A Subtle Twist of Fate

      Rose stood awkwardly in front of a table massed with silverware. Her interview wasn’t going well. It began over an hour ago when Mr Gaunt, the butler, interrogated her about her slender CV. Then he moved on to what he referred to as ‘the practical exercises’. They’d just established that she knew nothing about the proper care of silver and now were involved in a guessing game with various bits of cutlery. The suit she’d borrowed from her friend Sheri was too big in most places and too tight in others. And it itched. But she didn’t dare scratch in front of Mr Gaunt.

      Gaunt, in turn, had never recovered from the considerable impression that the television series Upstairs, Downstairs had made on him in the seventies. It was an era when he’d struggled with his identity and the result was a curious devotion to archaic class distinctions along with a violent obsession with Jean Marsh. Power plays that might have resolved themselves quite harmlessly in the more traditional sado-masochistic club circuit thus oozed out into his professional life with alarming regularity.

      Poor Rose watched in dread as his gloved hand moved towards another exotic utensil.

      ‘And this, Miss Moriarty?’ He held up a narrow, curved piece with three long prongs.

      It was agony.

      She hesitated. ‘Another fork?’

      He sighed, making a mark in his notebook next to all the other marks, before replacing it with the rest. ‘It is a lobster trident, Miss Moriarty. Extremely rare. At a push it may also be used to serve crab. But only at a push.’

      ‘Oh.’

      She’d tried being funny about her mistakes in the beginning but that was a long while ago now and there weren’t that many amusing things to say about cutlery.

      ‘This is the last one,’ he informed her, making his final selection.

      She nearly laughed with relief. ‘A dessert spoon!’ she cried triumphantly.

      Gaunt’s silence was withering.

      ‘It is a serving spoon,’ he said at last. ‘And a particularly large one at that.’

      Rose watched as he made a final, devastating mark, then closed the notebook.

      ‘I’m afraid, Miss Moriarty, that your dinner-service knowledge leaves something to be desired.’

      Her golden life-changing opportunity was slipping through her fingers.

      ‘Yes, but I could learn about that. You know, get a book from the library or something.’

      ‘The position of junior assistant to the acting assistant household manager is one of extreme delicacy and discretion. The circles in which the Bourgalt du Coudrays move are filled with aristocracy, politicians, famous actors and actresses, well-known figures from the art world, musicians…’

      ‘Yes,’ Rose cut in eagerly, ‘I know all about them! Ask me some questions!’ An avid reader of Hello! magazine, here was one test she was bound to pass with flying colours.

      ‘My point,’ Gaunt went on, glaring at her, ‘is that these are people who are used to a certain level of service and with whom mistakes must simply not be made. Under any circumstance. In addition, Mr Bourgalt du Coudray is a gentleman of very little patience. If he asks for a lobster trident, my girl, and you send him a dessert spoon, you’ll be in no small amount of trouble.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Rose again.

      It was all proving a great deal more difficult than she had imagined.

      He walked out into the front hallway and she followed him, giving her left thigh a quick scratch while she had the chance.

      ‘Language is of the utmost importance.’

      ‘I hardly ever swear!’

      ‘I’m not referring merely to foul language, Miss Moriarty.’ He flung open the double doors of one of the largest, most ornately furnished and beautiful rooms she’d ever seen in her life. ‘What would you call this room?’

      It was the room closest to the door, she calculated. ‘The front room?’

      ‘The drawing room,’ he corrected her. ‘This is my point exactly. You need to use the proper language, not only because directions become confused but because language sets the tone, to guests as well as one’s employers. No one wants to work in a house where the tone is lax. “Madame, Mr So and So is waiting in the drawing room.” It reminds them of who they are and what they are about. When you’re gone they may roll around and grunt like pigs, for all you care. But it’s the tone of the household and the quality of the staff that make a situation civilized. To lower the tone is to degrade yourself, Miss Moriarty.’

      He handed her a small stack of note cards and a pencil. ‘For your last exercise I would like you to write down the proper name of everything you see in this room. I will be back in fifteen minutes to check your progress. And remember, good penmanship is also a consideration.’

      He closed the doors.

      Rose looked round.

      There was an awful lot of stuff.

      She started with basics.

      ‘Settee,’ she wrote and placed the card carefully in the middle of the velvet Knowle sofa. ‘Pouff,’ she labelled the matching ottoman. On either side stood a pair of large salon chairs with elaborate claw arms, painted with gold leaf. They reminded her of the ones Posh and Becks used at their wedding. ‘His and Hers Thrones,’ she wrote neatly.

      Now, there must be a television somewhere. No one had a settee without a television. She scanned the room. Wait a minute…it must be behind one of the wall panels! She smiled. Very clever! A lot of people were probably fooled by that one. ‘Television,’ she wrote, being careful to use the full and correct name rather than just TV. Licking the back of the card, she stuck it to the wall.

      The marble-topped Empire commode had bottles of liquor and glasses on it: ‘Home bar,’ she inscribed. And these bookshelves were filled with fake books; she tried to pull one out but they were all glued together. Why would anyone bother to do that? They must have something to hide. It was probably a secret panel, the kind which when you pressed, led to another room. ‘Secret Panel!’ she wrote boldly, adding an exclamation point to show that she too had been amused.

      Six Holbein self-portraits fell under the heading of ‘A Few of the Apostles’ (she wondered that they hadn’t bothered to buy the rest) and the unfinished Degas sketch was labelled ‘Picture of a girl with no legs’. The chaise longue was cast as a ‘Broken Settee’, the Ming Dynasty vases as ‘Sweet Jars’ and the elephant foot’s table as ‘a badly burnt stump’. (There was no accounting for taste.)

      Next she turned her attention to the priceless collection of Dresden china figurines massed on the mantelpiece. There were a couple of words one was meant to use for things like this. Rose had heard her father, who ran a junk shop, use them. And she dearly wanted to impress Mr Gaunt with her expertise.

      It wasn’t ‘bits and bobs’, but it was something like that…ah!

      ‘Nick Naxs,’ she wrote quickly.

      And to the assortment of tiny seventeenth-century cloisonné snuffboxes, she gave the other specialist heading of ‘Brick a Brack’.

      But then Rose wavered.

      This was the trouble with getting clever, there was always something to catch you out.

      Surely