Siena Summer

by Teresa Crane

  Siena Summer

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Read More

  Copyright

  Siena Summer

  Teresa Crane

  Part One

  Kent, England, autumn 1918

  Chapter One

  So immersed was the child in her own affairs, and so efficiently did the swirling river water mask sound, that she was quite unaware of the young man’s halting but soft-footed approach along the footpath. He stood above her on the grassy bank, leaning heavily on his supporting stick, watching her, smiling a little, contem­plating the remembered self-absorption of childhood. Dressed in a brown corduroy smock, heavy woollen stockings – despite the warmth of the day – and small brown boots, she looked, he thought, like nothing so much as a little mouse. Even her straight, untidy hair, into which had been tied an improbably bright scarlet ribbon, was brown. She was sitting cross-legged by the water, beside her a carelessly discarded straw hat and a small fishing-net sheathed in slimy river weed, and before her a string-handled jam-jar full of murky water into which she was staring intently. Beyond the river the rolling, sun-dappled hop gardens and apple orchards of one of the most fertile counties in the land basked in a mellow sunshine that was as benign as it was surprising in this year of almost unremitting cold and rain.

  The peace of the unremarkable little scene suddenly and unexpectedly twisted in his guts like a stab of physical pain. He had almost forgotten there was a world such as this. A world apparently untouched by the barbarous, the inexplicable brutalities of war. A world of innocence.

  Innocence. Who could put tongue to such a word after the past four years? Who but a child?

  He shifted a little, easing his leg. The movement caught the girl’s attention. She looked up. As he had expected – as he had known – her eyes, too were brown – brown and bright and solemn. A mouse, he thought again, touched and amused. A little brown mouse.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then, ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Are you lost?’

  The unexpected question brought the barest shadow of a grim smile. God Almighty – out of the mouths of babes! ‘No,’ he said. ‘At least, I don’t think so.’

  She was studying him, frankly and interestedly. So far she had not smiled. ‘Not many people use this path. Well, not many people until the hop-pickers come. Then they use it all the time. To get to the pub, I think.’

  This time he grinned in quick amusement. ‘Sounds like a good enough reason to me.’

  She nodded matter-of-factly, and transferred her attention to the jam-jar.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Sticklebacks,’ she said, not looking up, her small face intent, ‘and some other little things. I don’t know what they are.’

  ‘May I see?’

  She nodded.

  With great care he manoeuvred his way down the gentle slope to the riverside. She held up the jar for his inspection. Straggling strands of her soft brown hair were plastered to her flushed cheeks. Her clothes were of solid good quality, and her accent was clear and precise, holding nothing of the soft Kentish burr. He studied the jar. She studied him. ‘I don’t know what they are, either,’ he said after a moment and with perfect honesty.

  She laughed, suddenly and with an edge of delight. ‘Perhaps I’ve invented a new fish.’

  He smiled. ‘Discovered,’ he said gently. ‘I think you may have discovered a new fish.’

  She was unabashed. ‘That’s what I meant.’ She cocked her head, looking openly into his face, her brown eyes narrowed against the setting sun. ‘What have you done to your leg?’

  His smile was wry. ‘I didn’t do anything to it. Someone else did.’

  ‘Was it the war?’ The question was matter-of-fact.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘It was the war.’

  The child’s attention was back on the jar. ‘Hugh and William went to the war,’ she said. ‘They were my brothers. But they were killed.’ Again he was taken aback by the frank calmness of the words. ‘I don’t remember them much. I was only six then. I’m ten now. Nearly eleven.’

  What have we done? What have we done to our children? Will this little one grow up thinking it natural for young men to die or be maimed in war?

  He turned his head, looking back the way he had come. On the ridge behind him that lifted above the river, the path had passed a memorial, shaded by oaks and well tended. ‘Do you live in the house up there on the ridge?’

  She glanced at him. ‘Yes. Tellington Place. O-oh!’ A light voice had called in the distance. The child screwed up her face in a fierce and rueful grimace.

  The voice called again. ‘Poppy! Po-ppy! Poppy, where are you? Poppy!’

  ‘That’s Isobel. I’ve stayed out too long again.’ She scrambled to her feet, shook out the enveloping brown corduroy; for the first time she seemed to take note of the mud and river weed that stained it. The scarlet ribbon was sliding down a lock of fine brown hair. Distractedly she tried to push it back up.

  ‘Poppy? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’ She cast a glance at her companion, shrugged with a beguiling roll of her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry. I have to go. I’m late. Isobel’s mad. I can tell from her voice.’

  ’Poppy!’

  The child took the jam-jar, went to the river’s edge and, with infinite care, emptied the contents into the deep, shadowed water below the overhanging bank. Then she stooped to pick up the dripping net and set off up the slope to the path that led through the grove of ancient oaks towards the house.

  ‘Hey—’ adroitly the young man scooped the straw hat from the ground with the end of his walking-stick. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

  Poppy accepted the hat with a quick grin. ‘Thanks. I’m always forgetting things. It gets me into trouble.’ She pulled a comical little face. ‘I sometimes think that everything gets me into trouble.’

  He watched her up to the path. She turned and lifted a hand. He smiled, and she was gone.

  He turned, stood for a long time, watching over the river, listening to the silence. The blessed silence. Birds sang. The water gurgled sweetly beneath its banks. The hop gardens were green and shadowed, glinting gold. There was no war here. No incessant, pounding thunder of artillery, no unnerving and constant threat of death, no demand beyond human endurance. No sniper lurked in the woodlands beyond the river, the sky was innocent of danger. The smell of death did not haunt the air, nor taint the muddy ground. This was normality.

  Was it? Or had that other, anguished world somehow become the norm? What was normality?

  He hunched his narrow shoulders a little, leaning on his stick, favouring his damaged leg. The little girl whose brothers were dead had begun to sing as she walked up the path towards the distant house. He could hear her high, clear voice above the sound of the river.

  With some difficulty he hauled himself back up the bank and set off in the opposite direction, towards the village and the pub.

  *

  When their paths next crossed a couple of days later, Poppy saw him before he saw her. She watched the tall, slim figure limp down the path towards the
tree in which she sat. He was wearing the same blazer, flannels and open-necked shirt as before, but this time he carried a small satchel on his shoulder. He was hatless, and the dappling sun glinted on his thick, soft, light brown hair, gilding it to gold. She sat quite still in the fork of the tree; not until he was almost directly beneath her did she move. Then, ‘Boo!’ she said, and jumped down on the path beside him.

  The young man gasped, stumbled, dropped the satchel, and all but fell. Alarmed, Poppy put out a small hand to steady him. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  The man’s quick grin was rueful. To her surprise she saw that a faint sheen of sweat stood suddenly on his forehead. ‘What do you do when you do want to startle someone?’ he asked. ‘Fire a pistol?’

  She giggled. ‘Don’t be silly. I haven’t got a pistol.’

  ‘Thank the Lord for that!’

  She laughed again, bent to pick up the canvas satchel, and handed it to him. He swung it back on to his shoulder. His hand was trembling. She fell into step beside him, her head cocked to look at him. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To the river. I thought I might make a few sketches.’

  ‘Sketches?’ She skipped a little, swinging her arms. ‘Can you draw?’

  ‘It’s what I do for a living.’

  ‘Oh?’ She stopped in surprise, then ran to catch up with him. ‘I thought you were a soldier?’

  He shook his head, smiling. ‘Not a proper one. I think they gave me a uniform just so that I didn’t feel left out.’ He seemed to have recovered himself; the jumpy edge had left his voice. ‘I draw the war rather than actually fight in it.’

  ‘But—’ She glanced at his stiffened right leg.

  He smiled again, gently. ‘To carry a pencil rather than a gun doesn’t stop people shooting at you,’ he said. Nor does it ease the terror of a barrage, or the nightmare sights and sounds of death and dismem­berment. He glanced back down at the child skipping beside him, was struck again by the innocence of the small, solemn face. How many men had died in the mud and agony of Flanders with a picture of just such a young face tucked in their pocket? Hundreds of thousands. Perhaps millions. How many children like this had lost fathers and brothers to this war to end all wars? How many of the survivors would come home unchanged to the children who waited? His heart suddenly ached for this youngster, who barely remembered a world not at war. He knew too well – few knew better – the brutalising effect that prolonged exposure to the terrible inhumanities of total conflict could have upon the sanest and most sensitive of men. A nation of innocents like this one would find themselves dealing with more than the loss or the physical maiming of their loved ones when the ghastly business was at last over. Which surely it must be soon? He wondered, not for the first time, how long it would be before he had to go back. If the newspapers could be believed, the Germans were being pushed back at last, disheartened by their demor­alising defeat on the Somme the month before. Surely now they would sue for peace? Surely, soon, the killing must stop?

  They had come to the edge of the woods. The river glittered beneath them, and beyond the water the fields and orchards and hop gardens lay still and warm beneath the sun. In the distance a cluster of tiled roofs, the typical circular roofs of the oast-houses that were used to dry the hops, stood in contrast to the rich verdancy of the countryside. An ancient tree had fallen. The young man perched himself on the log, his game leg stretched out in front of him. The child dropped unselfconsciously into the grass, reached for daisies to make a chain. She was wearing a pinafore today over the brown corduroy – a pinafore already woefully stained from her tree-climbing activities. Her brown head was bent, her face intent. He reached for his sketch-book.

  Moments later, she lifted her head. ‘What are you drawing?’

  ‘Wait and see.’ His pencil flew, his hand sure. He was smiling a little. ‘There!’

  She scrambled to her feet, came to his shoulder. ‘Oh! It’s a little mouse—’ She stopped, put her hand to her mouth, her eyes huge with delight. ‘No, it isn’t! It’s me! It’s me!’

  ‘It’s what you remind me of. A little brown mouse.’

  She was staring, speechless at the drawing. ‘It’s lovely! May I have it?’

  ‘Of course.’ He tore the page free and handed it to her. ‘Here you are, little Mouse.’

  She giggled. ‘My name’s not Mouse. It’s Poppy. Poppy Brookes.’

  ‘And I’m Kit. Kit Enever. How do you do?’

  She gurgled with laughter again, her serious little face suddenly alight. ‘I like you,’ she said. And with the words an unlikely but lasting friendship was born.

  *

  Poppy told no one about her new friend; not that there were many to tell if she had wanted. She was, by nature and by circumstance, a self-sufficient child used to keeping her own counsel and to making her own amusements. Her mornings were spent with her governess, Miss Simpson, a demanding and unimagi­native custodian who thought more of clean fingernails, polished shoes and the tedium of tables by rote than of the wonders of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the delightfully gruesome workings of the Inquisition, or the romance and terror of the French Revolution, that were the kind of subject more to her charge’s taste. So Poppy plodded obediently through her mornings and in the afternoon lived in a world entirely her own.

  Her mother and elder sister seemed always absorbed in things womanly and grown up that were to Poppy as arcane as Popery and as boring as the declension of verbs. Her father was often away in London; and, anyway, as long as she could remember he had never taken any notice of her except to give her expensive presents on her birthday or, on the odd occasion, to make vexatious – and invariably unflattering – com­parisons between the pleasing virtues of her elder sister and her own graceless shortcomings.

  Since Hugh and William had died, Poppy frankly preferred her father’s absence to his presence; there had been little warmth and no laughter in him these past three years. Images of the two young men – killed in the same action within hours of one another in the spring of 1915 – filled the house. Their pictures were everywhere: in the hall on the table beneath the sweeping oak staircase, in the drawing-room on the mantelpiece, the silver frames draped in black, in the dining-room, in her father’s study, on the landing – even two portraits, commissioned after their deaths, in the conservatory that her mother rather grandly referred to as ‘the Orangery’. Poppy remembered them only vaguely as large, noisy, genial people, often on horseback and always with a dog in tow, who had treated her with the kind of off-hand, sometimes even rough affection that they might have afforded a favour­ite puppy or colt. She had liked them, and sometimes the portraits made her sad. But then she did not like the Orangery anyway – the heat, and the perfume of the rare tropical plants that were her mother’s passion made her nauseous the moment she set foot in the place so she did not often have to look at them, and that was the way she preferred it.

  In this as in anything that she feared or disliked, as, for instance, the threat – the certainty – of being sent away to school, Poppy reacted with a practical, live-for-today approach: don’t think about it. Think of something else. There was always something to think about, something to escape to; a book, a secret adven­ture, a conversation with the imaginary companion with whom she spent the best of her time, the closest she had to a friend. The house, whilst not vast, was quite big enough for a small girl to lose herself in, to evade the supervision of those who, in truth, were often none too concerned about her whereabouts in any case.

  When the lost sons and Isobel had been young, there had been what her mother always called ‘staff’ to watch them; nannies, and maids and gardeners. Now things had changed. There Was A War On – Poppy always thought of these words with capital letters – and ‘staff’ was otherwise occupied, in the forces, in the factories, on the buses and trams. Now the Brookes family had Miss Simpson, who lodged in the village and came to the house each day on her bicycle, a cook whose name was Mrs Butler, t
hough Poppy had never fathomed if there had ever been a Mr Butler, or what had become of him if there had been, and two girls who came in from the village each day to help in the house, and whose concerns were more for their absent sweethearts than for a pragmatically subversive child with an inde­pendent mind and a talent for disappearing. Mrs Butler was the only one who ‘lived in’ and she rarely left her kitchen or her rooms in the old servants’ quarters in the attic.

  Kit Enever remained Poppy’s secret for a whole month.

  It was not a kindly month from the point of view of weather; the same wind and rain that made such a mis­ery of the trenches of Flanders and Verdun afflicted the whole of England. As elsewhere, the harvest in Kent, hop and fruit, was an interrupted and dismal affair. But rain or shine Kit walked the footpath to the village, exercising his damaged leg, and more often than not stopped along the way to sketch; and more often than not found himself with a small, interested companion.

  ‘Where are you living?’ she asked. She was sit­ting on an abandoned apple box, watching him as he sketched.

  ‘At the old rectory. The Reverend Harold Matthews is my uncle. I don’t have any other family.’ He was absorbed in the intricacies of a hop-bine. A field or two away the hop-pickers were working, calling and shout­ing in good-natured ribaldry, but here it was quiet. Quiet and vaulted and shadowed, like the aisle of a church. The wet, furrowed ground smelled pungently of life, of the cycle of growth and harvest. The sun struck suddenly through cloud, glinted and gleamed like blades of gold through the canopy of leaves.

  She stared at him, fascinated. The idea of not having a family was a new one to her, and not totally unattrac­tive. ‘What – no one at all?’

  He shook his head, still absorbed. ‘No one at all.’

  ‘No brothers or sisters? No mother or father?’

  ‘No.’

  She sat still for a moment, her chin on her small fists, contemplating the strange thought. ‘I’ve got a sister,’ she said. ‘And a mother and father.’