Time Squared, page 14
Yet this morning Eleanor was bored and restless, and the weather made it impossible to go outside. On impulse, she sat down at the dressing table. Pushing aside her brushes, she lay her hands flat on the mahogany as the medium had done, laughing silently to herself and planning to ask about Robert Denholm. The candle flame wavered slightly as the wind gasped through the drafty old window, the curtains fluttering, her eyes in the mirror impressively dark and mystical.
Eleanor tried to clear her mind the way the medium had advised. But focusing inside only made her conscious of her everyday thoughts, fragments of “time better spent mending” and “Mr. James is sly,” which she heard at a slight remove. Most of it was embarrassingly banal. Yet as she listened to her internal chatter, Eleanor also recognized it as a haphazardly woven blanket thrown over her horror of being alone; of being abandoned again as she’d been abandoned by her mother and father.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” came Elizabeth’s amused voice. “Catherine’s letter will arrive tomorrow.”
Eleanor’s lids flew open, and she glimpsed a disturbance at the corner of her eye like the flounce of a lady’s skirt as she left. Swivelling, she saw nothing. Not surprisingly, since nothing was there. Yet she’d heard Elizabeth as clearly as if she’d been in the room. Eleanor had no idea what was happening and shivered violently. Then the wind moaned through the loose pane and she leapt up in terror, running out of the room. Turning one way and the other in the hallway, she had no idea where to go. Finally she took a deep breath and decided on the nursery—yes, the nursery—where there was a baby who probably needed soothing.
When Catherine’s letter arrived the next morning, Eleanor decided she’d fallen asleep at the table and dreamed, that was all. The letter was a coincidence, for the obvious reason that it couldn’t be anything else. There was no such thing as ghosts, and in any case, Elizabeth was alive and well in Gloucester, staying with a man named Darcy who wasn’t the least bit a prince, but an industrialist so economical he’d dropped the apostrophe from his name.
With any luck, his son would make Alicia happy.
My darling, Catherine wrote, here we are in Cape Town, where I find myself warm and married, the two conditions inextricable. This is only a short note to assure you of my health, and of my husband’s health. I will write more presently. At the moment, we’re busy inhabiting a tiny cottage that is our first home, with roses growing up it! The conventional fighting part of the war seems largely to have ended, although the Boer commandos continue to execute raids on British forces, particularly on troops in the blockhouses from which the Army controls the countryside. Still there is a great deal for Arden to do in the Cape Colony to fulfill his new responsibilities with The Illustrated London News. Not far from Cape Town are some of those dreadful modern inventions called concentration camps where Boer women and children are housed in tents and starved and Africans face the same. The plan is part of the Scorched Earth policy in which the Army attempts to starve out the Boer commandos by burning their farms and salting their wells as well as placing their wives and children in camps. My husband is at one camp today and it’s my thought to join him presently. I am far from a professional artist and have neither the intention nor the possibility of placing my attempts in newspapers, but I can draw the children. And indeed, seeing my husband’s preliminary work, my original plan to earn my way by offering myself to do portraits of ladies in Cape Town seems fatuous. In Britain we have lived without war on our green and pleasant land these many hundreds of years but now that I see it close, I see differently, as my husband predicted. You must always remember your promise not to be angry with me! For anything. Even though I imagine you now live in the shadow of a newly risen volcano at Mowbray Close, known as my mother, who no doubt erupts regularly, and I do apologize for that. Speaking of apologies I haven’t seen Captain D. or heard of him although I will keep my eyes open. Indeed my eyes are wide open.
Write to me soon.
Love, Kate (as my husband calls me)
P.S. Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker have returned to India, leaving a name for jollity behind and a number of trifling debts, which Mr. W. in his expansiveness forgot to pay.
A letter from Robert Denholm arrived two days later.
“My dear Miss Crosby,” he wrote, and Eleanor cherished the my, tracing it with her finger until she grew afraid of tearing the paper.
My dear Miss Crosby,
Thank you for answering my letter. You divined my meaning and I’m glad you weren’t displeased. I was afraid you might be. However, I should tell you that we’re not facing battle in the conventional sense. With the arrival of two hundred thousand of our troops, the Boer is firmly outnumbered and no longer able to engage in traditional pitched battle, nor lay the sieges he did at Ladysmith and Mafeking. Instead he has reconstituted himself as a force of light infantry, assuming the new name of Kommando, a word from the Afrikaans. He rides in small units, well armed and well mounted, striking rapidly across land he knows intimately to destroy railway lines and our defensive blockhouses. His immediate motive seems to be not victory but revenge for our victories. Ultimately, I believe, he hopes to tire us into leaving Africa, but we will not.
I write from the countryside: for it is against the Kommando I am fighting. He is unnerving, arriving from everywhere and nowhere. In a sense, we are fighting modernity; fighting speed and craft. This is not the front because there is no front. Instead, my particular tariff takes me far afield with my scouts, trustworthy Africans who hate the Boer for taking their land. I should say they hate the Boer marginally more than they hate us, knowing that Britain has its eye on African land as well, particularly in the Witwatersrand, with its gold.
The time we spoke in Kent, you asked why I had chosen a military life. I told you that it permitted me a role in protecting Britain. Protecting you, if I may say so. That remains true. But on the ground, one can see that the Boer is fighting to protect his land and the African his, while Britain would like all of it, thank you, and things get muddy. Forgive me; the nights are dark and the hyenas chatter outside our ring of fire.
I like to think of your aunt’s garden in Kent, with its five-toed Roman chickens, and the mosaic that came to light after fifteen hundred years. The domestic goddess, with her look of amusement, reminds me of you. I do indeed hope that you find time to think of me, as loveable as you are, while in my isolation I think of you.
Yours most warmly, Robert Denholm.
It was written in copperplate, looking as if it had been copied from a draft. But scrawled across the bottom was, “Please write. I’d like it awfully. Robin.”
* * *
Eleanor walked out with her letter into a grey cold day as beautiful as summer. We all take our own paths, Elizabeth Mortlake had said, and Eleanor could see hers rising from the moors like a Roman road building itself ahead of her. She ran along it, the invisible cobbles leading her toward the crest of the hill where she and Robin Denholm had first talked. He had been weeping for friends killed in a battle disastrously executed by its commanding officer. Which one? It might have been the Battle of Magersfontein, remembered in the soldier’s verse: “Dearly we paid for the blunder/A drawing-room General’s mistake.”
She was bad with names, and there were so many battles. But Eleanor had looked in Robin’s grey eyes and known she was going to marry him, even though she hadn’t known him at all. She still didn’t, but he was a good man; she held on to that certainty. She would learn more about Robert now that they were writing, hopefully none of it unpleasant, since she could hardly stop writing to a lonely officer. She also couldn’t imagine him being anything less than honourable.
Reaching their bench, she found the wind whistling shrilly across the rocky hilltop. Looking into someone’s eyes in weather like this would have been a trick. Her own were tearing up, and she realized that the hard north wind was going to tumble her over unless she got out of there.
Kicking off, Eleanor ran downhill, elated despite the coming storm and the ever-present shadow of war. (Or maybe just slightly because of them.) She curved down the dale, the grass still green and springy. Finally she stopped out of breath under a crooked oak, tracing with a finger the runnels in its bark. In summer she wouldn’t stop here in dire weather, but it was too cold for lightning and she paused to look at the road, calculating whether she could make it back to the parsonage before it poured.
In the distance, a carriage came around the bend. A horseless carriage. She wondered who else had got one, then realized Stansfield Mowbray was at the wheel. Stansfield had brought Middleford’s first motor carriage back from Paris. Eleanor had stumbled on it parked in the drive at Mowbray Close, its two pairs of huge spoked wheels suspending a metal box between them. Stansfield had been shyly proud of himself in a beige dustcoat like the one gardeners wore, a pair of driving goggles pushed onto his forehead. It was the first time in his life he’d surprised her.
Now he was back from Gloucester and driving three others she could just barely make out. Friends must have returned with the Mowbrays, and Stansfield couldn’t wait to take them for a spin. A girl who was probably Alicia sat in the rear-facing seat, but Eleanor didn’t recognize the others. One was a gentleman sitting too close to Alicia, perhaps Mr. Darcy. Hoping for a lift, Eleanor ran downhill to intercept them, wishing as she squeezed through a drystone stile—her hair windblown and skirt tearing on a sharp white rock—that she could meet Mr. Darcy under more elegant circumstances. Not that it made any difference, certainly not anymore.
The motor carriage slowed as it approached, Stansfield pulling back on the brake. Now that she was close, Eleanor saw that the gentleman sitting close to Alicia wasn’t a possible Mr. Darcy but a very definite Murdo Crawley, and that both of them looked remarkably pleased with themselves. In shock, she turned to Stansfield in the driver’s seat. Beside him was a proud and prissy-looking young lady with curly black hair piled under an enormously fashionable hat. Both she and Stansfield appeared every bit as pleased with themselves as Alicia and Murdo.
“Miss Crosby!” Stansfield cried. “Out for an old-fashioned walk?”
“Walks are ripping,” Alicia called. “You know Mr. Crawley. He’s a great walker!”
From his seat, Stansfield said, “We’re here with Miss Darcy,” and the curly headed lady gave her a supercilious bow. Eleanor smiled through the introductions but disliked Margaret Darcy on sight. Judging from her sharp brown eyes, Miss Darcy returned the favour.
“You’ll want a lift,” Stansfield called, and Miss Darcy smiled up at him proudly.
It wasn’t pride. Closer to adoration, as if Stansfield was a hero just back from conquering a recalcitrant country. Maybe Margaret was the recalcitrant country. Lady Anne must be ecstatic; there would be money. Yet as Eleanor scrambled on board, she saw Miss Darcy use the moment to put a small hand in Stansfield’s great one, and a look of true affection passed between them.
How complicated the world became when your oldest friends attached themselves to people you didn’t like and did it very happily. Not that Eleanor disliked David Arden. She mistrusted him.
Once they were settled, Stansfield sounded his klaxon at no one in particular, and they motored off, running hard before the coming storm. Two new couples. Three, counting Eleanor and the letter in her pocket. Sitting beside them, she wondered what Mr. Crawley saw in the seventeen-year-old Alicia Mowbray. But she also knew.
October 1914
Middleford, Yorkshire
12
The flowers had bloomed beautifully all summer, as if in consolation for the war. As she wandered through the autumn gardens, Eleanor felt as if they’d been blooming forever, and she’d been wandering here since Odysseus sailed off to fight the Trojans, a soldier’s girl, her boy gone off to war. The Trojan War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Boer War—it could have been any of them, and she was eternally left behind, unable to find any more purpose in her life than girls ever found in wartime.
Now the Goodwood gardens were drooping, their scant blossoms limp on weak stems, the banks of pelargonium gone all elbows. Eleanor paused when she saw cutworm on a rose bush, semicircles bitten out of the leaves as if they’d been machine-gunned. It could have been any war, but in brutal fact they were fighting a modern war against the Germans, and it wouldn’t be a short one.
Everyone insisted the fighting would be over by Christmas, but in his letters, Robert said not. She was sure he was right, but it was hard to read about a long war and the part he expected to play in it. Eleanor had to anchor herself in the banal. Cutworms. Roses. Pelargoniums.
Not that Robert told her many details, leaving Eleanor to parse his letters as minutely as if she were trying to break a code. Censorship, of course. Everyone grappled with it. In his first long letter home, a mention of working with local scouts had suggested that Robert was being sent out on reconnaissance, perhaps taking a look at the German armies as they massed inside their own borders. Eleanor had been relieved when he next wrote from headquarters, where he’d missed the opening battles of the war. Maybe his general found him too useful to send directly against the Germans. She hoped so.
Then his letters had stopped at the beginning of September. Eleanor didn’t jump to thinking that Robert had been injured. Instead she’d assumed he was back on reconnaissance, proud of herself for intuiting this much, and with Robert for playing such a crucial role.
Yet his continued silence quickly became half-heard wheels, distant traffic; something else she’d known forever. As it rumbled on and on, Eleanor still hadn’t been afraid he’d been injured. Stupidly, in retrospect. Instead she’d worried that he was backing away from their increasing intimacy. They’d grown far closer in letters than they’d ever been in person, confiding in each other, developing jokes.
“Dear Nora,” he’d started writing. Eleanor had become Ibsen’s Nora living in a doll’s house, Goodwood having shrunk to insignificance beside the tiny shabby requisitioned rooms where Robert wrote her early in the morning or late at night. Maybe he’d begun to doubt she was capable of understanding him. A case of second thoughts.
Then she’d read about the Battle of the Marne. At first, Eleanor had insisted on believing that Robert was still back at headquarters. The casualty lists in The Times were horrific but he wasn’t anywhere near the fighting. Leafing through the papers, day after day, she’d pictured him busy at a field desk writing dispatches.
Until she’d read that two million men were massed at the Marne River. Two million men. Eleanor had realized that Robert must be among them, and her sick understanding made her bolt from the breakfast table, not really hearing her aunt’s alarm.
Rushing down the hallway, she’d grown intensely conscious of her body, the prickling of the hair on her arms as she passed an open window, the clumsy slap-slap of her heels on the carpet. Nothing could be more fragile than the human body. Her small frantic beating heart was the size of a fist. Her skin was paper to a bullet. When she reached the door, wanting to lose herself outside, her knees knocked together so hard she crumpled to the floor and sobbed.
* * *
Finally this morning, six days after the victory on the Marne, a stained envelope had appeared on the butler’s tray at breakfast. Such laughable incongruity, mud presented on silver. She’d grabbed it and run into the garden, where she’d torn it open savagely.
My dear Nora.
Let me first of all assure you that I am well and uninjured. I knew you would wonder when I couldn’t write, or hoped you would, and perhaps we should have a code word to signal imminent battle, one that could get past the CO. I have to censor the men’s letters, as you mustn’t say, and we’re to leave ours open for the CO to read as he chooses. The new one seems intent on it, more set on protocol than Col. Marsby, who believed that a gentlemen doesn’t read another man’s mail, and look how far that got him. However the new CO is closeted with the major as I write, so we’ll sneak this one through and perhaps agree on “chickens” as a code word, memorializing your aunt’s five-toed wonders. What were they called? Dorsets? Dovers?
“Dorkings,” Eleanor said aloud, making a gardener look up.
In any case, it’s filed under D in my mental pigeonholes, which I admit fatigue has made fall in on themselves like shell craters. There’s an awful breathless exhilaration in being tested in battle, they’re right, but mainly after making it through, and somewhat to my surprise I seem to have made it, left with only slight damage to the mental pigeonhole containing the names of chickens. But please don’t let anybody say that God was on my side, since if God was present at the Marne, he is harrowing, and I’m not sure I want him anywhere near.
Robert was alone in his cynicism. Everyone else Eleanor knew had been inspired by the allied victory, young men growing hectic with the wish to prove themselves in battle. Or at least, not to be called cowards. Most of the boys she grew up with were trying to get over to France, angling for commissions. Eleanor figured this was half the reason her aunt had approved of her correspondence.
There were also the hints Eleanor had picked up here and there about her aunt’s financial problems. She was becoming as stretched as everyone else. Robert was a bird in the hand as the bailiffs knocked discretely at the door.
Old bailiffs, too doddery to sign up.
The new letter was long and Eleanor read it circling the garden, growing increasingly unsettled by what Robert had written. His brother, Edward, was manoeuvring to get into the Royal Flying Corps, bucking their father—already back in uniform—who wanted Edward to join him in the Buffs. Meanwhile, Robert called the volunteers flooding across the Channel “toy soldiers,” leaving Eleanor frightened for the boys she knew, Stansfield Mowbray chief among them. Stansfield had been angling for a commission in the Lancasters, although a promising letter from the colonel had left him looking less like a toy soldier than an eager dog bounding around the parish. A large and joyous dog, his tongue hanging out, a golden retriever receiving permission to roll around in the mud.
Eleanor tried to clear her mind the way the medium had advised. But focusing inside only made her conscious of her everyday thoughts, fragments of “time better spent mending” and “Mr. James is sly,” which she heard at a slight remove. Most of it was embarrassingly banal. Yet as she listened to her internal chatter, Eleanor also recognized it as a haphazardly woven blanket thrown over her horror of being alone; of being abandoned again as she’d been abandoned by her mother and father.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” came Elizabeth’s amused voice. “Catherine’s letter will arrive tomorrow.”
Eleanor’s lids flew open, and she glimpsed a disturbance at the corner of her eye like the flounce of a lady’s skirt as she left. Swivelling, she saw nothing. Not surprisingly, since nothing was there. Yet she’d heard Elizabeth as clearly as if she’d been in the room. Eleanor had no idea what was happening and shivered violently. Then the wind moaned through the loose pane and she leapt up in terror, running out of the room. Turning one way and the other in the hallway, she had no idea where to go. Finally she took a deep breath and decided on the nursery—yes, the nursery—where there was a baby who probably needed soothing.
When Catherine’s letter arrived the next morning, Eleanor decided she’d fallen asleep at the table and dreamed, that was all. The letter was a coincidence, for the obvious reason that it couldn’t be anything else. There was no such thing as ghosts, and in any case, Elizabeth was alive and well in Gloucester, staying with a man named Darcy who wasn’t the least bit a prince, but an industrialist so economical he’d dropped the apostrophe from his name.
With any luck, his son would make Alicia happy.
My darling, Catherine wrote, here we are in Cape Town, where I find myself warm and married, the two conditions inextricable. This is only a short note to assure you of my health, and of my husband’s health. I will write more presently. At the moment, we’re busy inhabiting a tiny cottage that is our first home, with roses growing up it! The conventional fighting part of the war seems largely to have ended, although the Boer commandos continue to execute raids on British forces, particularly on troops in the blockhouses from which the Army controls the countryside. Still there is a great deal for Arden to do in the Cape Colony to fulfill his new responsibilities with The Illustrated London News. Not far from Cape Town are some of those dreadful modern inventions called concentration camps where Boer women and children are housed in tents and starved and Africans face the same. The plan is part of the Scorched Earth policy in which the Army attempts to starve out the Boer commandos by burning their farms and salting their wells as well as placing their wives and children in camps. My husband is at one camp today and it’s my thought to join him presently. I am far from a professional artist and have neither the intention nor the possibility of placing my attempts in newspapers, but I can draw the children. And indeed, seeing my husband’s preliminary work, my original plan to earn my way by offering myself to do portraits of ladies in Cape Town seems fatuous. In Britain we have lived without war on our green and pleasant land these many hundreds of years but now that I see it close, I see differently, as my husband predicted. You must always remember your promise not to be angry with me! For anything. Even though I imagine you now live in the shadow of a newly risen volcano at Mowbray Close, known as my mother, who no doubt erupts regularly, and I do apologize for that. Speaking of apologies I haven’t seen Captain D. or heard of him although I will keep my eyes open. Indeed my eyes are wide open.
Write to me soon.
Love, Kate (as my husband calls me)
P.S. Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker have returned to India, leaving a name for jollity behind and a number of trifling debts, which Mr. W. in his expansiveness forgot to pay.
A letter from Robert Denholm arrived two days later.
“My dear Miss Crosby,” he wrote, and Eleanor cherished the my, tracing it with her finger until she grew afraid of tearing the paper.
My dear Miss Crosby,
Thank you for answering my letter. You divined my meaning and I’m glad you weren’t displeased. I was afraid you might be. However, I should tell you that we’re not facing battle in the conventional sense. With the arrival of two hundred thousand of our troops, the Boer is firmly outnumbered and no longer able to engage in traditional pitched battle, nor lay the sieges he did at Ladysmith and Mafeking. Instead he has reconstituted himself as a force of light infantry, assuming the new name of Kommando, a word from the Afrikaans. He rides in small units, well armed and well mounted, striking rapidly across land he knows intimately to destroy railway lines and our defensive blockhouses. His immediate motive seems to be not victory but revenge for our victories. Ultimately, I believe, he hopes to tire us into leaving Africa, but we will not.
I write from the countryside: for it is against the Kommando I am fighting. He is unnerving, arriving from everywhere and nowhere. In a sense, we are fighting modernity; fighting speed and craft. This is not the front because there is no front. Instead, my particular tariff takes me far afield with my scouts, trustworthy Africans who hate the Boer for taking their land. I should say they hate the Boer marginally more than they hate us, knowing that Britain has its eye on African land as well, particularly in the Witwatersrand, with its gold.
The time we spoke in Kent, you asked why I had chosen a military life. I told you that it permitted me a role in protecting Britain. Protecting you, if I may say so. That remains true. But on the ground, one can see that the Boer is fighting to protect his land and the African his, while Britain would like all of it, thank you, and things get muddy. Forgive me; the nights are dark and the hyenas chatter outside our ring of fire.
I like to think of your aunt’s garden in Kent, with its five-toed Roman chickens, and the mosaic that came to light after fifteen hundred years. The domestic goddess, with her look of amusement, reminds me of you. I do indeed hope that you find time to think of me, as loveable as you are, while in my isolation I think of you.
Yours most warmly, Robert Denholm.
It was written in copperplate, looking as if it had been copied from a draft. But scrawled across the bottom was, “Please write. I’d like it awfully. Robin.”
* * *
Eleanor walked out with her letter into a grey cold day as beautiful as summer. We all take our own paths, Elizabeth Mortlake had said, and Eleanor could see hers rising from the moors like a Roman road building itself ahead of her. She ran along it, the invisible cobbles leading her toward the crest of the hill where she and Robin Denholm had first talked. He had been weeping for friends killed in a battle disastrously executed by its commanding officer. Which one? It might have been the Battle of Magersfontein, remembered in the soldier’s verse: “Dearly we paid for the blunder/A drawing-room General’s mistake.”
She was bad with names, and there were so many battles. But Eleanor had looked in Robin’s grey eyes and known she was going to marry him, even though she hadn’t known him at all. She still didn’t, but he was a good man; she held on to that certainty. She would learn more about Robert now that they were writing, hopefully none of it unpleasant, since she could hardly stop writing to a lonely officer. She also couldn’t imagine him being anything less than honourable.
Reaching their bench, she found the wind whistling shrilly across the rocky hilltop. Looking into someone’s eyes in weather like this would have been a trick. Her own were tearing up, and she realized that the hard north wind was going to tumble her over unless she got out of there.
Kicking off, Eleanor ran downhill, elated despite the coming storm and the ever-present shadow of war. (Or maybe just slightly because of them.) She curved down the dale, the grass still green and springy. Finally she stopped out of breath under a crooked oak, tracing with a finger the runnels in its bark. In summer she wouldn’t stop here in dire weather, but it was too cold for lightning and she paused to look at the road, calculating whether she could make it back to the parsonage before it poured.
In the distance, a carriage came around the bend. A horseless carriage. She wondered who else had got one, then realized Stansfield Mowbray was at the wheel. Stansfield had brought Middleford’s first motor carriage back from Paris. Eleanor had stumbled on it parked in the drive at Mowbray Close, its two pairs of huge spoked wheels suspending a metal box between them. Stansfield had been shyly proud of himself in a beige dustcoat like the one gardeners wore, a pair of driving goggles pushed onto his forehead. It was the first time in his life he’d surprised her.
Now he was back from Gloucester and driving three others she could just barely make out. Friends must have returned with the Mowbrays, and Stansfield couldn’t wait to take them for a spin. A girl who was probably Alicia sat in the rear-facing seat, but Eleanor didn’t recognize the others. One was a gentleman sitting too close to Alicia, perhaps Mr. Darcy. Hoping for a lift, Eleanor ran downhill to intercept them, wishing as she squeezed through a drystone stile—her hair windblown and skirt tearing on a sharp white rock—that she could meet Mr. Darcy under more elegant circumstances. Not that it made any difference, certainly not anymore.
The motor carriage slowed as it approached, Stansfield pulling back on the brake. Now that she was close, Eleanor saw that the gentleman sitting close to Alicia wasn’t a possible Mr. Darcy but a very definite Murdo Crawley, and that both of them looked remarkably pleased with themselves. In shock, she turned to Stansfield in the driver’s seat. Beside him was a proud and prissy-looking young lady with curly black hair piled under an enormously fashionable hat. Both she and Stansfield appeared every bit as pleased with themselves as Alicia and Murdo.
“Miss Crosby!” Stansfield cried. “Out for an old-fashioned walk?”
“Walks are ripping,” Alicia called. “You know Mr. Crawley. He’s a great walker!”
From his seat, Stansfield said, “We’re here with Miss Darcy,” and the curly headed lady gave her a supercilious bow. Eleanor smiled through the introductions but disliked Margaret Darcy on sight. Judging from her sharp brown eyes, Miss Darcy returned the favour.
“You’ll want a lift,” Stansfield called, and Miss Darcy smiled up at him proudly.
It wasn’t pride. Closer to adoration, as if Stansfield was a hero just back from conquering a recalcitrant country. Maybe Margaret was the recalcitrant country. Lady Anne must be ecstatic; there would be money. Yet as Eleanor scrambled on board, she saw Miss Darcy use the moment to put a small hand in Stansfield’s great one, and a look of true affection passed between them.
How complicated the world became when your oldest friends attached themselves to people you didn’t like and did it very happily. Not that Eleanor disliked David Arden. She mistrusted him.
Once they were settled, Stansfield sounded his klaxon at no one in particular, and they motored off, running hard before the coming storm. Two new couples. Three, counting Eleanor and the letter in her pocket. Sitting beside them, she wondered what Mr. Crawley saw in the seventeen-year-old Alicia Mowbray. But she also knew.
October 1914
Middleford, Yorkshire
12
The flowers had bloomed beautifully all summer, as if in consolation for the war. As she wandered through the autumn gardens, Eleanor felt as if they’d been blooming forever, and she’d been wandering here since Odysseus sailed off to fight the Trojans, a soldier’s girl, her boy gone off to war. The Trojan War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Boer War—it could have been any of them, and she was eternally left behind, unable to find any more purpose in her life than girls ever found in wartime.
Now the Goodwood gardens were drooping, their scant blossoms limp on weak stems, the banks of pelargonium gone all elbows. Eleanor paused when she saw cutworm on a rose bush, semicircles bitten out of the leaves as if they’d been machine-gunned. It could have been any war, but in brutal fact they were fighting a modern war against the Germans, and it wouldn’t be a short one.
Everyone insisted the fighting would be over by Christmas, but in his letters, Robert said not. She was sure he was right, but it was hard to read about a long war and the part he expected to play in it. Eleanor had to anchor herself in the banal. Cutworms. Roses. Pelargoniums.
Not that Robert told her many details, leaving Eleanor to parse his letters as minutely as if she were trying to break a code. Censorship, of course. Everyone grappled with it. In his first long letter home, a mention of working with local scouts had suggested that Robert was being sent out on reconnaissance, perhaps taking a look at the German armies as they massed inside their own borders. Eleanor had been relieved when he next wrote from headquarters, where he’d missed the opening battles of the war. Maybe his general found him too useful to send directly against the Germans. She hoped so.
Then his letters had stopped at the beginning of September. Eleanor didn’t jump to thinking that Robert had been injured. Instead she’d assumed he was back on reconnaissance, proud of herself for intuiting this much, and with Robert for playing such a crucial role.
Yet his continued silence quickly became half-heard wheels, distant traffic; something else she’d known forever. As it rumbled on and on, Eleanor still hadn’t been afraid he’d been injured. Stupidly, in retrospect. Instead she’d worried that he was backing away from their increasing intimacy. They’d grown far closer in letters than they’d ever been in person, confiding in each other, developing jokes.
“Dear Nora,” he’d started writing. Eleanor had become Ibsen’s Nora living in a doll’s house, Goodwood having shrunk to insignificance beside the tiny shabby requisitioned rooms where Robert wrote her early in the morning or late at night. Maybe he’d begun to doubt she was capable of understanding him. A case of second thoughts.
Then she’d read about the Battle of the Marne. At first, Eleanor had insisted on believing that Robert was still back at headquarters. The casualty lists in The Times were horrific but he wasn’t anywhere near the fighting. Leafing through the papers, day after day, she’d pictured him busy at a field desk writing dispatches.
Until she’d read that two million men were massed at the Marne River. Two million men. Eleanor had realized that Robert must be among them, and her sick understanding made her bolt from the breakfast table, not really hearing her aunt’s alarm.
Rushing down the hallway, she’d grown intensely conscious of her body, the prickling of the hair on her arms as she passed an open window, the clumsy slap-slap of her heels on the carpet. Nothing could be more fragile than the human body. Her small frantic beating heart was the size of a fist. Her skin was paper to a bullet. When she reached the door, wanting to lose herself outside, her knees knocked together so hard she crumpled to the floor and sobbed.
* * *
Finally this morning, six days after the victory on the Marne, a stained envelope had appeared on the butler’s tray at breakfast. Such laughable incongruity, mud presented on silver. She’d grabbed it and run into the garden, where she’d torn it open savagely.
My dear Nora.
Let me first of all assure you that I am well and uninjured. I knew you would wonder when I couldn’t write, or hoped you would, and perhaps we should have a code word to signal imminent battle, one that could get past the CO. I have to censor the men’s letters, as you mustn’t say, and we’re to leave ours open for the CO to read as he chooses. The new one seems intent on it, more set on protocol than Col. Marsby, who believed that a gentlemen doesn’t read another man’s mail, and look how far that got him. However the new CO is closeted with the major as I write, so we’ll sneak this one through and perhaps agree on “chickens” as a code word, memorializing your aunt’s five-toed wonders. What were they called? Dorsets? Dovers?
“Dorkings,” Eleanor said aloud, making a gardener look up.
In any case, it’s filed under D in my mental pigeonholes, which I admit fatigue has made fall in on themselves like shell craters. There’s an awful breathless exhilaration in being tested in battle, they’re right, but mainly after making it through, and somewhat to my surprise I seem to have made it, left with only slight damage to the mental pigeonhole containing the names of chickens. But please don’t let anybody say that God was on my side, since if God was present at the Marne, he is harrowing, and I’m not sure I want him anywhere near.
Robert was alone in his cynicism. Everyone else Eleanor knew had been inspired by the allied victory, young men growing hectic with the wish to prove themselves in battle. Or at least, not to be called cowards. Most of the boys she grew up with were trying to get over to France, angling for commissions. Eleanor figured this was half the reason her aunt had approved of her correspondence.
There were also the hints Eleanor had picked up here and there about her aunt’s financial problems. She was becoming as stretched as everyone else. Robert was a bird in the hand as the bailiffs knocked discretely at the door.
Old bailiffs, too doddery to sign up.
The new letter was long and Eleanor read it circling the garden, growing increasingly unsettled by what Robert had written. His brother, Edward, was manoeuvring to get into the Royal Flying Corps, bucking their father—already back in uniform—who wanted Edward to join him in the Buffs. Meanwhile, Robert called the volunteers flooding across the Channel “toy soldiers,” leaving Eleanor frightened for the boys she knew, Stansfield Mowbray chief among them. Stansfield had been angling for a commission in the Lancasters, although a promising letter from the colonel had left him looking less like a toy soldier than an eager dog bounding around the parish. A large and joyous dog, his tongue hanging out, a golden retriever receiving permission to roll around in the mud.
