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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
The year is 1919 and the population of Great Britain is still struggling to its feet after being hit by the atrocities of the First World War. Progress is slow, even in quiet spots like the village of Broughton Underhill, on the edge of the Black Country. Gradually, soldiers return, wounds begin to heal and people try to move on with their lives. But for the Wentworth family, this proves to be impossible as former police sergeant Herbert Reardon returns to the village, determined to finally find out what happened the night that his daughter, Marianne, was found drowned in the lake all those years ago, when the war was just beginning.However, as Reardon begins to investigate, it becomes clear that secrets still abound and lips are staying sealed. When Edith Huckaby, a maid from Oaklands Park, is found murdered in exactly the same spot, Reardon is convinced that the two cases are linked. As Reardon tries to discover the hidden truth, his suspects and witnesses are painstakingly trying to rebuild their lives, in a world which has been changed and scarred forever. Broken Music is a masterful portrait of the horrors of the frontline and the anxiety of the home front, as the loves and losses of wartime Britain are woven together and the truth slowly dawns on a local tragedy.
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Seitenzahl: 509
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Broken Music
MARJORIE ECCLES
Contents
PART ONE
Early March 1919
Chapter One
The crow flies up from the valley on steady wings, making straight for the group of stunted trees crowning the summit of the hill. The one he alights on is a spindly thorn, not tall enough for a nesting place, and a skeleton into the bargain, having been struck by lightning two years previously, but that isn’t why the crow has chosen it. From his perch, he surveys the immediate terrain with a bright, cold, practised eye, on the lookout for small animals or birds, worms, insects, anything that moves. Or better still, carrion.
He waits, unmoving, biding his time. Directly below him, out of sight, are caves hewn by prehistoric ancients out of the soft red sandstone of the hill. And below that, the village of Broughton Underhill, sitting comfortably as it has done since Saxon times alongside the shallow river which rises at the bubbling springs and the holy well of St Ethelfleda, and after that winds through the length of the village, at one point on its way broadening out to form the lake of the big house, Oaklands Park.
Down there, the March afternoon is still, cold and quiet, so quiet its everyday sounds float up to the hilltop: the children’s voices as they tumble noisily out of school, and the district nurse’s bicycle bell as she makes sedate haste towards the imminent arrival of a new baby; the sound of the church clock striking four, and faintly, the jingle of the harness as old Harry Packer and his great draught horses, busy with the spring ploughing in the ten-acre field at the home farm, turn the rich red earth.
Nothing stirs up there on the hillside. Nothing catches the crow’s beady eye. After a while he gives up and, with a hoarse croak, spreads his wings again and glides on the thermals back down into the village.
The crow was there again, hunched on the washing-line post in the back garden of the rectory, as he had been intermittently for days, like a black Puritan parson, when Amy took the corn out for the hens. It was a task she hated. Senseless creatures they were, screeching like flustered, hysterical old women. The slightest thing agitated them but they had to be tolerated, providing as they did much needed eggs and the occasional boiling fowl.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose when she saw the big bird and she clapped her hands to frighten it away, but only succeeded in provoking the silly hens to further squawks; with the same hard, unblinking stare the crow went on regarding her efforts to scatter corn from her basket as far as she could, in order to keep the hens from her feet. She would have crossed herself if she’d been a Catholic, or if she hadn’t thought her father might be watching out of his study window.
Florrie said crows were bad luck, they brought infection, they were omens of discord, and even death, and after the last years no one wanted any more of any of these, thank you very much. Well, yes, Amy thought – but I for one don’t intend to go on being miserable now that the beastly war with the Germans is over, now that I’ve turned eighteen and might begin to make up for what I’ve missed while it was on, stuck here in this dreary backwater. All very well for Florrie to sniff. But I don’t ask for much, really…dresses that I haven’t had to make over myself; some real jewellery, not just that childish string of corals and the pearl ring that was Mama’s; pretty shoes, she thought longingly, scuffing the toe of one hated, serviceable lace-up into the scratched, dusty wasteland the fowls had made of the backyard; some soft, embroidered underwear, scent, parties and dances. And later, a nice house, and pretty little babies… And, of course, a husband. She shivered deliciously at the frisson that ran down her spine.
One of the brave, handsome men returned from the front, he will have to be. One of the survivors, young and eligible. There’s going to be a scramble for those who are left. Of course, it’s ridiculous to think of me, Aimée Wentworth, having the ghost of a chance among all those girls (although some of them are practically old maids now, having waited all these years!); those girls who are rich, ready to grab, not as choosy as they had been before the war.
But I, too, have assets…and I’ve seen how young men look at me.
Amy forgot the crow, excitement making her pulses race faster as she gazed, unseeing, at the gloomy old trees crowded behind the house and nourished these not altogether unattainable dreams with a mental list of her considerable attractions. True, she had no money, and she wasn’t at all clever, like Nella or Marianne – but what man wanted a clever wife? Just look how Nella had thrown her chances away – that certainly hadn’t been clever. Amy herself had other assets – sparkling hazel eyes and the rich, waving red hair she had inherited from her mother, a well-curved little figure; she knew perfectly well how appealing her glowing looks were, and would be even more so if she had the right clothes to show them off. She had a good temper, an ability to laugh often, naturally pretty manners, and knew how to behave: she hadn’t wasted her time during the hours spent with her honorary aunt, Lady Sybil, and Eunice, at Oaklands Park, but had listened and learnt, even while they were only knitting those everlasting scarves and socks for the Tommies on the front line, or boring old squares to be made up into blankets for Belgian refugees from scraps of leftover wool.
And by no means least, as their grandmother never let them forget, there were the family connections which still meant a great deal: their mother had after all been a cousin of Lady Sybil’s, a Greville like her, and before her marriage to Papa, had come out herself. Though much good it had done her, thought Amy, who had scarcely known her mother and had never been allowed near enough her father to really know him, either.
But yes, my turn will come, and I won’t let it slip from my fingers, she vowed, her chin taking on its stubborn tilt, already aware that luck was what you made it. Aunt Sybil will have time and opportunity for social life again, once the last convalescent soldier has gone away, the hospital is closed and Oaklands restored to what it was before the war. There’ll be house parties and tennis parties again and Eunice will want me and Nella to be invited, especially now that Grev won’t be there. Grev, and…and…the others. But don’t think of that.
Amy never allowed herself to be despondent for long. She wholeheartedly agreed with Florrie: if you don’t look after yourself, nobody else will. And anyway, if the worst came to the worst, she thought defiantly, tossing her red curls, she had the means in her power to make what she wanted happen.
But the thought of this was a little bit too daring, even for Amy, and she swished round to go indoors, clapping her hands and whirling the empty basket at the black harbinger of doom still eyeing her from the washing post, just to show she wasn’t to be intimidated by a mere crow, but he didn’t move. Until she turned away; then, with a rusty caw that sounded suspiciously like a cackling laugh, he flew away to busy himself with the mice in the church belfry.
The afternoon sun had grown lower in the sky when, sated with mice and on his way back to his roost, the black bird paused to rest on a bedroom window sill of the Greville Arms, but no one noticed; there were things of more importance going on in the room. The publican’s firstborn, nine-pound baby had not long ago uttered his first cry in the world – or rather, a lusty shout, thought his exhausted but exultant mother, smiling… Oh, yes, his father’s son all right, she thought fondly. Another Sam Noakes. Strong as an ox, a lot of noise, but soft as butter. She and her baby gazed at each other and Mattie found in this new little face total recognition, and fell in love all over again.
They hadn’t been married when her Sam had enlisted with the Worcesters right at the beginning of the war. Couldn’t keep him back, though he was mithered about leaving his widowed father, bad as he was with rheumatism. But Walter Noakes, a veteran of the war with the Boers, had been as eager for him to go as Sam himself. ‘What? Let the bloody Kaiser stamp all over us? Not likely! You get out there, son, and wipe the floor with them Germans! You’ll be home by Christmas, see if you won’t.’
Some hopes! Four years later, they were still fighting, all those men of the village who’d joined up together and seen action in all the worst of the war – at places with unpronounceable names, that the Tommies called Wipers, Pop, Armenteers… Sam, lucky Sam, big flaxen-haired Sam with his muscles honed from all that helping his uncle in the smithy next door in his spare time, had miraculously gone through it all with only minor wounds and a dose of trench fever, until the Blighty one at Neuve Eglise. Shrapnel tearing through the flesh of his leg, that was, a bad enough wound to get him a ticket home and a brief sick leave, but not bad enough to prevent him being sent back to the front afterwards, as the daily lists of those lost began to fill page after page after page in the newspapers.
Just two weeks they’d had together, during that last home leave. She, fearful, he persuasive: ‘Come on, girl, I’ll take care of you – you’ll be all right. Say yes.’
‘All right,’ she’d replied. He hadn’t said he might never come back, he didn’t need to, with nearly everyone they knew losing sons, fathers, brothers, cousins, and the news from the front blacker than ever.
But in spite of his promises, she’d found herself pregnant after he was sent back to the front. Heads were shaken, of course they were, but Broughton had never been overjudgemental about the ‘mishaps’ that happened from time to time in their village; they were two healthy young folk, after all, and Sam was a hero, wounded and going back to the front and all. She’d had to leave her job up at the Big House, but she would have done that anyway to come to live at the pub and help out, to look after Sam’s father and wait for the baby. A few months later, the miraculous happened: the tide was turned against the Germans and they were forced to retreat, the Armistice was signed and Sam was safe and one of the first to be sent home, just in time to put a ring on her finger before their baby should be born.
Sometimes, Mattie could scarcely believe her good fortune. That she, Mattie O’Hara as was, one of the seven O’Haras brought up in the two-bedroomed cottage at the end of Water End Lane, had not been left alone with a child to bring up, and that her man had come home whole in his body and right in his mind, not like some. And that, God willing, she would never know poverty again now, it being in the nature of things that innkeepers, while never becoming rich, maybe, were never short of business. And more than that: in time, the smithy next door would come to Sam, his Uncle Ted being childless.
The afternoon sun poured in and the baby’s greedy little mouth found her breast and latched on to it, his eyes closed in total abandonment as he began his first attempts to suck. Mattie leant back and was content.
The district nurse felt the shadow of the crow across the window as she came back into the room. She wasn’t superstitious, but this had been a good birth, easy for a first one considering the baby’s size, and she was taking no chances. She put down her can of hot water, dropped the armful of clean sheets on the end of the bed and marched to the window, but she was too late, the black bird had already gone, flying home on strongly beating wings towards Oaklands Park.
For a while, he seems to pause over the small lake in the grounds, turned to sheet gold by the dying sun. His glance appears to rest meditatively for an instant on the old, broken-down boathouse and the rotten posts of the old jetty still standing above the water, and the sombre conifers surrounding the lake, and the red cliff of the Hill rising above. He wasn’t alive at the time of the happenings there, but perhaps some atavistic memory stirs in him. Neglected, like everything during the last few years and never very sturdy, the boathouse itself now looks ready to follow the jetty into the lake.
Warrant Officer Jack Shawcross, 1st Battalion, Duke of Wellington’s Yorkshire Regiment, lay on the bed that had been wheeled out on to the terrace, the blankets rearranged around him by Nurse Wentworth before she went off duty. He watched the colony of birds noisily settling on their nests in the tall, leafless elms opposite, their branches a black tracery against the cold sunset. Rooks or crows, he could never be sure which birds they were, though he had plenty of time to observe them, with nothing much else to do but look into the blank void that was his future. Wondering whether it was possible to be so broken, and yet find the possibility of going on.
At night, when the roaring dreams and sweats came, and the agony in his non-existent legs began, he tried not to think about golden-haired Emily, the girl he’d been engaged to, and the last letter she’d sent him.
Chapter Two
1901–1905
The Wentworth family had not always lived here at Broughton, in the gloomy rectory. When the children were young, they had all lived in Worcester, in a pleasant house called White Lodge, just off the cathedral close. They had a pony and trap, the little girls went to a small school run by the genteel daughters of Canon Wigmore, they had a large garden to play in, a pretty house to live in, a handsome father, the Reverend Francis Wentworth, and a beautiful, much admired mother.
Mama had been – well, a less vibrant version of Amy, delicately pretty, with large hazel eyes fringed with dark lashes and an amazing cloud of hair of that shade of red she had passed on to all of her children, in varying degrees. Nella’s most lasting memories were of her reclining on the sofa in the drawing room, looking too fragile to hug, but palely smiling, smelling of violets and always wearing lovely, becoming clothes. Sometimes she read them stories, or played the piano for them to sing to, but they were not encouraged, in general, to pester her too much in case their boisterousness should bring on one of her headaches, or fainting fits.
Their papa, a tall man like William was to become, extracting his fob watch from his top pocket after half an hour of their company, seeing Dorothea reach for her smelling salts, would suggest, ‘Perhaps it’s time for you to go and play now, children, and leave Mama alone to rest for a little while.’
Mama, smiling faintly, would add, ‘My darlings, you know how I love having you all around me. But my head…your voices. Just a little…piercing, I’m afraid.’
But sometimes, Nella did not really believe that Mama did like having them in the drawing room – or not when Papa was there.
Guiltily, they would creep out into the garden, followed by Queenie, their shaggy English sheepdog puppy, and for a while play as quietly as possible, so that the noise they made should not reach as far as the drawing room. But after a while natural high spirits would prevail and William would persuade his sisters to embark on one of his adventurous games, climbing into the orchard over the wall, for instance, where they weren’t supposed to go because it didn’t belong to them. Nella, small and quick, ready for anything, would in any case usually do whatever William suggested, but Marianne, more often than not, preferred to be alone, lying on the grass or rocking gently on the swing, her red-gold curls, fine and soft as spun sugar, spread like a curtain over her shoulders, not doing anything in particular. Dreaming, as usual.
Amy had been born when Nella, the youngest, was four, in January, 1901, on the same day that the old queen died. Everyone expected her, like so many other baby girls born on that day, to be named Victoria, in honour of the queen’s memory, but Dorothea had already chosen names for her unborn child – Amyas if it should be a boy, after her father, since William had been named for Francis’s father, and Aimée if, disappointingly, it should turn out to be another girl. Aimée it was, but no one now ever bothered with the fancy, Frenchified pronunciation Mama had no doubt intended, except Amy herself, as she grew older. Dorothea was not there to enforce it. Four years after Amy was born, she gave birth to another baby daughter who died after just two days, and then she herself followed, leaving a legacy of guilt behind: with her son and elder daughters, feeling that if they had been better children, quieter, their voices not quite so piercing, their mama might not have died; and with their father…
Well, who knew what Francis felt?
No one except, perhaps, Eleanor Villiers, Dorothea’s mother, and she could only suspect. Dorothea had never been strong, and Eleanor’s late husband, an otherwise sensible and down-to-earth doctor, had been neither where his daughter was concerned. Amyas could deny her nothing, she could do no wrong, with the result that Dorothea – pretty, spoilt, and difficult into the bargain – had really never shown much sense.
Even in her own pain over the loss of her daughter, Eleanor could find room to pity Francis’s obvious agony, but all the same, she thought, lips tightening…a delicate mother, four children already! In the first place, William’s difficult birth had nearly cost his mother her life, and a strained three years had followed, during which Eleanor had prayed that he would be their only child, but then another two babies, first the peaceful Marianne, then lively, energetic little Nella, appeared in quick succession, and later Amy, none of them easy births. That should certainly have been the end of it. But when it came down to it, Francis, despite his splendid appearance in the pulpit, the eloquent sermons, delivered with such conviction in his mellifluous voice and listened to with such respect, hadn’t shown much sense, either. He, a man of the cloth, a man of high principles, should surely have shown some restraint. And surely knew it.
After Dorothea died, Eleanor decided she had better stay on with the family to help out, not only from a sense of duty and because she was in any case lonely in her recent widowhood and needed something to fill her life, but because she loved her now motherless grandchildren, and there was little prospect of their father, wrapped up in his own troubles, offering the guidance they needed.
They were to leave Worcester and the cathedral, and their house, their school, their friends, everything they had previously known. Only Florrie would go with them, for she was to be four-year-old Amy’s nurse. She was far too sensible a young woman to remain a parlourmaid, said Grandmama Villiers, their dear Grandy, who would be giving up her own house to come and live with them when they moved.
‘But I don’t want to go away!’ declared Nella passionately, stamping her foot. ‘I won’t go if we can’t take Queenie!’
‘Now, now, Fenella, don’t be silly!’ Grandy spoke severely. ‘Of course Queenie will be coming with us; she’s a country dog, you know. She’ll love it at Broughton Underhill. And so will you when you get there.’
Nella was absolutely determined she would hate it. It was all going to be quite horrid, strange and new; only for lucky William would it make little difference. His life was now centred on his prep school twenty miles away, and they said he could just as easily make the journey from there in the holidays (and later from Rugby, where he was to go when he was old enough) to their new home, which would be the rectory at Broughton Underhill.
‘Does that mean, Father,’ William asked, when they were summoned into Papa’s study some two weeks after the funeral, ‘that you’ll be rector there?’
No, Francis told them. He would not be the rector. In fact, he would no longer be practising as a clergyman at all.
So that was why he was wearing a stiff collar and a tie, instead of his clerical dog collar. The children had absorbed, if not fully understood, through scraps of conversation picked up, and hints given by their mother, the belief that their father was settled here as a member of the cathedral chapter until one day he would be appointed dean, or archdeacon, or possibly bishop. This last they could well believe, their father being such a God-like creature. But what they had just heard was a puzzle, unmapped territory. Nella looked at her sister but Marianne, almost as though she hadn’t heard, was far away as usual, dreamily watching a robin on the window sill outside who seemed intent on attacking his own reflection in the glass. Nella was still feeling mutinous about the move, though she had been somewhat reassured by hearing that at least their grandmother would continue to be with them. So much had changed and become alarming lately, but Grandy was always the same: kind – though quite strict, and sometimes rather sad since Grandpapa, and now Mama, had died.
‘Father…’ William began, then hesitated. Twelve years old and already big for his age, muscular and athletic, untidy, his hair flopping over his forehead, he stood rigid and pale, the freckles on his nose standing out. He was growing up fast and had sensed things in the atmosphere, was nothing if not courageous – and had learnt more from the boys at his prep school than not to call his father the babyish ‘Papa’ any longer.
‘What is it, William?’
‘Oh, nothing…it doesn’t matter…it’s nothing, not really, sir.’
‘William, you know me better than to believe that will serve as an answer.’
William went from white to red. Shuffled his feet. ‘Is there…? Have you…?’ He stopped and then came out with it in an embarrassed rush: ‘Is there…anything wrong, sir?’ There was only one reason, William had discovered, why clergymen parted company with the Church. Disgrace. And the whispers, like the ones that had followed the tutor at his school who had disappeared one day, never to return.
Francis’s deep, dark gaze was bent on him. ‘Not in the eyes of the world, if that is what you are trying to say. It is entirely my own choice, and what is wrong is a matter between me and God.’ His frown, and his tone, remote and far away, forbade any further questions.
Nella held on to Marianne’s hand, as much to reassure Marianne as herself, for she often felt as though it was she who was the elder sister. William stood straight as a ramrod. They looked at their father, speechless, not understanding, their eyes begging for an explanation which Francis struggled for but was not able to give, since he barely understood what was happening himself. He turned his back and in his turn looked out of the window, then said in a curious, hoarse voice, without turning round, ‘That’s all, children. You may go.’
Papa had never been a very jolly sort of father, not the sort who picked you up and gave you rides on his shoulder, made jokes or played French cricket with you in the garden, like other people’s fathers did, though he sometimes smiled and patted you on the head. He was never unkind, or even very stern. But he was not the sort you could talk to, and his authority and rightness were not to be questioned. Outside the family, people spoke of him with a little awe, although everyone said he was not only the best-looking, but the most looked-up-to clergyman on the cathedral staff as he strode round the close with his quick, impatient stride, heels ringing, the skirts of his cassock flying.
But after Mama died, he had shut himself away for days in his study, and when he emerged he had become a different and rather frightening man. He hardly smiled at all, spoke rarely, and when he did he sometimes offended people.
He was, in fact, so rude to Nanny Rudd that she upped and left – or was sent packing, according to Marianne. Although she went about with her head in the clouds, as Nanny so often accused her, Marianne always remembered everything she heard – or overheard. This time it was what Nanny had said to Florrie (who wasn’t Florrie then but still Greenwood, the parlourmaid), and though Marianne didn’t really understand it, she knew it had made Grandy very angry. ‘Well, I don’t care, I’m sure, Florrie!’ Nanny had said. ‘I can’t live in the same house as that man a minute longer, anyway! Wouldn’t even look at his own baby, poor mite – can you believe that? It wasn’t the child’s fault she died,’ she had finished, inexplicably. ‘He’s a man, after all, and we all know—’
‘That’s quite enough, Nanny,’ Grandy had said sharply, entering the room just in time to hear this last.
So Nanny departed, and Nella had declared, ‘I don’t care that she’s gone,’ using the absolutely forbidden phrase (‘don’t care is made to care, miss!’) since Nanny herself had used it. ‘She’s a beast! And you’re not to scold me for saying that, either, Marianne!’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Marianne mildly. ‘I agree with you, she is.’
Nanny Rudd hadn’t been comfortable or kind, not like the nanny of their friends the Collins girls. She was strict and sharp and had strong fingers that dug into their scalps when she washed their hair, and pulled it back painfully when she tied their black bows. She saw to it that everything they wore was starched: their pinafores, handkerchiefs and even their drawers. Itchy britches, Nella named them. She was only nice to William, even when he was cheeky or disobedient. But then, nearly everybody was.
Broughton Underhill turned out to be a small, straggling community of some three hundred souls, a village situated in a valley between two ridges of hills and dominated by the largest of them, Broughton Hill, known simply as the Hill. The brisk climb to the top was strenuous, but the view from the top was worth it. On the one side the green Worcestershire countryside rolling towards the distant Welsh mountains. On the other, half a dozen miles away and spreading outwards as far as the eye could see towards Birmingham, began the industrial sprawl of the Black Country, which William, home from school and full of the history he’d learnt there, informed Nella had once been a great forest, the hunting preserve of kings. Land which was now despoiled, riven by canals and railways, punctuated with smoke stacks and great glass-work cones, its trees cut down years ago for fuel, its rich ores mined to feed blast furnaces and steel mills.
Sometimes, the more restless young men left the village to seek work in the nail and chain shops, the iron foundries of Cradley Heath, Halesowen or Blackheath, the glass works in Stourbridge and Brierley Hill, or they went in the other direction, to the carpet factories in Kidderminster, looking for betterment, or purely from a sense of adventure. But mostly people stayed: there was usually enough work on the Oaklands Park estate and the farms, up at the gravel pits or the brickworks, and if you worked for the estate, they looked after you for life. Apart from that, there was nothing much else in Broughton: some small houses and cottages, the schoolhouse and the Greville Arms, the smithy next door, the church of St Ethelfleda and the gloomy rectory where the Wentworth family were to live. And of course, the Big House itself, Oaklands Park.
Amy had only the vaguest recollections of the family’s first arrival in Broughton. Nella laughed and declared she could have had no recollections at all, since she was only four years old at the time; she only thought she had, from the stories she’d heard so often of that day when they had all arrived there. But she must have remembered some things, since she could hear in her mind, quite vividly, Grandy’s shocked exclamation at her first sight of the rectory, dark and forbidding, its tall, dilapidated chimneys vying with the square church tower for height, looking as though it were being pulled back into the clutches of what seemed like a forest of ancient and forbidding dark yews behind it, planted too near the house. It was a huge barn of a place, built at a time when rectors regularly had families of ten, eleven or more. Missing slates, peeling paintwork, collapsed guttering…
Inside it was worse. Dusty, moth-eaten curtains; dark wallpaper, stained and discoloured by damp; old furniture from earlier decades, most of it no doubt the unwanted property of previous incumbents, since the huge pieces were all but immovable, left stranded about the place like beached whales. It was piercingly cold.
Worst of all was the big stained-glass staircase window which increased the gloom of the high, cavernous hall rather than lighting it. Mrs Villiers speculated on the nature of the rector who had chosen such a highly unsuitable subject for a window in a rectory. Susannah and the Elders. Who wanted to be faced every day when they came down the stairs with two lecherous old men spying on a young woman bathing in her garden? The girls giggled when they saw it, but fortunately the window was so dark and gloomy, and further obscured by the huge yews outside, that the subject could only be discerned properly on close inspection.
This unprepossessing house had become their new home entirely due to the elderly incumbent of St Ethelfleda’s, the Reverend Wilfred Dorkings, having endured a particularly bad bout that year of his annual bronchitis, after which he had no option but to give up the struggle and live with his niece, the village schoolmistress, while still continuing as rector. Father Dorkings was a saintly bachelor who cared nothing for luxury (unless it was candles and incense in his High Church) and had lived mainly in the kitchen and his study, where he also slept, not even noticing the depredations which time, damp and neglect had wrought. Since he made no complaints to Lady Sybil, in whose gift the rectory and the living of St Ethelfleda were, the state of the house had gone unnoticed, and when she received the letter from Francis Wentworth (who had been a significant presence in her life since she was a child, her cousin Dorothea’s husband, and a frequent visitor to Oaklands) telling her of his abrupt and astonishing abandonment of the ministry, and his having nowhere to live, she had made the offer of the now empty house.
On their arrival Eleanor Villiers, having summed up the situation in one look, set her lips in a firm line. ‘Very well!’
The next day, in a violet silk gown trimmed with ecru lace, her many-tailed furs dripping over her shoulders and clasped together over her bosom with the beady-eyed mask of the unfortunate little animal who had provided them, her best towering grey velvet and moiré hat skewered firmly to her hair with an outsize pearl hatpin, her first action was to have old Strudwick, the verger and sexton, harness the pony into the trap and drive up to Oaklands Park, taking the reins herself. She had known Sybil since she was a baby and, outraged at the dirt and discomfort they were expected to be grateful for, had no compunction in giving her a piece of her mind.
What had she been thinking of, she demanded, sitting very upright in the comfort of Lady Sybil’s warm, flowerscented drawing room, sipping Earl Grey from delicate Crown Derby china balanced in her hand, what could have possessed Sybil to offer such a backhanded gift – nothing more than a hovel, when it came down to it, she added, exaggerating for good measure – to a bereaved, motherless, penniless family? This last was a further exaggeration. Francis was not, in fact, entirely penniless: he had a private income, though only just about adequate to cover William’s school fees and the day-to-day expenses of looking after his family – and there was in fact nothing backhanded about Sybil’s offer, though it had indeed crossed Eleanor’s mind to wonder about the mixed motives which had caused her to offer the house, and Francis to accept.
Sybil was mortified. ‘Really? As bad as that, is it? I must confess I haven’t had occasion to visit the rectory for years. I will certainly see that something is done at once.’
For all the fashionable clothes, the society manners, she hasn’t really changed, Eleanor thought, she is still the same generous, impulsive, careless girl she always has been – in fact, she has turned out better than ever anyone would have expected, considering the circumstances of her upbringing. Sybil’s mother had died when she was a young child, and her profligate and unheeding father, John Greville, Earl of Broughton, as careless of his only child’s welfare as he was of his inheritance, had left her in the care of a succession of indifferent nurses and governesses who turned a blind eye to her roaming the countryside, wild as a deer, with the gamekeeper’s son, until this state of affairs became no longer tenable even to her father. She was sent to live in London with his sister to be transformed from a hoyden into a young lady, relieving him of responsibility for her while he pursued his gambling and, under a mountain of debts, let the house slide into shabby and disgraceful ruin. The estate itself remained in better case, the earl having his reputation of being one of the best shots in England to keep up. Although he had found it necessary to sell land off piecemeal to stave off his debtors, the woods and coverts remained well managed and maintained.
Despite her protests, Sybil’s eventual debut into society was a success, if measured by the whirl of her activities, the friends she made. She was never a beauty, her features were too strong for that, but she was lively and popular and learnt how to dress well. It would have amazed no one if she had sold up and never returned to the dereliction that was Oaklands on her father’s death, but in fact she had confounded everyone by marrying a rich industrialist much older than herself, whose money enabled her to restore the house to its former glory. Arthur Foley was a self-made man and something of a rough diamond, but he had a kind heart and Mrs Villiers wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t had something to do with Sybil’s offer of the rectory.
She was wrong in this. Sybil was, in fact, taken aback by a situation she hadn’t truly known to exist, and aghast at how her neglect of her rector must have appeared. Moreover, the picture painted by Mrs Villiers had brought back to her what it was like to live in a run-down house – a hateful memory never far from her mind – and she promised to make amends, by way of despatching workmen to repair the roof, to paint and paper, hang new curtains and do anything else that needed to be done. Incapable of doing anything by halves, she went on to suggest that the two eldest girls, Marianne and Nella, might be allowed to share her daughter’s governess for their lessons. Miss Osgood only had Eunice to teach, her brother, Greville, being away at school, of course.
Much mollified by all this, Mrs Villiers forgave. She thanked Sybil warmly, and added that she thought Francis might well agree to this solution to the girls’ education, something he appeared not to have taken into account.
Her visit to Oaklands had in fact been most satisfactory, she decided as she drove the pony trap back and into the stable behind the rectory, but even so, she could not imagine how they were ever going to make this house into anything resembling a comfortable – even a warm – home.
But she and Florrie (who was already beginning to take on the indispensable role she was soon to occupy: nanny, housekeeper, cook, and dispenser of comfort, brisk advice and support) set themselves the task of creating order out of chaos and, as women do, quite enjoyed it if the truth be told.
There wasn’t much they could do about the cold. The bedrooms were worst of all, stifling in summer but so icy in winter that the flowery patterns of hoar frost, actually inside the windows when the children woke, were sometimes still there when they went to bed at night.
Lady Sybil, however, had crowned her generosity with one hitherto unimaginable luxury: a bathroom was installed, with hot water provided by the kitchen boiler and stored in a huge copper cylinder that loomed like a leviathan in one corner of the bathroom, a great comfort on which all three girls, despite being expressly forbidden to do so, would perch in winter while Marianne told them stories she had made up, huddled together like birds on a chimney pot to get warm before diving between the icy sheets and curling up into a ball to conserve any warmth they’d managed to gain.
In a small village like Broughton Underhill, where nearly everyone was someone else’s sister, parent, brother-in-law or cousin twice removed, newcomers were of intense interest and the Wentworths were at first objects of much speculation. Francis was, in fact, remembered by many as a frequent visitor to Oaklands, as a child and later, when he had spent weekends there taking part in the shoots, both before and after his marriage, and when word got around that he was in holy orders, it was believed that he was there to offer assistance to the ailing Father Dorkings and to be ready to step into his shoes when he retired. Instead, here they had a clergyman who rarely darkened the doors of the church, and never ministered; a gentleman who was obviously of somewhat straitened means, yet who was not visibly employed. His tall figure soon became a familiar sight, tramping interminable miles over the hills, that great woolly sheepdog at his heels, and eventually it came to be accepted that he was unlikely to be seen much in church, alongside the rest of his family. Mrs Villiers saw to it that they, at least, attended the services every Sunday. The children were often about the village, where they were liked for their unaffected manners, especially little Amy, who chattered to everyone and was given sweets and patted on the head because she looked so pretty.
Eunice, with whom the girls now shared lessons, was pretty too, a sweet-natured creature, but so shy and timid with anyone she didn’t know well, it was painful to watch. She was a delicate little girl who suffered from a bad chest and indeed looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away. Grev they only saw when he was home from Shrewsbury. An intense boy, very highly strung, his dark eyes too big for his pale face, he was doted on by his mother. Funny Grev, people said, so odd, but so talented. He was always playing some musical instrument or other – the piano, or the cello, or whatever his fancy had settled on at that particular time – and had already decided what he was going to be when he grew up: Greville Foley, composer, he told them, matter-of-factly. He was constantly scribbling at little pieces of music he was creating and became impatient with his sister and Nella when Marianne alone showed any enthusiasm for being allowed to play these with him. All three girls were of course taught the piano as a necessary accomplishment for young ladies by Miss Osgood, but Marianne was the only one who persevered beyond practising scales and learning to play simple pieces.
Mrs Villiers had once hoped Francis would find his salvation in marrying again, but that hope soon perished, though salvation of a sort did come when Father Dorkings, growing more frail, managed to persuade Francis (though only Father Dorkings knew how) to assist him in the parish, acting as a sort of unofficial curate, until someone could be found to take the old rector’s place so that he could retire. However, no other clergyman could be persuaded to accept a living where the rectory was occupied by someone else, and this unsatisfactory situation – to Eleanor at least – continued, though Francis gave no indication as to whether he found it so or not.
But all that was before the war. A war which had begun in some obscure corner of Europe and gathered momentum until it involved the whole world, changed the face of Europe and wiped out a whole generation of young men. Yet, even when it was over, after four long years, and peace had come at last, there was no question for the Wentworth family of returning to life as it had been… that life had ended abruptly, gone for ever, with a tragedy that had nothing to do with the war.
Life as they knew it had ended on that cataclysmic day at the beginning of August, in 1914, when the world was already swinging crazily round on its axis, out of control, as if it were the great lump of clay Joel Rafferty threw on his potter’s wheel before getting it centred and shaping it into submission. Such a clamour, an upheaval, so many things happening at once. The country turning to preparations for war and all that entailed. The huge thunderstorm that night, like a prelude to the thunder that would presently roll over Europe. All of which had seemed at that time almost an irrelevance, shocking as that might seem now, of less importance then than the personal calamity which had altered the lives of the Wentworths for ever.
The day they had lost Marianne. The day the music stopped.
Chapter Three
1914
But the world did not stop. Marianne had gone, for ever, but the world rumbled on, the war gathered momentum. And in the end there was no question, as far as Nella was concerned, of staying meekly at home while every young man of her acquaintance was marching off to war, eager to defend poor little Belgium from its arrogant invaders, the Germans, who had marched through neutral territory on their way to northern France and thus to Paris. Since she was prevented by her sex from beoming a soldier, she had done the next best thing and taken herself off to enlist as a VAD nurse. She had screwed up her hair, put on a severe felt hat ‘borrowed’ from Florrie, and added years to her age in order to appear old enough to serve in France when she’d completed her training, and though she knew the doctor signing her up had not believed her, the shortage of nurses, plus her earnestness and determination, must have carried her through.
She began her training in a big London teaching hospital where she learnt that windows must be opened three inches during the day and two at night, and to straighten the castors of beds so that they were not a quarter of an inch out of line, that a speck of dust was a sin, to make hospital corners when tucking in the sheets, and to obey Sister at all times. She did not see a wounded soldier until troop trains arrived bringing the hundreds of wounded and dying men from the battlefield they called the Somme.
Enormous as the shock of this was, it did not prepare her for what she encountered when she was sent overseas to nurse the casualties there. 1916. Flanders. Plunged straight into the thick of it with her fellow nurses, there she had the first taste of what war really meant.
‘Dear Father, Grandy and Amy,
Well, here I am at last, on active service, after a seasick crossing over the Channel which I will not upset you by describing. I have been assigned to a camp hospital, comprising long lines of camouflaged marquees which serve as wards, with tarpaulin passages connecting them. I am billeted in a bell tent with my friend, Daisy Musgrave. (You remember her, my fellow VAD who trained with me in London.) It’s all very military, but our tents are quickly becoming our home, with all our own things around us.
Like everyone else, I have brought too many clothes and personal possessions with me, though no doubt there will come a time when I shall be very glad to get out of uniform and into civvies for visiting the town when I’m off duty. Daisy has carted a gramophone with her everywhere, through thick and thin. She plays the latest dance music all the time and teaches me all the newest steps.
Don’t worry about me – we are well fed and watched over and chaperoned within an inch of our lives. We thought the hospital rules in London were strict but that was nothing to what they are here!
To keep up the morale of the men, there are concerts and sing-songs which we nurses are graciously allowed to attend, and jollifications organised for the men who are well enough, often with soldier dancing comically with soldier at these, because nurses must not partner them. Nurses must not dance with other nurses, either…nurses must not wear their own fur collars around their necks to keep out the icy wind as they run from their tents to the wards…nurses must not, ever, consort in public with officers…nurses must be saints, not human beings. So you can see how difficult this must be for me!
I am lucky to be bunking up with Daisy. She’s awfully nice, such fun and never grumbles, though this nurse’s life she has chosen is harder for her than for most, since she comes from a very grand family, and has never before needed to lift a finger to help herself. (Unlike me, with a sensible grandmama who has always brought us up to be useful around the house; thank you, Grandy!) She is very pretty and has lovely thick fair hair which is a great trial to her and keeps slipping down because she’s always had a maid to pin it up properly before. But she never minds when she has to do the jobs everyone hates, and she’s better than anybody at keeping the boys’ spirits up. They call her Sister Sunshine.
We VADs are all known to the Tommies as ‘sister’, much to the fury of the pukka, qualified sisters, which must be galling for them, after all. Their rank is very important to them, after the years of training, hard work and little pay they’vehad to endure to reach it. They keep up their self-importance by ordering us about as if we were children, and not very intelligent ones at that, but we are used to this by now and most of them relent when they get to know us. “Your assistance is not without its drawbacks, Miss Wentworth,”was all Sister Johnson said to me when I dropped and broke a syringe the other day.’
In the letters home which Nella wrote for those Tommies who were not able to write for themselves, they spoke jokingly of the rain, rain, rain, which would not drain away in this low-lying land, and played down how it filled with mud the bomb craters, and the overflowing trenches they were compelled to fight in; they did not mention that men, guns and horses were regularly drowned in the thick ooze, and did not speak of the horrific wounds and the deaths of their comrades; nor of the stink of death and corruption from unclaimed, unburied bodies, and the latrines which could be smelt half a mile away.
And neither did Nella mention the shock which had awaited her and her fellow volunteers. She was only one of the many young, half-trained girls, for the most part gently raised, living previously sheltered lives, most of whom had never even seen a half-dressed man before, never mind a naked male body. Having to do for them the intimate things which might help them to survive, nursing the sick and wounded in improvised, primitive and often filthy conditions which would have horrified the strict training hospitals they had so recently left. Cutting off mud-caked uniforms before they should set like cement, in order to tend stinking, gangrenous wounds and horrifying internal injuries, dressing the stumps of limbs lost by red-hot shrapnel, which could slice through an arm or a leg as easily as a piece of spaghetti; it all became second nature.
‘But I’ve left my best bit of news until last,’ she had concluded that first letter. ‘Grev is working here, too! Can you imagine how astonished we both were – me, especially? He was the last person I expected to see.’
In one of those happenings which are called coincidences, but which happened all the time in the random chaos of this war, she and Greville Foley had found themselves working in the same unit, she nursing and Grev as a non-combatant stretcher-bearer, a job which earned the respect of everyone, since it meant plunging out into no-man’s-land in the thick of enemy fire to bring back the wounded and dying. Unarmed, not trained to use weapons or handle ammunition, their only defence a white brassard, or armband, with a scarlet cross on it.
Chapter Four
Now, four years later, and with the end of the war and Oaklands as a hospital ceasing to exist, Nella’s work as a nurse was coming to an end, and there was an alarming gap stretching in front of her, an emptiness she couldn’t think how she was going to fill.
‘Why don’t you carry on nursing, become qualified?’ Miss Inman had suggested. ‘We need more women of your calibre in the profession.’
A life devoted to the alleviation of human suffering sounded worthy and lofty, and many of the other temporary nurses she had served with were seeking in it an escape from what might well now be a life of idle, enforced spinsterhood, but Nella didn’t feel that was justification enough. She had volunteered and done her duty willingly, and not only because she had found in it an antidote to the restlessness which had consumed her before the war. But now she was, in effect, back where she had started: even in those pre-war days she had upset a good many people by rejecting what she had seen as the aimless life projected for her, its sole object to get herself married as soon and as well as possible.
Oaklands Park was a Queen Anne house built of brick that time had turned to a warm rose pink, in its approach looking smaller than it actually was, being tall and narrow at the front, flat-faced and shallow-roofed, four storeys high, but stretching out a long way towards the back. Wall shrubs spread out at its base, seeming to anchor the tall house to the ground and prevent it looking top-heavy, while climbing the walls were Virginia creeper and roses – Gloire de Dijon, Albertine, Zephirine Drouhin (a bad choice, this – a rose of a vibrant pink colour that clashed horribly with the brick, but kept because it was thornless, had a rich fragrance and bloomed continuously). Where the carriageway from the road ended, the hundred-yard-long drive began, running ruler straight towards the front steps between a double row of yews, with grass stretching either side behind them, in turn flanked by matching herbaceous borders against brick walls, until the drive swept into a circle round a central fountain and then continued round towards the back.
Nella emerged from the back door with her usual haste, passed the stables and the carriage house now used to accommodate motor vehicles and ambulances, and made for the arched wooden door set in the old brick wall, struck anew by a glimpse of the disorderly aspect of the ornamental garden at the front. The borders were overgrown, with last year’s growth not cut back, the gravel was grass-grown and weed-infested; the roses on the walls, taking advantage of neglect, lolled unsupported and unpruned; the shaggy yews nearly touched each other, almost begging for their annual clip into the neat candle-flame shapes Lady Sybil had always been so particular about. Trimming them was a four-man-and-a-boy job and there was only Hughes and his garden boy now, where once there had been six men employed to look after the gardens, three of whom would never return.
Hughes had left a basket of vegetables for her outside the potting shed. Despite all the odds, he’d managed to keep his kitchen garden in good shape. The glasshouses might be empty of the peaches, nectarines and grapes, the hothouse roses and stephanotis which had filled them before the war, but the neat rows of cabbages, potatoes and onions were what mattered now, and kept the family in fresh produce, with some to spare. Compared to those unlucky beings in the towns and cities, Broughton Underhill, accustomed to being self-sufficient, had never gone hungry in the wartime years; they’d never had to queue miserably for even the bare necessities as food became scarcer and dearer. Sugar and tea rationing had hit them as hard as everyone else, and meat and dairy produce had been commandeered by the government, but what farmer was going to deny his family and friends a bit of butter, enough milk? In one or two backyards the odd clandestine pig rooted, hidden from officialdom – while snaring rabbits and hares and taking a game bird or two for the pot was an inherited skill for some in Broughton, and easy enough when lame old Scuddy Thomas was the only help the head gamekeeper had, and they both turned a blind eye, anyway.
Nella picked up the basket of parsnips and carrots and let herself out through the wicket gate that opened onto the ancient oak woods which had given the house its name. She hurried on, and as she reached the stile, the clock over the old stables chimed the half-hour and for a moment she hesitated, but then she climbed the stile steps and perched on the top rail, pulling her red-lined cloak around her. It wouldn’t hurt to snatch some time to herself.
A strong, cold wind blew across the fields and she impatiently tucked back into the confines of her uniform cap some escaped strands of the slippery dark chestnut hair, less red than that their mother had passed on to all the rest of the family. Her mind jumped back again to what had happened this morning, when she’d first heard from matron the name of the doctor who would be arriving within the next day or two to replace the present MO, who was leaving the army for good. Captain AD Geddes. Duncan Geddes. Yes, of course it was him, no mistake. And in a world which had for so long been so very dark and grey, a secret warmth flooded her.
She’d done her best to put the implications of his imminent arrival out of her mind while she worked, without conspicuous success, it had to be said. Panic touched her every time she thought of how she might react when they met. Even his name had stirred up feelings she thought she had controlled, despatched firmly into the past. What fate had sent him to Oaklands, of all places? Fate? Surely not. The thought that she might be working here must almost certainly have entered his mind.
She gazed, seeing and yet not seeing the familiar view which had shone like a glimpse of remembered Heaven beyond the mud and devastation in Flanders: rolling pastures and meadowlands extending to the ha-ha which protected the gardens of Oaklands from wandering cattle; to the left the big house itself, the figures on the terrace made tiny by distance. A tranquil, timeless scene. Transformed in autumn by the gold and amber of beech and oak, the trees were as yet bare and leafless, waiting for the true spring and the haze of bluebells that would spread beneath their feet. The dying sun was low and red in a cold green sky. A white flock of seagulls had flown inland, beautiful in flight, raucous and screaming as they followed the plough, scavenging for worms and small creatures fleeing from the blades as the earth was turned. The rows were arrow straight, a matter of pride and habit for Harry Packer, who’d learnt to plough a furrow trudging with his father behind the huge and heavy, patient Cleveland bays when he was thirteen. Still going strong at eighty-two, he should have been enjoying a comfortable retirement by now, but like his old ’osses, was still in harness and proud to be so – ‘till the boys come home’.
In front of her, beyond the stile, lay the path that led across the field and down to the lake. Nella could look at that dark stretch of water now without trembling inside, but she still couldn’t make herself pass through the stile and take the short cut from Oaklands to the rectory which passed by the lake. She, and all the family, were marked by what had happened there; they, and the others, too: Steven Rafferty, Eunice, Grev especially. And perhaps Rupert, though how would they ever know about Rupert?
