by Helen Peters
“Hello,” I whispered. “Hello, little robin.”
The robin hopped off the wall into the garden. I looked at my watch. I had three hours before Mum and Marcus would be home from the airport.
I stood up, put the notebook back in my bag, looped the carrier bags over my wrists and picked up the sack of coal.
“Right,” I said to no one in particular. “Home.”
Back at the flat, I went into action. I started as Polly had taught me, by dusting the surfaces, beginning at the top shelves and working my way down. I cleaned the bathroom until it sparkled, revelling in the luxury of rubber gloves and unlimited running water. Then I hoovered the entire flat, smiling as I thought how Polly would have loved this incredible machine that sucked up dust and dirt without you ever having to work on your hands and knees. I vacuumed up the dust from the long-neglected fireplace and took out all the pine cones that had been sitting in the grate for as long as I could remember. They would make perfect kindling.
It was amazing how different it felt doing housework in my own home, for somebody I loved. I wondered whether Polly had ever had her own home, or whether she had spent her whole life working for other people. We hadn’t been able to get an appointment at the records office yesterday, but Anna had promised to go when she had the chance. It had been quite tricky explaining why I was so interested in researching the life of a random housemaid from two hundred years ago.
“I just read the names of some of the servants in that book you’ve got about the history of the house,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t check. (I actually had looked in the book, but none of the servants were mentioned.) “This girl, Polly Harper, was the same age as me when she worked here, and I thought it would be interesting to know more about her.”
Anna had looked approving. “Well, I’m delighted you’re interested in the history of the place,” she said. “It’s always difficult, though, to find anything out about servants apart from birth, marriage and death dates. They left so little trace of their lives, you see. Before universal education, few of them would have been able to read or write, and even if they could, they didn’t have the time. They would have had hardly any possessions, and those they did have rarely survived.”
“What about the housekeeper’s book?” I asked.
“If the household records have survived,” she said, “there should be an entry stating when Polly began and finished her employment here. But Charlbury’s records were probably lost or destroyed when the house changed ownership, or when it was converted into flats.”
There must have been millions of people like Polly, I thought now, as I cleaned the kitchen sink. Millions of people who spent their entire lives working to make other people’s lives easier, who left no record of their own lives because they had never been taught to write, and who lay in unmarked graves because their families couldn’t afford a private burial.
I laid the fire with paper, coal and pine cones, and lit it, marvelling, after all my struggles with flint and steel, at the ease of striking a match against a box. The fire crackled into life and I left it to settle while I arranged fruit in a bowl, tulips in a vase and cheese on a plate.
My phone – which had miraculously come back from the dead on the journey home – beeped with an email. It was from Anna.
Dear Evie,
I thought you’d like to know that I went to the records office this morning after dropping you at the station and had some success with my research into Polly Harper. Luckily, many of Charlbury’s household records from the nineteenth century have survived and are held in the archive.
Polly arrived at Charlbury in 1812, aged eleven, and worked as a housemaid until 1820. In that year, she married one of the footmen, George Lewis, and they left Charlbury to become housekeeper and butler in a house in Highfield. So Polly did very well for herself.
Do come back and stay at any time, if you’d like to research more of the house’s history. I’d be very happy to help in any way I can.
I hope your journey home went smoothly. Give my love to your mother – and try to be nice to the husband.
Anna
PS Thank you for the chocolates you left in your room – they’re delicious. But did you mean to leave me a pair of washing-up gloves too? Were they supposed to be a hint? I’ll save them for your next visit!
I read the email twice, smiling at the screen. So Polly did achieve her dream. She must have taught herself to read and write using the primer I left under the pillow. And she married George too! As butler and housekeeper, they would have had their own apartment in the house in Highfield. So when I thought about her from now on, I could picture her sitting contentedly in her own room, with a roaring fire and an endless supply of the family’s tea.
Feeling very happy, I started to type a reply.
Dear Anna,
Thank you for your email and thank you so much for finding out about Polly. I’m so pleased she became a housekeeper. Thank you for having me to stay too.
I looked up from the screen, pondering what to write next.
I wondered what had happened to Jacob and Alice and Mary and Betty and William and Nell. I wondered if the records of that house in Highfield where Polly became a housekeeper were also in the archive. Perhaps I could find out more about her life after she left Charlbury.
Maybe one day I could write a history of Charlbury House. It would be way more interesting than that dull old pamphlet in Anna’s flat. I could write about what had happened to Sophia and Robbie after they left. I could write about the staff who actually ran the house, not just the people they worked for. And I could write in great detail about a particular few days in April 1814.
I could illustrate the book as well. Sophia had left some sketches of hers and some of Robbie’s in my box. I could put them in my book, and I could do some of my own too.
An extraordinary thought suddenly hit me for the first time. Charlbury had been my family’s house. I would be writing the history of my own family house. How incredible was that?
I hadn’t told Anna about the box yet. I wanted it to be my secret for a while. But I would show it to her some day. And I would show Mum too. After all, Robbie and Sophia were her ancestors as well.
I would never show anyone my letter from Sophia, though. That would be my secret forever.
I went back to my email.
It would be great to come back and learn more about the history of the house. I’d like to draw it too. Maybe I can come in half term, if that’s OK with you?
Thanks again and hopefully see you soon. Have fun with the skeletons.
Evie
The doorbell rang. I ran down the stairs and unlocked the front door.
“Mum!”
“Evie! Oh, it’s so lovely to see you.”
She almost squeezed me to death in an enormous hug. So she hadn’t completely replaced me with Marcus then.
Once I was able to disentangle myself, I looked up the garden path.
“Where’s Marcus?”
“He’s popped in to work to sort out a couple of things,” she said.
“Oh, right.”
I was almost disappointed not to see him. I’d been quite looking forward to showing off my work.
“I think he was being tactful,” Mum said. “Giving you and me a bit of time together first.” She looked at me anxiously. “So try to be nice to him, Evie.”
“Of course I’ll be nice to him,” I said. “What do you think I am?”
I picked up her suitcase.
“I’ll take it,” she said. “It’s heavy.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I can carry a suitcase, you know. How was Venice?”
“Gorgeous,” said Mum as she followed me up the stairs. “I’ll tell you all about it once I’ve made a cup of tea. Sorry you had to come home to such a mess. I just didn’t have time to clean before we went away, what with all the wedding preparations. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
I opened the door of the flat. Mum sniffed the a
ir.
“Has someone been cleaning?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have.”
Mum looked astounded. “You cleaned the flat?”
“Well, don’t sound so surprised.”
“But … I thought you’d only just got back.”
“I came home a bit earlier. I wanted to get things ready for you. Come and see.”
Mum looked at me in wonder. I led her in to the living room. Her jaw actually dropped.
“A fire! You’ve lit the fire! And candles! And look at those beautiful flowers! And it all looks so clean! Did you really do all this yourself?”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it! It looks absolutely gorgeous. My goodness,” she said, walking over to the mantelpiece, “have you polished the candlesticks?”
“I found some Brasso in the cupboard.”
“I can’t even remember when I last polished those. They were your grandmother’s. They look stunning. And you’ve polished the door handles too! And the window catches.”
She stared at me.
“I can’t believe you’ve done all this. Where did you learn to make a fire?”
I shrugged. “I just learned a bit – being at Charlbury – about how people used to live, you know? With fires and candles and stuff. And it’s made me appreciate things more.”
Mum frowned, as though she couldn’t make sense of this. “You learned that from staying at Anna’s? But it’s all been converted into flats, hasn’t it? I shouldn’t have thought there’s much left now of how the place used to be.”
“Oh,” I said, “you’d be surprised. It’s amazing how much of the past is still there, if you look in the right places.”
Acknowledgements
This book was inspired by the lives of many real people and places, and particularly by the story of the elopement and subsequent imprisonment of Hetty Walwyn, at Hellens Manor in Herefordshire. I am very grateful to the trustees of Hellens Manor for allowing Nosy Crow to take photographs at the house.
Thanks to Joe Friedman, Candy Gourlay, Paolo Romeo and Christina Vinall, for critiquing early drafts and encouraging me to continue. Huge thanks to Cliff McNish, who read an entire draft and sent me such thoughtful and helpful comments. Enormous thanks to Nino Cirone, for generously reading several drafts and guiding me in the right direction.
I am so lucky that my books are published by the fabulous team at Nosy Crow. Thank you so much for everything you do. Thanks especially to my wonderful editor, Kirsty Stansfield, for your invaluable advice, enthusiasm and encouragement.
I am immensely grateful to my lovely children, Dorothea and Freddy, who kindly allowed me to read them several drafts of this book, and gave incredibly helpful (if occasionally painful) feedback.
Lastly, and always, thanks most of all to Oliver, who helped me find the story and who always believed in it.
Also by
Helen Peters
FOR YOUNGER READERS
A Piglet Called Truffle
A Duckling Called Button
A Sheepdog Called Sky
FOR OLDER READERS
The Secret Hen House Theatre
The Farm Beneath the Water
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2017 by Nosy Crow Ltd
The Crow’s Nest, 10a Lant Street
London, SE1 1QR, UK
www.nosycrow.com
ISBN: 978 0 85763 842 7
Nosy Crow and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered
trademarks of Nosy Crow Ltd
Text copyright © Helen Peters, 2017
Cover copyright © Daniela Terrazzini, 2017
The right of Helen Peters to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted.
All rights reserved
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of Nosy Crow Ltd.
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Typeset by Tiger Media
Papers used by Nosy Crow are made from wood grown in
sustainable forests
All of the characters and events appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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