The Ledger of Small Things

"A good household runs on what is noticed and never said. The moment it runs on what is said, you have already lost the room." — Jameson

Jameson rose at a quarter past four, as he had done every morning for the better part of three decades, in the small but adequately appointed room on the upper floor that Charles Killerton had given him when he first engaged him at the manor. The room faced east, which meant that in July the darkness was already thinning by the time he dressed, the sky beyond his window the particular colourless grey of very early morning that preceded colour rather than followed it. He dressed without haste and without a lamp, his hands finding buttons and collar and cuffs in the sequence they always found them, his mind already moving through the floor below.

He descended the servants' stair and began his round of the ground floor in the order he always began it — the morning room first, then the drawing room, then the dining room with its long table and its smell of beeswax and old flowers, then the passage that ran behind the principal rooms toward the rear of the house. He paused at the foot of the main staircase as he passed it, as he always did, registering the upper floor. Mr Killerton's door — Charles's door, the master's door, at the far end of the landing — was closed, no light beneath it, the senior household settled and undisturbed as it ought to be at this hour. Mrs Killerton's sitting room adjoining it, likewise. The house above was as it should be.

He continued along the rear passage.

He was partway toward the garden door, his hand already reaching for the bolt, when he registered what he had already seen.

He stopped. He turned back.

The library door was thirty feet behind him, set into the passage wall between a side table bearing a blue-and-white vase and a framed engraving of the Massachusetts coastline that Mrs Killerton had particularly liked and had hung there herself some years ago. Beneath the door, in a thin and perfectly level line, burned the unmistakeable amber of a lamp still lit.

Jameson looked at it for a moment without moving.

On the side table beside the vase, where he had placed it at half past eight the previous evening, sat the tray. Cold beef, bread, a glass of claret poured and waiting. He had set it there himself after the third unanswered knock, had arranged it with rather more care than a corridor tray strictly required — the glass placed so it would not catch the draught from the garden door, the bread covered with a clean cloth — because it had seemed important, at the time, that the gesture be a considered one. A considered one, and a discreet one. Mr Charles had passed along this very corridor at nine o'clock on his way to lock up his workshop, and Jameson had been standing approximately where he was standing now, and Mr Charles had looked at the tray and then at the library door and then at Jameson, and Jameson had said, quietly, that Mr Francis had asked not to be disturbed but that arrangements had been made, and Mr Charles had said nothing at all, which was its own variety of communication, and had continued to the workshop without breaking his stride.

The bread cloth was undisturbed. The claret had not been touched. The cold beef sat precisely as he had left it, which at this hour of the morning meant it had been sitting in that corridor for the better part of nine hours.

Jameson picked up the tray. He noted the temperature of the coffee pot, which he did not need to touch to understand was long cold, and the quality of the bread, which he did not need to inspect to know was beyond serving to anyone. He noted these things in the manner of a man keeping an interior ledger whose entries were neither judgements nor complaints but simply facts, recorded accurately against future reference.

The light beneath the library door did not flicker. It burned with the steady, attended quality of a lamp that had been trimmed during the night. Whoever was on the other side of that door had been awake to trim it, which settled the question, if there had ever genuinely been one, of whether Francis had slept.

This was the fourth morning on which Jameson had retrieved this tray, or one very like it, from this corridor. He did not require a fifth to draw the conclusions available to him.

He carried the tray to the kitchen.

Mrs Holt was already at her range, her back to the door, working in the concentrated silence of a woman who had been managing the Ashwood Manor kitchen since before Jameson had held his current position and who regarded the early morning as her sovereign territory. The kitchen smelled of coals and the first faint suggestion of bread. Agnes, the kitchen maid — seventeen years old, eight months at the manor, and possessed of the particular alertness of a young person who has recently determined that observation is more rewarding than it initially appears — looked up from the breakfast china she was laying and registered the tray in Jameson's hands with an expression she did not quite manage to keep uninformative.

Jameson set the tray on the work table. He removed the bread cloth, folded it, set it aside. He considered the untouched food with the brief, conclusive attention of a man closing an account.

"The bread," he said, "will do for the birds."

Agnes drew breath.

"Mr Francis will take something light in the library this morning," Jameson continued, in the same register, "should he wish to take anything at all. I will carry it myself." He paused for precisely the duration required to ensure what followed was understood as instruction rather than observation. "It is not a matter that needs carrying further."

The last was directed, without any alteration in his bearing or the direction of his gaze, at Agnes, who was seventeen and curious and entirely capable of having an interesting conversation with the stable hand before seven o'clock if the material were sufficiently compelling. Agnes returned her attention to the breakfast china with a care that suggested she had understood perfectly.

Mrs Holt, at the range, stirred something. She did not turn around. "There'll be questions," she said, in the tone of a woman discharging an obligation by saying a thing once and not intending to say it again.

"There will not," said Jameson pleasantly, and went to check the front door bolts.

He completed the remainder of his round — the entrance hall, the morning room shutters, the drawing room, the small sitting room at the front of the house where Mrs Killerton received her particular friends and which smelled faintly, even at this hour, of the turpentine she used to clean her brushes — in the order he always completed it, unhurried, each task given the attention it warranted and no more.

When he passed the library door a second time on his return along the rear passage, he did not look at the line of light beneath it.

He had seen it. He had noted it. He had noted it four mornings running, and he was not a man who required repetition to arrive at understanding. What he had arrived at was the understanding that Mr Francis had come home from wherever he had been — and Jameson's considered view of Mesopotamia, formed over the past weeks, was that it was the sort of place that returned a man altered in ways that a Boston household was not immediately equipped to absorb — and that whatever Mr Francis had brought back with him, in those cases that had been carried to the library and not seen since, had taken hold of the young man in a manner that went considerably beyond the ordinary enthusiasm of a returned traveller.

He had also arrived at the understanding that Mr Charles's patience, which was a professional and architectural patience of considerable depth but not, in matters relating to his son and heir, unlimited extent, was being drawn upon at a rate that would eventually require an accounting.

That accounting was not today's problem. Today's problem was the lamp oil, of which they were getting through a remarkable quantity, and the breakfast tray, and the matter of ensuring that whatever was happening behind that library door continued to happen behind that library door and nowhere else in the manor's social geography until Mr Francis saw fit to emerge from it.

Jameson paused at the side table, straightened the blue-and-white vase, which had not needed straightening, and went to inform Mrs Holt that they would require a full complement of lamps trimmed and filled before noon.