Eleanor could hear the big guns booming across the Channel. Not precisely hear them, not during the day. That was a phenomenon of night, of changes in the atmosphere, and last evening as they’d had a drink in the library, they’d heard a deep cannonade from the battlefield. Now, getting ready for breakfast, she felt a thud in her eardrums that wasn’t quite a sound but a change in the air pressure. The next moment, there was a quiver coming up her elbow as she leaned on the dressing table, as if a small earthquake was rattling the chalk of Sussex.
They were staying at South Farm, one of the Mortlakes’ smaller residences, a short rail trip down from London near the Channel. Elizabeth had given her a room facing east, lit by the white rays of the morning sun. They’d gathered in Sussex for one of Lizzy’s schemes: forcing the Mowbrays to acknowledge Kate’s marriage. More to the point, forcing Lady Anne. In accepting the invitation, Eleanor hadn’t expected to find herself reminded so audibly of the carnage on the western front.
Not that she needed a reminder, not with the names of the dead and injured filling column after column in the newspapers. The war wasn’t going well, although no one said that. Or said it without being howled down. Robert had made it uninjured through the latest round of fighting in the Ypres salient but thousands had not. Many of his men had not. Yet now he was getting leave, and after spending most of the week with his mother in Kent, he would meet her in London, where they would see each other for the first time since the war began. Eleanor would go up to London after Elizabeth’s attempt at a reunion.
Lizzy’s scheme had raised its head after David Arden was offered a gallery show in London. Poor David had been injured in February after only four months in uniform, losing his right arm below the elbow and collecting shrapnel in his left leg. Blighties, they called wounds like that, which sent a soldier home not hopelessly damaged. Blighties were highly sought-after, Robert wrote. Seldom achieved. Fortunately David was left-handed, although the phantom pain in the missing arm was bad and he could still scarcely bend his left knee. He was on medical leave while being treated in London, and he’d been allowed to live with Kate in their Bloomsbury flat instead of taking up a hospital bed. Eventually he would go before a board that would determine his future, although going back on active duty was clearly not an option. Meanwhile he’d been painting with his one arm, rapidly securing the show, and Elizabeth wanted the family to reconcile so they could support him.
What is Elizabeth thinking? Kate wrote. It will be hard enough to get Mother to speak to me much less Arden—but she’s also scheming to throw both Mother and Father together with pacifists? Roger Fry and the Bells are invited to the opening and probably they’ll come since they got him the show, or Roger did, partly because of artistic infighting I won’t bore you with and partly because Arden is painting THE HORRORS OF WAR. Masked, of course, because there’s a fine line to walk with the Army refusing to let him paint the wounded and dying except when they’re being saved by heroic medical officers, of whom fortunately (says his wife) there are many. Wounded trees and houses are all right, which gives him an out. Not that he always takes it. Those won’t be exhibited, not with the Ministry at the show checking him up.
Eleanor was grateful that the opening gave Robert an excuse to say goodbye to his mother before the end of his leave. Mrs. Denholm was ill again, back in a wheelchair, unable to find her legs. With her husband and both her sons in uniform, a case of nerves was hardly surprising. Edward had finally got into the flying corps, piloting what amounted to a motorized kite, fighting off Germany’s fleet of lumbering Zeppelins before they could drop their bombs on London. Where had such an improvised rackety war come from, and so suddenly? She almost didn’t know.
Eleanor lay her hands flat on the table to feel the vibrations, remembering the time she’d done that at the parsonage and been certain she’d heard Elizabeth’s voice. This spring, she’d been diagnosed with megrim headaches, and had decided that the strange displaced dreams she’d been having lately, her weird glimpses of other times, were a precursor to the headaches, a more elaborate version of the kaleidoscopic colours she often saw before the first eye-gouging pain.
The Americans said migraines. Her aunt had taken her to London to see Mr. Blythe, who had moved south as a neurological consultant and spent most of his time working with head wounds. They’d gone to the hospital to see him, the consultation a favour to her aunt. Mr. Blythe had told her that twenty-one was a common age for girls’ megrims to start, and filled her in on the history and etymology of her headaches, a very thorough session in which he’d neglected to do anything to stop them. Not severe enough to risk ergot, he’d said, and medicine hadn’t another gun in its arsenal. Why not a cold cloth and a dark room?
They used to joke about Mr. Blythe over-treating mild ailments, but now he made it clear he thought she was being hysterical, and Eleanor could see why. An orderly wheeled a soldier into the lift as they were leaving, the top of his head covered like a mummy. Only one eye was left visible, and the soldier had winked at her quite merrily.
Mrs. Denholm’s wheelchair. The Tommy’s wheelchair. The creak of wheels echoing from the past. Eleanor’s mind could circle endlessly these days, and hours go by. Leaning on her flat hands, she levered herself up, going downstairs to find Elizabeth alone at the table.
“There you are! Did you sleep well?” Elizabeth asked.
She seemed to sleep admirably herself, always looking rested. But then, Charles was in the war cabinet, not in uniform, having something to do with logistics. Supplies. Weapons, from the sounds of it. And there had been happy news in the Mowbray family, when so many faced sadness. Margaret and Stansfield were expecting their first child in July, nine months to the dot after their wedding. Eleanor was supposed to be ignorant of the process, girls being light and airy angels, but with Mrs. Crosby as her aunt, she’d been educated.
She also dreamt about Robert. Fragmented dreams, often nightmares. But sometimes her dreams had an otherworldly beauty that she tried to hold onto after waking. Last night they’d had their arms around each other as they walked through tall sunlit golden grass. She knew this was an African savannah and that Robert had been there for a while and she had come to join him. They walked forward as slowly as if they were walking through water. She could feel him beside her, the strength of his bones and the pliability of muscle. He was wearing a clean white shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Peaceable lions yawned nearby and flamingos preened in the river. There was no danger. Never-ending love. It was such a luxurious dream that Eleanor had woken feeling comforted and humid, no other word, and knowing more than Mrs. Crosby had taught her.
“I don’t think you’re awake quite yet,” Elizabeth said with a burble.
“The bed’s extremely comfortable,” Eleanor answered, rousing herself. “And they forwarded a letter from Yorkshire yesterday saying that Robert is already back from the front. He’ll be crossing the Channel in a couple of days. I refuse to think about German torpedoes, but in any case, he’s safe for the moment. So, yes, I slept quite well, thank you.”
“But you’ve lost weight. I’m going to have to worry about you, Robin’s Nora. Cocoa?”
Lizzy poured a cup before Eleanor could answer and smiled when passing it.
Eleanor bent over the cup for a thick rich breath. “Where did you get such good cocoa?”
“One can’t live without chocolate,” Elizabeth said. “The only thing we truly needed from the New World. The Spaniards should have collected the seeds and left. I’m sure they could have grown it somewhere. Spain is big enough, and the valleys can get quite muggy. I don’t feel the same about tomatoes, I’m afraid. I’ve never liked tomatoes.” With a burble: “Or Americans particularly.”
“Robert says the Canadian troops fought very bravely at Ypres.”
Elizabeth stopped burbling, her knife suspended over her toast. “Nora, you’re at risk of becoming boring. Not everything need refer to the war. You have a role to play, you know. The men need to have something to fight for, and come home to. Robin Denholm does. I wonder what he’ll say in London, whether he’ll ask himself what happened to the sweet little girl he met, with her delicious sense of humour.”
Eleanor winced. She often asked herself the same thing, what had happened to her youth, whether they’d taken it permanently. She was only twenty-one and she didn’t want the war to change her. She wasn’t a pacifist like Kate and David. She assumed the war had to be fought, the German juggernaut halted. But she didn’t know how not to think about it, or how to lose the permanent knot in her stomach. If the sun were in eclipse, surely you wouldn’t look at the ground and say, How prettily the chickweed grows.
“I want him to like me,” she said. “I want to like myself. I’m not sure we actually know each other very well. Or really, what there is to know about me. I’ve done so little in my life when he’s done so much already. But I don’t think that’s a recommendation, Lizzy. I don’t want to be a delicious young girl. I’d like to have more purpose and substance.” Hearing herself sound earnest, she added, “But I’m afraid I haven’t found the lovely little shop where they sell it.”
Elizabeth looked indulgent, ready to say more when Lady Anne and Sir Waldo came down the hallway and into the room.
“Oh! Such a day!” Lady Anne cried when she saw them. “We went for a morning stroll, and Elizabeth, your garden is so much ahead of ours. The wisteria! We dawdled under the trellis, if you can imagine me dawdling. However do you get it to bloom so magnificently?”
“Pruning and guano,” Lizzy said.
“Pruning and . . .” Lady Anne threw herself in a chair. “My dear. Is that cocoa? I could eat a second breakfast. It’s a terrible habit to take one’s breakfast in bed, Eleanor. You mustn’t start, should she, Sir Waldo? Scaring off the gentlemen with podge.”
But Sir Waldo had gone still, looking over his wife’s head. When Eleanor turned, she saw Kate framed in the doorway, and the look on Sir Waldo’s face made Eleanor think, Oh, Elizabeth, you didn’t tell them.
Lit from behind, her face half in shadow, Kate wore one of her artistic outfits, a simple dress in a broad blue-and-yellow plaid. She’d cropped her hair and looked perfect. Gamine. Sir Waldo opened his arms and said, “There’s my dear girl.”
Kate ran into her father’s embrace. Eleanor relaxed, thinking that Elizabeth had arranged things beautifully. Reconciliation was simple. Time had to pass, that was all. But Lady Anne hadn’t spoken, and when she did, it was an explosion.
“Elizabeth! What were you thinking?”
“Now, Anne,” Sir Waldo cautioned.
She didn’t seem to hear him and wouldn’t acknowledge Kate. Getting to her feet, looking clumsy and ill, Lady Anne tacked crookedly out of the room.
A moment’s consternation. Elizabeth’s schemes were usually successful, and a rare pettishness constricted her lovely mouth. The horses in her merry-go-round had pranced onto the grass and the calliope music gone all jangled. Kate gave her sister a cynical glance. This was the new Kate, infused with the modern assumption that things wouldn’t work out. As other classes of society had known forever.
“Nora, you’d better go after her,” Elizabeth said. “Until your aunt comes down.”
Eleanor found one hand going to her breast. Me?
Lizzy nodded. Such was the power she exerted (how?) that Eleanor left the room, her job presumably being to tamp down Lady Anne’s fury (how?) or at least keep her from uprooting the wisteria, trampling the blossoms, and wrenching down the iron trellis, each stake a weapon.
Eleanor wandered the garden, amusing herself with irrelevancies, no doubt from an unconscious wish not to find Lady Anne. (Dr. Freud was on everyone’s lips.) Only when she walked out the front drive did Eleanor find her sitting on a bench with a view of the downs. The Mortlakes’ house was built on an escarpment above miles of sloping pasturage, so the bench looked down a long vista of hill and vale as England folded toward the coast. The pastures were bordered by dark green trees and the footpaths wandering through them white and deeply cut, taking ancient routes across hillsides where cattle browsed unheeding. At an angle in the distance, a raw chalk cliff gently eroded. Behind it was the Channel, the beaches and inlets guarded by coils of barbed wire.
Eleanor walked over to the bench and sat down beside Lady Anne.
“Elizabeth suggested I keep you company until my aunt comes downstairs.”
“Late as usual,” the lady replied. “Does your aunt think Mademoiselle’s regimen is going to get her a third husband? When men her age can marry girls scarcely out of the nursery. Surely she’s read the casualty figures.” Eleanor was about to speak when Lady Anne added, “Not that suitability has always concerned your aunt. Lieutenant Stickley, isn’t he now? Her steward? A temporary gentleman.”
“I wonder if you know that David Arden won the Military Cross for his actions when he was wounded.”
Lady Anne looked straight ahead, not blinking, only a slight flaring of her nostrils saying that she was listening. Kate had told Eleanor about it in London. She’d been there several times lately, not just for the headaches but so Mrs. Crosby could meet with the Ministry, having offered Goodwood for use as a hospital. Eleanor didn’t think her aunt wanted to marry again, although if she couldn’t get Goodwood off her hands, marriage might prove a fallback.
But just last week the Ministry had decided that the Middleford was air bracing, soldiers recovering well at the town’s small hospital. The army would use Goodwood as an infectious-diseases facility, erecting ranks of barrack-like tents on the grounds and housing officers in the residence itself, freeing her aunt from addressing the mortgage until after the war. Not that Eleanor was going to tell Lady Anne that she was about to lose her closest friend, if that was the right word. They would be moving to Kent.
Kate had met them at Euston Station. Mrs. Crosby had taken their baggage off in a trap, planning to check into their hotel before going to the Ministry. David wasn’t long out of hospital, and Eleanor agreed to walk with Kate to his new studio in one of the enormous and shabby Victorian warehouses along the canal. Whenever she took the train to London, Eleanor looked out at the brick monstrosities and wondered what on earth went on in there. Hundreds, maybe thousands of windows, all of them too filthy to see through.
As they left the station, Kate told her that David had taken a room on a sixth floor, despite his painful leg, wanting something high enough to look over the other old buildings. They’d cleaned the windows, and afterwards he’d told Kate that the light off the greasy canal had the same jaundiced phosphorescence as the light in No Man’s Land. He was pleased. His nightmares got worse. Kate said it was like that now.
She led Eleanor into a warren of streets behind the station. Little sunlight made it to the ground, and the cobbles were green in the gutters, pond scum hanging from the metal sewerage grates. The whole area stank of wet horses and algae and mouldy bread. Sometimes when they passed an open door, there was a fugitive smell of hot metal. The streets were empty, although once a gang of workmen jostled around a corner and chaffed them—“Eh, luv, you lookin’ for summut, luv, lookin’ for me, luv . . .”—even though they were grandfathers or weedy lads, too old or young to serve.
Kate’s route was intricate, sometimes taking them through alleys barely wide enough for a single file of workmen to pass. Eleanor was uneasily aware she could never find her way out on her own. Turning a corner, they came across a solitary man leaning against a wall, who sang out in a fine tenor when he saw them, “There’s a rose that grows in No Man’s Land, and it’s beautiful to see.”
The singer was a uniformed soldier smoking a cigarette, his legs crossed, a wound badge visible. Eleanor smiled, but the soldier grabbed himself and thrust a handful at her, asking if she wanted some, the army had the rest. They hurried off, although Kate insisted that the men were harmless, ignore them, and remained intent on explaining Arden’s war and what he was painting before they got to the studio.
“They were ordered over the top of the trench,” Eleanor told Lady Anne. “There was a major offensive along the front, but something went terribly wrong. I can’t begin to know what it was, but it was misty and smoky, and apparently their platoon ran off in the wrong direction. Kate says this isn’t mentioned in the citation, but everything that happened was a mistake.”
“A royal cock-up,” she’d said, her vocabulary cruder since her marriage. Modern.
“They ran through a wood and ended up in a field, although it had been fought over until it was all muck and shell holes, and the few remaining trees were skeletons. David remembers a horse’s ribcage and”—a foot so black and leathery he’d thought it was a boot, Kate said, with the suggestion that she was holding back, as David had probably held back—“and they were strafed with machine-gun fire. Very suddenly. No backup, no cover, the mist or smoke or miasma limiting their vision.
“Many of the men were killed right away and others badly injured, including the lieutenant who was the senior officer present. A good number ran off. David was one of the injured ones, suffering a wound to his forearm, making his right arm useless. But he managed to get the remaining men into a pair of shell holes, craters, maybe a dozen boys. He was the eldest, you see. He got one of them to tie a tourniquet on his arm torn from a, well, from the uniform of someone in the crater who’d been there for a while”—a skeletal German—“and strapped the arm against himself.”
Lady Anne gave no sign of listening and stared out at the downs.
“Apparently in No Man’s Land, one waits until dark to move, although David came under fire that morning when he pulled one painfully injured soldier into the crater—his cries were terrible, you see—but the poor boy died.”
Still no acknowledgement.
“When it was dark, David got every half-fit man to support another, or carry another, the remnants of their platoon crawling from one crater to the next, David carrying the badly wounded lieutenant over his shoulder.”
Kate had been scathing about the lieutenant, one of Robin’s tin soldiers whose stupidity had led the men astray. Or his youth, or bad luck, or bad orders. David had refused to saddle any other man with the lieutenant and Kate said he’d been tempted to leave him behind, not out of spite but because his injuries were grave. Shot in the shoulder with a head wound for good measure. He’d mostly been conscious and hadn’t complained, so there was that.
“I think it’s a very long story of crawling through mud. He had to guess at the right direction. They eventually stumbled on a pair of stretcher-bearers, who took out the ones they figured would survive, and the lieutenant. David stayed with the more gravely wounded, and the stretcher-bearers came back more than once, heroic men—conchies, in fact, Quakers—with David insisting on being the last one out, exhausted by then, staggering as he carried the final man as it was coming on morning, almost daybreak, and they were shelled.
“Kate says he doesn’t speak about that, but the poor young man was killed and David was injured for a second time in his leg, although he still carried the boy’s body out. So, the Military Cross for valour.”
It was his concern for the other men that had kept him going, Kate said, not martial fervour. Improbably, the lieutenant had survived, at least so far, the bullet just that inch high enough to have missed his vital organs, although the head wound was keeping him in hospital in London.
“David has a hooked prosthesis now for his right forearm.”
Eleanor wondered what else to say, but decided she had nothing left. There was a long silence, which Lady Anne finally ended by saying, “I wonder if you know that he’s married. Not to Catherine.”
“Most people don’t,” her aunt said.
Eleanor had been conscious of her aunt standing behind them for some time. Now she came around the bench to sit on the other side of Lady Anne.
“A few of us know, and Eleanor does now, although of course we don’t say anything.”
Eleanor gave her aunt an indignant glance. Of course she wouldn’t say anything. But Mrs. Crosby was intent on Lady Anne.
“David Arden is an admirable man,” she said.
“Is that your word for it?”
“A very promising artist, according to the critics.”
“And does that excuse his morals?” Lady Anne asked. “You imply that it’s supposed to. Artists seem to think they can do whatever they want, but I don’t excuse it. He’s a scoundrel, and while scoundrels may, may blossom in war, capable of doing the unconventional, the admirable, whatever you want to call it—fine. Give them their medals. But what about after the war, when a scoundrel out of uniform returns to being a shabby little man who abandoned his wife and children. He’s got my daughter, Clara.”
“I think you know there aren’t any simple answers to questions like that.”
Lady Anne was silent. It was an active silence now. Brooding.
“He married very young, Anne.”
Lady Anne snorted.
Mrs. Crosby paused for a long time before saying, “I married my first husband when I was far too young. You know that. But let’s be honest for a moment and admit it was my own miscalculation. Implying that it was my poor father’s fault can be useful but perhaps we shan’t hide behind that any longer. Henry Preston could be very charming, and I wanted Preston Hall. I think I’ve always liked houses better than men. They’re what men ought to be, solid and silent, although I think we can agree they share a tendency to groan.”
Mrs. Crosby couldn’t make Lady Anne smile.
“Of course I learned soon enough that Harry Preston was a bully, and I think it was embarrassment that kept me there afterwards, and the fact I was expecting Hetty. I would have left him after she was born, and I would have been justified, no matter what the church says. But I spent months wanting so fiercely for him to die that I blamed myself when his horse actually trampled him. I’d sent out psychic emanations, you see. I know it sounds odd, but after listening to what they’re saying these days, I think I was suffering from marital shell shock. I also think the stable boy did something to the horseshoes, Preston having beaten him almost as badly as he beat me. But that’s another question.”
“There’s no parallel, Clara.”
“I think there is. David Arden married because he thought he’d got as far as he could, teaching school in Wales. Painting shopkeepers’ portraits. Being a good father to his children. You’ve said yourself he hasn’t enough money to support Catherine because he sends most of what he earns back to the children. As well he ought. But he managed to get out of Wales and make himself an artist. He had to take his chance, and not only for his own sake. If he’d stayed there, he might have become another Henry Preston.”
Another long silence, and Lady Anne brushed her eyes wearily.
“The world’s coming to an end,” she said.
“Shall we go inside and see Kate?”
The simple physical embrace. Kate came up to her mother and put a hand on her shoulder. Grudgingly, Lady Anne put an arm around her, and they stood together for a long time.
Afterwards, they spent a silent afternoon in the library. Eleanor wanted to be anywhere else, but it had started raining solidly. She took a book from the shelf and pretended to read, wondering what she would do if she found out Robert was already married, and whether Kate had learned about David’s marriage before or after they ran off. That would make a difference in Eleanor’s opinion of David. Not of Kate.
A bell pull, and everyone froze. It was probably nothing, but telegrams were a threat these days. Elizabeth got up and went into the front hall, and they heard a brief discussion with the housekeeper, a few murmurs and a delay. Probably nothing, Eleanor told herself, and in any case, no one would send her a telegram about Robert, not here. It could only be Charles, but he wasn’t fighting. He was in charge of supplies. Weapons, probably.
When Elizabeth came back to the library, she held a telegram.
“Oh!” Lady Anne cried, half rising.
“A telegram from Charles,” Elizabeth said, and Lady Anne sank back down. “I don’t know how to tell you that Stansfield . . .”
“No!” cried Lady Anne.
“Stansfield has been killed.”