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and tidying like a dervish. She accomplished more in three hours than Emma could’ve managed in three days.
    She stood now before the curtains Mrs Davies had stitched up for the kitchen window. They were lovely – blue gingham café curtains with coordinating blue and white triangles draped in a pennant across the top.
    “Let me pay you, please,” Emma told her as she’d admired the woman’s efforts. “These curtains are as pretty – prettier! – than anything I’ve seen in the shops.”
    But Mrs Davies wouldn’t hear of it. “I got the fabric on the cheap – practically free. I stitched it up in a day and a ’alf.” She shrugged. “I can make them curtains in my sleep. Besides,” she added, “you and Mr Bennet done so much for us, givin’ Martine clothes and shoes and sending ’er home with those wonderful pies, it’s the least I can do. I don’t know what we would’ve done without your help after Mr Davies died. At the very least, we’d of lost our house, and no mistake.”
    Emma bit her lip. She felt a pinprick of shame for her uncharitable thought of the week before:
Things have surely reached the lowest of points when one is obliged to accept charity from one’s very own housemaid
.
    She remembered well how Mr Bennet –
Father
Bennet, because he was Litchfield’s vicar at the time – raised a church collection for Martine and her mother after Mr Davies’s untimely death, and added a sum of his own…enough to enable them to keep their terraced house.
    “Do you really like them?” Martine asked now, keeping her voice low as she joined Emma in front of the window. “The curtains, I mean? I told mum you might want somethin’ a bit plainer.”
    “I love them,” Emma said firmly. “Your mother has a real flair. I wonder…”
    “What, miss?”
    “Do you think she’d be interested in making more, for the bedrooms upstairs? I’d pay her, of course,” she hastened to add. “And I’ll buy all of the materials.”
    “I’m sure she would,” Martine said. “I’ll ask ’er, and let you know.”
    “Thanks. I’ll let you both get on with it, then.” Emma smiled and carried her cup of tea upstairs to her room.
    With the house sorted, and Charlotte back to school, and Mr Bennet closed away in his study, she could finally turn her mind to other things – specifically,
Mind Your Manors
.
    She went to her desk and sat down. Opening her laptop, she found the website and clicked on the “Appear on Our Programme” tab.
    Would you like your country house to feature in
Mind Your Manors
? We would love to hear from you!
    To apply, email details of your location along with photos and your plans, to: [email protected]. Should your house be chosen, you will be contacted by a member of our production company.
    Thank you, and good luck!
    Impulsively, Emma clicked on the email link and began to type.
    Dear Lucy
,
    My name is Emma Bennet, and I respectfully request that our home in South Devon, Litchfield Manor, be considered to appear on your programme…
    ***
    It was still raining on Tuesday morning when Emma got dressed for her first day of work at Weston’s Bakery.
    She glanced out the window in dismay. It was dark, and soggy, and the last thing she wanted to do was go outside in such sodden weather. But she’d promised Boz, and she wouldn’t let him down.
    With Elton at her heels, she went downstairs, surprised to find that her father wasn’t in the kitchen or sat in the library with a book, as was his custom.
    “Out you go,” she told the pug firmly, nudging him outdoors into the rain with the tip of her booted foot. “Hurry and do your business, I’ll wait.”
    She left the door ajar and put the kettle on. She just about had time for tea and toast before she left.
    In a few minutes Elton whined to come back inside, and after dumping kibble in his dish and fresh water in his bowl, she wrote a note and left it on the table to remind her father to let the dog out while she was