Mrs. Marjorie Flint had been Housekeeper for Mr. D.N. Strumpet since he had inherited his fortune and fired his father’s housekeeper twenty years ago. Mrs. Diaz had been housekeeper of Strumpet House for twenty years herself and Mrs. Flint was proud that she had survived as long. She remembered his words on the matter at the time well. “I wouldn’t have that woman working for me. I’m surprised she outlived the old man. He must have gotten her cheap” he had said. “Now, a proper British housekeeper, that’s worth what I’m willing to pay.” Mrs. Flint had tried to edge in the information that she was from Edenborough and considered herself nowhere near British numerous times, but Mr. Strumpet was fonder of his own voice than hers and the facts of her origin had never been set straight; not in twenty years.

Mr. Strumpet was the wealthiest and most certainly the most well-known man in Courtland Township. Everyone in town seemed to have a personal story about Mr. Strumpet, even if they had really never met the man. Mr. Steever had once told her over coffee that Strumpet was the wealthiest man in the county. Mr. Steever, known (mostly to himself) as one of the smartest men in town, had explained how the Strumpets had been scattered around Faright County since slavery. He even surmised that they had been the first family to actually bring slaves into Faright County. The main family home had always been outside Courtland Township since before anyone could truly remember. During Mrs. Flint’s tenure, the current Mr. Strumpet became the only Mr. Strumpet left. His cousins and brothers had all died without children and Mrs. D.N. Strumpet had died from an illness some years before and never managed to produce him an heir.

Mrs. Flint regarded Mr. Strumpet as a mean man, but only because he was a rich and ignorant man. She would use that excuse often when trying to console a scolded maid or calm the butler. “He’s very rich. Sometimes, rich people aren’t very pleasant to be around. Neither are the poor! But be around them we must, and it would suit us all to learn to deal with each other in a respectable fashion” she would scold. Secretly, she found him considerably offensive but it was mostly due to the fact that he didn’t listen well and he was quite frequently rude about things he had little knowledge of.

Once, there had been a gathering of women from town who were deciding how they were going to go about supporting their right to vote. Mrs. Flint was one of the first in attendance. When the turnout had overgrown Nell’s, the women wanted to reconvene at the Strumpet Theater just down the block. Of course, Mr. Strumpet wasn’t at his theater on a daily basis (as a matter of fact, he rarely returned to any of his buildings once the initial showing-off period had cooled down) so the theater manager, husband to one of the group’s members, allowed them to gather in the theater for an hour or so as it was not being used that morning. When Mr. Strumpet found out, he fired the manager. He also had the Courtland Courier (owned by the Strumpet family since issue number one) write an editorial condemning this new “women’s suffrage” issue as an end to American values and a movement to “steal the country away from most honorable men!”

Strumpet House was an enormously large house, a mansion really. It reminded Mrs. Flint of Harlaxton in Lincolnshire and she often called it a castle in haste. “House” just didn’t seem to fit. It had been partially burned during the War and rebuilt by Mr. Strumpet’s grandfather, a Colonel of the Confederacy. It was built on the top of Strumpet House at the end of Strumpet Road that ran all the way into Courtland Township intersecting Main Street at the center of town. (Secretly, he had many times tried to use his wealth and influence to get the small town’s name changed to Strumpet, but was unsuccessful.) There were stables and kennels and acres of lawn. Hundreds of shrubs and hedges and flowering trees. Massive oaks and enormous evergreens solidified the picturesque landscape. It was quite grand at peak season. Mrs. Flint could look out the windows of the top floor and see fathers from around the township occasionally driving by in their Model-T’s just to get a glimpse at opportunity and say to their children, peering wide-eyed at the size and majesty of it all, “One day kiddos. We’re gonna live in a place just like this one. It’s the American dream guys. Easy; all you gotta do is work hard. Just like Mr. Strumpet.”

Mrs. Flint was a stony woman in her fifties who had grown up in London and had survived some very desperate times. She had worked in a house since she was a child. She had grown up serving and even married, and was widowed by, a gardener who had grown up at the same house. This forged her into a frugal and stern woman as well as a whole host of reliable qualities that made her perfect for running Strumpet House. She directly oversaw the cook, Mrs. Cooley and hired what seemed like a rotating stream of housemaids. They were mostly younger women who would ultimately go off to school pursuing some dream or get married and no longer needed to housemaid for a living. Mr. Bertram was the butler. He was a smart and quiet man who always seemed to be exactly where he was needed at the exact moment he was needed. The Greenkeeper, Mr. Ibanez, was a kind man and often seen by passersby tending to the lush green grass and its surrounding blossoms, bushes, and trees. As Housekeeper, Mrs. Flint was in charge of the entire operation. Mr. Strumpet’s servants were Mrs. Flint’s army of manor-workers and they kept the entirety of Strumpet House in perfect condition just as she expected.

All was well at Strumpet House, until The Man arrived one day in early November, 1927. It was as if the cold and cloudiness of winter came with him that same day. If asked, Mrs. Flint would not recall a single sunny day after The Man’s visit. Mr. Strumpet had been rarely seen or heard since late in October, spending countless hours in his study. Mr. Bertram had a much more personal relationship with Mr. Strumpet. Being his butler, he was always in close proximity whenever Mr. Strumpet was at the house. Mr. Bertram seemed much more reserved than usual and was not talking to Mrs. Flint about what was going on. Mrs. Cooley and the young housemaids were whispering amongst themselves so much that the mansion seemed twice as drafty as it once had. Mr. Ibanez stopped coming to work on Saturdays and Sundays.

Mrs. Flint began to notice that the change was happening all around town, not just at Strumpet House. Courtland Township had already begun feeling the effects of the change weeks earlier and it seemed that cash money just simply started to vanish and nobody, not even Carl’s Market was taking credit. Nobody really seemed to understand where it had gone, but treated it no differently than a passing storm. Mr. Stever had mentioned to her over his cup of coffee, “Like the rain, money comes and money goes. Some days there are floods and some days there are droughts.” Dismissed with a shrug. This change, unbeknownst to them, would be a drought that would last a decade and change the town in irreparable ways.

Mrs. Flint began to suspect that Mr. Strumpet knew exactly what had happened but he wasn’t saying much more than anything he already had said. “If the information is needed so badly, buy a damned Courier!” He had yelled the last time she implied to even ask. The truth was, Mrs. Flint had already been examining the papers but they hadn’t seemed very forthright with information. Written with no more effort than a weather forecast, the stories just told of a decline in the stock market and a small amount of belt-tightening might be in order.

After The Man had come, Mr. Bertram was asked to hire guards for Strumpet House and to put Mr. Ibanez to work on building a fence around the estate. Mr. Ibanez didn’t really understand the need for a fence around the entire estate, the pastures were fenced and the horses had no desire to leave their luxuries. But he had always been a dutiful groundskeeper and he set to building the fence as requested.

Mrs. Flint decided to be a stone wall and acted as if she, personally, had control over any pertinent issues of concern and any discussion outside the scope of their tasks was strictly forbidden. Every week, after The Man came, she began to notice the housemaids were leaving, one by one. The day The Man came, Mrs. Flint was responsible for eight housemaids. By the end of the month, over half were gone without a word. Most of them snuck away in the night, but one was brave enough to explain to Mrs. Flint that she need to get to her family in Oklahoma; that she had heard things back home were turning dire. The delivery driver from Carl’s Market said he had seen one of them in town, but several people had started moving out of Courtland, so who knew. He also mentioned that one of the Strumpet buildings had been burned down over in Garish and he was fairly certain it hadn’t been an accident. Mrs. Flint had tucked away that tidbit of information and remained stoic for the good of the remaining household.

It was just before Christmas (there were only two over-worked housemaids left at that point) when Mr. Bertram called all the remaining staff together for an announcement. They were all eager to get an official statement as to what all these changes were about and why. Their eagerness came to a slow death as Mr. Bertram began to talk about banking and speculation and the riding out of waves. He explained to them that things were just a bit tight for everybody in the area, not just Strumpet House and that they were all strong (looking at the remaining housemaids) and that they could endure.

“There had been a recent spike in crime,” he explained, “and people, drunkards and outsiders mostly, expecting handouts. As such, Mr. Strumpet decided to have the fence built to discourage those elements from occurring around Strumpet Hill. It is necessary to keep us all safe.”

Mr. Bertram repeated Mr. Strumpet’s advice about not trusting any outsiders and that ultimately, it was the outsiders that had caused the need for such drastic changes in the first place. “The banks and the industrialists are the victims in this mess,” Mr. Strumpet had told him, “but we’re better and stronger than any outsiders and the outsiders will pay for stealing our way of life!” Mr. Bertram explained it the best the butler could. He hoped it would satisfy the servants that were still working and keep things running at Strumpet House. In some ways it did, but about a month into the New Year, it didn’t matter anymore.

Mr. Strumpet had declined severely and Mrs. Flint knew an end was near. He wouldn’t come out of his study for days and Mr. Bertram told her that he had stopped bathing completely. All of the housemaids had left and when Mr. Strumpet refused to reimburse Mr. Ibanez for the fence materials, the groundskeeper quit and said he was moving back to the motherland. Mrs. Cooley came to Mrs. Flint one morning and said there was only a week’s worth of food left and the deliveries had stopped coming and it appeared as though Carl’s Market had just disappeared along with all the money in town. It was shut down and boarded up in a single day. Mrs. Flint ensured her that Mr. Strumpet had plenty of money and she was to not worry herself. “Just make sure Mr. Strumpet had his meals when he wants them,” Mrs. Flint had told the cook. She knew when she said the words that it wasn’t really true but she was trying to remain loyal to the House. Mrs. Cooley never returned to Strumpet House after she finished cooking the last ham.

It was a cold Monday morning in February when Mrs. Flint, attempting to maintain a single, clean window saw the crowd moving on the gate in the distance at the end of the drive. They had torches and pitchforks! Had it really come to that? Her shock turned to panic and she ran screaming “Bertram! Bertram!” Mr. Bertram located her quickly and had already seen the gathering as he always had already seen everything and she was glad to see he had a shotgun in hand. She knew one shotgun wouldn’t be enough for what was about to happen, but he was an honorable man and would defend Strumpet House and what it stood for until his dying breath. Mr. Strumpet had spoken to him at great length about the “imbeciles and vagrants” that were going to be coming to take everything they had; their land, their home, their jobs. Mr. Bertram wasn’t about to go down without a fight.

When Mrs. Flint followed Mr. Bertram to the front doors, the mob had crashed the gate and were moving down the lane, quickstep, torches and pikes filling the air right above their mass of heads. Sneers and snarls rode waves across the angry faces of a crowd screaming about food and money and bigwigs. Mrs. Flint stood behind Mr. Bertram looking at the approaching mass over his shoulder and began to cry. Mr. Bertram had never heard it before and he didn’t even have to turn around to know what she was doing. Her wall had crumbled. The massive ensemble of angry civilians rushed Strumpet House. A shotgun spoke and was quickly shouted down.