The Housekeeper's Tale by Tessa Boase

Author:Tessa Boase
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2014-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

XII

‘White-Washed By Un-Civil Law’

‘The whole affair is scandalous’, wrote Louisa that night. ‘All the evidence was against the prisoner, also the Judge, but the Welsh jury said she was not guilty.’ What rankled most for the Yorkes was the barrister’s summing up. ‘Idlers on the pathway of life’, as Louisa recorded it–a phrase never to be forgotten. She was forced to stay in bed until 11.30 a.m. the next day to recover from ‘all the worry’. What had gone wrong for them? It had seemed such a black-and-white case: Mrs Penketh ‘stole the amount of £500, yet she was let off free, by a Welsh jury. There is no justice at all.’ Licking their wounds, the couple left deepest North Wales for the sanctuary of Erddig and the outraged support of their friends. As the North Wales Guardian and Wrexham Advertiser were trawled for juicy details of the trial (almost a full page in each), there was much muttering about all things Welsh.

‘There is a rumour that the jury were bribed at Ruthin’, wrote Louisa, still consumed by the trial four days later. ‘There can be no other way of accounting for the miscarriage of justice. We had many visitors and all were very sympathetic.’ But the wheels of the big house had to keep on turning. There was a new housekeeper at the helm, a slew of female staff about to leave the following year (perhaps out of sympathy for Ellen, or tarred by association with her), and the difficult matter of a pay rise for staff following the impertinent insinuations of Mr Artemus Jones. The old worry of unsettled servants reared its head again, distracting Louisa from the Penketh saga: ‘There is great excitement in the house with regard to precedence among the Servants. I wish these things could be settled without my being worried.’

But for Philip, who had only his charitable institutions, his cataloguing of papers and minimal contact with his two young sons to keep him distracted, the court case bit deep. Not only had their financial difficulties been exposed in public, but to be slandered as ‘Idlers on the pathway of life’! The Penketh episode scarred him. He sacked his lawyer, stopped his payments to charities and unsuccessfully tried to close a public footpath through the estate. He became obsessed with setting the record straight. ‘Philip is still dreadfully worried about the Ruthin affair and is trying to vent his rage in the newspapers, but none of the Editors care to take it up’, wrote Louisa a week after the trial. There was an unsettling liberal wind blowing through society, and an increasingly militant atmosphere between ‘bosses’ and ‘workers’. Tales of outrageous slights against the upper classes were no longer the stuff that sold newspapers.

And so Philip Yorke had to content himself, slightly pathetically, with his great verse marathon in the servants’ basement corridor. Perhaps, after all, what mattered most was that the remaining servants took his side and believed in his munificence. Five years

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