Castle Orchard

Castle Orchard

Also by E. A. Dineley

The Death of Lyndon Wilder and the Consequences Thereof

E. A. DINELEY

Constable & Robinson Ltd

55-56 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2014

Copyright © E. A. Dineley 2014

The right of E. A. Dineley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

Data is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78033-590-2 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-78033-593-3 (ebook)

Printed and bound in the UK

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Cover by Leo Nickolls

For Christopher Bryant

On a clear day, from the top of the high chalk downland, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral may be viewed, a sliver, a needle of light. Chalk downland undulates, dipping and rising, massively, in this direction or another whilst holding little villages, running water, manor houses and grey stone churches in its various green indentations. In one such valley bottom there is a particular village, not large; an estate, perhaps only apparent by a pair of gates in minor disrepair; a wide bend of a river, a church and a rectory, all lost in obscurity, impossible to find.

Within that distant rectory the Rev. Hubert Conway, a widower, not only does his duty by his parishioners in the village of Orchardleigh but, with the aid of his younger brother, keeps a school for preparing young boys for entry to Eton or Winchester.

The rectory has a dining room with three trestle tables, some rooms upstairs with several rows of small sad beds, and a spacious apartment given over to recreation on wet days. It looks over the cricket ground, the meadow that leads to the big house, the garden, the shrubbery and the river. Below, in the cellar, in the cold and the gloom, amongst the boots and the diminutive greatcoats, the lost hats and the winter mufflers, the cricket bats, hoops and forsaken clutter, Sam Jackson regales the boys with those things that make their hearts beat faster with emotions a mixture of horror and delight.

Mr Conway employs Jackson to clean the boots and fetch in the firewood. The man is not able for much else but it is not proper, in the eyes of the rector, to ignore and starve those who have returned alive from fighting tyrants, in particular Napoleon Bonaparte. Mr Conway believes Jackson to be a sad, ignorant fellow with his wooden leg and his single eye, but however ugly and unwholesome a sight, however poor in mental powers, he is yet one of God’s creatures. The rector reasons thus, but Jackson is a fearsome body and it is safe to say the rector actually knows nothing about him. He, perhaps naïvely, assumes youth to be innocent, the souls of the young to be unsullied and Jackson to be merely unfortunate. Waywardness takes Mr Conway by surprise and sins of a more dire nature cause him confusion. He has no concept of original sin, or certainly not after baptism has put all to rights. He is himself perfectly innocent: his pupils, even his three sons, are well in advance of him.

Now he sits at his desk writing letters. He dates each one 18 June 1825. He is aware of it being the tenth anniversary of that great, decisive battle, Waterloo, but he hopes if no mention is made of it his pupils will not heed it, for it is a matter so distracting they will never be got to attend to their Greek: but he has not allowed for Jackson.

As the boys see it, Sam Jackson has only one fault. He lost his leg and his eye at Toulouse, which precluded him from Waterloo. It is but a small drawback, for was he not at Salamanca, Talavera and Vitoria? In the cavernous space of the cellar he sits on an upturned barrel, a short clay pipe clutched between his teeth and, by the light of a single candle, spreads his arms over the heads of his audience, whose eyes are fixed, fascinated, credulous and incredulous by turn.

‘Wide as that, yer vultures were,’ Jackson says, for his fields of action are Portugal and Spain. ‘Yer dead and wounded were breakfast and supper for they, breakfast and supper for weeks on end. Yer looked up at a sky that only sort o’ peeked out from yer rocks, yer rocks being that ’igh an’ yer vultures sort o’ swooned off the edges an’ floated about till they flopped down on yer bodies an’ gobbled ’em up.’

Jackson pauses for effect before adding, ‘They can’t never ’ave known it so lucky: wish yer commissariat ’ad been so regular with the rations, yer lump o’ meat, yer biscuit, yer lump o’ bread.’

‘But Jackson, you buried the dead, you told us you did.’

‘When there was time yer buried the dead. They wasn’t buried none too deep. Turned up the sods with our bayonets an’ the wolves turned ’em up again. Time were in short supply.’

Jackson repeats the last sentence while jabbing his stick at a curly-haired infant in the front row, who half muffles a frightened cry. He then sits back and starts grumbling to himself. ‘March here, march there, march back: dizzying it were. Walk across the river, don’t stop, don’t bend, don’t drink, ’old yer piece above yer ’ead, keep yer powder dry, cross yer plain, climb yer mountain: yer mate gets ’eatstroke, screams and dies.’

He has forgotten the children. One by one they sneak away, reluctant, to fight other battles, in Greek and Latin, on the plains of Troy. Jackson continues his mutterings to the greatcoats and boots and yearns for his rum ration to loosen his bones.

Across the meadow from the village, the church and the rectory, lies an old, rambling, misshapen mansion of no great size or pretension. It stands a little back from the winding river which, in its course, winds around an old heap of stones, here and there one upright or one on another, all that remains of the castle; it winds round an octagonal turret, the Philosopher’s Tower; round a hot, sleepy meadow in which grazes, footfall by footfall, a stout pied pony, the rhythmical tearing of the grass the only sound beyond the chattering of the water; and it winds round an old apple orchard with the trees leaning every which way, but with no breath of a breeze to stir them, as if they play at statues: such is Castle Orchard, though the orchard could never have been the present one but some other orchard of long ago, or the word corrupted from another word, the meaning of which is lost. Such is Castle Orchard at the approach of midsummer.

Within the house a woman sat at a table, a woman perhaps verging on thirty years old, perhaps a little younger. It was apparent she took no particular care of her dress or her appearance in general, but to any who could overlook a worn garment and a pair of scuffed shoes of the workaday sort, there was something pleasing about her, though she was tired. Before her were the ledgers that held the accounts for the estate, the home farm and the house. Were these not always tiring? The agent had left them with her that she might understand them before Quarter Day, and when the rents came in, wrest what she could for repairs. Barns must be snug, roofs watertight, gates mended, ditches dug and, not to be forgotten, a pig raised and a barrel of ale provided for the bucolic activities the village, by tradition, associated with 1st May, over for this year but needed for next. Servants must be paid, though these numbered few; tea and sugar bought, salt – the necessities of life that could not be produced at home. The anxiety, the endless struggle, gave her a headache, she who never had headaches. Her mind ran on lists: milk, cheese, butter, beef, mutton and pork, eggs, honey, apples, plums, pears, peas, beans and saladings and sovereigns, half-sovereigns, guineas, pounds, crowns, shillings and pence. It would be easier to let the estate go to ruin.

She closed the books and reached for her pen. It was time she wrote to her half-sister. Louisa was the better correspondent but there were things to be said, especially today. She paused before beginning. Fond as she was of Louisa, she found it difficult to write. She had to practise a certain amount of subterfuge, though without telling lies; gloss over facts; make light of things, though without too much pretending. It was a fine line to walk but Louisa never could be told all: she was too young, and too unworldly, perhaps too happy, to be burdened. Today it should be easier because there was something of which she would like to speak, a recollection, a quiet sadness: there was no one but Louisa to whom she could speak, so she drew the ink towards her, dipped in the pen, started.

She laid the pen down for a minute. What would Louisa remember? What would she have been told? Of the latter, nothing creditable to her older half-sister. Would she remember their house in Devonshire thronged with young soldiers, officers, some already in uniform, hastening this way and that, bidding goodbye to their families, joining their regiments? They were sharing transport, exchanging information, gathering about her cousin Charles, because everyone always did, some going to Cornwall, some to Somerset, some stopping the night, some ready to embark. Two or three were from his own regiment, but there were others who were his mere acquaintance: an engineer, a cavalry officer he had, it seemed, gathered on the road. Would Louisa remember all of that or only the subsequent event, the event that had led to her own, not Louisa’s, incarceration, disgrace and all the troubles that had followed? Would she remember Charles finding it a grand excuse for a party, not that Charles had ever needed much of an excuse for one of those, the country dances and the springtime moonlit garden? No, Louisa had probably been sent to bed.

The next thing they knew, Charles was dead. It was the second great sadness in her life. She had lost her mother when she was a child, and at barely eighteen she had lost Charles, who had been to her as a brother. What of that could she say to Louisa? Suddenly the letter seemed harder to write than she had thought. Charles had died on the battlefield. And those other young men, what had been their fate? What carnage, what waste. As a family, they never learnt.

She stood up. Phil should have crossed the meadow and be back from school by now. She went to the window. The river could be seen and the stones of the castle, though Phil always said, crossly, that there was no castle. She could see the orchard. Where was Phil? She then saw Domino, the stout piebald pony, making the most of the June grass. Phil was there, not coming in, making his way towards the pony. He clambered awkwardly onto its back and lay on his front with his fair, curly head facing the tail, his legs hanging down, those skinny legs of which he was inexplicably ashamed. In one hand he held a long stick. She watched him. She looked at the river, the orchard, the view. Phil lay so still he might have fallen asleep. Of what did he dream? All of a sudden he sat up, slid from the pony and half-shouted, though his mother could not hear him, ‘They can’t, they can’t.’