The Gates of Rutherford (18 page)

“Something here, you mean?”

“Yes. Do you recall the old carding shed? It's empty now. On the moors road.”

“Yes, I know it.”

“I want to make a workshop up there. We might make ribbon-edged baby blankets, or gloves. Something of that kind. The men would not have to work on the looms, but in finishing. Something quiet and productive. Fancy items. My daughter is at St. Dunstan's in London and the men there make baskets. It is very successful, despite their disabilities.”

“And you would like me to organize this?”

Octavia was regarding him closely. It was as if she had launched into some foreign language, it seemed, by the perplexed expression on Ferrow's face. “Mr. Ferrow,” she ventured. “You need not worry about bothering Lord Cavendish. This is something that I shall pay for with my own money, as my own project.”

But he was merely staring at her. He seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation completely. Her eyes strayed to the papers that had spilled onto the floor, and then back again at Ferrow's face. “Is everything well?” she asked. “With yourself, and your wife?”

“Yes, thank you,” he said.

“And the remainder of the family?”

There was silence for some seconds. Then, “It's my sister's boy,” he told her. “I don't believe you've ever met Winifred and Edward. Their son Eric is employed by Holt.” Seeing her puzzlement, he added, “The company who make tracks. Caterpillar tracks, they call them. For the new tanks. For the war.”

“Does he?” Octavia said. “How interesting.”

“It is very interesting,” Ferrow agreed. “Very bright boy, you know. He went over with the first. It's a patent, the track. A good thing, too. We are losing so many horses, you see. We need mechanized vehicles. Tractors rather than wagons. And they can get through the mud better. . . .” He stopped.

“And he has gone with the tanks?” she prompted. “To France?”

“Yes,” he murmured. She saw his gaze descend from her face, and range about among the disarranged papers as if he were searching for something. “He wrote to me,” he said. “I have it here. Perhaps in the drawer. . . .” He fumbled with the drawer key, looked in the drawer for a moment or two, and then brought out a letter. “Here it is,” he said. He glanced over it, and smiled. “Very good,” he murmured, as if to himself. And then he looked up. “He says that he has been driving a tractor, towing a gun barrel. At Arras.”

“That does sound useful,” Octavia told him, wary now of the distraction in his face.

“I can't help thinking that I encouraged him to go,” he murmured.

“That is a positive thing, surely.”

He looked up at her. “Is it?” he asked. “Gun barrels, Lady Cavendish. Our artillery doesn't just fire shells without some reaction from the enemy. The death rate in the artillery is almost as bad as that in the Flying Corps.” And he suddenly realized what he had said. “Oh, I'm extremely sorry,” he stuttered, aghast. “I am very sorry indeed, Lady Cavendish.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Indeed it does,” he protested. “Please don't think of it. I'm hardly in a position to know the facts.”

“I think we all know the facts, Mr. Ferrow,” Octavia replied quietly. Slowly, she got to her feet. “I must go. It's rather late. Will you
ask someone to look over the old carding shed for me? To assess its suitability?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“And write to me in London with the results. I've sent you my address before.”

“Yes, I will.” He was hovering close to her, looking desperately anxious still at his tactlessness.

She smiled. “I see it as our duty here to keep optimistic,” she said. “Despite everything. To be positive.” He gave her an expression mixed with all kinds of feeling: anxiety, cynicism, hope, confusion.

She did something that she had never done before: she reached over to him, and laid her hand briefly on his arm. “Do give my very best wishes to your sister and her husband, and the rest of your family,” she murmured. And she patted him gently, as she would a child. “Tell her that I share her feelings, you know. I shall be thinking of her.”

•   •   •

D
arkness had fallen completely by the time that she parked the Metz outside the tithe barn at Rutherford. Octavia got out of the little car slowly, weighed down by the events of the day.

It was perfectly quiet and still. Octavia stood for a while in the dark, glancing around at the deserted yard and the long run of the stables that were now only occupied by the remaining two farm horses and William's own mount. Beyond, at the end of the line, was the five-bar gate that led out into the meadows.

She looked behind her at the magnificent height of Rutherford itself. The rain had passed over at midday, and clouds now scudded across the sky. She could smell grass, and the very faint scent of the flowers in the greenhouses just beyond the kitchen garden wall. She
hesitated for a moment, frowning sadly, and then turned away from the house and walked briskly to the gate, and let herself into the field beyond.

This was the meadow where they turned out the horses. The grass was growing strongly and was above ankle height. She walked out into it, aware of the damp clinging to her skirt. She took off her gloves and reached down and touched it. No little crowd of farm ponies to crop it anymore. No Wenceslas. Where was he, she wondered. Was he still alive? She straightened up and crossed her arms over her chest, breathing deeply. She doubted it. The horses keeled over with fright, or were injured, or simply died from exhaustion. She knew that; she was not a fool. After the war they would have to restock here entirely, if that were possible. Or perhaps the horses would be redundant in the future—perhaps they would have a machine to cut the meadows. As always, when alone, Octavia's mind strayed in an anxious fashion to Harry. But tonight it encompassed not only Harry, but Caitlin. Caitlin and Nash, and Harrison, who had died in 1915 at Cinque Rue. My God, it was all too awful. Where was Nash? she wondered. She must see Mary tomorrow and find out. Where was Caitlin, that quiet and self-possessed girl whom Harry so adored? No one had had word of her since the wedding. And where was Jack, for that matter? The Armitages must be sick with worry. Most of all, what was happening with John? He had taken a boat four days ago, and she had had no letter.

She put her hands to her face, a lonely figure out there in the darkness. The despair of losses and hardships were all around her. Rutherford was not the haven it used to be, the luxurious paradise of former years. For all its bulk, it was threatened. What would they do if Harry never returned? Charlotte would never come back here. William was not in the best of health after his heart attack last year, and on his next birthday he would be sixty-four. Eventually, Louisa
would be left alone in this great house. Octavia knew that the estate was not entailed to any distant branch of the family with a male heir, and so Louisa would own it if the worst happened.

But alone here . . . How could she bear that for her daughter? Alone in such a vast empty house? Alone to look after Sessy. Octavia's first instinct was that in such a case, Louisa and Sessy must come with her and John Gould. They would go to America together.

She reached the gate, and looked at the walls of the house that rose above the stable yard. They would leave Rutherford.

“Leave you,” she murmured. “All of us shall leave you.” And realized, in that moment, what an utter impossibility that was.

T
he Hotel d'Universe was only a half hour's walk from the front line of the battle, close to the railway station in Arras.

It was now the beginning of June. John Gould had been away from London for five weeks. It was a balmy night with a strong, warm breeze blowing. It was dark, and he had to feel his way along the street that ran behind the hotel, tripping occasionally on the uneven stones and into the gutters. His hands brushed against door pillars that had stood for centuries; over handwriting scrawled on the walls; over bullet-scarred brick and the miraculously clean glass of a few shop windows that showed faint pools of light cast by candles and oil lamps.

Alongside him was the ever-cheerful adjutant who had been detailed to accompany him; a brisk man with a strong Scottish accent. He came from a place called Wanlockhead, a village on the Borders. “High place,” he'd told John. “Tae beautiful for words.” Alan MacKay was a stocky man, a regular, and he propelled John now with a guiding hand under his arm. When he had heard that John
was from New York, he had expressed no surprise, but John was getting used to that. No one seemed surprised by anything; by histories, or horror, or coincidences. Reactions had been ironed out in men: flattened, crushed, their sensitivity removed. Some, John thought, were automatons; there was nothing behind their eyes. MacKay was not like that, however: he strode along with a gaze that missed nothing, a permanent grin on his face, and a turn of phrase that would have been unforgiveable in Chelsea. It was fookin' this and fookin' that. “You'll have a mind to that fookin' major,” had been his first warning. “He's a fookin' maniac.” And he'd slapped John heartily on the back, while glancing behind him at the top brass.

He was whistling very softly to himself now as the two men progressed. When they had passed the second little shop, he muttered an instruction in John's ear. “Din'ae feel in the next fookin' doorway,” he said. Then, in the next moment, exclaiming, “There now! Did I nae warn ye? Excuse us, mamselle,” he said to the over-painted woman who grinned at them like a surrealistic head, and who had dipped forward into the half light to breathe brandy fumes into John's face. “Ach, he's nae one for you,” MacKay laughed, elbowing the woman out of the way. “He's a man bewitched by a lady elsewhere.”

They paused when they had gone a few steps farther. “I never knew there would be so many civilians left here,” John said.

“Shocking, right enough,” MacKay agreed. “But there's men to feed and service, and Arras has been behind the lines awhile. They deem theirselves safe, so much as anyone can be.”

“But so near the front.”

“Aye, sae near.”

John had been traveling along that front in the last two weeks, only marginally tolerated by an army who grudgingly admitted the need to convince their new ally of the need of America's support.
Coming down on the overloaded train from Albert, he had passed through eerily tended fields with the crops growing in them, bordered by makeshift sidings, ammunition dumps, and shattered villages. He had found himself in a landscape that had been tossed about, shifting from one perilously close shift in the front lines to another.

He had thought to himself, as he had descended from the train, his permits clutched in his hand and his press pass buttoned into his coat, that the countryside hummed with an unusual vibration. It was not the guns, though they could easily be heard: it was something else, a tension that hung over the place. He thought he could feel it stretching away in all directions, as if France were seized in a permanent expectation of horror.

And yet France had also surprised him, even delighted him: the children holding makeshift gifts on the station forecourt had touched his heart. “Souvenirs,” they said, running up to him. They held out pieces of shrapnel, uniform, ribbon, bullets; posies of flowers, greetings cards, and even old postcards of what France had been before the war. He had looked down into their faces, amazed at the resilience of the human spirit. They grinned back at him as he handed them American candy that his mother had somehow managed to ship over to him. It had come through submarine blockades and now it landed in the sticky palm of a little girl who pushed the brass button of an English uniform into his hand by way of payment. “No,” he had said to her gently. “You keep that, okay?” And under his breath muttered, “Try not to sell it at all.”

“
Give us the real world out there,
” had been Bellstock's instruction to John by telegram before he had left London. He was the man who had first suggested the job to John two years ago; now the newspaper editor was anxious to wade in with the best firsthand reports that he could muster. “
Give us the muck and bullets. Full picture.”

And so yesterday he had written about the children with their pieces of shrapnel, and the girl's face. She was seven or eight, incredibly thin, with eyes that ought to have been bright and alive, but which were not. She looked wizened and old, wearing some other's child once-pretty frock. “They've come from out there,” MacKay had told him, nodding his head towards the front line. “Maybe two years ago. Maybe they've traveled all over, who knows? And they've come back to the biggest town near where their home used to be.”

Over the next twenty-four hours John had walked where he wasn't wanted, sometimes with MacKay in tow and sometimes not. He had started out thinking quite cynically that stories about children would wring the hearts of the reading public in the States and get their attention; but now it just wrung his own heart. He sat down in the few little cafés that were left and watched the cooks trying to make bread out of ground-down straw and husks. He watched refugees go by; women, mostly, towing silent children, walking behind scraggy-looking mules hitched to farm wagons, past piles of jealously guarded splintered wood. More often than not, though, they walked alone, heads down.

He had been near Monchy yesterday. The army had brought in a pile of bodies and laid them in a trench dug at the side of the road. MacKay had been at his side. “They're the lucky ones,” the soldier had muttered.

“Lucky?” John had asked. “How do you figure that?”

“They've got a grave,” MacKay said. “Wi' their own name over it. When this is over, someone will come and stand over them. So they're lucky, because someone will come and shed a tear over them. And there'll be a place to put their mammy's tears. But there's hundreds and thousands, they that hae disappeared.”

“How so?”

“Drowned, or pulled to fookin' pieces that can't be identified.
Nobody picks up the pieces. There's no time for that.” And he shrugged.

“So when the family do come—if they ever come—they'll wander around, not knowing where to mourn.”

“Aye. About right, laddie.”

John had looked at the tank tracks in the slush: snow had given way to rain. “I believe that somebody I know is serving near here,” he murmured.

“The flying officer that you're hoping tae see tonight?”

“No, someone else from Yorkshire. He was a groom in—in the large house there that I visited.”

“Which regiment?”

“The veterinary corps. His name is John Armitage. They call him Jack.”

MacKay had shrugged. “Ach, they're all over. He could be here today and move tomorrow. Go where they're needed.”

“But weren't they needed here? Wasn't there a cavalry charge?” John knew full well that there had been.

“Aye, well. Fookin' madness, ye see? We'll ask about, sir. I've got his name, and we'll ask.” But he'd given John a sideways look of exasperation. John thought that he probably wouldn't ask at all. He couldn't blame him. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

•   •   •

Y
esterday evening John had laid down on a bunk bed in MacKay's own billet, and he had written his diary. He began with the idea that had bothered him all day.

Where are the dead to be honored?
he wrote
.

Where are the places to be? I can't imagine a wife who has nowhere to mourn, no place to go. She may get a letter, a telegram; it may tell her that her husband is missing or dead. And missing is just another word for dead, a word that plumbs the depths of cruelty. She has handed over her man to the war, and the war has obliterated him. The war has somewhere lost him. How can that be? How can a man be simply “lost” or “missing” in this great avalanche of bureaucracy? How can they have done this to him, she'll think. Sent him out and marked him “missing.” Where did he go, what did he do? Questions that simply no one, not even the commanding officer, and sometimes not even the men who were alongside him, have an answer to.

How wrenching that feeling must be. There won't be a ship coming home carrying his remains, because there are no remains. He has been smashed to pieces, to shreds, to less than that. She'll pass some cemetery or churchyard during most of her days and see the stones with their inscriptions. But there's no inscription for her. She can't go to a stonemason and ask for his name to be put on the grave, with the words she's chosen. She can't ask for whatever the family wants—an angel, perhaps, or a scroll, or a laurel wreath carved. She can't take her children anywhere to show them, to reflect, to sit and stare. There is no grave and there is no stone.

He paused then and stared into the dark. Would there be memorials in France eventually? he wondered. Would there be proper cemeteries? Would they be tended? He cast his mind back to the ditch at the side of the road, and the sight of bodies being rolled from the trucks, or manhandled hastily by the exhausted soldiers who tried not to look at the faces of the dead. Would someone come back for these? Would someone record where they were? Who knew them for certain, who had recorded them? Who wrote to what department—to some safe office somewhere in London, saying who had died where
and for what? At what time, in what circumstances . . . He thought not. The office would exist, and the records no doubt. But a piece of paper with a hundred names on it has lost the savagery of the roadside ditch and forgotten the terror of the day. There was perhaps a blessing in that, but also an indignity.

He lay thinking of the dead turned to paper. If there were eventually some kind of memorial, he hoped to God that there would be no differentiation in the graves—no “them and us” between religions or nationalities. There were plenty of Sikhs and Hindus and Jews fighting for the British; he hoped that they wouldn't be put somewhere else. And that the officers wouldn't lie in somewhere more appealing than their men. He lay for a long time thinking about this, about how the world could be altered when the carnage was all gone. If only it could be a world where equality came—like the memorials. Where the world was all done with rank and favor.

And then he thought of Octavia, how she sometimes said the same thing and sometimes forgot entirely how fortunate she was. How fortunate they both were, in fact. A guilty flush rose to his face. Fortunate bloody beings in a world of wrong. Soon he would leave here and go back to Octavia, and he'd leave behind the men struggling in the mud, and weeping and praying in the hospitals.

What the hell would Octavia do, he thought, if Harry were killed? If he were one of the thousands, the millions? It didn't bear thinking about. He could imagine her pacing about in their house. She would pace forever, because there was nowhere to direct her. “My God,” he murmured. “What a shit-infested mess.”

Sighing heavily, he at last turned his attention to his impressions of the last few days: the things that had struck him most, and began to write again in a hasty scrawl, squinting in the half light of the lamp.

Most of the movement of the army is at night; hours when the enemy can't see you. Hours when the horses' hooves are muffled to stop the sound of them on the road; when the wagons that need to go fast instead go slow at the cross-sections of roads for fear of their rattle being heard by the enemy.