‘I’m open to any ideas at all,’ I assured her.
‘Well, what I really wish I knew more about,’ she said, ‘is insurance.’
‘Insurance?’
‘Jimmy’s forever pestering me about it. I say to him we should trust to Providence, but then I see folk all about struggling away, like you said, Mrs Gilver, and I just wonder. Our well went dry, you know. A few years ago now but it was a terrible thing when it happened. It was summertime and there was beasts in the fields to be watered and crops in the ground and we’d to give a fortune over to the spaeman to find us another one, not to mention Jimmy and the men taking so much time off to howk it we had to hire an extra man to do the farm work. Then blow me if the same thing didn’t happen again with the new well that winter. Or at least, it went sour. If we couldn’t have collected the rainwater we’d never have got through. So what I would really like to know is if there’s insurance for that? Water insurance. Would you know anything about that? For trouble aye comes in threes and the next time could break us.’
‘Water insurance?’ I echoed limply.
‘All insurance really, I suppose,’ said Mrs Palmer. ‘Jimmy’s just as keen on life insurance, if you would credit it, but there I have put my foot down, for it’s just not right. Mind you, goodness only knows how we would manage if anything happened to him, with all my girls still at the school. And I do worry about the house after that fire over by Wester Luck. You won’t have heard about that, Mrs Gilver, not belonging Luckenlaw, but it was a dreadful thing. The house was left a shell and half the buildings too, and I worry, even though I know it’s wicked of me.’ She stopped at long, long last and gave me a brave smile that I managed to meet with some sort of sickly stretching of my own lips.
‘That’s my Jimmy’s question for you,’ she said. ‘Does it make sense to spend the money every month or not? And my question would be’ – she broke off and looked searchingly at me for a moment – ‘is it right? Should we even try to outwit our fate thon way?’
‘I’ll – I’ll do my very best to answer you,’ I said, and I think she believed me. In truth, I was reeling. ‘What I can say right now, is that it’s not wicked of you to worry about it. Far from it – it’s natural.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ she said. ‘We should maybe just take trouble when it comes and let it run its course. What’s for us will never go by us, especially if we’ve brought it upon ourselves, mind.’
Suddenly, I was sure I knew what she meant but I hesitated about how to broach it. ‘Mr Tait told me about the troubles,’ I started gently. ‘But I have to admit to feeling a little sceptical. I don’t quite see how unlocking a chamber could cause blight. Or start a fire either.’
‘Well, of course it couldn’t,’ said Mrs Palmer, looking at me as if I had sprouted feathers. ‘Did Mr Tait tell you that?’
I shook my head and, chastened, tried to marshal some of my departed dignity.
‘Now Mrs Palmer, is there anyone else about the place I should speak to? In the spirit of the Rural I want to be sure and talk to everyone, not just the lady of the house.’
‘No, just me,’ she said. ‘My daughters are still girls, a long way from a woman’s cares, I’m glad to say.’
‘Really?’ I persisted. ‘I’m sure Lorna Tait mentioned a dairy maid when I said I was coming round here. Elspeth, was it?’
At this, Mrs Palmer’s expression grew rather fixed and she put her head back and looked at me from under her lids.
‘Elspeth is our dairy maid,’ she said, ‘but she’s not in the Rural. She went a couple of times but she didn’t stick at it.’
‘How strange,’ I said, affecting innocence and wondering whether Mrs Palmer would tell me the reason for Elspeth’s departure. She did not. ‘It was all tremendous fun last night. I think,’ I went on, ‘I think I’ll just pop in and have a word with her anyway, Mrs Palmer. One never knows, perhaps if I ask her what she would like to hear included in my talk next month, I might be able to entice her back.’ I began to make my way to the mouth of the drive which ran up the side of the garden and disappeared around to the yard. I was pretty sure I should be able to find the dairy without much trouble: farmyards are much the same throughout the land.
‘But Elspeth doesn’t run a household,’ Mrs Palmer persisted, trotting up the garden on the other side of the wall from me. ‘She doesn’t need to know about budgets.’
‘She’ll have to learn one day,’ I said, still marching very purposefully onwards, ‘if she marries and gets a house of her own, and I think it will be most interesting to hear what concerns her most about the prospect, don’t you?’ At that moment we reached the spot where the garden wall turned the corner and joined to the side of the house, the usual fierce separation of the agricultural from the domestic realm which was designed, I suppose, to keep the sheep out of the flowerbeds but which served an equally useful purpose to me now. Short of clambering over to join me in the lane, Mrs Palmer had no choice but to rush into the house at the front and out again at the back in an attempt to meet me.
I was too quick for her. I sped around the corner into the yard, hopping and leaping over the inevitable deposits underfoot, and made a beeline for the whitewashed building with fly-mesh over the windows and ventilation flaps high up in the walls, which I surmised must be the dairy house. I was right and, slipping inside, I found myself in a dim, cool room where a girl in a capacious apron and with a cap pinned over her hair stood on a slatted board bending intently over an enormous bowl. She glanced over her shoulder on hearing me then, slightly surprised I expect to find me a stranger, she put down the ladle she was holding and turned around wiping her hands.
‘Elspeth?’
‘Madam?’
She was a pretty little thing, very much in the style of storybook dairy maids, with her pink cheeks and her yellow curls peeping out from under her cap, and although she must work hard here at her butter churn and her cheese moulds there was as yet nothing of Mrs Palmer’s brawny competence about her arms and her soft little hands. A spike of anger stabbed me to think of some beastly lout frightening her in the dark and my resolve was strengthened. Before I could even begin to tiptoe my way towards the questions I must ask her, however, I heard Mrs Palmer’s boots clattering over the cobbles of the yard towards us.
‘I’m not going to take up much of your time,’ I managed to get out before she reached us. ‘I know you’re a busy girl.’
‘And dairy work cannot be kept waiting,’ said Mrs Palmer behind me, panting rather. ‘You’ve still the butter to finish, mind, Elspeth.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Elspeth, do carry on. I shan’t mind talking to your back under the circumstances. Not at all.’ Elspeth glanced uncertainly between her employer and me and then turned her back and plied her ladle once more. I repeated my spiel in as unconcerned a voice as I could muster, while Mrs Palmer hovered at my elbow, saying nothing.
‘I dinna go to the Rural, madam,’ said Elspeth when I was finished. ‘Not any more.’ She was holding the ladle over a dish, letting the skimmed cream drop from it in soft dollops.
‘So I hear,’ I said. ‘But I’d hoped you might come back if I promised to address your questions in my talk, you know.’
‘No, thank you, madam,’ Elspeth replied. ‘I canna see me goin’ back again.’ She scraped the last of the cream off her ladle with a wooden spoon and turned back to the bowl.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ said Mrs Palmer. Then to me: ‘I’ll not have her vexed.’ It is, I suppose, very commendable in any employer to be concerned with her servant’s peace of mind and, if I could have been sure that was all that lay behind Mrs Palmer’s sprint up the garden and her anxious hovering now, I should have been absolutely on her side. But had young Elspeth been in need of such solicitousness – had she still been, after all these months, quite as fragile as all that – she would surely not have held such a steady hand above the cream dish, nor looked around so calmly at the sound of my approach. I knew from my nursing days that anyone still wobbly from shock would have jumped a foot in the air at my sudden entrance into their quiet room.