Susan Speers (13 page)

“I knew you would come this way.” I heard Jeremy’s voice before I turned to see him. “I waited for you in the Faraway Glade.”

I laughed to hear our childhood name for the small patch of woods just outside Marchmont land. We thought ourselves daring to cross the forbidden boundary into uncharted territory. I drew a steadying breath. Jeremy wouldn’t tempt me there now.

He sensed my change of mood and stopped smiling. “Tea is at four as usual,” he said. “Let’s have a little talk before refreshment.”

“Will Caroline be there?”

“No, she will not.”

We made our way into the house in silence. I wondered, then, if I would see the baby. I wondered how I would feel to see Jeremy’s likeness in a child not my own.

“It’s good to see you, sir,” Henry said at the door. “It’s good to see you, Miss.”

Jemmy led the way to Father’s study. When I was seated, he took his place behind the desk, looking absurdly stern in the manner of his predecessor.

“Why did Henry greet you as if you’d been away?”

“Caroline won’t live at Hethering,” he said. “Arthur has a weak chest and she’s loath to leave his London physician for a country doctor.”

“I understand.” I would be the same.

“The truth is, Clarry, if Arthur were strong and healthy, she wouldn’t live here, she’s told me that. She says there are too many ghosts. Ghosts of you and me, of our happiness.”

She was right.

“You asked me here because you need me. I came because of our promise. Why do you need me?”

“I was in the OTC at Oxford, Clarry. Officers Training Corps. You must know I’ll be called up the minute war is declared.”

“I don’t want a war,” I said.

“Do you think I do? Do you think I want to be even farther away Hethering? I can just about manage the property from London. If I’m out of the country without someone I trust, someone who loves this land as I do in my place, I dare not imagine what will happen.”

“Some say the war, if there is a war, will be over by Christmas,” I said.

“Germany has been arming for years while we ignored the possibility of attack. We feel safe on our island, but we are treaty bound to defend Belgium.”

He cut the string on a parcel left for him on what was now his desk. Inside it was a children’s book. He opened the pages. I recognized the illustrations.

“How do you have that?”

A friend of a friend got me a forward copy. It’s not officially published yet.”

He turned the leaves, one by one. “This is Hethering, Clarry, these are our gardens, our land, you’ve rendered with such love.”

I looked at him helplessly.

“You know, don’t you?”

I nodded. I would care for Hethering, I would keep it safe for him.

*****

Jeremy’s solicitor joined us at tea and we went back to Father’s study to sign the papers granting me power as agent. I told Henry I would move into my old bedroom in a few days’ time. Jemmy walked me to the Picketys’ home on his way to catch the London bound train.

“Will you write to me Clarry?” he asked.

“Of course I will.”

“Not just about Hethering. I depend on you, Clarry, for so much more than that.”

“I know.” His fingers were beneath my chin, and when he moved to kiss my cheek, I turned my head and kissed his lips. He made a small sound at the back of his throat and wrapped his arms tight around me, kissing me all the while. When we broke apart, he smiled his farewell with such love and trust shining in his face. I hadn’t seen that smile for so long, I thought it was gone forever. I let go my scruples about his wife and child. War changes everything.

I didn’t return to St. Ives. It was cowardly to avoid the disappointment in Thérèse’s eyes, but I wasn’t sure I could leave my Refuge a second time, even to protect Hethering. I offered Thérèse a place at Hethering with me for the duration, but she replied with great dignity she would prefer to keep my Refuge safe for my return.

Amalia Pickety and I renewed our friendship. I enjoyed my romps with her children and Mr. Pickety’s sermons on Sunday. I met with Hethering’s tenant farmers and gardeners in the mornings and walked the grounds after luncheon. It was obvious our young men, from farmer’s sons, to stable grooms, to our burly under gardeners, were eager to join up to “give that narsty Hun a licking he’ll remember.”

Jemmy left me his handwritten journal of plans for Hethering. I took it to my mother’s sitting room after dinner and read each page. Here were his earliest ideas for improvements in the schoolboy hand I remembered. Here were the longings of a homesick schoolboy, and here he had pasted my first maps.

I saw his plans for the distant future in a section that began on the last page and ran backwards. There were fantastical gardens of topiary and plantings brought from the far corners of the world. Then I found his drawings for repair to each of our beloved follies. Beneath a detailed sketch of my Bridge of Sighs brought back to its former glory, he’d scrawled in pencil “
When
?”

I knew when. I would restore our follies. When the time came for me to give Hethering back, it would be a kingdom complete, a reward for his exile and his sacrifice. I began to add my own notes to his drawings, estimating time, labor and materials. If life denied us the union we craved, the children we wanted, Hethering would be our joint creation, our legacy, the flowering of our love.

Britain declared war on Germany on August 4. From that moment the country mobilized. Jeremy was already in officers’ training camp, I’d received a cable informing me in late July. His next letter told me he didn’t know when he’d be sent over, but he’d have leave first.

Every young man in our small village was in a fever to enlist in Kitchener’s army. In all too short a time they were gone, leaving women and old men to get in the harvest and prepare for winter. I spent hours making a schedule to assure Hethering’s needs could be met. An army officer came to requisition our horses, leaving us with two ponies and the promise of mules for our tenant farmers.

On a farm visit to Nanny Croft, Hethering’s oldest tenant, I learned her granddaughter and great grandchildren were coming from London to help work her farm. “They’s a lot of chirren be comin’ home to roost,” she told me. “Young Dickon Scard is leaving his fancy London perch to put his land in order afore he goes off to furrin’ parts.”

Dickon’s father had amassed a wealth of land before he died. Some was in the hands of his daughters and their husbands, other acres were leased.

Sure enough, within the week Henry brought me Dickon’s card. He also gave a great sniff to tell me London polish should not afford a farmer’s son Hethering’s hospitality. I ignored our snobbish butler and gave Dickon my very best smile.

He was dressed in the clothes of a country gentleman, but the wind had ruffled his hair and his roguish smile was the Dickon I remembered from our childhood.

“Here we are again, Clarry.”

“I’ll call for a picnic tea,” I said, “if you’ll walk to Willow’s meadow with me.”

“Pink frosted cakes?”

“Cook knows my favorites.”

While we waited he told me about the plans he’d made for his land, and the plans he’d made to enlist.

“You don’t want a commission?”

“I’m happiest with my lads. I’ll be an NCO soon enough, the recruitment officer told me that.”

He carried the basket across the lawns and gardens and through the Marchgate Wood. We sat on the bench by Willow’s pond and ate every last morsel, washed down by a generous thermos of tea.

“This is my land now,” I told Dickon. “Father cut me out of his will, but Jeremy gave me Willow’s home, her meadow and the pond.”

He put his head to one side and looked down at me. “He knows you very well.”

I busied myself packing up our basket, carefully folding and refolding the linen napkins.

“Clarry.” Dickon’s voice was husky. “I know how close you and Jeremy are, even now. I see his trust in you.”

I nodded, unable to meet his gaze.

“Is there even a chance for me?”

I thought for a moment about my future. I could go on as a kind of pitiful adjunct to Jeremy’s life, always left behind or worse, in danger of immoral conduct. Or I could choose this good man beside me. I did care for him. I knew he cared for me. We could have our own happy life.

I raised my eyes to his and smiled. He smiled too. He bent his head and kissed me and I kissed him back.

*****

Dickon and I weren’t promised to each other, but we were happy. Despite my place at Hethering, he never mentioned Jeremy’s name again, nor did I. I gave him a tour of my grand lodging, so many echoing rooms for one person He admired everything from a respectful distance, but when I ushered him into my mother’s tower room his eyes lit up.

“How my own dear mother would have loved a sanctuary like this one,” he said. “She longed for a ‘blessed moment of peace’ as she would say. We were a noisy, bothersome bunch.”

“From what I know of my mother, she would have given it all up for a large family,” I told him.

Dickon had paced out the measure of the room’s octagonal walls and stopped in front of the mantel, looking at the painting of the young girl reading.

“By all rights there should be a safe hidden behind it,” he teased. “I say, do you mind?”

“Go ahead.”

He was gentle as he took down the gold painted frame. I never expected that he’d find anything, but there it was, a small metal door recessed in the wall with a numbered dial guarding its secrets.

“Do you know the combination?” Dickon asked.

I shook my head. “I didn’t know it existed. I’ll have to look.” Surely somewhere in Father’s study or this room the numbers were recorded.

Dickon replaced the painting. “Don’t give up,” he said. “Imagine what treasure could lie within.”

He came for tea every day, despite the increasing frosty atmosphere created by my butler. We didn’t walk through all of Hethering’s parkland. Somehow I knew Dickon would think it trespassing, and I didn’t dare imagine Jeremy’s opinion on the matter.

If the weather was fine, Dickon and I sauntered through the woods to Willow’s cottage and took up our post on the bench by the pond. We talked and talked and laughed and laughed.

I described my plans to refurbish the follies: the tower, the bridge, the pagoda and the sadly crumbled Roman columns.

“And what of the fifth folly?” he asked me. “The marble temple?”

“It’s perfect, it never changes.” I said. “I might just clear away some brush.”

The truth was there were too many memories of Jeremy there, of Jeremy and of love. My fragile happiness with Dickon wouldn’t survive them.

One day he told me about his public school days, about the struggles he’d had as a farmer’s son among the gentry. He made every incident comic in the telling, but I knew better: he’d been badly abused by his so-called betters.

When he told me how his father saw him win the mathematics prize, I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him. His eager response led to more and longer kisses until we broke apart, breathless but still embracing.

Was kissing Dickon like kissing Jeremy? I wasn’t drawn to Dickon with the magical force that united me with Jeremy. Dickon wasn’t in my heart and my blood like my Jem, but I was a healthy young woman long deprived of the physical affection my body craved.

Dickon settled his arm around me as I put my head on his shoulder. We looked deep into the water Willow had loved, the water that took her life. He spoke a little about his work in the London bank.

“I have savings,” he said, “and good prospects ahead of me. I have my father’s acres and after the war…”

“After the war?” I couldn’t bear to wait. It seemed my whole life had been nothing but waiting and my spirit rebelled. “Do you really think this war will end as soon as Christmas?”

“I don’t,” he said. He stood up and walked to the water’s edge. He took a handful of pebbles and skipped them one by one over the ruffled waves. A cloud came over the sun and the wind turned chill. It made me wrap my shawl tight around me as I came to stand beside him.

“I don’t like the past,” he said. “I want to live in the present and hope for the future.” They were brave words for a man about to fight a war.

“You’ve been harmed by the past, Clarry, I know you have.” I hung my head and he kissed its crown. “I thought it would be better to wait,” he said, “but I don’t want to. Let’s begin our future.”

“I don’t want to wait either,” I said. Everything in me wanted my life to begin now.

He cut a thin green reed with his pen knife and wove it around the fourth finger of my left hand.

“I’ll go to London tomorrow and resign my position,” he said. “But I’ll come back here, to you, before I enlist.”

“Come back soon,” I said, and this time our kiss was a promise.

Days passed and Dickon sent me a letter saying he had been delayed with unfinished business at the bank. A letter from Jeremy arrived the next day. He described his training in a series of terse phrases, but when he wrote about Hethering, his words were sinuous and graceful. He wrote as a suitor would write about his beloved.

I wasn’t so foolish not to understand Jeremy and I submerged our feelings in our care for Hethering. I tapped my finger on the envelope bearing Dickon’s vigorous handwriting. I’d have to tell Jeremy about my plans with Dickon as soon as possible. I didn’t want him to hear about it from someone else. Still, I shrank at telling him before he left for France. I decided to wait until Dickon returned and we were promised for sure.

I looked up with pleasure when Henry came into the study to announce a visitor. My butler’s attitude was warmer and I had a brief hope he’d accepted Dickon in my life. Then I read the calling card. Henry Putnam, my solicitor?

I greeted my friend, wondering why he’d made a trip from London without notice, then caught the tiniest smirk on my butler’s face. Butler Henry had contacted solicitor Henry.

“Leave us,” I said to my servant and if my solicitor wondered at my tone, he didn’t comment.