abundantly clear why the old man had placed an advertisement for a housekeeper in The London List, and she hadn’t even gone ten paces down the dim and fragrant hallway. What would she find when she opened the closed doors? Alas, it was too late to run after the donkey cart.
She may have been raised a lady, but Lady Imaculata was now Mrs. Anne Mont. Anne was her humble middle name, much more suitable for a housekeeper. What her parents had been thinking at her christening was a mystery for the ages. Anyone who named a child Imaculata was asking for trouble. Much like those named Chastity or Christian or Prudence, the Imaculatas of the world were bound to disappoint, and she had been no exception—in fact she had taken a toe or two over the edge of propriety so often she was at a perpetual tilt.
As if a mere change of name would help her with the Herculean tasks at hand, she thought grimly. She’d need to reroute the Welsh equivalent of the Alpheus and Peneus rivers to wash away all this dirt and dust. She was very much afraid she’d gotten in over her head, and not for the first time.
With determination, she set down her portmanteau and got to work. Anne Mont needed this job, at least until she turned twenty-one and became Imaculata Egremont again to come into her funds. Two years was not so very long to endure isolation and filth, and anyway, she’d fix the filth or die trying. She closed her eyes, gingerly scooped the dead mouse up with her handkerchief and tossed it out onto the frost-covered drive, the handkerchief right along with it. Let the poor mouse have its embroidered shroud. She couldn’t imagine ever blowing her nose delicately into it again, even if she knew how to do laundry. Mrs. Anne Mont didn’t have the first idea how to wash a handkerchief or anything else, but supposed that was one of the things a housekeeper would have to learn. The major was apt to have handkerchiefs and clothes now, wasn’t he?
Her benefactress Evangeline Ramsey had pressed upon her an ancient copy of The Compleat Housewife before she left London, and Anne had plenty of time to read it and become dismayed on her journey west. The title page alone had been daunting—“Collection of several hundred of the most approved receipts, in cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials. And also bills of fare for every month of the year. To which is added, a collection of nearly two hundred family receipts of medicines; viz. drinks, syrups, salves, ointments, and many other things of sovereign and approved efficacy in most distempers, pains, aches, wounds, sores, etc. never before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such publick-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.” The author Eliza Smith must have been wonderfully efficient, but then she’d never had to deal with Major Ripton-Jones’s house and his dead and living pests. The major’s house was a dismal wreck and she would earn every bit of the pittance he’d promised to pay her.
Anne batted the worst of the spiderwebs away with her wet black bonnet, hoping none of the spiders decided to take up residency in her hat. Satisfied she could now walk the gauntlet of the hallway, she opened a shut door. It revealed a monstrously large cold double drawing room, big enough to host a cotillion, badly furnished. Great swaths of cobwebs hung in every corner, Dust lay thick on every surface, windows were so smudged one could not see the frigid rain-washed fields beyond them. The fireplaces at either end were heaping-full of cold ashes. No one had sat on the mice-shredded satin sofas in a long while.
Next was the monstrously large colder dining room, in worse repair—not a chair looked able to hold her weight, and she was quite a little thing. She could have written her name on the dust on the long dining table, if she could remember that she was Anne Mont now.
The door at the end of the hall was locked, but she swore she smelled peat burning beyond it. And gin. She took a long sniff, filling her nose with the distinct aroma of drink and unwashed man.
Definitely no lilacs.
Her elderly employer was behind it, most likely, and he was snoring. He must have doused the room in alcohol—she may as well have been