The Gates of Rutherford (30 page)

The Yser Canal was close by. There was a bridge too, but as soon as he got close to it, the smell made his stomach heave. The earth looked like a dark green swamp, a horrible pool in which they could see the bodies of both men and horses, and shafts of wagons and gun wheels. The towpath had formed part of the front line and had once been a tidy row of dugouts. Jerry had found the line since then, however. The shells had penetrated one such dugout where half a dozen British Tommies had been sheltering.

It was necessary to go down into the hole, feeling their way down a ladder covered with the slime that had once been living men. They brought out what they could, and, at the bottom, they found a man who had evidently been sitting with his gun across his knees when the shell had struck. The gun had speared him through the chest as neatly as a spike. His face had been only mildly surprised.

It was that, Jack thought, that had got inside his head somehow. It had unlocked something, unwound all the tightly rolled balls of memory. The things that he wanted very much to forget. He had thought that he had overcome them. He had thought that he had succeeded: that they were gone.

But after the man at the bottom of the ladder of the dugout, the images came back. Back like the wildly hurtling horses at Monchy,
flinging themselves in front of him, throwing themselves into his path.

•   •   •

L
ouisa was closer. He had an idea that he must get up and warn her.

Don't come here, don't come here
.

He never wanted her to see what measures men took against each other. He wanted her to stay where she was, safe and gentle in the arms of a place that had never hurt her.

He rubbed his eyes, feeling the way that his hands flagged and waved and felt as if they rippled, like the way wind touches water and makes it move. It was very odd. Mystifying. He frowned, and put them back into his lap, watching them because they were quite different to the hands he knew. They looked so different: pale, flaccid, colorless.

That second day last summer, he had walked through the fields and down to the river, and crossed the bridge where the water was shallow and the stones underneath it glowed. Sandstone and iron and granite in the stones. Bright pools. When he got across the bridge, he had begun to run. Behind him was all other life: ahead of him, the only life that mattered. He ran up the path between the trees, through the woodland where the sun streamed through the high branches.

He came out where the woodland met the moor, and an old drystone wall ringed Rutherford's outer boundary. It was probably two hundred years old, overgrown in places, tended in others. He saw how the lack of groundsmen at the house had resulted in the land looking wilder, as if it wanted to run away from the attention of men and was going back to how it used to be before Rutherford was ever built.

After another mile, he came to the cottage.

It was their place. Two more summers had made the roof bow further, the neglected garden more like a woodland itself with just a few blazing colors of wild perennials dotted in the grass. The door, bleached by endless seasons, had been open.

He stepped across the threshold and she got up to meet him.

Two years before, he had barely kissed her. Only sat with her, glad to do so, glad that she was here at all. Glad to listen to her, and glad to be silent. Now they held each other for a very long time.

“Jack,” she had said. “Don't let's talk about now. Let's talk about how it will be.”

Oh, they made up such a nice story together.

It was all about having their own place, a place like this, out in the country somewhere. And it would have fields, and it would have horses. They would get another horse like Wenceslas. More than one. They would have a smallholding. He told her that he wouldn't have her washing and cleaning like other women. She must live as she was used to, he said. They would have a maid, a cook. She had begun to laugh. “And how would we afford that?”

They'd let it go. Details weren't important in their fantasy. They would have a big featherbed. They would have a wood floor. They would have a kitchen range and a fire. It would roar in winter, warming the house, warming them. He could see exactly how she would look sitting in front of that fire, or by the bedroom window where the clematis curled on the sill.

My God, it was a lovely picture.

And they never trespassed over it; never tried to make the future into the present. They would wait, they agreed. They would wait for it to happen.

If he told any man here that, they would probably ridicule him. “There's no lead in tha' pencil, lad. There's nowt for her.” He smiled
to himself. One day he'd have Louisa for his wife. He kept telling himself that.

It was just a story, a made-up fairy tale.

But it was all he wanted to believe.

•   •   •

S
he had stopped walking.

She was looking at him, and raised her arm, and beckoned.

Jack got up, putting one foot in front of the other as best he could. Louisa was going towards the railway line, looking back over her shoulder to make sure that he was with her. He tried to hurry, but it was not much good. The ground pitched and rolled as if he were on the deck of a ship.

She got to the place where the horses were standing in line, waiting. Patient statues all in a row. In front of them, a small open-trucked train was shunting carefully. It was empty, going back for more. In front of the horses was another row: men, this time. Not so bad, some of them.

One was hitched onto his elbow, calling out for the RMC officer. He was laughing about something. Happy to be going. Almost giddily hysterical with it. Got a Blighty one. Never mind the blood congealed on his face, the uniform peeled back on his shoulder over a grimy bandage.

He noticed Jack coming towards him. “Hey, mate,” he shouted. “Look where you put your feet.”

Jack tried. He stared down, just avoiding others stacked around him. He could see, just in the corner of his vision, the pale edge of Louisa's dress as she moved between the men.

“Don't go on,” he muttered. “Tis too much.”

He came to a stop. Looked up at the horses.

Poor bloody beasts. Poor bloody boys.

He looked for Louisa and saw her standing at the farthest end, her back to him. She was in front of the last horse. He got closer to her—it felt, incredibly, as if he must be swimming. Like he used to swim as a boy with Master Harry, in the river. Catching dragonflies. Feeling little fish wriggle between their fingers. Going out into the murkier depths where the river curled away from the house.

Louisa looked back at him, and then stepped aside.

It was then that he knew that it was all a dream. He would wake up, and he would find that there was no Louisa, no river, no line of men, no horses. He would wake up and find himself in the clearing station with the kindly padre looking down at him, holding out his supper.

But for now, it was beautiful. It was all he had wanted from the moment that he set foot in France. He went up to the great grey Shire, and he examined it carefully all over, running his hands along its back and down its flanks. It had been hurt more than once; he could feel the pitted scarring, the shrinking of the flesh. The ribs protruded: the horse was slowly starving. As he touched it, a terrible shuddering began. And it seemed that once it had started, it could not stop. “There now, lad,” he muttered. “Don't tek' on, there now, there now.” It turned down its head and looked at him: the brown eyes still full of their old docility.

“Hello, old friend,” he said.

And he put his face into Wenceslas's neck, and held on tightly, feeling the warm breath of the horse on his own skin.

T
hey said that it was going to start to rain in August, but it was hard to believe it. Jenny stood on the steps outside the dining room of Rutherford; the French doors were open and it was mid-morning. Heat baked up from the herringbone brick path; the trees of the woodland across the river, a half mile away, seemed to float in a glorious haze.

If she looked down past the terrace she could see the parkland and the edge of the beech drive, now a vast slumbering landscape of green and gold. If you stepped just outside, as she had done a half hour ago to clean the glass, you were engulfed in the scents of the roses. Just by the doors here, the hydrangeas were almost past their best, their pinks becoming cloudy, their leaves red.

But it was not the view that Jenny favored at the moment. She liked to go to the little writing room that belonged to Lady Cavendish, just beyond here, tucked into the end of the corridor and opposite Lord Cavendish's study. From here, Mary had told her, Lady Octavia would sit sometimes through the morning, answering her
letters, with the door open so that she might see the green baize door that led to the stairs.

“She liked to keep an eye on things once,” Mary said. “Not just us—though she was always properly fair and nice. But the children, too. Miss Dodd told me that when Master Harry was smaller, her ladyship would let him run about in the Tudor hall. They were forever cleaning the marks from the paneling. Playing soldiers, you know? Strange to think of it after all that's happened—him being in the war and everything.”

Lady Octavia's room was, of course, shut now. The maids polished the little French desk with its beautiful inlay, and they shook the rugs and dusted the ornaments. Meissen, they were. Delicate and pale shepherdesses and shepherds that had once belonged to Lord William's mother. The staff had decided now that Lady Octavia must have only tolerated them; she had not taken them with her, and the house in London—so they had heard Miss Louisa say—was very modern. All the painters that her ladyship liked, the French ones, had been bought for the house in Chelsea. Cubists, Miss Louisa had said. There was apparently a large blue and red painting by a man called Picasso on Lady Octavia's bedroom wall.

“Foreigners,” Mary had sniffed. Still, Jenny made the room her special project, even if her ladyship was unlikely to come back to it. And Mrs. Nicholson had found her there later that morning, staring out of the window.

“Something to see?” the new housekeeper had asked.

Jenny had almost jumped out of her skin. “No, nothing, Mrs. Nicholson.”

The woman had walked over to Jenny's side and looked out. “Just the garden wall over towards the greenhouses,” she observed. “The cottages beyond. The stable yard. The meadows down to the river.”

Jenny felt herself blushing.

“Are they finished?” Mrs. Nicholson asked.

“Is what finished, ma'am?”

Mrs. Nicholson had smiled. “Not ‘what,' Jenny,” she said. “A ‘who.'”

Jenny didn't quite know yet if she ought to respond when Mrs. Nicholson smiled. She still remembered how Mrs. Jocelyn had used to respond to a smile—a pause, and then the amiability would drop from her face, and she would inevitably shout. But Mrs. Nicholson was a softly spoken woman with a keen eye. An accent that Jenny couldn't quite catch: not gentrified but then again not a workingwoman. No trace of Yorkshire or Durham. They had been told that she came from the borders of both counties, but she had an even, slow way of speaking. And always the humorous glint in her eye that so unnerved the staff.

“Jenny,” she said now. “Have you taken a shine to one of the prisoners' guards?”

“No, ma'am.” She felt a guilty prickle of sweat break out on her back.

“They seem very young.”

“Yes, ma'am. They are.”

Mrs. Nicholson put her head on one side. “How long since you were in London, Jenny?” she asked.

“Oh . . . almost three years, ma'am.”

“No family there?”

“No, ma'am.”

“You wouldn't like to be down there with her ladyship? If so, I can perhaps arrange it.”

Jenny stared at her. “If I've given offense I'm very sorry. . . .”

Mrs. Nicholson astonished her by laying a hand on her arm. “Don't jump like a startled deer, Jenny,” she said. “I'm very pleased with you. You and Mary both. I simply want you to be happy. I was wondering if staring out of the window indicated that you weren't.”

“Oh, no, ma'am.” And Jenny felt herself blushing even deeper. She folded her hands in front of her and stared at her feet. “I'm sorry.”

“Go along, then. You may help the hall boy take the baskets out to the field for lunch.” She smiled and turned away, needlessly rearranging the books on the desk. “That is, if you
must
catch a last glimpse of someone. Mr. March has told me that the fields are all done. They will be taking the hay to the tithe barn later.”

•   •   •

J
enny ran out into the hall, opened the green baize door, and waited until it had closed behind her. There in the cooler shadows of the stone stairs that led to the quarters below she stopped, her heart beating fast.

Dear God, I am useless
, she thought. She put her hands to her face. She'd never been able to hide her feelings. She looked down at herself, at the fingers reddened by work. At the nails bitten to the quick. It was all right for Mary and Miss Dodd, she thought. Mary took no nonsense, and resisted help; Miss Dodd seemed to know what to do instinctively. But she . . . she always had to be pointed in the right direction. She couldn't help her nervousness; she'd tried often to hide it. Mary thought she was funny. “What're you worried about?” she had chided her more than once. “Time enough to get worried if someone bawls you out. What's the point of worrying before then? Stand up straight and stop faffing about.”

Faffing about
. It was one of Mary's favorite phrases. She loathed anyone who
faffed
like Jenny did. She tut-tutted to herself if Jenny clattered a plate or dropped a duster. “What
is
the matter with you?” she'd demand.
Like a startled deer,
Mrs. Nicholson had said just now.

But if only they knew.

When she'd first come here, she'd already been anxious. Anxious and hesitant: thin, tall. “Not a scrap of meat on you,” Mrs. Carlisle
had said at the very first breakfast table. She had promptly buttered a piece of bread as thick as a doorstep. “Get that down you, and fatten yourself up. You'll need your strength.”

But Jenny never had fattened up. She was just as thin now as she had been on the first day, despite eating everything that Mrs. Carlisle foisted on her. She never would be a well-rounded girl. She'd looked at herself in the piece of speckled glass that passed for a mirror in her and Mary's room, and she knew that she would always have those jutting bones, the pale skin, the pale hair that she knotted into the tightest of plaits. Next to little feisty Mary, she was like a lamppost, she knew. She would never be attractive.

A man in London had told her that. She had had a job given her by the church, to take the pennies that ended in the collection plate to the post office. Just the copper: the farthings and halfpennies. The postmaster would kindly change them into shillings, and then Jenny had to take them back to the church, where the minister put them into a locked box that he kept in his room.

The postmaster had a boy who worked for him, a lad as tall as Jenny. But not thin at all. He was bulky, and always looked her over like a butcher assessing a carcass, wondering how to take his knife to it. He frightened her, and she'd avoid his eye; but one day he had caught her as she hurried up the lane, and he had bundled her into a side alley and pressed her against the wall. She'd prayed that someone would come, but no one did. He had pawed her while she wriggled in panic, and then he had laughed. “You're nothing but a bag of bones,” he'd muttered. She had pushed him away, and he'd let her go, and called after her, “No bloke with any sense would want you.” She'd run, hot with shame, to the church, the bag of silver clutched in her hand, slamming the door behind her, gasping for breath.

Harrison had been something like the boy from the post office. Groping and patronizing; unreadable, surly. She had never been able
to figure him out; neither him, nor his letters from France. When they had told her that he was killed, she had felt nothing but confusion. She'd gone up to her room that night and tried to cry, but no tears had come. She'd thought again, then, that she must be a strange person. Unloving, and unlovable.

And then . . . and then. Her hands sprang again to her face.

Now, a man that no woman should notice had noticed
her.

“Oh Lord,” she whispered to herself. “What am I going to do?”

•   •   •

S
he and Albert took the food out to the fields.

Mrs. Carlisle had packed it into two wooden boxes. The boxes were lined with hay, and Mr. Armitage had packed it in tightly, muttering to himself all the while. “Fresh hay wasted on bloody Germans,” he'd told her, while she waited alongside with the tureens of stew balanced on a nearby mounting block. “And what's she made stew for on a day like this?”

“It's just what's left over,” Jenny had explained. “Vegetables. No meat to speak of. Just bacon rind. It's more gravy than anything. Mrs. Carlisle was glad to be rid of it.”

“And yet still we've got to keep it hot,” he retorted, and spat on the ground to show his disgust. “Waste of time cooking it, waste of hay packing it, waste of your effort carrying it.”

“We've only got to go as far as the gate, or just inside it,” Jenny said. “The men will come up and get it then.”

“Men?” Mr. Armitage had straightened himself up and looked her up and down. “They're prisoners, not men.”

“I should think anyone is a man and not a beast,” she blurted out. “Prisoner or not.”

He stared at her, and put his hands on his hips. “They killed more than one from here. Have you forgotten that?”

“Not these men.”

“Ones just like them.”

She didn't feel able to argue. She knew what she wanted to say—that none of them had any say in the matter, that terrible things were done by both sides. But she knew what it would sound like. Conshie stuff. Cowardly stuff. Bad, unpatriotic. Wicked, even. And so she kept her mouth shut.

Albert brought a trolley—a long flatbed affair with four little wheels—and they put the packed boxes onto it, and walked to the stable yard gate. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Armitage turn on his heel and stamp back towards his cottage. Albert stopped the trolley, and climbed on the gate and leaned over, shouting. “Grub's up, grub's up!” She ssshed him; he was a witless kind of boy, ham-fisted, always smeared with coal dust or dirt. “I'm only hallooing them,” he told her.

The prisoners were right at the bottom of the field, close to the river. They were all standing in a patch of shade under an oak tree and Jenny could see that the guard was talking to them. Another stood to one side, leaning against the fence, his rifle held across his chest. Mary had said that you should never go near them, never speak to them; but she had spoken to Frederick when he had come to the dairy to help with the cream. Not on the first two occasions but on the third. He had asked her name, and told her his. He had seemed to fill the room, but there was nothing about him that was threatening. Rather, he reminded her of the coal wagon horses in London: soft, lumbering animals with sad expressions.

And when he had left the farm on that third time, he had turned back to look at her, and smiled.

Was it a sin to think about a man like that? A German? The fourth time that a message had come to the house to help with the butter and cream making, to her immense disappointment the footman
Hardy had been sent, protesting that it was not his job at all. Jenny had gazed at Mr. Bradfield and seen his sharply raised eyebrow as she was about to object.