The Wild Dark Flowers (36 page)

As William got closer, Sessy wobbled to her feet. “She’s more interested in the bait than the fish,” Harry said, laughing.

“Any luck?”

“Not a one.”

“There’ll not be much for a while yet.”

“No,” Harry agreed. “But we’ve seen tiddlers, haven’t we?” he asked Sessy.

Sessy nodded mutely, fingers twined in her curly hair.

The nursemaid came up and nodded, smiling at William, to whom she bobbed a brief curtsey. “Your lordship.”

“You’d best take her, Agnes,” Harry said. “It’ll be a while before I get up from here; it was a study getting down in the first place.”

Sessy was lifted up and placed in the elaborate perambulator—a rather monumental study in black and silver, heavily upholstered. From here, she waved at them regally for a moment. And, as they moved away, William and Harry could hear the nursemaid singing
“Beautiful dale . . . .”

Harry listened, glancing at his father.
“As boys we have wandered along beside the river so clear . . .”
he murmured. “
Beautiful dale. . . .
I wonder how old that song is. It could have been written for here.”

William, after some hesitation, sat down alongside him. It had struck him with emotive force that this was where he had come while they had waited for Harry to visit so many weeks ago, before he was injured. “This was my own father’s favorite place,” he said.

Harry said nothing. He was watching the water, thinking that it was also the spot where Sessy’s mother almost drowned after he had rejected her. But he kept his mouth shut. Bringing Sessy here had been, in effect, the act of bringing the child to her mother, but he didn’t expect William to understand that. His own mother might, of course. In fact, Octavia would have seen it from the first.

“I have been thinking of the estate,” William began now, in a slow and measured tone. “I have been giving it considerable thought, in fact.”

“Yes?” Harry answered, with most of his attention on the circling currents of the water ahead of them.

“I have been wondering how much you would want to take on, and how soon.”

Harry turned his head. “Take on?”

“We might have a meeting next week with the land steward. It will be your concern, after all. You may as well see the accounts, and so on.”

“The accounts?” Harry repeated, puzzled. “Well, if I might help, I should be glad to while I’m here.”

William smiled at him. “Not quite a case of helping as such,” he said. “Rather accustoming yourself to the workings of the estate in detail. To enable you to make your own decisions.”

Harry was still looking at his father bemusedly. “I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir.”

William waved one hand vaguely behind him, encompassing the vast grounds and the valley beyond. “I imagine you will want to have it under your belt, to understand it, by the time you are recovered.” And, seeing that Harry’s face still bore an expression of complete mystification, he smiled. “I shall turn the estate over to you, Harry, as soon as you’re fit. I had not planned it so early, of course. I imagined that when you were thirty . . .” He paused. “But you have greater experience now than either of us ever anticipated. And there is my health. It’s appropriate now, Harry. It is yours, after all. You may as well begin.”

“Begin? I . . .” Harry stopped. “I’m terribly sorry, Father,” he at last continued. “But there’s been some misunderstanding. I must go back.”

It was William’s turn to be confused. “Go back where?”

“Why, to France, of course. To the corps. They need every man they can get.”

William was horrified. “But you cannot fly again.”

“I can certainly fly,” Harry retorted.

“No, no,” William said. “Impossible.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I don’t see where the impediment would be.”

“But your legs . . .”

“I don’t need my legs as much as I need my hands and eyes. There’s nothing wrong with
them
. And I shall be mobile; it’s not as if I can’t walk.”

“You can’t possibly serve—you can’t be thinking of it. Your injury was too severe. You will break your mother’s heart; she thinks you’re safe here at last.” He paused, most reluctant to reveal his own feelings in the matter. But at last he murmured, “And myself, Harry. I need you here. Rutherford needs you.”

“Well. We shall see what the medicos say,” Harry conceded, plainly irritated. “But if they insist I can’t fly—which would be the highest idiocy—then I shall still be needed. I’m damned sorry for Mother’s disappointment, of course. Truly I am. And yourself, sir. But I must go. I thought that was understood. It’s my duty.”

“But how can you help in France if you can’t fly?”

“In training . . . in command . . .”

“That would take a promotion.”

“They may well consider the contribution’s enough to merit one, who knows?”

Harry was looking hard into William’s face. And, in it, William saw the stubborn, wayward Harry, the Harry of his teenage years, the Harry who could not be controlled, reasoned with. But there was something else there now, too: a hardened, mature determination.

“Harry, you cannot win this war on your own,” he murmured. “No one expects you to do more now. You have made a tremendous sacrifice already.”

“Sacrifice?” Harry repeated. “Sacrifice? I’ve done nothing.” And he gave a short, exasperated laugh. “One of my squadron tells me that the First Canadian Division had twenty-four hundred casualties at Festubert trying to take six hundred yards of line. They had already lost half their fighting strength at Ypres. Half! That is what I’d call a sacrifice. And Harrison.
That’s
a sacrifice. Do you know what kind of place Harrison died in? A rat-infested swamp called Quinque Rue. . . .”

There was a silence, in which Harry took breath. All around them the trees and river whispered; the sun shone through the leaves. William gazed on it, this picture of heaven that he wanted to give to his son so that he would stay grounded here, literally wedded to the ground. Perhaps shackled too, so that he could never escape again; yes, perhaps that. He never wanted to let Harry out of his sight again, let alone to the kind of hell that his son was describing.

“I can’t sleep for the thought of sacrifices,” Harry said softly. “St. Julien, for instance. They dug a trench near there during a midnight attack. Eight hundred and sixteen started; six hours later, six hundred of those were dead. We hear such things all the time. That is the real state of the war. They come back to the corps by message ‘
which are the proper trenches? Where is the front line?’
because it’s all mixed up, you see. These things are fought over and taken, and lost, and the whole lot blasted to hell by artillery, and new lines dug, and those obliterated in hours. . . .” He looked directly at his father now. “I see those lines, I see them in my dreams. And that’s why I must go back.”

They sat together for a few moments more, and then William helped Harry to his feet.

They walked together across the lawns, each looking up at the house and then across towards the tithe barn and the path leading to it, which they could see now was banked with potted flowers from the greenhouses.

“Good Lord,” Harry murmured. “March has actually allowed his precious babies outside. Romance is not dead.”

William smiled. They reached the house, and stood by the open doors to the drawing room. For a moment, William struggled with the desire to say something more to Harry; he felt a helpless, racking disappointment. He respected what Harry had told him . . . but . . . well, perhaps it was an old man’s frailty. He
felt
like an old man, for God’s sake. Unconsciously, he straightened his shoulders and decided not to burden his son any further. “Go on inside,” he said to Harry, patting his arm. “I’m sure that lovely young lady of yours will be waiting for you. It showed delicacy that she let you have time with Sessy alone.”

“She is a wonderful girl,” Harry said.

“Indeed she is. Off you go . . . I need to talk to your mother.”

*   *   *

A
s he knew she would, Octavia was taking a rest in her room. He stood outside the door a moment, biting his lip, then knocked.

“Come in,” he heard her call.

He saw that she was lying on the bed.

“Were you sleeping?” he asked.

“No.” She propped herself up on one arm. “What is it?”

“I’ve been speaking to Harry.”

“About the estate?”

“Yes.” He sat down heavily in the armchair closest to her. “I’m sorry, Octavia. But Harry intends to go back to France as soon as he can.”

“What!” she exclaimed. “Oh no, surely not.” She swung her legs off the bed; she was wearing an exquisite silk wrap, one that he dimly recalled them buying together on a trip to Paris. It must have been twenty years old, of a lovely pattern in pink and gold, and Octavia looked almost girlish in it. It made him think of the days of their honeymoon and early life together.

“He has been telling me about the battles,” William said quietly. “Some, at any rate. He feels a responsibility to go back there—all hands to the pump, as it were. Every man needed. A responsibility to those fighting on the ground, as well as his own squadron.” He paused; then continued, “We traveled through those places ourselves one year, you know. By train and that little barouche that we rented to take us through the countryside. Ypres and Lille.”

“It was the year of the Paris Exhibition,” Octavia murmured.

“Do you remember the medieval Cloth Hall at Ypres?”

“I do. Very beautiful.”

“It is gone now, in ruins.”

“I remember eating in a little place; we had stopped for lunch. . . .” Octavia was smiling fondly. “Do you recall? It was out in the Somme valley somewhere. There was just a single café, an estaminet. My goodness! Sitting in the shade outside . . . and a very old spaniel came to lie on the pavement. I can still see him sleeping there, on stones so old that they looked like polished glass. We sat there all afternoon.”

“St. Julien.”

“Good heavens!” she said. “I haven’t thought of it in years. Just a little place among fields. It was so warm that day. . . . I believe you’re right! Whatever made you think of it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he murmured. He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “I admire Harry of course, for returning. His loyalty and courage. But it’s a kind of madness.”

Octavia had got slowly to her feet and now paced the room, stopping to lean briefly on the stone sill of the window. “This is dreadful,” she said, at last. “I can’t bear it. Can’t we stop him somehow?”

“I doubt it.”

“His commanding officer?”

“The rest here seems to have done the boy good, Octavia. I’ve seen no nerves of the kind we noticed even a few months ago. He says he sleeps badly, but that’s hardly a reason not to fly. Probably in a month or two, if seen by a medical board, he would be passed fit. The whole experience of the crash may well have made him less inclined to take risks. All in all . . .” William paused. “He may even be a better flyer, a better officer.”

“But his injuries . . .”

“He says it makes no difference.”

He saw the pain on his wife’s face, and understood what she felt. She would do anything to keep Harry here. She walked slowly back to the bed, and stood in front of him.

“I wonder,” she murmured, “if children ever appreciate what they do to their parents.” It was said with a wry, infinitely sad smile. “To let them go, to see them out in the world, to want them to have their own life, of course . . . but to watch them leave. It’s hardly bearable. And yet one mustn’t say so, of course. I should loathe to be the kind of mother clinging on to him, or any of them . . . and yet . . .”

He had not heard her speak so frankly in some time. “We must be proud of him, at any rate,” he said.

“Of course I am proud of him,” she answered. “And of course one feels such admiration . . . but to fling one’s child into this abyss. That is what it feels like. I think of the Kents; I think of how Elizabeth was when I met her. So faded, so fragile. To lose them, but, worse still, to know
how
they were lost, in such horror . . . my God, William . . . if that were Harry . . .”

She sat down slowly, gazing at him.

He was about to offer some sympathetic platitude; his duty, his role after all, was to be the stalwart center in this house. And yet, he suddenly felt his eyes fill with tears. She was right. It was the thought that Harry might be lost as Rupert Kent was lost. He had seen the notices in the newspapers every day: those touching paragraphs with the grainy black-and-white photographs, accompanied by the inevitable text of grief.

“We must let him go,” he tried to say, but the words became blurred; to his embarrassment, a sob escaped him. He was thinking,
those we have lost; those we wish to keep.
And as for Octavia, who even now was kindly placing her hand on his hair and gently stroking it—well, my God, she had lost John Gould, and, before that, as she had painstakingly told him, his own love. Or so she perceived it.

He had trampled over her feelings as a young bride, and destroyed her trust over Helene de Montfort, and he had no idea how to rebuild this empty, decaying place that used to be his marriage. Nothing that he did or felt for her seemed to work; it was as if she were simply drifting away. He felt that he was not competent to reach her, understand her; to be with her was to feel nothing less than something infinitely precious draining through his grasp.

It was no exaggeration, he thought with despair, that one day it might be entirely possible that he would be here alone—without Octavia, or his daughters, or Harry. They might all leave for one reason or another, and then he would be back as he had been before he married: alone in Rutherford.

“Oh God,” he said, under his breath.

He was then dimly aware of Octavia kneeling down by his side; he opened his eyes and saw her kindness, her grief, her fears mixed in a single expression.

“Oh, William,” she whispered. “What are we to do?”

He put his arms around her. “Lie down with me and love me a little, my darling,” he pleaded. “I beg of you. Just today. Just a little.”