The Wild Dark Flowers (15 page)

“Yes.”

She leaned a little closer to him. He could feel her breath caress his face. “Do they sing up there?” she asked innocently. “Can you hear the larks up there?”

My God
, he thought.
Such a bizarre conversation. But humor her.
“Not with all the
minenwerfers
and what have you.”

“Are they the big ones?” she asked. And then, with a harder glint in her eye, “We’ve seen what they can do.”

“Yes,” he said. His eyes were pouring water. Jesus Christ, it was awful. “They make a wuffing noise,” he said, with effort. “Rather like a very large friendly dog.
Wuff wuff wuff.
And then it stops and goes straight down. Shifts rather a lot of earth. Turns out not to be such a friendly dog after all. We feel the bump up there—the ripples come up to us.”

“I imagine it’s like being on a fairground ride, of sorts. The kind that bumps up and down.”

“Yes, a kind of ride. A strange sensation. But one is used to it.”

Now, the nurse was frowning, silent.

He knew that some people disliked the aircrews, thinking that they were glamour boys, and thought highly of themselves. It wasn’t true, of course—not that he knew of—but newspapers did talk such unbelievable rot about how marvelous it all was to be in the air. He hated it, personally: hated being thought of as wonderful—more wonderful, the implication was, than the poor bloody infantrymen. “Gladiators of the air,” he had read in one such rag. He wished he could write to the journalists and get them to describe the fellows down in the trenches as “gladiators of the ground.”

“Get on with it, and be quick,” he muttered.

“I’m doing my best,” she told him.

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “Tell me something else. Anything else at all.”

“We had an adjutant in here three days ago,” she told him. “He had been buried. And while they were digging him out, another
minenwerfer
—if that’s what it was, he said it was a vast beast, anyway—came over and buried the digging party with him.”

“Did they get them out eventually?”

“Well, him,” she replied.

“Just him?”

“He had lain with a dead man’s hand pressing onto his face for hours,” she said quietly. “His chest was crushed, his ribs broken. He had had an awful struggle to breathe.” She finished the dressing and patted his arm. “Quite raving I’m afraid, poor man.”

“Glad to hear an adjutant’s had his portion,” he observed.

“The Germans had hit our own bomb store,” she replied. “He told me the sky was raining things. He kept saying it. All kinds of things . . .” she paused. “Still, I shan’t go on.” She looked cheerfully at her handiwork. “You’ll do.”

Her voice was soft, and he noticed now that her eyes were fantastic, an astonishing piercing green. The thread of hair that escaped the cap was red. “Are you Irish?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Once upon a time, long ago. In another world to this, in another life.” She gave a little dismissive shrug.

“What’s your name?”

She smiled. “You won’t remember it.”

“I’m Harry Cavendish.”

“So I see on your label.”

“And you are . . .”

“Get a little sleep now, if you can.”

“What did you do,” he asked her. “Before all this?”

“I lived in London.”

“Doing what?”

She smiled. “Enough now.” She was glancing up the train at the Sister’s back. Then she whispered. “It’s Caitlin.”

“Caitlin,” he repeated quietly. “That’s pretty.”

She pointed at his leg. “How does it feel now?”

“Oh, jolly good,” he told her. Pain was a peculiar thing; it was almost visible in the train—a writhing spirit that pressed itself down on the bodies.

“It’s nearly over,” Caitlin told him. “It won’t be long until we’re at Boulogne. Then you’ll be transferred to a proper hospital. The Casino, probably, on the seafront.”

“Is that true?” he asked. “The distance bit. We’re not far from Boulogne? We’re nearly there?”

She rewarded him with a dazzling grin: impish, and entirely human. “Sorry,” she admitted. “But I really have no idea at all where we are.”

The train rocked and rolled. Caitlin got to her feet, still professionally regarding his two splinted legs. Every now and again, at immense cost, he wriggled his toes. Some of them.

All the while that they had been speaking, the man in the bunk above him had been singing a broken tune. Harry couldn’t make it out. It was like no other song on earth, anyway: it was the song of a dying man. He didn’t need to see the poor devil to know that. The dying had an aura all their own; a man could sense it. Sometimes a strange quiet came over where they were, or the sudden loss of sighing or crying or screaming left a void like no other.

He angled his head towards the upper bunk. Caitlin was adjusting the pillow for the man, and folding back the blanket with a small frown of concentration. He heard her give a short sigh as she did so. Under them, the rails clacked and whistled, and the trembling cadence of the man’s song over his head kept a sort of accompanying rhythm.

She started to step away. “What injury has he got?” Harry whispered to her. “A bullet in the brain,” she said, as quietly as some other girl, before this war, might have said, “It’s raining,” or “I shall go for a walk,” or “The roses are so nice.” She bit her lip before continuing. “I’ve heard repetitions,” she said. “It’s as if some parts of the brain hold memories. It’s affected, and so . . .”

“They sing a song?”

“Or repeat a word.” She gave a small, sad shrug. “Would you like a little cocoa if I can find some?” she asked. He gazed at her.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Why? Does it matter?”

“Not really.” He smiled. He guessed at twenty or twenty-one, and realized that she was his own age. It made him wonder if his twenty-first birthday had been and gone without him knowing. “Yes please,” he said. “To the cocoa. If you have time. But only if you do.” He reached out for her hand, but she was starting to move away. “What’s the other name?” he asked. “Caitlin what? What’s your surname?” But she had gone, turned her back to him.

When the train caught speed at last, it had grown dark outside. Mercifully, he had a small window next to him. Although the little glass pane was halfway down his body, he could still glimpse the shadows of the passing French countryside at an oblique angle. The cocoa never came—he forgave her of course, she would have been so devilishly busy—and while he looked out at the darkness, he gradually fell asleep.

Sometime later, the train came to a halt. The lack of movement woke him. The singing in the bunk above him had stopped.

Harry turned his head to the window. Dear God, it was an endless night. He wondered, rather academically, if he had better odds now of coming through it. He could hardly remember the names or faces of the men who had been in that Flying Corps mess with him. More familiar to him were the controls of his aircraft—he could feel his hands on them still, feel the air rushing past him. Feel the descent, the whirling corkscrew that he had somehow survived.

And then he noticed something miraculous.

His eyes had fixed on the little square window, and he suddenly realized that out there in the half darkness there was a field of cherry trees. He tried to raise himself on his elbow, smiling. The trees were half in blossom and half in leaf, and a slight wind was blowing, moving among the trees. There must have been a thousand trees out there in the breezy darkness. Was it a beautiful dream? he wondered vaguely. Did such things still really exist? Every branch lifted and swayed. It was like looking at a softly moving sea.

It was true that there was a world out there, and it was quiet.

He thanked heaven for it.

A quiet spring night in the fields of France.

*   *   *

T
he next morning in Rutherford, March was waiting with Josiah Armitage.

The yeomanry had not come the day before: Jack had taken it as a sign that they might not come at all. And then Bradfield had walked over last evening, and relayed a telephone message. They were coming the next morning. The horses were to be made ready.

The clock on the yard tower read almost eight when they heard the sound of a lorry coming up the lane that led to the “outsiders’” houses—they could hear the grinding of the gears on the slight hill that led under a lane of lime trees at the very rear of Rutherford, shielding the coming and going of tradesmen and laborers from the main house.

Josiah glanced at March. Both men were in their seventies, March by far the more grizzled and weather-beaten. They held each other’s gaze in apprehension.

The lorry rounded the last corner and came in through the gates. Half a dozen men got out of the lorry—three from the cab in the front, three from the rear. They let down a ramp, and pushed straw out onto it with their feet, and then stood leaning on their rifles, looking back at the yard.

“No need for a bloody armory,” March muttered.

An officer in the Yeomanry was walking towards them. He was a slight, bowed man in his fifties. He was not the Yorkshireman who had come two days before. Neither March nor Armitage recognized him, and when he opened his mouth, they knew why. He had a West Country accent.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

Armitage touched his cap.

“Well, we’ve come to do our job,” the man said briskly. “Where’s your stock?”

Josiah inclined his head. “We’ve four in the paddock. We mun keep two. Can’t mow the fields and bring in t’harvest without.”

“Your nearest tenant farmer has two.”

“Right enough.”

“Well, can’t you use his here at the house?”

“’Tis seven miles to Bates’s farm, nine to the other.”

The man consulted his list. “His lordship declared twenty-two horses. Eleven went last year. We can leave one other. But we must take the Shire.”

Neither man spoke. Josiah glanced around the yard. He knew that Wenceslas was not here. Jack had taken him that morning down to the lower meadows, by the river.

“The Shire’s being worked,” he said.

The man raised an eyebrow. “I sincerely hope there’s to be no trouble.”

“No trouble, sir.”

“Then bring the Shire up, if you will.”

“He’s not a fast horse,” Josiah prevaricated.

The man gave him a sardonic smile. “I’ve yet to see a Shire that was,” he replied. “They’re needed for strength, not speed.”

Josiah looked at his feet. He was a patriotic man; he wanted to give what he could. And yet he felt that the horses were his, much more so than Lord Cavendish’s. He had seen half of them born, nursed others through illness. Every time in the past forty years when a horse had to be sent to the butcher’s yard he had been unable to sleep; sat in the stables keeping a vigil with those who had to go. And he had done the same last night with Wenceslas. Which was where his son Jack had found him at first light.

Neither man had spoken a word. They would have been ashamed if anyone else had known their feelings. Only a horse, others might say. Just a horse. But they were not horses to either father or son.

Josiah had eventually got up, laid a hand on his son’s shoulder, and gone into the cottage to bring them both a mug of tea. When he had returned, carefully carrying the tray across the yard slippery with morning dew, he saw that the stable door was open, and both Jack and the Shire were gone. He had put down the tray and walked slowly to the far yard gate, and looked down the long slope to the river. He saw Jack leading Wenceslas through the spring meadow; both man and horse had their heads down as they walked, as if in private conversation.

Josiah had considered going after them, but thought better of it. Jack was not running away—there was nowhere to run to, after all, with a gentle giant like Wenceslas—but he needed this time, his father knew. Josiah had turned away, gone back to the stable, and sat down alone.

He looked up at the Yeomanry captain now. “I’ll fetch them,” he said.

*   *   *

T
hree floors above, out of the small nursery window, someone else was watching the scene unfold.

Louisa had got up and wandered to the nursery still in her nightclothes and dressing gown; as she had entered, the nursemaid was bathing Cecily.

“Oh, ma’am,” she said. “The bairn’s not ready.” Yesterday evening Louisa had said that she would give Cecily a treat: she would come down and eat breakfast in Louisa’s own room, and Louisa was to open her travel trunk—the fine one, from London, with its many compartments—and find some of her own childhood toys.

“It’s all right,” Louisa had said. “I shall just wait.”

She smiled for a moment, seeing Sessy’s pleasure in such random things as a trail of soap bubbles, or the edge of the enamel bath, or the ridges in the pink flannel with which she was soon routinely scrubbed; then Louisa walked to the window and looked out.

“There are people down there in the yards, I think,” she murmured. There was a very narrow view of the kitchen gardens from here; she could just glimpse the roof of a vehicle.

The nursemaid did not look up: she had Sessy on her knee and was wrapping her in a towel. “They’ve come for the horses, ma’am. So they were saying last night belowstairs.”

Louisa turned around. “Which horses?”

“They say all of them, bar two.”

After a moment’s consideration, Louisa gave Sessy a brief kiss on the top of the child’s head. She left the room, walked down the flight of stairs, and went to her own bedroom. The housemaid who was tending to her in Amelie’s absence had laid out a set of clothes—rather beautiful ones today. A lawn dress and very pretty matching shoes, and a linen jacket.

Louisa stared at them, then ran to the French armoire and dug in the bottom drawer. She pulled out riding clothes—much faded. She had not worn them for years, but she was as slim—if not slimmer, since last year—than she had been at sixteen. In a minute or so she was dressed and running down the vast curving stair. She went out through her father’s library into the gardens, and through those to the kitchen plot, and through that past the greenhouses to the large wooden door in the wall that led out into the stable yard.