‘What sort of a gent is he?’
‘A very tall gentleman, with red hair.’
‘Ah, would that be Mr Pollard? A thin gent with very fine white hands? A university man from Oxford?’
‘Yes, indeed, that is the man!’
‘Ah yes, miss, I know him. But he didn’t stay here.’
‘Oh? But I understood him to say that he had hired your chaise.’
‘Ah, he did, miss. But he didn’t take a bed here. He was Mr Blacklock’s visitor. Stayed with him two or three days and left on the London coach the day before yesterday.’
‘I see. And Mr Blacklock is…?’
But unfortunately the door of the inn was now opened by a maid with a very long face and the kind of nervous bobbing curtsy that made Dido feel seasick. The ostler was obliged to return to his business and Dido had to begin her pleasantries all over again. However, by the time she was seated by a coal fire in a dark, low-beamed parlour and had been supplied with tea and muffin, she felt herself to be sufficiently well acquainted with the bobbing maid to venture upon a question or two.
‘Mr Blacklock? Oh, he’s out at Tudor House. That’s three miles up the Great Cresswell road, miss.’
‘And what sort of a gentleman is he?’
‘Well, now.’ The girl considered and Dido suspected that she had been fortunate enough to touch upon a favourite subject of gossip. ‘Well, I wouldn’t know, miss,’ she said with relish, ‘because you see, I never have seen him.’ She nodded meaningfully. ‘He never comes into the village.’
‘Oh? Is he a very old gentleman?’
‘Old? No, miss, I don’t think he’s so very old. But some kind of an invalid, I think.’
‘And has no one in the village ever seen him?’
‘Well now.’ The girl took a step closer, and a slight flush of excitement crept up her thin face. ‘Mrs Potter’s Kate – she’s seen him. She goes up regular with the milk and eggs. Sometimes, she says, he’s sitting out in the garden when it’s fine.’
‘I see. But he never leaves the grounds of the house?’
‘Ah now, as to that, miss, I don’t know.’
‘But you say he’s never seen.’
‘No, miss,’ said the girl with the air of one revealing a great and significant truth to an unpromising pupil, ‘not in the village he isn’t. But there’s a carriage comes to the house from time to time and it’s my belief – and Mrs Potter’s too – that Mr Blacklock sometimes goes away in it.’ She nodded significantly and dropped another curtsy.
‘How interesting! Now, why do you and Mrs Potter think that?’
‘Because of the way his servants carry on, miss. Young Kate says some days when she goes up there, there’s a rare old carry-on – the boot-boy and the gardener kicking a ball about on the drive and the maid standing by laughing and shouting. Now that’d not be happening if their master was at home, would it?’
‘Well, if Mr Blacklock is an invalid, perhaps they feel secure that he will not come out and see them.’
‘Maybe, miss. But he’d hear them, wouldn’t he? No, you mark my words, they’d only carry on like that if the house was empty.’ Her voice suggested that this was a matter only a fellow servant could understand.
‘I see. How very, very interesting.’
The girl smiled, bobbed about like a cork in a storm, and then seemed to decide to tell all. She glanced about the empty parlour and lowered her voice. ‘It’s my belief, miss,’ she said in a rush, ‘it’s my belief – and Mrs Potter’s too – that he might be a-spying for the French.’
‘Indeed!’ whispered Dido in return. ‘And, I wonder… I don’t suppose you can remember what sort of carriage it is – this one that comes to Mr Blacklock’s house sometimes.’
‘Why yes, miss, I can. It’s a small post-chaise with yellow wheels.’
‘Do you know whose carriage it is?’
The girl shook her head. ‘It doesn’t belong to anyone about here, miss, that I do know.’
‘Well, thank you,’ said Dido setting down her cup and recalling poor Catherine paying her visits in Belston. ‘I have enjoyed our chat very much indeed. Now, perhaps you could direct me to the draper’s shop.’
Fortunately, the shop was barely fifty yards from the inn. And before she had even climbed the three brick steps and set the merry little bell jangling on its wire behind the door, Dido knew that she had found the right establishment. For there in the small bow window, between a remarkably ugly puce bonnet and an olive green shawl, was a large roll of blue dimity dress material.
The inside of the little shop smelt of leather and newly cut cloth and it was packed from floor to ceiling with everything that the folk of Hopton Cresswell might wish to wear: from cards of ribbon to shelves full of pattens, bonnets on wire stands and parcels of gloves wrapped in brown paper, tied with hairy string and bearing labels like men’s beavers and York tan.
Behind the counter, squeezed into the smallest of possible spaces under the crowding shelves, was an elderly woman who wore an old, well-mended lace cap and an air of faded gentility. She was not, unfortunately, inclined to chat. All Dido’s attempts at conversation met with short discouraging replies. And, as she took the blue cloth from the window and laid it on the counter, she scowled darkly at it as if she held a grudge against it.
Dido pulled off a glove and felt the quality of the stuff as her mother had long ago taught her to do. It surprised her. In the window it had looked like good cloth; close to it was coarser than she had expected. Almost – but not quite – what her mother would have dismissed as ‘maid’s stuff’. And, she thought, as she pretended to consider buying, there was something else that was strange. The housemaid from Belsfield had seen this cloth in the window last month, so it had been on offer for at least so long. But the roll was still fat – no more than one dress length could have been cut from it.
‘I do not quite know,’ she said doubtingly, rubbing a corner of the blue cotton between her finger and thumb. ‘It is not such good quality as I thought.’
‘It is but three shillings a yard,’ said the woman with a deep sigh. ‘If you wish, I can show you some better stuff.’
‘No, wait a moment.’ Dido laid a hand across the roll to prevent it being removed. There was something in the woman’s manner which suggested that she had heard the same complaint many times before. So this was perhaps why she disliked the blue cloth. It was too poor for gentry: too good for servants. Unsaleable.
And yet it was not quite unsaleable: one length had been sold. Yes, one length had certainly been sold. Looking closely at the end, she could see where the shears had slashed through; a long blue thread came loose upon her finger. But to whom had that length been sold?
Since the shopkeeper was clearly no gossip, strategy alone would get her the information she required.
‘I wonder…’ she began thoughtfully. ‘A friend who is unwell has asked me to look about for stuff for the Christmas dole in her household. Now I wonder…’ turning the end of the blue cloth over in her hand, ‘I wonder whether this might do for the upper servants…’
The elderly woman’s manner changed rapidly at the prospect of selling a great deal of an unpopular commodity.
‘Why yes, madam, it might do very well.’ For a moment her look of pale refinement was swallowed up in eager calculation. ‘And if your friend was to buy, say, more than twenty yards of the stuff, I might be able to see my way to only charging her two and six a yard.’
‘Oh, that is kind! Now let me see. What kind of woman might this stuff be suited to?’ She thought of those hands with the healed chilblains. A working woman who had achieved a better post? ‘It might perhaps do for the cook,’ she mused. ‘And then there is the upper housemaid.’ As she named each post doubtfully she studied the shopkeeper’s face hoping for a response or a word of encouragement; but she received nothing but a small nod. She began to wonder how large she could make her friend’s imaginary establishment.