Turning the Stones by Debra Daley Page B

bold panorama, and not even an English one, in my opinion. Her inner landscape had sweep – it extended halfway around the world, as far as I could see.
    I told her about the altercation I had overheard the evening before, how the master wished I had never come to Sedge Court and believed that the sinking of his cargo was my fault, and that if it had not been for the intercession of the mistress, he would have had me evicted from the house.
    ‘Dear girl,’ Miss Broadbent said, ‘do not agitate yourself over things the master says at the minute. He has been dogged by bad luck and it has put him on edge. It is a great responsibility, you know, to have the burden of a large household on one’s shoulders.’
    ‘But why is everybody else on edge as well? Do not you feel it, Miss Broadbent? The house is laced through with anxiousness.’
    ‘That is what happens when people dwell at close quarters, Em. Mood is infectious, which is why we must guard against it.’
    *
    I am thinking of those shrewd covers on the chairs that flank the fireplace in the library at Sedge Court. Why do they stick in my mind? Certainly Mrs Waterland had worked them cleverly, raising the needlework above the linen ground toresemble cut velvet. If the master were not at home, Miss Broadbent would sometimes bring us to the library for instruction. It seemed always to be chilly there and in winter the light was so dim it was like peering through a veil. Eliza and I would shiver in our quilted waistcoats while Miss Broadbent scurried on whispery feet to the chimney piece to light candles. We were surveilled by mounted antlers, turtle-shells and sombre Dutch paintings. The shadows cast by the antlers looked like branches so that it seemed we were crouched in a forest surrounding the dark green sward of the billiard table, and the forest in its turn was enclosed by the leathery palisades of books in their presses. There, if you can imagine it, is Miss Broadbent carrying the brass candelabrum to the map table. Beneath its jittery light, Eliza and I are hunched over an old map of Wirral looking for the inscription that says ‘Sedge Farm’.
    The estate is still a farm. Beyond the woodland in the east there are three cottages in rather a sorry state of repair where the farm labourers live with their families. That is where the odd-job boy, Andy Croft, comes from and the laundress, Mrs Heswall. You see the labourers in the fields harvesting the corn with their sickles and the women raking it into rows ready to huddle up in sheaves. In the back-end of the year you might discover a man trimming a hedge or mending a fence and he will tip his hat and greet you with deference because you are from the house even though he knows you not, but otherwise the labourers go about unseen. The corn is cut, the cows milked and the pigs fed by the hand of spectres, it seems. Mr Otty says that when his father was a lad Sedge Court was little more than an overgrown farmhouse, but the master’s father crowned it with an additional storey, where Eliza’s apartmentand the servants’ garrets are now, and he built extensions at the back to form the commodious inner court, where a chaise may circle with ease, and garnished the facade with a perky little porte cochère. He planted the lawns and the copses, which screen the pastures for the milk-cows, and he aggrandised the name of the house.
    Eliza said, ‘Why must we get cross-eyes over a map of the Dee, when we could drive to Parkgate and ogle the Dee itself? Surely that would be geography?’
    ‘No, young lady, that would be an excursion.’
    Eliza squinted at Miss Broadbent. ‘When you were a girl, were you a Parliamentarian or one of the King’s men?’
    Miss Broadbent tilted her head to one side, a finger to her chin, and said with an amused smile, ‘Do you know I can hardly remember. After all, the war was more than a hundred years ago. Fortunately, I still have my own hair and teeth in spite of my amazing