Today is the day! Polly is getting married. His Lordship said that she could marry from the house because she has nowhere else, no family of her own. She has never said it but I wonder if that is why she is in such a rush to leave service, to get married – so she can have the family that she had always wanted, much like Ned. Maybe I’m being fanciful though. Polly is far more pragmatic than me and doesn’t have the romantic notions about life that I get from always reading books. She probably saw an opportunity when she first met Mr Mather and grabbed it with both hands.
Good for her.
Polly was abandoned as a baby on the steps of a church in Harrogate. She’s never known who her parents were and was brought up in a convent until she was old enough to go into service. She’ll tell you how much she hated the nuns, how much their education and religion was wasted on her, but the truth is Polly is smart as a tack and much cleverer than me in many ways. She knows exactly what she wants and today she gets to have it all. Her experiences have made her so much stronger and more resilient than me. She isn’t tied to her mother’s apron strings like I am. She doesn’t hide from the world in the pages of a book.
Mrs Derbyshire has gone all out to give Polly a good send-off. We had a little party downstairs, late last night after His Lordship and the girls had turned in, just some tea and sherry and sandwiches. We’re all exhausted this morning of course but it was worth it to see Polly so happy and excited and to see Mr Prentice wipe a tear from his eye as he gave a toast to Polly’s seven years of service. In public he has always disapproved of Polly and her general desperation to get out of service, something Mr Prentice has dedicated his life to, but privately I think he’s very fond of her. We all are. We’ll miss her terribly.
Especially me. Who will I read my Shakespeare to now? I don’t think Katy will be quite so tolerant when she moves into my room this evening.
Mrs Derbyshire and Cook have worked together late into the night all week to make Polly the most beautiful wedding dress.
‘I’m not having any maid of mine going out on their wedding morning looking like anything less than a princess,’ the housekeeper said. Cook has just complained a lot about eye strain and headaches while smiling indulgently at Polly. Everyone is happy to see Polly fall on her feet like this.
When Polly steps out of Mrs Derbyshire’s parlour, where she and Cook have been dressing the bride-to-be, we all gasp. She looks so beautiful – almost unrecognisable from the housemaid whose hair was always falling out of her cap and who often had a smut of soot on her nose.
‘I’ve had to use every spare hairpin in the house to keep your hair up,’ Mrs Derbyshire says, fussing with a stray strand. ‘So try not to move your head too much.’
‘And keep away from any soot or dirt,’ I tell her with a wink. She grins back at me.
‘In an hour’s time I shall be a solicitor’s wife,’ she says, trying and failing to put on a posh voice. ‘I need to learn quick smart how to keep clean and tidy.’
His Lordship has let us all have the morning off to go to the church with Polly. Just the morning though. We have to be back to serve luncheon.
‘Look here, Prentice,’ Katy had overheard His Lordship saying. ‘It’s one thing letting the staff go to this wedding, but it’s quite another to expect us to help ourselves to food in one of those buffets.’
‘Indeed, my lord,’ Prentice had replied. Prentice hates the idea of the buffet as much as His Lordship and I wonder if either of them will ever move with the times. We are well into the 1930s now after all.
Not that it really matters as none of the staff have been invited to the reception, which is to take place at Mrs Mather’s house – or Polly’s new mother-in-law, I should say. It seems so grown up to have a mother-in-law, but we are all grown-ups now. Lady Prunella told me that Mrs Mather did invite His Lordship to the reception, an invitation that he was swift to turn down. We will all return to the house as soon as the marriage service is over, and in time to prepare luncheon. We’ve done as much as we can this morning and Ned is coming in to help with the fires. I’m in the scullery when he arrives and he puts his head around the corner of the door and smiles his perfect smile.
‘Skip the wedding and spend the morning with me,’ he says. ‘We can play house while everyone’s gone.’
‘I can’t skip Polly’s wedding,’ I reply, trying to ignore the implication about ‘playing house’ – the first hint since the kitchen gardens that he may still think about a future for us. I wonder at him, at what he is thinking. We still spend a fair bit of time together when we’re both free – we take walks around the estate and talk about our work and, occasionally, I let him kiss me. But sometimes, like today he seems overly familiar, as though our future together is already decided. Have I led him on? Have I let him think I am more interested in a future together than I really am?
I should say something, spend less time with him, not lead him to think things that aren’t true, but whenever I consider broaching the subject I feel so sorry for him and how lonely he must be. He steals one of those kisses now before he disappears to deal with the fires. One day Mr Prentice will catch us and Mr Prentice is in such a state of perpetual anxiety about how much things have changed since the war that I cannot imagine how he’ll react.
Things have changed since the war and for the best. There is so much more opportunity for girls like me if only we are brave enough to take it. Only the other day I heard that a girl from the village, a girl who had been at my school, has moved to York to train as a nurse. Some days I despair at myself and wonder if I will be a lady’s maid forever, and I worry about what will become of me when Cecily and Prunella marry – which they will of course eventually – even Lady Cecily. I cannot stay near my mother for the rest of my life. There is a future out there for me somewhere. I know it, but I don’t know how to begin to find it.
But today isn’t a day for sadness. Today is a day for celebration.
We walk into the village together, Polly leading the way, holding on to Mr Prentice’s arm. He will be giving her away in the absence of a father and when she asked him I saw him turn around and wipe another tear. Mr Prentice has shown more emotion in the last few weeks than I’ve seen from him since I began my duties at Haverford.
We are all wearing our finest clothes – although they are not very fine in the grand scheme of things and have needed a lot of help from Mrs Derbyshire’s sewing needles – and there is a sense of excitement and possibility in the air. We are all in high spirits, mostly about our morning off, I think, rather than the wedding itself, and it is a beautiful morning as we walk through the trees and past the lake to the village. In the winter, when I walk back from my mother’s this way, it can be a little dark and creepy, but on a day like this when the skies are cloudless and the sun is warm, when there is joy and birdsong in the air, it feels like the most beautiful place on earth.
But how would I know? I’ve never even left Cranmere. I don’t have anything to compare it to. Sometimes it feels as though I will be here forever. Perhaps that is the real reason I never say anything to Ned; he might be my only hope.
The ceremony is very moving and all of us shed a tear – even if Mr Prentice, James and Andrews pretend they have something in their eyes (‘It’s a very dusty church, Annie,’ Andrews says with a smile) and afterwards we throw rice at the happy couple as they head towards the open-top car that will take them to the reception about five hundred yards away. Mr Browne, the church sexton, glares at us all from the churchyard. It is he who will have to clean up the rice after all. But you have to throw rice at a wedding. It’s bad luck not to.
Polly catches my arm as she passes.
‘I’ll come visit,’ she says, her smile not quite as sure as it was this morning. ‘I promise.’
I squeeze her hand, knowing that this is a temporary homesickness and that I’ll probably never see her again. My stomach drops at the thought. We haven’t been the best of friends, we have very little in common, but she has been a certainty in my life. A certainty that wouldn’t be there anymore.
*
We arrive back at Haverford just in time to change and go about our duties. It is a cold luncheon, but not a buffet of course, and Mr Prentice asks me to help with service.
I haven’t served at mealtimes very often recently. I think the butler is trying to pretend we still have enough staff to keep the house in the traditional manner, especially while Mr Everard is here, but James is run off his feet and Mr Prentice has a permanent worry line etched between his eyebrows. With Polly gone and Katy still so green, I’m not sure how we’re going to manage. But I suppose we will. We always do. There is talk of agency staff when Mr Everard’s parents arrive.
Today James and Mr Prentice need an extra pair of hands as the farm steward and some local landowners are joining His Lordship for lunch. I suppose that’s why he didn’t want a buffet and why he gives Mr Prentice a hard stare when he sees that it’s a cold lunch.
‘Apologies, gentlemen,’ he says, as though his two daughters weren’t there. ‘The staff were at a wedding or some such this morning.’
Nobody except him seems to mind, although everyone eats in a rather uncomfortable silence after that, speaking only about land-related matters and asking Mr Everard how things are done in America.
It is Mr Everard who tries to jolly things up a little.
‘I was thinking,’ he says placing his cutlery down on his plate in the American way that I’ve now learnt means he has finished. ‘We should put on a play.’
‘A play?’ Lady Cecily drawls. ‘How quaint. But are you so bored of English country life already, Mr Everard?’
‘I do wish you’d call me Thomas,’ he replies. ‘And no I’m not bored of your country ways yet, Lady Cecily.’ He smiles slowly at her and she holds his gaze. ‘I just thought it might be fun.’
His Lordship makes a grunting sound and signals to Mr Prentice to start clearing the table.
Mr Everard has been at Haverford for three weeks now and I expect he is desperately bored. According to Lady Prunella he grew up in New York City. His father is known as one of America’s most successful financiers who even managed to not lose too much money in the crash, and for the last few years he’s been acting in plays in New York and, more recently, London. He is also, now I have seen more than just the back of his head, extremely handsome – just as everyone keeps saying.
‘Well, I think it would be fun,’ Prunella says now eagerly, smiling widely at Mr Everard. She always seems eager whenever she talks to him. Lady Cecily tells her that she is too eager.
‘Well, it’s not you who he’ll marry is it?’ Prunella snaps back whenever Cecily brings it up. ‘Someone’s got to appear eager to marry him after all.’ In private Prunella has told me that she would marry him tomorrow if she could, so I wonder if Cecily is right, if she is too eager. And then I remember Polly’s face as she took my arm after the wedding and I wonder if she has been too eager as well, if she has married her solicitor in haste to get away from Haverford, just as Lady Prunella seems to want to do with Mr Everard. Perhaps we women are not that different after all. We all piss into a chamber pot, as Andrews so eloquently puts it.
‘What play were you thinking?’ Lady Cecily asks, as we begin to clear the table under Mr Prentice’s orders.
‘Twelfth Night is my favourite,’ Lady Prunella says. ‘All that nonsense with the yellow stockings!’
‘Then Twelfth Night it will be,’ Mr Everard replies. As I take his plate, he catches my eye and smiles. It’s the sort of smile that would give a girl goosebumps if I was the sort of girl who got goosebumps. Polly would be bursting with laughter if she were here. ‘Perhaps,’ he says, without taking his eyes off me, ‘the staff would like to be involved.’ I know I should move on and clear Lady Cecily’s plate but I feel as though I’m frozen by Mr Everard’s gaze. The way Ned looks at me pales into insignificance compared to the way Thomas Everard is looking at me now. My mouth feels dry and I try to swallow.
I hear Mr Prentice clear his throat and I spring back to life and back to plate clearing as His Lordship stands up from the table.
‘Are we done here?’ he says. ‘Done with this nonsense?’ He signals to the estate manager and the other gentlemen to go with him and Mr Prentice holds the door, following after them, no doubt to serve their coffee in the library. After all these years His Lordship still surprises me with his moods. Mr Prentice says he saw more in the war than I’ll ever understand, but even I can understand that you could never be the same person again if you came home from the hell of war to find your wife and son dead.
‘I can invite Hannah to help make up numbers,’ Lady Cecily says as I turn away from the table. ‘She was in the amateur dramatics group up at Cambridge.’
‘Oh, must you,’ Lady Prunella complains. ‘She is such a bore.’
James nudges me gently and nods towards the table where I notice not only has Mr Everard not followed the other gentlemen to the library, but he is still looking at me.
‘We’d definitely need some staff on board with the play if we want to make it work,’ he says. ‘What do you say, James, are you up for it?’
James nods. ‘Yes, sir,’ he says.
‘And you, miss?’ He doesn’t know my name and I feel sudden disappointment. But why should he know? I realise he is waiting for an answer but my mouth feels dry and my cheeks are on fire.
‘Of course Annie will be in the play won’t you, Annie?’ Lady Cecily says, smiling at me. ‘My maid is quite the fan of Shakespeare you know, Mr Everard.’
‘Is that right?’ he says as James nudges me and the dirty plates out of the room.
‘Annie knows more about Twelfth Night than any of us, I should think,’ I hear Lady Cecily say as I leave.
*
‘What was that all about in the dining room?’ James teases once we are back in the kitchen.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I reply, unable to look up at him.
‘Mr Everard’s play,’ he says, ‘the way he looked at you and all that about you loving Shakespeare.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I say. I feel as though Lady Cecily has betrayed me with her comment. My love of Shakespeare, of books in general, had felt like a secret between us. Obviously everyone knows I love to read but this makes it seem like something more. James certainly wasn’t supposed to know I loved Shakespeare, as this will just give him yet another thing to tease me about.
Cook comes to my rescue, which is something of a surprise. ‘You know how much Annie loves to read, James,’ she says. ‘It’s no surprise she likes the greatest writer of all time.’
James looks sceptical, glancing between me and Cook as though neither of us should know who Shakespeare is at all. ‘That doesn’t explain the way Mr Everard was looking at you,’ he says, as though he’s never seen anyone leer at a servant girl before.
‘I was just clearing his plate,’ I reply turning away from him, trying not to remember the way Mr Everard’s gaze had made me feel.
I hear Mr Prentice clear his throat behind me. He has glided into the kitchen on noiseless feet as usual. ‘Go about your duties, James,’ he says.
When James has gone and Cook has turned back to the stove, Mr Prentice places his hand on my shoulder and leans towards me. ‘Be careful with Mr Everard,’ he says, a fatherly warning in his eye.