With much love,
your mother.
Out of the letter fell a steel pen.
