November. That bleak month. Eleanor was finally and completely alone, the Mowbrays departure for Gloucester having ended even Lady Anne’s hectoring visits. Eleanor felt in danger of rattling apart, and decided to set up a program of study to fill her days. She’d done it before and had soon trailed off, but this time she was determined to make a go of it.
Eleanor had just finished reading The Portrait of a Lady, in which Mr. Henry James created an ambitious heroine in Isabel Archer, introducing her by saying that she would be an easy target of criticism, then spending several hundred pages criticizing her. She could imagine Mr. James being even more withering about the ambitions of an obscure girl in Yorkshire, a casually educated young lady who hoped for a purpose in life, for self-improvement, or at least for consolation. Others would think her absurd—the properly educated, certainly Middleford, everyone aside from Catherine—but she couldn’t think of anything else to do, especially with the weather so bad.
In her empty sitting room, Eleanor blocked in an hour each day to translate from the Greek. Her father had drilled her beyond the rudiments and she enjoyed translation in the same way she enjoyed piecing together a puzzle, finding the right fit for a Greek word in English. βíος, a man’s bios meant his trade or his living, she remembered, so a soldier’s bios was war. Death was his living. But the word also meant life itself, “life” and “work” being interchangeable in classical Greek.
Yet they also weren’t, and Eleanor would need to decide which puzzle piece of meaning best fit a given sentence. She thought The Odyssey would do for a start, with Mr. Butler’s translation at hand as a crib. Robert Denholm must have read The Odyssey. And if she was going to spend half her waking hours brooding on war, it would do her good to spend time on the story of a soldier finally coming home.
Another hour she’d dedicate to her botanical drawings, not worrying about the west wind, about vibration or the difficult matter of art. A white orchid had just bloomed in the greenhouse, its petals the colour of risen cream, and if she made a good job of it, she might frame it as a wedding present for Catherine. She’d read The Times at breakfast and turn to novels in the evening; no change there, but daydreams would no longer be tolerated. Otherwise: sewing, arranging flowers for Mr. Warfield’s church (war, war; it was everywhere), and either walking or riding in the afternoon when the weather permitted.
The one remaining subject was mathematics, which Robert Denholm had thought she might give another bash. Eleanor didn’t know where to start, but that was solved when her aunt was called into Kent, by what (or whom) she didn’t say. Eleanor usually stayed with the Mowbrays, but this time Mr. and Mrs. Warfield took her into her father’s old parsonage. Mr. Warfield’s parsonage, as it had been for six years. Eleanor hadn’t slept there since her father had died, but girded herself by remembering that Mr. Warfield had read maths at Oxford.
As her boxes disappeared around the back, a new girl led Eleanor in the front door of the parsonage. The Warfields always had a new girl, the household having become disorganized since their arrival, or at least since they’d begun to populate it with children, four at last count. As she waited in her dear old parlour, Eleanor saw that whatever financial arrangements her aunt had made for her stay were badly needed. In her father’s time, the parlour had been proud of itself. Now the carpet was soiled and the sofas stood skew-whiff, one of them missing a leg and propped up on a pile of old books.
“Here you are,” Mrs. Warfield cried, walking in rapidly. She was a brisk, round-faced, good-humoured lady with food stains on her bodice and hair that frizzed in the heat.
“It’s very kind of you to have me,” Eleanor said, shaking Mrs. Warfield’s sticky hand. (Four and a half children, she saw.)
“Nonsense. We’re delighted,” the lady replied, taking a chair. “I only hope it isn’t too difficult. I’m putting you in what must have been your old bedroom.”
“It might be a little affecting, but only at first,” Eleanor replied, sitting down gingerly. Lady Anne’s insistence that she wasn’t telling the truth about Catherine had left Eleanor intent on speaking nothing but.
“If you’d prefer another room,” Mrs. Warfield began dubiously.
Eleanor knew there wasn’t one. “I can miss my father anywhere. And the worst of it doesn’t come back as often anymore.”
Mrs. Warfield gave a sympathetic wince. “I’m sure it feels just as horrid when it does.”
Like being kicked in the head by a horse. There was a family story about Eleanor being kicked by a horse when she was young. She didn’t remember it, but after her father died, she’d recognized the sudden overwhelming nausea, the dizziness, the sense of floating free of time as something she’d experienced before. These days it could come at her from several directions, as she mourned not only her father but also the loss of Catherine. Not to mention the silence from Robert Denholm, who must have received her letter by now, if he was living, and hadn’t replied.
If he was living. βíος, she thought again. Death and life so close for a soldier. Lately she only felt partway tethered to life herself.
“However,” she said, “I admit, I come with a project to occupy myself. I wonder if I can ask Mr. Warfield’s advice. My father taught me some mathematics, and I thought this might be a good time to go on with it, if Mr. Warfield would be kind enough to recommend some primers.”
“Earnest girl,” she would hear one of the Warfields whisper to the other that night. It said much about their marriage that Eleanor wasn’t sure who had spoken. But Mr. Warfield not only agreed to lend her some books, he offered lessons, a promise he fulfilled meticulously whenever too many Middleford ladies called in a row and he needed an excuse to retire.
Greek. Drawing. Taking the older parsonage children outside for a much-needed ramble. Sewing. A restless sleep. Then one day the mail came late, while they were at luncheon. Mr. Warfield raised his eyebrows at something on the tray, making Eleanor’s heart turn over at the prospect of a letter, probably from her aunt, possibly from Catherine, but just maybe from the captain. My aunt allows the correspondence, she would say. She’d been so thoroughly truthful that surely they’d accept her assurances and not keep the letter back for an agonizing couple of days until Mrs. Crosby had written her approval.
Mr. Warfield passed her the envelope without comment. Eleanor was surprised to find it thick and creamy, and sent from not far away. She was at a loss until she recognized the writing.
“Elizabeth Mortlake?”
Eleanor couldn’t imagine why Lizzy had written, and opened the letter terrified that it contained bad news.
Relief as she read. Her aunt’s hand would have gone out as soon as she’d finished, and Eleanor would have had no reason to hold it back, although she might have. But the Warfields were so absentmindedly concentrating on their ham and pickle, she told them, “Elizabeth writes from Gloucester. She and Mr. Mortlake are staying with a colleague of his in Parliament, a manufacturer named Mr. Darcy. His estate is close to Murdo Crawley’s, where the Mowbrays have gone. Her mother has told Elizabeth she blames me for Catherine’s elopement. Lady Anne believes I knew of their plan and didn’t warn her.”
Meeting her minister’s eyes, she said, “I suspected she admired him but knew nothing of their plans, and now Elizabeth is kind enough to take any blame on herself. She says she’s reminded her mother that she was the one to first employ Mr. Arden in London.
“‘Although I’m not sure this is a matter for blame,’ she writes, ‘not because I’m avoiding it, but because this might prove a good marriage for Catherine. We’re not all the same person, and mark me, Eleanor, we need to take our own paths.’”
Eleanor stopped, feeling self-conscious, not having suspected before that Elizabeth might be referring to the captain. The Warfields didn’t notice, too busy nodding.
“With seven daughters,” said Mrs. Warfield, who had three, “Lady Anne can’t expect all of them to marry as handsomely as Mrs. Mortlake. At least one probably won’t marry at all. And although we have to pray not, there’s a good chance of a disaster. A misstep, better said.”
“Not Arden,” Mr. Warfield said.
“Not David Arden,” Mrs. Warfield agreed.
“He may be a radical,” Mr. Warfield said matter-of-factly, which would have made Sir Waldo choke on his biscuit. “A nonconformist, of course, being Welsh. But he’s hardworking and intelligent, his mind a compendium of odd facts, the way one often finds among self-educated men. I can’t speak to his artistic abilities, but Mrs. Warfield admires his painting.”
“He got himself to France,” she said. “And trained there.”
“I didn’t realize you knew him more than casually,” Eleanor said, conscious of not having read them the end of Elizabeth’s letter.
“He liked playing with the children,” Mrs. Warfield said.
Eleanor hesitated. “Perhaps having some of his own in Wales.”
“We wondered about that,” was all Mr. Warfield replied.
Whether he thought Arden was a widower, a bigamist, or the father of a tumble of illegitimate children, he was too discrete to say. Eleanor folded her letter and put it back in its creamy envelope, the ending hers alone.
In any case, Elizabeth had written, developments here in Gloucester are such that you needn’t worry about my mother anymore. You’ll be forgiven for something you didn’t do, while Alicia will be lauded for something she isn’t responsible for, her looks coming from our father.
So Alicia was going to marry one of the Mr. Darcies, perhaps the heir. Eleanor was happy for her and hoped her Mr. Darcy was indeed a fairy-tale prince. Putting the letter aside, she finished her luncheon, and after Mr. Warfield had taken up his shabby umbrella and left for a parish council meeting, she excused herself to tackle mathematics upstairs.
Trigonometry. On some days Eleanor understood it, or at least glimpsed the possibility of understanding it, but today the equations looked like the markings on the backs of her father’s collection of poisonous spiders. Throwing her maths aside, she took Mr. James’s The Turn of the Screw to her fire, where she failed to understand that, either. Did ghosts really appear in the story or was the heroine only imagining them, going half mad from being too much alone?
A blast of half-frozen rain hit the window, watery ice trickling down the panes. Eleanor could easily imagine ghosts and gods coming in from the moors on a day like this so they could haunt a warm corner. Not that she believed in ghosts, and she’d found her one attempt at table turning to be silly. Last year, the Moreland girls had hosted an evening with a medium in billowing scarves who painted lines around her eyes like the Roman lady in her aunt’s mosaic. The medium had told each of the girls what they wanted to hear, either romance or money or a flawless complexion. (Poor spotty Lilian Browne.) Eleanor had found it funny, and the medium had picked up on that, turning to her and saying, “The spirits don’t care to speak with you.”
Yet this morning Eleanor was bored and restless, and the weather made it impossible to go outside. On impulse, she sat down at the dressing table. Pushing aside her brushes, she lay her hands flat on the mahogany as the medium had done, laughing silently to herself and planning to ask about Robert Denholm. The candle flame wavered slightly as the wind gasped through the drafty old window, the curtains fluttering, her eyes in the mirror impressively dark and mystical.
Eleanor tried to clear her mind the way the medium had advised. But focusing inside only made her conscious of her everyday thoughts, fragments of “time better spent mending” and “Mr. James is sly,” which she heard at a slight remove. Most of it was embarrassingly banal. Yet as she listened to her internal chatter, Eleanor also recognized it as a haphazardly woven blanket thrown over her horror of being alone; of being abandoned again as she’d been abandoned by her mother and father.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” came Elizabeth’s amused voice. “Catherine’s letter will arrive tomorrow.”
Eleanor’s lids flew open, and she glimpsed a disturbance at the corner of her eye like the flounce of a lady’s skirt as she left. Swivelling, she saw nothing. Not surprisingly, since nothing was there. Yet she’d heard Elizabeth as clearly as if she’d been in the room. Eleanor had no idea what was happening and shivered violently. Then the wind moaned through the loose pane and she leapt up in terror, running out of the room. Turning one way and the other in the hallway, she had no idea where to go. Finally she took a deep breath and decided on the nursery—yes, the nursery—where there was a baby who probably needed soothing.
When Catherine’s letter arrived the next morning, Eleanor decided she’d fallen asleep at the table and dreamed, that was all. The letter was a coincidence, for the obvious reason that it couldn’t be anything else. There was no such thing as ghosts, and in any case, Elizabeth was alive and well in Gloucester, staying with a man named Darcy who wasn’t the least bit a prince, but an industrialist so economical he’d dropped the apostrophe from his name.
With any luck, his son would make Alicia happy.
My darling, Catherine wrote, here we are in Cape Town, where I find myself warm and married, the two conditions inextricable. This is only a short note to assure you of my health, and of my husband’s health. I will write more presently. At the moment, we’re busy inhabiting a tiny cottage that is our first home, with roses growing up it! The conventional fighting part of the war seems largely to have ended, although the Boer commandos continue to execute raids on British forces, particularly on troops in the blockhouses from which the Army controls the countryside. Still there is a great deal for Arden to do in the Cape Colony to fulfill his new responsibilities with The Illustrated London News. Not far from Cape Town are some of those dreadful modern inventions called concentration camps where Boer women and children are housed in tents and starved and Africans face the same. The plan is part of the Scorched Earth policy in which the Army attempts to starve out the Boer commandos by burning their farms and salting their wells as well as placing their wives and children in camps. My husband is at one camp today and it’s my thought to join him presently. I am far from a professional artist and have neither the intention nor the possibility of placing my attempts in newspapers, but I can draw the children. And indeed, seeing my husband’s preliminary work, my original plan to earn my way by offering myself to do portraits of ladies in Cape Town seems fatuous. In Britain we have lived without war on our green and pleasant land these many hundreds of years but now that I see it close, I see differently, as my husband predicted. You must always remember your promise not to be angry with me! For anything. Even though I imagine you now live in the shadow of a newly risen volcano at Mowbray Close, known as my mother, who no doubt erupts regularly, and I do apologize for that. Speaking of apologies I haven’t seen Captain D. or heard of him although I will keep my eyes open. Indeed my eyes are wide open.
Write to me soon.
Love, Kate (as my husband calls me)
P.S. Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker have returned to India, leaving a name for jollity behind and a number of trifling debts, which Mr. W. in his expansiveness forgot to pay.
A letter from Robert Denholm arrived two days later.
“My dear Miss Crosby,” he wrote, and Eleanor cherished the my, tracing it with her finger until she grew afraid of tearing the paper.
My dear Miss Crosby,
Thank you for answering my letter. You divined my meaning and I’m glad you weren’t displeased. I was afraid you might be. However, I should tell you that we’re not facing battle in the conventional sense. With the arrival of two hundred thousand of our troops, the Boer is firmly outnumbered and no longer able to engage in traditional pitched battle, nor lay the sieges he did at Ladysmith and Mafeking. Instead he has reconstituted himself as a force of light infantry, assuming the new name of Kommando, a word from the Afrikaans. He rides in small units, well armed and well mounted, striking rapidly across land he knows intimately to destroy railway lines and our defensive blockhouses. His immediate motive seems to be not victory but revenge for our victories. Ultimately, I believe, he hopes to tire us into leaving Africa, but we will not.
I write from the countryside: for it is against the Kommando I am fighting. He is unnerving, arriving from everywhere and nowhere. In a sense, we are fighting modernity; fighting speed and craft. This is not the front because there is no front. Instead, my particular tariff takes me far afield with my scouts, trustworthy Africans who hate the Boer for taking their land. I should say they hate the Boer marginally more than they hate us, knowing that Britain has its eye on African land as well, particularly in the Witwatersrand, with its gold.
The time we spoke in Kent, you asked why I had chosen a military life. I told you that it permitted me a role in protecting Britain. Protecting you, if I may say so. That remains true. But on the ground, one can see that the Boer is fighting to protect his land and the African his, while Britain would like all of it, thank you, and things get muddy. Forgive me; the nights are dark and the hyenas chatter outside our ring of fire.
I like to think of your aunt’s garden in Kent, with its five-toed Roman chickens, and the mosaic that came to light after fifteen hundred years. The domestic goddess, with her look of amusement, reminds me of you. I do indeed hope that you find time to think of me, as loveable as you are, while in my isolation I think of you.
Yours most warmly, Robert Denholm.
It was written in copperplate, looking as if it had been copied from a draft. But scrawled across the bottom was, “Please write. I’d like it awfully. Robin.”
Eleanor walked out with her letter into a grey cold day as beautiful as summer. We all take our own paths, Elizabeth Mortlake had said, and Eleanor could see hers rising from the moors like a Roman road building itself ahead of her. She ran along it, the invisible cobbles leading her toward the crest of the hill where she and Robin Denholm had first talked. He had been weeping for friends killed in a battle disastrously executed by its commanding officer. Which one? It might have been the Battle of Magersfontein, remembered in the soldier’s verse: “Dearly we paid for the blunder/A drawing-room General’s mistake.”
She was bad with names, and there were so many battles. But Eleanor had looked in Robin’s grey eyes and known she was going to marry him, even though she hadn’t known him at all. She still didn’t, but he was a good man; she held on to that certainty. She would learn more about Robert now that they were writing, hopefully none of it unpleasant, since she could hardly stop writing to a lonely officer. She also couldn’t imagine him being anything less than honourable.
Reaching their bench, she found the wind whistling shrilly across the rocky hilltop. Looking into someone’s eyes in weather like this would have been a trick. Her own were tearing up, and she realized that the hard north wind was going to tumble her over unless she got out of there.
Kicking off, Eleanor ran downhill, elated despite the coming storm and the ever-present shadow of war. (Or maybe just slightly because of them.) She curved down the dale, the grass still green and springy. Finally she stopped out of breath under a crooked oak, tracing with a finger the runnels in its bark. In summer she wouldn’t stop here in dire weather, but it was too cold for lightning and she paused to look at the road, calculating whether she could make it back to the parsonage before it poured.
In the distance, a carriage came around the bend. A horseless carriage. She wondered who else had got one, then realized Stansfield Mowbray was at the wheel. Stansfield had brought Middleford’s first motor carriage back from Paris. Eleanor had stumbled on it parked in the drive at Mowbray Close, its two pairs of huge spoked wheels suspending a metal box between them. Stansfield had been shyly proud of himself in a beige dustcoat like the one gardeners wore, a pair of driving goggles pushed onto his forehead. It was the first time in his life he’d surprised her.
Now he was back from Gloucester and driving three others she could just barely make out. Friends must have returned with the Mowbrays, and Stansfield couldn’t wait to take them for a spin. A girl who was probably Alicia sat in the rear-facing seat, but Eleanor didn’t recognize the others. One was a gentleman sitting too close to Alicia, perhaps Mr. Darcy. Hoping for a lift, Eleanor ran downhill to intercept them, wishing as she squeezed through a drystone stile—her hair windblown and skirt tearing on a sharp white rock—that she could meet Mr. Darcy under more elegant circumstances. Not that it made any difference, certainly not anymore.
The motor carriage slowed as it approached, Stansfield pulling back on the brake. Now that she was close, Eleanor saw that the gentleman sitting close to Alicia wasn’t a possible Mr. Darcy but a very definite Murdo Crawley, and that both of them looked remarkably pleased with themselves. In shock, she turned to Stansfield in the driver’s seat. Beside him was a proud and prissy-looking young lady with curly black hair piled under an enormously fashionable hat. Both she and Stansfield appeared every bit as pleased with themselves as Alicia and Murdo.
“Miss Crosby!” Stansfield cried. “Out for an old-fashioned walk?”
“Walks are ripping,” Alicia called. “You know Mr. Crawley. He’s a great walker!”
From his seat, Stansfield said, “We’re here with Miss Darcy,” and the curly headed lady gave her a supercilious bow. Eleanor smiled through the introductions but disliked Margaret Darcy on sight. Judging from her sharp brown eyes, Miss Darcy returned the favour.
“You’ll want a lift,” Stansfield called, and Miss Darcy smiled up at him proudly.
It wasn’t pride. Closer to adoration, as if Stansfield was a hero just back from conquering a recalcitrant country. Maybe Margaret was the recalcitrant country. Lady Anne must be ecstatic; there would be money. Yet as Eleanor scrambled on board, she saw Miss Darcy use the moment to put a small hand in Stansfield’s great one, and a look of true affection passed between them.
How complicated the world became when your oldest friends attached themselves to people you didn’t like and did it very happily. Not that Eleanor disliked David Arden. She mistrusted him.
Once they were settled, Stansfield sounded his klaxon at no one in particular, and they motored off, running hard before the coming storm. Two new couples. Three, counting Eleanor and the letter in her pocket. Sitting beside them, she wondered what Mr. Crawley saw in the seventeen-year-old Alicia Mowbray. But she also knew.