Holmwood, by Hester Quarrington
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
The garnet brooch went missing from Mrs Ashworth’s dressing table on the Tuesday, and by the Wednesday every servant at Holmwood had stood in the housekeeper’s room and watched their box turned out onto the floor.
Ellen Threlfall was the last. She was seventeen and had been at Holmwood since she was fourteen, first in the scullery and then, for a year, as second housemaid, which meant she cleaned the grates and the dressing room before the family woke. Mrs Pegler went through her box with the same thoroughness she gave to the silver: two print dresses, three caps, a Bible from the Sunday school at Knutsford, a bundle of letters from her mother tied with wool. She shook each letter out of its envelope. She held the Bible by its spine and riffled the pages. There was nothing.
‘You may put your things back,’ Mrs Pegler said, and went out without closing the door.
Ellen folded the dresses. She had seen the brooch on the Sunday, but not on the dressing table. She had seen it in the shrubbery below the terrace, in the hand of Miss Cecily, who was nineteen and to be married in the spring to a man with a house in Cheshire and a great deal of land. Miss Cecily had pressed the brooch into the hand of a young man in a shabby coat, and kissed him, and then run back towards the house holding up her skirts, and the young man had walked away down the drive with his hands in his pockets. Ellen had been on her knees in the window of the blue bedroom, doing the brass, and nobody had looked up.
On Friday she was sent for.
Mrs Ashworth sat at her writing desk in the morning room and did not ask her to sit. She said that nothing had been found, and that she did not accuse anyone, but that Ellen had been the only person in the dressing room that week apart from the family, and that she could not keep a girl about whom there was any doubt. Ellen would have her wages to the end of the month. She would leave on Saturday.
‘And my character, madam?’
Mrs Ashworth looked at her pen. ‘I do not think I can write one, in the circumstances. You understand.’
Ellen understood. Without a character no respectable house would take her. She had a mother in Knutsford who took in mending and two brothers still at school.
‘Yes, madam,’ she said.
She packed on Saturday morning. Mrs Pegler gave her a paper of sandwiches and did not meet her eye. Cook, who had been her friend, was busy with the luncheon and did not come up. Ellen carried her box to the top of the back stairs, as she had been told, and then, without quite knowing why, she put it down and walked along the passage and through the green baize door and into the front hall, where Mrs Ashworth was arranging flowers in a bowl.
‘Miss Cecily will know where the brooch is, madam,’ she said. ‘I saw her give it to a young man in the shrubbery on Sunday. I said nothing, because it was not my place. It is not my place now. But I wanted you to know that I know.’
Mrs Ashworth’s hand stopped on the stem of a lily.
Ellen went back for her box. Then she carried it down the front steps, which no servant at Holmwood had ever used, and set off down the drive without looking round.
“Ellen is presented as a powerless victim of the people she works for.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.