But one’s upbringing could never be quite erased. If his could be, he would cheerfully do it, for then perhaps he would not be feeling this sudden dissatisfaction with his life, this onslaught of conscience, this urge to go crusading.
It was idiotic. It was nonsensical. He might—and probably would—regret it. But it was perhaps better to act from conscience and be sorry than to bury his head in the sand and sidle by his own life because he could not be bothered to live it.
Someone had organized the staff, Percy saw as soon as he entered the seldom-used visitors’ salon on the ground floor. They were standing to rigid attention in such straight lines that someone had surely used a long ruler. And they were arranged strictly according to rank. All eyes faced forward. Percy felt a bit like a general about to inspect his troops—the Duke of Wellington, perhaps.
“At ease,” he said, standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him.
There was an infinitesimal relaxing of posture. Very infinitesimal.
“I am declaring war,” he said, and at least twenty pairs of eyes swiveled his way though the heads belonging to the eyes did not follow suit, “against smuggling.”
The eyes went forward again. Every face remained blank. Ratchett, Percy saw, was having a hard time keeping his spine straight. In fact, he looked like a bow just waiting to be strung.
“Mr. Knorr,” Percy said, “will you set a chair for your superior, if you please. You may sit, Mr. Ratchett.”
The head steward’s head turned and he squinted at Percy’s left ear, but he made no protest when Paul Knorr set a chair behind him. He sat.
“I am not intending to gather together an army to sally forth for a fight against the forces of evil, you will no doubt be relieved to know,” Percy continued. “What goes on beyond the borders of my own land is, at least for the present, not my concern. And I am aware that it would take a very large army indeed to rid the land entirely of smuggling. But it will end within the borders of what is mine. That includes the house, the park, and the farm, and even the beach below my land, since the only landward route away from the beach is the path up the cliff face and across the park. Anyone who takes exception to my decision is welcome to collect what wages he is owed from Mr. Ratchett or Mr. Knorr, without any penalty, and leave here with his belongings. Everyone who stays is my employee and will live and work here according to my rules, whether he or she is on duty or off. Are there any questions?”
The pause that followed reminded Percy of the one in the nuptial service when the members of the congregation were invited to report any impediment to the marriage of which they were aware. He did not expect the silence to be broken, and it was not.
“If,” he said, “there are any smuggled goods anywhere on my land at present—in the cellar of this house, for example—I will allow two days, today and tomorrow, for them to be removed. After that, there will be no more, and I will expect Mr. Ratchett or Mr. Crutchley or Mrs. Attlee to be in possession of both keys to the locked room in the cellar—the inside and the outside keys. If they remain lost after the two days, then the locks will be forced and new locks installed—and I will myself retain one set of the new keys.”
One maid—the deaf-mute—had her head slightly turned and her eyes fixed to his lips, Percy noticed for the first time. He strolled down the center of the lines, looking first one way and then the other. He felt more martial than ever.
“Anyone who fears reprisal,” he said, stopping and looking steadily into the face of the stable hand beside Colin Bains, a ginger-haired lad with freckles half the size of farthings, “will speak either to Mr. Knorr or to me.”
That was a tricky point, actually. Anyone who feared how the gang would react to his—or her—withdrawal from the trade would hardly make a public complaint and draw even more attention to him – or herself. Would they all be in danger of reprisal? It was a risk he had chosen to take.
“I will speak openly of this wherever I go over the next few days,” Percy said, returning to his place by the door and letting his eyes move from face to face along the rows. There was absolutely nothing to be read in any of them. “I will make sure it is clearly understood that this is my rule and that everyone in my employ is required to live by it or lose his or her position. Are there any questions?”
“Mr. Crutchley,” he said when no one spoke up, “you will send the servants about their business, if you please. James Mawgan, I will see you in the library as soon as you have been dismissed.”
The head gardener’s face turned in sharp surprise and became almost instantly blank again.
The morning room that seemed more like a library to him was unoccupied by any human, Percy was happy to discover. It was, however, occupied by the remnants of the menagerie. The bulldog—Bruce?—had claimed the hearth, and was flanked by his usual cohorts, two of the cats. The new one was beside the coal scuttle, cleaning his paws with his tongue. Hector sat erect and alert beside the chair Percy usually occupied. He was neither cowering nor hiding, an interesting development. The other two dogs—the long and the short—had been taken yesterday to the Kramer house, where apparently they had been given an effusive welcome and a large bowl of tasty tidbits apiece. All of Fluff’s kittens had now been spoken for, though they were not to leave their mother for a while yet.
Percy wondered if he had just set the cat among the pigeons, or stepped on a hornet’s nest, or awakened a sleeping dog, or otherwise done what it would have been altogether better for him not to do. Time would tell.