The Wild Dark Flowers (2 page)

Two stable boys and two undergardeners had gone—they were in training now for France. The kitchen maid, Grace, and one of the chambermaids, the lumbering and complaining Cynthia, had gone to work in the yards at the mills; they had been lured back by the better pay and the pleas of their mothers, whose husbands and sons were on their way to Kitchener’s New Army like so many others. The footmen Nash and Harrison had enlisted, too: the tall and blithe Harrison vanishing almost as soon as war was declared, without notice; and Nash—solemn and quiet, unshakably loyal, was still in training in England at this moment.

Mr. Bradfield struggled with only one footman and the dull-witted hallboy, Alfred; Mrs. Carlisle stoically worked long hours, trying to train the scullery maid, Enid, to help her, and regularly pleading with the housekeeper to find her another live-in pair of hands. It was a blessing that, since the war had started, the Cavendishes rarely held large dinners.

Upstairs, only Mary and Jenny were left to help the head housemaid, Miss Dodd, and even then it was generally believed that even Elizabeth Dodd had an idea to return to Sheffield, to be nearer to her sweetheart’s family. Amelie, her ladyship’s maid; Cooper, his lordship’s valet; and the nursemaid never left the upstairs—they may be servants, but they did not mix with those they considered lesser mortals. They were a race apart.

And so it was a sparse group that gathered at the kitchen table at seven o’clock, and, as was customary, they remained standing until the arrival of Mrs. Jocelyn and Mr. Bradfield.

Mary Richards stood impatiently at Jenny’s side. Eventually, they heard Mrs. Jocelyn’s skittering step on the stone flagstones of the corridor, and then the padded and more measured stride of Bradfield. Mrs. Jocelyn came into the kitchen clutching her Bible; she had been at her private morning prayers. Her eye glittered with malevolent concentration. Mary thought how, over the last year, the woman had become thin, as if in the grip of some permanent low-grade fever; the starched collar was loose around her neck, and, if you looked hard, you could see her bony hands shaking.

Mary glanced from Mrs. Jocelyn to Mr. Bradfield. By contrast, he was the same as always—tall and calm, his sandy hair brushed neatly. In moments when he was caught off guard, Mary would notice a rather sweet and engaging expression on his face, a sort of dreaming and philosophical look.

Bradfield now held out the chair for Mrs. Jocelyn. They all sat down. The food was served, and they began to eat in silence. Breakfast was not a lengthy meal: tea and toast only, while the elaborate kedgerees and egg dishes for upstairs bubbled behind them on the stove. When the last of the cups had been filled a second time, Bradfield took out his newspaper, and he passed whatever letters had been received to their recipients.

One such came to Mary this morning.

She looked keenly at the postmark:
Carlisle.

“What have you there?” Mrs. Jocelyn demanded.

“If you please, m’m, it’s from David.”

“David?”

“Mr. Nash, m’m.”

Mrs. Jocelyn turned her head away. “It’s a wonder he has time to write.” She disapproved deeply of a footman mixing with a maid: it was a dangerous quicksand, in her opinion—if not downright immoral. Mrs. Jocelyn was very fond indeed of pronouncements on morals. Next, she stared accusingly at Jenny. “And you?”

Jenny had blushed bright red. She had opened a letter whose bold handwriting on the envelope betrayed the sender: Harrison. She held it out, and then let it drop to the table as if ashamed of it.

Mrs. Jocelyn almost pounced on her. “A man that left the service of this house without a word.”

“He is in a London regiment,” Jenny ventured.

“And why would he go there?” Mrs. Jocelyn said.

“I don’t know,” Jenny admitted. And she dropped her voice. “He doesn’t write very much.”

Mrs. Jocelyn at last left them, making her way up to see Lady Cavendish to discuss the day’s menus. Mary could almost see the struggle in the older woman’s face not to criticize David Nash and Harrison more severely: they had enlisted after all, and deserved some respect. But Mary thought that the housekeeper probably had decided that fighting for one’s country was less important than polishing the his lordship’s silver; for nothing at all was more important to Mrs. Jocelyn than William Cavendish’s comfort.

Only when she had finally gone, and they heard the green baize door slam above them, did Mary pull a grimace. “Old cow.”

Fortunately, the remark went unnoticed among the clatter of plates. Jenny leaned towards her. “Any news? What does he say?”

“He’s got a few days’ leave.”

“Is he coming here?”

Mary stuffed the letter in her pocket. “Maybe. And Donald?”

Jenny showed her the hasty scrawl of Harrison, one side of a single page. It was not a love letter; in fact, it was full of talk of some London concert party that had come to his training camp. She looked up at Jenny, wondering what the other girl made of it. Harrison had certainly been no favorite of her own—he was too sure of himself, too apart from the next of them—but she didn’t want to spoil what pleasure Jenny might get from receiving his notes. After all, she was a sweet girl, quite naïve. Mary felt protective of her.

Jenny was frowning. “He says they’ll go to France soon. Why does he go, when others that signed up are training still?”

“Some of the London ones are being drafted into the Regulars,” Mary told her. “I heard Mr. Bradfield say so.”

Jenny folded the letter and put it away. “I don’t understand half of what he tells me,” she murmured. “I don’t know what I am to him at all.”

And, to her dismay, Mary saw tears in Jenny’s eyes. She wanted to say,
don’t let any man hurt you
;
but the other girl stood up quickly, taking her plate to be washed, and hurrying out when it was done.

*   *   *

F
orty miles away, high in the Westmorland hills, David Nash was walking along the spine of Helvellyn. He had climbed the western side of the great mountain that morning, and he stopped now on the summit, breathing the clean, sharp air deep into his lungs.

With the whole of Cumberland and the Borrowdale and Thirlmere valleys at his back, he gazed out towards the line of Ullswater. The lake was where he was headed that evening; he calculated that it would take him about three more hours to reach it. Far below him, Red Tarn was an almost-perfect dark blue circle at the foot of a smooth, thousand-foot drop.

He was, despite the beauty of the view, thinking of Mary Richards and Rutherford. He would be able to spend a day or so there, he hoped. He had always been too shy to tell Mary what he felt for her—he was better at putting things into words on paper—and Mary was always so seemingly sure of herself. He dreaded revealing himself and seeing her look at him with those narrow, assessing eyes.

The last time that he had been up here—it must be four years ago now, when he had first been promoted to footman at Rutherford—he had not been able to see his hand in front of his face on Helvellyn’s summit. Clouds had suddenly descended, and he had found himself stumbling along, disoriented, close to the edge; and looking down suddenly, he had seen the fog below him curling in a funnel, much like looking down into a drain as the water swirled away.

He had stepped back from the edge with all the hairs rising on the back of his neck; he had been that close to falling. But now, on this late-spring morning, there was not a cloud to be seen; he could even make out the distant rise of the Pennines towards Yorkshire and Rutherford. There was barely a sound either; he might have been the only man on earth.

He sat down on the smooth, close-cropped turf and stared back towards Brown Cove Crags, the way he had come. It had been a scramble up the narrow gulley with the gravelly scree slopes vertiginously rolling away beneath him. Down in the valley was the long, shadowy mass of Thirlmere, the reservoir that had been created to provide water for Manchester. There had been such an outcry when that lake was proposed; he remembered his parents saying what an outrage it would be. Now the little valley was obscured, its fields gone. He wondered what other changes would come, and lay back on the grass, and stared at the sky.

His brother worked some miles to the east of Ullswater, in a little village called Orton; he was groom at the Hall there. In September last year, David had taken the three days’ holiday owed to him and gone to find Arthur. He had found his brother in the stables of the Hall, mucking out, whistling loudly, with a beautiful grey hunter of the owner tied up in the yard. When he had seen David, Arthur leaned on the shovel and smiled at him. “Are you going?” David had asked. He did not bother to say where. They both knew. It was less than a month since war had been declared. “If you’ll come with me,” had been the reply.

No more was said. Arthur had gone inside the house and returned half an hour later, and they had walked together to the village center and caught a lift on the back of a cart going down to Keswick. It had been late in the afternoon when they had got to the recruiting hall, but there was still a long line of men waiting. It was all backslapping and smiles; it was all talk of chasing the Hun out of Belgium. He had gone in first, because he was the eldest; then he had watched Arthur sign his form, and smiled to himself when his younger brother had hesitated and, where it asked for his occupation, he wrote “footman” just as David had done. Arthur was no more a footman that he was the man in the moon, but David had winked at him conspiratorially as they went out, new members of the regiment.

They had gone into the pub afterwards. David grinned at him, “Well, we’ve done it now,” he said.

“Right enough,” he agreed. They were all puffed up with pride, flushed and happy. They swatted each other’s shoulders, and joined in with the singing. Someone had started “Rule, Britannia!” and “The Flower of the Valley.” They had come out of the pub laughing.

It had been no laughing matter, however, when Nash got back to Rutherford and went to see his mother in the village. She had three sons and four daughters; her husband, his father, had died some years before, and three of the daughters were in service. There was another family a few villages along, the children of his father’s first wife. They were all grown up—he and Arthur and his sisters were much younger. Fifteen children in all when the two families were added together; but the man responsible—his loving, quiet Dad—was long gone, buried in the churchyard when David had been only five. His mother was left to bring up her own six children alone, and she was a bitter, thunderous storm of a woman, free with her pinches and twists and slaps.

Still, to his complete surprise, she had said nothing when he showed her the enlistment papers, and told her that Arthur had done the same. She just held on to the doorframe, and her eyes filled with tears. It bothered him no end, shocked him; he tried to hold her hand, but she turned away and carried on with the clothes washing at the stone sink. “We’ll be back before you know it,” he’d told her, trying to be cheerful. “I’ll bring you back something pretty from France.”

She glanced at him. “Did you have to take Arthur with you?” she asked.

“He wanted to go more than me,” he told her.

She had shaken her head as if she didn’t believe him. His youngest sister, Gertie, came to the door of the outhouse, and stood there sucking her thumb and scuffing her shoe on the flagstone floor. She was not quite right, poor addle-headed Gertie; and she was the only one that mother would have with her now. “I’ve got to go, I’ve got to be part of it,” he said. “There’s a poster up in the village. It says you’re either a man or a mouse. I can’t be called a coward, Mother.”

“I’ve seen it,” she murmured. She stopped scrubbing and stared at the wall. “Why can’t you wait till they call you?”

“They might not call,” he said. “It might not come to that. It might be over quickly, and then I’d forever be thinking that I should have gone.” He patted Gertie’s head, and she looked at him like an adoring dog. “Besides, Lord Cavendish says it’s our duty to go.”

His mother snorted derisively. “What does he know?” she muttered. “He didn’t fight in the last lot. I can’t see him fighting in this one.”

“He’s something in the War Office, though,” David said.

“Is he,” she retorted sarcastically. “How very fine for him.”

“And their son has already gone. The Flying Corps has gone with the BEF.”

She didn’t reply.

He and Arthur had first been taken to a place called Ormskirk, south of the Lakes, on the way to Liverpool. They had spent all winter training. Then they went digging trenches in the flat open ground of Carlisle Racecourse, and then back again to their tented camp. Endless square bashing, endless marches, endless yelling and stamping and cleaning. They were used to following orders, though; they had both been in service since they were boys. It wasn’t so different to get up cold and damp and warm yourself by running, heaving, and carrying.

They were told that France was like this flat countryside, and muddy, too. That was all right, they told each other. A bit of mud never hurt anyone. It was a poor soldier who couldn’t stand mud and rain. And what they liked most of all—for they stayed together, trained together—was that they were part of something bigger, and they were all one. One big marching army. One body, with one idea and one purpose.

When they had joined up, everyone had said that the war would be over by Christmas, and the long months of winter training had disheartened them. It seemed as if his own prophecy might come true—that it would all be finished before their regiment got itself organized.

But then, by this spring, the stories of their great derring-do had begun to ring hollow, and he heard it unmistakably in his own voice. The edge had gone off the great adventure; they were glad lads no longer, their jauntiness had been replaced by a more determined grim humor. They had counted the numbers of the dead in the newspapers and started to guess the odds. The word “Ypres,” for instance, had taken on a bitter, awful ring since last October. All hell had broken loose there again last month, apparently. And he had no doubt that it was there—or thereabouts—where the regiment would end up. But there was no turning back. If anything, it was even more important to go.