The Gates of Rutherford (9 page)

As if summoned by her thoughts, the door opened, and John peered around the door. “Awake at last.”

“Where on earth have you been?” Octavia asked. “I woke up at five, and you weren't here.”

John came into the room, flinging aside his coat. He crossed over to the bed and kissed her. “Miss me? That's a good sign.”

Amelie excused herself. John sat down in the chair opposite the bed.

“Let me guess,” Octavia murmured. “You've been back to the newspaper offices.”

John held out his hands in a gesture to show that he had been found out. “It's all on, darling,” he said. He lifted a piece of paper from his pocket. “I'm going on a returning hospital convoy tomorrow morning.”

Octavia put her hand to her chest. “So soon.”

She'd known it was coming, of course. The reason for John having been on the
Lusitania
last year was that—on the face of it at least—he had been employed to sound out English families about how they felt on the United State's neutrality, and to get himself to France to report on the true reality of the war. John's employer was part of a faction who could not bear the United States to stand by.

But events had moved fast in the last three months. Too fast for her liking, for it meant that John would certainly take up his long-delayed task.

“I rather dislike Zimmermann,” she said, naming the German ambassador who had precipitated the United States declaration, and giving an ironic smile.

“President Wilson evidently agrees with you. Congress voted for war two days ago.”

She sighed and swung her legs out of bed, drawing her robe around her. “And so you have cooked up your journey, and got your permits. And never breathed a word to me.” She shook her head, still smiling, though with less humor. “I knew you would go, darling. You needn't have kept it a secret. All that ‘nothing to worry about.' I do wish you'd talk to me honestly. It's not as if I don't understand the war, you know. Every hour I worry about Harry.”

John immediately got up, and came to sit beside her. “I didn't want to spoil your enjoyment of the wedding.”

He had taken her hand in his, and now she looked down at it and began to smooth the fabric of his sleeve. “The British confirmed it, then.”

“Confirmed what?”

“This telegram of Zimmermann's to Mexico.”

John let out a short sigh, almost laughter, but not quite. “Arrogant buffoon. Came right out and admitted it. He telegraphed Mexico and promised them half the southern States if they declared war on America.”

“And so . . .”

“The whole world is at war,” John said.

She turned to him, and buried her face in his shoulder. For a long while they sat on the edge of the bed, holding each other. Her words muffled, Octavia said, “More sons . . . fathers, brothers, husbands.” At last, she lifted her face. “I want to tell you to stay here. To order it, John.”

“But you won't do that.”

“No, I won't.” She bit her lip. “William wanted to know what you were doing. He was surprised you were going to France. I expect he thought you wouldn't get permission.”

“Ah, I have contacts.”

“And you think it so really important. . . .”

“For my countrymen to know what's actually going on, how much we are needed? Yes, I do.”

“As if England and France and all our Commonwealth can't cope.”

“It isn't that at all,” John objected. “We're defending ourselves now, and democracy. We're making a stand against brutality . . .”

Octavia stood up abruptly, dropping his hand and walking to the window. There, she pulled back the heavy damask curtain a little more and looked out at the pretty garden behind the house. There
was a lawn, and a little summerhouse, and a paved path bordered by roses. After the downpour of rain the night before, it looked absolutely fresh, newly washed and brightly green. It was spring in London—beautiful, promising spring—and so quiet here by the Thames that one might have thought it was the heart of the country. But she knew that only a few miles away, the armies were struggling with foul weather. It had been a bitterly cold winter in France, and now Flanders was deep in mud through persistent rain.

She heard John get up behind her. He was soon at her back, closing his arms around her. He softly kissed her hair, her cheek. “Dearest. . .”

She looked at him. “I know you must go,” she said. “I know they all must go. I know that Harry has to be there, and that Charlotte must be at the hospital. I know that Caitlin is working somewhere, no doubt dreadful . . .” She shook her head. “We had an accident in the mills last week,” she murmured absently, thinking aloud. “A letter came last night. They're working flat out, twenty-four hours a day. One of the men injured had been in France. He stumbled somehow. I must go up there and see what's going on. Inefficient overseer, tired workers. It seems one can't escape it. The war reaches in and touches everything. I feel as if greasy hands are enclosing us.”

“You're tired,” John said. “You must try not to think about it.”

She turned on him fully now, eyes flashing. “Not worry about it!” she exclaimed. “Really, John. You sometimes sound so much like William. The mills are my responsibility. My father left them to me. I know those people inside out. I know my son and daughter, I see them going out into the world, and I wonder what kind of world it is that we've gifted to them. I wish it weren't so. I wish we had done more when we could.”

“Done more?” he echoed. “What do you mean?”

She sighed, shaking her head. “Not been so smug years ago, John.
When I think of how I sat in Rutherford like a stuffed doll and did nothing but arrange for the color scheme to be altered in the drawing room.” She allowed herself a gust of exasperated laughter. “We were so sure of everything. The Empire on every continent. Masters of the sea, all that. Prancing about waving flags and swords at whole countries and taking them under our wing as if they didn't have a mind of their own. We should have learned. Look at Russia. God knows what's happening to the Tsar now. Abdication! We built a world destined to fall apart, John.”

“My God,” he murmured. “You need to stand for Parliament.”

To his surprise, she didn't look shocked. “I heard a whisper the other day,” she said. “That if Waldorf Astor is given a peerage, and has to resign his seat, then Nancy might stand for it instead of him.” She nodded triumphantly. “Imagine that if you will. And I can.”

“Well, well,” John murmured. “While I've been busy, you've been plotting insurrection. I expect I'll come back and find you've got a whole lot of suffragettes in here as well as the crowd from the Café Royal.”

Now, she laughed with real delight. “But aren't they wonderful!” she said. “Complete bohemians. I would like to have lived that sort of life.”

“Why so?”

“Oh, it's so much freer. More abandoned. You know.”

“More abandoned?” he said, his voice lowering. “Do you mean more abandoned than you are already, Lady Octavia? How astounding. How impossible.” He kissed her, and she wound her arms around his neck, ineffectually seeming to push him away for a moment, and then relaxing into his embrace.

“I really should be getting dressed,” she said, as he manoeuvred her backwards towards the bed.

“Let's see,” he said. “Do we like that idea?” He made a momentary
show of pretending to consider it, then suddenly picked her up, sweeping her off her feet. “I don't think so,” he told her. “No, I don't think I like that idea at all.”

•   •   •

I
n Dorset, the rain had swept through during the night, and it was a morning of scattered sunshine.

Just after dawn, Charlotte was standing in the garden behind the house, looking out onto meadows crisscrossed by irrigation channels. Sheep were grazing in the fields. After watching the undulating expanse of green for some time, she drew her coat around her and walked down the long garden path, passing the lawn and the flowerbeds.

Under the three large apple trees farther down, daffodils had flowered through the grass. She paused and looked at them, scuffing her foot among them, lost in thought. Then she noticed the small gate in the fence, and she went through it, finding herself in a wilder patch. Some kind of weed had taken over here; it was a mass of blackberry trailers and straggling shrubs. A large hawthorn hedge now obliterated the view of the fields.

All was perfect silence. She tilted her head and looked at the sky, where the clouds raced. She stood there, quite unmoving, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, for twenty minutes or more.

Cold eventually overwhelmed her; she could feel the damp clay through the thin soles of her shoes. She glanced around in a kind of confusion, wondering if there was some way out in this part of the garden: a path through to the village, perhaps. A road back into town.

Then, frowning, she shook her head; and, wiping the tears from her face, she began to walk back to the house.

M
onchy
. To Jack Armitage's mind, the name of the French village sounded like a made-up word, something that had been dreamed up by men like him, who labored with the foreign language, shortening and stunting its poetry. He stood, head down in a faint sleeting rain, the reins of a horse in each hand; patient beasts that angled their heads towards him, their flanks trembling against the cold.

He thought about the French names, but on the whole he didn't like to think much. If he allowed his mind to wander, it would always go straight back to Yorkshire, to Rutherford. It would go straight back to Louisa's face, and her arms around him.

No, that would not do. It was too terrible to think of how far away that was, and how much—how very much—he wanted to return to it. He would go in an instant if he could be given the opportunity. He dreamed of her often; he wrote to her almost every day. He poured what he could into the letters, but was always mindful that his parents might open them. He knew, however, that she would read
his true feelings behind the banal words. He only wished that he had a better education so that he could eventually write something really poetic. Something that sounded as he really intended.
You are my very soul.
But then, to his mind, that was too much, too extreme, too flowery. Just to put it on a page like that. It would almost be making it ordinary to write such a thing.

But it was what he felt, even so.

Unconsciously, he shook his head. It would do him no earthly good at this moment to think of Louisa. He would rather let his mind stray to the horrors. They would sharpen his concentration. And there had been plenty of them.

And so he concentrated on the cold, and the ground, and the warm breath of the horses.

From this hillside, you could see a flatter plain beneath them. They were on one of the highest points for miles around, a relief from the months of swamp-fringed Somme and railway lines that ran through fens, and canals among coalfields.

Captain Porter swore under his breath as he walked back now towards Jack. Jack liked this man; he was from Derbyshire, a countryside that sounded like his own with its high ground, and a village called Eyam. Little villages, little villages. Jack closed his eyes. Across the valley they could see snow falling, a thick white curtain drifting towards them.

They could hear the artillery in Monchy in the valley below.

The artillery were in Feuchy, taken the evening before by the fifty-sixth division. Feuchy. Monchy. Wancourt. Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines. Words that ought to be in a song because they sounded like pretty pictures.

Jack Armitage stood in the windswept street lost in this dream of words, things he had learned, a little of another language that he had kept in his head. At times like these, in the depths, in the
murderous battles, he repeated the words to himself over and over. Green hillsides; he had known those once. Long ago, in another place. It was less than year, but it seemed like centuries. Green grass and meadows full of wild orchids. Wild garlic in Rutherford's woodlands by the river. Moorland high above, blazing yellow in the summer. Home. Ah, he couldn't help it. His mind would race back, the way that the animals raced away from the noise. He allowed it, was drowned in it; he leaned momentarily on the horse and it seemed to him that the beast leaned in towards him, invalids both, each afraid in their own mute way.

He thought about a place up there at Rutherford, a place long forgotten by the Cavendishes, but that he knew very well: a deserted place among the bracken on the edge of the trees. There was a derelict cottage, little more than four bowed walls, and a roof with loose tiles cascading into a space that had once been a garden. He had gone there half a dozen times with Louisa. Just sitting, although none of the men he knew now would have believed that. Sitting while summer rain came and went. And shadows came and went, and sun slowly crept across the floor. In darkness, too.

Hillsides and softly tangled gardens, and orchids. A river running through Rutherford's grounds, blissfully shallow and warm in the heat, raging in winter as the melt came down from the moors. Grey in rain, blue and peaty orange when it ran clear. Granite washed smooth in the riverbed, and iron veining the red stones. In his mind now he saw two images: a little village girl running through the shallows of the river where it turned in the village center, under the bridge—a little girl he'd gone to school with once, whose name he couldn't now remember. Hair flying, and a long sprigged muslin frock dancing around her. He saw her now clearly, this nameless friend, turning back to him and squealing with laughter.

And he saw Louisa resting in the crook of his arm, a strand of
fair hair caught across the collar of his jacket. Saying something, murmuring something. He tried to recall the exact words, the tenderness of them.

So much went away even when he tried to summon it. Some weary man, a regular soldier, had said to him when he first came here, “You'll find things go blank. It's the getting used to everything. Bear with it.”

And so he had. Borne with it.

In 1916, he had signed up to the veterinary corps. He had gone to Louisa's father and asked if William could use his influence to secure a job for him in the corps. Louisa had only nodded when he had finally made his decision. But she knew what he wanted all along, and said not a word in opposition. Unlike her father.

William Cavendish had looked up at him from his study desk, and shaken his head. “That's not possible. We're low on manpower as it is. So many have gone. You're needed here, Jack.”

Jack had been holding his cap in his hands, willing the older man to understand him. “The horses were needed too, sir. They need looking after over there. I can do that.” The yeomanry had come and taken Wenceslas in 1915, their big grey Shire, and the farm ponies. My God, that morning had broken his heart. Poor animals that shied away at the least noise. Dumb animals that he owed his care. He'd watched them being loaded into the vans, bound for the railway stations, bound for the coast and the ships—things that they had never seen, and could not understand. He'd lost sleep thinking about them, thinking that he ought to have gone with them and not been a reserved occupation there at Rutherford.

Even so, there had been a lot of reasons given to prevent him enlisting, and a lot of sighing from Lord Cavendish. But eventually his lordship had agreed, and written to a man he knew in London. On the day that Jack had left for the veterinary corps, his mother
and father had stood in the stable yard, motionless, silent. He knew that they had everything to say, and no way to say it. His father had eventually shaken his hand, and his mother had looked at him with her eyes brimming with tears. She'd turned her back and gone into the house before he was even out of that yard and walking down the long drive. He'd walked past everything he wanted to keep, and everything he'd known since he was a boy, out of peace and into devastation.

And now it was Easter, 1917.

He had barely listened to the Easter Sunday service. It was not that he wasn't a Christian. He wanted to believe it. He had, after all, believed it all his life. But then being in France had changed his mind about resurrection. None of the dead that he had seen would ever get up and walk like it said in the Bible. Nobody here was Lazarus. And for certain, nobody here was Christ.

“Are you awake?” the captain asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You're swaying about. Stand up.”

He did as he was told. All the green images, all the pretty-sounding names vanished as he opened his eyes.

They'd come up with the veterinary station and the third cavalry late last night. Into Feuchy, onto the redoubt. A river lay in the valley ahead of them: la Scarpe. Behind them was The Triangle, where one of the new tanks had taken the area, blasted its way through. Jack had passed it by in the evening light, a monstrous-looking thing, eerily inanimate among the communication lines, the twisted railway, the long column of mules, the heaped wall of corpses.

They had stopped there for a while.

It was strange: this ground that had been so lethal was now silent except for the tramping of men and the sound of artillery getting farther and farther away in the twilight as the Germans were pushed
back. Jack glanced over at the dead. Literally pile upon pile that had been stacked at the side of the road like kindling. One man's arm lay in the way, curved like a plea for mercy, or a call into the dead's kingdom. An artillery gun had run over it as he watched, but still the fingers seemed to be beckoning him.

He had looked away.

What had once been a church and a large chateau nearby was now just a mound of ruined brick, with trees grotesquely reduced to split trunks. The village had been evacuated the year before, so at least there were no civilians to haunt them. Shattered winter branches lay in the road, and tumbled walls, and several wagons on their side. A few dead-eyed and exhausted German prisoners passed Jack by, glancing at him only momentarily, too weary to raise their heads, their bodies slumped, their hands hanging by their sides.

Jack had been waiting outside a barn whose roof had miraculously escaped being completely torn away. Inside, they had housed twenty horses. The beasts routinely shook with fright. He had helped to bed them down, although rations were poor. They needed much more feed than was available, but the corps did its best. He'd seen men give their own biscuits, soaked in a bit of tea, to their mount in an effort to soothe them. And he had done that for an hour, going around to each horse, murmuring to them. Nonsense about pastures and soft, quiet bridleways: things they would probably never see again.

He had not been outside for long when a troop of the field artillery came by. High-spirited because of their success. He heard a bitter-sounding laugh: the kind of laugh that a man could give when he'd won over an enemy.

They had stopped suddenly by the German dead.

“Souvenir, mates,” one said.

They started looking through the bodies, kicking the dislocated
arm away with the tip of their boots. Going through the pockets, they threw away pocketbooks and photographs. Soon pictures of sweethearts and children and parents littered the ground. Out from one tunic came a pocket Bible and a letter written in classic geometric script. It was screwed into a ball and lobbed over the mound of tangled bodies. Then they found a Prussian whose tunic had rolled back and showed a belt. With a lot of tugging, they took it away, and one man slung it over his shoulder with a shout of triumph. Rumor had it that German snipers crawled out of their trenches at night and took the cap badges from their victims, and put them on their belt like so many Indian scalps. The belt that the artillerymen had found was once such, with a dozen or more badges glinting on it like trophies.

The veterinary corps stayed behind the front, having gone through Feuchy in the night shooting horses and mules that could not be helped, and pulling their bodies out of the way. It was a job he abhorred, dreaded. But the suffering of the mortally wounded animals was much worse than that final merciful shot. It was his duty to dispatch them. Sometimes he felt glad, even. Glad they were out of the nightmare, and that he had released them.

Around midnight, Jack and another man dug a trench in a boggy piece of ground where a small stream had once run. They had hoped to bury the horses, but their spades soon struck rock. They tumbled the corpses down and scraped some of the splintered tree branches over them. They knew the burial parties would come up soon for the men, but no one would have cared about the horses.

Captain Porter took the reins of his horse now from Jack's hands. “Where are you from again, Armitage?” he asked.

“Yorkshire, sir.”

The officer nodded. “I should have guessed with a name like that. The Yorkshire Regiment attacked Bullecourt yesterday. Know anybody in that?”

“No, sir. I knew a man from my place of work that joined the Borders with his brother. Name of Nash.”