ONE

Stoneythorpe, Hampshire, Saturday 1st August 1914

‘There you are!’ Emmeline was pulling apart the willow branches, poking in her perfect, entirely regular nose. ‘Mama wants you. Michael’s American friend has arrived early. And she’s fussing about the party.’

Celia looked to the side so the white and silver of the pond was sharp on her eyes. ‘I’ll come in a moment.’

‘Now, Mama says.’ Emmeline kicked at the soil with her boot. ‘Come along. I think I was good to even try to find you back here. It’s so dirty.’ Celia pulled herself out of the willows, ignoring Emmeline’s hand. ‘I don’t know what Mama is thinking, allowing Michael to invite this Jonathan person. We’ve quite enough to do, with the party and my wedding.’

None of us cares about your stupid wedding, Celia wanted to say. Not that it would be true. ‘Let them try to mock us now,’ Rudolf had said, pulling on his beard. ‘My wife was the daughter of Lord Deerhurst and my daughter is to be Lady Bradshaw.’ She scraped her boots in the grass and followed her sister up to the house.

Emmeline walked ahead, her pale pink skirt snaking after her – she was wearing out her old dresses in preparation for her trousseau. The house beckoned to them, the squat frontage of the servants’ hall, the breakfast and dining rooms and the back of the sitting room, its long, pale windows glinting in the sun, the Hampshire stone flashing coolly behind. In summer, Celia would usually be in the Black Forest, visiting her second cousins, Hilde and Johann. ‘We will make a longer visit next year,’ Rudolf had said. ‘When the international situation has calmed.’ She blushed to herself that she had been secretly relieved. From the age of eight, she had spent two weeks there with her siblings, but now they said they were too old for it, and last year Celia had gone alone. They had done the things that would look like fun to anyone seeing them from outside: fishing for sticks in the river by their house, taking rides with their groom and listening to the gramophone in the parlour. But Johann had been awkward with her and Hilde had wanted to be alone and not talk. ‘She is just growing, dear,’ Aunt Lotte had said. ‘She wishes to be quiet to think.’

Uncle Heinrich sat her down at the table and talked about the family tree, how Wolfgang de Witt had come from Holland in the seventeenth century, married Anna and never returned to his home country – ever. ‘Like your father, Celia,’ he said. ‘Rudolf will never leave England.’ Then he asked her questions about home – even about Tom, though he had never met him.

Now, the sight of Hilde’s letters, neatly written on pink-edged paper, illustrated with flowers around the edges, arriving every three weeks or so, made her feel embarrassed for the friendship that they no longer seemed to have, since they were grown. She stuffed them into one of her drawers, guilty also that a cancelled visit meant she could spend the summer months with Tom. That was, if Emmeline would let her escape the discussions about her wedding.

‘Come along,’ said Emmeline. ‘Why are you always so slow? Mama is waiting. She will be pulling her hair out. Well, not literally. But she says she wants to.’ Their mother’s great pride was her chestnut hair, still as thick as when she was nineteen, Rudolf said.

‘Mama is always worrying about the party.’

‘You know her, every year she says she will never be able to get everything done. And every year it’s a success. Anyway, what were you doing down there?’

‘I was thinking about Princess May, actually.’

‘Hmm. If you ask me, she must have felt lucky to marry the King. She was very plain and her mother had a figure like Mrs Rolls. I shall see them when Sir Hugh takes me to court and introduces me. I simply don’t believe she was the ideal bride.’

‘I think it was romantic that he chose her when his brother died. But I still don’t see why anyone would want to get married, even to the King.’ Celia was lying. She’d been thinking of Countess Sophie, the lady-in-waiting, courted by Franz Ferdinand, everybody thinking he wanted to marry one of the princesses of the house.

‘Well, he wouldn’t marry you. You always have dirty knees.’ She was right: Celia did usually have some dust or grime over her dress.

Emmeline was too beautiful, that was the problem. Her fair hair was pinned up by Miss Wilton into a great cloud around her head, and her eyes were so large that they drew your attention away from the rest of her face. She looked like Mixie, Verena’s doll from when she was a child, without flaws. Celia knew that, if you looked closer at her sister’s cheeks, there were slight bumps, dry patches, and that made them pink. But no one ever did look, apart from her.

Emmeline had always taken the lead roles in plays at school – finishing with Miranda in The Tempest. In Eversley, the nearest big village, she was like a kingfisher, striking people silent when they saw her height, slender figure and mass of pale hair. Celia sometimes looked in the mirror and wondered how different her days would have been if her reflection had been like Emmeline’s, the snub nose, pale eyelashes and thin frizzy hair replaced by her sister’s easy loveliness. ‘You have a happy face,’ a teacher had once said to her. Not beautiful. If she looked like her sister, people might follow her in the street, as they did Emmeline, offer her biscuits and cakes or ribbons as gifts in shops. Like Emmeline, she could say what she wished and no one would reprimand her, be cross or remember her angry words.

Celia had been a plump child and now she was too tall, too thin, like a lanky bird plopped out of its nest, Michael teased her. Her nose was too wide and her grey eyes too small, and when she smiled, her eyes crinkled smaller and her nose got wider. She tried hard not to envy her sister’s mass of hair, for her own lay flat on her head, fell out of buns and clips, dropped over her face. None of her clothes fitted because the waist was always wrong, and there seemed to be a permanent thin line of dirt under her nails. If they wore the same gown, it would look pristine on Emmeline, creased and out of shape on Celia, within a week thinned at the elbows and grey. ‘Why cant you just be elegant?’ her mother said.

Still, she thought, if all beauty got for you was marrying Sir Hugh, perhaps it wasn’t worth so very much. Sir Hugh was grass-thin and looked about a hundred, even though Verena said he was forty (old enough, Celia thought). He dressed so neatly that Rudolf said even King Edward would have approved of his buttons. He wore wide ties over his shirts, expansive, shimmering silk, their generous show a dark shock against the rest of him. Last year, after days of fiddling with their gowns, Emmeline and Verena had gone to Lady Redroad’s ball at her house ten miles away. They came back talking of Sir Hugh. A week afterwards, he came to visit, sat upright in their parlour, said nothing. Verena was jubilant. All the mothers had been looking at Sir Hugh, she said, and he was visiting them.

Celia took one skip – why did they always have to walk – towards Stoneythorpe. The dark red stone of the house shone above them in the afternoon sun, the three peaks on the roof and their turrets and towers reaching almost to the clouds, the whole of the back spread with ivy. As a child, she’d count out each of the twenty great windows and try to guess what might be happening behind the leaded panes of glass, whether the furniture was dancing when they weren’t looking. Now she only wondered that about her own room. She knew the house was grandest at the front, with its four main rounded windows and the ornate façade with the handsome carvings over the porch and on the roof. But the back was her favourite, she liked its humbler windows, the chips in the stone.

‘Here she is, Mama,’ said Emmeline wearily, as they arrived on the lawn in front of the back windows, just at the base of the slope. Closer up, the windows looked slightly fogged around the edges. They’d have to clean them again before the party. The footmen had dragged out a ring of chairs, but only Verena and Rudolf were seated, Rudolf asleep under his hat, legs stretched out in front of him. Michael was lying on a blanket on the grass, staring up at the sky, and a tall man in a boater was sitting next to him.

Arthur was the only one missing, their handsome, know-it-all older brother, in Paris since last year and saying he had no plans to come back. Without him, there was always a quiet spot, a hole where he would have sat in the middle, talked the most. Celia felt ashamed that she didn’t miss him, felt relieved not to be on edge from his sharp jokes. Her first memory of Arthur was when she was four, running away as she tried to catch up, laughing and shouting, ‘Go away!’

Emmeline swept herself into the empty chair by her mother. ‘I found her sitting in the dirt, as usual. No one would believe her fifteen.’ Verena tipped her glasses back on her nose and gave Celia a vague smile. She was sitting bolt upright as ever, her long neck extending out of her ruffled white blouse and blue jacket, glasses glittering on her pale nose under her puff of brown hair. Your mother pays a lot of attention to her clothes, a woman at a Winterbourne parents’ tea party had said to Celia. Verena did. She wore things that didn’t match on purpose, combined dark blouses with pale skirts. Rudolf teased her that sometimes she still thought herself dancing as a doll in Sleeping Beauty, wanted always to stand out.

Verena had small eyes, like Celia – it was Rudolf who had the great doe eyes Michael and Emmeline had inherited. Wrinkles snaked out from the sides, down her cheeks, up to her ears. When Celia was younger, she’d traced them on her mother’s face, drawing a map, touching the soft skin where it dipped and fell. ‘You really should not run off so often, Celia.’

The man in the boater stood and made a mock bow. His skin was sunburnt brown, the colour of Michael’s shoes.

‘Well, hello,’ he said. ‘You must be Celia. Short for Cordelia, I understand?’ His drawling voice sounded so ridiculous that Celia could almost think he’d invented it for effect. ‘I’m Jonathan Corrigan.’

‘You’re Michael’s friend from Cambridge, I know,’ Celia finished for him. He was so white and blond, the sun behind him so bright that her eyes were watering just from looking at him. ‘And no one calls me that name. It’s too long.’ Verena cleared her throat, her usual signal, and Celia dropped her eyes to her boots. Michael had talked endlessly about Jonathan for the past two weeks: his father’s two large homes in Boston, summers by the sea, his house in New York where the buildings were as high as the sky. Before Michael went to Cambridge, Celia had imagined him coming back with friends who looked like him, who would want to talk to her as much as he did: tall, thin young men with glasses and Michael’s dark hair, smiles that made their whole faces bright, like his. Michael was clever, shy, sometimes nervous; he bit his nails down so they were ragged and the skin underneath showed, fiddled with his clothes in company. She did not think he would have a friend like Jonathan, with his big round face and smile. Jonathan was like Gwendolyn King at school, the type of person who thought everyone was his friend.

Michael waved his hand. ‘Now, sis, be nice. Jonathan has driven all the way from Cambridge in time for the Bank Holiday.’ He pulled at his tie, his fingers flickering.

Celia shrugged. I didn’t ask him, she wanted to say. I didn’t ask him and his buttery smile to come here. Jonathan was staying for three weeks – almost half her holidays. He would be taking her brother off to walk in the gardens, talk and read, leaving her alone. She hated the fact that men like Jonathan saw a side of Michael she did not. She had hopes – so far secret from her parents – that she would go to Cambridge herself, sit in rooms full of books, discussing ideas with other girls just like her. They would toast muffins by the fire and discuss the philosophy of religion. Then she would go on to Paris, read books about philosophy and be cleverer than any boy.

Jonathan turned to Michael. ‘You didn’t tell me you had such a pretty younger sister.’ He had a thick gold ring on his little finger. Celia had never seen a man wear jewellery.

Emmeline laughed. ‘You jest, Mr Corrigan.’

‘I’d like to paint you, Miss de Witt, if I might be permitted.’ Celia gave him a polite smile. What was worst of all was that Michael had said to her last week that he might go to America one day. If Michael went to New York on a boat, so far away, he would be surrounded by shops with glass windows, and theatrical shows, and he might never come back.

‘I don’t know why you fancy yourself a painter,’ said Michael, nudging his friend’s leg with his hand. ‘Shouldn’t you stick to poetry? Darned hard enough to do that, if you ask me.’

‘If I see something or someone that requires depiction, I do so,’ replied Jonathan, his voice sounding more ridiculous to Celia by the minute. ‘I’d compose you against the house, Miss de Witt, the large oak tree to your side.’

He gave Celia a wink. She sat down by Michael and looked away, towards the house, hoping that Jonathan would see her eyes watering and so his idea of the portrait would be ruined. Michael nudged her shoulder in the way he always did, their sign of secret friendship amidst it all. Michael’s hands had patches of red that flared up from time to time. Verena had said they all had it as babies but Michael worst of all. She had tied his hands together to stop him from scratching.

‘How about it?’ said Jonathan.

‘Celia does not have time to sit for paintings.’ Verena’s mouth was narrowed, her words taut. ‘She has much to do in assisting preparations for the party. She has been given dispensation from her lessons from her tutor in order to help us.’

Jonathan nodded, switched immediately to Verena. ‘Of course, Mrs de Witt. The party. Michael promised I’d see a real English village in full swing. That’s if he can drag himself away from Professor Punter’s reading list. It might just be you and me, Mrs de Witt, if Seneca proves as captivating as usual.’

Celia watched her mother’s mouth soften under the light of Jonathan’s smile. In the pictures of ships going over the sea she’d seen, there was always a tall man walking with a group of ladies. That was exactly what she could see him doing, striding over the deck every morning, looking forward to arriving in England, where he probably thought people still dressed like they did in the Queens time. All the while, Michael was reading, Celia thought, preparing for his meetings with Professor Punter, to sit in his room and discuss great thoughts.

‘You certainly shall see an English party,’ said Verena, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘If I get these lists completed in time.’

‘I do wish you would stop fussing, Mother,’ Emmeline said, stretching out her skirts so her shiny boots protruded, her delicate calves almost on show, taking care to look away from Jonathan. ‘Every year you get in such a turvy over it all.’

Verena shook her head fondly. ‘Dear. You young people think great events arise from nowhere.’ She patted her bodice and returned to her lists. Verena had wanted to be a ballerina when she was a child, but grew too quickly, she said, even though they all knew that no girl of her family would have been allowed to flutter her way across a hot stage in front of people of the town. Sometimes, when Celia saw her mother presiding over plans, she tried to think of her as a dancer, directed by a gentleman in a suit, but could not. Everything about Verena was stiff, restrained, as if she were a peg doll grown tall and watchful. ‘I have much to do. Especially with Mrs Bell away.’ Their housekeeper had gone to visit a niece, whose children had promptly fallen ill with measles. The doctor had told her she must remain with them for at least two weeks.

‘Mama, my wedding is more important than a party for the village. Those children throw stones, and their parents only come to pocket as much food as they can.’

Verena did not reply.

‘You care more about those children than your own daughter’s wedding.’ Emmeline tossed her hair. Celia wished she could throw a paper aeroplane at her. For Emmeline, every party list inched her further away from her ideal self, resplendent in ivory silk from Worth, intricate beading billowing out from her tiny waist, a glassy tiara propped over her veil, glimmering with the beautiful future ahead of her.

‘It is our duty to entertain the village,’ said Rudolf from beneath his hat, the consonants catching on his words.

‘Mama! Are you listening to me?’

‘Emmeline, your wedding is not for another three months. There is plenty of time.’ Verena did not look up. The dark brooch on her lace-covered bosom glinted in the light.

‘But you haven’t ordered the decorations. I asked you to.’ Celia had heard every detail, she thought, a hundred thousand times: the flowers for the church, the tents they would erect across the lawns, the menu of lobster, beef and more ornate cakes than King George V’s. For the last six months, Celia had watched Emmeline complain, slam doors and cry about bridesmaids, lace and not having the reception at Claridges. She pinched Michael’s knee and he rolled his eyes. Emmeline had threatened that if Arthur didn’t come back from Paris, she would go there herself and get him. Try to be patient, Celia, Verena sighed when she complained.

Soon, Celia told herself, Emmeline would put on the mauve going-away suit ordered by Verena and take the train to Dover, in order to honeymoon in Paris and the Italian Lakes. She would be Lady Bradshaw and Celia would be free.

‘As I said, there is plenty of time.’

‘Time I greatly require to save for the expense,’ snorted Rudolf from under his hat. They all turned to look at him. ‘Celia. Might you go and ask Tom to join us here for tea?’

Verena’s voice cooled. ‘Dear. Marks needs him in the stables. He is without a second groom.’

‘Oh, poor Tom has surely worked sufficiently by now. It is so warm today. Celia, go and ask him.’ Celia watched her parents. Tom had come up for tea before, but only when Verena was inside with a headache. She looked at her mother, then her father. She felt their wants tussling over her head. Then her mother sat back and looked at her lists once more. ‘Go on, Celia,’ said Rudolf.

‘You humour her,’ said Emmeline. ‘She’s too old to be playing with the servants.’

Michael propped himself up on his arm. ‘Better play with lords, you mean?’ His voice caught around the first word. When he was a child, he had had a heavy stutter and Verena and the governesses had practised correct speech with him, over and over again. Still, Celia heard him reciting at night, bs, rs, ps, stopping and starting for hours.

Emmeline turned to Verena. ‘Next thing Father will be inviting Tom Cotton and all his family to sit in the front pew at my wedding.’

‘Lord Snootypants might like that,’ Celia said, jumping to the side so her sister could not reach her.

Emmeline swung out her hand for Celia’s skirts. ‘Papa! Did you hear what she said?’

‘Oh, leave her be,’ said Michael, dropping back to the grass. ‘She’s right. Sir Hugh detests the fact that he needs our German money, our canned meat money, to patch up his precious old pile of a house.’

‘Nothing wrong with a bit of canned meat,’ said Rudolf. ‘We’ve got a new range in next week, straight from Alsace. Sir Hugh should try some.’

‘It might do his pinch nose some good.’

Emmeline struggled to her feet through her tangled skirts. ‘You’re hateful! Well, when I’m married and living at Callerton Manor, I shall only invite Mama. And if you think I’m going to find a husband for her’ – she gestured at Celia – ‘you are quite wrong. Just look at her hair! And all that grime under her nails. I would rather die than introduce her to Sir Hugh’s friends.’

‘Never mind, Emmy,’ said Michael. ‘We could all turn up as organ grinders and do a German spot at your ball. Crown you the Canned Meat Queen.’

Jonathan spat out a laugh.

‘I’ve had enough,’ said Emmeline, her hand on her pink silk hip. ‘You can all stay and mock. I’m the only one in this family actually doing something. You spend more time at Cambridge playing cards than anything else, and heaven only knows what Arthur is doing in France, and Celia looks like a tramp, and nobody cares! Well, I give up on you all!’ She turned and hurried up the lawn, stumbling into her skirts.

‘Oh, let her go,’ said Rudolf to his wife, who was beginning to follow. ‘She will cry it out, then Miss Wilton will arrange her hair and it will all be better.’ Verena inclined her head, sat down again. Celia watched her sister hurry up towards the house, her shoulders dipped, the thick curl of hair behind her head bobbing in time with her feet. She looked too big for Stoneythorpe already. She could preside over whole ballrooms at Callerton, smiling graciously at queues of Sir Hugh’s hunting friends.

‘May I go to find Tom now?’

‘If you must,’ said Verena at the same time as Rudolf smiled and said, ‘Right this minute!’

Celia leapt up and hurried away. She could hear Michael shouting that Sir Hugh wanted to wring them dry, declaring that lords and ladies would be nothing in the future. Verena was trying to calm him, Rudolf shrugging it off, Jonathan making some joke about rich Americans.

Secretly, alone, hoping that God could not read her thoughts, Celia sometimes imagined Sir Hugh changing his mind about Emmeline. Then things would go back to how they used to be, and Michael and her father wouldn’t be arguing all the time. Then she chastised herself for being cruel to her sister. All Emmeline had ever wanted was to be a society bride.

‘The future is a ham in a can!’ sang Celia to herself, softly. She had never tasted a de Witt ham. Verena said they were for the poor, and young ladies and gentlemen should never eat them. But Celia followed what her father said about his products and felt a swell of pride every time they used to pass the large advertisement on the boards near the church in Hampstead. ‘De Witt, de Witt, keeps you fit,’ she sang as she ran.