Free Polly's Story by Jennie Walters Page A

good idea who that man might be.

Seven
    A remark lately made to me by a friend of mine, mistress of a small household, often recurs to my mind. It struck me as so exactly expressing what was needed. ‘Ellen’, she said, ‘was at one time rather given to flirtation, but I steered her through it.’ Now that seems to me exactly what we should do, ‘steer them through it’.
    From Our Responsibilities and Difficulties as Mistresses of Young Servants , Lady Baker, 1886
     
    I tried my best to stay awake until Iris came back, but my bed was too warm and snug and me too tired lying in it to keep my eyes open for long. Before I knew what had happened, Mary was calling for us to wake up the next morning. Perhaps it took Iris a little longer than usual to rouse herself; I might have been imagining things, given what I thought I had seen in the night. I watched her intently, but her face gave nothing away. No one would have thought anything was out of the ordinary as she quickly washed, slipped into her print dress and brushed out her thick fair hair before plaiting it to pin up under a cap. Then off she went as usual to bring Mrs Henderson her early-morning cup of tea.
    There was never a second to spare as our day began, but I had to try and find out whether my eyes had been playing tricks on me. Perhaps there was some clue among Iris’s things as to what she might have been up to. I picked up her hairbrush as if to borrow it, and noticed a small damp leaf, caught between the bristles. Not definite proof, perhaps, but enough to make me determined to look for more evidence later on, when I was cleaning the room. When I saw traces of fresh mud on Iris’s outdoor boots under the bed and felt the sodden hem of her coat, hanging behind the door, I knew for sure: she was that girl I had seen out by the lake. Well, that was a shock, although I didn’t know what to do about it. Iris wasn’t interested in my advice - she had made that clear enough. She ought to be more careful, though. What if it had been Mrs Henderson watching her out of the window, rather than me?
    When we heard a few days later that Master Rory was finally going back to his barracks in London, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. At least now I could fall asleep without worrying what Iris might be up to. I hoped that he would be away for a good long time, and that she would have come to her senses by the next time he paid us a visit. Master Edward was staying on at Swallowcliffe little longer, but he spent most of the time reading up in his room and was not much trouble to anyone - apart from a rather inconvenient interest in photography, that is. He had bought a wooden box camera in Oxford and used to wander around the house with it, getting in everyone’s way. We would have to stop what we were doing and stand without moving a muscle for ten or fifteen minutes at a time while he disappeared under a cloth at the back, fiddling about with goodness knows what levers and switches. It got so bad we used to run away and hide if we saw him coming, but poor Iris was a sitting target in the still room and found it less easy to escape. Still, it was a fairly harmless occupation, I suppose; at least he didn’t make much of a mess.
    Two things happened shortly after Master Edward left too which changed my life a great deal for the better. The first was that finally our third housemaid arrived; I made up a pair with her, and Jemima went back to working with Becky. The new maid’s name was Amelia, but Mrs Henderson soon decided that was much too fancy a name for such a position and that she should be known as Jane instead, the same as the girl before. As soon as I saw Amelia/Jane, I thought we should probably get along together perfectly well, and so it turned out. She was a quiet, steady sort of girl who worked hard and only spoke when she had good reason to: a blessed relief after having to cope with all Jemima’s flouncing about. The two of us soon found our own rhythm and