In Distant Fields (36 page)

A sound came from down the ward. She stood up, shading the light on her desk with a hand. Peering into the gloom of the ward, it seemed to her that she could see someone else getting out of bed. She was sure of it, she could see the figure quite plainly, heading not for her station but walking calmly in the opposite direction, with one arm of his pyjama jacket flapping uselessly by his side.

As the memory of Vera Logan's words came back to her, Allegra found it took all her courage to walk down the ward once more. It was Rory Jenkins! Was he too dead? Her mouth went dry as she put out a hand to touch his arm, but this time it was a proper pyjama jacket, and it was Rory Jenkins all right. He was sleepwalking.

Allegra could have laughed out aloud with relief as, holding on to his good arm, she led him back to his bed and settled him in once more.

‘Everything all right, Nurse?' Sister asked as early morning dawned, and at long last it was time for Allegra to go off duty. ‘Any trouble at all?' she asked, picking up the night duty log.

‘None, except Rory Jenkins sleepwalking.'

‘They do that, you know. Sometimes it's a sign
of getting better, I always think, trying to get out of the hospital, go home. Now off you go, Nurse,' Sister instructed her. ‘Go home and get some sleep. We're expecting a big intake today, so we're all going to have to be on our toes in the next hours.'

Allegra thanked Sister and was about to take her leave, only to be stopped by a call from the bed of the patient sleeping nearest to where she had been sitting at her desk.

‘Nurse,' he said in an even quieter whisper, indicating for her to come as close to him as she could. Allegra bent down to hear what he wanted to say.

‘Yes – yes – Mr … ?' she said, searching for his name.

‘Jim, dearie. Jim'll do just fine.'

‘What can I do for you? Is there something I can get you?'

‘Not get me, no – but there is something you can do for me.' He looked up at her. ‘Write a letter to my mother for me? Tell her where I am, how I am, you see I can't––' He nodded at his right hand as if it was a person. ‘He doesn't work right, see?'

I know, I know.'

Allegra sat down by his bed and, taking out some of her own paper and a pen, she started to write the letter for him. Sleep, after all, could wait for just a few more minutes.

*     *    *

Maude looked up from penning her latest letter to Hughie in America. It was her last-ditch attempt to try to persuade him how unnecessary it was for him even to think of returning to England. The army would not want him; his asthma would mean that he would be passed unfit. It would be foolish to return. Even as she signed the letter she knew what his reply would be; it would be the same as he had said last time they had exchanged letters. ‘No matter, Mamma,' he had written. ‘I will be happy to take anything on offer.'

In fact, even before his mother had sat down to write to him on the subject, Hughie had undergone a medical examination in New York to ascertain the current state of his health and had been privately delighted to be told that his condition had improved dramatically. Neither he nor his doctor could understand the exact reason for his improvement.

‘I can only think that it is the lack of damp here, or just being away, the change; that can happen to asthmatic patients. I have seen it before.'

Hughie smiled. ‘Or it might be a well-deserved absence from my beastly father,' he volunteered.

The doctor laughed. ‘Could be, Mr Milborne, could be that exactly, who knows?'

Hughie had, however, decided to keep the good news from his mother until he returned, when his intention was to enlist as soon as possible. He simply could not abide the idea of not
going to the party along with all the rest. Bertie was going. He would go too, and that was all there was to it.

Later he sat down to write to his mother that as soon as he could wrap up his affairs in America he would be home: ‘If the army won't have me, then I can always join a knitting circle!'

In the hurry that always follows a decision, he forgot to post the letter, and it sat behind the clock on his mantelpiece for some weeks. Finding it at last, just before his sailing, he quickly put it in what he had learned to call the mail with a PS on the back of the envelope: ‘I might be home before this!'

It irritated Kitty that Partita was quite so good at knitting, particularly since she knew how much Partita hated it. But although she was still only-learning the skill, she could knit as fast as anyone else seated round the library fire – a number that included both Tinker and Bridie, who could both already knit – with her feet up in front of her on an ottoman, racing through ball after ball of wool while sighing deeply with boredom all the while.

‘I've always had this capacity to pick things up quite quickly,' she said between sighs.

‘Quickly?' Kitty laughed. ‘If there were an English Ladies knitting team you'd already be on it.'

‘Oh, I don't think so.' Partita frowned. ‘I may look as though I can knit but you haven't yet seen what I'm knitting.'

She held up her handiwork for assessment. It was greeted predictably enough with amazement from Kitty and laughter from the maids.

‘May God help the poor lad who gets that,' Bridie grinned. ‘Sure he wouldn't know whether to wear it or put it on his tea pot.'

‘It is meant, I think, to be a body warmer,' Partita said gravely.

‘Yes, but what part of the body is it meant to warm, Lady Tita?' Tinker asked, poker-faced.

‘A foot, perhaps,' Kitty said helpfully. ‘Or maybe an elbow?'

‘If we're talking perhapses, then perhaps you all ought to wait until I've finished,' Partita suggested. ‘At least it's a cheery colour. Guaranteed to bring a smile to the face – and actually while we're on the subject, you do wonder what the point of all this knitting is, if they're all going to be home for Christmas. What is the point?'

‘Since it is now only two weeks away,' Kitty said. ‘I don't
really
think that prediction holds any more.'

‘No,' Partita agreed. ‘I know it doesn't. But then it doesn't do any harm to keep thinking it – just in case of miracles. Have you any news more about Tommy Taylor, Tinks? Since he volunteered.'

‘Didn't I say, milady?' Tinker replied, casting off her knitting and holding it up to appraise it. ‘He come up from London two days ago 'cos he had some leave, and he looks so good in his uniform, I can tell you. He looks really smart.'

‘He's bound to, Tinks. He always looked the part in his livery; took every eye.'

‘And he looks every bit as smart as a soldier, milady. His battalion's part of Kitchener's Third Army, and he says once they get over there, look out, Jerry.'

‘He's not going out before Christmas, surely?' Kitty wondered, looking up from her needles.

‘Ah, no, surely not, please God indeed,' Bridie agreed. ‘Surely they'll stick a white flag up for the Holy Season – please God so they will. They'd never be shooting at each other during the Nativity now, would they?'

‘I understood that no fresh troops were to be sent out until the New Year,' Kitty assured her. ‘But that's only hearsay. Something the Duchess said the Duke had mentioned.'

‘Papa is still simply furious, being stuck behind a desk in Whitehall,' Partita reminded them. ‘Said it's neither fish nor fowl, being a general and being given a pen instead of a sword. He told Mamma he had a very good mind to issue himself an order to go over to France and join his regiment, and when you think of it, it's not such a bad notion, because who could countermand him?'

‘Tommy says his lot aren't going to be sent over till May,' Tinker said, casting on for a new garment. ‘He says he heard if they were sent sooner Jerry wouldn't have a chance, but seems they're being made to wait so that when they do all go over, the New Armies this is, they'll be really certain of victory.'

‘And now who needs the wireless or the newspapers when you've got young Tinker here?' Bridie wondered. ‘She's a positive goldmine of information.'

‘What about Tully then, Bridie?' Tinker wondered, glancing at her friend. ‘Still not made his mind up?'

‘He says he must see to the horses first, then he'll decide,' Bridie replied. ‘All this requisitioning, he says it's a wonder they haven't been up here yet.'

‘Tommy's brother, who lives down in Essex, he told Tommy they've taken just about every horse there is in Essex, so they'll be bound to be up here soon.'

‘Just don't tell Papa,' Partita said. ‘Can you imagine?'

She looked at Kitty, both of them knowing what a fell blow it would be if and when the purchasing officers finally came to call.

The Duke had failed to persuade the powers above him to offer him more than his present desk job.

‘Anyone would think we were finished, Boodles,' he confided aloud to his boon companion as the dog streaked ahead of him across St James's Park. ‘Truly, anyone would think one had lost one's marbles, instead of gaining a few more over the years. Still, might make it an excuse to kick on back to Bauders for a few days over Christmas, bit better than kicking one's heels in London.'

He was hardly home, and feeling once again oddly at a loose end, probably due to the busy nature of Circe's hospital routines, and one thing and another, when Jossy, having picked him up from the Halt, reappeared before him as he walked about the park, Boodles dashing in front, much as he had been earlier in London.

‘Ah, there you are again, Your Grace. Sun's bin up more than a few hours, so doubtless we'll be going for a ride, won't we?'

‘Will we, Jossy?'

‘I'm thinking that's what Barrymore Boy just told me.'

‘Oh, good.' The Duke nodded. ‘Good idea, Jossy. Blow the London cobwebs away, eh? Come on, Boodles, time to change for a ride.'

When the Duke walked into his stable yard, Jossy had already saddled up Barrymore Boy, and was holding first his bridle by the saddling block and then the stirrup leather opposite to the mounting side as John swung into the saddle. Almost at once, and before they walked out of the yard, both horse and rider gave that particular sigh that men and their horses are wont to give when they are once more reunited.

Just for a second, before Barrymore Boy's hoofs started to touch the still damp grass, it seemed to the Duke that the park lay before them spread out as if on a vast table, with trees and deer merely toys. Yet they were real, just as his toy soldiers had been real when he was a small boy
and playing on his own on the top floor of his father's house, wondering at the sights and sounds of the grown-ups below him in the same park through which he now began to trot and then canter.

The scenes through which horse and rider now cantered were those of winter, but a perfect winter in which the frost had hardly melted off the leaves of the magnificent old trees planted centuries ago by his ancestors. As Barrymore Boy started to canter, faster and faster, John knew that their spirits were as one, and as he flew over a wooden stile and increased his pace into a gallop, he happily surrendered thought for sheer sensation. It was as if all the worries and the cares of the past weeks had been pounded from under him, and he was ageless, a free spirit surrendering to the moment.

Finally he eased his mount back to the first halt they had taken, now they were back in the park, John taking the view from the last rise that overlooked his home, the ancient stonework of the great house illuminated by a great watery midday sun.

‘Home, old fellow,' John said quietly, pulling one of his horse's big ears back gently. ‘
Dulce domum
. Home sweet home.'

They were waiting for him in the stable yard, standing idly smoking cigarettes, one of them seated on a water barrel, the other leaning over an empty stable door. Hearing the clatter of hoofs
on cobbles and seeing the upright figure of the horseman and the scurry of the grooms to take the horse and attend to the rider, the two men had little trouble guessing the identity of the new arrival, and extinguished their cigarettes at once, straightened their caps and marched down the yard to introduce themselves to the Duke.

The purchasing officer, a small wiry man with an intense look to his eyes, a neat ginger moustache and prominent rabbit teeth, introduced himself officially to the Duke and stated his business.

‘Name – Thomas Dyke. We are here to requisition horses, sir.'

The Duke eyed him. ‘Yes?'

There was a way of saying ‘yes', and another way of saying ‘yes', and Jossy knew that way of His Grace's saying ‘yes' after a bit of a pause – and it was chilling. However it did not seem to have much effect on this Thomas Dyke.

‘We have already called on your tenant farmers, sir,' Dyke stated, moving towards the Duke to show him the list of horses already earmarked for service. ‘You will be paid the sum of forty pounds for the ordinary horses up to fifteen hands three, and up to the top limit of seventy pounds for beasts deemed suitable as officers' chargers. The animal from which you yourself have just dismounted, sir – a good stamp of a horse mark – should fetch you the seventy pounds.'

‘The horse to which you refer, sir, is already
spoken for and will not be going to you,' John replied, nodding to Jossy to take Barrymore Boy away. ‘The horse has been loaned to Captain Harrington of the Dragoons, a neighbour of mine, and that is where he is to go.'

‘That is a matter for debate, sir,' Dyke replied, regarding the Duke with a pair of singularly mean dark eyes. ‘My instructions are to requisition all suitable beasts, after which they will be sent to the remount centre to be trained for service and to be allocated as the army sees fit.'

‘You aware who you're addressing, man?' Jossy asked, stepping in between the two men, while still holding hard to Barrymore Boy. ‘His Grace has made his wishes perfectly clear.'