Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on 09/15/00 from 172.17.4.90 via proxy home.cosco.com.cn:
In Reply to: Re: PM-Beckfoot servants. posted by John Wilson on September 14, 2000 at 13:38:36:
A masterly exegisis! Seems utterly right. We now have to dispose of the black carriage (sorry, not trap, you are right!) horse, otherwise we need another servant to care for the horse. Billy Lewthwaite does not seem regular enough at the house to be grooming and mucking out a horse.
May I offer two possibilities? Either the carriage was hired from an hotel in Rio, which would routinely have had such things, for the purposes of driving the GA about, or, more probably, Beckfoot has a carriage (which would certainly have been needed when the house was built, in the nineteeth century) but no longer has horses. A suitable horse is borrowed from a farmer when needed.
So we are down to Mrs Braithwaite, full time, Billy Lewthwaite, a classic odd job man, fairly regularly but certainly not full time, and a maid when Miss Turner visits.