She said this to Harry and when he laughed she was relieved to see how it changed his face. It made her feel she had the power to transform him to what he had been when he first sent her the beautiful bouquets of flowers, so long ago it seemed.
‘Have you thought any more about marrying me?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Please say yes, Lark. I don’t think I could go back to France without that. I’ve thought of nothing else since I went into hospital. It’s kept me going through everything.’
‘What happened to you?’ she asked.
He stood up and walked across to the tall window overlooking the street and his voice was harsh as he said, ‘I went mad. I started to scream and scream and one of the other officers was going to shoot me, but fortunately I had a friend in the trench and he stopped him. Shell shock, they said! They brought me home and got me better so that they can send me back again.’
With a sharp movement he turned back to stare at her. ‘And believe me, I don’t want to go. I have nightmares about it. I’m terrified but I’ve got to go… All the men who’ve been killed will come out of their graves and haunt me if I don’t go back.’
She ran across the floor and grasped him in her arms. ‘Oh Harry, it’s so awful. Of course I’ll marry you, of course I will.’
It was a quiet wedding held on the day before he was due to return to France, but the newspapers got hold of the story and announced that the famous music-hall artiste had married a young peer and war hero. She was back on stage on the night of the ceremony and the audience stood up and cheered when she began to sing.
They spent their wedding night in the Savoy Hotel but when they were in bed together he clasped her in his arms and said through clenched teeth, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything, Lark. I’ve never done it with anyone but a prostitute when I was at school… hope you won’t be disappointed.’
She felt relieved but soothed him, feeling old and wise though she was even more virginal and inexperienced than he. Years of listening to the uninhibited conversation of Sadie and Bella however had left her with some knowledge.
‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter, it happens like that sometimes. You’ll be all right tomorrow,’ she whispered to him.
‘But I want you so much, I want you so badly.’
She held him close and stroked his hair. ‘Ssh, don’t worry,’ she crooned, ‘just talk to me. Tell me about what it was like when you were a little boy.’
He talked for hours, telling her about his home, his pony and his boyhood friends. But as dawn began to streak the sky outside their window, he started to talk about the war though she tried to stop him…
‘Let me tell you about it,’ he whispered, ‘I want to talk about it. I want to clear it out of my mind. I want to tell you about the time we fought for three days to capture a foxhole with three Germans in it. We could see them, crouched over their guns, firing out at us and we had to keep trying to get in to their foxhole and kill them. My best friend died, my captain was killed, our sergeant was shot down, the men were slaughtered one after another but we were ordered to go on till we took that foxhole. On the third day we made it, we got in and – you’ll not believe this – the Germans were all dead. What we had been seeing were three corpses. They were crouched up in there in shooting positions with their eyes staring at me and – the smell! My God, I can’t describe the smell!’ Without speaking she drew him to her and he fell asleep, his head on her breast.
1918
At last it was beginning to look as if the war was coming to an end. Both sides were exhausted and the women whose men were still alive were hanging on to the hope that, in the end, they would survive.
The spring was chilly and Lark’s energy was low. She was still in bed when Bella arrived at Mount Street looking grim. She sat down on the bed and nodded to Sadie to bring in tea before breaking the news which she so obviously carried with her. Alarmed by her grimness, Lark sat up anxiously and stared at her.
‘What’s wrong, Bella? It’s not Bill is it, he’s all right is he?’
Bella never believed in beating about the bush and she blurted out her story.
‘Bill’s fine, so am I. Don’t worry about us. It’s your mother, Larkie. An odd little man came in to the Queen’s last night and gave me a package. He said it’d been sent over from Russia. It’s your mother’s papers and photographs – apparently she was shot some time during the winter in St Petersburg. He didn’t know who did it – or if he did, he didn’t say.’
She reached into her carpet bag and fished out a bundle of papers wrapped up in dirty, stained canvas. Lark slowly untied the frayed string that held them together.
All that was left of her mother’s life was some closely written pages that looked as if they had been torn out of a child’s exercise book; four printed sheets in Cyrillic letters which she could not read; and a small sheaf of photographs on card mountings, most of them showing Hannah with various male comrades in high-necked Russian shirts. At the bottom of the pile there was a publicity postcard of Lark herself in stage costume.
Wordlessly she held this out to Sadie and Bella, who looked on silently, not knowing how she was going to react to Hannah’s death.
‘She was very proud of you,’ ventured Bella.
‘Was she? I suppose she was. I didn’t know much about her, really. Aylie used to say that she was very clever as a child, really brilliant. She could have done so many things…’
Lark carefully wrapped the papers up again and laid them on the bed at her side. She needed time to think about Hannah. As she drew on her wrapper and looked up at the concerned faces watching her so closely, she knew that if she had just been told about the death of either of them, her grief would have been real and true. How sad she could not feel like that about her mother.
* * *
The telegram about Harry arrived three days later – killed on the Somme where he had cheated death for so long. She crumpled up the thin sheet of official words in her fist and wondered if Harry’s ghost would wander that desolate shell-pitted landscape for ever.
It did not occur to her not to go to the theatre. Accompanied by a silent Sadie, she rode there in a cab, staring blindly out of the window. She had not loved him but had felt great pity and affection for him. She had married him from compassion and now he was dead, a sacrificial victim to the Gods of War. Her sorrow was mixed with a terrible anger at the waste of human life. She stared out of the cab window and realized that an all-pervading feeling of grief filled the streets of London. It was no longer a bustling, happy city but a place where grey-faced women in black walked with bowed shoulders along the streets. It was a city full of mourners.
Chapman was waiting in her dressing room. Publicity conscious as always, he had alerted the newspapers and a few reporters were clustered in the passage outside the door as she came in, but one look at Sadie’s face was enough to quell their questions.
‘You don’t have to go on,’ said Chapman, ‘I’ll put on your understudy – or I’ll close the show for the night if you want.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll go on. I’ll finish it. Just go away and let me get dressed.’
He rushed out and told the press that in spite of her grief, Lady Lewis had decided not to disappoint her public. She would sing for the soldiers as a tribute to her dead husband.
The theatre was packed when she stepped on to the stage. People were even standing in the aisles. A hush swept over them when the curtain rose and they saw her standing very still in the middle of the stage, wearing a cream silk dress with a long train and large pink silk cabbage roses tucked into her corsage. Deliberately she had made herself look as splendid as possible, with diamond bracelets on her wrists and a necklace of brilliant stones glittering round her neck. Her yellow hair was piled high in a thick crown and into it Sadie had tucked an elegantly curved white aigrette.
The cheering died away when she spread out white-gloved hands to silence the crowd and gestured to the orchestra to strike up. Ton
ight there would be no cheeky, sexy songs, tonight she would only sing of emotions, of love and longing. Her voice was magnificent and it soared out into the dark theatre like a benison, soothing the listeners, taking them away from their everyday concerns into a land of enchantment.
She knew that she had never sung better. Like a swan in its death throes, her magic was more intense than it had ever been. She had reached her peak.
Then she began to sing a series of popular war songs but she sang them with such poignancy that the words achieved a new meaning. The roses that bloomed in Picardy were roses of blood; the road that was winding ahead of the singer was the road to eternity; ‘Cheerio, Toodle-oo, Goodbyee…’ was a brave gesture against certain death. Finally she sang the most moving song she remembered from her childhood. It was an old song of mourning still sung in the Borders for the men who fell in the sixteenth-century Battle of Flodden, ‘The Flo’ers o’ the Forest’.
Her voice rang out with words that moved every heart:
‘I’ve seen the smiling of fortune beguiling,
I’ve tasted her pleasure and felt her decay,
Sweet was her blessing and kind her caressing,
But now they are fled, they are fled far away.
I’ve seen the Forest adorned the foremost
Wi’ flo’ers o’ the fairest baith pleasant and gay,
Sae bonny was their blooming, their scent the air perfuming
But noo they are withered and a’ wede away.’
Halfway through, her voice cracked and wavered. The tears began to flow down her carefully rouged cheeks, and she put her white gloves up to her face for a second but pulled herself together and re-started the song. The audience gasped and rustled in sympathy as her voice rang out stronger than ever, and when she finished, everyone in the theatre was in tears as well. Chapman gave orders to the stage hands to drop the curtain on Lark who was standing, head drooping, sobbing openly. But as the red velvet wall slid along before her, she swept it aside and stepped in front of it.
Holding out her arms to the audience, she cried, ‘This is a terrible war. We have all lost so much, we are all mourning. Be brave, be brave!’
Then Chapman and a stage hand rushed on stage and led her away.
Everyone was worried about her, she would not eat and she could not stop weeping. A series of doctors were called and they prescribed rest, port wine, and a change of air. Chapman sent her back to Bognor where Bella and Sadie fussed round her. She was still there on the day that the Armistice was announced.
* * *
‘But I don’t understand, he said he wasn’t rich. I wouldn’t have married him if I’d known he was so rich…’
The lawyer, a prim little man called Octavius Pike, looked at her in a sceptical way. He had never before heard a widow complaining about her husband being richer than she thought.
‘Lady Lewis,’ he said patiently, ‘Sir Harry was sole heir to a considerable fortune, a very considerable fortune.’ His voice had a plummy sort of satisfaction for he enjoyed dealing with estates of consequence.
‘But his grandmother…’
‘His grandmother died last winter and she also left her grandson a sizeable inheritance. As his wife, it all comes to you. He was an only child, as you no doubt know.’
The lawyer did not really believe this actress person when she protested that she had not realized Sir Harry Lewis was one of the richest young men in England. He had no doubt that the wealth had been a major factor in her decision to marry him – after all, he was considerably younger than she was. But Lark had not been so calculating as to check up on Harry and the news that she had been left hundreds of thousands of pounds and several properties by him was quite literally a shock.
‘Perhaps you could put me in touch with your financial advisers and your own lawyer,’ suggested the little man who was perched on the edge of her sofa like a tetchy toy.
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t any. I’ve never needed any. Chapman pays me my money and Sadie looks after everything else.’
‘Chapman? Is he a lawyer?’
‘No, he owns the Alhambra Theatre,’ she said and the lawyer reeled. There was no way he was going to allow the Lewis fortune to pass into the hands of a theatre proprietor.
‘Perhaps it would be best if I continue to handle legal matters for you,’ he suggested, and she was grateful for the offer.
‘But are you sure it’s all mine? He said his mother was still alive in South America.’
‘Sir Harry’s mother is now Mrs Lafferty and she has been taken care of by the estate. She has no claim on Sir Harry’s will,’ was the reply. Mrs Lafferty was obviously the skeleton in the Lewis cupboard.
* * *
‘You’re rich, you’re really rich. You’re as rich as the finest duchess in the land,’ cried Sadie exultantly. ‘You can go out and buy anything you want. For God’s sake, Larkie, do something! Let’s go out and buy you some new dresses at least.’
Lark was still unable to stir herself from her lethargy. She sat in her bedroom window, watching the back gardens of the neighbouring houses.
‘I don’t need any new dresses, I’ve a cupboard full of dresses.’
‘Let’s buy you a lapdog then, or a parrot or a motor car…’ Sadie’s mind ranged over all the things she could think of that might interest Lark.
‘What a selection,’ was the reply. But it was said with a laugh, which was a good sign. ‘All right, I’ll come out with you but not to buy a lapdog or a parrot and certainly not a motor car. I’m not used to being so rich, I want to let it creep up on me gently.’
Mr Pike organized a trip for her to visit Harry’s Herefordshire properties. There were several large farms and a massive house with turrets and sweeping lawns, set in a walled park. She stared at it in disbelief as her hired car swept up to the front door where a line of curtseying maidservants under the command of a stern butler were waiting. Inside it was gloomy and depressing, a house of mourning for two dead heirs.
‘I hate it, I’m not staying here. Let’s go, Sadie,’ she said abruptly only half an hour after being shown into the drawing room. Leaving behind an outraged butler, she returned to London and gifted the Herefordshire house with two of its supporting farms to an organization that looked after severely wounded soldiers. Mr Pike was disapproving of this largesse but she mollified him by saying it was a gift in memory of Sir Harry and a charity should be set up to run it under his name.
* * *
Winter was ending, spring was coming and with it came Chapman, bearing a new contract.
‘How would you like to go to America now?’ he wheedled. ‘I’ve got it all down here in black and white – they’ll pay you anything you want.’
She did not even open his contract.
‘I’m finished with singing. I’ll never appear on a stage again. That night when I broke down was my very last appearance and don’t try to coax me round because I mean it.’
He knew better than to argue. The timid little Larkie had disappeared and been replaced by this firm, determined woman. Money and a title had really brought a change in her, thought Chapman bitterly as he left the house.
‘So what do I do?’ she asked Sadie after he had gone.
‘You’re not one for good works,’ was the reply, ‘I don’t see you chairing committees or running charity balls. You’ll have to do something, though, or you’ll fade away.’
Sadie was concerned because Lark was as thin as a walking stick. Her carefully corseted cleavage had completely disappeared.
‘You remember that I once said I wanted to go back to the Borderland? Well, this is the time to do it. I want to see if my memories are right, is it as wonderful as I remember? We’re going north, Sadie – and don’t object, you’ll love it. It’s a beautiful place – I think.’
* * *
Spring came late to Scotland in 1919 and there was still a dusting of crisp white snow on the ground when she turned the key in the lock of Aylie’s cottage. It t
urned easily – the lock was well oiled in spite of the years the cottage had been empty.
The main room was empty but in a corner there was a pile of trunks and boxes, covered by a faded patchwork quilt. The light coming in through the warped, greenish glass of the window had a strange radiance from the reflected snow outside. A dusting of ashes and soot lay around the blackened hearth and on the mantelpiece still stood a few little bits of pottery that her grandmother had loved, the fairings from long ago.
She left the door open and walked slowly across to the boxes. The old quilt felt soft to her fingers and when she held it to her nose, it smelt of apples and lavender, Aylie’s smell.
The first box was full of books, pots and cooking bowls. She heaved it off the pile and laid it down in the middle of the floor. The second box contained old bedding, lace-trimmed pillowcases and the padded quilts. They were faded and splitting now but she could make out the minute stitching and the scraps of coloured materials that had gone into them.
At the bottom of the pile she came on Aylie’s treasure chest, the dome-topped, brass-bound chest that had come from Jane’s cell in Charterhall. The key was in the lock but it was rusted and she had to prise the box open with an old kitchen knife. When she looked inside she found a layer of thin paper covering a bundle of old manuscripts on vellum and beautifully illustrated. With reverent fingers she turned the pages, but was unable to make anything of the Latin words.
Then she found the silver and Alice’s books of medical cures, written in what looked like rust-red ink by a slanting hand. Some of the writing had faded away to nothing with age but occasionally a little drawing had been added, an outline of a snowdrop with its bulb or a sketch of a foxglove head.
At the bottom of the box she found the greatest treasures. Wrapped in a scrap of silk was a little spray of white satin roses, yellow with age and sadly crumpled. Lark remembered Aylie telling her about her wedding at Coldstream and how, even as a child, she had recognized the genuine love that filled her grandmother as she told the story. The romance of Hugh and Aylie had been very real and very true – but so tragic. Tears filled her eyes as she held the satin roses in her hands, then she rewrapped them reverently for her grandmother’s sake and put them back in the trunk. The last thing in the box was the French Hussar’s jacket. Its colours were still strong and although the sleeves were frayed and the loops of gilded braid tarnished, it looked magnificent and proud. She took off her fur-trimmed tippet and tried on the jacket.
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