Shipwrecked, the Duke of Glenarvon Ordered the Girl to Serve Him — Unaware She Would Eat First

“Cook it,” said the Duke of Glenarvan, and dropped the fish on the rock at her feet. His housemate looked at the fish. Then she picked it up, drew the little horn-handled knife she had used to gut it in the first place, cut it cleanly into two unequal parts, laid the larger on a flat stone beside the fire she had built 4 hours ago out of dried wrack, and a tinderbox she had carried ashore inside a wax cloth pocket, and ate the smaller herself, raw, in six bites, looking at him the whole time.

“No,” she said. Kester Glenarvan had been shipwrecked at half past 4:00 that morning, had walked a mile and a half of tidal shingle with a cut in his thigh, had watched the boat that carried his own valet and four injured crewmen pull away east into a rising sea because there was no room in it for two more, and had spent the last 6 hours discovering that he did not know how to do a single useful thing on Earth.

He sat down on the rock. It seemed the only dignified course available. “You have eaten my fish.” “I have eaten half of a fish that I caught with a bent pin and a length of your neck cloth, your grace, in a pool I found off a rock I climbed with the tide coming in at me.” Ailsa Glenarvan wiped the knife on the hem of her skirt.

“The other half is yours. It is on that stone. It will cook there in 20 minutes if you turn it twice and do not let it burn on the fire side, which it will do if you do not attend to it.” “You expect me to cook it?” “I expect you to eat it,” she said. “How it gets from that stone into you is a matter I have no strong feelings about.

” He looked at her properly for the first time in 4 years of employment. He had known her as a shape in a passage. She had been engaged as a housemaid at Glenarvon when he was in London. She was one of 11. Her name appeared on a wages list he signed twice a year without reading. She was perhaps three and twenty.

She had come on the packet because his aunt had insisted that a housemaid go ahead to open the north wing. And she had come on deck at 4:00 in the morning when the boat struck. And while 11 grown men shouted at each other in the dark, she had gone below and come back up with the tinderbox, a coil of line, two blankets, and the small tin box of biscuit from the pantry locker.

And had tied all of it into a bundle inside a waxcloth apron before she went over the side. “Miss Renfrew,” he said, “where did you learn all this?” “Fintry,” she said. “My father took mackerel out of a 19-ft boat, and my mother salted them. And there were seven of us. And when he drowned, I was 14, and I went into service because there was nothing else.

That is where I learned it.” She fed a twist of rack into the fire. “Your grace, we should have this out now because we may be on this rock for days, and I have no patience for saying it twice. Out there, you are the Duke of Glenarvon, and I am a housemaid, and I will curtsy to you until the sea freezes over.

On this rock, I am the only person who knows how to keep us both alive, and you are a passenger. If you order me about, I shall not answer. If you ask me, I shall tell you everything I know.” The wind came over the top of the scary, and the fire flattened and stood up again. “How long?” he said. “The boat went east.

If they got in at the point, they will send out for us when the sea drops. It will not drop tonight. She looked at the sky with the flat professional interest of a woman reading a well-known page. Tomorrow it will blow harder. The day after less, four days I should think, maybe three. And in four days we shall have starved. We shall not, but we may be very tired of limpets.

For the first time something that was nearly a smile Turn the fish, sir. It is catching. He turned the fish. He burned two fingers doing it. It was, he reflected afterwards, the beginning of his education. She built two shelters. She did it before dark on the first day, working with a broken hatch cover, a spar, a quantity of dried rack, and one of the two blankets.

And she built the second one 18 paces from the first on the other side of the fire. And she did not explain herself until he asked. Two. Two, your grace. It will be a great deal colder in two. Yes, said Elspeth Renfrew. It will. He understood then and was ashamed that he had had to be shown. Miss Renfrew, you are afraid for your character.

I’m not afraid, sir. I am certain. She went on wedging the spar without looking up. In four days a boat will come. There will be six men in it, and by the time they have rowed home again every soul on that coast will know that the Duke of Glenarvan spent four nights on the Skellies with a housemaid. Nobody will say a word against you.

You will be thought unlucky and rather romantic, and it will do you no harm at all in London. Her voice was perfectly level. And I shall be turned off without a character within the month, and there will not be a house on that coast that will take me, and I shall not be able to say why, because the true reason is nothing at all, and nobody believes nothing at all.

She sat back. So, two shelters, 18 paces apart, and the fire between them where any man in a boat can see both. And you will sleep in yours all night and I in mine, and when they come they will find it so, and there will be six witnesses to it. That is not modesty, your grace. That is bookkeeping. Kester Glenarvon sat on a rock in the failing light and thought about the wages list he had signed twice a year without reading.

“I will sleep where I am told,” he said. “Thank you. And Miss Renfrew, you will tell me what to do tomorrow, all of it. I am not a fool, and I am strong, and I have nothing else whatever to be getting on with.” She looked at him for a moment, as though recalculating something. “Then you can carry water,” she said.

“There is a seep at the north end that runs into a hollow, and it is sweet if you take it off the top and do not stir the bottom. I have a biscuit tin. It holds about a quart, and we shall want six trips.” He made nine. The second day it blew, as she had said it would. They spent it wedging the shelters and rolling stones to windward and gathering rack in armfuls before the rain came, and prying limpets off the low rocks with a horn-handled knife, and at some time in the middle of it, sitting under a broken hatch cover,

eating a limpet that tasted like a boiled purse, the Duke of Glenarvon began to laugh and could not stop. “Sorry. I gave a dinner in June,” he said, “for two and 30 people, and there were 11 dishes, and I recall complaining to my chef about the sauce. Elsa Renfrew wrapped her arms around her knees. What was wrong with the sauce? I have not the least idea.

And she laughed, too. A startled, unpracticed, entirely unservant-like laugh, and it went into him further than the cold had. On the third night, his leg swelled. He had said nothing about it, which she told him at some length and in language no housemaid had ever used to him, was the single stupidest thing any man had done on that rock.

She had the stocking off him by firelight, and the cut open, and boiled seawater and a strip of her own petticoat hem, and she cleaned it out with a thoroughness that made him grip the hatch cover until the wood complained. You should have shown me yesterday. You would have made me sit down. I would have made you sit down and put your foot up on a creel and drunk the water I carried, yes, and you would have been well tonight instead of shaking.

She bound it tight and neat and tied it off. Your grace, do you know why I came up on deck at 4:00 in the morning? Because the boat struck. Because I could not sleep. Because I had my notice written out in my box. She sat back on her heels. I had meant to give it to Mrs. Baird at Glenarvon on the Friday.

£7 a year and no prospect of more, and my sister has a place in a laundry at Torrance, and they wanted a second pair of hands. I was going to leave your service. He looked at her across the fire. His leg was throbbing, and his head was light, and he had, he decided, no capacity left for pretending. And now now I have been four days on a rock with my master, and I shall have no character at all, and my sister’s laundry will not want a woman that is talked of.

She said it without self-pity, as a bookkeeper reads out a total. So, I shall go home to Fin Tree and take an oar and be a fisherman’s daughter again, which is not a disgrace, whatever they think of it in London. “Miss Renfrew,” said the Duke of Glenarvan, “will you marry me?” The fire snapped.

Far off, the sea worked at the north end of the skerry. “No,” she said. He had not expected that. And he had a sudden and unaccustomed sensation of having been hit somewhere under the ribs. “You do not have to be afraid of me.” “I am not.” She was still sitting on her heels with her hands red from the salt water and her hair coming out of its pins.

“I am refusing you because you have asked me on the third night of a shipwreck, with a fever coming on out of decency, because you have worked out what will happen to me when that boat comes, and you mean to put it right. And that is the best thing any man has ever done for me, your grace, and I will not have it.

” Her voice shook, and she steadied it. “If I say yes to that, then for the whole of my life, I shall be the maid he had to marry. And so will you. And in 10 years, you will look at me across a table and wonder.” “I would not.” “You would. Men do. Not from wickedness, from tiredness.” She got up and put more rack on the fire.

“Ask me on dry land, sir, if you still want to. Ask me when you are well and warm and shaved and have had 11 dishes in a bad sauce, and when there is not a single thing in it for me but yourself, then it is a choice, and I shall believe it.” The boat came at 11:00 the next morning with six men in it, and found a fire burning between two shelters 18 paces apart, a duke asleep in one with his leg bound in a strip of petticoat hem, and a housemaid sitting on the high rock with a fold of rack in her hand, waving it, having watched that horizon

since first light. She was right about the talk. It went up and down the coast within a week, and reached London within three. She was wrong about what he would do with it. He did not pay her off. He did not send her quietly to a cousin in the south with 50 lb, which was what his aunt Lady Menteith recommended in a letter of 11 pages.

What he did being, as she had once observed, not a fool and strong, and having nothing else whatever to be getting on with, was to write out over three days a full and exact account of the wreck of the packet Kittywake. The striking, the boat sent east with the injured, the hour of the landing, the two shelters and the reason for them, the water, the fish, the limpets, and the bound leg.

He had it signed by the six men of the rescue boat, who were pleased to be asked, and by his own valet, and by the master of the packet. And he sent it to the sheriff, to his own minister, to Mrs. Baird the housekeeper at Glenarvon to be read aloud in the servants’ hall, and to Lady Menteith with a covering line asking her to circulate it as widely as she found convenient.

At the end of the account, in his own hand, he had written that Elspeth Renfrew had conducted herself on the Skellies as no other person of his acquaintance could have done, that he owed his life to her, and that any person who spoke slidingly of her within his hearing would find it a very expensive amusement.

Then he did the harder thing, which was to leave her alone. He accepted her notice. He gave her a character three pages long. She went home to Finchtry in the November to her mother’s house with the mend roof and took an ore in her cousin’s boat and was talked about and outlasted it. He came in the spring. He came alone on a hired horse in ordinary clothes up a track that smelled of tar and salt and found her on the shingle at Finchtry mending a net with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a horn-handled knife at

her belt. And he got down and stood 11 ft off with his hat in his hand because the whole village was watching from the seawall and he wanted every one of them to see it. “I am well,” he said. “I am warm and shaved and I have had 11 dishes and complained about the sauce and I have thought of nothing but you since the 12th of October.

There is not one thing in this for me but you.” He turned the hat round in his hands like a boy. “You told me to ask you on dry land. This is the driest land I could find. Miss Renfrew, will you marry me?” Elsa Renfrew put down the net. “Say it louder,” she said. “My mother is at the window.” “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” she said.

They were married at Finchtry in the June in the small kirk above the shingle with her mother and her four brothers and her sister up from the laundry at Torrance and six men from a rescue boat in the third pew in their best coats and Mrs. Baird from Glenarvon weeping into a black bonnet. Lady Monteith did not come.

She came the following Christmas and stayed a fortnight. And by the end of it was telling the story of the Skellies to strangers as though she had rowed the boat herself. The Duchess of Glenarvon never learned to be grand and did not attempt it. She learned figures instead and the north wing was opened and the estate boats were re-rigged.

And 11 fishing families on that coast had a landlord’s who could tell to the fathom where their fathers had drowned and why. And who fought the harbor commissioners for 9 years and got a stone pier built at Finchtry that stands yet. And in the long dining room at Glenarvon, in a glass case set into the wall between two portraits of men in armor, there hung a small knife with a horn handle, salt-pitted, the blade worn thin with sharpening.

Guests asked about it. The Duke of Glenarvon would put down his glass and say that it was the most valuable object in the house. That with it his wife had once caught a fish, gutted it, cut it in two unequal halves, given him the larger, eaten her own raw in six bites and told him no, which no one had ever done before and nobody had ever needed to do since.

And the sauce, his wife would add from the other end of the table, was almost certainly excellent.

Shipwrecked, the Duke of Glenarvon Ordered the Girl to Serve Him — Unaware She Would Eat First

“Cook it,” said the Duke of Glenarvan, and dropped the fish on the rock at her feet. His housemate looked at the fish. Then she picked it up, drew the little horn-handled knife she had used to gut it in the first place, cut it cleanly into two unequal parts, laid the larger on a flat stone beside the fire she had built 4 hours ago out of dried wrack, and a tinderbox she had carried ashore inside a wax cloth pocket, and ate the smaller herself, raw, in six bites, looking at him the whole time.

“No,” she said. Kester Glenarvan had been shipwrecked at half past 4:00 that morning, had walked a mile and a half of tidal shingle with a cut in his thigh, had watched the boat that carried his own valet and four injured crewmen pull away east into a rising sea because there was no room in it for two more, and had spent the last 6 hours discovering that he did not know how to do a single useful thing on Earth.

He sat down on the rock. It seemed the only dignified course available. “You have eaten my fish.” “I have eaten half of a fish that I caught with a bent pin and a length of your neck cloth, your grace, in a pool I found off a rock I climbed with the tide coming in at me.” Ailsa Glenarvan wiped the knife on the hem of her skirt.

“The other half is yours. It is on that stone. It will cook there in 20 minutes if you turn it twice and do not let it burn on the fire side, which it will do if you do not attend to it.” “You expect me to cook it?” “I expect you to eat it,” she said. “How it gets from that stone into you is a matter I have no strong feelings about.

” He looked at her properly for the first time in 4 years of employment. He had known her as a shape in a passage. She had been engaged as a housemaid at Glenarvon when he was in London. She was one of 11. Her name appeared on a wages list he signed twice a year without reading. She was perhaps three and twenty.

She had come on the packet because his aunt had insisted that a housemaid go ahead to open the north wing. And she had come on deck at 4:00 in the morning when the boat struck. And while 11 grown men shouted at each other in the dark, she had gone below and come back up with the tinderbox, a coil of line, two blankets, and the small tin box of biscuit from the pantry locker.

And had tied all of it into a bundle inside a waxcloth apron before she went over the side. “Miss Renfrew,” he said, “where did you learn all this?” “Fintry,” she said. “My father took mackerel out of a 19-ft boat, and my mother salted them. And there were seven of us. And when he drowned, I was 14, and I went into service because there was nothing else.

That is where I learned it.” She fed a twist of rack into the fire. “Your grace, we should have this out now because we may be on this rock for days, and I have no patience for saying it twice. Out there, you are the Duke of Glenarvon, and I am a housemaid, and I will curtsy to you until the sea freezes over.

On this rock, I am the only person who knows how to keep us both alive, and you are a passenger. If you order me about, I shall not answer. If you ask me, I shall tell you everything I know.” The wind came over the top of the scary, and the fire flattened and stood up again. “How long?” he said. “The boat went east.

If they got in at the point, they will send out for us when the sea drops. It will not drop tonight. She looked at the sky with the flat professional interest of a woman reading a well-known page. Tomorrow it will blow harder. The day after less, four days I should think, maybe three. And in four days we shall have starved. We shall not, but we may be very tired of limpets.

For the first time something that was nearly a smile Turn the fish, sir. It is catching. He turned the fish. He burned two fingers doing it. It was, he reflected afterwards, the beginning of his education. She built two shelters. She did it before dark on the first day, working with a broken hatch cover, a spar, a quantity of dried rack, and one of the two blankets.

And she built the second one 18 paces from the first on the other side of the fire. And she did not explain herself until he asked. Two. Two, your grace. It will be a great deal colder in two. Yes, said Elspeth Renfrew. It will. He understood then and was ashamed that he had had to be shown. Miss Renfrew, you are afraid for your character.

I’m not afraid, sir. I am certain. She went on wedging the spar without looking up. In four days a boat will come. There will be six men in it, and by the time they have rowed home again every soul on that coast will know that the Duke of Glenarvan spent four nights on the Skellies with a housemaid. Nobody will say a word against you.

You will be thought unlucky and rather romantic, and it will do you no harm at all in London. Her voice was perfectly level. And I shall be turned off without a character within the month, and there will not be a house on that coast that will take me, and I shall not be able to say why, because the true reason is nothing at all, and nobody believes nothing at all.

She sat back. So, two shelters, 18 paces apart, and the fire between them where any man in a boat can see both. And you will sleep in yours all night and I in mine, and when they come they will find it so, and there will be six witnesses to it. That is not modesty, your grace. That is bookkeeping. Kester Glenarvon sat on a rock in the failing light and thought about the wages list he had signed twice a year without reading.

“I will sleep where I am told,” he said. “Thank you. And Miss Renfrew, you will tell me what to do tomorrow, all of it. I am not a fool, and I am strong, and I have nothing else whatever to be getting on with.” She looked at him for a moment, as though recalculating something. “Then you can carry water,” she said.

“There is a seep at the north end that runs into a hollow, and it is sweet if you take it off the top and do not stir the bottom. I have a biscuit tin. It holds about a quart, and we shall want six trips.” He made nine. The second day it blew, as she had said it would. They spent it wedging the shelters and rolling stones to windward and gathering rack in armfuls before the rain came, and prying limpets off the low rocks with a horn-handled knife, and at some time in the middle of it, sitting under a broken hatch cover,

eating a limpet that tasted like a boiled purse, the Duke of Glenarvon began to laugh and could not stop. “Sorry. I gave a dinner in June,” he said, “for two and 30 people, and there were 11 dishes, and I recall complaining to my chef about the sauce. Elsa Renfrew wrapped her arms around her knees. What was wrong with the sauce? I have not the least idea.

And she laughed, too. A startled, unpracticed, entirely unservant-like laugh, and it went into him further than the cold had. On the third night, his leg swelled. He had said nothing about it, which she told him at some length and in language no housemaid had ever used to him, was the single stupidest thing any man had done on that rock.

She had the stocking off him by firelight, and the cut open, and boiled seawater and a strip of her own petticoat hem, and she cleaned it out with a thoroughness that made him grip the hatch cover until the wood complained. You should have shown me yesterday. You would have made me sit down. I would have made you sit down and put your foot up on a creel and drunk the water I carried, yes, and you would have been well tonight instead of shaking.

She bound it tight and neat and tied it off. Your grace, do you know why I came up on deck at 4:00 in the morning? Because the boat struck. Because I could not sleep. Because I had my notice written out in my box. She sat back on her heels. I had meant to give it to Mrs. Baird at Glenarvon on the Friday.

£7 a year and no prospect of more, and my sister has a place in a laundry at Torrance, and they wanted a second pair of hands. I was going to leave your service. He looked at her across the fire. His leg was throbbing, and his head was light, and he had, he decided, no capacity left for pretending. And now now I have been four days on a rock with my master, and I shall have no character at all, and my sister’s laundry will not want a woman that is talked of.

She said it without self-pity, as a bookkeeper reads out a total. So, I shall go home to Fin Tree and take an oar and be a fisherman’s daughter again, which is not a disgrace, whatever they think of it in London. “Miss Renfrew,” said the Duke of Glenarvan, “will you marry me?” The fire snapped.

Far off, the sea worked at the north end of the skerry. “No,” she said. He had not expected that. And he had a sudden and unaccustomed sensation of having been hit somewhere under the ribs. “You do not have to be afraid of me.” “I am not.” She was still sitting on her heels with her hands red from the salt water and her hair coming out of its pins.

“I am refusing you because you have asked me on the third night of a shipwreck, with a fever coming on out of decency, because you have worked out what will happen to me when that boat comes, and you mean to put it right. And that is the best thing any man has ever done for me, your grace, and I will not have it.

” Her voice shook, and she steadied it. “If I say yes to that, then for the whole of my life, I shall be the maid he had to marry. And so will you. And in 10 years, you will look at me across a table and wonder.” “I would not.” “You would. Men do. Not from wickedness, from tiredness.” She got up and put more rack on the fire.

“Ask me on dry land, sir, if you still want to. Ask me when you are well and warm and shaved and have had 11 dishes in a bad sauce, and when there is not a single thing in it for me but yourself, then it is a choice, and I shall believe it.” The boat came at 11:00 the next morning with six men in it, and found a fire burning between two shelters 18 paces apart, a duke asleep in one with his leg bound in a strip of petticoat hem, and a housemaid sitting on the high rock with a fold of rack in her hand, waving it, having watched that horizon

since first light. She was right about the talk. It went up and down the coast within a week, and reached London within three. She was wrong about what he would do with it. He did not pay her off. He did not send her quietly to a cousin in the south with 50 lb, which was what his aunt Lady Menteith recommended in a letter of 11 pages.

What he did being, as she had once observed, not a fool and strong, and having nothing else whatever to be getting on with, was to write out over three days a full and exact account of the wreck of the packet Kittywake. The striking, the boat sent east with the injured, the hour of the landing, the two shelters and the reason for them, the water, the fish, the limpets, and the bound leg.

He had it signed by the six men of the rescue boat, who were pleased to be asked, and by his own valet, and by the master of the packet. And he sent it to the sheriff, to his own minister, to Mrs. Baird the housekeeper at Glenarvon to be read aloud in the servants’ hall, and to Lady Menteith with a covering line asking her to circulate it as widely as she found convenient.

At the end of the account, in his own hand, he had written that Elspeth Renfrew had conducted herself on the Skellies as no other person of his acquaintance could have done, that he owed his life to her, and that any person who spoke slidingly of her within his hearing would find it a very expensive amusement.

Then he did the harder thing, which was to leave her alone. He accepted her notice. He gave her a character three pages long. She went home to Finchtry in the November to her mother’s house with the mend roof and took an ore in her cousin’s boat and was talked about and outlasted it. He came in the spring. He came alone on a hired horse in ordinary clothes up a track that smelled of tar and salt and found her on the shingle at Finchtry mending a net with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a horn-handled knife at

her belt. And he got down and stood 11 ft off with his hat in his hand because the whole village was watching from the seawall and he wanted every one of them to see it. “I am well,” he said. “I am warm and shaved and I have had 11 dishes and complained about the sauce and I have thought of nothing but you since the 12th of October.

There is not one thing in this for me but you.” He turned the hat round in his hands like a boy. “You told me to ask you on dry land. This is the driest land I could find. Miss Renfrew, will you marry me?” Elsa Renfrew put down the net. “Say it louder,” she said. “My mother is at the window.” “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” she said.

They were married at Finchtry in the June in the small kirk above the shingle with her mother and her four brothers and her sister up from the laundry at Torrance and six men from a rescue boat in the third pew in their best coats and Mrs. Baird from Glenarvon weeping into a black bonnet. Lady Monteith did not come.

She came the following Christmas and stayed a fortnight. And by the end of it was telling the story of the Skellies to strangers as though she had rowed the boat herself. The Duchess of Glenarvon never learned to be grand and did not attempt it. She learned figures instead and the north wing was opened and the estate boats were re-rigged.

And 11 fishing families on that coast had a landlord’s who could tell to the fathom where their fathers had drowned and why. And who fought the harbor commissioners for 9 years and got a stone pier built at Finchtry that stands yet. And in the long dining room at Glenarvon, in a glass case set into the wall between two portraits of men in armor, there hung a small knife with a horn handle, salt-pitted, the blade worn thin with sharpening.

Guests asked about it. The Duke of Glenarvon would put down his glass and say that it was the most valuable object in the house. That with it his wife had once caught a fish, gutted it, cut it in two unequal halves, given him the larger, eaten her own raw in six bites and told him no, which no one had ever done before and nobody had ever needed to do since.

And the sauce, his wife would add from the other end of the table, was almost certainly excellent.