The telephone rang in the bowels of the house, and she blocked the sound from her mind. She was not to be disturbed during this particular hour, and Jenny would let the caller know she was not yet about. A tap on the door violated her careful arrangement and caused her pen to drop a blot on the page.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Jenny. “But it’s Mr. Kent on the phone, and he insists.”
The jolt of fear, the deep breath, the suppression of any visible trembling; Agatha rose slowly, blotted her letter on the mat, and placed her pen in its holder.
“Tell Mr. Kent I’ll be right there,” she said, letting the maid hurry down while she took off her gloves, and the woolly blanket she used as a shawl, and proceeded in a dignified glide through the upper hall and down the polished stairs. No point in running and perhaps slipping, twisting an ankle. No point in assuming her husband was calling from London with some emergency. Better to keep to one’s carefully constructed life of patience…
“I got a coded telegram from Hugh’s surgeon,” said John. “Grange, Wheaton, Bookham, Sidley STOP Blighty bound STOP HS Folkestone 18:00 STOP.”
“Oh my God, they’re hurt,” said Agatha.
“I telephoned Major Frank at the hospital, and he’s sending his ambulance. They’re coming home, Agatha.”
“I must get to Folkestone,” she said.
“I’m taking a train in an hour,” said her husband. “Let me handle this, Agatha. We don’t know what we’ll find.”
“I’m coming,” said Agatha. “No force on earth will keep me from those docks.” She put the telephone back in its cradle and called wildly for Celeste, Jenny, Cook, and Smith. The household came running.
—
Beatrice was leaving school to go home for her midday dinner when Agatha Kent all but overtook her on the street with no greeting.
“Mrs. Kent? Agatha?” called Beatrice.
“I can’t stop,” said Agatha. “I have to get to Folkestone and of course the car was taken weeks ago and all the trains are hopeless these days so I have to find anyone with a car or a lorry.” Most of the private cars had been acquired by the army for war service, and the trains were so slow and full of troops that travel had become difficult.
“A pair of horses might get you there in a few hours,” said Beatrice. It was over thirty miles to Folkestone, but a horse might do the trip in four or five hours at a trot.
“But they would be spent and lame from the effort and I would not get home again.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “The boys are on a hospital ship with Harry Wheaton and young Sidley,” she added, looking stricken. “They may all be badly injured. We just don’t know.”
“Alice Finch,” said Beatrice. “We must find Alice Finch.” Alice had managed to get her motorbike grudgingly exempted as part of her beloved motorbike and bicycle messenger corps. The corps included certain stalwart ladies, some scouts, and assorted amateur male cyclists too old or young for military service, who enjoyed the thrill of cycling through the dark, carrying messages between shoreline sentry posts.
“A motorbike?” asked Agatha. “I don’t know.”
“Nonsense,” said Beatrice. “I only hope she can take both of us because I’m coming with you.” She gave no thought to her afternoon classes. An image of Hugh, bleeding and pale on a stretcher, was before her eyes as they hurried up the hill to Alice’s cottage and rousted her and Minnie Buttles from their luncheon. Alice agreed at once to take them, and Minnie ran to find them goggles and a pair of motorcycle breeches for Beatrice, who would have to ride astride. The motorbike was dragged from the shed, and Agatha pushed and shoved into the sidecar, an extra can of petrol under her feet. Then Beatrice tucked the unfamiliar breeches firmly into her belt and climbed behind Alice. A running start, pushed from behind by Minnie, and the engine roared to life. Alice opened the throttle, and in a sight that brought shopkeepers to their doors and made the dogs bark, three ladies flew down the high street and away across the marsh, hair and hat ribbons flying in the wind.
—
The Folkestone docks were chaos to the untrained eye. Lorries and ambulances crisscrossed the yards with no apparent care for the processions of soldiers, stretcher bearers, and walking wounded, who marched like ants from warehouse to warehouse. A large, badly painted steamship was moored in the middle of the chaos. A red cross painted on the funnel was its only protection from the U-boats that patrolled the Channel. Men were unloading stretchers from the deck and a lower cargo door, while those who could walk hobbled down the gangplank as best they could. Many were on crutches, some wheeled in bath chairs. Several men were carried down by orderlies, sitting on regular metal chairs.
From the steep hill above, Alice quieted the engine to say, “Looks like they have the perimeter guarded. I’ll try to use my credentials to get you as close as I can.” As Alice’s credentials consisted of a certificate she and Minnie had printed up in their studio, and handed out to all members of their messenger corps, Beatrice had no comfort that they would be allowed anywhere near the ship.
Fortunately, the brand-new private, on the smallest checkpoint, was already overwhelmed in managing his rifle and a clipboard while having to raise and lower the heavy barrier.
“Motorbike Brigade, transporting nurses,” shouted Alice as they approached. “Can’t stop in case the plugs give out.” She pulled a certificate from her coat and gave it to him as she continued to coast the motorbike forward slowly with her feet. “Open up sharpish, lad,” she barked. “Don’t want to decapitate two matrons with the barrier, do we?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, and though his eyes widened at the incongruity of women in trousers and oily goggles, he ran to raise the barrier and wave them through, his rifle falling off his shoulder and hanging at a dangerous angle from his elbow. Alice drove all the way to the gangplank to park the motorbike among a row of waiting ambulances.
As they watched, the crowd began to seem less random. Beatrice detected patterns in how the injured were moved: some to ambulances, some to a makeshift hospital building. She could see several men with clipboards and lists giving directions as the stretchers came off the ship. Nurses moved up and down the rows of men, checking their injuries.
“We should ask a man with a clipboard,” said Beatrice. “They have the lists.”
“No, they will surely have us escorted away,” said Agatha. “See where they are keeping families behind that fence?” Back towards the main road, a small group of people waved and called out. But they were too distant to hear anything or make themselves heard. “We should ask a nurse.”
She stepped from behind the ambulances and consulted a nurse in a severe navy blue uniform and frilly cap under a scruffy man’s greatcoat. The nurse looked around and nodded. Then she went over to a man with a clipboard and asked him a question. While he was consulting his papers, Beatrice scanned the myriad faces for Hugh’s. It was alarming how many men looked, at first glance, as if they might be him: a similar turn of the head or line of jaw, a pair of gray eyes under a heavy bandage, a hand reaching out from a man whose face was burned beyond recognition. For a moment she feared she had forgotten what Hugh looked like. Perhaps he had faded from memory as her father’s face kept doing this winter. Fading so she had to stop, sit down, and will back every feature, every quirk of the eyebrow, until she had his face again for immediate conjuring.
She saw John Kent first, walking from behind the last ambulance in the row, speaking to the driver. Agatha saw him too, and began to run towards him. Beatrice turned to follow, but Hugh’s face appeared in her path. She did not see from where he came. She felt her heart leap as she looked him up and down for injuries. She did not bother to be shy; there were too many hurt to consider one’s manners.
“Beatrice,” he said. She ran into his arms, and he embraced her hard, his head sunk on her shoulder and his shoulders shaking as he tried not to break down.
“Are the others with you?” she asked, her face pressed to his hair. “Daniel?”<
br />
“Daniel is gone,” said Hugh, his voice hoarse. “I could not bring him home, Beatrice.”
“I am so sorry,” she said. As she comforted him, she saw Agatha struggling to look in the back of the ambulance. Her husband pulled her away and spoke in her ear. As he held her tight, her knees buckled and she threw her head back in a low cry that seemed to come from the deepest core of pain.
“We must go to your aunt,” said Beatrice, and Hugh hesitated for a moment, as if unwilling to let her go. But then he put his chin in the air, pretending that he could see perfectly well out of eyes blurry with unshed tears, and they hurried to help John and his distraught wife.
—
It was bittersweet to follow the ambulance home to Rye, to see it draw up outside the Wheaton home and to see Lady Emily and Eleanor sobbing with joy and pain, cradling Harry Wheaton in their arms. Agatha climbed from the front seat of the ambulance as if she had become a hundred years old in the journey of a few miles. John supported her arm. She could only shake her head slowly at Lady Emily. And Lady Emily could only kiss her cheek, as if both ladies had been struck dumb by death. Hugh helped unload the stretcher cases as Major Frank examined the patients’ labels and directed their disposition about the hospital.
“This one doesn’t belong here,” said the Major. “He’s a private, and this is an officers’ hospital.”
“He’s a local boy, Major,” said Hugh. “Served as batman to both Harry here and my cousin, Daniel. It was my cousin’s last wish that we see him home.”
“Understand the sentiment entirely,” said Major Frank. “But can’t be done. No mixed wards, you know? Have to send him on by train to Brighton.”
“No, you can’t,” said Hugh. “He’ll never last the trip, and besides, his family doesn’t have the money to traipse to Brighton to care for him.”
“My hands are tied,” said the Major. “From the shape he’s in he probably should never have made the Channel crossing.”
“You’ll put him in the private wing of the house,” said Harry Wheaton. His voice was slurred from exhaustion and pain. His stump oozed at the edges of the bandage, and he was obviously in more agony than he was showing. “Put a cot in my father’s study. Easy for the nurses to get to and his family can come and go through the garden doors.”
“Harry, you’ll not put the farrier’s son in your father’s study,” said Lady Emily. “How could you think of such an insult to your dead father?”
“Not his study anymore,” said Harry.
“I beg your pardon!” said his mother.
“I beg yours, Mother,” said Harry. “But my father, the Colonel, took care of his men, and I should do the same.” He gestured to the orderlies holding the stretcher on which Snout lay unconscious, his cheeks flushed and his chest wheezing with each breath. “Chop, chop. In the study, if you please.” As the stretcher was carried in, Harry added, in a low voice, “Perhaps if I had stood up for the scrawny little blighter earlier…”
“I’ll let his parents know,” said Alice. “And I’ll take Miss Nash home.”
As Beatrice climbed into the sidecar, hitching her baggy breeches up once again in full view of a puzzled Lady Emily, Hugh came to grip her hand in his.
“Once again duty divides us, it seems,” he said. “I must make sure Snout is settled and then go to my aunt and uncle.”
“Do not feel any concern for me,” she said. She returned the pressure of his hand. “I am so grateful you are here to help them. Daniel is an unbearable loss, Hugh.”
“When I have seen to both, may I come to you?” he asked.
“I would be happy,” she said. “I will wait up for you.”
“I may not leave you again,” he said. He squeezed her hand fiercely. “I know now that I am home.”
“I will not let you go,” she said, and felt no blush of hesitation as she looked into his face. As Hugh left, Alice fired up the engine and walked the machine forward until it caught.
“I’ll be sending Minnie round for a midnight chat with her father,” said Alice. “Someone’ll need the Vicar first thing in the morning.”
—
Beatrice went home and lit a fire in the grate and under the kettle in her small kitchen. She took her meager dinner, left out under a damp towel, and shaped it into the semblance of a cold supper. She unearthed a bottle of sherry, given her by a pampered boy whose leg was now blown off. When the kettle sang, she took it to her basin and scrubbed the dirt and day from her body. Dressed in a loose gown, her hair brushed and down around her shoulders, she barred the doors to her landlady’s rooms and sat in the dark firelight, nervous but not afraid, to wait for Hugh. This was the confusion of war, thought Beatrice. That some should sit mourning in a drawing room, or smoothing the brow of a dying boy, while in a cottage on a cobbled street, two young lovers could only choose to stand against the shocking burden of death and loss with their love and their passion.
—
Hugh and Beatrice were married the next day, walking together to church on a morning unexpectedly mild, as if to celebrate the vernal equinox, when the world balances perfectly between light and dark, and spring signals fresh life. The war seemed to have swept away and rendered useless all the normal etiquette of mourning and marriage. Hugh telephoned his uncle in the early hours but gave him every option to remain at home. They came to church, the Kents, and Celeste; and though they were swooning with their grief, they offered no remonstrance but only tender words of affection and happiness. Alice Finch and Minnie Buttles came out to sign the register for them, and the Vicar made the ancient ritual short and simple, unadorned by superfluous hymns and prayers.
The boy, Snout, lingered for a week, his lungs succumbing slowly to pneumonia brought on as a corollary to a trench fever unrelated to his later wound. Hugh spent long hours with Dr. Lawton at the boy’s bedside and consulting with the hospital doctors. Snout’s family was a constant at the Wheaton house, going silently in and out of the garden. His invalid mother was carried in every morning and seemed to grow stronger as she fought for her son’s life. His great-grandmother came in with herbs and teas, foul-smelling concoctions that eased his breathing but could not defeat the infections. She rubbed his chest with salves and made such prayers and incantations that the hospital nurses, gliding in and out, whispered of witchcraft.
—
Such is the slow accumulation of sorrows in a long war that the requests for memorial services begin to outweigh the marriages and the parishioners begin to keep their black coats brushed and hung at the front of their wardrobes. The church bulletin, hand-delivered on Tuesday, announced that Sunday’s communion service would be another memorial for two officers fallen and buried overseas; Colonel Archibald Preston Danforth Wheaton, commanding officer, Second Battalion, Fifth Division, Royal East Sussex, of Wheaton Hall, Rye; and Lieutenant Daniel Sidney Bookham, also of the Second Battalion, Fifth Division, Royal East Sussex, of Rye and Lansdowne Terrace, London. The bulletin highlighted KILLED IN ACTION, an enticement to attend not dissimilar to the greengrocer’s sign announcing “fresh from Devon” or “picked today.” But first there was a boy to bury.
The funeral service for Richard Sidley was on Saturday. Beatrice felt guilty that she faced the somber ritual with the warm heart and flushed cheeks of a newly wedded woman. She and Hugh had lain in each other’s arms to the last moment that morning, watching the clock’s hands and finding excuses, and shortcuts to their dressing, so they might snatch an extra few moments away from the world.
Now they stood in the cobbled street outside the church and waited for the funeral cortège to arrive. Agatha had insisted she was well enough to attend and stood between her husband and Celeste, her face white and old against her black coat. Celeste, too, looked older than her years, but she held up Agatha’s arm with quiet strength, and it seemed to Beatrice that she had already acquired the resilience of a mother in these past days.
Much of the town seemed arrayed on the narrow pavement; even the
Mayor and his wife had come, and he was somberly dressed with the mayoral chain of office tucked inside a dark greatcoat. Many of Snout’s schoolfellows stood scuffing their boots against the curbs. Some of them looked sheepish, as if they were visited by every taunt and shove they had inflicted on the poor boy. And now the coffin came slowly up the street, borne on the undertaker’s best dray and covered with the Union Jack and the town flag with its prancing lions. Behind the coffin, Snout’s mother rode in a pony cart, his father leading the stout pony by the head. Beside him, Snout’s sister, Abigail, carried an armful of lilies and, somewhat strangely, a large jar of coins tucked under her arm.
A stir among the crowd of townspeople greeted the turning in to the street of Snout’s great-grandmother, driving her barrel-topped caravan wearing a scarlet coat fastened with gold sovereigns and a heavy black skirt stiffened by many black and red petticoats. Her gray hair was braided about her head, and a top hat perched above, covered with a long black lace veil. The wagon was bright with new paint, its wheels picked out in red and gold. The horses in the shafts pulled together, their flowing manes and the feathers on their feet brushed to silk and streaming in the breeze. The harness jingled with bells, and the leather shone with waxing.
Behind the caravan, a line of Gypsies, gathered from all over the county, marched. First a young boy leading a riderless horse, a pair of boots tied across its back. Then the men walked, with grim faces, their black coats bright with red scarves, flowers, and gold buttons. Behind them came carts with floral tributes, wagons filled with elderly women and children, and in the rear, young Gypsy girls and their mothers, each in her best dress with hair braided and tucked under a dark shawl or mantilla. The men remained outside the church, a dark army silent and severe. Only the occasional whinny of an impatient horse, the tossing of its head and harness, broke the quiet of the street. Beatrice saw some of the good people of Rye melting quietly away, too proud to share the sanctuary of the church with the Romanies. Others hurried in, and Beatrice watched idly to distinguish who was there to mourn, who to be seen by others, and who was chiefly anxious to have the service done, so they might spread the story of the Gypsy mourners to all their friends.
The Summer Before the War Page 47