Emma’s still teetering. I nod as I go retrieve her. “I’d be up for it, definitely, but let me put it to Hugh and I’ll let you know.”

Sally hums to herself as she disappears down the hall. At the mere prospect of a dinner party, all the tension seems to have leached from her step.

We should do it, then. Keep up the tradition.

“Yeah, hello?” Avery’s voice echoes like a gong the second she opens the conservatory door from the west lawn.

Max stiffens next to me with a deep, startled bark.

I smile, glad that she’s finally giving in to my insistence that she come straight in, make herself at home. A few years ago, I found her shivering on the porch in the rain, waiting for somebody to hear her faint knocks. That was after the war started and most of the staff, all those people who answered doors for us, packed up and shipped out for the front lines.

It’s funny how shorthanded we feel even now, after four years of war, considering that when I moved here, I found it ludicrous how many people worked for us. Indoors: housekeeper, two maids, valet, chef. Outside: groundskeeper, three gardeners. It felt in those first few days like I’d wandered into Downton Abbey, and if I didn’t learn my lines quickly enough, I’d be fired and sent home.

Alder House itself, sprawling and cobbled together and strange, actually warranted the number of staff filling it, and I fell in love with it right away. The gaping entryway with its grand, oblique staircase. The east section’s sunken kitchen and staff quarters, built into the remnants of the old Norman manor house, with Romanesque archways overhead and carved faces peeking from unexpected corners. The dining room so massive I laughed when I first laid eyes on the table, built to seat thirty-two. It isn’t the glossy burnished palace antique you’d expect but an unbelievably gnarled and scratched expanse of oiled oak, so old it might even predate most sections of the house. The rest, built up in sections: the small rooms Tudor, the more elegant ones Georgian, the ones with tons of glass Edwardian, and here and there, surrounding the house, an unassuming ruin of a stone wall that, they tell me, was once a castle battlement.

For all its weirdness, Alder House seemed to welcome me. I probably would have settled in right away if I’d been hired as a maid.