Paying Guests Read Online Free Page B

she could hear the faint sounds that meant Rosie and Dora, the housemaids, were finishing off the cleaning of the rooms up there, and from the dining room came the clink of cutlery and china that showed Lucy was at work. She could smell the beeswax and lavender used to polish the drawing-room furniture, the bowls of roses from the garden that were everywhere, and beyond that the shadowy scent of hot bread. Eliza baking, she thought; that will be for Duff. He adores her doughnuts and she only makes them when she bakes bread. So, shewould be baking an extra batch just so that she could make doughnuts for Duff.
    Absurdly, Tilly’s spirits lifted. She was the most foolish woman alive. Duff must be down in the kitchen with Eliza, in the old comfortable way, and the young man she had seen in Brompton Road hadn’t been him at all. She caught up her dark green surah skirts and went hurrying to the back of the hall and the green baize door that led down to the kitchen quarters.
    She stood for a moment at the top of the stairs that led into the kitchen, staring down into its familiar comfort. Ahead of her the stairs sparkled with clean white paint on each side of their runner of dark red drugget; the brass stair-rods that held the drugget in place glittered with the rich polish given them by Mrs Cooper, the woman who came in by the day to do the roughest of the housework. The well scrubbed floor of the kitchen itself looked, in the midday light, as though it were made of a dish of rich cream instead of humble sandstone and the many coloured rag rugs that were scattered across it winked brightly back at her. Everywhere there was a gleam and glitter from the copper pans that hung across the beam in the centre of the whitewashed ceiling and the blue and white dishes on the great Welsh dresser and the glow of the fire in Eliza’s highly polished black stove.
    Eliza was at the table, itself scrubbed to warm amber by years of loving attention, slapping bread dough rhythmically from side to side with regular turns of her muscled wrists which showed clearly under a dusting of flour, for her black housekeeper’s dress sleeves were rolled back. Her face beneath the neat white cap she liked to wear over her carrotty hair was scarlet with the heat and the exertion of her work, and she had unbuttoned her dress at the throat so that her neck was clearly visible too, in a way that made her look vulnerable. Tilly felt a wash of affection for her. All these years of building up Quentin’s that she and Eliza had shared had formed a bond between them that no amount of trouble could strain.
    She moved on down the stairs and Eliza looked up and grinned, splitting her wide freckled face into its familiar creases. She was stilla young woman, barely thirty, but the long years spent over cooking stoves had permanently reddened her cheeks and dried her skin. But she was still good to look at.
    ‘There, and I thought I could be done with this before you got home!’ she said comfortably. ‘You must have gone like the wind, Mum, to be back this soon.’
    ‘I’ve ordered turbot for tonight, Eliza,’ Tilly said. ‘And shrimps for a sauce.’
    ‘And there’s a nice bit of cold beef to make a platter of beef cakes,’ Eliza said, and gave her dough one last thump before putting it under a clean white cloth in a yellow pottery bowl to rise beside the stove. ‘And I got a dish of macaroni for Mr Geddes all planned – poor man, to live on such sorry stuff! – and a couple of nice fowls that’ll boil up lovely. And the last of the lettuces from Mr Morton’s market garden together with a few of his late tomatoes fit for baking. We shall contrive an excellent dinner, and economical too.’ She laughed richly. ‘It do add to the pleasure, Mum, to know I’ve done a dinner as’ll protect your cash box.’
    ‘As long as we do not keep them on short commons, Eliza,’ Tilly said, a little absently. She was trying to think of a way to ask about Duff that