Polly's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

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