The Duke’s carriage halted in the muddy lane, and Reginald Ashcombe leaned out with a smile so thin and cold that Anna felt her mother’s thimble grow warm against her throat. He was a man who held half the fields around Pine Creek and kept the magistrates in his pocket. His youngest son had caused a scandal the summer before—a farmer’s daughter, a gamekeeper’s gun, and money quietly paid to keep mouths shut. Anna’s mouth had never been paid.
When the Duke’s steward had questioned her, she refused to swear on a Bible that she had seen nothing. Her mother had raised her not to lie on the book. That refusal had been remembered, and it had waited for its hour. “Is it true,” the Duke asked, loud enough for his coachman and footman and two laborers mending the hedge to hear, “that you have been turned out of Barrow Hall for insubordination?
”
Anna answered plainly that she had been dismissed on a change of housekeepers, and that her character was in her tin box if he wished to read it. He did not wish to read it. He said that a girl of her sort walking the roads with no place to sleep was a burden on the parish, and that he, as a Christian landlord and magistrate, had a duty to set such burdens to useful work. Then he drew a folded paper, already sealed with red wax, from his pocket and held it out through the window between two gloved fingers.
The paper, when she undid it later on the verge of the lane, was an order under his hand and seal granting Anna Turner, spinster of the parish of Pine Creek, the tenancy and full charge of the property known locally as Marsden’s Folly—a stone tower of three stories on half an acre at the northern edge of the village, together with all responsibility for its rates, taxes, repair, and lawful use for the term of her natural life, or until it should be forfeited for waste or neglect. There was no rent. No stipend. At the bottom, in the Duke’s own clerkly hand, the words: “Let her make of it what she can.
”
It was not a kindness. It was a sentence. Every man in the county knew Marsden’s Folly had stood empty for sixty years. The roof leaked in three places.
The stair was rotten on the second flight. Tramps and nesting jackdaws had taken the lower chamber. The rates alone would eat a laborer’s wages, and the walls were said to be settling toward the western field. He watched her read it.
He waited. He expected tears, or begging, or a plea for the workhouse—the outcome that would have pleased him and settled the account of her unpaid mouth once and for all. Anna did none of those things. She put the paper inside her tin box beside her letter of character and the three sovereigns and eleven shillings that were her whole fortune.
She closed the lid. “Thank you, sir,” she said, in the same even voice her mother had used when handing back mended linen. The Duke’s smile thinned further, because a thanks he had not expected was worse than a curse he had. He tapped the roof of the carriage with his stick, and the horses moved on.
Mud from the near wheel spattered the hem of her gray skirt. She did not sit down. She did not turn back toward the village. She shifted the tin box under her arm, settled her mother’s shawl across her shoulders, and walked north.
She was nineteen. Both parents were dead. Her father had gone first, of a lung fever caught mending a carter’s wheel in freezing rain. Her mother had followed the next February, worn thin by grief and too many buckets of hot water carried too far.
Anna had nursed them both and buried them both in the yew-shadowed corner of St. Michael’s churchyard. When the parish accounts were settled, there was nothing left but the cottage furniture, which the landlord’s man came for within the week, and one object her mother had pressed into her hands the night before she died: a plain silver thimble, worn smooth on the crown, with the initials MT scratched inside the rim. The last warm thing left of her.
Anna wore that thimble on a black ribbon around her neck, hidden under her collar. She had taken a place at Barrow Hall as a maid of all work under old Hetty Marsh, the widowed housekeeper who had taken the laundress’s bright, quiet daughter into her kitchen on washing days and never quite let her go. Hetty had taught her to make lye soap, keep a still room book, knead bread until the dough sang, plaster a cracked wall with lime and horsehair, and read a bill of sale. She taught her the household accounts and how to spot a tradesman cheating you by a farthing on the pound.
But Hetty died in her sleep in the October of Anna’s nineteenth year. The new housekeeper brought in from London did not want a country girl with reading in her head and opinions in her hand. Anna was let go with a week’s wages and a folded letter of character that praised her honesty and said nothing at all of her worth. That had been the morning the Duke’s carriage overtook her.
Now she walked north. The lane climbed slowly out of the low ground and ran between bare blackthorn and hazel in the cold March light. Rooks called from the elms above Barrow Hall as she passed the lodge gate for the last time. She did not turn her head.
Two miles above the village, the lane forked. The eastern fork ran up toward Ashdown Court. The western fork ran down through alders toward a bridge over Pine Creek, running high and brown with winter rain. She took the western fork.
Beyond the bridge, the lane rose through rough pasture where black-faced sheep grazed thin grass. Above the pasture, on a shoulder of ground overlooking the whole northern reach of the valley, she saw it for the first time. Marsden’s Folly. Square and gray against a gray sky, three stories of dressed stone with a dark ironstone course at the first floor.
Its roof was a squat pyramid of slate with two slates gone from the north pitch and a third hanging askew. The windows were tall and narrow and mostly boarded. Ivy climbed the west face to the second story. A single jackdaw sat on the roof finial and watched her come.
Anna stopped at the gate—a broken wooden thing hanging on one hinge—and looked up at the tower for a long quiet minute. She was tired. Her boots were wet through. She had walked seven miles since dawn and had not eaten since a heel of bread at the Barrow Hall kitchen door that morning.
She pushed the broken gate open with her shoulder and went in. The half acre had been a garden once. She could see the shape of it under the winter grass: a rectangle of beds edged in brick, a flagstone path, and against the north wall the black leafless bones of an old espaliered pear. Nettles had taken the beds.
A fallen ash lay across the path. She stepped over it and went to the door. The door was oak, four inches thick, banded with iron. The key that came with the order turned with a slow, reluctant grinding, and the door gave inward with a sigh of trapped cold air that smelled of stone and old smoke and the dust of jackdaws’ nests.
The lower chamber was round inside the square walls, twenty feet across. A great open hearth stood on the north side with an iron crane still swinging across its throat. Plaster had come off in patches. Straw and rag lay in one corner where tramps had slept.
Jackdaw droppings and half a bushel of sticks lay heaped on the hearthstone. A rough deal table stood under the eastern window with one leg broken and mended with wire. The stair rose in a tight spiral of oak treads. The first flight was sound.
The second, above the middle chamber, was rotten through in three treads. She went up carefully, putting her foot to the edge of each tread where it met the wall, and did not trust the middles. The middle chamber had a smaller hearth of dressed stone, a boarded floor of wide elm planks black with age, one shuttered window facing east and one facing west, and a built-in cupboard beside the hearth. The shelves were empty except for a single blue and white cup with no handle and a mouse’s nest of shredded paper.
The upper chamber was the sleeping room. Where the two slates were gone, the March light fell in two clean columns and lit a patch of floor where the rain had been coming in for years. A rope bedstead stood against the north wall with no mattress, only the frame and crossed hemp ropes gone slack and gray with dust. Through the small square window she could see the roofs of the village half a mile off, and the tower of St.
Michael’s where her mother and father lay. She went down again and stood in the lower chamber, setting her tin box on the mended table. She counted what she had. Three sovereigns and eleven shillings.
A shawl. A Bible. A letter of character. A change of linen.
A thimble. And a stone tower with the roof going, the stair going, the plaster going, no rent to pay, and no man in Pine Creek willing to help her. She sat down on the three-legged stool. She did not weep.
She put her hand flat on the table and thought about where to begin. She began with the hearth, because a fire was warmth and light and boiled water, and the first step of any household Hetty Marsh had ever taught her. She cleared the jackdaw sticks with her hands, carried them out in armfuls to a heap by the fallen ash, and swept the flags with a besom of ling she cut from the bank behind the tower with her pocketknife. She laid a small fire and coaxed it with a scrap of paper and a match from the tin box.
When the flame caught, she sat back on her heels and watched it burn, and felt for the first time that day that she was not entirely alone. It was while she was sweeping under the hearthstone that her besom struck a hollow note. She knelt and looked. The hearthstone itself was a single slab of gritstone, but the flag directly in front of it gave back a different sound.
She fetched the iron poker from beside the crane and worked its point into the joint between the flag and its neighbors. The mortar was old and crumbled easily. She lifted the flag and set it aside. Below it was a cavity, a foot deep and two feet square, lined with brick.
In the cavity stood an iron-bound oak chest the size of a large tea caddy, wrapped in a piece of oiled sailcloth gone stiff and brown. She carried it to the table by the light of her small fire and opened the lid. Inside, on a folded square of green baize, lay sixty-two gold sovereigns in three neat stacks. A small chamois bag, which she opened to find a woman’s gold wedding ring and a pair of garnet ear drops.
A bundle of banknotes tied with red tape, which she counted later at ninety-four pounds. A still room book bound in calf, with the name Eliza Marsden written on the flyleaf. And a folded letter sealed with a wafer of red wax, addressed in a careful sloping hand to whoever should find this. Anna sat down with the letter in her hand.
She did not open it at once. She looked at the name on the still room book. Marsden. Eliza Marsden, of Marsden’s Folly.
Sixty years gone. She turned the letter in her hand once, then broke the wafer with her thumbnail. She read it aloud in the quiet of the lower chamber, because Hetty Marsh had taught her that a written word gained weight when spoken. “To whoever finds this,” the letter began.
“My name is Eliza Marsden, born Eliza Whitton at Kendal in the year 1780, married to Joseph Marsden, the mason of this parish, in the spring of 1802, and left a widow of it in the autumn of the same year when he fell from the scaffold of the church at Great Ayton. Joseph built this tower for me with his own hands out of stone we brought from the quarry beyond the beck, and he meant it for our house and for our children, but there were no children, and there was no house after him, only me in it for forty-one years. I took in sewing and I kept bees, and I brewed cordials from the herbs in the garden, and I saved what I could against the day when someone should need it more than I did. I never had a daughter, though I wanted one.
If you are reading this, you are in trouble of some kind, and this tower has come to you the way it came to me, unwanted and dear. This is honest money, saved by needle and hive. The ring was my mother’s, and the ear drops were a gift from Joseph on the morning we married. Use them or keep them as suits you.
I hope you are a young woman. I hope you are strong. God keep you. Eliza Marsden, this 15th day of June, 1843.
”
Anna read the date twice. June 1843. She had been three months old in her mother’s arms when Eliza Marsden, forty-one years a widow, had knelt on these flags and buried the chest for her. She folded the letter and laid it on the still room book.
She pressed the silver thimble at her throat between her finger and thumb. And she sat for a long time by the small fire without moving. In the morning, she went into the village with two sovereigns sewn into the hem of her skirt. She bought a straw pallet, a woolen blanket, a tin kettle, a pound of tea, a loaf, a quarter of bacon, six eggs, a bundle of tallow candles, nails, a claw hammer, a bricklayer’s trowel, a bag of lime, a bag of hair, and a coil of tarred hemp cord.
She carried what she could and paid the carrier’s boy tuppence to bring the rest up to the tower on his handcart. The carrier was Robert Hindle, twelve years old, freckled, quiet, grateful for the coin. He came back the next morning without being asked, to see if she wanted anything else fetched. She began with the roof, because Hetty Marsh had taught her that a house without a roof is not a house.
The slater, Jonas Pickard, a widower of sixty-one, looked at the measurements she brought and said he would come Thursday. He came Thursday, replaced the slates, re-bedded the ridge, and charged her seven shillings and sixpence—refusing the odd sixpence because, he said, she had measured true. The stair was the work of William Ackroyd, a joiner of forty-four. He cut three new treads to match the old ones, set them into the wall mortises, and tested each by standing on it with his full weight.
He charged her twelve shillings and drank a cup of her tea before he went. His wife, Sarah, sent up a jar of damson jam the following week. The plaster Anna did herself. She mixed lime and hair and sand in a shallow trough in the garden, the way Hetty had taught her, and worked it into the fallen patches.
She limewashed the walls in three coats of pale yellow, because the traces under the damp marks told her that was the color Eliza Marsden had chosen. The garden she cleared bed by bed through April and May. A farmer named Edward Boothroyd, who owned the field beyond the western wall, watched her working from his gate for three days before he brought over a sickle and said she was welcome to it as long as she needed it. By midsummer, the tower had a sound roof, a safe stair, plastered walls, a swept hearth that drew clean, a bed with a straw pallet and a woolen blanket, a table with four legs, three chairs bought secondhand, a shelf of pans and crocks, and a garden with beans and peas and cabbages in the beds Eliza Marsden had first turned in 1802.
Anna had paid her rates to the parish clerk in June, settled a small bill at the ironmonger’s, banked forty pounds of the notes in her own name at the branch office of the county bank in Northallerton, and had begun to keep a still room book of her own in the back pages of Eliza Marsden’s book, in the same careful sloping hand, copied line by line until it became her own. The village learned her name in pieces. The vicar, the Reverend Matthew Alderson, called in July to enter her in the parish list and stayed an hour drinking tea and looking at the still room book. He went away saying she was an uncommonly sensible young woman.
Sarah Ackroyd came again with a second jar of jam and a pattern for curtains. Edward Boothroyd brought her a hen and a young cockerel in a wicker basket, saying his wife had too many. Robert Hindle came up the lane three mornings a week with the post and a penny loaf, and Anna gave him a boiled egg and a mug of small beer, and taught him on Sundays to read from the same battered Mrs. Beeton her mother had used.
By harvest she was known in Pine Creek as Miss Turner of the Folly. The phrase carried no mockery, only the plain naming of a person and her place. Women began to bring their fine linen for her to wash and iron, because she had her mother’s hand with cuffs and collars and charged a fair penny. She hung a painted board on the gate reading: fine washing and mending, plain cordials and simples, honest measure.
William Ackroyd made the board from the offcut of the oak plank he had cut the stair treads from. Sarah painted the letters. A small ritual formed at the tower door. On Friday afternoons, the women of the village brought their washing up in baskets and stayed for tea in the lower chamber.
On Sunday evenings, after service, the vicar walked up the lane to sit half an hour by her fire and speak of the bees Eliza Marsden had once kept, and which Anna was learning to keep again from a hive Edward Boothroyd had given her. The tower, which the Duke had granted her to break her, had become the place people came when they wanted a thing done well and a fair price paid for it. By the second autumn, the tower stood on the rise with a sound roof and pale yellow walls that caught the last of the evening light. Anna sat in the middle chamber at a small oak table William Ackroyd had made her from the last of his stair oak, with the two books open before her.
On the left was Eliza Marsden’s still room book with its sloping careful hand. On the right was Anna’s own book, begun in the back pages and now spilling forward into a second calf-bound volume ordered from the stationer in Northallerton with money earned by her own needle and hive. She had been entering the year’s cordial receipts—elderflower, blackcurrant, rosehip—priced by the bottle and half bottle, with the names of buyers written beside them. Farmers’ wives from the North Road.
The landlady of the Fleece. A chandler in Thirsk who took a case each quarter. And the housekeeper at Ashcombe Court, who sent a maid up the lane with a shilling wrapped in paper and no message written on it. The tower had begun to be spoken of beyond the parish.
A gentleman from the Yorkshire Post had come in July, stood at the mended gate reading the swinging board aloud, and written in his paper a piece calling Marsden’s Folly the neatest small holding in the North Riding, and Miss Turner of the Folly a young woman of uncommon sense. Coaches on the North Road slowed at the rise to let passengers look up, and travelers took away small bottles of her cordial wrapped in brown paper. The Duke had passed the gate twice in his carriage. He had not looked up either time.
Anna had not looked out. On the shelf above the middle chamber hearth stood two objects together. One was Eliza Marsden’s gold wedding ring on a small pewter dish, kept because Anna would not sell what a widow had saved by needle and hive. The other was Margaret Turner’s silver thimble, worn smooth on the crown with the initials MT scratched inside, taken off its black ribbon each evening while Anna sewed and set on the dish beside the ring.
Two women who had loved a girl they never got to see grown. One by three months, one by four years, too few. Both present in the room by the small quiet gleam of what they had left behind. Anna closed the books and banked the fire.
Downstairs, the hens muttered in the coop against the south wall. Beyond the west window, the espaliered pear, pruned and fed, carried a dozen fruit against the stone. Hetty Marsh, dead these two Octobers, had taught her to lay a fire, mix a plaster, keep a book, and read a bill. Anna had done all four inside these walls, and the walls had answered her.
The Duke had given her the tower to break her. She had not broken.
