The Wild Dark Flowers (14 page)

“She is seventeen,” Octavia murmured. “Don’t you remember being seventeen, William?”

“I would have been castigated, even at seventeen, for ringing my own doorbell,” William replied. But his words were lost in a volley of sudden exclamations.

Behind the London housemaid, Florence de Ray had emerged from the hallway, and had at once drawn Charlotte into the house. The de Rays had been known to the Cavendishes for many years, and Hetty de Ray—Florence’s mother—had befriended Octavia from the first days of their marriage. Watching the two girls ascending the staircase, William thought with benign partiality that Florence was as plain as Louisa was pretty—the girls were the same age—but, then, Florence had her compensations. She was level-headed and modest; he hoped that her influence on Charlotte would be more effective than it had been on Louisa last year—but then. Who was to tell? Women were an unfathomable species.

Florence’s mother, Hetty, now too came into the hall: a broad and smiling vision in some sort of purple lace dressing gown. Hetty held out her arms to Octavia. “My dearest girl!” she boomed. “How was the train? No, don’t tell me. Dreadful, I expect,” she continued, shooing them all into their own sitting room as if they were a couple of reluctant sheep. The housemaid hopped backwards to avoid her and retreated down the hall. All the while, Hetty de Ray kept up an unstoppable flow of observations.

“You must be thoroughly exhausted,” she observed. “I know that I am! We’ve been in town all Season and beyond. Florence would insist upon it. She’s become quite the busybody up at St. Dunstans. They take the blinded there, you know. Did you know? Well, I expect not. Do sit down, my dears. Sit down.”

Octavia had gratefully slumped to the nearest sofa already. “You simply wouldn’t recognize Regent’s Park!” Hetty blithely continued. “Have you seen it? No, of course you haven’t. Well, don’t.” She gave a theatrical sigh. “Where all this shall lead, I truly can’t guess. Staff are deserting us even here. My second chambermaid is making bombs. Can you imagine! Bombs! One’s blood runs cold. She couldn’t thread a needle when she worked for us.”

All this was delivered in the hearty, braying tone that they both knew so well. Hetty was a force of nature, one of the old school, a daughter of Britannia who had followed her husband all over the world. Trailing an overpowering scent of jasmine in her considerable wake, she lowered herself back into the sofa in which she had been sitting before they arrived. “I’ve rung for tea,” she said. “Though heaven knows how long it might take your staff to deliver it. You’ve only one cook here, Octavia! A cook, a housemaid, and a footman. Although where the footman might be this evening I can’t guess. Such desperate nonsense, isn’t it, this war?”

Octavia glanced up at William.

“Darling man, do sit down,” Hetty admonished. “It’s your own house after all.” He obeyed, stiffly, in his own time.

“You’re very kind to come here and get things ready for us,” Octavia said, taking off her gloves.

“As I say, it’s impossible to get staff,” Hetty replied. “And so I don’t mind coming here and setting a firecracker under the apologies you’ve got left. But really! May I send a man or two over from Dalletts? We’ve got a few left. The halting lame and sick, of course. The one-eyed and pea-brained. But beggars can’t be choosers. They’re trustworthy at least.”

Dalletts was the de Rays country house in Surrey. “We couldn’t . . .” William began.

Hetty brushed his objections away with a wave of her hand. “We must help one another out. And talking of which, can you guess? Not in the remotest!” She gazed at them with true affection, and clapped her hands together. “Herbert has found news of Harry.”

William saw what looked like a small electrical charge run through Octavia; Hetty’s husband, a diplomat, worked in Whitehall. She leaned forward. “He has? But how?”

“A man who knows a man who knows a man and all that. This particular man in question is a chaplain. He’s related to the Bickersteths, but then you don’t know the Bickersteths. Their son Morris was with Herbert when Balfour gave his speech. He turned to Herbert and said, ‘It makes one realize that dying for one’s country is a magnificent thing.’ What a tremendous family they are. But then you don’t know them.”

“I think we have established that,” William said, with an edge. In the face of Hetty’s infernal chatter, his patience was beginning to desert him.

“The Bickersteths,” Hetty repeated, giving William a very straight look, and slowing her words as if she were explaining to a small child, “know the RFC chaplain. He saw Harry when he was first brought into the field hospital. Or rather, he saw the nurse who had seen Harry. And he then wrote to his father, who works with Herbert’s secretary. That is what I mean when I say a man who knows a man who knows a man. Or, in this case, a man who knows a man who knows a chaplain.” And Hetty sat back with cheerful triumph, slapping her hand on her lap as if this were absolute proof of her husband’s genius.

The door opened, and the same housemaid who greeted them on arrival came in with the tea. It was set down before them.

“There now,” Hetty said, waving her hand at the girl. “You can go, child. Has that cook woken from her torpor to at least give us a tray of sandwiches?”

The girl blushed. “Yes, m’m.” The girl retreated. Octavia had been staring at Hetty this whole while. She watched now as Hetty leaned over the tea tray. “Hetty,” she prompted. “What else?”

“I shall send Sara, my best girl, to you,” Hetty was murmuring, surveying the tray. “She’ll make a decent housekeeper for you for three or four days.”

“Hetty!”

Mrs. de Ray glanced up at them both. “Legs, darling,” she said, smiling. “Both legs broken. And a wound or two from the aeroplane. Metal. But he’ll recover. Quite dazed, couldn’t quite understand where he was by all accounts, but he’s all right. The Northumberland Fusiliers got him out, we’re told. Harry’s due in Boulogne very soon.”

There were a few moments of complete silence, and then to William’s dismay, Octavia burst into tears. With a fluttering gesture of annoyance, Hetty indicated to William that he should leave Octavia alone. She herself got up and placed a large linen handkerchief in Octavia’s lap.

“Now then, dear, don’t you think I’m being extraordinarily useful?” she asked, smiling.

Octavia had taken Hetty’s proffered handkerchief. “Yes, yes indeed you are. Thank you, Hetty.”

“I’m sure William will like to go and see Herbert, won’t you, William?” Hetty asked. “He’s expecting you first thing in the morning. He has all the details.”

Octavia was gripping Hetty’s hand. “But you’re quite sure?” she asked. “This chaplain . . .”

“It’s quite amazing how the letters get through in such double-quick time,” Hetty observed. “That’s the transport division for you. They have motorcycle couriers, I’m told. Cameron is with them, did you know?”

Cameron was the de Rays’ eldest son. They had three boys; and the last that William had heard was that all were in the diplomatic corps, following in their father’s footsteps. He recalled Cameron as a good, dull boy, very tall and rather gaunt, who possessed poor intelligence and not an ounce of humor. “But surely he was in South Africa?” he asked.

“He was,” Hetty said. She had settled herself back in the sofa. Her voice was absolutely calm. “And he enlisted and came home, and he is attached to, of all things, the veterinary corps.” She gave a small smile. “Anyone less able to empathize with a horse one would be hard pressed to find. He loathes most animals. He was thrown, you remember, by a camel when we were in Kathmandu.” She delivered this gem as if it were the most natural event in the world. “He would
not
get back on again. Ridiculous. As a result, I fear he wouldn’t know the right way to sit in a saddle. But there. Can’t be helped. And it’s not all horses, he tells me. They requisition, and they oversee the unloading in the ports and that sort of thing.”

“So he’s not at the front?”

“Rarely.”

“And Gordon, and James?” These were the other sons. “Are they still here in London?”

“Yes, in the Foreign Office. Gordon shan’t go. His eyesight is too poor. James is terribly ambitious to be in the War Office. So . . .”

“You’ve heard of Rupert Kent?” Octavia asked. She was now much more composed.

“I read of it in the
Times
,” Hetty answered quietly. “Really awful, darling. Awful.”

The three of them remained quite still. William gazed out into the street. He was glad to have to go and see Herbert de Ray. It would give him something definite to do. He would arrange, if he could, to go to Boulogne, if that were possible.

Failing that, he would go to Folkestone and meet the hospital ship.

*   *   *

I
t was deepest night in Flanders.

Harry was thinking of the Wastleet running in its great curve around Rutherford, soft and low in the summer and brilliantly clear.

It made him think of the place where he had swum as a boy, lying on his back and drifting despite Jack Armitage’s warnings about the current. Trees rose above the water there, and he would look up into them and see the sky in a blue fretwork beyond the branches, and he would feel the water turning him round and round.

Blissful times. Summers that had no end. But all that was gone now; it was no more than a fragment of memory. Water . . . irrigation. But the irrigation that he was enduring now was nothing like the river at Rutherford lost in a summer haze.

This particular new irrigation consisted in a nursing Sister pouring saline and iodine into one of his wounds. When he had been carried onto the hospital train that morning, they had made a tremendous fuss about the filth he lay in. He had been stuck to the stretcher with his own blood.

“What time is it?” he asked now. The flushing and the pain continued. No one answered him.

He looked past the Sister to the face of the nurse who was studiously watching the process. “Please—what day is it?”

No reply. He closed his eyes. He had lost the pattern of time; he couldn’t think now how days were held together.
My God, that was painful. Why didn’t they stop? Wasn’t that enough?
He tried to distract himself. Was it Tuesday? Wednesday? He told himself to think back. On Sunday he had flown on reconnaissance again. Sunday, or Monday? And what was the month? Was it May still, or June?

“Please stop,” he heard himself whimper.

“We can’t stop,” the Sister said, “Until it is very much cleaner.”

The train was moving now; grinding its way. The man on the bunk above him started to groan hideously.

Could it be that he was still alive? He felt the pain of his legs: he saw and heard the other people. But it was somehow all so surreal. He had been above this world; he had been flying his favorite, the Sopwith Tabloid, the single-seater. Perhaps he was there still, and this was a dream? There was a screech of liquid agony from somewhere else close by. Had that been his voice? He could not tell.

There had been, days ago, whatever it was—weeks, perhaps years, who knew?—a whining and rushing sound. He recalled the piercing volume of it, and the shock with which he had felt the plane tip over. The Sopwith had been descending to earth and the rushing noise was the wind tearing at the Sopwith’s superstructure. He must have been hit; he tried to remember.

He had pawed at the controls like a madman; there was a coughing sound from the propellers. “Christ damn you!” he had screamed. The plane had rocked and bumped; some charmless bastard had been firing on him from below.

And then the engine had caught. Was that right? He wondered now. Had it fired again, and saved him? He frowned in desperate concentration. No . . . it had not been enough. He had brought the nose up, and the Sopwith had chattered and hopped in the air. And then, while he had still been wrestling with it, it had plowed into the ground at an oblique angle, skittering along the surface. He had hit something: a mound, a slough of water. A thread of track way had gone past, and with a loud and high-pitched jagged squeal, the left-hand wing tore away in pieces. He glimpsed the large rubbed-edged wheel from the left-hand side go bouncing around in the debris.

And suddenly, all had been still.

He had sat for a second. The force of the impact made him feel as if every tooth in his head was loose. He began frantically trying to extricate himself from the shattered Sopwith.

Then he heard shouts. He looked up to see men running towards him. He swayed uncertainly in the cockpit with what felt like scalding fire running through his thighs and knees, and he shouted, “Shoot me then, you bastards, if that’s all you can do!”

They kept on running.

He thought that he had perhaps started to laugh when he had realized that they were British.

*   *   *

I
t was later—perhaps it was hours, perhaps only minutes—that they came to clean the wounds again. It must have been the early hours of the morning—perhaps near dawn. The train was still bumping slowly along.

He tried to be jovial this time. His head felt a little clearer. “I’m sorry for being a bally nuisance,” he said.

This time, it was the nurse on her own.

“What do they call you?” he asked.

“Be still,” she told him. “Be quiet while I do this, and I shall tell you something strange.”

“Will you?” he remarked, trying to smile. “I doubt that you could tell me anything stranger than the things I’ve known recently.”

“We had a very nice billet neat Béthune,” she said, ignoring him. Her hands worked deftly in the lantern light of the train. “I had a proper room, up in the roof. You could hear nightingales.”

He thought he had misheard her. “Nightingales?”

“Isn’t it perverse?” She had given him a bright smile. “We were only a half mile from the line. On our last day there, the garden was shelled. But the nightingales still sang.”

“The men told me that you could hear larks,” he agreed, almost dreamily. He concentrated on the thought of nightingales and not what was being done to his legs. “They said that the artillery would stop, and the larks would sing.”

“It’s as if they must,” she murmured. “They absolutely must, or die.” She glanced at the note pinned to his jacket. “You’re an airman, aren’t you?”