It was all so terrible. Eleanor stared down at the newspaper article that called Jack a scoundrel, condemning his “nefarious deception”, and then thrust it away with a shudder. She’d never wanted this.
Yet what had she wanted, when she’d told Jack all those dreadful things? When she’d called him a coward and worse, and acted as if she hated him? She didn’t hate him at all, yet she didn’t know what she felt now besides an unending misery for all they’d both lost.
In the days and weeks that had followed Jack’s arrest her parents maintained a dignified silence on the subject. Eleanor’s wayward behaviour was not discussed, and she forced herself to become involved in the church and village, as a kind of penance for her reckless foolishness. Oh, but she’d been so very reckless. Katherine had chided her for it, everyone had, and she’d actually thought she’d grown up a bit. But she’d shown her true colours in the moment she’d shouted at Jack, and forced him away from her forever.
She taught a Sunday School class, and spent hours embroidering handkerchiefs and knitting socks. She mastered the art of turning a heel, though it gave her no satisfaction. She even visited dreadful Susannah Belmont, whose barbed remarks thankfully bounced off her; she felt too numb, too dead inside, to be hurt by someone’s petty spite.
No amount of good works could fill up the terrible emptiness inside her, though, and even when her hands were busy with whatever task she’d set herself, her mind seethed with fear and regret. The newspapers were full of Jack’s desertion, and with the country caught between hope and grief, the story of a soldier’s desertion captured everyone’s imagination. It seemed as if half the world wanted him hanged or shot, and the other half was tired of all the needless death and misery and wanted to show mercy. But everyone, it seemed, agreed that he should pay somehow.
Stories were trotted out; stories of soldiers who had endured far worse losses than Jack – or rather John – had. Soldiers who had stayed at the Front when their whole families had been felled, their farms lost. It was clear that Jack was not to be excused – or pardoned.
“What do you think they will do to him?” Eleanor asked Katherine, several weeks after Jack had turned himself in and been taken back to Alnwick.
“I don’t know,” Katherine answered frankly. “They’re saying he might be court-martialled, even though he’s been demobilized, since it happened during the war.”
“And if he is?” Eleanor asked through numb lips.
“He won’t be executed – not now,” Katherine told her with what Eleanor suspected was meant to be bracing cheer. “But he might receive a prison sentence… I don’t know, Eleanor. The mood of the country is so strange these days. Up one minute and down the next.”
“The decisions of the courts shouldn’t be dictated by mood,” Eleanor protested and Katherine nodded soberly.
“I know. But the fact is, they are. And Jack might be made an example of.” It was the first time, Eleanor noted, that her sister had called Jack by his Christian name.
She stopped reading the local newspapers, because she couldn’t bear to see Jack vilified in such a heartless way… and yet she knew she’d done the same thing, and to his face. If only she hadn’t been so reckless, so impulsive and thoughtless and cruel…
But it was too late. Jack was gone. And the walled garden was gone too, left to weeds and ruin. A week after Jack had been taken back to Alnwick, her father turned off the heat for the butterfly house. Eleanor knew her father felt betrayed by Jack too, and hurt. When he’d asked her about the garden, she’d simply shaken her head. She couldn’t bear even to think about it any more, which felt like another loss.
After her father had turned off the heat, Eleanor went into the butterfly house herself and drew back the netting, watching with wretched despair as the butterflies bumbled their way to freedom, a thousand tiny wings silhouetted against the sky before they were gone. How long would they last? Some had been used to tropical climes. But then, how long did anything last?
She shut the door on the garden and no one went in there again; it was as if it had never been ploughed or planted. As if none of it had happened. Her parents never spoke of Jack once.
Summer lurched into autumn, and the weather grew cold, the skies dark and overcast. The newspapers continued to print stories of Jack, peppered with melodramatic accounts of other soldiers who had suffered and not deserted. Eleanor didn’t read any of it, but one afternoon in early October Katherine came to her and told her what she’d heard.
“He’s to be court-martialled,” she said, taking Eleanor’s cold hand in hers. “I don’t know what the sentence will be, but…” She hesitated, her eyes full of sympathy and sorrow. “It will be serious. At least we’ll know what’s going to happen in a few days.”
Eleanor nodded; her throat had closed up too much for words. She didn’t know if knowing would make her feel better or worse.
And then the verdict came, and she realized it was worse, much worse. She was up in her bedroom when Katherine came to tell her, her face so serious that Eleanor knew it was bad.
“Not…” she began, and then found she could not continue.
“No,” Katherine said quickly, “not that. No one wants that any more, I think. But ten years of penal servitude, Eleanor. I’m sorry. He’s to be sent immediately to Reading Gaol.”
Ten years. A decade of his life. And who knew what he would be like when he came out, his health broken, his name still blackened, his life in ruins? And it was all her fault.
If she hadn’t challenged him, condemned him, he could have escaped. Left a free man, even if he would have had to keep running.
“Thank you,” she finally said. “Thank you for telling me.”
She could not sleep that night. She could not set to anything the next day, to read or eat or even think. Her parents went on with their duties, and Katherine returned to Whitehaven, as if everything had gone back to normal. Eleanor suspected her parents were actually relieved. The thing was done, and they could move on.
But how could she move on, knowing what she had done? How could she live with herself, enduring endless, pointless days, on and on, with no respite in sight? She wrestled with the question for a week; it tormented her thoughts in every waking moment, and sleep was nearly impossible. She watched her parents moving about the vicarage as if they were actors in a play; listened to Tilly and Mrs Stanton chatting in the kitchen, as if everything was fine, as if life could just go on. And on. And on.
The answer, when it came, seemed simple, even easy. She couldn’t go on like this. She didn’t want to. She’d asked Jack what would happen to her, and now she knew. She would not wait to grow old, wracked by guilt and filling her days with meaningless pursuits; no, she would choose her destiny. She liked that thought, found comfort in it.
This, then, would be her last reckless act, except it didn’t feel impulsive or thoughtless. It felt like the only choice left to her.
The rain was sleeting down as she walked through the house in a final, silent farewell. She could hear the rustle of papers from her father’s study, the clang of copper pots from the kitchen. She stepped out onto the porch without even a wrap; her indoor slippers were soon soaked. And still she walked. First to the garden, lifting the latch that had almost rusted shut in the months since Jack had gone. It was bare and bedraggled now, the branches stark and leafless, everything left to ruin. She wondered who would open this gate one day in the future. Another girl, another gardener? Would they fill it with flowers, even butterflies? She almost smiled to think of the garden being redeemed and loved again. It would not happen in her lifetime.
She left the garden then, and slipped through the gate to the churchyard, and then down to the sheep pasture, the world growing dark around her, the rain coming down steadily, soaking her and freezing her to the bone. She felt nothing.
All the way to the beach, each step made her more sure, more purposeful. This was her choice. This was what she wanted.
She stood on the edge of the headland, the waves crashing below her, sending up their icy spray to douse her face. The ground was slippery with mud; it would be so easy to take that last little step. She might even do it by accident, slipping in the mud, windmilling to the waves below.
She should do it, she thought. Now, before her courage failed her, before she slunk back to the vicarage, ashamed and as empty as ever.
Now…
A hand suddenly clamped down on her shoulder. Her feet slid in the mud and her legs gave out from under her. For a second she was suspended, as close to falling, to death, as she’d ever been, and in that moment she knew she did not want to die. She wanted to live, not just for her own sake, but also for Jack’s.
And then that hand on her shoulder was pulling her backwards, an arm wrapped around her waist, yanking her away from the edge of the cliff so they both fell with a grunt and a gasp onto the muddy headland; she at least was cushioned by the body below her.
“Are you all right?” The voice was rough with anxiety and emotion, and Eleanor turned in shock to stare at the face of James Freybourn.
“What…” For a moment she could not speak. “What are you doing here?”
“I was driving through town and I saw you,” he said. He sat up, and then helped her up, draping his sodden coat around her shoulders. “You were walking to the beach in nothing but your day dress, soaked through and looking like a ghost.”
But she hadn’t been a ghost, after all. She’d been seen, by James of all people, and she was thankful.
“I thought…” James looked away. “I thought you might be going to do yourself some harm.” He spoke quietly, without censure or anger or that peculiar coldness that had become unpleasantly familiar in the last year. He spoke, Eleanor thought, almost like the old James.
He stood up, reaching a hand down to her. “Let me get you home. I have the motorcar.”
“I can’t go home like this. I can’t face it—”
“Then I’ll take you to Whitehaven. My parents are out, and only Katherine is home. She can attend to you.”
Wordlessly Eleanor nodded, and they walked to James’s motorcar, parked haphazardly on the edge of the beach road.
“What were you doing out on a day like this?” Eleanor asked when she’d got into the passenger seat. She had started to shiver violently, and she wrapped her arms around herself.
“Sometimes I like to go for a drive,” James said and then added, almost reluctantly, “I just need to get away.”
“James…”
“I know,” he said, his tone abrupt, his hands clenched on the steering wheel as he stared straight ahead. “I know what you were going to do, Eleanor, because I’ve nearly done it myself.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate the dazed fog of her mind. “When…”
“That last summer, ’18. You know, it’s easy for people to shake their fingers at Taylor, or Bradford, or whatever his name was. Easy to say he was a coward, because they’ve got no idea what it was like. How terrible it was.” He closed his eyes briefly, his pale face etched with strain. “Walter wasn’t a coward. He hated the war, and it affected him badly. He’d started to have the shakes, poor man. But he wasn’t afraid. Not like I was.”
“Being afraid doesn’t make you a coward,” Eleanor said softly.
“But it did me, because I wanted to end it.” He held up two fingers, barely a breath of space between them. “I came this close. This close. Walter found me.”
“What…”
“I was going to shoot myself,” he stated baldly. “After the Battle of the Lys, in Ypres. Thousands of men, hundreds of thousands of men died, but they called it a victory because the Jerries lost more.” He shook his head slowly. “Over half my men died on that one day and I just couldn’t… It was all so pointless, so utterly wretched. I was sending men to their deaths over and over again. They knew it as well as I did.” He let out a shuddering breath and continued. “Walter found me holding my service pistol… well, never mind. He didn’t tell anyone, even though I could have been court-martialled. Disgraced, my family disgraced. He never told anyone. He just took the pistol out of my shaking hand.”
Eleanor saw tears starting in his eyes, and she laid a hand on his arm. “Oh, James. Is this – is this why you and Katherine…”
“I can’t bear to look at myself. How could she, if she knew?”
“You must tell her. The agony you’ve both gone through! If the war leaves us any legacy, it should be to snatch at happiness – and not just snatch, but fight for it. There has been too much sadness, too much grief and loss and death.” She spoke fiercely, but James just kept staring straight ahead. “Katherine loves you, you know,” she said in a quieter voice. “Desperately.”
“I know.” James’s voice was low, his head bowed. “And I couldn’t bear it if she stopped.”
“She won’t,” Eleanor protested. “She’s far more constant than I ever was—” She broke off, the pain of losing Jack as fresh as ever, and James turned to place a hand on her arm.
“I’ll take you back to Katherine,” he said quietly. “She’ll know what to do.”
Eleanor gave a gulping kind of nod, and with a small, sad smile James got out to turn the crank to start the car.