I’ll Bring You Buttercups. Elizabeth Elgin

      ‘Lady Helen has lost weight,’ Miss Clitherow remarked to Alice only the week before as together they shook out and pressed the morning dresses and tea dresses and dinner dresses and ball gowns put away for the period of milady’s mourning. There would be a lot of work to be done before her sewing-maid went flitting off to London, she suggested pointedly, or where would her ladyship be, after so long in nothing but dreary black and purple? And Alice had fervently agreed and made a mental promise that Lady Helen’s clothes would all be seen to in good time, for she cared deeply for the mistress of Rowangarth, would always be grateful for the stroke of good fortune that landed her with the Rowangarth Suttons and not the Suttons of Pendenys Place. To have been in service at Pendenys, with the ill-tempered Mrs Clementina and the need always to be on the lookout for young Mr Elliot who thought all servants fair game, would have been unthinkable. She wondered why Lady Helen did not employ her own personal maid; why she preferred the aid of the housekeeper to help her dress and herself, the sewing-maid, to look after her clothes when Mrs Sutton of Pendenys had a lady’s maid from France to keep her clothes immaculate and even to style her hair.

      Alice sighed, and thought instead of the lace-trimmed, blue-flowered tea gown and the pernickety sewing-on of fifteen shanked buttons in mother-of-pearl. And so fiddling a job was it that she was soundly asleep by the time she had bitten off the cotton attaching button number three.

      ‘I heard it whispered,’ said Mrs Shaw, who stood on a three-legged stool in the servants’ sitting-room, ‘that you and Tom Dwerryhouse are walking out.’ She had been longing to ask the question, but had refrained from asking it in public since it was obvious the lass wanted it kept a secret.

      ‘Not walking out exactly,’ Alice whispered from the swinging folds of Mrs Shaw’s hem. ‘But he does seem to have taken Morgan in hand: sits when he’s told, that dog does now, and comes when I call him – or most times he does. And you can’t say it isn’t an improvement, and not before time, either.’

      Alice didn’t usually sew for Rowangarth staff, it being understood that when she had attended to the needs of her ladyship and Miss Julia, any spare time was spent repairing household linen. But Lady Helen was taking her afternoon rest, Miss Clitherow was away to town on Rowangarth business, and Miss Julia was out bicycling, so no one would be any the wiser if Alice spent a little time pinning up the hem of Cook’s newly acquired skirt. And it was, remarked Mrs Shaw, an ill-wind that blew nobody any good because here she was, the recipient of a quality skirt, passed on by a friend in service in Norwich as a direct result of the sinking of the SS Titanic and the late owner of the skirt having no further use for it, so to speak. And more bounty to come. A good winter coat, Mrs Shaw had been promised, and anything else the poor unfortunate lady’s executors thought fit to dispose of.

      ‘He’s a well set-up young fellow, yon gamekeeper,’ Mrs Shaw pressed.

      ‘Yes, and he likes dogs. Even sees good in Morgan.’ Alice was not to be drawn. ‘Can make him do anything. Now me – still sets me at defiance, sometimes. Fairly laughs at me – aye, and at Mr Giles, too. Turn round a little to your left …’

      ‘Was Mr Giles that found him – the dog, I mean. By the side of the road, wasn’t it?’

      ‘It was, Mrs Shaw, and in a terrible state, all battered and bleeding. Wrapped the poor thing in his jacket and carried him to the village, to the veterinary. Vet said the dog had been whipped something cruel, and neglected too, and it looked as if he’d run away or been abandoned. Best put the poor creature to sleep, he said.

      ‘But there were no bones broken, so Mr Giles brought him back to Rowangarth and him and Reuben got him on his feet again, between them.’

      ‘Aye. And a nuisance he’s been ever since, the spoiled animal,’ the cook sniffed. ‘For ever knocking things over; always in the kitchen, begging for scraps. And when I go to chase him back upstairs he looks at me with those big eyes. Well, what’s a body to do, will you tell me?’

      ‘Just like Mr Giles to bring him here, though. He don’t like animals suffering.’ Alice removed pins from her mouth. ‘Don’t like it when the shooting season starts. Not a one for killing, not really – well, that’s what Cousin Reuben said. A waste of two keepers Rowangarth is, though it might have been better if Mr Robert had been here. You can step down now, Mrs Shaw …’

      She gave her hand to the small, plump cook, who said that now the pinning was done she could see to the sewing herself and thanks for her trouble.

      ‘No trouble, Mrs Shaw. And if your friend at Norwich sends you anything else, I’ll be glad to help alter them. But tell me about Mr Robert? Why didn’t he stay at Rowangarth after his father died? Why did he go back to India when her ladyship needed him here?’

      ‘Mr Robert? Sir Robert it is now, him having inherited. And as to why he came home from India after Sir John got himself killed and saw to everything and got all the legal side settled then took himself off again with indecent haste leaving his poor mother with the burden of running the estate …’ She inhaled deeply, not only having said too much for the likes of a cook, but had run out of breath in the saying of it, ‘… beats me,’ she finished.

      ‘But there’s Mr Giles here, to see to things.’ Alice liked Mr Giles. It was one of the reasons she took Morgan for a run every day.

      ‘Happen there is, and I’m not saying that Mr Giles isn’t good and kind and it isn’t his fault he’s got his nead in a book from morning till night.

      ‘It’s his brother, though, who should be here, seeing to his inheritance and not bothering with that tea plantation, or whatever it is they call it.’

      ‘A tea garden, Miss Clitherow says it is, and it’s tea that keeps this house on its feet,’ Alice reminded. Tea came every year from Assam; two large chests stamped Premier Sutton and the quality of it unbelievably fine.

      ‘Yes, and a tea garden that could well be looked after by a manager and not by the owner, my girl,’ came the pink-cheeked retort. ‘But it’s my belief –’

      ‘Yes, Mrs Shaw?’ Alice whispered, saucer-eyed.

      ‘It’s my belief there’s more to it than tea. More to it than meets the eye.’ Nodding, she tapped her nose with her forefinger.

      ‘A woman?’

      ‘A woman. Or a lady. Can’t be sure. But one he’s fond of, or why did he go back to India when his duty’s here, now that Sir John is dead and gone? Why doesn’t he marry her and bring her back here as his wife, eh?’

      ‘You don’t think she’s a married lady!’

      ‘A married woman.’ corrected Mrs Shaw from the doorway, ‘and if you ever repeat a word of what I’ve just said –’

      ‘Not a word. Not one word, Mrs Shaw. And I’ll be off, now, to give Morgan his run.’ And maybe see Tom, and perhaps discover where he would be working tonight, for gamekeepers worked all hours, especially when there were pheasants and partridges to see to, and poachers to look out for. ‘See you at teatime, Mrs Shaw.’

      Oooh! Young Sir Robert and a married woman! And him in love with her, or so it would seem. But it was easy to fall in love, Alice acknowledged, thinking about Tom and how far they’d come since that first stormy meeting. Very easy indeed.

      Reuben Pickering spooned sugar into the mug of tea then handed it to the young man who sat opposite at the fireside. He was pleased enough with the underling who had recently come to Rowangarth and who, if he behaved himself, would one day be given the position of head keeper. When he, Reuben, had presided over his last shoot, that was, and snared his last rabbit and shot his last magpie, and gone to live in one of the almshouses on the edge of the estate; in the tiny houses where all Rowangarth servants ended their days, were they of a mind to. And when that day came, young Dwerryhouse would leave the bothy where he lived and come to this very cottage with his wife, like as not – a thought that prompted him to say, ‘Kitchen talk has it that you and young Alice are walking out.’

      ‘Then