Susan Speers (17 page)

He brushed the bits of foam from my shoulder with his bare, broad hand.

“Fancy a tumble then, Miss?” His voice was cheerful, he hooked his thumb at the stairs.

I felt a hot red tide rise from my high collared blouse. “No thank you,” I managed.

“Leave the lady be, soldier,” said a bright, cheeky voice. A girl, young beneath her paint, took the doughboy’s arm. “I’m thinking her has a sweetheart already.”

“I do. Yes. Thank you.” I stammered.

“I’ll show you some fun,” she patted the soldier’s tunic pocket and waggled her fingers at me, having found a generous wad of bank notes. They disappeared into the crowd.

I looked around the room again, desperate because now I knew a lady on her own was prey to unwelcome attention. That’s when I saw Jeremy, rather I saw a gaunt ghost of a man who resembled my Jem. He sat at a table behind a gilt painted pillar, his eyes closed. He appeared to sleep sitting upright and bore a terrible resemblance to his father and mine before they died.

I sat down across from him, making as little noise as possible, but when I touched his hand, his body convulsed and his eyes opened to stare at something I didn’t see.

When he jumped to his feet, eyes filled with fear, I grabbed his hands and pulled him back down. “It’s me, Jemmy, it’s Clarry.”

He shook his head and grimaced in confusion and apology.

“I dream of you every night,” he said. “I see you at Hethering, I see you waiting for me in the folly on the hill. I see your lacy dress, your beautiful eyes, your smile. How can it be I am with you for real, but chased by France’s horror.”

“You’re in England now,” I said. “You’re with me and I banish every bad thing from you.”

A hectic flush stained his pale face and his dark eyes shone with happiness. “My avenging angel,” he said. I loved his smile.

“Do you have leave?”

“A few hours, nothing official. I’ve been called back to discuss — there’ll be a push, that’s all I can say. We have the hours I begged — well, we have a few hours, that’s all.”

He’d engaged a room. I ignored dusty corridors and cheap furnishings. I unpinned my hat and set it on the bureau, but he took it off to dust its brim and set it down again on his unfolded handkerchief.

“This isn’t a proper place for you.”

“It doesn’t matter. The name was right.”

“Will you remember me, remember us, when you see our old symbol? How our tower sheltered us. All our happy days.”

Jeremy was nostalgic and depressed. How surreal to leave the blackened hell of war for too few hours of blissful peace, even in the ugly rooms of the Watch Tower Inn.

We didn’t make love. That happiness belonged beneath the open skies of Hethering. These dubious surroundings would make it sordid. That’s what I told myself as Jemmy lay exhausted in my arms, his head on my breast, both of us atop the creaking bed’s soiled coverlet.

The room darkened with an approaching storm. I heard thunder and felt Jemmy flinch at the noise. The rhythmic patter and fresh smell of rain soothed him. I closed my eyes for a moment, thankful to have him with me. I dozed and woke to find him watching my face.

“I’m memorizing you,” he said.

“You hardly need to,” I said.

“I almost never see you sleep. You have the face of a Madonna. You must have children.”

I might have pushed past his weariness and my distaste for our surroundings to love him as I should, but a loud knock startled me.

“Sergeant Hardy, Captain. Ten minutes before the hour, as you requested, Sir.”

Jeremy sat up and buried his face in his hands. “I have to go. There’s transport waiting.”

I pulled his hands away from his face and looked full into his eyes. “I love you Jeremy,” I said. “I always have, I always will. I’m proud of you, I pray every hour for your safe return.”

“Clarry,” he said. “Listen to me. There’s little time left.”

I let go his hands and watched his face.

“I won’t survive this war. I came to say — I came to say goodbye.”

“Jemmy, you can’t think like that.” I remembered Dora’s anxiety for Dickon’s good spirits. “It’s dangerous to think that way.”

“No, Clarry, it’s not like that. I’m no more tired or disheartened than the next fellow. But the BEF is almost gone, soon fewer than a tenth of them will stand against the Boche. We’re desperate for Kitchener’s men.”

“Jemmy, no.” I didn’t believe him, I couldn’t. None of this in the newspapers. He exaggerated, it was part of his depression. He needed more leave, not this pittance.

“I’m doomed, Clarry. One way or another, I’ll be dead by Christmas. Our generation is doomed. Imagine twenty Oxford men charging a machine gun and you’ll know the waste of it all.”

I put my hands around his sorrowing face like a blessing. Surely some men would survive the maelstrom. Jeremy was clever, no, he was brilliant. They wouldn’t put him forward as cannon fodder.

“I have a chance to change the odds against us, to make a difference.” His despair was conquered by zeal. I knew that look, I remembered his search for Mad Madison’s folly. My heart froze as I watched him embrace a new quest, a new folly.

“A suicide mission.”

“Not as such, love, but my chances are — they’re not good. I want to go out fighting with everything I have.”

“They want your foreign service knowledge.”

“It’s my best weapon, but it will take me where few return.”

Another knock. “Two minutes, Sir.”

“I won’t let you go,” I said. “I won’t allow it. Not to this business. I’ll tell Caroline, we’ll petition the War Office. You have a child.”

“You must let me do this, it’s what I’m meant for. I could save lives, a lot of lives. Don’t condemn them too. Let me go, love.”

I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t say yes, and he used my silence to say worse.

“I release you, Clarry, from any and all promises to me, from the hope of our future together. Marry Dickon Scard if you will. My quarrel with him is nothing compared to the fight for England’s survival. Dickon’s a good man, he’s one of us. His family held Hethering land once, they hold the best bit now.”

“You want me to marry Dickon?” Tears ran down my face.

“Have children, have ten children, name a girl Belle like your poppet.”

The door handle turned. “Now, Sir, there’s not a minute to spare.”

“Jemmy,” I clutched his hands. “You chose Belle over the folly. Choose our children over this madness.”

 “Help Arthur, if you can.” His boots were on in an instant, he had practice with hasty exits. He kissed me hard, just once, then pulled my clutching hands off him, holding them in a painful grip.

“I will love you forever, Clarry, from heaven or hell.”

He was gone. I never saw the man who took him from me. I wouldn’t see the men who killed him. I was once bereft again. It seemed the entire world opposed my need to love this one man. My father, Jemmy’s wife, his child, the War Office, the German Empire. Helpless and defeated, I sat on the sinking mattress and stared at the door.

*

Much later, I fumbled my shoes onto numb feet and pinned my hat in place. I folded Jemmy’s handkerchief, ragged, but clean, its wisps of my embroidery clinging despite the army’s rough laundry. I stumbled down uneven stairs, too upset to avoid holes worn in the filthy runner.

A soldier passed me, the boy from the tap room.

“Are you all right, Miss?” He peered at my tearstained face. “Is it bad news? Is your sweetheart dead?”

“He will be,” I said.

I don’t like to remember the days after my return from Watford. I sent visitors away. I held myself apart from all emotion. I sat for hours at the piano, my fingers still.

Henry brought me oceans of tea. Cook broke into her hoarded supplies to make special meals. She baked my favorite biscuits, but I couldn’t swallow past the lump in my throat.

Every day I wrote the date in my account ledger. I knew Dickon’s precious leave was slipping through my fingers, but I didn’t send a message to his sister.

I sat in the rose garden one evening, the sun as loathe to leave the sky as I to return to Hethering’s empty husk. I heard a crunch of gravel on the foot path, but didn’t turn until Dickon sat down beside me.

I didn’t know I’d be bathed in happiness as pink and warm as the clouds in front of me. His dear face, his ruddy cheeks, his clear eyes called me back to the living. He’d had a week of country air and good food. I was wrong to compare him with Jeremy’s grey-faced wraith, but Dickon’s vitality gave me hope that life went on.

“I had to come,” he said as if we were in the middle of a drawing room conversation. “Dora said no, but I love you, Clarry. I need to see you. Even this brief encounter will give me hope over there.”

“Hope?” It wasn’t a word people used that year.

“Hope that one day, life as we knew it will continue. Hope you’ll be there with me.”

Jemmy gave me up with his last hope. Dickon carried me with him. Perhaps it was unfair to think that, perhaps Jemmy had knowledge Dickon was spared. Still, I clasped Dickon’s warm brown hand to anchor me in this world. It wasn’t the other way round as he thought.

“Has something changed?” He looked at my face, then tilted my chin with a gentle finger, more hope dawning in his puzzled eyes.

I leaned against his hand. “I’ll marry you, Dickon, if you’ll have me.”

“If I’ll have you?” His voice was incredulous and tender and amused all at once. “Of course I’ll have you, Clarry. I want you every day. I need you every day.”

“Well, then.” I lifted my face, hoping his kiss would wake my frozen heart.

He didn’t kiss me. “What about Jeremy? I have to know.”

“He wants me to marry.” It was true.

“Hard to believe.” Dickon was kind, but he wasn’t foolish.

“He gave me his blessing.” Under sentence of death.

 “To marry me?”

“The war changed him.” It will murder him.

“Well,” he exhaled, his brow creased. “I didn’t guess he’d ever change his opinion of me, but if it gives me hope of loving you, Clarry, I’ll believe it. I’ll take my chance, and thank him for it.”

He took a knot of pink silk from his pocket. Inside was a gold filigree circle studded with amethysts and seed pearls.

“I bought it in Paris,” he said, “because I couldn’t forget you and I couldn’t give up hope.”

The ring wasn’t a perfect fit, but I would manage. He kissed my forehead, he kissed the corner of my mouth and then we shared our betrothal kiss as the sun slipped below the horizon and darkness fell.

*****

We drove through the soft dark night to tell Dora and her husband, Ash. She woke her children to share our celebration and an impromptu feast of cider and shandy, and bread spread with butter and strawberry jam.

They blinked and yawned in their nightgowns and nightshirts, the baby drowsy in her big sister’s arms. All had Dickon’s ruddy cheeks, most had his crooked smile.

“They’re so sweet.” I helped Dora divide the bread among the children as fast as I could. Despite the late hour, the children ate with good appetite and I joined them in feasting on the simple treat.

“You’ll want your own bairn soon?” Dora asked.

“As many as you if they’re as handsome,” I said, but I thought of Jeremy’s charge ‘
have ten children
’. My face must have sobered, because a little silence fell that Dora hastened to end.

“Come see us any time,” she said. “Don’t wait on Dickon’s next leave.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll need your help planning a wedding.”

“You won’t wait ‘til it’s done?” She meant the war, the ogre in our lives.

“No,” Dickon said. “We’ll be man and wife without its blessing.” Now we had Jeremy’s benison, Dickon would wait on no other.

Dickon stopped his auto up the lane from Hethering’s gates. “I don’t want to bring your butler’s wrath down on my head.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “I should have come sooner.”

“No, I said, “You chose right.”

“In the day and in the lady.” He leaned over and kissed me with great feeling. I closed my eyes. I wanted to please him, I wanted to feel as he did, I wanted to stop thinking.

“Clarry,” he murmured, and his passion became mine, but he stopped kissing me and sat up. He wound down his window and breathed deep the cool night air.

“No babies ‘till we’re wed,” he said. “I want everything done right.”

Dora and I brought him to the train station the next morning. She stood back while we said farewell.

“I’ll write you every day,” I promised. “You answer as often as you can.”

“I’ll put in for leave tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t care what they think, I’ll be after’em ‘til it’s mine.”

He ran up the platform to hug his sister, then back to me, to clasp my hands and search my face. “I mean it, Clarry, do you? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I called as he jumped aboard the moving train and caught his kit bag from the porter. I was sure. After all, I’d given my word.

The ring fell from my finger, but I found it and held it high as I waved and the train took him away.

“Poor man,” said Dora, coming to take my arm as the train disappeared from view. “Poor lass. It’ll be a long time before he gets another leave.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“Ah, men do and women wait,” she said. “It’s not a fair world.”

“It’s not fair,” I agreed. I lived alone in Hethering’s beauty while Dickon and Jeremy risked their lives in hell.

Dora had the right of it. Dickon got no more leave. As the weeks and then months passed, I began to believe he was made an example for asking so soon and so often. I begged him to stop and wait his turn. I didn’t want him passed over for a much needed rest when the proper time came.

I kept my promise. I wrote to him every day. We made plans for our life together. We dreamed about where we’d live. We made jokes about kitchen curtains and garden beds. These fanciful details let me see how our life would be.

Until the war ended, I would find us a suitable cottage in the village. My butler’s feelings made Hethering impossible. Willow’s cottage was impossible. I couldn’t begin my marriage in a bed I’d shared with Jeremy. I wrote Dickon it was ‘too small’. If he thought I was snobbish, so be it.