‘That Eugenie’s a pretty little thing,’ my large lady said. ‘No wonder Clara wants her married off in a hurry and out of the way - far too much competition.’
Her friend leaned forward and lowered her voice confidentially, although there were no other ladies in the room at the time. ‘They had better hope she makes a good match. You’d never think so to judge from this evening, but I’ve heard somebody needs to bring some money into the family. Nobody can make a living out of farming these days, and a place like Swallowcliffe must cost a fortune to run.’
‘My dear, there’s talk they may have to sell off part of the estate. Really, it’s a disgrace! Our finest houses are all being bought up by bankers and factory owners, and who knows what state England will be in by the end of the century.’
There was a pause while they both fanned themselves. ‘There’s always Edward, I suppose,’ said the other lady eventually. I could tell she was rather put out to find herself the bearer of stale news. ‘Perhaps he can catch one of these rich American girls who seem to be all the rage in London. There’s bound to be a new batch coming over for the season. Some of them are perfectly lovely, I hear, and better manners than one might imagine.’
The conversation turned to more general matters, and shortly afterwards I came to the end of my sewing. I snipped off the thread and got up, my legs half asleep from having been in the same position for so long.
‘Oh! I had quite forgotten you were there,’ my lady said, rather taken aback. ‘You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?’ She glanced down at the hem of her gown and then opened the beaded evening bag hanging from her elbow. ‘I think I shall only give you sixpence, since you have taken such a time.’
I might have said that it was a very long tear and she ought to have given me twice as much as she’d promised for mending it, rather than half, but as a matter of fact I did not. After all, there was a sovereign in my pocket. I did not feel sorry to see those ladies go, and wished I had not had to listen to them talk in that way; it was a worry to think of the Vyes being short of money.
I went to check the bedrooms upstairs, my head spinning with all kinds of thoughts I didn’t know what to do with. What a strange evening it was turning out to be, and shortly to become stranger still. I bumped into a lady on our servants’ staircase; she must have lost her way, although I didn’t see how she could have gone so far astray as to end up there. I curtseyed and stood aside to let her pass, wondering whether it would be rude to offer her directions back to the ballroom. She was wearing a lovely pale green gown, with a white pierrot mask over her fair hair.
And then I had my second shock of the evening. ‘Polly? It’s me!’ came a familiar voice, and the mask was snatched away to reveal -
‘Iris?’
I stood there staring at her, lost for words. ‘What are you doing?’ I managed to gasp eventually. ‘Where has that dress come from? And the mask? What if Mrs Henderson sees you?’
‘She won’t know who I am. You wouldn’t have, would you, unless I’d decided to take it off? I couldn’t resist giving you a surprise.’
I could not stop looking at Iris. She was the equal of anyone in that ballroom and finer than most, with her beautiful eyes shining and such a mischievous grin on her face that you could not help but smile back at her. I lifted a ruffle on her dress, feeling the silk cool and smooth against my fingers. ‘Wherever did you get this?’
‘It’s an old one of the mistress’s in my last place. I was keeping it for our servants’ ball in the new year.’ Her face changed and she added quickly, ‘I’m sorry. You won’t want to hear about that.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ I reassured her. ‘I was going to tell you - Lady Vye’s changed her mind, after what happened with Master John. I am not to be dismissed after all.’
‘Quite right too! I knew Mrs Henderson would stick up for you.’
‘Have a care, Iris,’ I warned. ‘She’s bound to notice if you’re away too long.’
‘Don’t worry, I am only going for the one dance. She won’t even know I’ve gone.’ She slipped past me on the stairs, then turned back with one last dazzling smile. ‘There’s a gentleman waiting for me, Polly. I can’t let him down - not after he has gone to the trouble of finding me a mask and these lovely gloves.’ She stretched out both arms to show me the swankiest pair of white kid gloves, right up to the elbow. Oh, she did look a picture! I’d have given my eye teeth for some gloves like that, with my hands being so rough and chapped from hard work.
‘Wish me luck, Polly,’ she said, before the mask went on again and she had turned back into a stranger.
‘Good luck then,’ I said, but she had already disappeared.
I went on my way upstairs, more worried than ever. Iris was bound to have admirers, being so pretty, but she was playing a dangerous game if there was a gentleman involved. The stakes were high, and she had a lot to lose. Trying to pass herself off as a lady would land her in a great deal of trouble, I thought, even if she got away with it so far as Mrs Henderson was concerned. Real life wasn’t like those romantic novelettes Iris was so fond of reading, where the master of the house would end up marrying the governess, or the scullery maid would turn out to be the long-last daughter of a duke, who happened to recognize her when she was throwing out the pigswill. (She had leant me one of them once.) Gentlemen weren’t in the habit of marrying maidservants, so far as I knew, no matter how beautiful they were.
I don’t think any of us servants went to bed that night. By the time supper had been cleared away, we had to start preparing tables for the hot breakfast at three in the morning: devilled kidneys, rump steak with oyster sauce, roast partridges and lamb cutlets. And by the time that had been cleared away, some of the guests who had gone to bed at a reasonable time would shortly be getting up; they would need fires made up in their rooms, and hot water to wash, and then another ordinary breakfast as usual. Even with the extra footmen, we were rushed off our feet. I only saw Iris for a moment again - back in her black uniform and apparently no one but me and her gentleman friend any the wiser about what she had been up to.
At seven in the morning, we all sat down in the servants’ hall for our own breakfast, half dropping with tiredness but in one mind that the ball could be declared a great success. Eugenie had looked lovely and danced all night, Master Rory’s cavalry officer friends had charmed all the ladies and been as dashing as anyone could have wished, and the food was very splendid, by all accounts - although we still thought Mrs Bragg was as fine a cook as the French chef, for all his airs and graces. At least the day ahead would be fairly quiet: most of our guests were leaving in the afternoon, and then the whole family were going to a neighbour’s for dinner.
By the evening, the tables had been cleared away, the footmen had gone back to London, our guests had departed, their bedrooms were stripped and aired, and the house settled back into itself. Master Edward and Master Rory were staying on for a while longer, but that did not mean too much extra work for us. I did not have a chance to be with Iris privately over the next few days, but I watched her. She kept herself to herself and at last I realized she did not want to confide in me; she could have found an occasion, had she wanted to. That hurt me a little, I must admit. I had thought we were closer friends than that. Perhaps she thought I was too young to understand about love and romance - although she used to tease me about William, calling him my ‘young man’ just to see me blush. He and I were friendly, that was all, although he did seem very pleased to hear that I would be staying on at the Hall. He had told me that he had a younger sister, of whom he was very fond, and I probably reminded him of her. If anything, I thought he might have been keen on Iris; he was always the first to notice if she was struggling to carry anything heavy, and the three of us had once spent a very pleasant afternoon together, after we’d come across him on one of our Sunday walks.
Anyone could tell that something was afoot with Iris at the moment. You could see how happy she was just by looking at her face, a
nd I was not the only one to notice. ‘Why are you so full of the joys of spring?’ Becky asked one morning, hearing her singing to herself as she brushed her hair, but she only shrugged the question off with a smile.
I so badly wanted to warn her again to be careful, although I knew she wouldn’t thank me for it. You see, the suspicion was growing on me that the gentleman who was paying her so much attention could only be Rory Vye. All his cavalry officer friends had left the house by now, and Master Edward was hardly the type to flirt with a maid. I thought back to that first evening when I had seen Master Rory in the still room, and then how eager Iris had been to watch him skating on the lake, and how quickly he had left the ice to talk to her. I knew very little about gentlemen and how they went about their business, but it was obvious that Rory was the type to break hearts. He could not help charming everyone, it was in his nature; if Iris took him at his word, she was bound to be disappointed.
Almost a week after the ball, I was woken up in the middle of the night by the screech of a fox outside, and it barked several times again to make sure that I stayed awake. I lifted my head off the pillow to see whether anyone else had been disturbed by the eerie noise - and then sat up in bed to rub my eyes and look again. No, I had not been mistaken: Iris’s bed was empty.
Where could she have been? With chamber pots under each bed, we had no reason to wander about and Mrs Henderson would have had plenty to say about it had she caught one of us! What did Iris think she was doing, out on her own somewhere in the middle of the night? Then I drew back the thin curtain to look out of the window, and what I saw only added to my fears. A full moon hung low in the sky, and its light revealed a figure hurrying along the shadowy path by the edge of the lake: a woman in a black cloak with some sort of pale dress underneath. I knew immediately this had to be Iris. She was alone, but somebody was obviously expecting her in the boat house. A fire had been lit in the grate: I could see smoke rising from the chimney, and the flash of a white shirt at the window. A man was waiting for her there in the dark - and I had a good idea who that man might be.
Seven
A remark lately made to me by a friend of mine, mistress of a small household, often recurs to my mind. It struck me as so exactly expressing what was needed. ‘Ellen’, she said, ‘was at one time rather given to flirtation, but I steered her through it.’ Now that seems to me exactly what we should do, ‘steer them through it’.
From Our Responsibilities and Difficulties as Mistresses of Young Servants, Lady Baker, 1886
I tried my best to stay awake until Iris came back, but my bed was too warm and snug and me too tired lying in it to keep my eyes open for long. Before I knew what had happened, Mary was calling for us to wake up the next morning. Perhaps it took Iris a little longer than usual to rouse herself; I might have been imagining things, given what I thought I had seen in the night. I watched her intently, but her face gave nothing away. No one would have thought anything was out of the ordinary as she quickly washed, slipped into her print dress and brushed out her thick fair hair before plaiting it to pin up under a cap. Then off she went as usual to bring Mrs Henderson her early-morning cup of tea.
There was never a second to spare as our day began, but I had to try and find out whether my eyes had been playing tricks on me. Perhaps there was some clue among Iris’s things as to what she might have been up to. I picked up her hairbrush as if to borrow it, and noticed a small damp leaf, caught between the bristles. Not definite proof, perhaps, but enough to make me determined to look for more evidence later on, when I was cleaning the room. When I saw traces of fresh mud on Iris’s outdoor boots under the bed and felt the sodden hem of her coat, hanging behind the door, I knew for sure: she was that girl I had seen out by the lake. Well, that was a shock, although I didn’t know what to do about it. Iris wasn’t interested in my advice - she had made that clear enough. She ought to be more careful, though. What if it had been Mrs Henderson watching her out of the window, rather than me?
When we heard a few days later that Master Rory was finally going back to his barracks in London, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. At least now I could fall asleep without worrying what Iris might be up to. I hoped that he would be away for a good long time, and that she would have come to her senses by the next time he paid us a visit. Master Edward was staying on at Swallowcliffe little longer, but he spent most of the time reading up in his room and was not much trouble to anyone - apart from a rather inconvenient interest in photography, that is. He had bought a wooden box camera in Oxford and used to wander around the house with it, getting in everyone’s way. We would have to stop what we were doing and stand without moving a muscle for ten or fifteen minutes at a time while he disappeared under a cloth at the back, fiddling about with goodness knows what levers and switches. It got so bad we used to run away and hide if we saw him coming, but poor Iris was a sitting target in the still room and found it less easy to escape. Still, it was a fairly harmless occupation, I suppose; at least he didn’t make much of a mess.
Two things happened shortly after Master Edward left too which changed my life a great deal for the better. The first was that finally our third housemaid arrived; I made up a pair with her, and Jemima went back to working with Becky. The new maid’s name was Amelia, but Mrs Henderson soon decided that was much too fancy a name for such a position and that she should be known as Jane instead, the same as the girl before. As soon as I saw Amelia/Jane, I thought we should probably get along together perfectly well, and so it turned out. She was a quiet, steady sort of girl who worked hard and only spoke when she had good reason to: a blessed relief after having to cope with all Jemima’s flouncing about. The two of us soon found our own rhythm and made a very efficient pair, if I do say so myself. Just as well, because the Vyes would shortly be going up to London for the season (Miss Eugenie was to be presented at Court, to complete her coming-out), and we would be starting on the spring cleaning when the weather had warmed up a little.
Then came the second piece of good news. Jemima had been chosen to go up to London with the family and work as parlourmaid in the townhouse there for the season. That was a feather in her cap and no mistake; she went about looking very pleased with herself.
‘One way to wriggle out of the spring cleaning, I suppose,’ Mary remarked, but I didn’t mind in the slightest. She would be away until July or August at least, and that could only be another relief.
And then just to fill my cup of happiness to the brim, I learnt that we were to be given Mothering Sunday as a holiday before the spring cleaning began, and could go home to visit our families! I could hardly wait, and counted off the days as February turned to March in an agony of impatience. Iris’s people were miles away up in Yorkshire so I invited her to come with me; Mother would not mind, and it would be nice to have some company on the journey.
At last the great day came. The second coachman took the four of us maids off in the barouche to the railway station at Edenvale, about four miles away. Becky and Jane were going up to their families in South London, while Iris and I would go several stops down the line in the other direction to my village of Little Rising, where Mother would be waiting to meet us. I was wearing an old blouse and skirt of Miss Eugenie’s which Harriet had begged for me, since they would be quite out of fashion by the time they fitted her, and in the basket on my lap was a pair of stout boots for my little brother Tom, hardly worn, together with two of Harriet’s outgrown cotton frocks and a thick woollen coat which my sister Lizzie could wear next winter. Mrs Henderson had let us bake simnel cakes in the still-room range to take home and delicious smells were wafting up from my basket where the cake lay on top of the clothes, wrapped up in greaseproof paper.
It was a fine day, so we had the hood folded back to look at the countryside as we trotted smartly through it - and to give poor Iris some air, as she was feeling rather queasy from the bucketing-about of the carriage. Everywhere was lush and green after all the rain we had been having; the trees and hedge
rows were heavy with blossom or dotted with tightly-furled emerald buds on every branch, so fat you could almost feel them straining to burst open. Lambs frisked about in the fields, wagging their little woolly tails, rabbits scuttered away into the long grass before our wheels, and a springtime promise of new life blew towards us on the breeze. The birds were singing their hearts out, the sun was shining, and if I had been any happier I would have burst too.
Becky smiled at me across the carriage. I must say, she was a great deal more pleasant to the rest of us when Jemima was not around. When we arrived at the station to find that there was a half hour to wait before either train arrived, she rummaged in her bag and took out a letter she had received from Jemima in London the week before which we could read to pass the time.
18 March, 1890
My dear Rebecca
Well, I am thoroughly ashamed for taking so long to write to you! The truth is, I have had scarcely a minute to myself since we arrived in Eaton Square. We have had quite a stream of visitors. All of London society seems to have come knocking at our door - no doubt to see Miss Eugenie, who must be one of the prettiest girls out this season. If you could only have seen her in the gown she wore to be presented at Court.
Lord and Lady Vye have been invited to several balls at Buckingham Palace and apparently Her Ladyship is becoming quite a favourite with the Prince of Wales. I should think he might well be invited to shoot at Swallowcliffe come the autumn, and won’t that send Mrs Bragg into a state! We have guests to supper nearly every night - not to mention trips to the opera and the theatre, and endless card parties. Of course this means late nights for me also, but I have a fair-sized room to myself and am often able to rest there in the early afternoon, so I do not mind. These tall white houses in Eaton Square are delightful, far more convenient and modern than a rambling old place like Swallowcliffe and so much easier to clean.
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