1794: Blandy, a Mallard Butler
Diary entry
A cold morning. The fires were laid by half past five, which is to say, by half past five they were laid correctly, after Blandy had been made to understand the distinction between a fire that is laid and a fire that will catch. There is a difference. I have explained it to him on four separate occasions, and I begin to suspect the explanation is not the difficulty.
His Grace rose late, which is to say, His Grace rose at ten, which is what rising early looks like when one has the right to determine what rising early means. I had his chocolate brought up at nine, his newspapers at a quarter past, and by the time I presented myself at the door of the dressing room, he was in that particular posture of mind—reclined, alert, and architecturally displeased—that signals an idea has arrived.
I have learned to recognise the idea before it is spoken. One does not survive thirty-one years in service without developing something of the naturalist’s instinct: the careful observation of habitat, the reading of sign. His Grace’s ideas announce themselves in the set of the jaw, a slight elevation of the chin, and a quality of stillness that is not peace but rather its administrative cousin—the stillness of a man who has decided that the world requires adjustment.
He told me of the blue.
I listened. This is my occupation, properly understood—not the fetching and carrying, not the management of the lower staff, not the correspondence with tradesmen, all of which occupy my hours considerably, but the listening. One listens, and in listening, one becomes the necessary instrument through which His Grace’s relation to reality is made functional.
The sapphires, then.
His Grace has learned—and I do not inquire too closely into the pedagogy of this—that the labouring poor have long made use of cabbage, or more precisely, certain preparations derived therefrom, to achieve a blue in their cloth. I am aware of the practice. It is not, I think, a practice one would describe as entirely reliable, but it exists, and it is the kind of thing that makes its way into conversation at a certain kind of dinner table, where it serves to illustrate the ingenuity of the common people, or their pitiability, depending on who is speaking.
His Grace’s response to this intelligence was characteristically his own.
If the poor extract blue from cabbage, he reasoned—and I use the word in the spirit in which it was offered—then he, possessed of rather different resources, ought to extract his blue from something proportionate to his station. He has, in the lower vault, a collection of sapphires of some significance. He wishes them crushed. He wishes the blue extracted. He wishes it applied to his new spring coats.
I said that I would attend to the matter.
This is not—and I note it here, where no one reads—a sentence I have ever spoken in perfect confidence.
Young Blandy came to me in the afternoon, the junior footman, who has the excellent quality of doing precisely what one tells him and the considerable limitation of understanding rather less than one hopes. I sent him to Mrs. Blandy, the housekeeper, who looked at me with that particular expression—eyebrows level, mouth sealed—which in a woman of lesser restraint would be laughter.
We have, between us, arrived at a solution.
There is woad.
Woad is not, by any reasonable construction, sapphire. It is a plant. It can be obtained. It is not, I think, beyond our combined ingenuity to ensure that the relevant preparations are presented to His Grace in the context of what was extracted from the correct vessel, on the correct morning, following the correct application of what might plausibly be described as a proprietary crushing procedure.
His Grace will not crush the sapphires himself.
I have given instructions that the sapphires be removed to the lower store and catalogued with greater precision than previously, which is to say, catalogued. The woad preparation has been arranged by Mrs. Blandy, who has not asked me to explain my purposes and whom I, in return, have furnished with a small increase in her household budget for the quarter and a word of appreciation that I believe she received with the dignity it merited.
I have mentioned to His Grace that progress on the extraction is underway. This is true.
The coats will be blue.
His Grace will be pleased. His Grace will have achieved something—in his understanding—that no other gentleman of his acquaintance has yet accomplished: a blue derived from the resources appropriate to his station.
I do not trouble myself with the precise weight of this achievement. We serve His Grace. We serve ourselves when we serve His Grace. The arrangement has sustained this household through three political changes, two floods, a fire in the east wing that is still officially attributed to lightning, and any number of his predecessor’s enthusiasms, of which this current episode is, I note for the record, considerably more manageable than the scheme involving the peacocks.
I shall not think about the peacocks.
There is, however, a matter which I have not resolved and which sits at the edge of the day’s accounting like a small unpaid invoice.
If His Grace should next require yellow.
I have been turning this over since supper. Yellow occurs in nature in considerable variety—saffron, weld, onion skins, various resins. None of these are gemstones. His Grace’s collection does not, to my knowledge, include a significant holding of yellow stones, though there are topazes, and I believe something that was described to me as a chrysoberyl, though I have not verified this.
The chrysoberyl cannot be crushed.
That is to say, it could be crushed. All things can be crushed. But the chrysoberyl is part of a set that was given to a Duchess by Frederick the Great, or so the inventory claims, and the inventory was written by a man who I suspect had not been paid in several months and may have been writing in a spirit of aspiration rather than documentation.
I will need to think about yellow.
I will need to think about it with some care, and before His Grace does.
The candle is low. Blandy has been reminded, again, about the morning fires. The sapphires are safe. The woad is ordered. The coats will be blue.
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