‘I understand you’re carrying on an affair with Alex Denham,’ he began, without preamble. He turned to stare out of the window. ‘I don’t know how your mother and I produced a child like you. A daughter who has shamed us, hurt us, who has dragged the Courtenay name through so much muck and filth that it will never be clean again.’
‘Daddy, you’re exaggerating–’
‘Do you deny you’re seeing this man?’ Sir Gerard rounded on her in a fury. ‘I expect you do! But I have no wish to hear the lies and fabrications you’ve no doubt prepared for me today.’
‘I don’t deny I’m seeing Alex,’ Rose said quietly. ‘But–’
‘He’s married, girl!’ Sir Gerard glared. ‘He has a wife, she had his child! He’s a ne’er-do-well, a wastrel, Mrs Sefton says–’
‘Mrs Sefton!’ Rose glared back at him. ‘Since when did Gerard Courtenay listen to the likes of Mrs Sefton? To nonsense churned out by a malicious, ignorant old woman who does nothing useful with her rotten, empty life? Who roams the district spying on her neighbours, then runs back to Charton to spread slander?’
‘What you’re doing is a scandal!’ cried Sir Gerard. ‘You must give up this man.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I’ll disinherit you!’ Sir Gerard’s eyes were bulging. ‘Listen to me, child. I don’t make idle threats. I’ll leave this whole estate to charity–’
‘Do as you think fit.’ Rose turned to go.
‘Come back here, you wicked girl!’
But Rose kept walking, out of the sitting room, out of the Dower House and off down the path, where she met Polly coming home.
Polly’s eyes were cold. ‘What have you done now, miss?’ she began.
‘I beg your pardon, Polly?’
‘It’s not my place to tell my betters how they should behave.’ Polly sniffed and brushed past Rose. ‘But if I was you, Miss Courtenay, if I had your conscience, I wouldn’t sleep at night.’
Chapter Seventeen
She didn’t know how he’d managed to arrange it, but Rose found Alex waiting for her on the starboard deck of the Medusa. Standing side by side, they watched the coast of England fade away.
‘I think we’re both insane,’ said Rose. ‘I should be working in some cottage hospital in Dorset. You ought to be in Whitehall, pushing papers round a desk.’
‘Then I would go mad,’ said Alex. ‘Rose, you’d better go and find your friends. You’ll need your orders, and now the ship is moving you can’t stay on deck with me.’
But Rose leaned against the rail and smiled up at him, delighted to be with Alex and be going back to France. She’d taken off her hat to let the wind rake through her hair. It had been bobbed the week before, and now it framed her face with curls.
‘There’ll be a QA sister here somewhere,’ she told Alex. ‘She’s bound to have my orders. If I don’t turn up, I expect she’ll come and look for me.’
‘I’d hate to be responsible for you,’ said Alex grimly. ‘If I were your commanding officer, you’d be on punishment duty all the time.’
‘You mean if I didn’t bend, you’d break me?’
‘I’ve never broken anyone,’ said Alex, staring out across the foam-flecked waves. ‘As for breaking you – I know I couldn’t do it. I’d pity anyone who had to try.’
‘Miss Courtenay, there you are at last.’ Rose found Sister Marshall sitting in the first class lounge, with half a dozen other Queen Alexandra nurses and some timid-looking volunteers. ‘I understand you’ve been on sick leave. I trust you’re fit again?’
‘Yes thank you, Sister,’ Rose replied demurely.
‘You’re going to a village near Bailleul. The hospital takes casualties from all the clearing stations south of Ypres, so your experience will be very welcome.’ The sister fixed Rose with a hard, blue stare. ‘Miss Courtenay, I’d appreciate it if you’d stay with us, and not go wandering round the decks again.’
So Rose didn’t see Alex until the ship docked at Boulogne, and even then it was only for a moment as she and the other nurses were marched off in single file, like a flock of geese.
He noticed her at last, and nodded briefly. Then he turned away and started talking to a sergeant-major. Instead of lovers, it was as if they were acquaintances or casual friends.
She knew he couldn’t come and say goodbye, but as he was swept away by a vast, undulating tide of khaki, she felt cold fingers grasp her heart. Now he was sure of her and knew how much she loved him, had he become complacent? Maybe she was boring him?
All that year he’d been so restless, badgering the army to let him go back earlier than planned. A couple of short stints as an instructor at a training camp in Yorkshire during January and February had probably kept him sane.
She thought of Chloe, of the other woman’s baffled anger. She knew it could not be easy to be Alex Denham wife.
The hospital in Flanders turned out to be a cluster of long wooden huts and large marquees, surrounded by a township of flapping two-man tents in which the nurses lived.
After getting a lift into Bailleul, Rose had trudged through devastated countryside in which there was hardly any green. No cowslip, primrose or even wood anemone had come up to greet the spring. She couldn’t help comparing this bleak and wasted land with the golden glory that was Charton, where the rain fell sweetly on a million daffodils beneath the leafless trees.
She strode along the lines of canvas, looking for the tent in which she would be shivering for the next few weeks, until the warmer weather came.
She finally tracked it down and went inside. ‘Elsie!’ she exclaimed, staring in astonishment at her friend from Auchonville who was sitting cross-legged on her bed, brushing her hair.
‘Rose Courtenay!’ Elsie dropped her brush. Jumping up, she hugged Rose in delight. ‘I thought you must be dead. We heard you were on that train they bombed.’
‘But they didn’t get me.’ Rose dumped her suitcase on the sagging canvas bed. ‘Elsie, it’s so good to see you! I never thought you’d stick it out.’
‘I didn’t want anyone to say I was a slacker.’ Elsie blushed. ‘I couldn’t have faced my father or my brothers if I’d shirked.’
‘You’re hardly shirking here. We’re only twenty miles from the front line.’
‘Actually, it’s more like ten,’ said Elsie, shuddering. ‘The noise is awful sometimes, and the sky is all lit up at night. They keep telling us we’re going to move. Last week, we were ordered to pack up and get the men away. But then they brought another convoy in, and said we had to stay. So here we sit, and hope we don’t get bombed.’
‘The Germans don’t bomb hospitals,’ said Rose. ‘It’s a well known fact. We can all rest easy in our beds.’
She started to unpack.
In spite of a persistent rumour doing the rounds of pubs in Charton, Lyme and Dorchester, where he’d been feted as a sole survivor, Alex found the original third battalion of the Royal Dorsets hadn’t been wiped out. By the time he reached the salient that made a semi-circle round the ruined town of Ypres, he’d seen a dozen people he knew.
Michael Easton had survived the autumn on the Somme, and as Alex slogged along the last few miles of trenches, he heard a familiar voice.
‘Captain Denham, sir!’ Corporal Brind looked prosperous and happy, even though his uniform was filthy and he was bent double beneath his pack. He was carrying a sandbag that Alex knew would probably be full of things he’d pinched.
‘Just a few comforts for the troops,’ he added, grinning as he stroked the canvas sack. ‘A nice bit of fruit cake, a couple of hundred Woodbines and the Daily Sketch, so that our boys can have–’
The rest of what he said was lost as a dozen shells exploded in the purple sky. A burst of answering artillery made the churned-up mud shake like a jelly, and clods of earth came raining from above.
‘Come on, sir,’ mouthed Brind. ‘It’s always pretty hot down this here alley. Jerry keeps it covered night and day.’
The noise inte
nsified. A hundred yards in front of them a shrapnel shell exploded, and a piece of metal sliced through Alex’s greatcoat sleeve before embedding itself in the trench wall.
‘They get you, sir?’ husked Brind.
‘I don’t think so.’ Alex knew he wouldn’t feel any pain. That would come much later, when he had recovered from the shock of being hit. But he couldn’t feel any ominous trickling dampness either, so he hoped he was unscathed.
He and Brind got home at stand-to-arms. After a day of sleeping, writing letters, cleaning weapons and picking lice out of their dirty clothes, the men would work all night, shoring up the trenches, burying their dead, going on patrol in no-man’s-land and bringing down supplies.
Although the shelling never stopped and men were being killed, everybody seemed in quite good spirits. Alex could see why. They had the bombs and shells to do the job. The ammunition dumps he’d passed as he came down the line had been immense, so huge it was hard to believe that just two years ago the army had been almost out of shells, and many attacks which had been going well had been aborted, because there was no artillery support to see them through.
Things were getting done. There was an end in sight, and men were saying that maybe by this Christmas it would all be over and they’d be going home.
As Alex found his way around the sector, he saw the engineers had tunnelled deep beneath the German lines, sapping forward underneath the enemy emplacements, laying mines and high explosive ready for some giant firework party to be held in summer.
Or so rumour said.
‘The fellow you’ve replaced went mad,’ said Major Whelan, who was Alex’s senior officer and also the battalion commander. ‘He was a drunkard, too. Some chaps can’t function sober, I’ll admit. But Henderson was useless drunk or sober, night or day.’
‘Once he led a whole platoon into a German trench,’ said Harry Langham, who was Major Whelan’s aide. ‘He got them all blown up, then came back singing Tipperary, with not a mark on him. They had to send him to the funny farm. Do you drink much, Captain Denham?’
‘I don’t drink at all,’ said Alex.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ The major frowned. ‘I hope you’re not a Presbyterian? I don’t like holy officers. They aggravate the men.’
‘I’m not holy, sir.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Major Whelan grinned. ‘Who do you know from when you were out last?’
‘Lieutenant Easton, Corporal Brind–’
‘Oh yes, young Easton. He’s never had a single scratch. I don’t know what to make of him. I’d say he was windy. He makes a mess of all his night patrols, hangs back, never volunteers. He sets a bad example to his men.’
‘But he’s a damned fine shot,’ said Harry Langham. ‘He must be the best in the battalion. If you want something hit, Lieutenant Easton is your man.’
Alex soon got used to being back, to being cold, to wearing filthy clothes and getting shot at night and day. He had enough to keep him occupied, for when Major Whelan was away he took command of the battalion. This meant doing endless paperwork, as well as looking after all the men.
He knew he wasn’t fit. Some days he could hardly stay awake. He had a nagging headache that never went away. When he could snatch an hour to himself, he didn’t want to drink vin blanc, play cards or walk around the sector looking nonchalant and setting a good example to the men.
After hours of filling in forms, of writing letters of condolence to the relatives of dead or wounded men, he couldn’t find the energy to write a private letter, even one to Rose. He just lay down and slept.
Sleep became his quest, his holy grail – he longed for it. If he could sleep, even the ominous scrape and scrabble of German sappers mining underneath the British trenches, where they’d be planting high explosive and planning to blow the company to glory, didn’t worry him.
‘You’re due three days leave,’ said Major Whelan, looking at the roster in the dugout. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘I hadn’t really thought about it, sir.’
‘You need some relaxation,’ said the major. ‘Go and find yourself a girl and have a bit of fun. Alex, you’re a conscientious officer, but you’re so damned serious all the time. Eat, drink and be merry with a pretty mademoiselle – that’s my advice to you.’
So Alex wrote to Rose, suggesting they might meet. If he could find a guest house in St Omer, would she come and stay?
‘I can’t get away,’ she told him. ‘We’re extremely busy, wounded men are coming down from the salient all the time. Matron is a stickler for filling in our time sheets, and signing in and out. She notices if anyone misses breakfast, and she wants to know the reason why. So I’m sorry. It’ll have to be some other time.’
He felt as if she’d punched him in the face.
In June, the ridge above Messines was blown. Thousands of startled Germans were taken prisoner, and many thousands more entombed alive. In reserve that week, Alex watched through field-glasses as Allied forces walked through Armageddon, pushing forward to a new front line.
Then everybody went on holiday. Alex had assumed this breakthrough would be followed by a mass attack, that the whole German army would be pushed back to Berlin. But nothing happened.
The men and officers grew restless, muttering they’d wasted the only decent chance they’d ever had to have a bash at Jerry. They went out on patrol and took more German prisoners, they bombed the enemy’s trenches and they cut the enemy’s wire. They drilled and went out skirmishing, but still no order to move forward came.
‘What do those halfwits at headquarters think they’re doing?’ Major Whelan stared through the field periscope trained on the German lines. ‘If those idiots on the Staff don’t get a blasted move on, the summer will be over. It’s jolly wet in Flanders in the autumn, and I don’t fancy trying to take those ridges in the rain.’
But Alex didn’t care what happened in the Ypres salient. He was fretting about Rose. She hardly ever wrote to him, and when she did her letters told him everything and nothing. She talked about her work, her friends, she said she’d been to Hazebrouck and Saint Omer for the afternoon.
She’d finally got some leave, but it seemed she’d spent it in Boulogne, with some girl called Elsie. She never talked about their future, so perhaps they didn’t have one any more?
You take too much for granted, Captain Denham. Oh, don’t be silly. I don’t care about being married. Everything she’d said to him was branded on his brain.
He took his tone from her and answered her infrequent letters briefly and dispassionately. He now decided that the girl who’d kissed him with such fervour on a windswept beach, who had defied her family and friends to be with him, was just a mirage, an illusion.
Reality was the cold, disdainful beauty in the horrible pink gown – the heiress who had snubbed him when he’d asked her if she’d dance. She’d marry Michael Easton and break Alex Denham’s heart.
He had very little to do with Michael, who kept out of his way. But he couldn’t help noticing that when Michael looked at him it was with utter loathing – and there was madness in those pale blue eyes.
July was hot and sunny, leave came round again, and Alex wondered if he might see Rose. She hadn’t written for at least a fortnight, so he told himself she must be busy, and it might be difficult for her to get away.
He thought about it for a week or more. Should he come straight out with it, should he confess and tell her he had to see her or go mad? But in the end he wasn’t brave enough, and went back home to Dorset.
He stayed with Henry, who was glad to see him. He went for long, exhausting walks around the cliffs and headlands, never stopping to admire the glorious panorama rolling out in front of him, never resting on a fragrant cushion of wild thyme, never gazing at the green and gold and blue of summer landscape, sea and sky.
He merely walked, head down, and found exhaustion helped to numb the pain.
In the third week of July, the British g
uns began to fire again, pounding enemy trenches and churning up the ground that Allied troops would have to cross if there should be a battle.
Alex could see it would be difficult to get men, guns and tanks across such horrible terrain. He shrugged and went to check the saps, where his men were mining.
‘At long last.’ Later on that day, Major Whelan came back from brigade headquarters bringing with him maps and battle plans.
‘It’s going to be next week,’ he told his captains as he handed round the maps. ‘A surprise attack, with twelve divisions, huge offensives on all fronts – those ought to get the buggers moving.’
The major grinned, then glanced at Alex. ‘You don’t look very offensive, Mr Denham.’
‘Sir?’ Alex had been thinking about Rose, deciding he would not prolong the agony. If he could find the courage, he’d write to her that evening, to say he would let her go.
‘Your lot’s going over first, with Mr Langham’s chaps.’ Major Whelan glared. ‘Alex, are you listening? Look lively, man! We’ll expect your boys to cut the wire and occupy that farmhouse on the right by ten o’clock. You’ll have to work out how you’re going to do it.’
The week before the great assault, the weather changed and it rained every day. The trenches flooded. Latrines and sump holes overflowed, and men had to wade through stinking sewage as they squelched their way into position, ready for the surprise attack on the last day of a hot July that had turned autumnal and depressing overnight.
Alex’s four lieutenants led their men into the front line trenches. At three o’clock the Allied barrage lifted and the first wave of infantry set off across the swamp.
Alex’s men got over without taking casualties. The four platoons went forward, moving through the shrouding mist and darkness.
When they’d rehearsed it, this manoeuvre had looked quite straightforward, and he was confident they’d reach the farmhouse, where a hundred Germans were supposed to be dug in. They would flush them out and take them prisoner. Or if they resisted shoot them, finishing them off with bayonets.
The driving rain made staying in the rehearsed formation hard. They couldn’t see each other, and Alex was afraid that if the weather didn’t improve they’d lose their way.
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