The Wild Dark Flowers (4 page)

She had sat for a very long time staring out of her own bedroom window, in the comfort of her beautiful room, thinking about Emily Maitland, who had died as her daughter was born, and whom she herself she had never really known and now would never know.

Sessy had duly come into Rutherford, though still hidden away by the sheer distance of the nursery from the main house. As often as she could without being a nuisance to the sturdy woman who looked after Sessy, Louisa would creep in to play with the little girl.

“You needn’t be embarrassed,” Louisa said to Jack now. “She’s up in the nursery, you know.”

“I know.”

She took a step closer to him. “She’s a dear little thing,” she said.

“That I wouldn’t be party to, as I don’t see much of her.”

“Very strong, and rather willful, I’m afraid.” He made no comment. “I’ve been wondering . . . do you think it’s too soon to find her a little pony to ride?”

He looked surprised. “She’s only a bairn.”

“She’s seventeen months old, and walking.”

“Aye. Maybe.”

“Well, do you think it’s time to sit her on a pony? I’m sure she would love it. I had Grey Goose when I was ever so little.”

He smiled. “That were a grand little one.”

“Yes,” Louisa agreed. “I still miss her, you know.”

They gazed at each other in silence; after a moment, Jack dropped his eyes and seemed to take a great interest in the sandy gravel under his feet.

“I’ll ask Father.”

“Aye,” he agreed.

“And will you help me find the right sort of animal?” He raised his eyes. “I can’t very well do it without you,” she told him. She smiled when he shrugged by way of reply. “That’s settled, then,” she murmured. She turned to go, stopped, and looked back at him. “Do you remember when we danced in the orchard?” she asked.

“I do.”

She smiled hesitantly. “Carefree days,” she murmured. And, almost to herself, added, “I was such a little beast most of my life, I’m sure. So pleased with myself generally. So thoughtless.” She looked at him. “Did you ever dance again to that song?”

“I don’t dance much,” he told her. “There’s not the opportunity.”

“It’s very frivolous, I suppose, to talk about dancing just now.”

“I suppose,” he agreed.

She turned to go, then stopped and looked back at him. “You’re not going to enlist, are you?”

“Your father has said he can’t spare me.”

“But you’ll not listen to all this talk of going anyway?”

“I can’t say,” he replied quietly. “I must go in time, I think.” She frowned; he nodded at her and made a kind of shrugging gesture. “I’m away down to the farm then, if there’s nothing else.”

“No, no, of course,” she told him.

And she watched him go, until he was out of sight beyond the gates of the yard.

*   *   *

A
s the motor taxi trundled along the narrow lanes from York station that evening, exhaustion crept up on Harry Cavendish.

It was strange, because he had managed to keep awake all the way from London, relishing the green peacefulness of the world beyond the train window. Other passengers had engaged him in conversation too, eager to hear his version of the war.

Perhaps it was the strain of keeping a positive slant on his stories—it was not done to suggest even a fragment of the nightmare in Flanders, it was perceived a duty to be insouciant, even offhand—but it was only when he stepped onto the platform at York that an overwhelming need to sleep gripped him.

It was not long before his head tipped back and his eyes closed as the taxi went along. He felt himself to be lolling gently on a warm tide, and the patchwork landscape that moments before had been his home country now became monochrome reconnaissance photographs of France all laid out in an endless line, one after the other. Scribbled lines in the mud that were once farms and fields and cottages.

His hands were relaxed in his lap, despite the thick bandage on the left; but in his dream he was hefting the camera in a mahogany case, weighing ten pounds, over the side of the Avro to try and take pictures. He was dimly aware that his observer was dead, a bloody red mess behind him; somehow he had got hold of the camera case, and he felt the plane tilt as he partially released his grip on the controls to take the photograph.

And then, absurdly, he was dreaming of sketching the lines below them. Trying to figure out which trench belonged to which side was something of a challenge—for it looked like someone had gone mad with an ink pen that dripped blotches between the hairsbreadth wriggling lines. But he knew all too poignantly that deep in the lines were thousands of living men, and deep in the blotches were shell holes, full of the dead.

And all the time they shot at him from far below while he tried to keep a steady grip. “You bloody sods!” he muttered.

The driver looked back at his passenger, saw he was asleep, and smiled to himself.

Those photographs that Harry had helped to take mapped out Neuve Chapelle in March this year. Horrible Neuve Chapelle. Dreaming still, slumped in the depths of remembering, the strange otherworldliness of the images suddenly became more real. He was above Saint-Omer last year, and it was a clear, fine day. Harry looked over the side of the aircraft, his BE2, and he saw the Maubeuge road crowded with retreating troops.

He had been so jaunty on those first few days last year, before everything went to hell. The BEF and the corps were chasing, chasing; they were pushing the Germans back. Or at least that was what was supposed. They were all innocents then. All optimists. All so supremely confident in the last few weeks of the summer of 1914.

He tried to struggle out of the depths of sleep now; he didn’t want to see this picture: it was an awful, impotent memory. Because the BEF and the French didn’t chase the Germans away; my God, no. In just a few short hours, in silent mime below him, thousands streamed back the way they had come, the wounded being carried by men who threw away their rifles, artillery guns stuck in the center of the road, horses backing up, and in among them all civilians towing carts and cattle, and children running, screaming, in and out of the summer wheat that would never now be harvested.

The retreat to Saint-Omer. The Battle of Mons, August 23. He and the other pilots had only landed in France ten days before. He had only got his commission in the Flying Corps a few days before that, and his Royal Aero Club certificate a week previously. He had thought that, despite all he had said about hating the air, his father had some hand in making things go so straight and true for him. But Harry hadn’t had time to see his father to thank him, or to go home to Rutherford. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, they were qualified, commissioned, and gone. Anyone who could fly a plane was in one.

Harry had gone out and looked at the planes the night before they left England, and the light of day was very slow to fade—it was one of those balmy, lovely evenings of summer. And he stood alone and thought,
I am twenty years old. I am twenty years and two months old. And tomorrow I am going to war.

The next day, he had crossed the Channel in a Farman, a ridiculous sloughy machine that wouldn’t go more than fifty or so miles an hour. He longed for the Blériot that a chap at Hendon had shown him; it went twenty miles faster. The Farman lumped over the Channel, and he had headed for Cap Gris Nez, the quickest route.

It had taken him nearly an hour with a rough sea underneath him and a distrustful passenger, a driver who had been seconded into the role of mechanic and who prayed loudly all the way. Harry had never felt so desperately frightened or so exhilarated; not even his very first flight could compare to that crossing to France. He sat rigid and hunched, eyes on the controls, the plane, the sea, the horizon: it all became a jigsaw of navy blue and white. He kept thinking of the absurd luggage that he had with him, most particularly the tire inner tubes that had been bought from bicycle shops in Dover, and which he was meant to inflate by mouth if he ditched in the sea.

By the time that they crossed land, his teeth had been chattering and his face felt frozen, wind whipped; his lips were sticking to his teeth, his throat was closing up. Seeing the first piece of shoreline, he felt triumphant, as if he had won the war all by himself.

They had got to the aerodrome at Amiens and he had seen, to his astonishment, fifty planes all lined up as if they were at a show, and crowds cheering them. To his embarrassment, his passenger, the surly mechanic, had waved. When he had got the Farman down, he had grabbed the man as they had walked away from the machine. “Don’t do that showboating business ever again,” he’d told him, “Or I shall box your bloody ears.”

Oh, the dark, dark water of the Channel and the drizzling rain of Amiens, and the feeling of being an avenging angel ready to fly out over northern France and watch the BEF hound the Germans back over the Belgian frontier; oh the delight of it. He would have rather been in his aircraft, whatever they gave him, than be on the ground. The minute that he was in the air he was more alive than he had ever been in his life; even the controls in his hands felt surreal, brightly lit, more than three-dimensional. He would walk to his plane as if he were going on a morning stroll, jingling the change in his pockets. He liked to think he could make any plane dance; it was freedom itself.

He was knocked back, of course, by older men. “The callow carelessness of youth,” he had heard one say of an eighteen-year-old boy, newly qualified like himself, who had managed to crash his machine on the South Downs before ever reaching the Channel. “Brief candlelight.”

Harry had asked the man what he meant. “Sir, ‘brief candlelight’ . . . ?” He was wondering if it was some sort of jargon for a technical term. The man had downed the whisky in his glass; they were standing at a makeshift mess in the aerodrome. “There’s husbandry in heaven; its candles are all out. Or some such thing,” the man had replied. And he had eyed Harry, smiling. “You don’t know the play?”

“No sir.” The officer had laughed.

“Just as well, perhaps. Supposed to be bad luck.”

Harry had come to the conclusion that the officer had been one over the odds, drunk. But the phrase remained. The snuffing out of candles; and they were all candles. Particularly the young ones. Brief candles flickering in the dark. He understood that, finally.

It was true that the young ones died. But then, they all did, whatever age they were. He’d known so many go the reckless maddening way of the boy who had smashed into the Sussex soil, including poor Allentyne getting shot in a place that guaranteed no little Allentynes would ever emerge—“right through one fuselage to mine own,” the man had joked as he was taken from the wreckage. Wreckage of a reconnaissance flight only four days after they got to France.

The motor taxi suddenly slowed, and made a sharp right-hand turn.

Harry woke up, shuddering briefly: Allentyne’s face had been so absolutely clear that he was convinced for a moment that the poor devil was right here next to him. Harry shot upright, and the driver noticed the movement.

“Just coming up to the house, sir,” he said.

And so it was. There, in the sweet evening air, Rutherford. To Harry’s absolute chagrin, he felt like crying; he ran his right hand rapidly over his face.

As he watched the view of the house steps ahead of him on the drive, he saw the great door suddenly swing open, and his youngest sister Charlotte stepped out. She clapped her hand, and ran back the way she had come, and suddenly his parents were there: his mother looking radiantly happy, his father smiling, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip.
My God
, Harry thought.
The old man looks tir
ed.

The taxi came to a halt; Harry pushed open the door. Charlotte had run down the steps; he saw Bradfield at the door, smiling.

Charlotte threw herself into her brother’s arms. “Harry!”

He started laughing. “Hello, scrap,” he said.

She pushed herself away from him. “Scrap?”

“I do beg your pardon,” he replied. He kissed her extended hand. “Quite the grown-up lady, I see.”

His mother waited as he climbed the steps. She held out her arms to hug him. “Darling,” she murmured. “Darling boy.” He could feel her trembling. She stepped back from him, and, frowning, touched the scar on his cheek. “What’s this?” she asked, horrified.

“Little present from Fritz. Flew a bit low one day.”

“A
bullet
?”

“There are one or two about, you know.”

“Oh, Harry.” She looked at his hand. “And this??

He shrugged. “Well now, that’s why they gave me a couple of days. Went to see the doc in London, though. He gave me the all clear.” And he wagged his fingers above the bandage. “Can’t blame Fritz for it, though,” he said. “Some fellow put a chair on it. Blow me if it didn’t numb the hand right up. Couldn’t grip anything for a while.”

“A chair? But how could he do that?”

Harry smiled at her. “I’m afraid I was lying on the floor.
De trop vino
. Embarrassing.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw his father frown.

Then behind them, in the shadows of the doorway, a voice called out. “You’re awfully late,” Louisa admonished him. “Someone’s been kept up past her bedtime.”

Harry had been quite all right until that moment; disengaging himself from Octavia, he was in the act of shaking his father’s hand. And then, in a flurry of movement, Louisa was at his side, and Sessy was thrust into his arms, and a small starfish hand reached up and grabbed hold of the collar of his uniform jacket, and he looked down into a serious little face, very fair, framed by almost starched-looking curls. And saw Emily Maitland’s eyes gazing back at him.

And suddenly it was all one: the children running screaming along roads from Mons; the tilting terrors of reconnaissance; the snuffing out of human candles in churned seas of mud, or up on thermal currents pricked by brown pockets of antiaircraft fire.

He buried his face in Sessy’s small round shoulder, and felt those same inquisitive little hands touching the crown of his head like a blessing.