Time Squared, page 16
“Stansfield asked me to be friends,” Eleanor replied.
“Hmmm.” Lady Anne craned her neck until she spotted Margaret, who was strolling with Agnes, deep in a good gossip. Probably about her, Eleanor realized.
“Agnes Moreland,” Lady Anne said, with surprising venom. “It often happened at Girton. The least popular girl oozing up to the latest arrival and attaching herself like a leech. Dreadful creatures, leeches. I don’t know what the Morelands were thinking, not drowning the child at birth.”
Eleanor couldn’t help smiling. “I didn’t know you went to Girton. I wonder why I haven’t heard that before.”
“Well, they had to do something with me,” Lady Anne said, holding out her arms and turning a circle to show herself off.
Eleanor wasn’t sure what to say. She’d never had a chummy conversation with Lady Anne. It seemed an oxymoron.
“Were you at Cambridge the same time as my father?” she asked.
“With your uncle. Your father came up later. More to the point, Sir Waldo was at King’s College. Which put paid to any thought of education.” Lady Anne looked triumphant. Turning back to Margaret and Agnes, she frowned more thoughtfully.
“She’s a bitter girl, Agnes Moreland. I don’t want Margaret falling under the influence. She’s a little too proud already. Hard to take without Stansfield calming her down.”
Entirely thrown, Eleanor could only say, “Of course the boys will be home by Christmas.”
“You can’t believe that. Robert Denholm knows what he’s about, and must have said. I always told your aunt, ‘Send her after the younger brother, not the elder. More sense and far less sensibility, as our friend Miss Austen would say.’”
Lady Anne paused to nod slowly, growing pleased with herself. “I said that even before we knew the Denholms own precisely one stone of that drafty old castle, and that one likely to fall off. Oh! Those places! Impossible to heat! A hundred years from now Ackley Castle will be another ruin. You watch. We’ll go there for picnics.”
In a century? It struck Eleanor as oddly possible. “That would be nice.”
“All of us,” Lady Anne insisted. “Stansfield will come back.”
“Of course he shall.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. But he’s resourceful and he’s lucky. He’ll make it through.”
With a final nod, Lady Anne sailed off to greet other guests, her arm raised in a wave.
“Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How’s your lady wife today?”
“They’ll be home by Christmas.”
“Stansfield is lucky.”
Superstition as balm on anticipated wounds. Eleanor looked around without seeing anyone else she particularly cared to speak with. Elizabeth and Charles Mortlake were coming for the wedding but didn’t seem to have arrived yet, and the engaged couples were busy talking with Agnes Moreland. Yet Eleanor hadn’t been here long enough to leave, and in any case, her aunt was now surrounded by so many admiring gentlemen it would be impossible to pry her away. Instead, Eleanor thought of the oak. When she and Kate had grown bored at other fêtes, they used to climb the old oak, Queen Elizabeth’s tree. They had a favourite place along one low branch, which looked for all the world like an extended arm with a slightly crooked elbow.
Walking over, Eleanor leaned against the ancient bark, which smelled faintly like marshland: earth and damp and mushrooms. Rumour said Elizabeth had touched it with her redhead’s long pale fingers. Of course, rumour had her touching every old oak in England and half the noblemen, which couldn’t have left her much time to defeat the Spanish Armada.
Smiling, Eleanor wondered what it had been like at the rude court of Good Queen Bess, the hooped skirts and gentlemen’s capes and Shakespeare performing his own plays in front of the groundlings. She could half hear their coarse whoops coming from the games down the hill, where grown men jeered and howled.
And with a strange dizzy jolt, Eleanor was back there, walking into a dark room, a tavern crouched under wide oak beams. It smelled of smoke and hops and charred meat, dust motes tumbling through a nearby circle of candlelight. She heard the word glimpse and didn’t know what it meant. She was just a girl fetching her father. Looking around the crowded tables, she grew worried when she couldn’t see him amid the roaring drunken jollity, and turned when Kit Marley raised his tankard to recite . . .
* * *
An acorn hit her shoulder. Another memory. Not that Christopher Marlowe was a memory, but a dream that must have grown out of one of his plays, even though she hadn’t been asleep. The acorn was a memory, Eleanor told herself firmly. She’d pegged down acorns from the old oak throughout her childhood, sometimes gathering them out of season from Mowbray Wood with a backup store of pebbles and conkers. When another acorn flicked onto her hat, she began to smile. A dream of acorns. Ghostly acorns.
Giggles from above, far from ghostly. Coming back to herself, Eleanor looked up to see Mary Ann and Cassandra Mowbray sitting exactly where she and Kate used to sit, legs dangling from the long crooked branch. Cassandra waved at her sweetly and Eleanor felt knocked through with nostalgia.
Tossing down her hat, she climbed the burls the way her feet remembered, grabbing onto the bough and swinging up inelegantly to join the little girls.
“You can’t come here,” Mary Ann told her. “You’re an adult.”
“How awful for me,” Eleanor said. “Am I an adult? Surely not.”
She nudged Mary Ann further along, and Cassandra clambered over her to sit close to the trunk, hooking one arm securely around it, a thumb going to her mouth. Such a sweet vague little girl, her skin soft as whipped egg whites. Not for the first time, Eleanor wondered if Lady Anne had run out of names by the time she got to her seventh daughter.
“Well, if you’re going to be here,” Mary Ann said, “you can tell us who that gentleman is. We think it’s Edward Denholm, but we weren’t expecting him.”
Eleanor didn’t think it could be Edward, and was surprised to see him walking back from the cricket match down the hill.
“You’re right, it’s Mr. Denholm,” Eleanor replied. “I thought he was in London trying to get a commission. Maybe he’s come to ask Stansfield for help.”
“He had a row with Elizabeth this morning.”
“Oh, has Elizabeth arrived?”
“But they made up. Now he likes her. There! She’s just come down from the nursery.”
When Mary Ann pointed, Eleanor saw Elizabeth in a lovely blue dress and a hat trimmed with full-blown living white roses. She was on her own, marvellously erect, surveying the party. A movement at the corner of her eye, and Eleanor saw Edward Denholm see her, too. He lit up the way he’d once lit up for her and motored smartly across the lawn.
As Edward got close, Elizabeth heard him call and smiled happily. Their greeting was flirtatious, no other word, and Eleanor didn’t like it. Not because of Edward Denholm; he could do what he wanted. But Elizabeth Mortlake was married with two children. Eleanor didn’t care to see her listening with such amusement as Edward launched into a long and animated story. It seemed to involve the cricket match. He mimed bowling, and Elizabeth put one hand flat to her breast as she listened, burbling with laughter.
“She oughtn’t be so very friendly, ought she?” asked Mary Ann. Eleanor didn’t know what to say, and Mary Ann persisted. “Ought she?”
“Elizabeth is so beautiful, men can’t help behaving like that,” Eleanor said, supposing that Elizabeth couldn’t help it, either. It must be such a temptation, great beauty. Not using it was like Leonardo da Vinci refusing to paint.
“Do you think she’s beautiful? We do, but she’s our sister.”
“I’m quite sure there are goddesses less beautiful than Elizabeth.”
A giggle from Cassandra. Glancing over, Eleanor saw that her thumb was out of her mouth and she was pegging down another acorn. A small pause, then a pebble. A new target must have arrived under the tree. Craning over, Eleanor was embarrassed to see Charles Mortlake. He couldn’t have heard what they’d said about Elizabeth. Surely not.
“Cassandra! Stop!” she whispered.
But Charles Mortlake looked up, and when he saw them—saw Eleanor sitting with the children, her legs dangling—he looked every bit as amused as Elizabeth. He jumped to grab the branch where they sat and monkeyed up the trunk to join them, not caring for his fine wool trousers. Once settled, he took Cassandra in his lap.
“Hullo there. Excellent view,” he said, and looked directly at Elizabeth and Edward Denholm. Eleanor tried to think how to distract him and couldn’t.
“Lizzy’s a goddess,” Cassandra said.
“Yes, she is,” Charles replied. “And amusing herself with a mortal, from the looks of it.”
Most men would be jealous, but Eleanor didn’t see a tick of it in Charles Mortlake. Smiling, nonchalant, he was the definition of indulgence, every bit the grandson of a duke, his sophistication, she realized, far beyond her. Eleanor remembered the ball in London, how Elizabeth and Charles had used Edward to restore her reputation, and her aunt’s reputation, and more to the point, the Mowbrays’ reputations.
How, she realized, they had used her.
“Poor Eleanor, I’ve shocked you,” Charles said. “Should you prefer me to make a scene? When Elizabeth will grow bored with Mr. Denholm in five minutes, and send him off to help Margaret Darcy find her lost apostrophe.”
That sounded right. She hoped it was. “I suppose I’m too earnest,” Eleanor said. “I’ve been accused of it.”
“Earnest. By whom?”
“The Warfields,” Eleanor said. “Observing my attempts at self-education. Doing mathematics and reading Mr. James’s novels, where he takes aim at girls far more worldly than me.”
Charles paused and smiled. “You always surprise me, Miss Nora. Tell me how Robert Denholm is.”
“No doubt in danger. While we’re at this absurd party. Up a tree.”
“I thought it was rather a nice party.”
“Miss Darcy lost her apostrophe,” Cassandra said. “Poor Miss Darcy.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Charles said. “She can get another if she wants.”
“Can she?” Cassandra asked, immensely impressed. “What’s an apostrophe?”
Charles took out his handkerchief rolled it into a tube that he hooked at the end, and it was exactly an apostrophe. Then he tossed it lightly into the air and it hung there, and hung, and hung suspended, Cassandra clapping her hands and Mary Ann oohing and aahing, staying there so long it looked uncanny. Eleanor hated magic tricks. She wanted to know how they did it and could never figure it out.
“For your next trick, you can stop the war,” she said.
Charles met her eye. His were an extraordinarily deep brown and even more amused. She realized he didn’t want the war to end, not yet, not with men wanting to prove themselves, filthy with it, Charles first among them as he waited to enter the war cabinet. She heard Robert saying, “Old men sending young men off to war,” and while Charles Mortlake wasn’t old, in this moment he looked ancient.
We’re really in for it, she thought. This is what they want, what they’ve always wanted. Her aunt’s voice arising from deep in her memory. “There will always be another war.”
May 1915
Sussex, England
14
Eleanor could hear the big guns booming across the Channel. Not precisely hear them, not during the day. That was a phenomenon of night, of changes in the atmosphere, and last evening as they’d had a drink in the library, they’d heard a deep cannonade from the battlefield. Now, getting ready for breakfast, she felt a thud in her eardrums that wasn’t quite a sound but a change in the air pressure. The next moment, there was a quiver coming up her elbow as she leaned on the dressing table, as if a small earthquake was rattling the chalk of Sussex.
They were staying at South Farm, one of the Mortlakes’ smaller residences, a short rail trip down from London near the Channel. Elizabeth had given her a room facing east, lit by the white rays of the morning sun. They’d gathered in Sussex for one of Lizzy’s schemes: forcing the Mowbrays to acknowledge Kate’s marriage. More to the point, forcing Lady Anne. In accepting the invitation, Eleanor hadn’t expected to find herself reminded so audibly of the carnage on the western front.
Not that she needed a reminder, not with the names of the dead and injured filling column after column in the newspapers. The war wasn’t going well, although no one said that. Or said it without being howled down. Robert had made it uninjured through the latest round of fighting in the Ypres salient but thousands had not. Many of his men had not. Yet now he was getting leave, and after spending most of the week with his mother in Kent, he would meet her in London, where they would see each other for the first time since the war began. Eleanor would go up to London after Elizabeth’s attempt at a reunion.
Lizzy’s scheme had raised its head after David Arden was offered a gallery show in London. Poor David had been injured in February after only four months in uniform, losing his right arm below the elbow and collecting shrapnel in his left leg. Blighties, they called wounds like that, which sent a soldier home not hopelessly damaged. Blighties were highly sought-after, Robert wrote. Seldom achieved. Fortunately David was left-handed, although the phantom pain in the missing arm was bad and he could still scarcely bend his left knee. He was on medical leave while being treated in London, and he’d been allowed to live with Kate in their Bloomsbury flat instead of taking up a hospital bed. Eventually he would go before a board that would determine his future, although going back on active duty was clearly not an option. Meanwhile he’d been painting with his one arm, rapidly securing the show, and Elizabeth wanted the family to reconcile so they could support him.
What is Elizabeth thinking? Kate wrote. It will be hard enough to get Mother to speak to me much less Arden—but she’s also scheming to throw both Mother and Father together with pacifists? Roger Fry and the Bells are invited to the opening and probably they’ll come since they got him the show, or Roger did, partly because of artistic infighting I won’t bore you with and partly because Arden is painting THE HORRORS OF WAR. Masked, of course, because there’s a fine line to walk with the Army refusing to let him paint the wounded and dying except when they’re being saved by heroic medical officers, of whom fortunately (says his wife) there are many. Wounded trees and houses are all right, which gives him an out. Not that he always takes it. Those won’t be exhibited, not with the Ministry at the show checking him up.
Eleanor was grateful that the opening gave Robert an excuse to say goodbye to his mother before the end of his leave. Mrs. Denholm was ill again, back in a wheelchair, unable to find her legs. With her husband and both her sons in uniform, a case of nerves was hardly surprising. Edward had finally got into the flying corps, piloting what amounted to a motorized kite, fighting off Germany’s fleet of lumbering Zeppelins before they could drop their bombs on London. Where had such an improvised rackety war come from, and so suddenly? She almost didn’t know.
Eleanor lay her hands flat on the table to feel the vibrations, remembering the time she’d done that at the parsonage and been certain she’d heard Elizabeth’s voice. This spring, she’d been diagnosed with megrim headaches, and had decided that the strange displaced dreams she’d been having lately, her weird glimpses of other times, were a precursor to the headaches, a more elaborate version of the kaleidoscopic colours she often saw before the first eye-gouging pain.
The Americans said migraines. Her aunt had taken her to London to see Mr. Blythe, who had moved south as a neurological consultant and spent most of his time working with head wounds. They’d gone to the hospital to see him, the consultation a favour to her aunt. Mr. Blythe had told her that twenty-one was a common age for girls’ megrims to start, and filled her in on the history and etymology of her headaches, a very thorough session in which he’d neglected to do anything to stop them. Not severe enough to risk ergot, he’d said, and medicine hadn’t another gun in its arsenal. Why not a cold cloth and a dark room?
They used to joke about Mr. Blythe over-treating mild ailments, but now he made it clear he thought she was being hysterical, and Eleanor could see why. An orderly wheeled a soldier into the lift as they were leaving, the top of his head covered like a mummy. Only one eye was left visible, and the soldier had winked at her quite merrily.
Mrs. Denholm’s wheelchair. The Tommy’s wheelchair. The creak of wheels echoing from the past. Eleanor’s mind could circle endlessly these days, and hours go by. Leaning on her flat hands, she levered herself up, going downstairs to find Elizabeth alone at the table.
“There you are! Did you sleep well?” Elizabeth asked.
She seemed to sleep admirably herself, always looking rested. But then, Charles was in the war cabinet, not in uniform, having something to do with logistics. Supplies. Weapons, from the sounds of it. And there had been happy news in the Mowbray family, when so many faced sadness. Margaret and Stansfield were expecting their first child in July, nine months to the dot after their wedding. Eleanor was supposed to be ignorant of the process, girls being light and airy angels, but with Mrs. Crosby as her aunt, she’d been educated.
She also dreamt about Robert. Fragmented dreams, often nightmares. But sometimes her dreams had an otherworldly beauty that she tried to hold onto after waking. Last night they’d had their arms around each other as they walked through tall sunlit golden grass. She knew this was an African savannah and that Robert had been there for a while and she had come to join him. They walked forward as slowly as if they were walking through water. She could feel him beside her, the strength of his bones and the pliability of muscle. He was wearing a clean white shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Peaceable lions yawned nearby and flamingos preened in the river. There was no danger. Never-ending love. It was such a luxurious dream that Eleanor had woken feeling comforted and humid, no other word, and knowing more than Mrs. Crosby had taught her.
