The ‘to-do’ that Mrs Derbyshire warned me about carried on for some days. Not that I heard anything mind – there was just a strange atmosphere in the house and Mr Prentice and Mrs Derbyshire fussed more than usual about clean aprons and best behaviour.
Despite my impeccable manners and immaculate apron, I don’t see either His Lordship or Lady Prunella for nearly a week after their return from London. I am still too young to wait on table and my duties – bed making, fire lighting, dusting and the like – are done when the rooms are empty. I do, however, meet the infamous Andrews, Lord Haverford’s new Scottish chauffeur. He seems nice and I don’t really understand what the fuss is about. Cook says he has ‘dangerous political views’ but when I heard him talking during dinner in the servants’ hall it seemed as though he was a supporter of the Labour Party, which doesn’t seem dangerous to me as they are meant to be supporting working people like Cook herself.
‘He isn’t in any position to have views at all,’ Cook had said.
Mr Prentice seems to object to Andrews eating in the servants’ hall with the rest of us. I’m not really sure where he is meant to eat. In the garage with the cars?
I don’t have much to do with Williams, His Lordship’s valet, who has also returned from London as he is a long way above the likes of me in the pecking order of the staff at Haverford and Mrs Carruthers has remained in London with Lady Cecily. I’m not sure why Lady Cecily is still in London. Nobody seems to be talking about it in the servants’ hall and if they mention it at all Mr Prentice silences them pretty quickly – but I do wonder if this is the root cause of the ‘to-do’.
I find out what happened a few days later.
The staircase at Haverford House is breathtaking. When Mrs Derbyshire first showed it to me, I didn’t hear what she was saying for a few minutes because I was staring at the curve of the steps and the shining mahogany banisters. I could imagine glamorous ladies coming down these stairs on their way to attend a dance in the ballroom.
‘It will be one of your duties to keep this staircase looking spick and span,’ Mrs Derbyshire had said when she’d finally got my attention again. ‘Polly will show you what needs to be done, but I want to be able to see my face in these banisters.’
It is the banisters I am polishing – using a little beeswax and a lot of elbow grease as per Polly’s instructions – when I finally meet Lady Prunella. She is running down the stairs in a manner that I’m sure both Cook and Mrs Derbyshire would disapprove of, when she sees me and stops suddenly. I remember what my mother has always drilled into me – to carry on with my work as though I’m not really there. Much as I want to look up, I keep my gaze on the banisters and just catch glimpses of Lady Prunella from the corner of my eye.
‘You must be the new housemaid,’ she says. I hadn’t expected her to talk to me and I almost forget to curtsy.
‘Yes, my lady,’ I say quietly.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
‘Annie Bishop, my lady.’
‘Oh you can stop all that “my lady” nonsense with me,’ she says, although I know of course that I can’t. Mr Prentice would have my guts for garters. I’d probably be sacked on the spot. ‘It’s nice to have another young person around the place,’ Lady Prunella goes on, although that doesn’t seem very fair on Polly. I suspect what she means is it’s nice to see a new face. I know already from Mr Prentice that His Lordship’s youngest daughter is the same age as me, give or take a week or two.
‘It’s very boring being back here,’ she continues. ‘After weeks in London where there is so much to do.’
I don’t know how to reply to that, having never been to London, having never even left Cranmere. I turn back to the banisters.
‘Such a fuss.’ Lady Prunella seems to be talking to herself now and when I look at her out of the corner of my eye she is slumped a little, a deflated version of the girl who was running down the stairs only a few moments ago. ‘It’s my sister’s fault of course that we had to come back. Such a row with Papa. Nobody ever rows with Papa and Cec should know better. Just because she wants to go to university. Is it really worth it do you think, Annie, tearing your family apart just to sit about reading books?’
‘I couldn’t say, my lady,’ I mutter, although sitting reading all day does sound wonderful to me. To have such an opportunity. Imagine! I have a feeling that Lady Prunella is expecting more from me, an opinion on her sister’s mysterious behaviour. But it is not my place to give an opinion. Surely Lady Prunella knows that.
I am saved by Polly.
‘Have you finished those banisters?’ she asks after bobbing a curtsy to Lady Prunella. ‘Mrs Derbyshire says you’re to come with me.’
I follow Polly down the stairs and across the hall.
‘I’ll see you again, Annie,’ Lady Prunella calls after me.
*
‘You’ve no business to be talking to the family,’ Polly says as she bustles down the corridor. I follow with my duster in hand. I want to tell her that I hadn’t said anything, that I’d just stood and listened. What choice did I have? But I don’t say a word; I just trot after Polly, clutching my duster.
She opens a door and leads me into a room I’ve never been to before.
‘Lord Haverford’s library,’ she says as we walk in. I look around me in awe. ‘We have to clean in here at least once a week, His Lordship’s instructions. It’s a boring old job but somebody’s got to do it.’
‘And that somebody is me,’ I say.
She nods with a smile. ‘You and me.’ I try not to let her see how much the idea of spending time in Lord Haverford’s library pleases me in case she takes the job away. ‘But just you for this morning as I have duties elsewhere. Mrs Derbyshire will be along in a minute.’
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to read. My mother taught me my letters before I started at the little village school and I would pull out one of the few books that we had at home and try to make sense of those letters on the page. I was a quick learner once I started at the school and I suspect my enthusiasm was quite unusual at a time when most mothers needed their children to help out at home while all the men were away at war. Miss Timmons, the schoolmistress, lent me whichever books I wanted to read and I consumed them with relish, eager to talk about them, eager to read whatever came next.
I was lucky that my mother allowed me to stay at school until I was fifteen and I was lucky that she encouraged me to read at home – we read from my father’s Complete Works of Shakespeare together in the evenings.
My mother had told me about Lord Haverford’s library but nothing could have prepared me for the sheer splendour of seeing all of those books before me for the first time. After Polly leaves, I stand in the middle of the room, my duster still clutched in my hand, and turn around slowly.
‘Now, Annie, that doesn’t look like dusting to me,’ Mrs Derbyshire’s voice echoes from the door. When I look at her though she is smiling. ‘It’s a beautiful room isn’t it,’ she says. ‘All these books.’ She pauses and frowns at me. ‘Do you read, Annie?’
‘Oh yes, Mrs Derbyshire. I love to read.’ The words are out before I can stop them. I hadn’t been planning on telling anyone how much I love to read, certainly not so soon.
‘Me too,’ the housekeeper replies, surprising me. ‘I do so love Jane Austen. Have you read Austen?’
I nod and Mrs Derbyshire takes me aside and explains to me that Lord Haverford is generous with his library. We can take out books whenever we want as long as we record what we have in the ledger. And then, very particularly, she shows me where the Jane Austen books are shelved.
‘But only after you’ve finished all your duties, or Mr Prentice will have your guts for garters,’ she says, her voice stern again as she turns to go.
*
Nobody in the servants’ hall mentions the row between Lady Cecily and her father that Lady Prunella hinted at. A few times I have opened my mouth to ask and then thought better of it, remembering the lecture Mr Prentice gave to me on my first day about respect and not gossiping. It feels as though the whole thing is blowing over, the atmosphere in the house settling again. I wonder if perhaps Lady Cecily will come home when Mr Prentice receives a letter from Carruthers. He shakes his head as he reads it before refolding it again along the creases and putting it in the inside pocket of his coat.
‘Well?’ Mrs Derbyshire asks.
‘It seems Lady Cecily is set upon her endeavour to go to Cambridge,’ he replies with one of his disapproving sniffs. ‘Term begins in October.’
‘And what about Carruthers? Will she be returning to Haverford then?’
‘She will,’ Mr Prentice replies. ‘To look after Lady Prunella. She writes that she hopes she does not fail Lady Prunella as she has done Lady Cecily.’
Mrs Derbyshire laughs harshly. ‘There’s a lot I could blame that woman for,’ she says. ‘But Lady Cecily having a brain isn’t one of them.’ I know that there is no love lost between Mrs Derbyshire and Mrs Carruthers – James the footman has told me that the two women bickered constantly about how the house should be run – and I wonder what it will be like when Carruthers returns to Haverford.
‘It isn’t right if you ask me,’ Cook says. ‘Women have no need of an education.’
‘Well luckily nobody is asking you,’ Mrs Derbyshire snaps at her, showing a rare glimpse into her inner thoughts. ‘Women have as much right to an education as men.’
‘Times are changing, Mrs Jones,’ Mr Prentice says and it is clear from his tone that he is not happy about that.
I find out more the next day from Lady Prunella who wanders listlessly into the library while I am cleaning. Polly had said it was a job for both of us but I can’t help noticing that she is rarely here to help. Not that I mind. I love being in the library by myself.
‘Oh hello, Annie,’ Lady Prunella says. I stop what I’m doing to curtsy. As I do I notice how sad she looks, how pale and tired. I suspect she is missing her sister. ‘I suppose you’ve heard that Cecily is staying in London and then going up to Cambridge. Can you believe it? And Papa isn’t stopping her. He says he’s tired of the whole thing. She told Papa that if our brother would have been able to go to university then so should she and Papa says he can no longer argue with that.’
She sighs and slumps into one of the chairs, plucking a book off the shelf without enthusiasm. ‘She won’t even be able to get a degree,’ Lady Prunella goes on. ‘Women can study at Cambridge but don’t get a degree. What’s the point in that? She should at least go to Oxford and get a degree at the end of it all. But no, she insists on taking Daniel’s place at Cambridge, although of course she’ll be at Girton rather than King’s, and now I’m stuck here on my own forever.’ She sighs and begins to leaf through her book and I turn back to my dusting.
I find myself thinking about the mysterious Lady Cecily who seems to have defied all conventions, upsetting everyone from her own family to Cook and Mr Prentice. Only Mrs Derbyshire had seemed to be on Lady Cecily’s side. I wonder why Lady Cecily has done it and I think about Daniel Montagu, Prunella and Cecily’s brother and His Lordship’s only son. I’ve heard whispered conversations about Daniel – heir to his father’s estate, who was only sixteen when he died of the Spanish flu just as the war ended. My mother had told me that Lady Haverford had followed her son to the grave two months later – both of them were dead before the war had been over a year.
Prunella begins talking again and I’m not sure whether she is talking to me or to herself. My mother has always said that the family ignore the staff most of the time. But Lady Prunella appears to be defying convention almost as much as her sister.
‘I shall call her bluestocking from now on,’ she says. ‘Who would want to be a bluestocking rather than a beautiful lady? I don’t understand it at all. She had her coming out this season, but she wasn’t interested in that either. She says she doesn’t want a husband. All she has talked about for months is Cambridge.’ She throws the unread book down. ‘Such a bore.’
There is something about Lady Prunella that draws you in. She is warm and funny and, while not conventionally beautiful, she has an aristocratic presence much like His Lordship. She has inherited his long nose and blonde hair. I realise that I have stopped my duties to look at her. I turn away just as her eyes flick up towards me. ‘You know all about Daniel and Mama I suppose?’ she asks and before I can answer she tells me the story I am already half aware of. Somehow it sounds all the more heart-breaking coming from her. I don’t say anything though; I just nod and dust and bite my lip.
But later as I’m lying in bed, Polly snoring softly in the bed across from mine, I think about how Prunella must feel alone in this house with only her taciturn father for company – a house that echoes with the absences of the rest of her family.