The Gates of Rutherford (24 page)

He pointed back to the other prisoners and Frederick went off, digging the nails of his fingers into his palms. “Work,” he muttered to himself. “Work.”

T
hey were going north, and into Poperinghe.

Harry had told John that the hospital train was just like the one that he had been transported in when he was injured in 1915. Same atmosphere. Same color, same crowding. It was the sort of train where he had first seen Caitlin, Harry had added, with a mournful tone in his voice.

They'd stood on the platform in the dark, and watched the wounded being loaded. So much cargo, the air thick with the smell of dirt and gas; fetid and bloody. Inside the train, the stench was of antiseptic. Antiseptic and stewed tea. Mingled over it all, smoke and oil and sweat. How many of these trains had gone from here, John wondered sadly. And how many more would there be? He watched the men go by, very young in most cases; shattered beyond belief, some of them.

“This is nothing,” Harry had told John, when he saw his face.

“I appreciate that,” John replied.

“I doubt that you do.”

John tried not to say much; he was on a short leash with Harry, he considered. Added to being his mother's lover, he was now the man who had compromised Harry's ability to move about as he wished. He'd been ordered to accompany John to the Channel ports, as Harry's own squadron was being posted as part of a new coastal operation near Nieuwpoort and Harry was being sent back to Blighty anyway. John respected Harry's frustration with him, and was sorry that they could not, apparently, be real friends. He knew that Harry would have liked to slope home by himself, alone with his depression and cynicism. More than once in the last two days he had seen Harry look at him with something like disgust as John tried to take a happy line with those around him.

He couldn't exactly blame him. For what was he, Gould, anyway? He wasn't a fighting man. He wasn't an expert on anything. He wasn't a veterinarian or economist or tactician or industrialist. He did nothing, really. That was undoubtedly Harry's unspoken opinion. The most he ever was was good company. John looked around himself as they settled in the cramped quarters on the train and smiled grimly.

But Harry was still Octavia's boy.

John looked now at him, and envied his ability to sleep
. Octavia's boy
, he thought to himself. He wondered if he should describe Harry to Octavia: she would want to know the details of her son. But he couldn't think how he could phrase it. “
There's someone else in Harry's place”
might be accurate.

She'd told him often of how it used to be at Rutherford when Harry was growing up. William had been pleased that their first child was male: the heir, a necessity. John tried to imagine William Cavendish as a new father. He would have been well over forty. By all accounts, the earl had been on the brink of being a lifelong bachelor, moldering away with his dogs and damp rooms until Octavia had come into his life. He must have been so proud of his firstborn,
and of his new wife, even if he never showed it in any great depth. Where on earth had it gone wrong—how could a man let a woman like Octavia slowly slip away from him?

Octavia always maintained that it was the appeal of her money that had made William Cavendish propose to her, but John wondered at that. The painting on the staircase at Rutherford showed Octavia when she was still not thirty, dark-haired and vivacious-looking, her head dropped slightly and looking out at the painter with a slightly rebellious air. Who could not be attracted to such a face?

William must have loved her. He loved her still. Who could not love a beautiful, intelligent woman like Octavia? Ever since John had first seen her, she had possessed him, and he had never looked at another woman. He never would again. She was perfection. Momentarily, he closed his eyes and thought of her in his arms, like a girl, her parted lips, her soft, smooth skin. In the last three years, William Cavendish had been robbed of what he wanted to keep near him: first Harry had been taken by the war, and then Octavia had been taken by John himself last year. He couldn't help feeling sorry for the man, even if he truly didn't understand him. He didn't understand this English reserve of simply standing by and watching his wife walk away.

That night when John Gould had returned to Rutherford, he had glimpsed an expression first of disbelief and then utter disappointment on William Cavendish's face. Octavia had hesitated at first, struck dumb by John's sudden appearance, but then—in front of the staff, the villagers, the family, no less—she had run to John and flung her arms around him. You could have cut the silence in that room, at the wedding of Mary and David, with a knife. The color had drained from William's face, and he had sat down, staring at John, his mouth set in a rigid line.

“William,” Octavia had said, suddenly dropping John from her embrace embarrassedly. “Look who it is.”

The room had waited for William's reply. “I see very well who it is,” he had murmured.

Poor William. Yes, he could say that. Not to anyone else, of course, for it would sound condescending. The smug opinion of the victor. But he really felt it in his heart. If William Cavendish hadn't responded as he himself would respond—God help him, he would knock down any man that his wife flung her arms around—well then, John had to give him admiration in one respect. William Cavendish had dignity. He had composure. In fact, he had so much dignity and composure that he had dignified and composed himself straight out of his marriage.

•   •   •

J
ohn glanced again at Harry. There was no noise now on the railway track; the train had been stalled here for almost an hour. It was now eight in the morning, full daylight. They had been traveling since three a.m. Night manoeuvres of a kind. The train had no windows, no seats as such; as a moving ambulance it had no room to speak of for hitchhikers like themselves. They were in what had once been the guards' van, which was now stacked high with stores. Once on board—sidestepping the stretchers, the nurses, the piles of ammunition at Albert—they had commandeered a tiny corner and stared out at the dark.

“Rum do,” Harry had commented. “Traveling with you. Press pass gets you into some strange places.”

“You'd rather be with the corps,” John replied.

“Sir, you are bloody correct. But when a man is told to do a thing, he does it.”

“Accompanying me.”

“Accompanying the honored representative of the United States on his Royal progress.”

“Is that what your commanding officer suggested to you?”

“It was not a suggestion,” Harry replied sulkily, and had crossed his arms, sunk his head on his chest, and slept almost immediately.

He felt sorry for Harry, too. Sorry in more ways than one. All that Harry Cavendish had wanted at the beginning of the war was to fly. John recalled that conversation at Rutherford's dining table, when he himself had been banished from the room while Harry's parents argued about his signing up at all. He remembered the dawning horror on Octavia's face, the tenor of her voice. William, in frustration, calling his son an idiot, and Octavia's pathetic attempt to broker a peace between father and son. “Harry, you don't need to fight in a war,” she had said plaintively. “Your father really doesn't mind you flying . . .” And Harry's reply. “Mother, I don't need your permission.”

He had told them, while they stared at him aghast, that he was going to Upavon, in Wiltshire, to train. Octavia had immediately suggested that John himself could go with him.

John had known then, of course, what her motive had been in saying that. She couldn't go, and neither could William. But John, as a free agent—merely then a visitor from the States—might find an excuse to wander through England and end up wherever Harry was. He would be her eyes and ears. Harry had remonstrated against the idea at once. “I don't need a nursemaid, for God's sake. I'm nineteen years old, Mother.”

My God, John thought now. It was only three years ago. Not even that. Not quite. It was the wonderful summer before war was declared. He and Octavia had become lovers not a month before; the air in that dining room had sung with tension of one kind and another. He could still see Harry's handsome and youthful face, and the idealism and excitement in his expression. Still see the way that his hands had clenched and unclenched in an effort to keep calm and stop himself running out of the room. And he could still see Octavia's pleading smile.

Harry had finally turned on his heel, and, on his way out of the
door, had stopped next to Harrison, the footman. He had looked back at his father. “I'm bloody fed up of people opening doors for me,” he had exclaimed. “Why should Mr. Gould open a door for me at Upavon? Why should Harrison here open any door?”

John Gould sighed heavily. Harrison had been killed in 1915 at a place called Cinque Rue nears Aubers Ridge. On the ninth of May, there had been eleven thousand casualties among the British; many fell within a few yards of their trench, because the artillery bombardment had left the enemy largely unscathed. Brave men, and Harrison among them. He survived hours of shellfire out in no-man's-land, and was picked up conscious, talking about going home to Rutherford. By the time that they got him back to his own trench, however, Harrison had been dead.

As Harry slept on, John got up and edged his way slowly down the train, stepping aside frequently for the nurses who bustled back and forth. Now and again he stopped by a bed, looking down at eyes looking beseechingly back at him. “What can I do for you?” he asked more than once.

He got out his notepad and pen and squatted down beside them. He could feel the temperature inside the train starting to rise, and the sweat began to trickle down his back. “I'm listening,” he kept saying. He took down addresses, and names. “To Eva Marshall . . .” “To Adelaide Blake . . .” “To my dearest father . . .” “Dear Mother . . .” John didn't know if he would be allowed to send these messages, and he certainly wouldn't send them for print. But he kept on listening and writing.

“I've come through all right,” one boy told him, watching John write. “Tell her I . . . tell her . . .” He had gripped John's wrist. “Tell her . . .” John had looked about him for a drink of water, a cool cloth. Anything. “I got a boy I never seen,” the lad said. “We was eighteen when we were wed. I've got a boy . . .”

“That's a fine thing to look forward to,” John murmured. The lad's
face was unaccountably livid, bright as a poppy, and his eyes tinged a jaundiced yellow. The fingertips on his own wrist pressed yellow, too: yellow knuckles and lilac-colored nails. “I've got a boy . . .”

John stood up after a while and closed the notebook. The lad had given him no address; instead, he took the number and name scrawled on the rail of the bunk. Private Anderson, King's Own Rifles. John looked away, out of the window. There were busy sidings out there, and beyond it a marshaling yard. Coming into Poperinghe. He wondered if Private Anderson's wife would ever know exactly where and how her husband died. Just outside Poperinghe, at eight o'clock in the morning, talking about his son.

John walked to the end of the carriage, and then saw Harry at the other end of it, signaling to him that he was about to descend the steps, and get off.

John nodded, and followed him.

•   •   •

H
e had not known quite what to expect of a town so close to the German front line in West Flanders, and to the coast, but it existed as if it were nowhere near a war. Unless, of course, you stopped to look about you, and realized that nine out of every ten people who passed you were in uniform.

The town was positively heaving. They stopped at the town hall, a miraculously new building, built only six years before, and sparkling white in the sunshine. It appeared to have given up its civic status entirely, however: the flags outside it showed it to be a divisional HQ. Harry wrinkled his nose. “Too many brass hats,” he said to John. “Sitting it out in comfort while the young go by. I bet they come out on the steps and wave. Bastards.”