Free Polly's Story by Jennie Walters

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, and 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