Daisychain Summer

  ‘Not have the means?’ Clementina’s jaw sagged. ‘But my son’s expectations are – phenomenal!’

  ‘Expectations, dear lady, do not buy establishments – merely castles in the air.’

  It had been so awful, so degrading. How dare the woman imply that Elliot could not afford a wife! Didn’t she realize he was no mean catch? Didn’t she know that young men – rich young men – were thin on the ground, a fact that refugees with little to commend them but a title would do well to dwell upon!

  Furiously she brushed her hair, dismissing the maid helping her prepare for bed. Tonight, Clementina wanted no one to see her tears, for tears there would be. Anna was so perfect, was all she could have hoped for in a wife for Elliot. Anna, it was plain to see, was completely besotted. They made such a handsome couple; would have beautiful children – if ever they got as far as the church, that was!

  ‘Aaaagh!’ Clementina’s emotions spilled over and she flung the brush across the room to hit the wall and fall with a clatter. ‘Drat the woman!’

  How could she prevaricate so; be so damn patronizing! She would be glad when tomorrow came and the old biddy took herself back to Cheyne Walk.

  ‘Ooooh …’ Her shoulders began to shake, her head drooped. Anger gave way to tears and she laid her head on her arm and sobbed out her misery. Even penniless foreigners got the better of her, looked down on her. It was too much to bear! She jumped at the closing of the door, dabbing her eyes guiltily, sucking gulps of air.

  ‘Whatever is wrong, Clemmy? I could hear you at the end of the passage.’ Edward placed a comforting hand on that of his wife. ‘Has it all been too much for you?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ Her despair was all at once gone and she was angry again. ‘It’s her! Who does she think she is? Pendenys isn’t good enough for her Anna! You heard her, didn’t you? Her daughter couldn’t possibly marry a man who hadn’t the means to –’

  ‘Hush, now. Calm yourself, Clemmy. You want Elliot to marry Anna, don’t you?’

  ‘You know I do!’

  ‘Then buy them a house. You know you can afford it.’

  ‘But I want them to live here,’ she wailed, ‘with me.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I think the countess is right,’ Edward said softly, ‘though she was wrong to imply that Elliot could not support a wife,’ he added by way of mitigation.

  ‘Yes, she was wrong, Edward – I suppose it’s because she’s foreign, you see.’

  ‘But a countess,’ he reminded her.

  ‘I know.’ She turned to him, bewildered. ‘Do you really think …?’

  ‘I really do. Their own home,’ he insisted. ‘That way, Elliot will the sooner settle down.’

  ‘Settle down? I hope you aren’t implying that –’

  ‘After the war, I meant. Young men are still unsettled by it.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ That war, and Elliot being sent to France. Once, she would have given all she owned in exchange for the certain knowledge that her eldest son would return safely. So why was she worrying about a house? And think of the pleasure it would give her to furnish it with nothing but the best, as Elliot deserved. A house not too far away, mind! ‘They shall have a place of their own!’

  ‘You are quite right.’ His relief was heartfelt. ‘And in the morning, why not suggest that Anna be allowed to remain here with us? You’d like to have her stay a few days more, now wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Y-yes.’ Yes, of course she would. Better by far the girl stay behind at Pendenys, away from her scheming mother. ‘But I don’t want that maid of hers. She – she floats.’ And she was far too attractive to be given the run of the place, even though she spoke not one word of English. ‘And the countess must take the Cossack back with her, an’ all – he’s frightening the servants!’ Tomorrow, at breakfast, she would beg the countess not to insist that Anna return to London with her, although it would dent her pride to have to capitulate so completely. ‘I’ll ask her, in the morning.’

  ‘And she will agree, I’m sure of it. Now why don’t I ring for some milk – help you sleep?’

  ‘Mm. Hot milk, I think, and a little honey …’

  Tomorrow, she sighed, was another day. Tomorrow, it would all come right. It must!

  ‘I declare, Helen,’ Clementina sighed as she took tea at Rowangarth, ‘that I am sick of the very sight of houses. Either too big or too small.’ Or too far away from Pendenys, though she would never have admitted it. ‘We shall never find one in time for Easter!’

  ‘Did you know,’ Helen offered, ‘that Denniston House is on the market?’

  ‘That place! Yes, I knew. As a matter of fact I have the keys with me. But we shall not even consider it. They couldn’t live there. The place is a slum!’

  ‘What is a slum?’ Anna frowned.

  ‘A slum is a house not fit to be lived in,’ Julia supplied, offering more tea.

  ‘And is it – not fit to be lived in?’

  ‘Not really.’ Julia smiled affectionately. Denniston House was merely neglected; had stood empty since the last wounded soldier left it, two years ago.

  ‘But Mrs Clementina said it is also gloomy and full of ghosts. Did someone die there, tragically?’

  ‘No ghosts, Anna.’ Just memories of a young wife, desperate to get to France; her and Alice bicycling to Denniston each day – and Sister Carbrooke and Staff Nurse Love, and the wounded soldiers.

  ‘Then please forgive me, Ma’am,’ Anna turned bewildered eyes to her fiancé’s mother, ‘but why do you not wish us to live there?’

  ‘Because it was once a hospital – in the war, my dear. Goodness only knows how many germs they left behind them.’

  ‘Then people did die there and there are ghosts?’

  ‘No one died whilst I worked there,’ Julia defended. ‘Why don’t we go and see it, you and I, Anna? You said you have the keys with you, Aunt, and it isn’t far from here. You’ll look after Drew, mother? Oh, and can you ride a bicycle by the way?’

  ‘Bicycle?’ Clementina gasped. ‘If you must go, take the car. It’s waiting, outside …’

  Now they stood, gazing at the old house, Julia calling back the past, Anna wanting desperately to prove Elliot’s mother wrong.

  ‘Sometimes I despair, Julia. I would have been happy to live at Pendenys Place, but Mama insists no house, no wedding and now it is November, then it will be Christmas and Easter – and still nowhere to live. No house we have looked at seems to satisfy,’ she sighed. ‘Some are too big and some are too small. This one seems the first that is neither.’

  ‘It certainly isn’t a slum.’ Julia fitted the key in the lock. ‘Needs money spending on it, though, but it’s more roomy than you’d think.’ She gazed around her, dry-mouthed, heart thumping, letting the silence wash over her. ‘And it does have electricity. It was put in by the military when they took it over as a hospital.’ She let go her indrawn breath, willing herself to be calm. Aunt Clemmy had been right, in part. There were ghosts here; memory ghosts from a time when she and Alice had been young and lived defiantly from day to day and letter to letter. And where had the carbolicky smell gone and why had she come back here, opening old wounds?

  ‘This was once Ruth Love’s ward.’ She pushed open the double doors to their right.

  ‘But it’s quite big. It would make a lovely drawing room!’ Anna walked the length of the room, pushing open the creaking glass doors at the far end, stepping into a conservatory in need, now, of putty and paint.

  ‘It would.’ No noise here, now; no laughter. No wounded soldiers caring little about their broken bodies because they were safe in Blighty, the squalor of the trenches forgotten for as long as it took them to get well enough to be sent back there. Where were they all, now?

  The room opposite had been Matron’s office, she recalled, though now through the open door they could see the rows of empty shelves that told them it had once been a library.

  ‘This,’ Julia opened a door at the end of a small passage, ‘is the butler’s pant
ry.’ They had used it, though, for sterilizing instruments and preparing trays of dressings, ready for the medical officer’s rounds.

  ‘Does the house have cellars,’ Anna demanded.

  ‘Three. And a kitchen and scullery and a staff sitting room.’ And so many memories, Anna Petrovska. Memories of ambulance convoys and paper sacks for flea-ridden, blood-soaked uniforms. And the nurses’ sitting room over the stables, where just sometimes there had been time to listen to gramophone music. ‘There are seven bedrooms, if I remember rightly, and two bathrooms.’ And attics, where the live-in nurses had slept.

  ‘If you were me, would you live in this house, Julia?’

  ‘I’d live anywhere, with Andrew.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me – I didn’t think. Elliot was lucky to have come back from that war.’

  ‘Yes. He was.’ Julia set her lips tightly. All at once there were too many memories and she wanted to go home, to Rowangarth. ‘You could always come back again and look at it; bring Elliot with you. I’ll have to get back – Drew, you know …’

  ‘Ah, yes. He’s a beautiful little boy. He calls you Mummy, yet he is not yours, Mrs Clementina says.’

  ‘He’s my brother’s child. My brother is dead and his widow remarried. She left Drew with us. She is still my very dear friend,’ she added hastily. ‘I miss her. Once, she too nursed here.’

  Once, in another life, when they had loved and hoped. She laid her hands to cheeks that burned. ‘Do you want to go upstairs?’

  ‘Yes, I do, but I would like Elliot to see it with me. What do you think, Julia?’

  ‘Would I live here, you mean? Yes, I would. It needs cleaning and decorating and carpets laid, of course. And the kitchens could do with a couple of decent cookers and new cupboards. But Denniston House isn’t too big that it’s unfriendly nor too small to be a nuisance for space. It could easily be made into a home.’

  ‘Mrs Clementina doesn’t like it, I know it. And Elliot, if I asked him, would say he didn’t like it, also. But I like it!’ Anna tilted her chin. ‘And there are no ghosts here. I would feel it, if they were.’

  ‘Anna – don’t say you like the place just because you want nothing to delay your wedding,’ Julia cautioned. ‘The very next house you look at might be ideal.’

  ‘This house is ideal,’ came the firm retort. ‘It is just right for us and if Mrs Clementina doesn’t like it, then perhaps –’ she smiled impishly, ‘she won’t visit too much! Now – shall we go upstairs?’

  ‘N-no. You go.’ All at once, Julia felt the need to be alone. ‘I’ll take a look at my old ward – remember Ruth Love and all the soldiers we nursed …’

  And remember a young girl, Anna, one week a wife; remember that no task was too menial nor too heartbreaking. All that young probationer wanted was to pass her exams, then volunteer for France. She had been impatient that a sea separated her from her love; would have gone to hell and back again, just to be near him – to see him, even. One distant glimpse of him would have been worth all the fetching and carrying and bedmaking and swollen, throbbing feet. Andrew, who had been straight and tall and good to look at. Major Andrew MacMalcolm, waiting for her at the Gare du Nord station, so handsome in his uniform she had wanted to cry out her need of him for the whole of Paris to hear.

  Andrew’s hands, his healing hands, had touched her intimately; his mouth had covered hers possessively; his lips trailed every part of her wanting, aching body. And the woman she had become wanted him now. Every wild and wanton pulse beat out for him still, yet no man who lived and breathed would ever be able to satisfy her need nor give her that feeling of ecstasy when they had lain close after each exquisite coupling.

  Eyes closed, she hugged herself tightly. Andrew was never coming home. Andrew’s beloved body lay in a grave in another country. Two years, almost, since that telegram was delivered to a hospital ward in Celverte. She had been demented with anger and disbelief and then desolation took her and she had gone home to Rowangarth and Alice’s waiting arms; to Alice, who understood.

  Now, she was an incomplete creature; only half a woman giving all that was left of her affection to one small boy. She was dried up, unloved. No man would ever take her again. Three years being a wife; only ten nights of them spent in Andrew’s arms.

  So be it. She had loved and been loved and now she must learn to live with the aloneness.

  ‘Wait for me!’ She clattered up the stairs on angry, urgent feet. ‘Changed my mind!’ Too many memories, Anna Petrovska. I can’t face them alone …

  That night, at Rowangarth, Julia thought about Anna’s defiant chin and her wish to live in Denniston House in spite of Aunt Clemmy’s scathing comments about it. All at once, the ghosts left her and she smiled. With Anna and the countess to contend with, Aunt Clemmy would not have things all her own way! Perhaps Anna Petrovska was exactly the wife that Elliot needed.

  Then her sudden smile faded. What little she knew of Anna she liked, and she was far better than her cousin deserved. Julia hoped he would not hurt her too much …

  Tom Dwerryhouse was a contented man. His first three shoots at Windrush had gone well; so well that he had money in his pocket to prove it. Pleased by the abundance of game birds, guests had tipped generously and not only himself but Dickon, too. This Christmas, the folk at Willow End would not go without.

  The thought pleased him and he smiled into the leaping flames of the fire. He had so much; Alice in his arms in a candlelit bedroom and Daisy, fair as a lily and eyes so blue you couldn’t help but notice them.

  She smiled a lot, now, and laughed a lot, too. She had him twined around her little finger – aye, and Mr Hillier an’ all. Mr Hillier called her his little flower and she smiled and blinked her eyes at him, scarce six months old and already a little flirt! Yet truth known, Tom admitted with scrupulous fairness, it wasn’t right that the man who owned Windrush Hall and paid his wages every week should single out Daisy Dwerryhouse for such attention when there were eight more children on the estate that he never so much as looked at. It was something, he considered, that might well be taken amiss by other employees, yet who was a gamekeeper to say his employer nay? And happen he’d soon tire of the bairn. Mr Hillier was known for his fads and fancies; was rich enough to indulge them, whatever the next one might be. He had spared no expense, entertaining his shooting guests from London lavishly.

  ‘Well done, Dwerryhouse,’ he’d said, when the last of them had left. ‘There’ll be something extra in your pay, this week.’

  ‘I reckon it’ll run to a goose, this Christmas,’ he murmured, ‘and happen we’ll ask Willow End for supper, on Boxing Night. Think you’d better be looking out for something for young Keth’s stocking.’ Tom smiled, wanting to share his good fortune.

  ‘Hm.’ Alice counted the stitches on her needle. She was knitting a jumper for Drew for Christmas; one in bright red, with enough wool over, happen, to make a matching hat with a big, bright pompom on the top of it. Drew, Julia’s son.

  ‘I said –’

  ‘Sssssh.’ She had a stitch too many on her needle and it was throwing the pattern wrong.

  ‘Sorry.’ Tom stretched out his legs, offering his slipper soles to the fire. Something was bothering Alice. She’d been quiet all day, hardly speaking, answering him with a yes or a no, most times. ‘You all right, bonny lass?’ He had to ask her. ‘What’s upsetting you?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She bit on her lip, then laid her knitting on her lap, gazing up with troubled eyes. ‘No – something is the matter, Tom. It’s the fifth, you see – of November.’

  ‘Bonfire night?’ There was to be sparklers for the estate children and potatoes baked in the embers of the fire – Mr Hillier’s orders. And gingerbread men, from Windrush kitchen.

  ‘Not bonfire night, Tom. It’s Julia. Had you forgotten?’

  Dammit, but he had! When folk would be laughing and joking around bonfires and having the time of their life, there’d be Julia remembering that this day, two years gone, a lan
d mine had snuffed out her man’s life as if it had been of no more consequence than a candle flame.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alice.’

  ‘You weren’t to know …’ Just six days before that war ended; when Julia had been entitled to hope that her man had come safely through it all.

  ‘No.’ He’d been safe out of the fighting, then; hadn’t heard the war was over, even, ’til next day. Safe, he’d been, with Henri and Louise and Chantal – pretending he was a French soldier who’d been shell-shocked and could neither speak nor hear. Tom Dwerryhouse – deserter.

  ‘She’ll go through hell again, Tom. She loved him so.’ And as if it wasn’t enough, that lot at Pendenys would be rubbing salt in, talking about the wedding that was to come and Mrs Clementina making such a fuss as if her Elliot was the first man ever to get married. Married! The only thrill for that one on his wedding night would be clean sheets! ‘I’ve tried to put a letter together, but words can be cold things, sometimes.’

  ‘Then why don’t you ring her up, have a chat with her – let her know you understand? I’ll give you the money to pay for it. Push the bairn down to the Post Office, early on. You’ll be the one Julia wants most to hear from; give the lass a bit of comfort, why don’t you?’

  ‘Telephone?’ Eagerly she snatched at the idea. ‘Think it won’t upset her, too much?’

  ‘Reckon she’d be more upset if you didn’t. You’re sisters, in a way, and that’s what sisters are for. Have a nice long talk with her.’

  ‘You’re a good man.’ Alice laid aside her needles and wool, then knelt at his feet, her head on his knees. ‘I understand, you see. You were once dead, so I know how she’ll be feeling. It’ll be like she’s got a great, cold stone inside her, just where her heart ought to be.’

  ‘I love you, Alice Hawthorn.’ He ran his fingers through her hair. ‘We have so much, you and me. There’s times I think I’ve been too lucky.’

  ‘We get what we deserve, Tom …’