‘I’m going back to Belgrade.’
Leonora looked up from her book and regarded her fiancé with a frown. ‘Why, Tom?’
‘I’m going to try to talk some sense into that mutton-headed brother of yours.’
‘In that case, I wish you luck.’ Leo responded dryly. ‘But why now, all of a sudden?’
Tom sat down opposite her. ‘I don’t like what I’m hearing from various sources out there. You remember I told you last summer, when we were there, that Ralph was getting mixed up with some dangerous people. I get the impression that something is brewing and I think we should try to get him away before it blows up in his face.’
‘What do you mean by “various sources”?’
‘Max, for one. As a newspaper man he has contacts all over Serbia and beyond, and there isn’t much he doesn’t get to hear about. But some of the fellows I got friendly with last year, who I still correspond with, are telling me that they are worried, too.’
‘What do they think is going to happen?’
‘No one seems to know for sure. But it seems that Apis and the rest of the Black Hand are plotting something in Bosnia. They are dedicated to the creation of a Greater Serbia, to include Bosnia Herzegovina, so it would suit them very well to engineer some act of provocation that might provoke a war.’
Leo sighed. ‘Haven’t they had enough fighting? I should have thought two wars in the last two years would have been enough to sicken them of it. When I think of all those brave men, Bulgarians and Serbs, who suffered so terribly side by side and then were ordered to turn against each other, I could weep. And all those people involved in the siege of Adrianople, on both sides, went through hell so that the Bulgarians could occupy it. And then look what happened. A few months later, at the Treaty of Bucharest, it is handed back to the Turks. It’s so futile! And now they want to start all over again.’
‘You have to remember Serbian society is dominated by the military. As far as they are concerned, they had two very good wars. First they got rid of the Turks, then they beat the Bulgarians to hang on to Macedonia, in a war that lasted less than a month. Now they are determined to get Bosnia back.’
‘But I can’t believe Ralph would let himself get mixed up in something illegal,’ Leo objected. ‘He may be a bit too easily dazzled by military heroics, but he’s not an idiot.’
‘No, of course not. But there is such a thing as guilt by association,’ Tom said. ‘At the very least, it will do his army career no good.’
‘That’s true,’ Leo agreed. ‘But I don’t give much for your chances of changing his mind, and anyway, he can’t leave even if he wants to. He’s been posted as a military attaché and he has to stick to his post.’
‘He must be due for some leave, surely,’ Tom said. ‘He hasn’t been home for over a year. Failing that, at least I may be able to persuade him to distance himself from that crowd.’
Leo looked at him and saw the determined set of his features, so different from the easy-going, almost vapid expression she remembered from two years ago. ‘When will you leave?’ she asked.
‘Tomorrow morning. If I get the first ferry, I can catch the Orient Express from Paris that evening.’ Leo’s lips twitched and he raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’
‘I was just thinking, eighteen months ago I bet you would have thought catching the Orient Express was about on a par with flying to the moon on a broomstick.’
He laughed. ‘That’s very true. When Ralph sent me off on that wild goose chase to look for you I was terrified. But I have you to thank for broadening my horizons – among other things.’ He reached out and touched her hand. ‘Will you come with me?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I can’t, Tom. You know that. I should almost inevitably bump into Sasha and that would just be too painful for both of us. You do understand, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ he answered. He stood up. ‘Well, if I’m going to catch that ferry I had better go home and tell Peters to pack a bag for me. You will be all right until I get back?’
‘Of course I shall. But you take care, Tom. Those men are dangerous.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you in a week or two.’
He bent and kissed her cheek and she watched him go out of the door with a twist of anguish at her heart. For a year he had been her rock and her haven, something to cling to in a world that had fallen apart around her. Two years ago she had despised him, now his gentle companionship was more precious to her than anything. But her pain was not simply due to his prospective absence. She had learned to live with solitude. It was the thought that he would be in Belgrade, that he would breathe the same air and tread the same streets as Aleksander Malkovic, a joy that was forever forbidden to her.
She was jolted out of her unaccustomed descent into self-pity by the sound of the telephone. Her grandmother had always refused to have an instrument installed but it had been one of Ralph’s first actions on becoming master of the house. Leo was often grateful for it but its ring still made her jump.
Beavis, the butler, appeared at the door. ‘Miss Langford is on the telephone, miss.’
‘Thank you, Beavis.’ She passed him into the hall and reflected as she did so how radically his manner towards her had changed. When her grandmother had been alive she had been aware that he regarded her with disapproval but now he was as respectful to her as he had been to the old lady. At first she had wondered if it was due to the accounts of her exploits that had reached the English press but later she realised that it was simply the fact that now, in her brother’s absence, she was mistress of the house. It had taken her some time to get used to this new status but at least she no longer had to think up excuses for her actions or account for her whereabouts.
She took up the telephone and spoke into the mouthpiece. ‘Hello, Victoria?’
‘Are you coming to the drill tonight?’
‘Yes, I’ll be there.’
‘Good. I’ll pick you up about a quarter to seven.’
‘Thank you. I’ll see you then.’
‘Yes, till this evening. Bye.’
It was more than a year since Leo had returned from Serbia. Almost immediately Beavis had informed her that Victoria had called repeatedly over the previous months, asking for news of her. He had been able to tell her that Leo was in Belgrade with her brother, but nothing more. Leo’s first instinct had been to shut herself away and see no one, but then she remembered how close they had once been. She needed a friend now, more than ever before, so she sat down immediately and wrote a note asking her to call the following morning.
It was not until she heard Victoria’s voice in the hall that she experienced a twinge of doubt. Was it really possible to pick up the threads of their previous relationship, after the bitterness of their parting at Adrianople?
Beavis announced, ‘Miss Langford, miss,’ and Victoria entered and stood still, just inside the closing door. She was wearing a simple dark-blue tunic dress with a peg-top skirt over a plain white blouse, and her normally sparkling blue eyes were shadowed with doubt. For a moment neither of them spoke, then Victoria said, ‘Thank you for your note. I was afraid you would never want to see me again.’
Her words broke through the constraint Leo was feeling and she crossed the room and took hold of her hands. ‘Of course I want to see you. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘I don’t know how you can forgive me for the way I behaved,’ Victoria said. ‘I am so ashamed of leaving you like that, all alone.’
‘I wasn’t all alone,’ Leo said, suddenly aware that she had been partly to blame. She had concealed the true state of affairs from Victoria and left her to shoulder all the guilt. ‘Come and sit down. There’s a lot I need to tell you.’
She led her friend to a sofa and they sat side by side. ‘I was so relieved to learn from Beavis that you were safely in Belgrade,’ Victoria began. ‘I had been picturing you lying in that awful hospital tent, dying of typhus. I knew I should have stayed but I just didn’t have the courage. I always thought of myself as rather brave, you know, but I couldn’t face the squalor and the disease any longer. I had to get away. I’m afraid I don’t have your capacity for self-sacrifice.’
‘It wasn’t self-sacrifice,’ Leo said. ‘That’s what I need to explain. I stayed at Adrianople, not out of a sense of duty or compassion. I stayed because I wanted to, because there was something, someone, there that I wanted to be close to.’
‘Someone?’ Victoria queried. ‘Who? It wasn’t Luke, was it? You weren’t secretly carrying a torch for him while I …’
‘No!’ Leo interrupted her, half-laughing. ‘No, I was fond of Luke, but we can come back to that. He wasn’t the reason I wanted to stay.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Do you remember Colonel Malkovic?’
‘Wasn’t he that insufferably arrogant man we met in Salonika that first evening? The one who wouldn’t let us go to the front?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘You can’t mean you … you had fallen in love with him!’
Leo took her hand and gripped it tightly. The desire to pour out the story of the last few months was overpowering. ‘Sasha’s not arrogant, Vita. He’s proud and reserved, but he’s also strong and brave and kind. Let me explain …’ As succinctly as she could she told the story of her meeting with Malkovic at Chataldzha, when he had mistaken her for a boy, of the expedition into the Turkish trenches, of how she had encountered him again at Adrianople and ultimately become his secretary. ‘So you see,’ she concluded, ‘all the time you thought I was sacrificing myself nursing typhus patients I was actually having a wonderful time, riding out with Sasha and talking and playing cards and … well, getting to know him and realising he was the only man I could ever think of marrying.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Victoria said with a frown. ‘You are engaged to Tom Devenish. I saw the announcement in the paper yesterday. I admit I was surprised, knowing the way you feel about him. What went wrong?’
‘My brother,’ Leo replied. ‘Ralph turned up at Adrianople and gave the game away.’ The momentary euphoria that her recollections of the days spent at Sasha’s side had produced dissolved, as she told first of Tom’s arrival, then of Ralph’s, and Sasha’s fury at her deception.
‘And that was the end of it?’ Victoria asked.
‘Oh no, far from it. You see, we met again in Belgrade and when he saw me as a woman he realised that he was in love with me, too. But he’s not free, Vita. He’s been betrothed to a girl he hardly knows since he was fourteen and he can’t break it off without creating a blood feud between the families. His honour won’t let him do that. So there it is. There’s nothing to be done and we both have to learn to live with it.’
‘And does that mean marrying Tom? I can’t see how that solves anything.’
Leo shook her head. ‘I’m not marrying Tom. The engagement is a matter of convenience for both of us. Ralph wouldn’t let me come back to London unchaperoned and I had to get away from Belgrade. So Tom has made himself responsible for me, which means that Ralph trusts him again. You were absolutely right there, incidentally. It is Ralph he loves, not me – although we have actually become very fond of each other in the last few months.’
Victoria shook her head slowly. ‘What a tangled world it is! Poor Leo! I’m so sorry for you. But what a mess it all is. There’s you, hopelessly in love with Sasha and Tom equally hopelessly in love with Ralph and poor Luke in love with me. I treated him atrociously, Leo. You were absolutely right about that, but at the time I just wanted to grab whatever comfort I could in the middle of all that misery and I didn’t think about the consequences. I wonder what happened to him.’
‘He’s back in New Zealand,’ Leo said. ‘I gave him my address before he left Adrianople and there was a letter waiting for me when I arrived home.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘As far as is possible with a broken heart. He’ll survive, and I suppose I shall – somehow.’
Victoria squeezed her hand. ‘If there is anything I can do to help … What are your plans now?’
‘I don’t have any.’
‘Come back to the FANY. It will do you good to meet up with all your old friends.’
‘You have rejoined, have you?’
‘Well, technically we never left. I tried to contact Mabel Stobart when I got back but she has gone off to Canada to visit her son and the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy seems to have been disbanded. As far as I can see, Stobart was pretty disillusioned with the reception she got when they came back. I mean, if anyone deserved a hero’s welcome she did, but really, except for a few people, no one seems to have noticed what we all did. It certainly doesn’t seem to have made any impression on the powers-that-be. But the FANY are going from strength to strength and Ashley Smith is convinced that if war does come we shall be allowed to play our part. So why don’t you come along to the next drill?’
Leo shook her head. ‘I’m not ready for all that yet. I just need time and peace to sort my life out. I think I shall go up to Bramwell Hall, our place in Cheshire, for a while. Maybe when I come back to London I’ll rejoin.’
A year had passed since that conversation. Leo did as she had suggested and spent several months at Bramwell. She rode out over the Peckforton Hills on Amber, the little chestnut mare her father had bought her to sweeten the pill of being left behind in England when she was fifteen. When the weather was poor she spent long hours studying the history of the Balkans and practising her Serbian. Quite what her object was in doing this she could not explain, except that it seemed a last, tenuous link with the happiness she had once dreamed of.
Since the death of her grandfather, Bramwell had been cared for in the absence of the owners by a married couple, James and Annie Bartlett. Both had been born on the estate and had risen from scullery maid in Annie’s case and under groom in James’s to the position of housekeeper and estate manager. They had been kind to the wild fifteen-year-old who had been deposited in the household five years earlier, and they extended the same unspoken sympathy to the sober young woman who had returned from the horrors of war. Leo found herself cosseted and spoilt as she had never been before.
Sometimes Tom came to stay, and sometimes Victoria came, but mostly she was alone and slowly the wounds healed and she ceased to wake every morning with that hollow sense of loss.
Tom, meanwhile, was busy making finished pictures from the sketches he had drawn during his horrendous weeks on the battlefield and arranging the exhibition he had planned with Leo. It was the opening of this that finally persuaded her to leave her sanctuary and return to London. The pictures created a sensation, but it was not the kind that they had hoped for. He was variously accused of ‘sensationalism’; ‘gothic exaggeration’; ‘an almost pornographic delight in violence and suffering’ and an attempt to undermine the morale of the nation. Dispirited, he packed the pictures away and vowed never to exhibit again.
Over the winter Leo slowly picked up the threads of her old life again. Most of it was centred on the FANY, where she found a renewed sense of purpose. With rumours of impending war with Germany growing stronger week by week, all the members were confident that if the crisis came they would be ready, and that their services would be welcomed by the military hierarchy. Leo found it difficult to take the practice drills seriously and from time to time she attempted to point out how very different the experience was under real war conditions. She tried to bring home to the others the horror of some of the wounds they would have to deal with, and the effect of living with the noise of the guns and the pervading dirt and stench. But she had the impression that many of them thought she was ‘shooting a line’ in order to bolster her own standing within the corps, so she gave up.
She continued to attend the drills, however, and as winter gave way to spring and then summer, corps morale received a boost during the annual camp, when they were inspected by the commanding officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps and given an excellent report. There was a general feeling that they were ready to swing into action as soon as the call came.
As the months passed Leo had to fend off frequent enquiries about when she and Tom were going to get married. At first she told people that she still needed time to recover fully from the effects of her experiences in the Balkans but that story began to wear thin when it was clear that, physically at least, she was back to full health. Then, in a moment of inspiration, she hit upon the perfect excuse. ‘It all depends on my brother,’ she would say. ‘Of course, he must be there to give me away but at the moment his duties are keeping him in Belgrade. We are waiting for him to finish his tour of duty.’
Now Tom was heading for Belgrade with the object of persuading Ralph to apply for leave. If he succeeded it might save Ralph from possible disgrace but it would certainly pose new problems for the two of them.