In Distant Fields (32 page)

‘Kitty will lead the way,' she said after a moment, smiling at Kitty for her to go first. Kitty also hesitated. She too had no idea how or where to begin, since she had never made up a bed in her life either.

‘I suppose we start with a sheet,' she said with absolute uncertainty. ‘At least I suppose we do.'

The Duchess frowned at the bed in front of her, pondering the dilemma further.

‘Wouldn't that be … a little inadequate, I would have thought. All those bobbles on the mattress – one would feel those through just a sheet.'

‘Perhaps this goes on first,' Partita suggested, holding up a tartan rug.

‘I don't think so,' Kitty replied. ‘That's a rug,
and if it's to go anywhere then I imagine it goes on top – it being a rug.'

‘I know,' the Duchess said, in a moment of inspiration. ‘Why don't we call one of the chambermaids? Or better still, why don't we go and see how they're getting on? After all, they're all busy making up beds in the dining room.'

The three of them hurried across the hall to the dining room where two of the chambermaids were indeed busily making up some of the dozen or so beds that had been installed in the great room where royalty had so often dined.

‘Good,' Circe said, making for the nearest unmade bed. ‘You're doing splendidly, you girls. Aren't they, Kitty? Partita?'

She nodded at where the youngest chambermaid was just starting to make up a fresh bed.

‘Oh,' Circe said, observing. ‘You put … I see, yes, of course.'

The maid looked up briefly at her mistress before continuing with her work, spreading the thick underblanket over the mattress before billowing a freshly starched and laundered sheet out over the bed.

‘I do like the way you all do that,' Circe continued, nodding to Partita to observe the maid's handiwork. ‘That's a very neat trick.'

‘A hospital corner, Your Grace,' the maid replied. ‘What they do on hospital beds. My mum taught us all that when we was little, ‘cos she used to be a nurse, you see, Your Grace.'

‘Rather like an envelope, of sorts,' Circe observed.

‘Stops the sheet getting untucked,' the maid continued. ‘Keeps the linen nice and tidy.'

‘Then another sheet,' Circe smiled in private triumph.

‘Then the blankets, Your Grace,' the maid continued, as if aware she was giving her mistress a lesson in basic housekeeping. ‘And more hospital corners on them too, fold the top sheet back over the blankets, and turn the bed down so.'

‘An absolute work of art,' Circe complimented her. ‘Bravo indeed.'

Three-quarters of an hour later, the beds in the drawing room had been neatly made up, all with perfect hospital corners and top sheets folded neatly back and to one side, to await their patients. Their morning task completed, Partita and Kitty were dispatched into Stonebridge, the nearest town, driven there by Harry in a delivery van he had been lent by a tradesman friend of his father's.

‘How long have you been driving, Harry?' Partita asked in delight as the van lurched away down the long drive from the house. ‘Not just this morning, I hope!'

‘Of course not,' Harry retorted, tongue stuck determinedly in one cheek as he searched for the next gear. ‘I've had half a dozen lessons from Mr Burrows and he thinks I'm totally proficient – otherwise he wouldn't have lent me his van, would he?'

‘Was that meant to happen, Harry?' Kitty asked, poker-faced, about the terrible tearing noise Harry had just extracted from the gearbox.

‘Yes,' Harry replied blithely. ‘It's called changing gears, Kitty.'

‘Gracious me,' Kitty laughed. ‘Sounds appallingly technical.'

‘Give me a horse and cart any day,' Partita said. ‘I agree with Papa.'

‘
Rejoice that man is hurled from change to change unceasingly
,' Harry quoted, arriving triumphantly and at long last in top gear. ‘Now we're motoring.'

‘Pity those poor souls over there getting a lift from this driver,' Partita said to Kitty, eyeing Harry from the front seat as she teased him.

‘When are you due to leave, Harry?' Kitty asked from the back of the cluttered van where she had done her best to make herself comfortable. ‘Any idea?'

‘No more than a week at most, I think,' Harry replied, wondering if he'd left enough time to brake for the road junction that was coming up in front of them, then jamming on the brakes when he decided perhaps he hadn't.

‘Careful, Harry Wavell!' Partita screamed, laughing as the van slewed to a crooked halt. ‘You are carrying the cream of England here!'

‘I was about to say, drive carefully when you get there,' Kitty said, once she'd picked herself back up off the van floor. ‘But on second thoughts that would be more than a little fatuous.'

I'll be fine, Kitty, don't you worry about me,' Harry said, motoring on now that he had checked the roads were clear. ‘I shall have a very large Red Cross on the side of what I drive and not even the Hun shoots at the Red Cross.'

‘Even so, keep your head down and your window wound up,' Kitty advised him.

‘If he does that, Kitty, he won't see where he's going,' Partita said scornfully. ‘Will you, Harry Wavell?'

‘No I will not, Lady Partita.'

‘Will you please stop calling me that? You didn't call me that when we were at Waterside.'

‘So stop calling me Harry Wavell then, like it's some sort of a joke.'

‘It isn't meant as a
joke
, stupid. I was just teasing.'

‘And I'd rather not be called stupid either, Partita.'

‘Fine. Then I won't call you stupid, or Harry Wavell, if you stop calling me Lady Partita, because I don't know how you do it but somehow you manage to make my name sound sarcastic.'

‘Just the way you make mine sound—'

‘Pax?'

‘Pax,' Harry shrugged. ‘I wish it was all pax.'

‘You two,' Kitty sighed. ‘You're always squabbling.'

‘No we're not!' Partita said.

‘Yes we are.' Harry grinned. ‘And we always have.'

Harry left the two young women outside the hall where they were to take their first practical nursing class, which had already started. The hall was filled all but to capacity, instilling in Partita an immediate sense of panic when faced with the noise, the heat and, above all, the smell of so many humans packed into such a badly ventilated place. For a moment she found herself considering slipping out the side door and finding somewhere quiet where she could wait for Kitty. Kitty, after all, could pass on to her everything she had learned at the class.

Partita began to work her way through the throng in search of a door that could afford her a swift exit, but was stopped when she heard a voice.

‘You, please? You, young lady, yes you, making your way to the door. You look a likely sort,' a middle-aged man in a white coat was saying, indicating with one index finger for her to approach. ‘We've gone through two mutton-heads here. Yes, mutton-heads – no other word for it,' he went on, nodding at the poor dolts whom he was insisting on identifying. ‘Imagine! They think if you're treating someone with a cut throat you can use a tourniquet on them. Imagine that? About as likely as binding up a broken leg with cotton.'

This brought renewed laughter from all the women who thought they knew better, even as Partita went to the front of the throng.

‘What would happen if one used a tourniquet
on such a wound, do you think, young woman?' the doctor finally demanded as she drew level with him.

‘The patient would die from strangulation,' Partita replied in a calm voice.

‘Shouldn't you be waltzing round some ballroom somewhere?' a voice called derisively from the back of the room.

‘That's quite enough of that, thank you,' the doctor called back. ‘We are neither at the hustings nor the music hall. This young woman is quite right – of course strangulation would be the result, so,' he turned back to Partita, ‘what would
you
do if faced with a victim with a cut throat?'

‘Call for help.'

‘You think that sufficient?'

‘I think it considerably better than killing the poor fellow with my ignorance.'

The doctor nodded, but remained straight faced.

‘And if help was not forthcoming?'

‘I'd use my hands, if at all possible,' Partita told him, remembering the time she had been out hunting and had had to stem bleeding when a young man in front of her had his ear torn off by a piece of wire.

‘And?'

‘And I'd make sure the patient didn't move.'

‘Good.' The doctor nodded. ‘And what would you do, say, for a fish hook embedded in the skin?'

‘Are we likely to come across that in battle, Doctor?' Partita wondered in mock innocence, finally earning a shout of laughter from the audience.

‘Answer, please.'

‘I wouldn't make any attempt to pull it free, if that's what you're after. I'd cut it out with a knife,' she said, remembering now how, when Gus had been teaching her to fly fish by dry casting on a lawn at Bauders and had caught himself in the upper arm with a hook, she had in fact done that very thing, under Gus's direction, cutting the deeply embedded fly out of his flesh with his fishing knife.

‘Mrs Forester here has broken her forearm in two places. Here.' He handed Partita a bandage. ‘Let's see your bandaging skills.'

Partita looked first at the doctor and then at the mock-patient, who had now begun to groan overloudly, relishing her role to the full. Partita took the rolled-up bandage as well as two splints from a nearby table and proceeded to do a first-rate job of attending to the double fracture. When she finished, she threw the doctor a satisfyingly cool look, while at the same time earning a round of applause from the rest of the room.

‘I would say that you have studied nursing at some point,' the doctor announced, looking vaguely disappointed.

‘No, Doctor, I have done no nursing.'

‘Your mother was a nurse perhaps?'

‘Her mother's a duchess!' a voice from the back volunteered.

‘And something of a doctor,' Partita admitted, edging away from the doctor with a smile to soften the blow that his failure to make an ass of her must have engendered.

Her victory complete, she went to find Kitty and see how she felt about the situation.

‘I think you'd better take over this class.'

‘I was actually wondering whether or not I could stick it,' Partita replied. ‘But the good doctor made me see differently. Let's go and stare at him; try and put him off his stroke. I bet he knows much less about bandaging than I do. Come on.'

Kitty dutifully followed Partita, whose blood was up. They found two free seats in the front row, seats most of the other women were loath to take in case of being roped in as part of the many demonstrations. Once settled, Partita as promised did her best to disconcert the increasingly discomfited doctor as he lectured the hall on all forms of practical bandaging, and the initial treatment of more superficial wounds, before he brought the class to a close with a promise of a lesson on the means of containing infection and contagion.

‘Just can't wait,' Partita laughed as they waited outside the hall for Harry. ‘What a treat we have in store.'

‘Look,' Kitty said, indicating a disturbance in an ironmonger's shop on the opposite side of
the street where a burly man, still in his shop apron and shouting at the top of his voice, was being forcibly removed from his premises by two policemen.

Partita, her curiosity aroused, immediately crossed over the road to investigate, followed a little reluctantly by Kitty.

‘He's speaking German,' Partita observed as the two of them stood by the Black Maria that was waiting for the miscreant. ‘As I understand it, I think he's saying something about how he wants the streets to run with English blood. How sweetly kind of you,' she called back, in German.

Hearing this the young man turned, but Kitty, sensing what he was about to do, grabbed Partita and pulled her out of the way just in time as he spat contemptuously at Partita, before the police bundled him into the waiting car.

Despite the spittle missing her, Partita stared in horror.

‘What a disgustingly girly thing to do,' she called after him, still in German.

‘I didn't know you spoke German, Tita?'

‘I don't, not really, only we all used to speak German with Weigel when we were small. Oh, there's Harry. Good.'

On the journey home, Partita was understandably quiet, leaving Kitty to do most of the talking to Harry.

‘I say, Harry, your driving's coming on already. You've been practising while we were in class.'

‘It's all in the clutch,' Harry called. ‘I went up the lane and down the lane outside, must be fifty times – and hey presto! I suddenly got it.'

‘So you'll be off soon then, Harry. Now you've got it. You'll be off driving ambulances with the rest of them.'

‘I shall, Kitty. Can't wait to be of use. Faulty heart, indeed! I'll show them.'

Harry glanced at Partita but she was lost in thought, staring out of the van window at the passing countryside, so he glanced back at Kitty, only to find her equally lost in thought.

‘I'll write to you both when I'm away. Let you know how many people I've run over,' he joked.

‘That would be nice,' Kitty said, putting a hand lightly on his shoulder. ‘And we will write to you.'

Circe laid out the new plans for the remodelling of the walled garden that had arrived in that day's post from Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens. She leaned over them eager to identify each and every plant that had been carefully numbered or lettered on the drawings against the list of plants that had been contained with the plans. Once Circe had identified them she could visualise the colour and shape of each of the flowers the brilliant pair were proposing, plants in whose growth Circe saw the future, their petals and leaves seeming to beckon her forwards, giving her hope in renewal.