The Housekeeper's Tale - Dorothy Doar's Story by Tessa Boase

Author:Tessa Boase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

VII

Eight Dozen Of Sweet Wine

Mrs Cleaver arrives at Trentham Hall with her bags after two days’ travel by stagecoach. She has her instructions. She knows she is on trial, and that this could be an unprecedented chance for advancement. Gingerly, she knocks on Mrs Doar’s door.

‘Who is it?’

The housekeeper’s voice sounds thin and strained to Mrs Cleaver’s ears. She hopes Mr Lewis has paved the way for the transfer of power, as she doesn’t want a fight on her hands.

On 9 May Lewis writes to Loch: ‘Mrs Cleaver arrived on Monday.’ He has also received a note from Lady Stafford, increasingly tetchy as the political tension mounts in London: ‘Her Ladyship will never again have a married House Keeper it is attended with many bad consequences.’

Mrs Cleaver is put straight to work drawing up an inventory: every new housekeeper must know how things stand. It is a way of taking possession–to finger and itemise every sheet, every cloth, every teacup and saucer. No cupboard or room escapes her eye.

Lewis’s letter, interrupted, continues in an irritable hand. ‘I am this moment told Mrs Doar has packed up 8 dozen of sweet wine to be sent off. Is this allowed? Mrs Doar has not pleased me these last few days, for I think she does not estimate properly the great kindness shewn her by the family and thinking she ought to be continued.’

Dorothy Doar is still sick in her bed and won’t be moved: it is her only way of hanging on. How could they bring in her replacement so quickly? After all these years! Her store cupboards, her systems, her girls, her rules. Is it her replacement? Mrs Doar finds Mrs Cleaver coldly efficient and reeking of ambition. She becomes resentful, contrary, territorial. But most of all she is frightened. It is time to stop procrastinating, as her uncertain future now stares her baldly in the face.

While Mrs Doar was packing up her ninety-six bottles of sweet wine, Britain was teetering on the brink of revolution. On 7 May Earl Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, requested an interview with the King and asked His Majesty to create sufficient Whig peers to push the Reform Bill through the House of Lords. It was a bill that aimed to enfranchise the growing middle classes (those living in homes worth at least £10 annually–£500 in today’s money–which cut out most of the working classes) and give proper representation to the newly industrialised cities of the English Midlands and North–and thus far it had been systematically and cravenly blocked by the Tories.

William IV then had sudden doubts about meddling with Parliament. He misjudged the ugly mood of the nation and refused. On 9 May, with the Reform Bill vetoed yet again by the House of Lords, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet resigned in disgust.

On 10 May, town councillor Mr Lee wrote to James Loch from Birmingham, where the police were trying to prevent ‘an explosion of public feelings’. ‘Disastrous news from London. The country is I feel in an awful state of difficulty.

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