The Wild Dark Flowers (12 page)

Standing there, gasping for air, he wished so much that he had not spoken to his father that afternoon about Neuve Chapelle.

*   *   *

T
hey had taken poor Masterton—the pilot in the other plane—to a field dressing station, and found that it was in a shattered church. Two miles away, they could hear the battle thundering.

In the glimmering light of lanterns, as they got to the door, he saw beyond the medics a white figure moving. Just for a second, Harry imagined it was some kind of ghost—horrors were plucking at him, it was all too easy to watch phantoms, for he felt at that moment that they were all phantoms—the men, the horses, the mules, the wagons, the screaming pitch of shells, the muffled crump of explosions—it was the seventh circle of hell, he thought. This dark doorway was surely the Styx; devils were coming for them all, dragging them all farther into the underworld. And yet . . . and yet . . . she was there—the ghost in white, a nurse walking between the stretchered lines of the injured.

She looked up briefly, and met his eye.

Behind him, the medics were dealing with several men, Masterton among them. He heard one say, “Seven thousand in twenty-four hours.” Seven thousand casualties, he thought, was that possible? Or seven thousand dead?
In one day?

The nurse that he had thought was a ghost was busy taking off one apron, and tying another around her; but he could still see the rim of chalky mud and dried blood on the hem of her skirt.

He looked along the wall of the church. There seemed to be no space for Masterton; the beds were only inches apart in the flickering gloom. In the corner, behind them, he could see that the wall held pictures of the Stations of the Cross. The church was crumbling—there were holes in the roof as well as the walls—but the wall niches with their little plaster figures were intact. “
Christ, who died on the tree
.”

There had been no trees along the road outside. Broken stumps, shattered poles, stood where there had once been woods. Just half a mile away—at a crossroads, at a point in a rutted swamp—he had seen a man’s torso pierced on such a relic, a fragment blown by the murderous tide. “Someone get that man down, why can’t you?” he’d shouted to the few troops gathered by the side of the car. “We’ll get round to him, sir,” had been the reply. “He don’t care no more.” Stations of the Cross; hung on a tree.

Here in this room, so far from France, he could hear the nurse talking now. She had been intent on giving the poor devil by her feet a scrap of material soaked in eau de cologne. The man, grimacing with pain, had thanked her. “Better than I’ve smelled for a month,” he had muttered. She nodded. She had a soft voice reminiscent of Sussex on the south coast; soft, burring tones. It was a voice full of melody and kindness in that awful place.

There was precious little melody out on the battlefield. A man might start out kind—might even retain some of that kindness despite everything—but in many of the men he knew even the kindness had been overlaid with a blank look. They would have the “thousand-yard stare,” something that he had glimpsed in his own face: the weary, stunned look of a man determined not to show how afraid he really was.

The nurse was moving away from him now in this all-too-real memory. He was, as he often felt at night, intimately back in that church while Masterton whimpered behind him. The vibration of the shelling had got down inside him somehow that night and never left him; even when the noise stopped for a second, he could feel the jarring throughout his body. The earth shook too, from time to time.

The driver of the staff car had come alongside him and offered him a cigarette. “Do you suppose they’ve got any brandy here?” he asked him.

“I shouldn’t think so, sir.”

“No,” Harry replied, drawing the smoke into his lungs. “No, of course not.”

“Had we better go?” the man asked him.

“Yes.”

They turned around, and Masterton’s stretcher was on the floor by the entrance. The faint light of dawn was filtering over him. He looked like a memorial in some English country church; his arms were crossed over his chest, and a note was pinned to him. His eyes were closed; he looked peaceful.

Harry squatted down next to him; he touched his hand. And then he saw that the fingers were blue, and the hand itself was grey.

*   *   *

H
e breathed hard now, trying to control the feeling of panic that sometimes overwhelmed him. It often caught him unawares, even here at Rutherford.

Breathe once; breathe twice, he told himself. Hold the air a little; let it go.

And again . . . slow now . . . slow now . . . and again.

He started pacing the room, trying to walk it away. Faster and faster, faster and faster . . .

Fear was the raw adrenaline of flight. It was a kind of ecstasy. It was visceral, and it could be fought and conquered. But this panic—these horrible phobias—could not be so easily dispensed with. Panic was a slippery beast; it was vile, getting into his bones, getting into his heart and rummaging about inside him, turning his gut inside out. He tried to stamp it down, and it slid out from under him and snapped at his heels.

He kept seeing Masterton’s plane limping home; he kept seeing it slam into the runway like a dead duck. He kept seeing them hauling Masterton out of the cockpit; and he kept hearing himself shouting at Masterton to shut up when he called for his mother, heard the raw fury of his own voice, the cruel bluntness of it.

And he kept seeing the first light outside that ruined church that might have been the first light of the world, except that its growing brightness revealed nothing at all like Eden.

T
wo weeks later, Jack Armitage was fulfilling the promise that he had made to Louisa to find a little horse for Sessy to ride. The livery yard was in a village eight miles from Rutherford, on the way to Catterick.

It was late in the afternoon of a beautiful day as he came down the lane towards the farm tucked into the hillside. The weather had been hot this last fortnight, ever since Master Harry had gone back to France. The crops were getting higher in the fields, the new lambs on the farms were getting heavier, and all around him, the land barreled away, lit by sunshine. He was whistling to himself with lazy contentment as he came to the farm gates; and then he noticed that the first one, and all those beyond, were standing open. Jack walked on farther, into an unnaturally empty yard.

He had not been here in more than a year; it had been May then too, and the cow parsley all out in the verges. At this time twelve months ago, Lady Cavendish had been back at the big house for several weeks, and the American had just arrived, and Louisa had still been in London. It had fallen to him then to take the last of the small ponies that the children had ridden to be sold, and Grassington Farm was the nearest; other families came here to find mounts for their children. He had patted Thistle, the little Shetland, as she had been led away. It was four or five years since Charlotte had ridden her, and to keep her at all was sentimental. Charlotte showed no interest at all in riding anymore.

But now, ironically, he was back to find a mount for Cecily. Or, more accurately, for Louisa. He was anticipating how pleased she would be if he could find a little horse for the child that Louisa seemed to care for so much.

As he stood in the yard and looked around him, he saw Mrs. Hallett come out of the barn. She was dressed as always, in corduroy breeches and a waistcoat, like a man. He noticed that her hair had been cropped. “Mrs. Hallett!” he called.

She turned and looked at him, squinting in the sunshine. “Jack, is it?”

“Aye.”

He walked over; they shook hands. She was almost as tall as he was, ruddy-faced.

“Horses all out?” he asked.

She put her hands on her hips, but said nothing.

“I come to see for a pony for the little one up at the house,” he told her. “Only a bairn, mind. I don’t reckon Thistle’s still here?”

“You’ve not had them at Rutherford, then.”

“Had what?”

“Yeomanry out requisitioning, buying up.”

“What, not yours?” he said, shocked.

“All but four. All gone today.”

He stared at her. The Hallett horses were just for hacking out; they had, for the most part, been taken in when they were unwanted for work. Mrs. Hallett bought old milk-cart horses and even pit ponies, and little runabout geldings like Thistle, and turned them out into her fields and let them lead a better kind of life in their last years. He’d seen many a one get strong, and afterwards go trotting by Rutherford gates pulling a little dogcart, or being led in a group of children. Two years ago, the Hallett horses had been in the Catterick fete all dressed up in ribbons and pulling a wagon decorated with blossom for the May Queen. But for all that they were mild, broken-backed beasts. No good for war.

“Every one but the smallest,” Mrs. Hallett told him now. “They left me those that measure under fifteen hands.” She took a step close to him, and put her hand on his arm. “They want heavier horses,” she told him. “That’s what they said. Complained about the slightness of mine, but paid me sixty pounds each. Complained like they weren’t right enough. But they had all the forms, and they took them for the Army Remount. You’re sure they’re not at Rutherford today?”

A cold chill went through Jack. He’d left his father at the stables while he himself went to Richmond to fetch a few errands. He’d taken his time. “What, they said they were coming to us?”

“No, not right off,” she replied. A sympathetic smile—half smile and half grimace, in truth—hovered at the corner of her mouth. “Lord Cavendish only let a few go last year, didn’t he?” she asked.

“Only the half dozen we had up at the tenant farm. We’ve got a fair few left.”

She nodded. “That’ll be his lordship keeping them back, I’d guess. He’s a soft spot for his livestock, that I know.”

“Well, we bain’t have many.”

“You’ve got a couple of Shires, though.”

“No,” he said, “we only got Wenceslas now.” And a picture of the great, soft-natured Shire came into his head. He and the horse had worked alongside each other for several years, winter and summer. The Shire was massive, but as biddable as a baby. Even as a colt, he had been enormous, and they had named him when they had first plodded after him through the snow. “Like the king in the Christmas carol,” Jack’s father had said, smiling. “Feet the size of four counties.”

“They’re wanting heavies for artillery guns. Clydesdales, mostly,” Mrs. Hallett was saying now.

Jack felt warm, angry. “He’ll not go.”

“You’ve never a choice. They got forms and the like. They’ll write a check for him.”

“Not for Wenceslas.”

She looked at him long and hard; her hand was rubbing his arm as if by way of comfort. “There now,” she murmured. “The boys go, and the horses must. It’s the way of it.”

He tried to find something to say to her. He knew that she loved her horses; was a fool for them, in fact. She would feed them and starve herself if it had ever come to it. She had never had children; he had always supposed that the creatures took the place of a family. They
were
her family, in fact.

He scanned her face, and saw unhappiness there, but he didn’t know how to comfort her. He couldn’t imagine her going back into her cold, flagstone kitchen that night. There had never been a Mr. Hallett, not for years. It was said in the village that he had left her soon after they had been married, long before the turn of the century. She had grown old up here on the sweeping slant of the hill, living more with horses than people. He wondered what she would do tonight. Perhaps she wouldn’t go back into the house at all, he thought. Perhaps she would stay out here in the yard, and cry when there was no one to see her.

“I won’t let them take him,” he told her. “Not him. Not guns.”

“Ah, Jack,” she muttered. There was a world of grief in those two words.

When he thought about it afterwards, he knew that he had been rude to her. He had turned around and walked straight out of the yard, and he had heard her calling out to him that he must stop for a drink of tea, but he didn’t heed her.

He set off to walk the six miles back to Rutherford, and ran some of it as much as he walked. Suddenly the lanes weren’t beautiful anymore, not as beautiful as they had been that afternoon when he had set out cadging a lift from the grocer’s van, and walked around Richmond whistling, and then on to Mrs. Hallett with a brisk step, thinking of how happy he could make Louisa by finding a pony for Cecilia.

Now it was all gone; he had forgotten what he had gone to Mrs. Hallett for. All he could think of was the woman’s stricken face as he had turned on his heel and walked away.

He reached the stable yard at Rutherford at six, and went straight to the Shire’s stall, and looked in over the painted green door. The great grey, all eighteen hands of him, turned his head and looked at him with the patient and soulful eyes Jack knew so well. “You’re here, then,” he said out loud, relieved.
My God,
he thought. What would this animal do, under fire? What happened to beasts like them if they were hurt? Did they leave them at the side of the road, just leave them, what? What happened out there? They couldn’t just leave them, surely. His heart started to beat rapidly. He had never had to put a horse down himself.

He’d heard one man say at York races last spring that his own racehorse had known when his time had come. “He looked at me with a mother’s eyes,” the man had said. There had been a pint of porter in his hands, and he was maudlin, of course, and he was perhaps exaggerating, but Jack had still accepted what he had said. Horses
did
look at you like that: a liquid, understanding gaze.

The beasts had character; that was what people didn’t know. They cried sometimes if they were truly hurt, and they could scream. A team of horses had come down in Blessington once, taken a bad turn on the hill and overturned a wagon, and they had screamed like children, caught under the load.

He couldn’t imagine a horse in war. What did they do with them, what did they ask them to do? Pull guns, for God’s sake? Pull a gun through what, through lanes like these? He doubted it. No parsley growing in the verges now in Flanders. No tunnels of overarching trees. And the ships. They put them on ships. There had been a photograph in the newspaper of a horse being swung over the side of a ship in a kind of harness. And Jack knew that they took them over hundreds, perhaps thousands, at a time, and that some of them died in the holds. Frightened, he guessed.

No, it couldn’t happen to Wenceslas. He wouldn’t allow it. For Wenceslas, this great soft docile boy? No, it wasn’t possible. For a start, Jack reasoned to himself, the Shire was too big by far. He wouldn’t fit in a normal wagon to pull a gun, never mind those cramped ship’s stalls. And he would be slow, too slow. Jack had never seen Wenceslas rise to more than a lumbering trot, and that only grudgingly. He’d be no good for battle.

Jack ripped open the door and went over to Wenceslas across the fresh straw, and stood trembling—half in fury and half in exertion—by the horse’s side. At last, he put a hand out and stroked the warm flank.

“Over my dead body,” he promised. “I’ll see to it.”

He walked back to the house he shared with his father and mother. Josiah Armitage was washing up for supper in the outhouse; Jack went in and stood by the stone sink. “I’ve been to Hallett’s, and her horses are gone,” he said. “I went over to find a little pony for the bairn. For Cecily.”

“I know,” Josiah replied. He was soaping his arms to the elbows, carefully cleaning his nails. Jack’s mother hated it when either of them sat down at the table with a speck of dirt on them. He looked weary; older and more dispirited than Jack could ever remember.

“Are they coming here?”

“March and Bradfield both came over an hour ago,” his father said. “The Yeomanry rang the house. Lord Cavendish only said a year, they told Bradfield. That we was keeping what we had a year. But no longer.”

Jack stared dumbly at his father as the old man meticulously dried himself on a thin towel that hung on a nail above the sink. Josiah replaced it with elaborate care, then turned and faced his son.

“They’ll not take Wenceslas,” Jack said. He heard a childish twang in his own voice, the pitiful sound of childhood when he had lost something dear. A pleading sound. “I’ve looked after him for five years, Father.”

“They’re back in the morning, eight sharp,” Josiah replied. “They’ll take them to the train. They’re going to Romsey eventually.” He paused. “Wenceslas, too.”

“Where is Romsey?” Jack demanded.

“Down south. Hampshire. Then on to the coast.”

“And what then?”

Josiah Armitage shook his head. “Wash up, and set your’sen down for supper,” he told him quietly. “Your mother is waiting.”

*   *   *

T
he sun was not shining the next day.

A cool breeze was blowing from the west, off the top of the moors. Bradfield had not been able to sleep; he woke far ahead of the alarm clock by the side of his bed. He thought he could hear sounds in the main house in addition to the faint moaning of the wind. He could always tell when the wind changed direction; somewhere in the turreted chimneys far above him the air sounded a low, stuttering note. He had got up and washed and dressed, sighing. He disliked routines being disrupted. It jarred his soul.

Going down to the kitchen at five, he had been surprised to find Mrs. Jocelyn seated at the servants’ table. He stopped on the threshold. She had a Bible open in front of her. “Good morning,” he said.

“I’ve seen to those girls,” she replied, not acknowledging his greeting. “They were not up. I have spoken to Miss Dodd. Time was that a head housemaid had control of her staff.”

So that was what had awoken him: the tread of the housemaids’ feet on the back stair. “Mrs. Jocelyn,” he said with quiet puzzlement. “It is ten past five.”

She frowned at him as if she had not understood him. “It is light,” she said.

“True enough,” he agreed. “But it is still ten minutes past five.” She looked up at the clock. “They are not due to rise for another fifty minutes,” he pointed out.

A ring of heightened color showed above the collar of her dress. She slammed the Bible shut, and got to her feet. “I should think I might say what hour they begin work,” she told him. “If I want them up at three in the morning, they are obliged to obey me.”

He came fully into the room, and closed the door behind him. At the far end, the range was faintly glowing. The hallboy would be in soon enough to stir it up, and the cook soon after. But there was absolutely no need to have disturbed the housemaids so early.

He drew out a chair some feet away from her. “Do share a cup of tea with me,” he said.