The Housekeeper's Tale - Ellen Penketh's Story by Tessa Boase

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

VIII

Overspent

A large mirror foxed with age hangs between the windows in the little wood-panelled lair of Erddig’s housekeeper. It rests on the mahogany work table, and anyone entering is immediately drawn to study their reflection in a way that would surely incense the writers of those Victorian servants’ manuals. But this wasn’t an instrument of vanity; rather, it was a classic piece of Erddig parsimony. By placing a mirror behind the single lamp on the table, you double the light source.

And so Ellen Penketh, paraffin lamp in hand, enters her snug berth from the dark corridor and sets the light down on the table. There is double the light, yes. But also double the damage. She looks at her tired eyes and drawn face, once so pert and hopeful. The house has taken her youth. She was 32 years old on arrival. She is now 37, and comfortably into middle age. Her feet ache, her hands are hardened and the gleam is fading from her eyes.

Two oval portraits of the Yorke children hang on the wall by her glowing coal fire. Master Simon, bonny in sailor outfit and hat with ribbons; little Phil, swamped in a white bonnet that frames his deliciously chubby face like a sunflower’s petals. Ellen has been intimate witness to her mistress’s blossoming with the fulfilment of late motherhood. She has cosseted those children as if they were her own–dressing their dollies in little outfits made by blind Mary, her seamstress sister up in Pendleton–how Mary lived to please those boys with gifts.10 And she would be a saint if she did not occasionally resent Louisa Yorke’s good fortune.

She had been Mrs Yorke’s accomplice for every exhausting household plan, from the repainting of the kitchen walls (deep blue, to set off the copper pans), to the incessant rearrangement of the Erddig china and silver treasures, to the plotting in detail of every ambitious dinner party. Ellen Penketh had seen, to be blunt, an anxious, frumpy woman transformed by marriage, motherhood and the luxury of not having to work for a living. Mrs Yorke was a kind-hearted woman, but she was also, by now, a bit of a tartar.

It all boiled down to the question of money. Erddig, with its reputation for generous hospitality, was floating on a raft of debt. In marrying a poor curate’s daughter instead of an heiress, Philip Yorke had sealed the estate’s downward slide. Erddig’s annual income of less than £5,000 (£290,000 in today’s money) came from the farms on the 2,500-acre estate, and the Hafod and Bersham coal pits, but it was being fast eroded by falling income from tenants and high taxation. Philip was also prone to extravagant (if much needed) estate improvements. Louisa, no stranger to money worries, was shocked to find out the extent of their debt. On 2 October 1903 she wrote in her diary, ‘Bank account is overdrawn to the amount of £1,500 which worries me very much indeed.’ This is around £86,000 in today’s money.

The cook-housekeeper was key in driving down costs.

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