—

My Dearest Ess,

Your suggestion is the perfect solution to Mere Meldrum. You could, of course, have had it for your home for as long as you wished, but if it suits you to become its owner, then I shall put it in hand at once. I shall make it over to you entirely for whatever sum you raise on the property Mother left you.

If I may suggest, be guided by Hewetson. He has always looked to your interests very well and from what you have told me of his investment of the income from your property, it must have yielded very well indeed.

I should prefer that the entire matter be handled by Hewetson, as I do not wish to involve my own practice. Mere will be costly to keep up, but as most of those portraits, vases, clocks and pieces of statuary you consigned to the attics are valuable, I suggest that you let him send them to Sotheby’s and invest the proceeds. Get him to go over the books with you and the agent: you will see that such bits of Mere as the dairy herd will bring in a fair contribution.

Whatever you do, don’t let Mere become a burden. Ask Father for money if necessary, take in paying guests, open it as a hotel – anything, just so long as you make it your – and Stephanie’s – home. It is a beautiful house that deserves to be happy – as you do, my dearest sister.

It may be some time before I see you, but I shall carry with me a picture of you there in Lyme creating a new Mere Meldrum.

As ever, yours,

Jack

KATE

Wife of Rev. Peter Warren
Died 22 October, 1917
R.I.P.

Victoria stood in the October chill of the graveyard before the newly erected headstone, a twin to that of its close companion, to the Rev. Peter.

Aunt Kate, unlike Grandmother who had wanted no marker for her old bones, had wanted a ‘piece of respectable marble like Peter’s’ which her successful children had seen to it that she had. Kate, who had not seen her sons for years, would have been proud of them, silk-hatted at a village funeral. In their youth they had been given the same advice as had later been given to Victoria – ‘get on out in the world if you wants to make summit of yourself, you won’t never be nothing in this here place’, and so as Vic and Linty had gone, Victoria was now going.

She had been to look at the weathered cross, carved ‘Louise Tylee 1862–88’ which, apart from Victoria herself, was the only thing of substance left to indicate that her mother had ever lived.

Unsentimentally, Victoria knew that this was the end of that part of her life. Of the warm, strong environment of her childhood, where women living alone fended for themselves; where homeless children came and went, and some orphaned children came and stayed; and where destitute women, abandoned – as her grandmother had been abandoned – by men who had left them with children to feed and no means of providing for them, had received the unpatronizing charity of The Refuge, as the hospice was known.

She still had relations in the village, but they were not so close that it would hurt Victoria never to see them again. And, much as she had loved her home as a child, she had outgrown it. Kate had taught her her first letters there, and her grandmother had shown her how to deliver a baby safely in sterile surroundings. It had been a home shared with a dozen other children and sometimes more, and several temporary aunts; its floors had gleamed with polish and its shelves and cupboards had reeked hygienically of the Old Lady’s disinfectant – Caroline’s Holy Water, as the Rev. Peter had once called it.

The links that had attached Victoria to the village and The Refuge were now all broken – Uncle Peter and Aunt Kate side by side; her mother, whose cross had been erected when she was younger than Victoria was now; Grandmother, who had been mother, father, guide, conscience and mentor, had become a recently sunken mound where snowdrops, scillas and anemones were now as naturalized as the horse-daisies, buttercups and poppies that bloomed after them. The Refuge will continue, Uncle Vic and Uncle Linty, hard-nosed, soft-centred railway contractors, have agreed to become its trustees in Victoria’s stead.

She can go. From this village. From this country. The Hague Congress, the petition for peace with its thousands of signatures has made no impression on governments, on the war, on the slaughter of young men. The senseless killing of an entire generation of men goes on and on. The bookshop, the birth-control network, the ‘Underground’ are all functioning. Red Ruby has said everything she can say. Women have still not got the vote, but it will come soon, she is convinced of it.

Now she feels as free as Tankredi once said that people with revolutionary ideas must be. Tankredi. Recently he had turned up in London and had once again set her alight – this time not only her body but her mind.

Russia! he had said.

And had enthused about his colleague Trotsky, and the remarkable Lenin. Once power was seized a whole new system would be created. The people would take over all factories and all privately owned capital. The peasants would take possession of their holdings and the old, rotten and infected regime would fall.

And Victoria Ormorod, Blanche Ruby Bice, Red Ruby, was afire to be part of it.