1892: Lord Somebody’s Housekeeper and the Correspondence She Was Asked to Burn
A Great House in Hampshire
We return, as this memorandum periodically must, to the servant question, specifically to the question of what servants know, what they retain, and what uses they subsequently make of their retention. The housekeeper at a great house in Hampshire—a woman of fifty years’ service and the moral architecture of a minor fortress—was instructed by her employer, a lord of middle years and extreme nervousness, to burn a quantity of letters found in the drawer of the blue guest bedroom after the departure of a particular guest whose name she knew perfectly well. The housekeeper burned the letters as instructed. She also, being of the generation that distrusts completeness, retained one—folded inside the household accounts for October 1892 where it remains, to her knowledge, to this day. She has never employed it, demanded anything for it, or discussed it. She simply has it. Her employer, who suspects this without being certain, has raised her wages twice since 1892 for reasons he has never been able to explain to the estate agent.
A housekeeper who knows when not to act is worth, it appears, rather more than a housekeeper who merely knows.
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