‘But what if he isn’t? You don’t understand!’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘This is all my fault! If Edward dies, it is down to me.’
‘How can that be, Miss?’ I asked, thinking she had taken leave of her senses. ‘You couldn’t make an accident happen.’
‘We were riding along together, the three of us,’ she said. ‘Rory jumped the hedge first and I followed. It was high, but my horse wanted to take it and I let him have his head. Why didn’t I think? I should have known the jump was too much for Edward, and that he would have died rather than admit it. Well, now he might - die, that is. If I’d turned back, this would never have happened.’
‘But you said so yourself: it was Master Rory who went over the hedge first, not you. If anyone has to take the blame, it should be him.’
‘I shouldn’t have followed Rory,’ she whispered. ‘Edward was bound to come after us. I knew those boys had some silly competition over me and I should have put a stop to it well before now.’
‘Master Edward and Master Rory have been rivals from the moment Rory was born,’ I told her, repeating something I’d heard Mrs Henderson say. ‘They are always fighting over something, and perhaps this time it was you. But that makes this accident no more your fault than it was the fault of the fat brown trout that Rory fell in the lake, trying to land him before Edward could.’
She laughed. ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ I said, ‘if you’ll forgive my impertinence. Be careful of Rory Vye, Miss. He will break your heart and not think twice about it.’
She stared at me for a long moment. ‘Whatever makes you say that?’
‘Because I’ve seen the damage he can cause,’ I said. ‘He destroyed somebody who was very dear to me, and I couldn’t bear to let him hurt you too. Follow your head this time, Miss Brookfield.’
There, I had done it now. But if I had not told her what I thought of Master Rory, I should never have forgiven myself.
Six months have passed since Edward’s accident. It’s a warm day in June, and we are gathered in a semi-circle around the front entrance at Swallowcliffe. ‘Lovely day for a wedding,’ somebody mutters for the hundredth time, gazing up at the bright blue sky. We are waiting for the bride to come out and climb into the barouche that will take her to the village church, where her groom and guests are waiting. The carriage has been garlanded with roses and orange blossom, and the four grey horses have their manes plaited and tied with white ribbons. There are flowers in every room of the Hall, because the wedding breakfast will take place here after the service. At first they wanted to hold the ceremony in our little chapel, but it was nowhere near big enough for so many guests. We shall be more than twenty in the house over the next few days, and a noisy lot those Americans are too.
‘Here she is,’ Megan whispers, clutching my arm. ‘Oh, there’s beautiful!’
I hadn’t been able to help Miss Brookfield dress this morning; now she’s almost a grand married lady, a proper maid has been found for her from Paris. ‘She is rather hoity toity,’ Miss Brookfield whispered to me when I brought up her hot water last night, ‘but maybe we shall get used to each other in time. If only you were a few years older, Polly! But Lady Vye said I couldn’t possibly go on having a maid of fifteen.’
‘Sixteen now, Miss,’ I said, as if that made any difference.
‘To think this is the last night I shall go to bed as Kate Brookfield,’ she said, sighing. ‘Well, I hope I’m doing the right thing.’
I can just make out her face through the cloudy veil as she walks past on her father’s arm, looking very solemn and serious. William opens the door of the barouche and up she climbs, the French maid holding the long train of her dress so that it won’t tear and then arranging it carefully around her feet. She waves to us and we all wave back, and then somebody cheers, which Mr Goddard looks a bit cross about at first, but before long everyone is cheering and clapping and he’s joined in just as heartily as the rest. There can’t be a single person here who isn’t delighted Miss Brookfield is marrying our Master Edward, especially after everything he has been through, and what could be wrong with showing it?
It took him a long time to get over that accident. For two weeks we didn’t know which way the dice would fall. Apparently the horse had done a great deal of damage when it rolled on top of him - which stands to reason, I suppose, a great heavy animal like that. And then slowly, he began to get better. There had to be a nurse with him most of the time and the family took turns sitting at his bedside too, Miss Brookfield included. She wouldn’t go back to America until she knew he was on the mend, and somehow the date for her return kept slipping further and further back. At last her mother went home without her, and we had a good idea then how the land lay. She and Master Edward had spent a great deal of time together, and Master Rory had eventually been told to rejoin his regiment so he wasn’t around to complicate matters. I am sure he didn’t want to go and leave Miss Brookfield alone with his brother, but there was nothing much he could do. Serve him right! That’s what I thought. Let him see for once what it’s like to want something and not have it, just like the rest of us. He’s the only one not to look happy this morning, but I can’t find it in my heart to feel any sympathy at the sight of his miserable face. I’m glad to think of him in pain, after all the suffering he has caused others.
William and Thomas climb up beside the coachman and the carriage pulls away. I know William would dearly like to wink at me but of course he can’t in front of all these people. How fine he looks this morning! I don’t know why he should be so fond of me, but I’m very glad he is. We’re better friends than ever and, although we have to be careful about being seen together at the Hall, he is to come and visit me when I am home at Little Rising for my week’s holiday later in the summer. I plan to call in at the Rectory and see how young Ralph is doing. My mother wrote to tell me that the Chadwicks had taken in a foundling baby, and you never saw such a beautiful child. He is the apple of their eye, apparently, and not yet been heard to cry.
Iris would be so proud of her son; I hope somewhere she’s looking down on him and knows he is happy. I’m saving up to have a headstone made for her grave. That is all I can do for my friend now, but I’ll watch over Ralph for the rest of my life. I’ll help him in any way I can, for her sake - and maybe one day I shall shame his wretched father into providing for the boy.
I will never forgive Rory Vye for what he has done.
Swallowcliffe Hall
2
Grace’s Story
Find out what happens when the fortunes of Swallowcliffe Hall and the Vye family are turned upside down by the coming of World War One in 1914. Polly’s daughter Grace is working as a kitchenmaid but, unlike her mother, she doesn’t enjoy life inside the house; she’d much rather be working in the stables with the horses. Cricket teas and shooting-party luncheons will soon become a distant memory, however. Tragedy comes to the Hall as Lord and Lady Vye make their way home from America aboard the Lusitania, and life for everybody changes as trainloads of wounded soldiers also arrive to convalesce. In these heady times, Grace finds herself falling in love – with the wrong person. Can she break through the class system to find happiness, or is the old order still as strong as ever?
Chapter One
This day will be momentous in the history of all time. Last evening Germany sent a curt refusal to the demand of this country that she, like France, should respect the neutrality of Belgium. Thereupon the British Ambassador was handed his passports, and a state of war was formally declared by this country.
From The Times, 5 August 1914
‘Oh, Gracie, you are a sight,’ my mother said, picking leaves out of my hair. ‘I hope none of the family saw you like this.’
We’re almost the same height now, so her brown eyes were looking straight into mine. You can tell we’re mother and daughter, I suppose, although my hair’s a little fairer than hers, but it has to be said that light brown hair and dark brown eyes are about the only
two things we have in common.
‘Now sit down while I put the kettle on,’ she said, ‘and tell me all the news from the Hall. Are you getting on any better in the kitchen?’
I tried to ignore that question. ‘Two footmen and one of the garden lads have volunteered for the army already. Alf told Florrie all about it.’
Florrie’s first kitchenmaid above me at Swallowcliffe and Alf’s her young man - he works in the gardens too. Florrie thought it wouldn’t be long before he joined up, although he had an elderly mother who wanted to keep him wrapped up in cotton wool and we knew she wouldn’t let him go in a hurry.
‘You don’t say.’ A shadow passed across my mother’s face and she shook her head a little, as if to clear it. Then she pulled out a chair opposite me. ‘Now, who was that I saw coming back from the railway station in His Lordship’s Rolls-Royce? Noisy great thing, it is! And the way that French chauffeur or whatever they call him sounds the horn, you’d think Judgement Day had come.’
My parents live in the gate lodge at Swallowcliffe Hall. I moved out as soon as I started working in the big house and now I share a room up there with Florrie and Dora, the scullerymaid. Ma used to be a housemaid at Swallowcliffe, but once she married my father (who was a footman at the time), of course she had to give that up. She loves the place as much as ever, though, and opening the gates lets her keep an eye on all the comings and goings. Whenever I call in at home on my afternoons off, I get a regular grilling about what the Vye family are up to.
‘They’re having a big luncheon out on the terrace,’ I told her. ‘It must have been the Duke and Duchess of Clarebourne you saw in the Rolls - they’ve come down from London specially. And old Lady Vye’s there, of course.’ (She’s Lord Vye’s widowed mother, and quite a battle-axe; I call her the Dragon Lady to myself. The way she can look at a person sometimes, it’s a wonder flames don’t come shooting out of her mouth.)
‘Oh, lovely,’ Ma sighed. ‘I bet the table looks a picture. Now, what did Mrs Jeakes give them to eat?’
‘Cold beef and chicken, veal-and-ham pies, and a whole poached salmon. Almond cheesecake and plum tart to follow.’
I had an idea what might be coming next. Sure enough, my mother pounced. ‘What did you make? Have you moved on to pastry yet? Surely you can’t still be on vegetables and garnishes?’
‘I tried my hand at mayonnaise this morning,’ I offered, hoping this would satisfy her. (Of course the wretched thing had curdled, but Ma didn’t need to know that.)
The look came over her face that I’d come to dread: half disappointment, half worry. ‘You ought to be moving on, Grace, getting your foot on the ladder,’ she said for the twentieth time. ‘Everyone knows Alf’s only waiting for a place as head gardener and a house along with it before he asks Florrie to marry him. There’s a real chance for you to become first kitchenmaid if you work at it.’
But how could I get excited about that? Most of the time all I wanted was to tear off my apron and run out of the kitchen as fast as my legs could carry me. Sometimes when I was standing over the stove in my thick stockings and heavy apron, the dress underneath plastered against my body like a hot poultice, it felt as though I was suffocating. There wasn’t even a window at head height to give us a breath of air; they’re all set up high in the wall so we couldn’t waste our time staring out. You can imagine what that was like - as if the whole room was one big oven and Mrs Jeakes, Florrie and I were being roasted inside it. I kept thinking some giant was going to reach down through the window and pluck me out when I was done.
There was no point trying to explain, though. I knew exactly what Ma would say. ‘Count yourself lucky! In my day, the second kitchenmaid had to be up at half past five every morning to light the range, and woe betide her if it wouldn’t draw. You’ve got it easy with that gas stove, not to mention hot water at the flick of a tap. The number of times I had to traipse up and down stairs, filling and emptying those blessed hip baths!’
The trouble is, no matter how much she might grumble about the old days, she still thinks working at Swallowcliffe Hall is the be-all and end-all of everything. And I’m not sure that it is, for me. So I tried to change the subject. ‘What’s going to happen, Ma? What will they do at the Hall if all the lads enlist?’
It wasn’t only the young men at Swallowcliffe who’d been on my mind. Ever since we’d heard that war had been declared with Germany, I’d been worrying about my older brother, Tom. As luck would have it, he’d just turned nineteen so he wouldn’t even have to lie to the recruiting officers about his age. He’d followed in my father’s footsteps (Da being coachman at the Hall, running the stables and driving the carriages) and was working as a groom in Suffolk for the Ildersley family. There’s four years between the two of us, but I’m closer to him than either of my sisters even though he’s a boy. Perhaps it’s because I’m so much of a tomboy myself, as Ma keeps pointing out.
I couldn’t bring myself to say Tom’s name, but surely she must have been thinking about him too. Why were we chatting about motor-cars and luncheon parties as though everything was the same as usual?
‘All the lads won’t enlist,’ my mother declared over the shriek of the kettle. ‘We’ll teach the Kaiser a lesson and the whole thing will have blown over by Christmas, you’ll see. Oh, bother it!’ She had managed to splash boiling water over her hand and would have dropped the teapot if I hadn’t been there to rescue it.
‘Here, I should be doing this,’ I said, sitting her back down in the chair and wishing I could have bitten off my tongue. Just because someone doesn’t mention a thing straight out, doesn’t mean it’s not on her mind.
We chatted about this and that while we drank our tea; safe, everyday gossip that had nothing to do with the war or my prospects in the kitchen. And then we both caught the clip-clop of horses’ hooves outside - quite a few of them, from the sound of it - so I went to the front window to see whether the gates needed opening.
‘Ma? Come and look at this!’
It was such an unexpected sight that I couldn’t trust my own eyes. Together we watched as a line of horses came walking up from Stonemartin village, one after another, not saddled or bridled but tied by their halters to a long rope which kept them together. Some I recognised: a pair of huge Shires with feathery fetlocks who pulled the hay carts at harvest time, two bays from the dairy who collected butter and milk from the farms, and my favourite, the butcher’s black mare following on behind them. I’d christened her Raven when I was little (though I once heard Mr Ryman call her Bessie) and used to bring her apples when Tom and I had been scrumping. She’d come trotting over to the fence to meet me, and delicately twitch the apple from my hand with her soft whiskery lips like a genteel old lady.
An army man, dressed in khaki, slapped her on the rump and shouted something to make her get along. What could be happening to all these horses? Where were they going? Not to the Hall, that was all we knew; they were being driven straight past our gates. I hurried outside to find out, my mother close behind.
‘They’re being shipped across the Channel,’ the soldier told us. ‘Off to serve their King and country - not that they’ve any choice in the matter.’
‘But how will we manage without them?’ I protested. ‘You can’t just take them away!’
‘Oh yes, we can, young lady. The government says so and we’ve paid their owners fair and square. What do you think our boys will do without horses to bring them supplies and drag the guns about?’
I knew Mr Ryman thought the world of his fine mare; he’d brush her coat till it shone like black satin and always got out of the cart to lead her up the steep hill on the other side of Stonemartin. He wouldn’t willingly have let her go for a hundred pounds, especially not if there was a chance she’d be hurt. ‘Good luck, Raven. Keep safe,’ I said, stroking her warm, smooth neck and wondering if I would ever see her again.
There was nothing more we could do. Ma and I had to stand there and watch that long line of horses disappea
r down the road: all of them patient, steady creatures who were known and loved in the village. A gang of children had come running along at the end of the procession and several of the little ones were crying. There were tears in my eyes too. It didn’t seem right, sending animals across the sea to a war which men had started.
‘Let us through, would you? We’re expected,’ called a loud voice. We turned around to see two more soldiers, these ones riding horses of their own and looking like officers, waiting at the gates which my mother - careful as ever - had closed behind her.
‘Oh my heavens, they’re going up to the Hall too. Of course!’ she gasped, a hand flying up to her mouth. ‘I wonder if your father knows about this? He never said a word.’
‘We have to warn him!’ I didn’t know which way to turn, everything was so sudden and unexpected. It hadn’t occurred to me to think how I could reach the stables before two men on horseback; nor, more to the point, what was to be done once I got there.
Ma still had her wits about her. ‘Take Tom’s bicycle from the shed. I’ll give them a drink and keep them here as long as I can. Hurry, Grace!’
I hitched up my skirts and set off hell for leather down the drive, my hair whipping out behind me and my head in a whirl. Those soldiers couldn’t take the Swallowcliffe horses too, could they? It would break my father’s heart.
‘There’s nothing to be done, Grace. We have to let these men do their job.’
Father was busy sweeping the yard; a chore for Bill the stable boy, by rights, though he didn’t seem to be around.
And what about your job? Are you just going to stand there and wave goodbye to that too?’
Sweep, sweep, sweep, my father went - like some machine. What was the matter with him? Didn’t he realise what was happening? But then he stopped and looked at me for a second, and I saw the pain in his eyes. ‘How can it be different for us up here than it is for everyone in the village? We can’t go on driving carriages about in front of people who’ve lost their working animals. They’ve done their duty and now we have to do ours.’ He went back to his broom.
Polly's Story Page 14