Thomas Everard has not brought a valet. This has caused a lot of unnecessary fuss in the servants’ hall and Mr Prentice is practically apoplectic.
‘I asked him if his man was following behind, on the train perhaps. I asked if we should arrange for him to be collected from the station and Mr Everard looked at me as though I’d asked him if he’d brought the moon,’ the butler tells us incredulously, as Polly and I hide in the corner and try unsuccessfully not to laugh. ‘He had no idea what I meant but in the end it transpired that he hasn’t brought a valet with him.’
‘What is the world coming to?’ Mrs Derbyshire replies, and I can’t quite work out if she’s being serious or not.
‘Well, it’s no good,’ Mr Prentice goes on. ‘No good at all.’
‘Where is his valet?’ James asks.
‘He doesn’t have one, can you believe? What is the world coming to?’ he repeats and shakes his head sadly. ‘James, there’s nothing else we can do. You’ll have to step up and help Mr Everard dress…’
‘But I’ve never done anything like that before,’ James protests. ‘How will I know what to do?’
Mr Prentice holds up his hand. ‘Williams will have to give you a crash course,’ he says, looking at His Lordship’s valet. ‘We don’t have long – there’s less than half an hour until the dinner gong now.’
‘But what about serving dinner?’ James asks. ‘I can’t be in two places at once.’
Mr Prentice is so red now he looks like he might burst and luckily Mrs Derbyshire takes control of things.
‘You two girls,’ she says to Polly and me. ‘You stop giggling in the corner. Polly, you can help Mr Prentice for now and you can serve at dinner. Once Annie has dressed the girls she can come down and help me and Cook. And as for James, as soon as he’s done with Mr Everard he can come back down here and change into livery and be back in the dining room before anyone has noticed he’s missing. It’ll be a rush but it will have to do.’
‘It’s positively uncouth,’ Mr Prentice says in a choked voice.
‘Well, it’s the best we can do for now,’ Mrs Derbyshire replies. ‘And perhaps tomorrow you can speak to His Lordship about another footman.’
‘I’d rather we had another valet,’ James says, but Mr Prentice gives him a look so severe that he turns away and goes to Williams for his crash course.
‘We can’t go on like this, Mrs Derbyshire,’ Mr Prentice mutters as he and the housekeeper start to walk away.
Polly nudges me and giggles again. ‘I’d best go,’ she says. ‘Or he’ll…’
‘Have your guts for garters,’ I finish.
‘Exactly.’
I watch her follow Mr Prentice to the staircase, as I wait for the dinner gong. Polly and I are like chalk and cheese in many ways, but we always have fun. Polly is one of those people who finds the funny side in everything and I realise that Haverford House will feel empty without her when she leaves to be married.
*
I go upstairs to help dress the girls. Prunella is in a state of excitement at the prospect of finally meeting Thomas Everard.
‘When Papa first mentioned him I didn’t allow myself to believe he would really come,’ she says. ‘It’s not as though anything interesting ever happens in this house, is it?’
I don’t say anything in reply and I certainly don’t remind her that it isn’t that long since her twenty-first birthday party. I continue to curl the front of her hair with the hot tongs, that I’m sure I will never get used to using. Mrs Derbyshire is always having to put cold tea on the little burns on my fingers.
‘Have you seen him yet?’ Lady Prunella goes on. ‘Is he very good-looking?’
‘I’ve only seen the back of his head, my lady,’ I reply. ‘From the library window when he first arrived. It was a very neat head though.’
‘An actor,’ she exclaims loudly, making me jump and almost burn her head. ‘Can you imagine? What will Papa say when I marry an actor?’
She catches my eye in the mirror as she often does and I smile benignly, as I often do. ‘I couldn’t possibly say my lady,’ I reply although even she must know that Mr Everard has not been invited to Haverford because of his acting skills – however brilliant they may be according to the review of Hamlet that Mr Prentice read out to us from The Times. He is here because his father is as rich as Croesus – or at least that was what Mr Prentice told us after reading the review to us, and the butler is not known for outbursts of hyperbole. Even Lady Prunella knows full well that if she were to marry Mr Everard, His Lordship would be delighted that some money was finally coming into the house.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Lady Cecily sighs from the corner of the room. I had dressed her first. She rarely needs much help, and she is waiting now, leaning louchely against the doorframe. ‘Who says he’s here to marry you?’
‘Well, he’s hardly here to marry you, is he?’ Lady Prunella bites back, her eyes narrowing. ‘How is dear Hannah? When will she be visiting again?’
The insult barely registers with Lady Cecily, even though both she and I know what her sister is insinuating. She turns away.
‘I’m going down,’ she says. ‘Don’t be too long. You don’t want to keep Mr Everard waiting.’
After Lady Prunella has left, I tidy the girls’ rooms and stoke the fires. Even though it is the middle of summer the family like to have fires in the evenings. I gather up some mending that needs to be done and go back down to the servants’ hall where James is in a fury over our visiting actor.
‘He didn’t even want anyone to help him dress,’ James is saying. ‘Says he has never had a valet and has no need for one now that he travels about with his acting. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘As you’re told, James,’ Mrs Derbyshire says. ‘You do as you are told and you were told to dress Mr Everard.’
‘Which is what I did do but he just snapped at me and kept pushing me away. It was awful. I’m not doing it again and that’s that.’
‘Don’t let Mr Prentice hear you talking like that,’ Mrs Derbyshire replies. ‘He won’t like it.’
‘And I don’t like dressing people who don’t want to be dressed.’
‘Between you and me,’ the housekeeper goes on. ‘I think Mr Prentice would prefer you in the dining room tomorrow so I wouldn’t worry too much. I’m sure Williams can help Mr Everard if need be.’
James scowls at me as he pushes past me, as though any of this is my fault. I brush it off. I know he gets as frustrated with his work as I do, and I ask Mrs Derbyshire what she needs me to do.
*
Lady Prunella is not as enamoured with Mr Everard after dinner as she was before.
‘He just kept talking about Shakespeare for positively ages,’ she says. ‘It was tremendously dull.’
‘Well, you were the one who wanted to marry an actor,’ Lady Cecily replies. She often comes into her sister’s room after dinner as though she is afraid to be alone. I think when she is alone she feels the sadness of the house a little more than usual.
‘It’s all right for you. You know all these plays and books that he’s talking about, but ordinary people like me and Annie…’ here she catches my eye in the mirror again and I smile again ‘…well, we don’t know what he’s talking about.’
‘Oh come on, Pru, there’s a whole library downstairs you could have learnt from but you chose not to. Annie is better read than you.’
I keep my head down and don’t look up at either of them. Because it’s true: I am better read than Lady Prunella, and it is Lady Cecily who has helped me become that way.
Lord Haverford’s library has opened my eyes to more books than I ever thought possible, as Lady Cecily well knows. I am bowled over by it every time I go in there to dust – there are so many books and so much to learn. It would take several lifetimes to read everything in there. It is Lady Cecily who has helped me decide what to read, what to focus on, so that I am not overwhelmed. She tells me sometimes about the libraries at Cambridge that hold every book ever printed and she introduces me to modernism, which I have loved, even when it has felt very hard to get a grasp of. I particularly enjoyed the Virginia Woolf novel that she recommended: Mrs Dalloway. It took me a while to get into, to understand what was going onI don’t have a Cambridge education after all – but I got there in the end. I was quite proud of myself about that. And it made me realise what women are capable of when they allow themselves, when they break free from what society tells them they need to be.
But my main love, as Lady Cecily knows, the writer whose words I turn back to again and again, is the bard himself. I take after my father in that, even though my mother has no idea where he got his big grey book of the Complete Works from. ‘It must have cost him a fortune,’ she’d told me when I was fifteen and had recently left school. ‘It’s yours now. He would have wanted you to have it.’
Later, when it is finally time for us servants to go to bed, I take the blanket-wrapped parcel from my bottom drawer and carefully remove the book that used to belong to my father. I turn the pages carefully to the first scene of Hamlet.
‘“Who’s there?”’ I whisper to myself, following the words on the page with my finger. ‘“Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.”’
‘Oh no, please,’ Polly moans. ‘Not Shakespeare, we’ve heard enough of that for one night from Mr Everard at dinner.’
I’m rather pleased that she recognises the opening line of Hamlet but I don’t push it. I ask her instead what our house guest is like.
‘Extremely good-looking,’ she says dreamily. ‘Very tall and his American accent is rather lovely. Even Shakespeare didn’t sound too bad with that accent.’
‘Polly,’ I chastise jokingly. ‘You’re supposed to be getting married on Saturday.’
Her face freezes for a moment and she nods slowly. ‘Saturday,’ she repeats.
‘Last-minute nerves?’ I ask.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. She’s smiling but it seems forced. ‘Now get back to your boring Shakespeare.’
‘You’ll miss me when you’re gone,’ I reply.
‘I know,’ she says quietly and I wonder if I hear a hint of regret.