The Wild Dark Flowers (3 page)

He watched the glorious blue sky now and considered himself, just an inconsequential body of a man lying on the back of a three-thousand-foot-high mountain, of no greater worth than the grass. Not in himself. Not in everyday matters. He was ordinary from the outside; he knew it. But perhaps war would make him better than he had ever been before; of more use, of more purpose. Perhaps it would steel him a bit, make him bigger in some way that he couldn’t get a grasp on, couldn’t define.

He knew that he was not much to look at; he was not handsome, he would be passed over in a line. The battalion had already had some photographs taken in training, and, when he had come to look at them when they were pinned up at the barracks, he couldn’t place himself for a long time. When he did, it was to see with some chagrin that he had nothing striking about him; nothing made him stand out from the crowd. He was tall, right enough, but his shoulders were sloping—he supposed from so many years of service, trying to polish up a kind of obsequious look. He was thin, too—pale handed, thin wristed—he was hardly the soldierly ideal.

Mary had been surprised when he came back and said that he had signed up; she had raised an eyebrow. “I had you down for a quiet man,” she told him. His hackles rose at the subtle insinuation. Seeing his frown, she smiled. “I can’t see you as a soldier, that’s all I meant,” she whispered when they saw each other again, passing in the corridor from the kitchen. “With your poetry and all.” He had considered her. “A poet can carry a gun,” he told her. “I’ll come back in uniform, see how you like me then.” She smiled back at him. “I like you enough as it is,” she replied. Astonished, he had watched her back as she hurried away.

He propped himself up on one elbow now and looked down towards Ullswater. Just below him began Striding Edge, the long narrow ledge that led away from Helvellyn and down towards the distant lake and Glenridding. He’d walked it before; it was not as bad as it looked from here. He would be down in the village by sunset. It was not as hard as the way he had already come, from Dale Head—a grinding, exhausting, exhilarating walk. Tomorrow he would climb to Bampton Common and finish at Shap, where he would rest his back against the Guggleby Stone, a relic of a thousand years or more, of stone circles and avenues that no one understood.

He’d done it so that he could carry the walk and the mountains with him, keep the images of it all in his head—as a kind of invisible keepsake.

This time last year, he had never realized that there would be a war at all—never even dreamed of such a thing. He had been doing what he always did at Rutherford; waiting table, laying out clothes, polishing silver. He thought of the steamy servants’ kitchen, where Mary even now would be laboriously laying the trays for afternoon tea, and tried to put himself alongside her, and dreamed of putting his hand, thin as it was, frail as it seemed, over her ruddy, hardworking fingers. He imagined stopping her in her work, looking into that earnest, honest face of hers, seeing those brown eyes gazing back at him with their usual touch of understated humor and kindness. He imagined something he had never done: lifting those same fingers to his mouth, and gently kissing them.

She might laugh at him if he did that; he wondered if she would. Laugh, and turn away, or make a joke of him. Or perhaps, now, she wouldn’t laugh at all. Perhaps she would turn her down-to-earth look on him, and tilt her face. He would look down on her thick brown hair held demurely at the nape of her neck. He would watch that mobile mouth turn upwards in a smile. Perhaps she would even lay her hand on his shoulder.

He smiled, despite himself; they would make such an odd couple. It was only that she always talked to him, only that. He liked her voice. He had asked her to write to him, so that he could have that voice wherever it was that he was going. “I shall do that,” she said. “A promise?” he asked. “I don’t say one thing and mean another,” she retorted sharply.

He pushed back his hair, and the cool breeze of the hills blew over him. Out of his pocket, he took a sheet of paper and a pencil. He had rhymes in his head that were not quite rhymes; he savored the words as if they had a taste, arranged them in his mind, trying to get the feeling of the mountain curled under him like a great dog, trying to get its power, its pulse. He shut his eyes and felt the enormity of the miles ahead of him.

Opening his eyes, he smoothed the paper on his knee, and began to write.

*   *   *

L
ouisa Cavendish had been sitting in her father’s library all morning, and had not stirred even to take lunch. Her father was out seeing the estate manager; her mother was shopping in Richmond with Louisa’s sister Charlotte. But she liked her solitariness much more these days: in fact, she enjoyed it.

She sat back now, catching sight of herself in her father’s little mahogany wall mirror: a slight, fair, rather pretty girl. She wondered vaguely if she looked different since last year. She was nearly twenty; she sometimes felt more like fifty because of her wretched treatment by Charles de Montfort. She put her head on one side, assessing herself. Perhaps her experiences—her being so dramatically jilted—had actually given her a more interesting air? A darkness, a suggestion of character?

She shook her head and smiled sadly. “You are certainly a ridiculous, silly fool,” she told her reflected face.

Since she had come back from France in August last year, the library was the place where she felt most comfortable. She had never been a great reader when she was younger; it had all seemed such a waste of time, and she had skipped her schoolwork whenever she could. Unlike her sister, Charlotte, she would happily fling down a book rather than read it, and the learning of French above all had been torture. It was an irony in itself, she had considered since. French was the language of distrust, of despair, to her now. It was the language spoken by liars like Charles de Montfort.

She would sometimes think of him, when off her guard, in a rather rosy light, as if he inhabited a grotesque fairy story that became more unreal with each telling. He had been handsome—she doubted that she had ever seen a more handsome man—and he had been such fun, so lighthearted. It still mystified her how much she had misjudged him; it made her doubt herself. That, above all, greater even than the whispered scandal and disgrace of having been jilted so theatrically, was the thing that had unnerved her so much. It made her question every opinion she had ever had, and it made her question her own advantages. Because all her popularity and lightheartedness and frivolity, all her good humor, all her prettiness, had brought her to her knees.

For a long time after her father and Harry had rescued her and brought her back to Rutherford after the debacle of her elopement, she had mistrusted herself even to speak, let alone take pleasure in the world. She remembered her mother sitting on her bed last autumn, stroking her face, chafing her hands, saying, “Darling, please talk to me. It’s quite all right to talk to me, I shan’t criticize you.” But her mother’s kindness had made it all the worse. Louisa simply lay there with tears streaming down her face. “Don’t blame yourself,” her father said, the first time that she managed to come down to dinner. “It wasn’t your fault.” But of course, it was her fault. She knew that. She had failed quite spectacularly to have a grain of sense in her head.

Now, however, pleasure was coming back. And to her complete surprise, she felt it most in the library, carefully looking through the books, running her hand over histories and maps and the records of other lives. Here, and in the archives, where Father kept all his own father’s diaries, she felt that her family were wrapped around her, gently protecting her, gently encouraging her to look outwards, past herself.

Her father would come in sometimes and stand next to her. He would say very little. But he would occasionally put his hand on her shoulder, and lean to kiss her cheek. “Read the translation of Homer,” he would suggest, or, “Look at the botanical drawings, they are rather fine,” or some such thing. She knew he was offering her what he himself most enjoyed. He wanted to share it with her. She would look up at him, and he would blush, and pat her shoulder rather embarrassedly. “There’s a good girl,” he would say, as if she were five years old. “There’s a good girl.”

She got up now at last, and stretched. She looked out onto the terrace; then opened the large doors through to the hall, crossed over it, and went into her father’s study. There on the desk was the morning newspaper, still folded at the page about Rupert Kent. She laid her hand on it reflectively.

She hadn’t much memory of Rupert—he was nine years older than she. He
had been
nine years older, she corrected herself, frowning deeply. Her mind immediately conjured up Harry as he had been last October, putting an arm around her shoulders and whispering, “Buck up, dear girl, won’t you? For my sake, if nothing else. I don’t want to think of you here moping about.” She had smiled at him; one couldn’t help smiling at Harry’s irrepressibility. “I shall try,” she promised him. “There’s a love,” he responded, pretending to give her chin a glancing blow.

She shook her head at the memory. Slowly, she walked out of the room and through to the orangerie.

It was a building that ran down the length of the south side of the house. Palms reached up to the roof, and there was a warm, heavy scent. She stood for a few moments, gazing out at the grounds, and then seemed to make a decision. Taking up her hat, which was lying discarded on a cane chair, she went out through the double doors and down the long herringbone path, skirting the kitchen garden within its high walls, until she finally emerged in the bright afternoon sunshine at the stable block.

Jack Armitage was just crossing the yard. As soon as he saw her, he stopped dead.

“Good afternoon, Jack.”

“Afternoon, miss.”

She smiled at him. “Are you busy?” He paused, after a brief glance over his shoulder. “Of course you are,” she said for him. “Two of the boys have gone, haven’t they?” She knew that the stable hands had enlisted long ago.

“That they have.”

“Where are they training?”

“They’ve gone already, gone to France.”

“So soon?”

“Some do,” he said. “And the Blessington Pals are going this week, too.”

“Are they?” It was the group that had signed up together from the mills that her mother had owned, twelve miles away on the other side of the moorland hills.

“And Harrison, and Nash.”

“Yes, of course,” she replied.

He stood watching her. She liked it that he had little to say; she found it comforting. The people who distressed her now were the ones that never stopped talking. Jack was a good man; she liked his implacability. He was tall and dark and had been a constant presence when she was growing up. There were only six or seven years between them: he and Harry had almost been childhood chums, as far it was possible between the son of the family and the head groom and his boy. “Jack,” she asked now, “have you seen Cecelia—little Sessy—lately?”

He colored a little. The subject of Harry’s daughter was still a tender one. Since the little girl had come to live at Rutherford, the staff shied away from the subject; there was a conspiracy of silence, it seemed to Louisa. She tried to be careful; she didn’t recall Emily Maitland exactly—she only had a memory of the pale, frail girl who had been one of the parlor maids. She had known nothing at all about Sessy being Harry’s daughter by Emily until after she came back from France. She had even sat the child on her lap at the late- summer dance for the staff, sat with her and held her little fingers in her own, and gazed down at her—all without knowing that they were in any way related. It was her mother who told her just before Christmas. “The child who comes here,” was the way she had introduced the subject. “Will have a nursemaid. I’ve employed one. She’ll come to live here.”

“The village child—Sessy?” Louisa knew that Octavia had a soft spot for the girl, and that she was regularly at the house. But, in the dense fog of her own recovery from her shock and illness after Paris, Louisa had not realized the significance of it all.

Octavia had sat beside her in the morning room as she told her the news; it was a bitterly cold morning in late November, and a fire was roaring in the grate as they took their morning tea. Louisa had a magazine open in her lap that she was not truly reading; the fashion pictures had no interest anymore. And so the importance of what her mother was saying only filtered through slowly. “She is Harry’s daughter, darling. Surely you understood that.”

Louisa had stared in surprise. “No, I didn’t,” she admitted. “How awfully stupid of me.” And Harry suddenly came back to her as he had been in October, gazing out of the window at the little dogcart that went down to the village. “So that’s why he went down there so much,” she murmured. “I thought it was some girl. Or rather, you know, someone he was fond of down there in the village.” She looked up at her mother. “But of course, it
was
someone he was fond of.”

“Yes,” Octavia said. “And now she’ll come and live here. Your father has agreed to it.”

Louisa took some time to think about it. “And the mother. . . .”

Octavia sat sitting with her shoulders squared as if she dreaded an argument. “Emily Maitland.”

“Well,” Louisa replied, after a moment or two of astonishment and horror. “We have both been rather a trial to you, Harry and I, it seems. You’ve borne it awfully well.”

Octavia’s face had broken very briefly into a smile, but she said nothing else. Thinking about it alone in her room afterwards, Louisa had considered how what might have been an absolute scandal even a year ago had now been utterly overshadowed by the war. Life was fleeting, it was temporary: that was a lesson drummed into them all in the past few months. She could see how the little girl was something else: some beacon of hope, of vitality, in a war-dreary world. Yet, even considering this, it was still remarkable that Octavia—and her father, good heavens!—was prepared to face down the whisperings that would inevitably accrue. And what would Cecelia be to her? A niece. A Cavendish. Another girl growing up in Rutherford, and taking, presumably, Harry’s name as her own.