The next afternoon, Eleanor paused at the top of the garden as she arrived at the Mowbray’s annual fête. She was pleased with her dress, the ruched bodice in the light greyish green that suited her better than any other colour. The slim skirt was done in a darker striped cambric. Even her fashionable aunt approved: the perfect afternoon dress, exactly what was wanted. Yet Eleanor had paused not to show it off (as Agnes Moreland was whispering to Margaret Darcy) but to take a good look around.
Under a pale blue sky, the usual marquees dotted the lawn, serving the usual tea and cakes. Down the hill, the games were being played where they’d always been played. The thwack of a distant cricket bat, the applause. Everywhere she saw the faces she’d always known. No one in Middleford would miss the Mowbray’s fête nor, she suspected, particularly enjoy it. They were too conscious of being on their best behaviour, the wives worried about what their husbands might say, the husbands wanting a beer.
But here was the difference this year: khaki. The dressmaker’s son stood outside the nearest marquee worrying his neck under the scratchy woollen collar of his Red Cross uniform. Bob Flodden was an asthmatic refused for military service, but his mother had told Eleanor he was going out as an ambulance driver. A gaggle of four other young men showed off the uniform of the British Expeditionary Force, three farmers’ sons and the baker’s boy, all of them looking so thoroughly impressed with themselves that they almost managed to look unimpressed by the baronet’s park. Lean poplars above, lean boys below. Walking shadows, Eleanor thought, and shivered.
Practical-minded Middleford was surprising itself by sending its sons off to war, overtaken by a patriotic need to thrash the Kaiser before he crossed the Channel. The fête was timed to celebrate the Mowbray marriages, especially the heir’s marriage, but also to let Sir Waldo beam approval on the local war effort. Doing errands in town beforehand—her new dress, a stunner of a hat—Eleanor had heard mothers talk as if they were sending their sons off on short-term loan, like books going out from the lending library. Mrs. Flodden, pinning a sleeve: “Our Bob’s not a shirker. He’ll do his bit, even with the asthma. Have some fun with the parley-vous and be home in time for Christmas pudding.”
Watching Mrs. Flodden bobbing around her in the mirror, Eleanor had decided against playing Cassandra and repeating what Robert had written. Mrs. Flodden had to know she was repeating a superstition anyway, like saluting a magpie to ward off sorrow.
“Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How’s your lady wife today?”
“The boys’ll be home by Christmas.”
Not much difference and Mrs. Flodden knew it, a tiny shrewd brave woman, supporting five children on her meagre earnings, the ones her husband didn’t drink.
Eleanor was about to step into the fête when someone spoke behind her.
“Look at you. You’ve cut your hair.”
Eleanor turned to find Margaret Darcy, who brushed a surprising kiss on her cheek.
“That’s the only way you’d notice, from behind,” Eleanor said. “The effect is rather spoiled in front by one’s hat. I hope you’re well. Not too over-burdened by the preparations.”
Margaret simpered, there was no other word. But Stansfield must have been after her as well. She was obviously making an effort.
“I hope you know how delighted we all are. I can’t remember not knowing Stansfield. He’s always been such an inevitable part of my life, like the Mowbrays’ great oak. They must have introduced you. It dates to the time of Elizabeth.”
“I hardly think Stansie’s a tree,” Margaret said, her voice going as thin as her smile.
“You’ve cut your hair?” Agnes Moreland asked, joining them. “Your beautiful hair, Eleanor. It’s going to take forever to grow it out. When surely it’s only a fleeting fashion. In France.”
Mademoiselle had cut it that morning à la garçonne, approving for once of Eleanor’s fashion choice, which she usually found too British. The only problem was her stunning new hat, which had been made to sit on top of a large coil of hair. When she’d tried it on afterwards, it had flopped down into her eyes as if she were a child playing dress-up. Eleanor had to borrow one from Mrs. Crosby and spend half the morning transferring the red silk poppy trim.
“My aunt launched one of her bon mots,” she said. “‘The only reason one pays attention to fashion is to stay ahead of it.’”
“Your aunt or Oscar Wilde?” Agnes replied. Margaret tried to hide it but she liked the dig, and gave a significant eyebrow raise to Agnes.
“It’s as good as one of Mr. Wilde’s, isn’t it?” Eleanor replied blandly. It was obvious Margaret and Agnes were going to be friends and that she needn’t bother. I tried, Stansie, she said silently, and after Agnes sweetly savaged her dress—“Is that meant to be a military colour?”—Eleanor excused herself to circulate.
Mrs. Browne, resplendent in a new Red Cross uniform, wanted her back in the first aid class. Some of the girls were signing on after the course as Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, helping with the injured lads sent to Middleford’s small hospital. “Finding a role,” she said pointedly before leaving. Eleanor stood wondering whether she ought to go back when there was a sudden tug on her bodice. Mrs. Flodden was behind her, straightening a seam. Eleanor had no idea why people kept doing that, as if she were a public concern, like an orphan (she was an orphan) or perhaps a clogged pump.
“Doesn’t Bob look handsome in his uniform?” Eleanor asked over her shoulder.
“Doesn’t his mother think so?” Mrs. Flodden replied, giving a final tug and going for cake. Afterward, Eleanor saw her aunt in animated conversation with a manufacturer—a recently widowed manufacturer—and was wondering whether to join them when she saw Lady Anne bearing down on her. Despite Elizabeth Mortlake’s promise, Lady Anne still hadn’t entirely forgiven her for Kate’s marriage. She often felt relegated to the fate of the Rev. Mr. Warfield, still a source of disappointment five children after failing to marry one of her daughters.
Lady Anne arrived already talking. “I was happy to see you with Margaret. I do so hope it continues.” Squinting hard: “I would like that.”
“Stansfield asked me to be friends,” Eleanor replied.
“Hmmm.” Lady Anne craned her neck until she spotted Margaret, who was strolling with Agnes, deep in a good gossip. Probably about her, Eleanor realized.
“Agnes Moreland,” Lady Anne said, with surprising venom. “It often happened at Girton. The least popular girl oozing up to the latest arrival and attaching herself like a leech. Dreadful creatures, leeches. I don’t know what the Morelands were thinking, not drowning the child at birth.”
Eleanor couldn’t help smiling. “I didn’t know you went to Girton. I wonder why I haven’t heard that before.”
“Well, they had to do something with me,” Lady Anne said, holding out her arms and turning a circle to show herself off.
Eleanor wasn’t sure what to say. She’d never had a chummy conversation with Lady Anne. It seemed an oxymoron.
“Were you at Cambridge the same time as my father?” she asked.
“With your uncle. Your father came up later. More to the point, Sir Waldo was at King’s College. Which put paid to any thought of education.” Lady Anne looked triumphant. Turning back to Margaret and Agnes, she frowned more thoughtfully.
“She’s a bitter girl, Agnes Moreland. I don’t want Margaret falling under the influence. She’s a little too proud already. Hard to take without Stansfield calming her down.”
Entirely thrown, Eleanor could only say, “Of course the boys will be home by Christmas.”
“You can’t believe that. Robert Denholm knows what he’s about, and must have said. I always told your aunt, ‘Send her after the younger brother, not the elder. More sense and far less sensibility, as our friend Miss Austen would say.’”
Lady Anne paused to nod slowly, growing pleased with herself. “I said that even before we knew the Denholms own precisely one stone of that drafty old castle, and that one likely to fall off. Oh! Those places! Impossible to heat! A hundred years from now Ackley Castle will be another ruin. You watch. We’ll go there for picnics.”
In a century? It struck Eleanor as oddly possible. “That would be nice.”
“All of us,” Lady Anne insisted. “Stansfield will come back.”
“Of course he shall.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. But he’s resourceful and he’s lucky. He’ll make it through.”
With a final nod, Lady Anne sailed off to greet other guests, her arm raised in a wave.
“Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How’s your lady wife today?”
“They’ll be home by Christmas.”
“Stansfield is lucky.”
Superstition as balm on anticipated wounds. Eleanor looked around without seeing anyone else she particularly cared to speak with. Elizabeth and Charles Mortlake were coming for the wedding but didn’t seem to have arrived yet, and the engaged couples were busy talking with Agnes Moreland. Yet Eleanor hadn’t been here long enough to leave, and in any case, her aunt was now surrounded by so many admiring gentlemen it would be impossible to pry her away. Instead, Eleanor thought of the oak. When she and Kate had grown bored at other fêtes, they used to climb the old oak, Queen Elizabeth’s tree. They had a favourite place along one low branch, which looked for all the world like an extended arm with a slightly crooked elbow.
Walking over, Eleanor leaned against the ancient bark, which smelled faintly like marshland: earth and damp and mushrooms. Rumour said Elizabeth had touched it with her redhead’s long pale fingers. Of course, rumour had her touching every old oak in England and half the noblemen, which couldn’t have left her much time to defeat the Spanish Armada.
Smiling, Eleanor wondered what it had been like at the rude court of Good Queen Bess, the hooped skirts and gentlemen’s capes and Shakespeare performing his own plays in front of the groundlings. She could half hear their coarse whoops coming from the games down the hill, where grown men jeered and howled.
And with a strange dizzy jolt, Eleanor was back there, walking into a dark room, a tavern crouched under wide oak beams. It smelled of smoke and hops and charred meat, dust motes tumbling through a nearby circle of candlelight. She heard the word glimpse and didn’t know what it meant. She was just a girl fetching her father. Looking around the crowded tables, she grew worried when she couldn’t see him amid the roaring drunken jollity, and turned when Kit Marley raised his tankard to recite . . .
An acorn hit her shoulder. Another memory. Not that Christopher Marlowe was a memory, but a dream that must have grown out of one of his plays, even though she hadn’t been asleep. The acorn was a memory, Eleanor told herself firmly. She’d pegged down acorns from the old oak throughout her childhood, sometimes gathering them out of season from Mowbray Wood with a backup store of pebbles and conkers. When another acorn flicked onto her hat, she began to smile. A dream of acorns. Ghostly acorns.
Giggles from above, far from ghostly. Coming back to herself, Eleanor looked up to see Mary Ann and Cassandra Mowbray sitting exactly where she and Kate used to sit, legs dangling from the long crooked branch. Cassandra waved at her sweetly and Eleanor felt knocked through with nostalgia.
Tossing down her hat, she climbed the burls the way her feet remembered, grabbing onto the bough and swinging up inelegantly to join the little girls.
“You can’t come here,” Mary Ann told her. “You’re an adult.”
“How awful for me,” Eleanor said. “Am I an adult? Surely not.”
She nudged Mary Ann further along, and Cassandra clambered over her to sit close to the trunk, hooking one arm securely around it, a thumb going to her mouth. Such a sweet vague little girl, her skin soft as whipped egg whites. Not for the first time, Eleanor wondered if Lady Anne had run out of names by the time she got to her seventh daughter.
“Well, if you’re going to be here,” Mary Ann said, “you can tell us who that gentleman is. We think it’s Edward Denholm, but we weren’t expecting him.”
Eleanor didn’t think it could be Edward, and was surprised to see him walking back from the cricket match down the hill.
“You’re right, it’s Mr. Denholm,” Eleanor replied. “I thought he was in London trying to get a commission. Maybe he’s come to ask Stansfield for help.”
“He had a row with Elizabeth this morning.”
“Oh, has Elizabeth arrived?”
“But they made up. Now he likes her. There! She’s just come down from the nursery.”
When Mary Ann pointed, Eleanor saw Elizabeth in a lovely blue dress and a hat trimmed with full-blown living white roses. She was on her own, marvellously erect, surveying the party. A movement at the corner of her eye, and Eleanor saw Edward Denholm see her, too. He lit up the way he’d once lit up for her and motored smartly across the lawn.
As Edward got close, Elizabeth heard him call and smiled happily. Their greeting was flirtatious, no other word, and Eleanor didn’t like it. Not because of Edward Denholm; he could do what he wanted. But Elizabeth Mortlake was married with two children. Eleanor didn’t care to see her listening with such amusement as Edward launched into a long and animated story. It seemed to involve the cricket match. He mimed bowling, and Elizabeth put one hand flat to her breast as she listened, burbling with laughter.
“She oughtn’t be so very friendly, ought she?” asked Mary Ann. Eleanor didn’t know what to say, and Mary Ann persisted. “Ought she?”
“Elizabeth is so beautiful, men can’t help behaving like that,” Eleanor said, supposing that Elizabeth couldn’t help it, either. It must be such a temptation, great beauty. Not using it was like Leonardo da Vinci refusing to paint.
“Do you think she’s beautiful? We do, but she’s our sister.”
“I’m quite sure there are goddesses less beautiful than Elizabeth.”
A giggle from Cassandra. Glancing over, Eleanor saw that her thumb was out of her mouth and she was pegging down another acorn. A small pause, then a pebble. A new target must have arrived under the tree. Craning over, Eleanor was embarrassed to see Charles Mortlake. He couldn’t have heard what they’d said about Elizabeth. Surely not.
“Cassandra! Stop!” she whispered.
But Charles Mortlake looked up, and when he saw them—saw Eleanor sitting with the children, her legs dangling—he looked every bit as amused as Elizabeth. He jumped to grab the branch where they sat and monkeyed up the trunk to join them, not caring for his fine wool trousers. Once settled, he took Cassandra in his lap.
“Hullo there. Excellent view,” he said, and looked directly at Elizabeth and Edward Denholm. Eleanor tried to think how to distract him and couldn’t.
“Lizzy’s a goddess,” Cassandra said.
“Yes, she is,” Charles replied. “And amusing herself with a mortal, from the looks of it.”
Most men would be jealous, but Eleanor didn’t see a tick of it in Charles Mortlake. Smiling, nonchalant, he was the definition of indulgence, every bit the grandson of a duke, his sophistication, she realized, far beyond her. Eleanor remembered the ball in London, how Elizabeth and Charles had used Edward to restore her reputation, and her aunt’s reputation, and more to the point, the Mowbrays’ reputations.
How, she realized, they had used her.
“Poor Eleanor, I’ve shocked you,” Charles said. “Should you prefer me to make a scene? When Elizabeth will grow bored with Mr. Denholm in five minutes, and send him off to help Margaret Darcy find her lost apostrophe.”
That sounded right. She hoped it was. “I suppose I’m too earnest,” Eleanor said. “I’ve been accused of it.”
“Earnest. By whom?”
“The Warfields,” Eleanor said. “Observing my attempts at self-education. Doing mathematics and reading Mr. James’s novels, where he takes aim at girls far more worldly than me.”
Charles paused and smiled. “You always surprise me, Miss Nora. Tell me how Robert Denholm is.”
“No doubt in danger. While we’re at this absurd party. Up a tree.”
“I thought it was rather a nice party.”
“Miss Darcy lost her apostrophe,” Cassandra said. “Poor Miss Darcy.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Charles said. “She can get another if she wants.”
“Can she?” Cassandra asked, immensely impressed. “What’s an apostrophe?”
Charles took out his handkerchief rolled it into a tube that he hooked at the end, and it was exactly an apostrophe. Then he tossed it lightly into the air and it hung there, and hung, and hung suspended, Cassandra clapping her hands and Mary Ann oohing and aahing, staying there so long it looked uncanny. Eleanor hated magic tricks. She wanted to know how they did it and could never figure it out.
“For your next trick, you can stop the war,” she said.
Charles met her eye. His were an extraordinarily deep brown and even more amused. She realized he didn’t want the war to end, not yet, not with men wanting to prove themselves, filthy with it, Charles first among them as he waited to enter the war cabinet. She heard Robert saying, “Old men sending young men off to war,” and while Charles Mortlake wasn’t old, in this moment he looked ancient.
We’re really in for it, she thought. This is what they want, what they’ve always wanted. Her aunt’s voice arising from deep in her memory. “There will always be another war.”