She found her was leaning on the sill of one of the dormer windows that looked out across the flat leads of the roof to the woods that lay to the west of the house.
‘How green and lush the countryside has become in the three weeks we have been here,’ she observed. ‘I feel spring has come at last – it quite fills one with hope for the future.’
Antonia looked at Donna’s thin cheeks, usually so sallow, now touched with colour. It seemed she was flourishing in the face of this new challenge. The daughter of an impoverished East India Company army officer, she had been left with no choice after his death, when she was in her early twenties, but to become a governess.
Although Donna rarely spoke of her previous employers, Antonia knew she had not found the role a congenial one. Becoming companion-governess to the fourteen-year-old Antonia had better suited her temperament and the two had soon become fast friends.
‘Yes, it is lovely.’ Antonia leant on the ledge next to her, and for a moment neither spoke as they breathed in the fresh smell of the breeze wafting softly across the beechwoods from the Downs. ‘What brought you up here?’
‘It occurred to me that we gave these rooms only the most scant inspection that first day and I wanted to see if we had missed anything useful. But there is only a chair with a broken leg and another damp spot we had failed to notice. But then I noticed chimney stacks. See?’
Antonia followed the pointing finger to where ancient twisting brick stacks just broke the tree-line. ‘Good heavens, that is the Dower House. I had quite forgotten it. The last time I was there, I was very young. My father’s elderly cousin lived there for years but, since they had quarrelled violently ages ago, we never visited. She is long dead now.’
‘Will the house be yours, then?’ Donna enquired.
‘Well, yes, it must be. It is part of the estate.’ She met Donna’s eye and they spoke as one. ‘Furniture!’
‘Of course, it may have been cleared out by your father and sold when his cousin died,’ Donna said with the practical air of someone who was determined not to be disappointed.
‘Perhaps not. They were on such bad terms and he had other things to occupy him…’
‘Such as his wine cellar,’ Donna supplied waspishly. ‘Well, we must go and have a look, and the sooner the better. Just let me glance in at the kitchen first, I left Widow Brown preparing the vegetables for dinner.’
A scene of chaos greeted them as they crossed the threshold. The charwoman was chasing the tabby cat round the kitchen with a broom, a badly mauled, skinned rabbit was bleeding damply on the hearthrug and a pot of giblet stock boiled over on the range.
‘Mrs Brown, whatever is the matter?’ Donna demanded.
The charwoman grounded the broom and stood panting, red in the face. ‘That dratted cat, Miss! It’s the rats it’s meant to be eating, not what's in the pantry.’
The cat, seizing its opportunity, dragged the rabbit off into the scullery and Antonia darted across to save the stock pot before it boiled dry.
‘Oh, dear,’ Donna lamented. ‘That rabbit was our dinner. Did the boys leave any other game this morning, Mrs Brown?’
Shortly after they had arrived, Antonia had the idea of encouraging her tenants to ‘poach’ the plentiful game that infested her neglected lands. She had struck a bargain: she would take a cut of the animals they snared or shot and, in return, they could keep the rest to feed their families. She had laid down the strict condition that they did not stray by so much as a toe into Brightshill or any other estate in the neighbourhood.
The scheme was already starting to work well. Her tenants would be better fed and she felt confident that they were now safely removed from all temptation to run foul of the law – or the Duke’s gamekeepers. In return, she and Donna would dine well on rabbit, pheasant, pigeons. Yesterday there had even been venison.
They had become adept at plucking, skinning and stewing to the great benefit of the housekeeping account. Perhaps more importantly, she felt she had begun to heal the rift between landlord and tenant that her father’s behaviour had opened. Whenever she met any of her tenants Antonia had been warmed by their obvious gratitude.
And there was still the river and the lake to consider, although that might have to wait. She had looked at her late brother's fishing rods, but after becoming entangled in hook and line before she had even got them out of the cupboard, had regretfully decided she needed lessons before threatening the local pike and perch.
‘I believe there is still a brace of wood pigeons.’ Donna peered into the larder. ‘I had better stay here and see what I can retrieve. Will you go on to the Dower House without me, Antonia? Now, Mrs Brown, let us see what we can do here.’
Antonia slipped out of the back door with relief, glad to escape from the smell of burnt stock. Rain earlier that day had given way to sunshine, although she had to watch her step with the mud as she picked her way across the freshly gravelled paths through the walled vegetable gardens.
Old Johnson was hoeing between lines of seedling vegetables, grumbling at the skinny lad who was putting in pea sticks along newly dug trenches. Knowing full well that the gardener could, and woul
d, hold forth at length with incomprehensible gardening questions if she gave him the opportunity, Antonia gave them a cheery wave and went out through a wicket gate into the ruins of the pleasure grounds beyond.
She negotiated clumps of brambles and nettles, remembering with sadness the smooth sweep of lawn and well-tended shrubberies that had once occupied the area. Her mother had loved to stroll in the cool of the evening in the formal rose garden she had created. Now Antonia could not even recognise where they had walked together.
She swallowed hard against the almost physical pain of remembering and walked on towards the belt of trees that fringed the pleasure grounds and separated them from the gardens of the Dower House and the pastures beyond.
A small group of fallow deer started away, almost under her feet, reminding her that the fences must be in disrepair. The animals were lovely to watch, but would swiftly lay to waste any efforts to civilise the gardens. Gloomily she attempted to calculate how much fencing would cost, not only for the grounds but, more importantly, the fields and pastures.
The Dower House was hidden behind a rampant hedge of briar and thorn, taller than her head, that made her think of the tale of the Sleeping Beauty. She was approaching the rear of the house, she realised as she came to the garden gate. It hung crazily from one hinge, the wood quite rotten and covered in lichen. Antonia lifted it aside gingerly and walked through to find herself in a paved yard with a well in the middle.
The house had been the original farm on the estate, she recalled. Built in the reign of the first James, it was a two-storey building of two wings constructed of local red brick, under a tiled roof capped by the twisting chimney stacks Donna had seen from the attic that morning.