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Authors: Amy Myers

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BOOK: Songs of Spring
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‘Where’s Yves?’

Caroline hurtled breathlessly down the staircases to the kitchen to grab some breakfast more speedily – oh, for Mrs Dibble’s array of dishes awaiting them in pre-war days, plain cheap food though it was. On the other hand, she
told herself valiantly, looking at today’s meagre spread, she wouldn’t go back to those days now. They remained a happy memory in her heart, like Reggie, her first love, born of her girlhood, not her maturity. She was twenty-five now, and had she married Reggie she would still be in Ashden. She loved Ashden deeply, but not as a prison, and with all the feudal duties and burdens that even now after three years of war lingered on, that’s what it would have become for her as the squire’s wife.

‘He and Captain Dequessy left early.’ Ellen sat down to pour herself some tea from Caroline’s pot.

This sounded bad. Had some new problem arisen? Caroline hadn’t quite yet worked out the correct balance between her three roles: clerk assistant to two army captains, and those of lover to one and friend to the other (and moreover friend might become sister-in-law if Felicia married him).

‘Did they say why?’

‘Only that they wanted you to have some more sleep after last night.’

Caroline felt somewhat annoyed. She had a job, just as they did, and here was Yves making concessions to her that he would not have tolerated in anyone else. When she arrived at the office, having run most of the way across the park, there was no sign of Yves or Luke in the office, and she slipped behind the desk in her cubbyhole to attack her work. Today’s batch of intelligence reports was already waiting for her. It still amazed her to think that she, Caroline Lilley, rector’s daughter, had managed to land up in the Secret Service Bureau, although of
course to the outside world she was just a WAAC.

Her irritation vanished as usual when she looked up to see Yves coming through the door. Her heart still lurched when she saw his tall, awkward figure, and the scarred face, which looked so austere and yet so quickly changed, when his eyes lit up with warmth and tenderness – as they did now.

‘Caroline, I am glad you are here.’

‘What’s wrong, Yves?’ She was alarmed.

‘I have to leave for La Panne immediately – Luke gathers that there is a crisis developing, and I should be there.’

‘How long will you be away?’ Normally Caroline did not ask such unanswerable questions, but today she could not help it. Despite the bleakness of the war situation, and of the December weather, she had been eagerly looking forward to their spending Christmas together at the Rectory. Christmas might provide, with her father’s quiet good sense, a beacon of light for the unknown horrors of 1918. Last summer had seen the usual public optimism that the next offensive would be decisive, as the High Command always maintained. In July, the troops had gone into battle at Ypres in the belief that to take the Passchendaele Ridge meant the end of the war, and in late October, the Canadians had, suffering enormous casualties, gained a toehold there. Yet there was still no end to the war. On and on it went. Even the recent success of the big tank offensive at Cambrai had not offset the spur offered to the enemy by the collapse of Russia after the abdication of the Tsar and the Italian retreat to the Piave line.

Yves, of course, realised the reason for her question, and
came over to her desk to talk to her quietly. ‘I will return in time,
cara
. We will spend Christmas together, never fear. I have no choice but to go now.’

He told her that King Albert had been impressed by Lord Lansdowne’s courage in writing to the British press that he believed the Allies should negotiate peace terms now. The Belgian government was split on whether to seek a separate peace for themselves now, or to pursue the ‘Death or Glory’ policy the Allies would undoubtedly favour. ‘The Allied plans for 1918 need the Belgian army to stand firm,’ he explained.

‘Plans?’ she echoed hollowly. ‘
Are
there any?’

‘Certainly there are!’ Luke had come in without their noticing. ‘Lots of them. Everyone has his own, that’s all.’


My
plan,’ Caroline announced firmly, ‘is to spend Christmas at the Rectory, preferably with both of you, even if—’

‘Felicia doesn’t come,’ Luke finished for her, as she barged into dangerous waters. ‘If she doesn’t, I’ll volunteer to stay here, though. Someone has to man the barricades.’

He was right, of course. War no longer stopped for Christmas – if it ever had. Trains carrying troops one way might indicate a lull in German strategy; carrying them the other could signpost a coming offensive, or, almost worse, prior knowledge of Allied plans. Every day Field Marshal Haig had the benefit of new intelligence gained from the increasingly successful secret organisation La Dame Blanche, operating within Belgium, and which took its name from the ghost of the White Lady said to herald the
downfall of the Hohenzollerns. If only the legend would prove true!

This autumn it had risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its predecessor, which had been controlled by Caroline’s former army intelligence boss in Folkestone, and which had been betrayed from within. The new La Dame Blanche offered their services not to Folkestone, but to the Secret Service Bureau, whose organisation in Holland, run by Captain Landau, had leapt at the opportunity.

The network of agents was increasing rapidly, after an initial problem when La Dame Blanche had insisted not only that they should organise themselves on military hierarchical lines, but that they should be a recognised part of the British army. The latter requirement was the hitch, but it looked now as though Yves and Landau had managed to achieve a good old English compromise, whereby they declared oaths of allegiance, and were issued with identity discs, which were to be buried in the ground until the war was over. Everyone seemed happy at the moment.

Caroline looked on each new batch of intelligence as another hammer in the enemy’s coffin; after all, her sister Felicia’s life might depend on some stray snippet of information that allowed C, as the head of the SSB was known, to deduce German intentions.

Felicia and their Aunt Tilly, her father’s younger sister, ran an advanced first-aid post on the Flanders Front, and had been heavily engaged all autumn, for the fighting had been aggravated even more than usual by the winter rains and mud. The offensive was over, but somehow Caroline
thought it unlikely that her sister would take leave at Christmas this year.

‘I don’t know why I set such store on Christmas,’ Caroline remarked, cross with herself for caring so much.

‘You’re a rector’s daughter,’ Luke pointed out. ‘It’s the family business.’

Surely it was more than duty that called her back? Something more even than Ashden. It was the image of the Rectory itself. In her mind’s eye, it never changed: Mrs Dibble always stood at the kitchen table stirring Christmas puddings, Mother was working in her ‘glory-hole’ boudoir or floating round the Rectory organising her family in her own disorganised way, Father sat in his study, his door and heart ever open for his family’s problems.

Another factor, she recognised, was that in her disappointment over Yves’ absence, though she tried to live in the certainty of the moment, she knew that the inevitable final farewell to Yves would have to be made someday. That was what made these temporary separations all the more difficult to bear. However hard she tried to convince herself that the war effort was gaining from what deep inside she saw as a waste of precious fleeting time for herself and Yves, the mutiny inside her rumbled on.

‘I have to leave now, Caroline.’ Yves came round to her side of the desk, bent over and kissed her.

Why had he done that? She instantly panicked. He
never
kissed her in the office. Was he going back to his wife already? Happiness, like raisins, never came unadulterated – perhaps that’s what made it happiness?
With much effort she managed to joke: ‘I hope the Germans know it’s Christmas too.’

‘I’m not sure Ludendorff does, but I do.’

She promptly stood up and saluted him. ‘Then
au revoir, mon capitaine
.’

As soon as he had gone, the office seemed desolate with just herself and Luke. She could hardly see over the top of the pile of reports today. Gathered from different sources, they all needed to be checked for duplication. This had proved a major problem, since if GHQ or C received two or three reports each with the same information, they were naturally inclined to believe it true. In fact, owing partly to the complications of the many smaller organisations that existed in Belgium, partly to the letter-box system they used to smuggle the reports over the frontier to Holland, and partly to the increasing use of pigeons to carry intelligence, the agents often overlapped, with the result that one report could find its way by several different means to London. If that information was wrong, and false credence was given to it, it could have devastating consequences.

‘For want of a nail, the shoe was lost …’ as Benjamin Franklin once said, and Luke said all the time.

Caroline took a deep breath and picked up the first report. Luke glanced up and saw her face.

‘Don’t look so glum. You’re in luck. Yves has given me strict instructions to cheer you up while he’s away.’

 

Margaret plodded steadily back through the Rectory garden. The sooner the war ended and she could get a new coat, the better; this one was only fit to be torn up
for dog blankets, and even Ahab would turn up his nose at it soon. She’d been queuing for an hour at the butcher’s. She thought longingly back to the days before this war had started: when Mrs Dibble of the Rectory telephoned, the orders were round here before she’d hung the receiver up. Now there were no more delivery boys. They were too busy delivering bullets and shells to the enemy.

Her face sank into its now customary lines of bitterness. Christmas and no Fred. Christmas and no Joe. At least Joe was alive – somewhere. Italy, his wife Muriel had worked out from their private code. She wouldn’t even see his kiddies this Christmas, as Muriel was taking them to her parents.

Margaret knew only two things about Italy: firstly it had come down in the world since the time of Julius Caesar, and secondly you got there by crossing over the Alps. Hannibal had done it by elephant, but she presumed even Field Marshal Haig must have thought of some better method by now. Though judging by the mess on the Western Front, she couldn’t be too sure. She tried to picture Joe on an elephant – ridiculous, maybe, but it put off having to tell Mrs Lilley the bad news.

It was all very well the government telling everyone to eat roast fowl at Christmas, but were they going to provide them? The most she’d been able to wheedle out of Farmer Sharpe was the promise of one capon. How was that going to go round goodness knows how many at the family table and nine or ten in the servants’ hall? What’s more, Wally Bertram said he could only let her have two pounds of sausage meat and a small joint of beef. He was getting
above himself. Meat was so scarce, he claimed, that he was only opening in the mornings now. In Margaret’s opinion, he wanted his afternoon nap. What happened to service for the customer?

The net result was that she was going to have to tell Mrs Lilley that Oscar would have to go after all. She remembered the day he arrived as if it were yesterday. Percy had shouted in the middle of her pastry – if you could call it that. ‘Daisy!’ (That was Percy’s pet name for her.) ‘Look what I’ve got.’

She’d looked up and shouted right back. ‘What’s that dirty animal doing here?’

There, trotting along at Percy’s side at the end of a piece of string, was a pink piglet. In
her
kitchen.

Percy was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘Seb Mutter gave him to me for helping him muck out his sties. The government says we should all fatten up our own pigs, so here he is.’

The piglet had given a confirmatory squeal, before she hustled both of them out, with orders to build the animal a sty of its own. The Rector had named him Oscar after that playwright, because he seemed to have literary leanings. On his very first day in his new sty he was found to be eating his way through a copy of
The Strand Magazine
with evident enjoyment, while leaving the rest of the pile, composed of parish magazines, untouched. The heap was in the adjoining workshop and Percy had left the door open by mistake.

Oscar had grown not only in size but in the family’s affections. Not to mention Elizabeth Agnes’s heart. Every
day she trotted down to see Oscar. If the next time she saw him he was in the oven – even Margaret flinched at the consequences. Now there seemed to be no choice.

She pulled herself together, as she entered the kitchen. She stopped short in shock. There at the table Agnes was sitting over a cup of tea chatting to
Lady Buckford
!

‘Good morning, your ladyship,’ Margaret managed to say through stiff lips. When the Rector’s mother had come to live with them, there had been ructions and the whole household had been upset. Now it had all settled down, and she and Lady Buckford had come to an understanding. But that didn’t give her the right to push herself into her kitchen.

‘Have a cup of tea, Mrs Dibble.’ Agnes leapt up hastily, seeing Margaret’s reaction.

‘I hope you will forgive this intrusion,’ Lady Buckford said, sounding more like she assumed it rather than hoping, in Margaret’s opinion. ‘But it is kitchen business.’

‘Yes, your ladyship?’ Margaret did not give an inch.

‘My son, Lord Buckford, tells me he has leave over Christmas, and will naturally be spending it in Wiltshire with Lady Gwendolen. However, he proposes to call here on Christmas Eve with his gift to me.’

‘Yes, your ladyship.’ Margaret was busily calculating whether an earl could be fed on vegetable pie, should he stay for luncheon.

‘His gift is two large turkeys, three capons and a goose from the Buckford House Farm. They are all at your disposal.’

Margaret was flabbergasted, unable to say a word
even of thanks, but Agnes promptly burst into tears.

‘What are you crying for, girl?’ Lady Buckford was taken aback at this reception of her news.

BOOK: Songs of Spring
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