Polly's Story (4 page)

‘Who’s there?’ said a surprised voice, and the curtain was drawn back to reveal Harriet herself, wrapped up in a blanket and settled comfortably on the window seat with her little dog, Nelson. I had seen her at prayers in the chapel and noticed her particularly at church the week before: she was Lord Vye’s younger daughter and near my age, I thought. Not what you would call a pretty girl, but striking, with thick auburn hair and something very lively and likeable about her expression.

‘I’m so sorry, Miss,’ I said, hastily picking up my things. ‘You startled me. I’m just laying your fire and then I’ll be off.’

‘You startled me back,’ she said, though she didn’t sound too cross about it. ‘Wait! Come here for a moment and see this.’

I went over to the window, though to be honest I would sooner have got on with my work because I was behind myself already. My hot water jugs and tea-trays were still to be taken around before breakfast, not to mention all the servants’ rooms which Jemima and I would have to tackle afterwards. I forgot about them as soon as I glanced outside, however. Miss Harriet’s bedroom faced the park, and a fine stag was standing a little way apart from the rest of the herd. He looked like some creature out of a fairy tale, half hidden in the early-morning mist among the pale trunks of the silver birch trees. As we watched, he pawed the ground with his hooves and bellowed.

‘I think he is trying to attract a female,’ Harriet told me. ‘They don’t seem very interested, do they? I can’t see why not. He looks a handsome fellow to me.’

‘Perhaps he has no conversation,’ I said, forgetting myself for a moment.

Well, that made her laugh. ‘Can you sit with me for a while?’ she said, patting the seat beside her. ‘I feel like some company this morning.’

‘I’d love to, Miss,’ I said (which was quite true), ‘but there’s so much work to be done! I should have got your fire going by now, for one thing - you must be half frozen to death.’ I fetched a quilt from the bed to make her more comfortable. Oh, she did look snug! I’d have given my eye teeth to be so warm and cosy, sitting there beside her, and nothing to do with the rest of the day but watch deer and stroll around the estate.

‘You are new here, aren’t you?’ she asked as I tucked her in. ‘What is your name? How old are you?’

‘Polly, Miss,’ I said, having decided to give up on Olive once and for all. ‘I am fourteen.’

‘I shall be fourteen in July!’ she said, as if it were the strangest thing in the world that we should be so close in age. (I did not have the heart to tell her that she could never catch me up: come the summer, I would be fifteen.) ‘And my name is Harriet, as you probably know. I hope we shall be friends.’

I nearly laughed out loud at this. The idea of me being friends with Lord Vye’s daughter! I’d learned by now that to most of the family, we servants were invisible. We might as well not have existed, apart from the work we did. I had tried my best to melt into the wall when Lord Vye passed me in the corridor the other day, but he looked straight through me anyway. Still, that’s Miss Harriet for you: she has her own way of looking at the world.

As we talked, I happened to notice that she had torn her nightgown, climbing up on the window seat. She told me that Agnes, the young ladies’ maid who attended to her and her older sister Miss Eugenie, had complained to Lady Vye about the amount of mending she was expected to do, and that Lady Vye had had sharp words with Harriet about it. She was not nearly so careful with her clothes as Eugenie. So I offered to darn the nightgown if she wanted, without Agnes or anyone else having to know about it. I had had enough of hemming dusters and sheets, to be honest, and was glad of the chance to show what I could do. When I had finished, no one would know the nightgown had ever been torn in the first place.

‘Now I am sure we shall be friends,’ Harriet said, changing out of the nightgown into another. ‘I wish you could be my maid, Polly! Agnes is always so cross and disapproving.’

I shall be glad enough to stay as under housemaid for the time being, I thought, once Miss Harriet’s fire was alight and I was hurrying along to the next bedroom with her nightgown hidden under my apron bib. I spent the rest of the morning trying to catch up with myself because there was plenty to be done and now I was later than ever. And yet my friendship with Miss Harriet was to prove more important than I could ever have known, so it was time well spent. Over the next few days, she took to following me around in the middle of the day when things were quiet, asking me all sorts of questions about my work. Perhaps she was bored. She certainly didn’t seem to have many friends her own age; Master John was too young to be much of a companion for her, and Miss Eugenie too busy turning herself into an eligible young lady. I had to show her the marble sluice in a cupboard along the corridor where we emptied away the slops, which she’d never even noticed before, and explain the use of everything inside my cleaning box: blackleading for the fireplaces, soft soap and silver sand to scrub the floorboards (you couldn’t risk getting them too wet) - even a slice of stale bread for taking marks off the wallpaper. She particularly liked my dustpan, which had a hole for my thumb and a holder for my candle so that I could use it with one hand in the dark. She would have been a lot less taken with the thing if she’d had to use it every day, but I didn’t want to say so.

It was Iris who really helped me settle in at Swallowcliffe Hall, Iris whose sympathy softened the ache of home-sickness that dogged me through those long days and lonely nights. She was the one who realized I had no hat for church on Sundays and leant me one of hers, she who showed me her favourite corners of the Swallowcliffe grounds: a winding gravel path through the rose garden; a mossy stone fountain beside the summerhouse; the little marble statue of Eustacia Vye, the second viscount’s only daughter, who had died of rheumatic fever at the age of two. I could not understand how I had once thought Jemima pretty; now I knew her a little better, the discontented look on her face and the downward turn of her mouth quite spoilt her looks for me. But Iris was quite beautiful, all soft curves and peachy skin, and sweet-natured through and through.

I also found myself seeing more of William, and was almost beginning to think of him as a friend. We were meant to keep away from the menservants but I would often bump into him early of a morning when I was laying the fires downstairs and he was filling up the coal buckets. There was never anyone else about at the time, so we could have a chat quite safely (we were not supposed to talk to each other in the front of the house, as a rule). He looked more ordinary then too, not being in livery or having his hair powdered until it was time to serve the family breakfast. He said the powder made his head itch something terrible, and I thought he looked much more handsome without it; such thick, wavy brown hair he had, and brown eyes like mine that were usually crinkled up in a smile. He was always making me laugh with some tale about what had happened at dinner the night before, and it got my day off to a very good start if I should happen to see him.

There would soon be no time for cosy chats with anyone, however, because it was shortly Miss Eugenie’s eighteenth birthday and we would be rushed off our feet from morning till night. A large party of guests were staying at the Hall, including Lord Vye’s two sisters and their families, and Master Edward and Master Rory (his two older sons) were coming home too. There would be dinner parties and dancing to entertain the fine company, and hunting and shooting no doubt, for those who liked that sort of thing - and then there was to be a grand masked ball to mark the birthday itself.

‘You’re bound to like my brothers,’ Harriet informed me. ‘All our maids fall in love with one or other of them. Some people say Edward is more handsome, but Rory can charm the birds out of the trees and he’s a cavalry officer, which is too dashing for words. If you saw him in his uniform, you would just die on the spot.’

‘Then we had better hope he’ll not be wearing it this weekend,’ I said, and we laughed. I was brushing out Miss Harriet’s hair; she said I had a lighter hand than Agnes. ‘And is Master Edward in the army too?’

‘No, he’s studying at Oxford University. He finishes his degree in the summer and then he’ll come back and learn how to run the estate, since he’s going to inherit it all when my father dies. So he’ll soon be looking for a wife.’ She sighed. ‘And there’s Eugenie already after a husband.’

‘But she is so young! There will be plenty of time for that, surely?’

‘She wants to be mistress of her own house. Anyway, all the best girls get snapped up in their first season, or so my stepmother says.’

I’d only seen Eugenie from a distance but, to be honest, I didn’t find her quite as beautiful as everyone else seemed to think. She reminded me of a painted porcelain doll, with that rosebud mouth and her round blue eyes set so wide apart. In my opinion, her face seemed to lack some spark of expression to make it interesting. Give me Miss Harriet any day of the week, for all her red hair and freckles.

Harriet was looking hangdog at her reflection in the mirror. ‘Just think,’ I said, to cheer her up, ‘you will be in Miss Eugenie’s place in a few years’ time, going through to dinner on the arm of some dashing young man! I am sure you will look very elegant.’ And I piled up her hair to see how it suited her. In fact this made her chin seem a little too - obvious, somehow, but a few pretty ringlets would probably soften the effect.

‘I’d sooner be dead!’ Harriet said crossly, shaking her hair out of my hands. ‘Having to make polite conversation with some boring creature my stepmother thinks is suitable! Eugenie told me she dozed off when she was sitting next to the Honourable Henry Cavendish last week, but when she woke up he was still droning on about his collection of interesting fungi and she hadn’t missed a thing.’

We both laughed some more at this, and I decided that perhaps I had misjudged Eugenie. ‘Do you ever want to get married, Polly?’ Harriet asked, which made me think a bit.

‘I am not sure that I do,’ I said at last. My parents were happy enough together, but it was a hard life for my mother, having four children to bring up on very little money - even before my father died. And what if the man I married took to drink, or turned out to have a bad temper? Besides, if I took a husband I would have to leave service, and I was certainly not ready for that just yet.

‘I am never getting married,’ Harriet said decisively. ‘I shall keep house for my brother Rory, and own a pack of beagles and hunt all day long. Will you come and be my housekeeper, Polly?’

‘Certainly,’ I said - so that was decided.

The very next day, however, something took place which was to change my prospects at the Hall completely. Nothing to do with Jemima, either: I brought about this disaster all by myself. Perhaps it was because I was feeling happier, and that made me feel more confident than I should have done. I can think of no other reason why I should have been so stupid.

This is how it happened. Mary checked her cleaning box before tea the next afternoon and realized that she must have left a duster in Lady Vye’s sitting room upstairs. Luckily the family were occupied with their own tea in the main drawing room, but Mary was in a quandary because Mrs Henderson wanted to see her right away and she had no time to retrieve the duster. I offered to fetch it for her, trying to be helpful, so Mary told me to hurry straight there and back, and no messing about along the way. Off I went, and sure enough - there was the duster on Lady Vye’s writing table. I picked it up, and then couldn’t resist a closer look at the table, with its pretty design of flowers all inlaid in different woods.

Oh, why hadn’t I listened to Mary? It would have saved me a great deal of trouble. But it is easy to be wise after the event, and my eye had been caught by an exquisite porcelain figurine standing in one corner. The day before, I had heard Mary grumbling to Becky about Lady Vye and these figurines of hers. She had four of them, a present from his Lordship; they each represented a season, and she liked to keep a different one on her table each week to look at while she wrote her letters. Mary was always forgetting to change them around; she had plenty of other things on her mind. Which season was this? I wondered, picking up the china figure. (What was I thinking of?) It was a young country girl in a sprigged muslin frock, carrying a thick sheaf of corn. Autumn, most probably, rather than Summer. Of course, I should never have touched the thing! I was not even allowed to dust the top of the writing table; polishing its legs was the furthest I could go. Handling anything so precious as this ornament was strictly forbidden.

Suddenly the door burst open with a crash, and in rushed Miss Harriet. I was so startled by the noise, and already so guilty besides, that the figurine flew out of my hand. It fell on the floor and cracked into three or four pieces, the dainty head with its fair curls rolling away from me across the carpet.

I stared at Harriet, frozen with horror. She looked down at the broken china and then back at me. There was nothing to be said. We could hear Lady Vye’s voice calling from somewhere close by as she followed her stepdaughter up the stairs. I was in the most terrible trouble, and we both knew it.

Four

Never begin to talk to the ladies or gentlemen, unless it be to deliver a message or ask a necessary question, and then do it in as few words as possible. Do not talk to your fellow servants or to the children of the family in the passages or sitting rooms, or in the presence of ladies and gentlemen, unless necessary, and then speak to them very quietly.