The Wild Dark Flowers (19 page)

The man considered. “Do you know how many U-boats there are?”

“No. Does anyone?”

“No, I guess not. But there’s more sinkings than reaches the public ear.”

“That so?”

“Merchant vessels. All the time. Little steamers, most of them.”

“But not ships like this.”

“No,” the man conceded. “Nothing like this. Except, I’ve been thinking of something. Something that’s eased my mind. The
Wayfarer . . .”

“Another merchant?”

“On war business. They hit it a month ago just off the Scillies. It was taking the Warwickshire Yeomanry to France. Two hundred soldiers and seven hundred horses.”

“What happened to it?”

“A friend of mine down at Boston Harbor heard tell it got struck by a torpedo, but didn’t sink. Forty-foot hole below water, but it didn’t sink.”

“Any killed?”

“Five men.”

“And all those horses . . .”

“Not one lost.”

John was amazed. It hadn’t occurred to him that a ship could be hit and not sink.

“So you see, if a ship like the
Wayfarer
doesn’t sink, even if struck . . .”

“Then nothing can hurt the
Lusitania
,” John said.

“That’s right,” the man agreed. “Nothing. Nothing in this world.”

*   *   *

O
ctavia was dressing, with the help of Amelie, before breakfast, when Charlotte burst unceremoniously into her room. As the girl rushed across, Amelie made a slight sibilant noise under her breath; she abhorred a lack of decorum far more than her mistress. It made Octavia smile, although as Amelie was dressing her hair she was unable to move, and watched her daughter through the reflection in the looking glass.

Charlotte came close and rested her chin on her mother’s shoulder. “Oh, you positively can’t guess,” she said, grinning.

“Then you had better tell me.”

“They just delivered another telegram, addressed to Father. I took it up to him.”

“I expect you have made the maid very cross, then. That is her work.”

“She’s not cross. I just danced in the hallway with her.”

Amelie dropped her hands, and Octavia turned in her chair. “You did what?”

“Oh, Mother,” Charlotte laughed, and dropped to her knees, and put her arms around Octavia’s waist. “Harry’s coming on a ship tomorrow. He’s coming home.”

The relief that poured through Octavia was a positive wave: it actually seemed to wash over her from head to foot. Charlotte was looking at her keenly. “Oh, don’t cry,” she exclaimed suddenly. “Amelie, give me Mother’s handkerchief. . . .”

The two of them fussed around her. Charlotte pressed the still-warm teacup into Octavia’s hands. “Drink a little, Mother. Amelie, ring for fresh.”

“No, no,” Octavia said. “It’s quite all right. Just—well, such lovely news.”

“Isn’t it!” Charlotte said, and jumped to her feet. “I shall go with Father to Folkestone. May I go with him? Are you going? Shall we see him get off the ship? Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”

Octavia waved her hand to stop Charlotte’s dancing on the spot. “No. We would get in the way, darling.”

Her daughter’s face fell. “But Mother . . .”

“There will be hundreds of men being brought off the ship, and I expect a lot of ambulances waiting, and medical staff. No, no, dear. We must wait.”

“But what was the point of coming down, if we don’t go and meet him!”

“Your father will do that. We will get everything ready here.” It was almost comical how quickly Charlotte sank to the recesses of the nearby chair. She slumped with disappointment. “He’s going to be awfully tired,” Octavia pointed out as gently as she could. “And not well. They may not even allow him to be nursed here. It will depend on his injuries.”

She regarded her daughter. If it had been Louisa sitting in the same chair, there would now have been a sudden outburst of tears at the thought of Harry’s wounds. But Charlotte sat clear-eyed. One could almost see the thought processes racing across her brain, and, sure enough, in the next moment she was sitting forward in the chair. “I can’t just wait here all day,” she said. “Can you?”

“Probably not.”

“Then may we go with Florence to Regent’s Park this morning?” Charlotte asked. “To the hospital? She’s learning Braille, you know. It’s so very clever. She’s going to be a helper, to teach the men who’ve been blinded.”

“Darling,” Octavia said. “I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

Charlotte reacted as though she’d been stung. “We can’t talk of what’s appropriate and what isn’t now, Mother. People need help.”

Octavia opened her mouth to object, but Charlotte was once again on her feet, and in a flash back again in the same position kneeling at Octavia’s side. “Can’t we go, you and I?” she begged. “They’re organizing some sort of fete at the weekend with games and things, to raise money. We could help with the preparations for that, surely?”

Amelie finished Octavia’s hair, and caught Octavia’s eye in the looking glass. There was, just for a moment, the slightest frown of criticism.
Perhaps
, Octavia thought,
my own maid thinks that mother and daughter are capable of extraordinarily reckless behavior
. And she found herself thinking, quite involuntarily,
How very old-fashioned.

She turned in her seat, brushed down her dress, and smiled. “I think that’s a very productive way to spend our time,” she said. “I shall speak to your father about making a contribution to the hospital.”

“And go there? After breakfast?”

“If you would like to, yes.”

“Be-yong!” Charlotte said, bounced to her feet and did a little twirl as she made for the door. She blew a kiss on the threshold, and disappeared.

Octavia glanced again at Amelie. “What on earth does she mean?”

Amelie’s face became even more disapproving. “It is
bien
, ma’am.”

“Then why doesn’t she say so?”

“It is slang, ma’am. It is what is done to my language, by the soldiers who come back from France.” She made a full-throated tut-tutting sound this time as she gathered up the hair things. “And I think . . . I
think
 . . . it is said by thieves here, by bad persons.”

Octavia stifled a smile as she got to her feet. “Yes,” she murmured ironically. “Of all the things that happen in wars, mispronunciation of a native tongue must be quite the worst.”

*   *   *

T
hey were able, after some considerable wait, to get a taxicab from the house to Regent’s Park.

It had always been a pleasant journey; Octavia had occasionally taken the children to the Zoological Gardens here when they were in London during the winter. She sat in the rattling cab now with Charlotte at her side, and wondered if it was only fourteen months ago when they and Louisa had taken a horse-drawn hansom from the dressmaker’s to Claridge’s. Nowadays, one rarely saw the old hansoms. She pined for them a little; they had been more private than the motorized cabs.

Now, as they paused at intersections, those on the crowded pavements looked in on them, and, indeed, down on them from the teetering heights of the omnibuses. Octavia was awfully glad that there would never be a need for her to use an omnibus; they looked so flimsy. It was said that three hundred had gone over to France to transport troops, but she found that hard to believe, for there seemed to be just as many of them as always. Here and there, a woman conductor stood on the outside spiral staircases, balancing in the swinging motion of the vehicle, a ticket machine around her waist, holding back her long skirts with one hand as she stepped up or down. It looked so incongruous, though not nearly so strange as the women porters had been at the railway station, their hair stuffed under large cloth caps and with floor-length canvas aprons over their clothes, hoisting suitcases on their shoulders. Charlotte had thought it thrilling; Octavia rather less so. William, of course, had considered it not worthy of comment. He had looked away, with a small and disapproving shake of his head.

“Look,” said Charlotte, tapping her mother’s arm. Outside in the sunshine, standing in a group on a street corner, was a section of the Royal Field Artillery Horse; unsaddled, the horses were being led. “Florence says that another lady VAD at the hospital lives in Camberwell, and there’s a huge number of horses just stabled in the street,” Charlotte said. “I mean, outside ordinary houses. Just tethered in the road. Why do you suppose that is?”

Octavia frowned. “There must be tremendous numbers being brought into the city for training,” she ventured, “Perhaps there was nowhere else to put them.” Although she really had no idea.

“Poor horses,” Charlotte murmured. Octavia did not dare tell her that William had broken the news that the last horses from Rutherford had gone, including Wenceslas. They sat silently after that, not even remarking on a contingent of Australian troops marching along by the barracks. And, if it had not been for these two sightings—the horses and the troops—it might have been possible to believe that England was not at war at all, for London looked as it always did: busy, ordered, and, when the cab stopped at the park lodge gates, wonderfully green.

“It’s up on the Outer Circle,” Charlotte said, when they had got out. “Florence said that she would meet us.”

And so she did. Unlike her mother, Florence was dressed very somberly in a dark skirt and jacket. “Hello, Lady Cavendish,” she said, smiling. “Shall we walk in the grounds? They are putting up a marquee for the fete on Saturday. I think our director might be there. And, of course, you will see some of the men.”

She led the way, out from the white portico into the park.

The grounds were very quiet—one could only just hear the hum of the London traffic beyond the gates. Stepping out onto the graveled paths, Octavia felt a moment of apprehension. This was a hospital, and the men were blinded; it was not merely a stroll in the sunshine, no matter how routine Florence seemed to be in her introductions to various helpers along the way. Just up ahead, Octavia could see a group of three or four men and two nurses sitting together on a wooden bench. As they drew level, she saw the familiar white stick of the nearest man, and a youthful hand gripping it. He was talking animatedly, his face averted, but, hearing their footsteps, he turned his head.

There was, she thought at first, nothing much to see. No terrible scar. No distorted face. It seemed that his eyes were half closed, though as small as a child’s. It was only as he spoke, holding out his other hand to shake Charlotte’s—Florence was introducing them—that Octavia saw the jagged blue line at his left temple. It was more like a pencil scribble than a wound, lines radiating into his hairline.

“Captain Preston,” Florence was saying.

Octavia held out her hand. “How do you do.”

He was smiling. “We are just discussing a game we might play on Saturday,” he said. “Pushball. What do you think it might be?”

“I really can’t say.”

The other men were laughing. “A gigantic rubber ball,” Preston replied. “Six feet high. A very good invention by our founder. Two teams of men try and wrestle it over a line. It’s rather fun.”

“There are rowing races on the lake on Saturday, too,” Florence said. “Captain Preston and Corporal Turner here are in opposing teams.”

Corporal Turner was quite another matter. Octavia looked quickly at her daughter, but Charlotte seemed not to be fazed by Turner’s injury. The left-hand side of his skull, though perfectly smooth—too smooth, too pale and plastic in appearance—was depressed inwards. It was, to Octavia’s dismay, most horribly fascinating. But Charlotte was speaking quite openly to him, while he tilted his gruesome face this way and that.

“Where were you injured?” she was asking.

“A place called Fosse, miss,” the man replied, “Second week of October last year.”

“And was it . . . was it a bomb?” Charlotte asked.

“Not a bomb,” he said. “Rifle fire.”

“Oh, in the second week. That would be around the time that the Germans recaptured Lille?” Charlotte asked. Both Octavia and Florence looked at her in amazement.

“Yes,” the man said. “Lot of cavalry round there. Death’s Head Hussars. We caught some of them. It was about the last thing I saw—their fuzzy old busbies with the silver skull and crossbones on the front.”

Octavia realized that he was turning his head because he had hearing only on the left side. It was so curious to watch him rolling his misshapen head to one side to speak, and back again to listen. “They wanted the five railway lines, and they got them. They’ve still got them.”

“And you were marching along?”

“No. We was dug in, waiting. Stray bullet. I never knew I was properly hit. The others said, ‘Take yourself back to the clearing station.’ It felt like a punch, see? Never knew what it was. Knew I was bleeding but my cap was—well, it was like, welded in there.” Octavia shuddered involuntarily, but Turner merely laughed. “I helped somebody else, and we walks back. I kept walking, like. On a bit and on a bit. And I kept thinking, ‘I’ll blink a few times, and it’ll come back.’ But it never did. Walking and walking, and carrying some other bloke’s pack, too and with ’alf me head left behind.” And he laughed again. Octavia realized immediately that the injury had taken away some faculty, some part of the brain that inhibits speech, or moderates actions.

Captain Preston shifted a little in his seat. “Don’t encourage him,” he said, in a smooth, well-educated voice. “The fellow can’t stop once he starts. Bores us all half to death.”

“Begging your pardon,” Turner remarked, smiling.

Charlotte was absolutely calm. “Thank you so much for talking to me,” she said. “I shall watch out for you in the boats on Saturday.”

Florence ushered them onwards. They had only gone a few yards when Octavia stopped. “I must go and apologize to those men,” she told the girls. “I didn’t say a word to them. I’ve been very rude.” She felt both anguished by their injuries, humbled by their optimism, and hopelessly embarrassed at her own inability to talk as her daughter as done—relaxed, and in a kind way. It was truly amazing, she thought, what one’s own children could reveal to you. She began to turn, but Florence stopped her.