I could have taken her by the shoulders and given her a good shake! ‘Better for you, perhaps, but maybe not for her,’ I said, Iris not far from my mind. ‘Have you ever asked yourself where she would go? And how do you think she’ll feel, having to leave because she couldn’t manage to teach you anything? Lady Vye won’t give her a good character reference and who knows where she could end up. Miss Habershon might be full of learning and getting on for a lady, but she is still a servant like the rest of us. She and I are on the same side in that respect.’
I could see I’d got to Miss Harriet now. ‘In that case I had better choose another hiding place,’ she said stiffly. ‘Goodbye, Polly. I am sorry we have to disagree.’ And she turned on her heel and marched off down the corridor.
I felt dreadful, watching her go, but it was too late to take back what I had said. My words hung like a black cloud between us, and I might never had a chance to clear the air. I shudder to think how things could have turned out.
Piecing together the afternoon’s events from what I saw with my own eyes and what I learned afterwards, this is the gist of what happened. Miss Harriet did not manage to avoid her lessons for very long; wherever she went, Miss Habershon must have found her, because they ended up in the schoolroom together half an hour or so later. Then after a little while, Mr Goddard brought a message for Miss Habershon from Lord Vye, asking for her help right away in translating a letter he had received from a German gentleman who bred gundogs (His Lordship being interested in buying a pair). Not wanting to lose Harriet again, Miss Habershon took the schoolroom key and locked the door from the outside so that she could not run off - not a good idea, looking back, but I suppose it seemed sensible at the time.
This is where I came into the picture, having been sent up to the schoolroom by Mrs Henderson to ask Miss Habershon whether she would be dining with the family or the children that night. I was just rattling the door and wondering why on earth it should be locked when Miss Habershon came hurrying back from Lord Vye’s study with the key. She opened it and we went into the room together - to find it empty. There was no sign of Harriet anywhere, but the sash window had been pushed up, and a breeze ruffled the pages of an open book on her desk.
‘Dear Lord!’ Miss Habershon gasped, turning pale. ‘Whatever has she done?’
We both ran over to the window and looked out, dreading what we might see. Harriet was about four or five feet below us, clinging precariously to the branches of an old wisteria which snaked its way up the side of the house. The climber was not strong enough to bear her weight and we could see it slowly tearing away from the wall, inch by inch. I could not move or think for the horror of it.
‘Try to hold on!’ Miss Habershon cried, hanging out of the window and reaching down her arm to see if she could touch Harriet. ‘Oh, this is hopeless. Polly, you may be able to reach her. I’ll run downstairs.’ And she was off like the wind.
I threw myself over the windowsill. ‘Look up, Miss!’ I said, leaning down as far as I possibly could without falling myself. ‘Try to grasp my hand.’ I was a good deal taller than Miss Habershon, and my fingers were not so very far above Harriet’s head: if she stretched out her arm, she could probably touch them.
‘I daren’t move or I shall fall!’ Harriet called shakily back. There was the most dreadful rending sound even as she spoke, and a whole section of the climber she was holding came away from the wall. We both screamed and she swayed sickeningly in front of my eyes, before managing to grab hold of a nearer branch to steady herself.
‘Polly, I’m so frightened,’ she whispered, and who could blame her. ‘Help me!’
It was terrible, being so close and yet not able to do anything. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, trying to sound confident. ‘Try to take my hand when you’re ready.’
‘If I let go, I shall fall,’ she said again, risking a quick look upwards.
‘Just try,’ I urged her. ‘One step at a time.’
Very slowly, Harriet took one hand away from the branch. Then suddenly her foot slipped. She panicked and lost her balance, so that for a terrible second she was hanging from the wall by one arm alone, her legs thrashing about in the air. My stomach turned over, but somehow she managed to find a new foothold among the creaking, cracking wisteria branches. Leaves and twigs fell in a shower on to the grass below; it looked a very long way down to me.
‘I can’t do it,’ she sobbed, laying her cheek against the wall.
‘Yes, you can,’ I said. ‘Don’t give up!’
Closing her eyes and flattening herself against the wall, she slowly took away her right hand and reached up again to find mine. The tips of our fingers touched, while the climber splintered and snapped around her. ‘Nearly,’ I said, stretching down as far as I possibly could. ‘Just a little further now!’
We were in desperate trouble. Even if Harriet managed to grasp both my hands with her own, I was probably not strong enough to pull her back up through the window. How long could I hold on to her before she lost her grip and fell? Maybe long enough for help to arrive, that was our only hope. Her hand grazed mine again - and then suddenly, there was no hope left. With a wrenching groan, the main trunk of the creeper finally tore away from the wall. Harriet made one last desperate lunge for my hand but already she was falling back into thin air, screaming and falling away from my outstretched arms, falling down and down to the ground.
Things would have been a lot worse if Miss Habershon hadn’t been standing there below, that’s for sure. It was impossible for her to catch Harriet from that height, but at least she managed to position herself underneath so that she could break her fall, and they both tumbled over together with a sickening thud. I could not tell from above whether either of them was dead or alive. By the time I had run downstairs and outside, however, Harriet was already sitting up.
‘Oh, Miss! Are you all right?’ I said, sinking to my knees beside her. ‘Thank heavens! What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?’
Harriet would not answer: she was staring at Miss Habershon, who lay there on the grass without moving. ‘I’ve killed her!’ she whispered, her face as white as chalk. ‘She is dead and it’s all my fault.’
Thankfully it turned out that Miss Habershon was not dead, only knocked unconscious for a few seconds. She was the more badly injured of the two, however. It turned out she probably had a couple of cracked ribs and certainly a broken wrist, while Miss Harriet escaped with bruises and a sprained ankle. Still, the whole thing could have been a great deal worse, and the three of us knew it. Nobody else ever found out what really happened; we decided to say that the bicycle had run away with Harriet, and Miss Habershon had been hurt trying to stop her. That was the story, and we kept to it. If anyone thought it strange that I should have wheeled Miss Habershon’s bicycle back to its home in the stables before fetching help, they did not say so - nor stop to wonder why there should have been not so much as a scratch on the contraption. Harriet told her stepmother the accident was her fault if it was anybody’s, so Miss Habershon was thanked very kindly for her efforts and allowed as much time off to recover as she needed.
Miss Harriet and I had made up with each other quickly enough after our little falling out: I said sorry to her and she said sorry to me, and that only left one person out of the triangle. ‘All right, I’ll apologize to Miss Habershon,’ Harriet said, ‘but will you come with me, Polly? I don’t want to go on my own.’
‘She won’t eat you,’ I said, though I was happy enough to hold her hand - and curious to see how things would turn out, too.
Miss Habershon was sitting by the window with her wrist in plaster. There was no need for Harriet to have worried about seeing her: as soon as we came in, she started right off saying how unwise she was to have locked the schoolroom door, she should never have done such a foolish thing and she hoped that Harriet wouldn’t hold it against her. Harriet could hardly get a word in edgeways! But then she said that Miss Habershon hadn’t been so wrong, in her opinion, because she would have run away if she’d had the chance, and locking the door wasn’t half so foolish as climbing out of the window. We had a bit of a laugh about that, and the long and the short of it was, Miss Habershon and Miss Harriet ended up quite friendly. Harriet said she would try harder at her lessons, and Miss Habershon said she would try to find something more interesting to teach her; she’d think up some way of squaring it with Lady Vye. So the accident brought some good with it, alongside the bad.
Well, now Miss Harriet was going to have to manage her life without me for a little while, because shortly after the house party was over I would be going home for my week’s summer holiday. I had been putting money aside for the train fare and was hoping for a tip from Miss Brookfield to make up the shortfall; she was very generous, which is not something you find as a matter of course with wealthy people. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to get away. Swallowcliffe seemed a different place without Iris, and life was particularly flat and dull after our guests and the Vyes went back to London at the end of July to catch the last of the season. Then they would be going straight up to Scotland in the middle of August for the grouse shooting (no one worth their salt would be left in the city by then). This time William went with them, since Thomas had taken a tumble down the cellar steps in the dark and got a black eye for his trouble.
I was sorry to see William go - and Miss Brookfield too, as we had become quite attached to each other. She didn’t seem to think that being a servant, I was not worth talking to, and had told me all sorts of interesting things about America: how vast it was, with mile upon mile of wild open country in the West, and what terrible things the settlers had to put up with as they tried to carve out a life for themselves. (That wouldn’t have been my cup of tea!) But it was probably not goodbye for ever, since she had been invited back to Swallowcliffe in October for the first of the shooting parties.
‘And Harriet has made me promise to go hunting with her,’ she said. ‘So I shall be turning up again, like the proverbial bad penny.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it, Miss,’ I said, quite truthfully. Rory was right: the house seemed to come alive when Miss Brookfield was in it. She was far too good for him, but Edward would be lucky to have her as a wife. If he had any sense, he wouldn’t let her slip away.
So all in all, my week’s holiday was particularly welcome. Yet as I sat on the train, I could not help remembering when Iris and I had taken that same journey together back in the spring, and how happy we had been in each other’s company. Where was she now, and how was she feeling? I hoped to goodness her parents had been prepared to take her back home: those Baptists can be a strict and unforgiving lot. The thought that she might be ill and miserable somewhere, all alone, was unbearable to me.
Ten
As with the Commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.
From
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management,
1861
‘Don’t you go worrying yourself to death about that Iris,’ my mother said as we waited for the train that would take me back to Edenvale at the end of my holiday. ‘She’s made her bed and now she must lie on it. There’s nothing you can do for the poor girl - her troubles are her own and she has to bear them herself. Whatever’s the point in making yourself miserable too?’
‘I should just like to know she’s safe and well,’ I said, looking down the railway track and hoping the train wouldn’t take long to arrive. It had been lovely at home but now I wanted to be back at Swallowcliffe, with a bed to myself and room to breathe - which probably sounds very ungrateful and selfish, but that’s the truth of it. A week had been long enough to remind me how stifling life could be in the village, with everyone so involved in each other’s business and eager to pass judgement. Even my mother had disappointed me a little, I have to confess. I hadn’t been sure whether to tell her about Iris, but she asked after my friend most particularly and so out the story had to come.
‘Well, she’s not the first to be led astray and I dare say she won’t be the last,’ my mother said at the end of it. ‘I’d have thought she’d have had more sense, mind. Just be sure you never make the same mistake, Polly, my girl! Can you imagine how people round here would talk? I should never get over the shame of it.’
Her reaction seemed heartless to me, and I was sad she couldn’t find it in herself to be more charitable. Had she forgotten how easily Iris had become a part of our family on Mothering Sunday? How sweet she had been with Martha and Tom, and how patiently she had listened to Lizzie? People were remarkably quick to wash their hands of her, in my opinion, and it hurt me that my mother should be the same. We talked no more about the matter that evening, keeping instead to safer subjects such as the new vicar, Reverend Chadwick, who was causing quite a stir in the village.
‘You should hear his sermons!’ my mother said, chuckling. ‘He does get himself worked up about all sorts of odd things. But he sat up two nights in a row with poor Mrs Hammer when her time came, and he’d give you the shirt off his back. He let Tom Ford have his very own shoes when the scoundrel said he had none to come to church in and that was why he stayed at home on Sundays. Goodness knows what Mrs Chadwick had to say about that! They’ve been married ten years, I gather, but they haven’t been blessed with children which is a shame - Mrs Chadwick takes the Sunday School class and she’s right motherly.’