Stephen beamed as he saw her, and then he turned towards Coventry. “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked, his voice warm with laughter. “They’re all damned whores. Every one of them, as tricky as a barrel of monkeys.”
“Go,” Coventry said very, very softly to Lily. “Go.”
Like a bird watching a snake, Lily took one sideways step to the door, never taking her eyes from her husband’s smiling face.
“Got any tea?” he asked Coventry. “Got any biscuits?”
Coventry made a small inviting gesture to the fireside chair and Stephen stepped forward into the room. Lily pressed back against the wall to let him pass. She had a sudden realization that he could hardly see her, he could hardly see her and the baby. He simply was not there in the little room with the sea lapping outside and the foghorn calling through the mist. He had slipped away and was once more the man they had forced him to become in the trenches, a man beyond feelings, beyond fear. A man whose principal pleasure was his friendship with his batman, whose joy was a cup of stale tea, and whose habit was daily murder.
Lily took another silent step towards the door.
“Kettle’s on,” Coventry said comfortably. “Want some rum, Captain Winters?”
“As a chaser,” Stephen said. “I don’t like ’em mixed.”
There was a small step up to the door. Lily had to move into the room to skirt the angle of the open door. As she stepped forward Stephen turned his head a little towards her. Lily froze again. The revolver in his hand was shiny and well-oiled, he held it as one might hold a favourite pen. It fitted his hand.
“Go,” Coventry said, his voice a whisper.
Lily felt for the door jamb behind her with her free hand, her other hand clutching Christopher to her heart. She stepped backwards, up the little step, and felt under her bare feet the cold wood of the outside staircase. Even then she hesitated, for just a moment; fearing for Stephen, fearing for Coventry, fearing for them both and for the madness that the war had forced on them.
“Go,” Coventry said softly. “We know our duty.”
She closed the door and crept down the steps. She felt that at any moment that Stephen might erupt into madness, he could be down the steps and barring her way in two strides. She crept bent-kneed over the shingle, bruising her feet and stumbling on the wet stones. She got into her car and put Christopher on the passenger seat beside her. He stirred in his sleep and opened his eyes, as blue as her own. She turned the switch to start the engine.
The engine turned over but it did not fire. Lily gritted her teeth and tried again. She knew that the sound of the engine might be the very thing that broke Stephen’s fantasy of being back at Ypres in a God-given lull from the shelling. If he remembered where he truly was, and what she knew, he would come after her and the baby with the loaded revolver in his hand.
She switched the car right off, and then tried it again. The engine turned over for a moment and then died. The arrow of the temperature gauge on the bonnet was pointing to red, the car was overheated and the sea mist was penetrating the engine, soaking the points and the plugs with cold damp air. Lily had her foot down hard on the accelerator, flooding the engine with too much petrol. She gave a soft sob, moved the spark lever to the start position, paused, and then turned on the engine again.
The engine suddenly fired, Lily pressed the accelerator, took off the handbrake, slipped it into gear and eased forward. She switched on the headlights and glanced fearfully over her shoulder. Even now, if Stephen came down the steps and jumped into the Argyll, he could catch her. There were long stretches of deserted road between here and home. There were a thousand places where his more powerful car could overtake and then block her way. There was that little shaking bridge over the sea where he could ease forward and nudge Lily’s smaller lighter car towards the edge and then through the frail wooden rail into the deep fast-flowing current.
Lily drove carefully forward. There was an open gateway at the end of the estuary where she could rejoin the track. But at the very bend at the edge of the beach the wheels stuck for a moment in sand and the engine stalled.
In the silence the foghorn was very loud. A couple of sea birds called into the darkness.
And then Lily heard it—very clearly—two revolver shots. First one . . . and then the other . . . very sharp, echoing over the dark water and scaring the roosting sea birds up in a screaming pale cloud which circled the little harbour once, twice and then slowly settled again, calling and preening, crying and scolding. Then there was silence; the complete silence of absence, the silence when someone has gone. Lily knew then that Coventry had done his last act of service for the man he loved.
The war for both of them was finally over.
TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE
FALLEN SKIES
FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss the D. H. Lawrence quote from Lady Chatterley’s Lover that opens Fallen Skies. How does this epigraph relate to the novel’s title? How have the skies fallen for Stephen and Lily?
2. Stephen is first attracted to Lily because she reminds him of the time before the war. “She looks like there had never been a war”. He thinks she will help him forget the atrocities he witnessed and committed. Why do you think his marriage to Lily fails to clear his conscience and erase his nightmares? Were his expectations of her unrealistic?
3. “A solitary rebel, [Lily] pretended that the war, which overshadowed her childhood and drained it of joy, did not exist”. Do you think Lily’s efforts to ignore the war and its aftermath helped her to survive difficult times or failed to prepare her for reality?
4. Coventry and Rory are literally silenced as a result of their wartime experiences. Discuss each man’s muteness and eventual recovery. What do you think helped each man to reclaim his ability to speak?
5. Does Stephen’s relationship with his brother, Christopher, seem to surpass sibling rivalry? How has Stephen let his envy become completely out of control? Do you think Muriel and Rory played any part in exacerbating the tension between their two sons?
6. Discuss the way marriage is portrayed in the novel. Was there evidence of any happy unions? What are your feelings about the divorce laws and the understanding regarding sexual relations between husband and wife? How do you think Lily’s story may have developed if the novel took place today?
7. Do you think Charlie’s decision to not marry Lily because of his injury was a chivalrous one? Do you think they could have been happy together without lovemaking and children? What do you think Charlie could have done to redeem himself once Lily married Stephen?
8. Discuss Lily’s reaction to her mother’s death and then, later, her reaction to her baby’s disappearance. Do you think she was hysterical? How do the two events act as bookends to her relationship with Stephen? How has she grown and matured in the interim?
9. Discuss the beliefs about sex among the upper class in the novel. Muriel claims that “A lady does not enjoy it. . . . Bad girls are the same as prostitutes”. Stephen is also pleased that Lily seems to dislike sex. How do these beliefs affect Lily and Stephen’s marriage? How does the power dynamic develop given this understanding?
10. Do you think that what Charlie and Lily shared could be considered an affair? In the absence of physical union, does a strong emotional connection still constitute infidelity? Where should the line be drawn?
11. “People live on islands . . . alienated from each other by a thousand rules of conduct”. How has a strict adherence to good manners affected some of the characters in the novel? When has unflinching conduct aided them? When has it hurt them? How did Lily learn to use it to her advantage?
12. Both Charlie and Stephen came out of the war forever altered. Whose ailment do you think was more unendurable? Are they comparable? Is either man capable of living a fulfilling life? Do you agree with John Pascoe that “perhaps it was easier for those . . . who had never come home”?
13. World War I is sometimes idealized as a battle of suffering by the b
rightest and best in English society. Gregory’s account of the war is far darker and shows English soldiers as responsible for an atrocity. What does the novel gain from this rejection of a romantic view of war? Do we as readers learn anything?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Visit www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/index.htm to read firsthand accounts from World War I soldiers.
2. Learn more about shell shock and what Stephen and Coventry might have endured at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_stress_reaction and www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/shellshock.htm.
3. Visit www.geocities.com/flapper_culture/ to learn more about the Jazz Age and the styles popular at the time.
TURN THE PAGE
to find an early excerpt from
The King’s Curse
Philippa Gregory’s final book
in The Cousins’ War series
Westminster Palace, London, 29 November 1499
In the moment of waking I am innocent, my conscience clear of everything. In that first dazed moment, as my eyes open, I have no thoughts; I am only a smooth-skinned tightly muscled young body, a woman of twenty-six, slowly waking with joy to life. I have no sense of my immortal soul, I have no sense of sin or guilt. I am so deliciously, lazily sleepy, I hardly know who I am.
Slowly, I open my eyes and realize that the light coming through the shutters means that it is late in the morning. As I stretch out luxuriously, like a waking cat, I feel that I was exhausted when I fell asleep and now I am rested and well. And then, all in a moment, as if reality had suddenly tumbled down on me like a shelf piled high with denouncements, I remember that I am not well, that nothing is well, that this is the morning that I hoped would never come, for this morning I cannot deny my deadly name, I carry it like a scar on my face, the mark of Cain. I am the heir of royal blood, and my brother—guilty as I am guilty—is dead.
My husband, sitting on the side of my bed, is fully dressed in his red velvet waistcoat, his red jacket making him bulky and wide, his gold chain of office as chamberlain to the Prince of Wales splayed over his broad chest. Slowly, I realize that he is waiting for me to wake, his face crumpled with worry. “Margaret?”
“Don’t say anything,” I snap like a child, as if stopping the words will delay the facts, and I turn my face away from him and bury it in the pillow.
“You must be brave,” he says hopelessly. He pats my shoulder as if I were a sick hound puppy. “You must be brave.”
I don’t dare to shrug him off. He is my husband, I dare not offend him. He is my only refuge. I am buried in him, my name hidden in his, my dangerous self decapitated. I am cut off from my title as sharply as if my name had been sliced off and rolled away into a basket.
It is the most dangerous name in England: Plantagenet, and once I carried it proudly, like a crown on my head. Once I was Margaret Plantagenet, niece of two kings—Edward and Richard; my father was their brother George, Duke of Clarence; and my mother was the wealthiest woman in England and herself the daughter of a man so great that they called him Kingmaker. My brother, Teddy, was heir to the throne of England named by our uncle King Richard as his heir, and between us—Teddy and me—we commanded the love and the loyalty of half the kingdom. We were the noble Warwick orphans, saved from fate, snatched from the witchy grip of the white queen, raised in the royal nursery at Middleham Castle by Queen Anne herself, and nothing, nothing in the world was too good or too rich or too rare for us.
But when the king was killed, we went overnight from being the heirs to the throne to becoming pretenders—survivors of the old royal family, while a usurper took the throne. What should be done with the York princesses? What should be done with the Warwick heirs? The Tudors, mother and son, had the answer prepared. We would all be married into obscurity, wedded to shadows, hidden in wedlock. So now I am safe, cut down by degrees, until I am small enough to safely conceal under a poor knight’s name in a little manor in the middle of England, where land is cheap and there is nobody who would ride into battle for the promise of my smile.
I am Lady Pole. Not a princess, not a duchess, not even a countess, just the wife of a humble knight, stuffed into obscurity like an embroidered emblem into a forgotten clothes chest. Margaret Pole, young pregnant wife to Sir Richard Pole, and I have already given him three children: two boys—Henry, named sycophantically for the new king, Henry VII, and Arthur, named ingratiatingly for his son, Prince Arthur—and my daughter, Ursula. I was allowed to call a mere girl whatever I wanted, so I named her for a saint who chose to be martyred rather than married to a stranger and forced to take his name. I doubt that anyone has observed this small rebellion of mine, I certainly hope not.
But my brother could not be disempowered by marriage. Whoever he married, however lowly she was, she could not change his name. He would still hold the title the Earl of Warwick, he would still answer to Edward Plantagenet, he would still be the true heir to the throne. When they raised his standard (and someone, sooner or later, was bound to raise his standard) half of England would turn out just for that haunting flicker of white embroidery, the white rose.
So since they could not take his name from him, they took his fortune and his lands, and then they took his liberty, packing him away, like a forgotten banner, among other worthless things, into the Tower of London, among traitors and debtors and fools. But though he had no servants, no lands, no castle, no education, still my brother had his name, my name. Still Teddy had his title, my grandfather’s title. Still he was the Earl of Warwick, still he was the white rose, the heir of the Plantagenet throne, a living constant reproach to the Tudors who captured the Plantagenet throne and now call it their own. They took him into the darkness when he was a little boy of eleven and they did not bring him out until he was a man of twenty-four. He had not felt the grass under his feet for thirteen years. Then he walked across Tower Green, perhaps enjoying the smell of the rain on the wet earth, perhaps listening to the seagulls crying over the river, perhaps hearing beyond the high walls of the Tower the shouts and laughter of free men, free Englishmen, his kinsmen, his subjects. He walked to the scaffold and they beheaded him.
And that happened yesterday. Just yesterday. It rained all day. There was a tremendous storm, a thunderstorm, as if the sky was raging against cruelty, rain pouring down like grief, so when they told me, as I stood beside my cousin the queen in her beautifully appointed rooms, we closed the shutters against the darkness as if we did not want to see the rain that on Tower Green was washing the blood into the wet grass, my brother’s blood, my blood.
“Try to be brave,” my husband murmurs again. “Think of the baby. Try not to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid.” I twist my head clear of the pillow and speak over my shoulder. “I don’t have to try to be brave. I have nothing to fear. I know that I am safe with you.”
He hesitates. He does not want to remind me that perhaps I do still have something to fear. Perhaps even his lowly estate is not humble enough to keep me safe. “I meant, try not to show your grief. . . .”
“Why not?” It comes out as a childish wail. “Why should I not grieve? My brother, my only brother is dead? Beheaded like a traitor when he was innocent as a child. Why should I not grieve?”
“Because they won’t like it,” he says simply.
PHILIPPA GREGORY is the New York Times bestselling author of several novels including The Other Boleyn Girl, The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and The Other Queen. A writer and broadcaster for radio and television, she lives in England. She welcomes visitors and messages at her website, www.PhilippaGregory.com.
Published by Simon & Schuster New York
Cover design by Cherlynne Li
Cover photograph by Jeff Cottenden
Author photograph by Sigrid Estrada
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By the same author
The Cousins’ War
The Lady of the Rivers
The White Queen
The Red Queen
The Kingmaker’s Daughter
History
The Women of the Cousins’ War:
The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother
The Tudor Court Novels
The Constant Princess
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Boleyn Inheritance
The Queen’s Fool
The Virgin’s Lover
The Other Queen
Historical Novels
The Wise Woman
Fallen Skies
A Respectable Trade
Earthly Joys
Virgin Earth
The Wideacre Trilogy
Wideacre
The Favored Child
Meridon
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Fallen Skies Page 59