The Wild Dark Flowers (30 page)

“Suicide, sir, to do that!”

“Take hold—take hold—”

“All right now, sir . . . ”

The major straightened up, gasping for air.

“Nobody fired,” he said, grinning in wonderment.

“Victoria Cross that is, sir.”

“I hardly think so,” the major said. He was wiping sweat out of his eyes. “Get that lunatic away from here. Get him down the line to the clearing station.”

The men were doing their best. They were frog-marching the man as much as they could in the narrow line that was already choked with troops.

The major knew what was planned for the rest of the day. He had received his orders before he had decided to go out there and get whoever he could out of that vision of hell.

Haig had decided midmorning to renew the attack. Noon had been the zero hour, but there was not time to bring enough supporting units forward. Another attack would begin at two forty. The major looked at his watch.

It was two fifteen: there was a lot to do before the next men went forward. He looked down at his feet, to where the man that he had carried was lying. He saw that the man had taken a bullet in the hip, perhaps the back. His left foot was missing. But he had been conscious; he had survived nearly five hours of continual German shelling.

The RMC corporal, who had been bending over the man, now straightened up.

“We’ll get a stretcher down here,” the major said. “He’s on his way home to Yorkshire. He’s been telling me about it.”

The corporal gave a shrug that was hard to interpret. Then, “No need for a stretcher,” he said, finally.

They both looked down at the man that neither of them knew, the man for whom the major had risked his own life.

For a moment, the major said nothing.

Then, he turned away, shaking his head.

They would say later to him, after the war, many years later when the whole unraveling horror of the time was fully realized, fully understood, that there had been more than eleven thousand casualties that day.

But he only ever remembered one of them.

He would always remember the man from a place called Rutherford in Yorkshire who had been going home.

*   *   *

I
t was light by five o’clock, and William lay awake.

His sleep had been fitful; the air in the room of the Grosvenor Square house seemed to have choked him. Not wanting to ring for Cooper in the darkness of the early hours, he had managed to get out of bed and go to the window, and with something of a struggle, he had raised the frame.

Coolness had slowly poured into the room. He had stood and listened to the sounds of London—the few mournful and distant hoots of railway engines, the intermittent and now increasingly rare sound of horse’s hooves on the roads.

What day was it? He tried to remember.

The ninth of May. His favorite month; he liked Rutherford in the spring. He always began his longer walks in May, and his favorite rides across the moors. But not this year. This year, all that treasured tradition had been pulled out of shape, first with the news of Rupert Kent’s death, and then Harry’s injury. And their own arrival in London at the very time that they had always left it in the past, after the Season.

They had not been to the Season this year; they had decided not to subject Louisa or themselves to London again so soon after the debacle with Charles de Montfort. And so the year was already peculiarly distorted before it had begun.

He had begun to think of them all—all of England, in fact—as being in the grip of some strange twisted fairground mirror. Nothing was the same. One took hold of a fact, and it disintegrated in one’s hands. He was certain now that Octavia had been right, and that the newspapers did not report how the war was really going; the jingoism of hearty victories covered up something much worse: something, again, pulled out of shape, crushed and twisted.

He watched the far side of the square, and saw a horse-drawn cab pull away from the curb outside a house directly opposite. He watched it with mixed feelings and memories.

The cabs were merely relics of a time whose standards and routines were being swiftly erased. He had once been a young man in this city; he had raised a small amount of rakish hell, and much later still, as a married man, returned here as a Member of Parliament, the very epitome of respectability. His younger self had gone, vanished as if his dalliances and indiscretions had never been.

Except for Helene de Montfort. She rarely came to his mind these days; it was odd that he should dwell on her now. Since that business last year—since he had seen Helene in Paris brought low by some affair that had evidently gone sour, abandoned by some anonymous lover—he had managed to put her away, out of his conscious thoughts. He had supposed that she would survive without him; she barely cared for him, and had lied to him for years, suggesting that her son Charles had actually been his. And so, in his mind, after bringing Louisa back to Rutherford from Paris, he had closed the door to Helene in his mind.

He leaned his head down on the cold window glass, and looked down into the empty green square behind its railings. His marriage. Octavia. He had thought that he had saved it, mended his fences, brought his wife and children together again under Rutherford’s roof.

But what had he achieved, in reality? he wondered. Octavia had gone last night to Folkestone entirely on her own. Without Cooper, without Amelie—and, of course, without him. She was so brisk, so expressionless, a different woman entirely to the one that he had married. Businesslike almost, with something like only pity in her eyes. “Do as the doctor tells you,” she had said to him. He had felt like a great burdensome child; it was all wrong. She was meant to depend upon him, to listen to him and concur with him—not make her own decisions.

He had watched her go, watched the taxicab from this same window. And then Cooper had come in and fussed around him and shooed him into bed. Child again. “Get out of here,” he had finally hissed to his valet. “Bring me brandy.”

“That I cannot do, my lord,” had been the reply.

He stared at Cooper in astonishment, and the man spread his hands helplessly. “Her ladyship’s strict orders.”

“God damn it!” William roared. And felt his heart flutter like a sparrow against his rib cage. Cooper had seen the change in his complexion, and bundled him into the bed. To William’s mortification, he had been powerless to stop it, and lay there gasping like a landed fish.

“Octavia,” he whispered when he was alone. He thought of her beautiful face staring at him as she had pulled on her gloves and wrapped the shawl over her traveling coat. “I shall be back with Harry as soon as I am able,” she had said.

“Hire a private ambulance,” he told her. “Don’t let him be shoved onto some train or other. Get a motorized ambulance, and come back with him that way.”

“I will,” she replied. “It’s all in hand, William. I have arranged for two nurses to come here tomorrow. Amelie has her instructions.”

And then she was gone.

Unthinkable once that a woman of her class could travel alone on public transport. Utterly unthinkable. Only a certain type of woman did such a thing when he was young. He remembered them now, those women: he thought of himself and other young men going down to Piccadilly; he thought of the painted girls of sixteen and seventeen.

What an enormous joke it had all seemed; he never once gave a thought to them. Why they were there. Only that they
were
there. Girls to amuse him; girls that you paid after twenty minutes in some sweaty room or other; glasses of cheap champagne, false sighs, and then hands snatching his money.
Oh my God
, he thought, the desperate callousness of youth. The mistakes, the greed.

He pushed himself back from the window and looked at the clock on his bedside table.

Ten minutes past five.

He realized that his thoughts were racing. He must try to think clearly. He walked slowly over to his bureau, and from it he took out a sheaf of paper and his fountain pen; going back to the bed, he climbed laboriously into it, resting the paper on the coverlet and an open book that was still lying there from the night before.

And after a while, he began to write.

*   *   *

M
uch later, a tap came on his door.

“Who is it?” he called. He was lying back, the writing done, the envelope tucked under the coverlet, out of sight.

The door opened, and Charlotte’s smiling face appeared. She came into the room carrying a breakfast tray.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Surely you’ve not made that yourself.”

“Don’t be silly, Father,” she retorted, laughing. “I took it from the cook downstairs.” She put the tray down on the bedside table and made a place for herself on the edge of his vast bed, drawing her heavily embroidered Chinese dressing gown about her. “Now I’m going to spoil you, and feed you things.”

He tried to be angry, but could not. He gazed at her as she poured his tea, ladling far too much sugar into the cup and stirring it briskly. She was a kind girl. Not pretty, like Louisa—or, rather, not pretty in Louisa’s fashion. She was not finely drawn, but had a strong, handsome face.

He remembered that he had once murmured to Octavia, watching Louisa and Charlotte play on the lawns when they were little more than babies, that he had wondered where such a lumpish child had come from. Octavia had smiled and objected, of course, and he had only meant it as a joke. But Charlotte as a small child always seemed bold and large next to her sister. The teenage years brought glowering sulks and storms; now, though, she had matured into something entirely different. Dark haired, and bright-eyed under that newly shingled fringe of hair. How he wished that women did not cut their beautiful tresses. It somewhat frightened him, although he could not have said why.

“Here you are,” she said now, handing him the cup.

He eased himself up in bed. “Thank you.”

“We have had a call from Mother. I thought that you would like to know.”

“Thank you, dear. Yes. Did you speak to her?”

“No. They told me downstairs. She was on the train until nearly midnight, and then she got off at somewhere called Plummington. She decided to go the rest of the way by car. She’s found someone to drive her this morning.”

“My God. What happened to the train?”

“Oh, overcrowded, or signal failure or something.” Charlotte smiled, and patted his knee. “She’s quite all right,” she said. “She left a message that she would ring again when Harry’s ship arrived. She’s quite happy, just rather annoyed she couldn’t reach Folkestone; so you can remove that outraged expression, Father.”

“I shall write to the railway company to complain, nevertheless. A woman alone . . .”

“We’re not all winsome little flowers, darling. Mother certainly isn’t.”

He sipped his tea. “No,” he murmured. “I realize that.”

He sat back, and she looked at him. “You seem a bit better,” she observed. “Better color.”

“I shall be better when I get out of bed.”

“Oh no, it’s not allowed.”

He snorted. “I’m very tired of being swaddled up here,” he said. “I’m going downstairs at least and read my newspaper.”

Charlotte’s face fell. “Well, I don’t think you ought to,” she said.

“Not ought to!” he had taken the
Times
every day for the last fifty years, and read it religiously over his morning coffee.

“Well, it’s rather horrible news. Mr. Asquith’s been talking again about munitions. You know how that gets you annoyed.”

“A lack of ammunition is tantamount to murder of our troops.”

“There—you see? Stop it, Father. You shan’t see the paper at all. You shall stay up here and be spoon-fed milk sops.”

He had to laugh. “Bring me the
Times
,” he told her quietly. “It’ll make me feel human at least, part of the world. I promise I shall not shout.”

“Well, you see, that’s another thing. There is no
Times
to be had today. The delivery boy was very apologetic, but people apparently came into the shop off the street and just bought up every copy.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “We have a daily order. That is preposterous.”

“I know,” she conceded. “But it’s this thing about the
Lusitania
. They’ve got the
Daily Sketch
downstairs. Yesterday’s. Until we can run a copy of the
Times
to ground, that is. Would you like to see that instead?”

“The
Lusitania
 . . . ?”

“I saw a little bit about it yesterday evening. Florence had been past the Cunard offices, and she said there were people all over the place. And there’s been some sort of riot in the West End. German businesses, you know, being looted.”

William stared at her. “The
Lusitania
 . . . ?” he repeated, more loudly.

She gave a little shrug. “Well, I suppose you’ll find out about it anyway. I don’t suppose seeing the newspaper will make much difference.” She hopped from the side of the bed. “I shall fetch it.”

“Charlotte,” he said softly. “What happened to it?”

She paused in the doorway. “Oh, I’m afraid that it sank,” she said. “On the seventh, in the afternoon. It’s beastly, isn’t it? A submarine torpedoed it, and you know—it was all civilians on board. I know they sink merchant ships all the time, but a passenger liner!”

And she closed the door behind her. He heard her feet going downstairs, and a muffled and hurried conversation. Then the sound of her returning.

All the while he lay immobile, feeling as if the air had been drawn out of him. Of course, Charlotte did not know that John Gould had been on board. And, whatever happened, he must not reveal that it was of any tragic importance to them if she
did
discover that the American had been a passenger. None of their children knew of Octavia’s involvement with Gould—only that he had been a visitor to Rutherford. And none of them ever
would
know. He would make sure of that. If Charlotte made the connection—he twisted himself further up in the bed, wincing at a scratching wire of pain that seemed to be lodged in the base of his throat—if Charlotte made the connection . . . he must try to be a good actor. He must try to say, “Oh, the man who was in Yorkshire last summer?” carelessly, as if that same man had not held the power to shatter his life.