The Gamekeeper's Wife

by Clare Flynn

  Martha bit her lip. She had promised herself she would do her utmost not to think about what had passed. To be grateful for what was present. To try to show affection to this man who had rescued her. This kind man.

  There was no point in thinking about what might have been. No point in wondering whether, if she had told Kit about the baby, it would have made a difference. All that was past history. Reggie Henderson had steered her into a safe haven. He would care for her and Jane, and for her unborn child. Their child. Reggie was right – that’s how she must think of it – this life pulsing inside her. Not Kit’s child, but Reggie’s. She must concentrate on the future.

  ‘I was thinking…’ Reggie’s words were tentative. ‘Wondering if perhaps we might occasionally bring Jane across here to the house. Only for an hour or so at first. A little longer once she’s used to being here. Then, maybe, after some time, she might feel comfortable enough, familiar with the place… that she could live here all the time with us. What do you think? After all, we’re still in the grounds. She can see her oak tree from the drawing room window.’

  Martha felt a surge of joy inside her. ‘You really think so? That she might be able to live outside the ward?’

  ‘If we are patient and don’t rush things. One step at a time, helping her get accustomed to new surroundings. But it may take months.’

  She stretched her arms around him. ‘Thank you, Reggie.’

  * * *

  A few weeks later, when Dr Henderson indicated Jane was ready to spend a few hours with them in their house in the grounds, the young woman suddenly developed a high fever and a terrible wracking cough. The home visit was postponed and Jane was put to bed in the ward. Soon after, she began to shake and shiver. A physician was summoned to her bedside and pronounced that she was suffering from pneumonia.

  Martha watched helplessly as Jane struggled to breathe. Rasping sounds from her throat, lungs full, damaged, straining. Eyes wild, panic mounting, sweat soaking the sheets. Cries like an injured animal, caught in a trap, unable to break free.

  Refusing to eat, Martha wouldn’t leave her vigil at her daughter’s bedside, accepting only water from the ward nurses when they or Reggie insisted. Reggie often sat with her too, holding Martha’s hand in his, offering silent comfort. He would have stayed all through the night if Martha hadn’t insisted that he needed his sleep and owed it to his patients.

  The physician who attended, explained how the illness was likely to progress, that the crisis was a turning point, when Jane would be at her worst, and would either turn a corner and gradually recover or… But Martha wouldn’t allow herself to think about the alternative.

  In the gloom of the ward, she kept her vigil, alone save for the sleeping patients and one other nurse. Reggie had gone back to their house to snatch a few hours’ sleep before his morning rounds. Martha stared up at the large wall clock above the desk at the nurses’ station. She had been watching its progress all night, measuring Jane’s against it. She monitored her daughter’s temperature every hour, the lines on her face deepening as each time her hopes were dashed. The thermometer appeared to be stuck at 104: a dangerously high fever. Hair was plastered to Jane’s forehead and Martha smoothed it away then wiped a cool cloth over her brow, soaking up the perspiration, praying that her daughter would recover.

  There had been another patient on the ward, a month ago, who had contracted pneumonia. She had suffered for five or six days, until her body went into a shock reaction, sweating copiously and shaking violently. The woman’s temperature had plummeted in the space of an hour and she had fallen into a deep and undisturbed sleep. The following morning she had sat up in bed asking for some tea. Within two days, she had recovered enough to get out of bed.

  Martha clutched Jane’s hands, whispering softly to her, telling her daughter she was there, promising she wouldn’t leave her. She had no idea whether Jane could hear her, let alone understand her. The young woman lay, bathed in sweat, struggling to breathe, making little chuntering noises like a small animal. She had vomited bile and blood earlier, but now at least that appeared to have stopped.

  The physician had ordered four-hourly doses of sulphate of quinine, alternating with tincture of chloride of iron. Glancing again at the clock on the wall, Martha saw that the hand had moved on only five minutes. It was twenty minutes before she needed to administer the next dose. She needed to sterilise the needle and syringe before giving the injection. That meant going into the nurses’ room and leaving her daughter while she did so. What if, in the minutes she was away, Jane were to deteriorate, or wake and find her absent? She went through the same argument over and over again in her head. She didn’t want anyone else to nurse her daughter but she didn’t want to leave her bedside. Eventually, as the hands advanced around the clock-face, she knew she could postpone no longer and, after kissing her daughter’s brow, she made her way to the room where the medicines were kept and took up a glass syringe and laid it on the counter while waiting for a pan of water to boil.

  Terrified of missing a crucial development in her daughter’s condition, she returned to the bedside. She knew she was not meant to leave water to boil unattended, but there was no one about to see this breach in protocol. The ward was quiet – only the sound of snoring, the odd sleeping groan and the faint noises from Jane as she struggled to find a breath. The noisiest woman on Sycamore had been screaming and tearing her bed sheets earlier, but had been dispatched to one of the two padded cells off the ward, where no one would hear her screaming and where a straitjacket and the padded furnishings would be proof against her propensity for destruction.

  After to-ing and fro-ing between bed and medicine room, at last the ten-minute boiling of the syringe was complete and Martha titrated the medicine into the glass tube. She went back to her daughter’s bedside, rolled up the sleeve of Jane’s nightdress, noting that it was soaking wet. She gave the injection, then turned her attention to wiping away the copious sweat on her daughter’s face and neck. The clock was showing the time as ten minutes after three. The darkest hours of the night. Didn’t they say that that was when people were most likely to die? She pushed away the thought. Believe. She had to believe. Trust in God.

  In the distance along the ward she could see the duty nurse, snoozing in a chair. A quiet night for her.

  Martha wanted to change her daughter’s sweat-soaked nightclothes, wash her body and dress her in fresh dry linens but knew she couldn’t do this without waking her and that might cause more distress. If only she could take all the agony her daughter was suffering upon herself. At least she would be able to understand what her body was going through, might find the strength and resources to fight the disease. But poor Jane felt only pain and was at a complete loss as to why it had afflicted her.

  It was at half past three that Martha realised the crisis was happening. Sweat continued to pour from her daughter, more than should be possible, but there was no drop in Jane’s temperature. Her face was red and blotchy, her tongue lolling in her throat and when Martha took her temperature again the thermometer showed it had increased to 106.

  ‘Nurse Barker, come quickly.’ When the snoozing nurse didn’t reply, Martha screamed, ‘Nurse Barker!’

  The nurse jumped and hurried down to the bedside.

  ‘It’s the crisis and she seems to be getting worse. Her temperature has risen two degrees in the past half hour and she’s sweating badly,’ said Martha, her own heart pounding in her chest as she felt the clutch of rising panic. ‘What should we do?’

  Nurse Barker was taking Jane’s pulse. ‘It’s racing. We need to get the duty doctor.’

  ‘Then go. Go! Go! Please, I beg you. I can’t leave her.’

  The nurse seemed affronted, as if about to point out that while Martha may be Dr Henderson’s wife, she was only an auxiliary, but must have thought better of it. She walked briskly out of the ward.

  ‘Hurry.’ Martha spoke more to herself than to the departing nurse. ‘Oh, please, God, hurry.�
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  But she knew there was no point. By now Jane’s breathing was so laboured it was like that of a drowning woman. She was a drowning woman. Drowning slowly and painfully from lungs filled with poison.

  Martha slid off the chair and knelt by the bedside, her daughter’s hand clasped inside her own, as she begged her to stay with her.

  She wasn’t aware of the exact moment of Jane’s death – the last little flutter of breath drawn into those ravaged lungs. Instead she felt a sudden cooling in her hands, a stiffness and a silence that was so complete it was palpable. She gave a gulping sob and tried to rub the life back into her daughter’s hands. Cold. Lifeless. It had happened so quickly. From one moment to the next. Life there, flickering, fragile, and then gone. Snuffed out. Blown away like autumn leaves.

  Jane’s birdlike, bony hands were now cold and white, like alabaster hands on a tomb. Frozen forever, they would no longer pluck at her bedding or tug at her sleeves. Giving a cry of pain, Martha bent over and kissed her dead daughter’s head, then collapsed forward, her own head resting against the thin cold body under the blankets.

  She lifted her head again, looking about her, at the line of beds with their sleeping occupants, at the brown ceramic half-tiled wall, the glow of the lamp on the nurses’ station. The tick of the wall clock as it continued to mark the passage of time. All the little mundane things that were unchanged on the ward. How could these trivial things be the same when Martha’s world was changed so utterly, with Jane in it no longer?

  Looking down at her daughter, Martha saw Jane’s face was now calm, her eyes closed, the chill of death spreading through her thin body. Beside the bed, the empty syringe lay in the enamel bowl where she’d left it. She should take it away and sterilise the glass tube and needle for the next patient. A little cry escaped her. Why was the world continuing as usual when her daughter was gone? Surely there should be some kind of pause, some acknowledgment of the passage of a life. Some momentous sign that nothing could ever be the same again.

  Martha didn’t even notice what the duty doctor did when he arrived. Didn’t listen to his whispered instructions to the nurse as he told her to prepare Jane’s body for removal to the mortuary. It felt as though she had been swept up by a huge tidal wave that was carrying her out to sea. She didn’t care whether she would see land again or be dashed against the rocks.

  Insensible to the hands that gently pulled her to her feet and held her against his chest, she barely registered Reggie’s arrival at the scene. It was only when she felt a strange sensation inside her, a fluttering like tiny bubbles rising to the surface of a pool, that she remembered that she was bringing a new life into the world. As the spirit of Jane had left the world, that of her unborn baby was demanding her attention.

  She tilted her head to look at Reggie Henderson. ‘I felt our baby move,’ she said.

  The following evening, still red-eyed and exhausted from her lack of sleep, Martha told Reggie they would have to inform Kit of his half-sister’s death.

  ‘He hasn’t visited her in months. I don’t see why we should,’ said Henderson.

  ‘She was his sister. He didn’t visit because I asked him not to.’

  ‘All the same. Is it really necessary?’

  ‘He has to be told. He has a right to come to the funeral. Besides the Shipleys must be informed as they pay Jane’s fees.’ As she spoke her daughter’s name she gave an involuntary sob.

  Dr Henderson placed an arm around his wife’s shoulders. ‘Very well, my dear, I will take care of it.’

  ‘And the funeral?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘He must be invited.’

  Henderson directed his eyes at his wife’s swollen belly and nodded. ‘Very well. But I doubt he will come.’

  ‘He will come,’ she said.

  In the event, Dr Henderson requested the hospital superintendent to write an official letter to Mrs Edwina Shipley to inform her that, due to the demise of Miss Jane Walters from bronchial pneumonia, the standing order for payment of residency fees could be cancelled. A cheque for the amount overpaid on the quarterly advance payment was enclosed along with the final closing statement.

  * * *

  When she stood at the hole in the ground into which her daughter’s coffin had been consigned, Martha was beyond tears. She had known Jane for such a brief time, but her daughter had brought so much joy to her. She had hoped they would have years to make up for all those they had lost. Aching with grief that now she would have no chance to build on the progress Jane had made, Martha knew she could never replace the beauty of the quiet mornings she had spent holding her daughter’s hand and singing to her. Jane’s death was a loss she was sure she would never get over.

  As she flung her handful of soil onto the lid of the coffin she raised her eyes to look around the churchyard, hoping against hope that Kit Shipley would appear to pay his respects to his half-sister. It was a miserable November day, with squally showers that cut into the faces of the small group of mourners. The graveyard was uniformly grey, except for the splash of colour from the flowers waiting to be placed on top of Jane’s grave.

  Why hadn’t he come?

  Chapter 20

  Christopher never got to read the letter from the asylum about his half-sister’s death. Edwina Shipley locked it away in a drawer in the small escritoire she used for her own correspondence in the morning room.

  She knew Christopher would eventually notice that the payments to St Crispin’s had ceased but given the backlog of estate paperwork he was dealing with, it would probably be some time before he found out. She was confident that by then he would be safely married and the witless offspring of the gamekeeper’s wife would be long buried.

  * * *

  Christmas 1919 was a miserable affair for Christopher. Not that any Christmas since the start of the war had been pleasurable. When he had been in Borneo it had passed like any other day – it had been hard to imagine a traditional festivity when in steaming heat and with so much work to be done. Yet that Borneo Christmas had been one of the happiest he had known. When at the Front, Christopher joined up too late for the famous but unofficial Christmas truces of 1914 when both sides had spontaneously laid down their arms to sing carols and join in an impromptu football game in no man’s land. After that, a conscious effort had been made in subsequent years by the commanding powers to keep the intensity of the battle up. And as the war had progressed with its attendant annihilation, neither side had felt sufficiently well-disposed to the other to want a temporary ceasefire.

  Christopher’s only Christmas at the Front, in 1917, was memorable for the death of one of his men, caught by shrapnel from a stray shell on the night of Christmas Eve. Bleeding to death, the young Private was carried by his comrades to the nearest medical station, where he died soon after midnight. No, Christmas was not a cause for celebration, rather a time to remember that poor lad and all the others Kit had seen killed or wounded during the terrible years of the war.

  This year, in the light of his engagement to Lady Lavinia Bourne, the Bournes were to join the Shipleys at Newlands. For Mrs Shipley, the festive season was an excuse for excess – with no expense spared on decking Newlands with elaborate decorations and a table groaning with food and treats.

  Christopher stood in the entrance hall where there was a welcoming log fire burning in the grate and an enormous Christmas tree standing guard at the foot of the sweeping marble staircase. Such a sham! A waste, when people were hungry and jobless, when the recent war had wreaked havoc in so many lives. But for Edwina, it was a way to draw a line under the past, to be optimistic about the future. And that future included Christopher’s marriage the following May to Lady Lavinia Bourne.

  It was difficult for Christopher to absent himself from the festivities, although Lavinia’s unashamed refusal to emerge from her bed until late in the morning gave him some respite, and he was able to ride Hooker out in the mornings. On the night of Christmas Eve, Christopher and his mother dis
tributed gifts to the servants, in line with tradition. His mother, determined to make it a memorable Christmas, volunteered to host the meet on Boxing Day for the local hunt, as had always happened when George Shipley was alive. She invited more guests to dine on the day after Boxing Day. Christopher had to give her credit, she was indefatigable in her attempts to put on a bright face and to re-establish Newlands as the centre of the social life of the area. He admired her energy and wished he could match it himself, but he felt hollow, empty, and desperately lonely.

  As he watched Edwina moving effortlessly between her guests, ensuring glasses were charged and conversation was flowing, he had to admit his respect for her. He would have liked to be able to hate her, to punish her for what she had done to him, for being who she was – or rather for not being who he wanted her to be, but he was awed by her energy. From time to time, in an unguarded moment, the shadow of sadness in her eyes was apparent. When he saw this, Christopher reminded himself of what she had lost too. Her life had not been the one she had probably dreamed of. She had been married to an unfaithful, ambitious man, who had shown her no affection. She had lost her elder son in the first flush of his youth. She must be disappointed in her younger son, in his reluctance to do as she had done herself and knuckle down and play the game. Yes, she had a burden to carry and she didn’t shirk from the task. But it was a burden of her own making. And in carrying it she was forcing him to carry it too.

  The closer acquaintance that Christmas afforded them did not do anything more to endear Lady Lavinia to him. She had arrived with her two precious chihuahuas in tow and talked to her pets constantly and in a loud and exaggerated baby voice that made Christopher shudder.