The Gamekeeper's Wife

by Clare Flynn

  The Gamekeeper's Wife

  Clare Flynn

  Cranbrook Press

  The Gamekeeper’s Wife

  Cranbrook Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Clare Flynn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Untitled

  Clare’s newsletter

  Also by Clare Flynn

  Also by Clare Flynn - The Canadians Trilogy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Does it matter? – losing your legs?

  For people will always be kind,

  And you need not show that you mind

  When others come in after hunting

  To gobble their muffins and eggs.

  Does it matter? – losing your sight?

  There’s such splendid work for the blind;

  And people will always be kind,

  As you sit on the terrace remembering

  And turning your face to the light.

  Do they matter – those dreams in the pit?

  You can drink and forget and be glad,

  And people won't say that you’re mad;

  For they know that you've fought for your country,

  And no one will worry a bit.

  * * *

  Siegfried Sassoon

  Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon

  Chapter 1

  Christopher Shipley woke up to find his mother standing at the foot of his bed, looking at him with ill-concealed criticism.

  ‘Still in bed, Christopher? You know what they say about idleness.’ Without waiting for an answer, she pulled the curtains apart, allowing watery sunlight to spill into the gloomy room. ‘Remember what the doctor said about not allowing your handicap to hold you back.’ She looked away but not before he caught the slight downward turn of her lip when she saw the flat bedding where the contours of his missing leg should have been. He hated pity. More than revulsion.

  ‘I can’t let you put off talking to the Walters woman any longer. You won’t find a new gamekeeper unless you can offer him the cottage that goes with the job. Offering accommodation is our only hope of attracting a suitable candidate.’ She turned to look at him, fixing him with a determined gaze. ‘You know that as well as I do, darling.’ She studied his face and Christopher felt as though she was searching for something that wasn’t there. No matter what he did he would always fall short of her expectations. The one thing she wanted was beyond his capacity to deliver – for him to be his elder brother.

  ‘What’s the hurry? The poor woman’s lost her husband. Why do we have to harry her out of her home too? Can’t we wait and let her get out when she’s ready?’

  Edwina Shipley tutted loudly. ‘For goodness sake, Christopher, sometimes I despair of you. If left to her own devices the woman will never move. That cottage is part of the gamekeeper’s recompense.’ She moved across to the window and gazed out at the rolling parkland beyond. ‘And it’s a very superior cottage. Three bedrooms and she’s there all on her own. What right does she have to take up so much space with no family? I always said as much to your father even when the husband was alive. Such a waste of space for a childless couple. But George was attached to the Walters man and wouldn’t hear of him moving into more modest accommodation. But now – we must find a new head gamekeeper. You must find one.’

  Christopher leaned back against the pillows. ‘I don’t see why we need a new keeper. I don’t even like shooting. I’ve no wish to hold shooting parties.’ He studied her face, wondering why she was oblivious to his repugnance at the idea of holding a gun in his hands again.

  She tutted again, her tongue rasping against her teeth, impatience growing. ‘How many times, Christopher? It’s not just about you. You don’t give a damn for anything – the engineering works or the estate. You have a responsibility to the firm, to the Newlands estate, to this family, the servants.’

  ‘I know that, Mother. What’s your point? What’s that got to do with hiring a gamekeeper?’

  ‘The shooting here is essential to reviving the estate. All part of your job. How else are you going to attract the best kind of people to visit? How else are you to make your mark and expand Shipleys? Your father made his best business deals over a shooting weekend. When your grandfather was alive Prince Albert graced us with his presence and the late King was a frequent visitor. Being able to entertain here has been vital to the growth of Shipley Engineering. You should know this as well as I do.’

  Christopher said nothing. There was no point. No matter what he said, his mother would never understand. Never be able to acknowledge that he wasn’t interested in royalty staying for a shooting party, that he didn’t give a damn about his place in society, and the prospect of discussing business deals left him cold. But if he resisted her she would come back at him stronger, would keep up a constant barrage of reproach until she wore him down, rubbing away his resistance like a blacksmith hammering metal.

  Edwina left the room, throwing him one last steely look. ‘Just do it, Christopher. It’s not a lot to ask.’ The door closed behind her.

  He rarely wanted to do anything these days, but this task was particularly onerous: he was dreading telling the gamekeeper’s widow that she had to vacate her home to make way for a new incumbent. Not only because of the bad news but because he felt guilty he hadn’t called on her before now as her late husband had served with him.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the once familiar bedroom. It belonged to another life, another person, another world. He no longer fitted in. Reaching for his prosthetic leg, placed as usual on the top of the trunk at the end of the bed, he strapped it onto the stump, tightening the leather bands so that it gripped his withered skin securely.

  The pain wasn’t so bad today, more a discomfort, a constant chafing. He wasn’t sure which was worse: the days when pain seared and burned through his body, his shattered nerve endings screaming out and blinding him to everything else, or the days like today when pain thrummed away in the background, mingling with the images in his head and wrapping him up in a shroud of misery.

  Christopher occasionally considered ending it all. Taking a shotgun and setting off into the woods, sitting down under a tree and blasting his head off his shoulders. But something held him back. His reluctance to hold a gun in his hands again after his experiences in the war rather than his unwillingness to take his own life. And wouldn’t suicide be a coward’s way out and a mockery of the sacrifices made by the men who had served beside him?

  Of course, his mother couldn’t understand any of this. After her initial joy that
her second son had survived the trenches, Mrs Shipley had grown impatient. Treating Christopher with kindness on his return from the Front, her solicitude had now turned to annoyance. She couldn’t understand his reticence, his long periods shut away in his bedroom, his endless gazing into space. Edwina Shipley was a get-on-with-it, no nonsense American, who had no time or sympathy for anyone who failed to share her vision of the world. ‘Buck up!’ and ‘Onwards and upwards!’ were her war cries and Christopher couldn’t recall a time when he had come across her motionless or lost in thought. She’d no time for thinkers. Edwina was a woman of action, of deeds not words. Christopher sometimes wondered if this was because she was afraid if she stopped to think, to take stock, to weigh up what her life meant, she might conclude that the answer was not very much and her world might crumple and fall apart.

  The loss of her husband and firstborn son had caused only a stiffening in her posture, a straightening of the back, a tightening of the lips, before she was busy organising memorial ceremonies and throwing herself into the erection of a pair of marble plaques in their memory on the walls of the village church. Percy, Christopher’s brother, had been the heir apparent, adored by both parents. Killed on the first day of the First Battle of the Somme, his death caused his father to suffer a stroke when he heard the devastating news, leading to his own death soon after. But Edwina bore all this with fortitude – to complain or grieve was not in her nature. Christopher knew his own lack of resilience was a constant source of irritation to her.

  Now that his mother was gone, he tarried over dressing. The fact that he wouldn’t permit his late father’s elderly valet to assist him was yet another source of annoyance to his mother. Christopher bridled at the thought of that kind of intimacy, at the idea of another man helping him put on his clothes. He had no wish to expose his missing limb to the scrutiny of a servant; to accept help not only felt inappropriate and old-fashioned, it would be an admission of weakness, an exposure of his disability to the pity of another person. Better to do it himself even if it took him twice as long.

  Once dressed, he made his way slowly down the stairs, holding himself erect as he negotiated the shallow sweeping stairway to the hall. He hated the house: its high stuccoed ceilings, draughty corridors, pale sandstone turrets and grandiose wide doorways. It was all so false. His grandfather had built it in the neo-gothic style that was prevalent in his day – a monument to his achievement as an industrialist and an eradication of all traces of his humble roots as a carter turned factory mechanic before he set out on his own, designing, manufacturing and selling machinery to supply the factories of the north of England and latterly across the Empire. The old man had never managed to lose his Yorkshire accent, but Christopher and Percy had benefited from a public school education, rubbing shoulders with the sons of aristocrats. They had never really fitted in, but had been accepted with reluctance by slightly threadbare landed gentry forced to attach themselves to money. He had always suspected that these people left Newlands with a wiping of hands, anxious to rub out all traces of ‘new money’.

  He made his way to the stable block, glancing up at the huge clock that adorned the decorative brick tower above it. The hands were set at three-seventeen, the moment Percy had met his death according to his commanding officer, now a constant reminder of the family’s loss. Those frozen clock hands were a reproach to Christopher, reminding him that he had survived when his braver, more handsome, more outgoing, elder brother had been blown to bits on 1st July 1916. Christopher hadn’t even been in uniform then. He’d been in Borneo, studying tropical vegetation, in an all-too-brief fulfilment of his dream of being a botanist and explorer, after completing his degree at Cambridge. The dream had been cut short when he was summoned home by the news of his brother’s death and his father’s stroke. By the time he reached England his father was dead too, leaving Christopher an inadequate substitute for them both in the eyes of his mother.

  The groom had saddled up his horse ready for him to ride out. On horseback Christopher felt a whole man again. It had taken him time to build up the strength and control to apply the necessary pressure to the horse’s flank with his prosthetic leg. But now that he had become proficient, riding was a welcome escape and he rarely missed a day.

  Newlands was a large estate of rolling landscaped parkland, broad vistas, artificial lakes and acres of carefully curated woodland, where the shooting had once been regarded as outstanding. Since the war and the departure of most of the estate workers to the Front, most never to return, the grounds had been neglected. The formal gardens were overgrown, the parterres now indistinguishable from a rough shrubbery, the lawns unclipped, the ponds empty of water, the greenhouses filled with brown desiccated vegetation, their glass panels encrusted with moss and dirt. This abandoned wilderness was what Christopher was wanted to resurrect, restore, replenish. His mother expected him to recreate the splendours of the pre-war years, but all he wanted to do was get away. Return to his work in Borneo, to his detailed botanical drawings, to the book he was compiling on the flora of South East Asia, to academia, to peace.

  He nudged his mount forward, enjoying the cool breeze against his face, the pound of Hooker’s hooves on the turf beneath them. He had named his horse after his hero, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the eminent botanist. Christopher had discovered his book, Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya, one of the many unopened volumes bought by his grandfather to furnish the shelves of the library. As a child he had pored over the pages, admiring the delicate drawings of plants and then taking his sketchbook and pens and meticulously drawing the plants he found in the gardens. When sent away to boarding school, his passion for plants had continued, later cemented by his study of botany at Cambridge. The prospect of abandoning all this to run the estate and the Shipley engineering empire was a life sentence. But who was he to complain when his brother and most of the men of Newlands had lost their lives? His own concerns were trivial compared to their sacrifice.

  He steadied Hooker’s pace, slowing to a leisurely trot as they entered the woods. The gamekeeper’s cottage was in a small clearing a few hundred yards inside the woods, surrounded by beech trees. It was a pretty part-timbered cottage, covered with a scalloped clay-tiled roof in the Arts and Crafts style.

  Outside, a neat row of washing hung from a line and a thin trail of smoke drifted from one of the barley-sugar twist chimneys. Behind the house were kennels, and a sitting house for nesting game birds. Swinging himself out of the saddle he felt a juddering through his body as his artificial leg hit the ground first and the impact drove pain through his stump. It was always a harsh reminder, coming back to earth after riding – on horseback he forgot his disability.

  Leaving Hooker untethered to crop the grass in the clearing, he approached the house. The sooner he got this job over with, the better. Once done, he might earn a brief reprieve from his mother’s constant carping.

  Before he reached the door it opened. The woman must have been watching him through the window. A dog slipped out from behind her and sniffed around Christopher before curling up next to a woodpile.

  She was older than Christopher. Early or mid-thirties he guessed. Dressed in a drab brown garment, she had scraped her dark brown hair back from her face into an untidy bun.

  ‘The dog’s old. Does nothing but sleep these days. I expect he thought it was my husband coming back. He never gives up.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Mr Walters. I’ve been meaning to come and offer my condolences for some time.’ Christopher tugged his hat off his head.

  ‘You’re the younger son, aren’t you? Master Christopher?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I should call you Captain Shipley now, I hear. Come to tell me to get out, have you?’

  Christopher felt the blood rush to his face and he started to stammer an answer, but she spoke first. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ She studied him, her face expressionless. Christopher felt his face heating up under her gaze.

  The woman gave a shrug.
‘Best come inside. Kettle’s just boiled.’

  He followed her into the house, uncertain why he was doing so, but unsure what else to do.

  The door opened straight onto the kitchen, with the scullery beyond it. Mrs Walters prepared the tea in silence as he stood leaning against the door watching her. She was tall, almost as tall as he was, and despite her loose fitting dress he could tell she was of slender build. As she moved about he caught the odd glimpse of her calves above the top of her buttoned boots. She picked up the tray and asked him to hold open the door from the kitchen and he followed her into a small parlour with a scrubbed deal table and a fire burning in the grate. A pottery jug filled with spring flowers sat upon the table. She motioned him to sit.

  ‘You lost your leg in the war I heard. Doesn’t stop you riding though. They give you a wooden one?’

  Christopher blinked, taken aback by the woman’s frankness. He muttered assent. ‘Others lost more.’ Then feeling the heat burning in his face, he stammered, ‘I knew your husband. He served with me.’

  ‘Served for you, you mean.’

  ‘He was my batman.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He hesitated. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like a personal servant. He looked after my uniform, ran errands, did all kinds of tasks for me. He was a good man. The best.’ He lowered his head. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Were you there when he died?’