The Redeemed

by Tim Pears

  ‘I suppose Alice …’ Lottie began ‘… Lady Prideaux, I mean, would say that eggs can be boiled and dried and powdered, and sent to the troops.’ Lottie was not sure she would ever be able to conceive of Alice as her stepmother. Her widowed father’s young second wife, not five years older than Lottie herself.

  Cook said she did not think that dried and powdered eggs sounded very tasty, for soldiers or anyone else. Alice returned with the recipe, which she had torn from the newspaper, and placed it on the table. Cook leaned over it.

  ‘Look, you see,’ Alice said, ‘it uses no eggs, and only one large spoon of sugar.’

  Cook squinted and read aloud, ‘Six spoonfuls a flour. Half a pound a beef suet. Half a pound a currants. The sugar. One large carrot.’

  ‘The secret,’ Alice told her, ‘is in the boiling. The longer a Christmas pudding is permitted to boil, the richer it will become.’

  ‘One large carrot,’ Cook repeated.

  ‘Precisely,’ Alice said. ‘One assumes that is what will give it sweetness, and moisture. And there is no shortage of carrots, you see.’

  Cook frowned. She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, your ladyship,’ she said. ‘I never heard a that before.’

  Lottie said quietly that she had better get washed and changed into more appropriate attire, though she was not sure whether either of them heard her, for they remained engrossed in their discussion of ingredients.

  Lottie climbed the stairs to the nursery. As she approached she smelled paint. Linseed, turpentine. She opened the door and walked in and for a moment thought that she had entered the wrong room or the wrong floor. As if the configuration of the house had been altered in her absence. She had only been lodging in Bampton for a few months but it was the longest she had ever been away and perhaps that was all it took to forget what you thought you knew so well. Then she understood.

  The long attic room was empty, save for dust sheets on the floor and one paint-spattered stepladder, and tins, brushes and other decorating paraphernalia. All the old furniture was gone. In the middle of the room was a single object, covered in a white sheet. Then she saw that a number of crates stood at the far end. Lottie walked down the long room, her footsteps muffled by the sheets on the wooden boards. The heavy rain of 20 December had been followed by these cold bright days, and sunlight glared into the bare attic through the dormer windows and skylights.

  Lottie raised the lid of the first crate, disclosing items covered in layers of newspaper. She lifted one out and carefully unwrapped it. A fragile skeleton, that of a hare, one of those Leo Sercombe had given her. She had brought him up here after one such skeleton was crushed when she attacked him. Had sneaked him up here, in fact, surreptitiously.

  Lottie rewrapped the hare’s skeleton and put it carefully back in the crate and replaced the lid. She turned and walked to the centre of the room. Lottie took hold of the white sheet and dragged it off the object beneath. She had assumed it was a piece of furniture or some such solid mass, but as she pulled the sheet over it the object moved. Lottie let go of the sheet and took a step back. Whatever it was remained in the same place yet in motion. Perhaps it was a clockwork mechanism of some kind. The girl took courage and slid the sheet off entirely. There before her was a rocking horse, brand new, brightly painted. It shifted on its rockers then came to rest. Lottie stepped around in front of the wooden horse. It looked past her with oddly lifelike painted eyes.

  Lottie wished to protest but how could she? To complain, at the age of seventeen, that her nursery was being taken over?

  She fetched the stepladder and carried it across the room. One of the skylights possessed a concealed pair of hinges that opened it wide and allowed access to the roof. She pushed open the skylight, and rose up through the opening until she was standing on the top step of the ladder. She put her hands on the window ledge and sprang up, lifting one hand and at the same time twisting so that she came to rest sitting on the ledge. She swung her legs up and walked across the roof.

  A walkway ran along the centre between a chimney stack at each end, and in the middle was a raised wooden platform. Lottie did not know its function or provenance. She had never seen anyone else use it. Her father said he had been told that his great-grandfather liked to shoot birds from an armchair brought up here, but this sounded like a family fable. His grandfather was a keen astronomer, so perhaps there had once been a telescope mounted there through which to view the cosmos overhead.

  The platform was rickety. It always had been. Lottie was not confident it would bear her weight, but she climbed it tentatively and stood upon it. The air was still as it had been for days and she was grateful. The platform tottered, swaying as she moved. A sudden breeze could have carried it off.

  Lottie looked around. The height afforded her a panoramic view of the estate and the land surrounding it. The horse-ploughed furrows, the grazing pastures, the woods. Moor rising away on one side, hills on the other. She did not believe her ancestor was either a hunter or a stargazer, but rather like her he had loved his home and simply wished to contemplate it. Its beauty and its bounty.

  For dinner they had ox-tail soup followed by a soufflé with oysters, which Alice’s mother Lady Grenvil had brought down from London. The servants cleared the plates. The Christmas crackers were decorated with pictures of the dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy. Duncan Grenvil had bought them in Hamleys. They pulled the crackers. Lottie’s father Arthur and his wife Alice. Alice’s parents Lord and Lady Grenvil. Lottie. And Doctor Pollard, a widower from Taunton. Each tiny explosion left an odour of saltpetre in the air.

  Lottie looked at the smaller end of a cracker with which she had been left. ‘You’d better make a wish then,’ she told the doctor.

  ‘I imagine we all have the same one,’ Doctor Pollard said. ‘That the war will be over soon.’

  ‘Over by Christmas,’ said Duncan Grenvil. ‘Yet again.’

  Alice asked her father not to be morose. He apologised, and said that he had spotted a rather wonderful board game, called Kill Kiel, based on sinking German submarines. His wife exclaimed that Duncan was as brilliant as ever. Had he already forgotten that the game was under the tree, all wrapped up, and ready to be Arthur’s present? Her husband had just spoiled the surprise.

  ‘Not at all,’ Arthur said. ‘Now I shall look forward to opening it all the more. And playing the game this afternoon.’

  ‘Observe what is going on, Alice,’ Maud Grenvil told her daughter. ‘I trust you are taking note. This is a reflex action for them, they stick together.’

  The men made sighs and gestures of demurral. Lottie watched them. Duncan Grenvil was her father’s best friend. Was it odd that Arthur had married his daughter? Was it odd for Maud?

  Alice nodded to the butler, Mister Daw, and the main course was served. Roast turkey with chestnut stuffing. Boiled ham. Lottie concentrated hard on keeping gravy stains from the frills of her white blouse.

  ‘No goose, Papa?’ she asked.

  ‘Apparently not,’ he said.

  Alice looked from Arthur to Lottie, her brow furrowed in perplexity, or suspicion.

  ‘Papa loves goose,’ Lottie explained to the guests. ‘We’ve always had it at Christmas.’

  ‘You never said,’ Alice told her husband.

  Maud Grenvil commented that it was quite a spread. She had not seen so many vegetables in London all year.

  Duncan asked, ‘What word from young Carew?’

  ‘He writes far more to Lottie than to me,’ Arthur said. ‘You’d better ask her.’

  Lottie told them that their former estate manager was now in the cavalry. William’s most recent letter assured her all was well. They’d delivered the Germans a crushing blow at the Ancre river, taking so many prisoners it was a challenge to feed them.

  ‘I hope you write back to him,’ Alice said.

  ‘Of course,’ Lottie assured her.

  The Grenvils had not been down to the West Country since the summer. Now Alice asked Arthur to
try to persuade them not to go back to the capital. ‘They can evacuate to their own home down here,’ she said. ‘Out of reach of those dreadful Zeppelins.’

  ‘You mustn’t worry, Alice,’ her father said. ‘Our plucky little aircraft mob those ugly balloons and are bringing them down now. We barely see them any more.’

  ‘No,’ Alice agreed. ‘But only because the Germans are sending bomber planes now.’

  ‘But one feels one’s needed there,’ Duncan Grenvil said. ‘And your mother’s doing wonderful work at the hospital.’

  Doctor Pollard asked what work this was.

  ‘I simply organise some volunteer nurses,’ Maud Grenvil said. ‘One’s friends’ daughters. Their friends.’ She turned to Lottie. ‘You could come and join us, my dear, if you’re looking for something to do.’

  Alice remonstrated with her mother. ‘I want you to stay here, Mama, and instead you’re trying to take people in the opposite direction. You can’t! Anyhow, Lottie is doing her bit already, acting as an assistant to one of our local veterinary surgeons whose assistants are at the Front.’

  Lottie told them a little of what she had been doing with Patrick Jago, how much she was learning. Doctor Pollard said that increasing numbers of women were becoming general practitioners, and with the casualties in France he suspected that unfortunately this may need to continue after the war was over. Presumably it would be the same for veterinary medicine. Duncan Grenvil said that with small animals perhaps that would be so, but surely there was a difference between treating humans and manhandling shire horses and bulls, with which all agreed.

  After the main course they were served plum pudding and mince pies, and orange jelly. Lady Grenvil said that girls in the Voluntary Aid Detachment kept watch on the tons of hay stacked on the docksides, waiting for shipment to the horses of the Expeditionary Force. She asked Arthur Prideaux how the farms on the estate managed to bring in the harvest with so many men and lads gone.

  ‘A number were permitted to return from the front line to help, actually,’ he said. ‘Many thousands came back for the harvest.’

  ‘What if the enemy had found out?’ Lottie wondered. ‘They could have overrun us.’

  ‘I imagine,’ her father said, ‘German farm workers went home for the same purpose, at much the same time.’

  ‘Poor Arthur’s wearing his fingers to the bone managing the estate,’ Alice told her guests. ‘I hardly see him.’

  ‘The problem is one that’s been forty years in the making,’ Lottie’s father said. ‘We allowed ourselves to rely on other countries for wheat, meat, sugar. Staples. The war’s simply brought the situation into stark relief. We nearly ran out of wheat this year.’

  ‘And hasn’t the price risen by an extraordinary margin?’ Duncan said. ‘You farmers must be raking it in.’

  Doctor Pollard said it was going to get worse if, as was feared, the Germans moved to unrestricted warfare and attacked merchant convoys bringing food from across the Atlantic. Arthur Prideaux disagreed. He said that he did not believe a civilised nation would abandon the rules of war.

  ‘The ministry wants us to plough up our grazing land,’ he said.

  ‘They want everyone to,’ Maud Grenvil said. ‘You should see the allotments in front of Kensington Palace. And I hear His Majesty’s offered up the gardens at Buckingham Palace for vegetable production.’

  ‘I can just picture Queen Mary out there with her fork and spade,’ said Alice. ‘She’s game for anything, you know.’

  ‘It’s all very well for those flat counties in the east,’ said Arthur. ‘I mean, they’re virtually prairies. The West Country here’s higgledy-piggledy. It’s no good for corn in any quantity. Best kept for dairy.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll always want milk, Papa,’ Lottie said.

  ‘We can all see you’re in your element, Arthur,’ said Duncan Grenvil. ‘You’ve always been a farmer at heart.’

  After the food had been taken away they drank coffee and liqueurs, and nibbled at desserts, and spoke of how the wounded were brought home on night trains. How medicines were scarce in Taunton, but that people seemed to visit their GP less often with trivial aches and sprains. Lottie said little. She wondered how soon she could return to Bampton, and the veterinary practice.

  5

  People brought their dogs and cats to the surgery. Patrick Jago was indifferent to them. ‘I know it’s the way things are going,’ he said. ‘But at the College we saw ourselves as horse specialists, and I’m afraid I still do. I can’t help it.’

  After Christmas the vet left the small animals to Lottie, while remaining on hand if she needed to consult him. In the middle of January a woman brought in her spaniel. ‘It has become melancholy,’ she said. ‘I have no idea why.’

  Lottie examined the dog. It did not object but stood upon the table gazing glumly at the wall. She felt its stomach. Dogs swallowed all sorts of things. Nails, meat skewers, hat-pins. Safety pins and needles. Golf balls, tin-tacks. She wondered what this one had snapped up.

  Lottie took the spaniel out to the yard, followed by the owner. She squatted and gripped the dog’s mouth with her left hand, pressing down the hanging lip on either side with finger and thumb so that it covered the molar teeth of the upper jaw. It could not bite her fingers now without first biting its own lips.

  It was surprising how few people knew that a dog could be made to vomit by giving it a crystal of washing soda, no bigger than a garden pea. Whippers-in of hounds knew, and always carried a lump or two with them, for hounds sometimes picked up poison that had been laid for vermin. Lottie flicked her soda grain to the back of the spaniel’s tongue, and its reflex movement gulped it down. The dog looked at Lottie with a blank expression. Then it opened its mouth, retched a couple of times, then vomited easily and copiously – and there on the ground, mixed in with the animal’s breakfast, was a medium-sized brooch. Lottie picked it up and held it out to the owner, whose relief was equalled by her distaste. Lottie handed her the dog’s lead instead, and took the brooch to the tap.

  A week later another dog, a Labrador this time, was brought to the surgery by its owner, a retired sea captain. This dog was well known in the town. The owner gave him a penny each day to take between his teeth to the bakery, where he was given a currant bun, for which he had a predilection. One day the baker met the dog’s owner in the street.

  ‘I don’t mind your dog havin his bun,’ he said. ‘But he don’t always bring his tin.’

  Now the captain said his dear Lab had been taken ill with symptoms of stomach derangement. Lottie could hear a faint rattling as the Labrador walked into the room. Patrick Jago took a skiagraphy, which revealed a cluster of coins. Too many for a simple emetic. They told the captain to leave the dog at the surgery overnight. Lottie watched Jago carry out a gastrotomy, and together they extracted from the dog’s stomach a total of one shilling and tuppence.

  Lottie washed the money and when it was dry she gave it to Jago. He told her to keep it, she was earning every penny.

  ‘I should be paying you,’ Lottie said. ‘For everything you’re teaching me.’

  Unless Patrick Jago knew that he would require a great deal of tackle, of instruments and stocks of medicine, he rode on horseback to his country clients, a length of cord slung around the horse’s neck, saddlebags over its rump. Lottie rode his old assistant’s cob beside him, over hills, through wooded valleys, up onto the moor. They rode in sunshine and darkness, in rain and hail and snow. When the roads were icy they tied sacks around the feet of their horses. Some nights Lottie fell asleep in the saddle and her pony carried her back to Bampton unprompted.

  She trusted that no one knew the smooth-cheeked lad accompanying the vet was in reality a girl, still less that she was Lord Prideaux’s daughter. But Bampton was more than ten miles from the estate, and few people in the town knew aught of it, while those on the farms they visited rarely ventured beyond their own valley.

  They were called to a farm outside the village of S
kilgate. A mare had become vicious. She would not let anyone near to groom or ride her. The farmer thought she was incurable and must be destroyed, but Patrick told him it was likely due to a cystic condition that could be cured. They needed a variety of instruments for use in this case and took the buggy. They laid straw in the yard and cast the mare, and the vet carried out the operation.

  Afterwards, Lottie returned the instruments to the buggy. While Patrick talked with the farmer and his carter, giving instructions for the mare’s convalescence, Lottie looked around. She heard voices coming from a cowshed and peered in. There was a cow, in poor condition, being examined by two men. One told the other that the beast had worm in the tail for sure. Lottie watched in horror as he lifted the tail and drew a razor across its end and squeezed out a thin white tendon. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘That’ll cure it. Rub a load a salt on the cut now.’

  Lottie returned to where the vet and the farmer were still in conversation. ‘Do you know what your man is doing?’ she interrupted. ‘While the surgeon here applies his learning, acquired through the painstaking accumulation of scientific knowledge, a quack back there attacks a poor cow with his knife. It’s barbaric.’

  The farmer flushed, whether from anger or embarrassment it was hard to tell. And if the latter, was it that he’d allowed such quackery or did not know it took place upon his premises? Or perhaps he did not take kindly to being spoken to in such a way by a fresh-faced boy. Before the farmer could say anything, Patrick Jago said he believed the mare was in good hands and with luck would give no more trouble, and they must be on their way.

  As he drove the buggy, Lottie recounted to the vet what she had seen. He shook his head and told her she must not talk to people in that manner.

  ‘But they need to be cured of their stupidity,’ she said.

  ‘They are our clients,’ he said. ‘My customers. I shall lose them if you annoy them. Besides, superstitions do not die out overnight. We must be patient.’ He smiled. ‘Many of the older farm workers round here still carry a potato in their pocket to ward off rheumatism.’