The Summer Fields

  The rain clatters on the shingled roof, the torrent pouring from the eaves with such force that it throws up a fine mist, blurring the other buildings around the yard.

  Elen gives her account of the recent argument. Her friend considers the information for a few moments, then says, ‘Men are simple creatures. They’re not the same as us.’

  ‘Of course they are. Men love, do they not?’

  ‘Yes, but the things that drive them are not the same. For a woman, kinship is the single most essential thing in life – her lover, her family, her friends, her children. These matter to a man, but other things come first – honour, position, respect. You and I, we know the language of kinship. Men don’t. They’re good at other languages that we sometimes find impossible to understand. You can’t expect a man to say the words that a woman would say.’

  ‘How then can I know his feelings?’

  ‘By his actions.’ Sarah squeezes her arm. ‘I wasn’t there, I didn’t hear what passed between you, but it sounds to me as if he wasn’t being crafty. He was being straightforward and honest.’

  ‘He refused to say he cared nothing for the keepsake.’

  ‘Do you want him to scoff at this Arabella behind her back simply because she has feelings for him? Should he belittle her gift so you can feel better about yourself?’

  ‘No. Of course that’s not what I want,’ she says, although she does not wholly mean it.

  ‘I am glad of it, for a man who’s cruel about his past is likely to remain unchanged in the future.’

  ‘You support his evasions.’

  ‘Are you so certain that’s what they were?’

  ‘I don’t know any more.’ She looks out at the drumming rain. ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I would say sorry.’

  ‘But I did nothing wrong.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t surprise me a jot if he was sat up in that room, watching the rain and thinking just the same.’ She pats Elen’s hand before releasing her arm. ‘Look Elen, this is a minor skirmish to what lies ahead. You told me you were taking each day as it comes, and yet, here you are, fretting about a future that may or may not be.’

  ‘He wants me to stay with him on the Continent when he is well again.’

  Sarah sighs. ‘That would be very foolish. Look at how tonight has pained you. You think he’s the love of your life but you don’t truly know him.’

  ‘I do. I’ve seen him at his lowest. Surely there is no better way to understand another person than to know them at their worst.’

  ‘But your stations have been skewed, first by the pox, and now by his injuries. You’re his carer and protector. By all the laws of nature, these two duties should fall to the man.’

  ‘That’s not true. Twice he has come to my rescue.’

  ‘Which proves my point. Both times, although he was sick, the urge to protect you was too strong to resist. The rest of the time, he has had to surrender his power to you. You’ve taken the position that he, as a man, needs to have. Until he is strong again and you’re both free of these unnatural restraints, you can’t judge how things between you will be.’

  ‘It will be months before he is truly fit and no longer dependent. What am I supposed to do now?’

  ‘There is no point, I suppose, in telling you to go home?’ Elen shakes her head. ‘Then all you can do is make friends again for the time being, but I beg you, be careful. I see powerful troubles ahead.’

  The storm is skirting the hills to the east; the time between the blaze of lightning and the crack of the thunder lengthening as the boiling clouds hurry past. Over the drumming of the rain Elen hears shouting. She listens more carefully. Someone is whooping and cheering in the distance.

  Sarah also hears it and is on her feet in an instant, peering through the mist rising up from the sodden ground.

  ‘Oh, Mr Barker – this will not do,’ she says, but her expression is one of impish amusement. ‘Cover your eyes, Elen. I’m afraid my darling Mr Barker has his own special way of celebrating the arrival of the rain.’

  As the torrent begins to ease a little, Elen can just make out the pale figure of the surgeon gambolling around in the puddles of water on the other side of the yard, his arms stretched up towards the sky. The sight of a forty-year-old man dancing around like a child would have been singular enough in its own right, but Mr Barker is as naked as the day he was born.

  His wife dashes through the rain towards him, her hair streaming out behind her like a pennant. On hearing her approach, he rushes across and sweeps her into his arms, spinning her around. Sarah pummels him playfully on the shoulders until he drops her, then she wraps her shawl around his waist, knotting it fast to cover his modesty.

  ‘You are the most ridiculous clown, Mr Barker,’ she says, panting from her exertion.

  ‘And you are the most wonderful woman, Mrs Barker.’

  Elen leaves them to their celebrations and creeps upstairs to the upper room, expecting to find Mordiford asleep. He is not. The sound of the Barker’s laughter comes up to them through the window.

  ‘How do they manage to be so happy when the world is full of pain?’ he says.

  ‘I have depressed you with my foolishness.’

  ‘Quite the reverse. I am naturally full of the black humour. It is you alone that balances me. You are spring to my autumn, winter to my summer fire, yet still I drag you down.’

  ‘It seems I am quite capable of doing that all by myself.’

  ‘Draw up that stool. Come and sit beside me.’ She does as he asks and he reaches out for her hand. ‘Has the storm passed?’

  ‘It has.’

  ‘I am glad.’

  ‘And I am sorry.’

  ‘No, I will not have it,’ he says. ‘You and I, we have been through much together. Harley’s death was a most singular and violent experience. It will be burned on our memories for the rest of time. Perhaps to divert ourselves, we squabble over a trinket.’ He smiles wearily and looks at the keepsake lying on the table. ‘What would you have me do with it?’

  ‘Keep it,’ she says. ‘It is a pretty thing.’

  Mordiford frowns at her then shakes his head. ‘The mind of a woman is a truly perplexing thing,’ he says.

  ‘Now you truly are baiting me, sir.’

  ‘Indeed I am.’

  Chapter 7

  October 1704

  The storm moved on, and gradually, over the next few weeks, so did the wounded, until the only patient remaining was Captain Mordiford. Each day Elen expects to be told to start loading up the carts for the journey to Nördlingen. Instead she and Sarah take trips in the pony and trap to buy food from the nearby homesteads, loyal to the triumphant allies. Each evening Mr Barker and Dr Argyll reassure one another that tomorrow they will break camp, move on up the line, and throw themselves into their medical work again.

  Captain Mordiford is the focus of their delay. As he grows stronger, she knows that his is not the only wound healing in the enchanted tranquillity of the farm amongst the cornfields. Mr Barker fills his days constructing a complicated splint from wood and leather. ‘Give me another week,’ he tells her, ‘and I think I may be able to get the captain upright.’

  Dr Argyll checks his patient early each morning before leaving Elen in charge for the day and setting off into the countryside with an insect net and a notebook. Lately the captain has been sleeping in the lower rooms of the farmhouse so that he can be easily moved outdoors in the daytime. Elen suspects Sarah’s cautious hand in the arrangements for it means they are seldom alone together, but her friend’s vigilance only increases their understanding. When Sarah settles down after lunch with her bodice loosened, basking like a cat in the sun, Mordiford clasps Elen’s hand or twists a curl of her hair around his fingers.

  ‘See,’ he whispers, his eye on the surgeon’s wife. ‘This lock is a living thing. I tie it in a knot thus and when I release the end, quite unaided, it uncoils itself like a serpent.’

  In company, Elen feels his eyes on he
r. When she catches Mordiford’s glance, the flutter in her stomach is so violent it feels as if she has swallowed a bowl of butterflies. At night she fights sleep for as long as she can, playing her waking dreams in her head. In those dreams the finger that twists the curl of hair, strokes her cheek, slips down to the nape of her neck and beyond.

  She imagines the roughness of Mordiford’s hand running over the smoothness of her skin, knowing that despite her innocence, he could conjure a wantonness from her that would leave her with no shame at all. She longs for time to pass and free Mordiford from the restraints of his injury, but at the same time, she wants these sun-filled days to last forever.

  One evening this merry band is eating supper round a makeshift table set up under an old grapevine, which has spent the latter part of the summer bursting free from a ramshackle frame. They dine on smoked sausage, fresh eggs bought from local villagers and bread baked in the outdoor oven. Wine is in plentiful supply and Elen enjoys the freedom of a few glasses in the evening.

  Mordiford sits opposite her, his leg, now free of maggots and healing well, supported on a bench to the side. She drains her tumbler and Mordiford reaches with difficulty across the table towards the pitcher. She is about to save him the trouble when Sarah places a restraining hand on her wrist below the table.

  ‘What is it?’ Elen says, thinking for a moment that Sarah disapproves of her drinking.

  ‘The wine is always sweeter from a man’s hand, my dear,’ Sarah replies, giving her a good-humoured wink before sliding her gaze over to the captain. Elen watches the wine trickle into her glass, lets her eyes travel up to his hand on the neck of the pitcher. How dark that hand would look lain on the white skin of her stomach, her thigh, her… She inhales quickly and smells the perfume from the waxy flowers on a tree nearby. Mordiford sits back, keeping his eyes down, until the other three are chattering loudly over one another, then he looks across at her.

  He has never been more handsome. The food and rest has filled out his cheeks and smoothed away the frown of pain that used to crease his brow. The pits on his face have faded as his skin has browned, which in turn has made the blue of his eyes glow all the more vividly.

  ‘We have been leaving you outdoors to toast for too long I think, captain,’ Sarah says, jerking Elen away from her thoughts. ‘You have gone as brown as a peasant.’

  ‘And you have gone as red as a tomato,’ he says.

  ‘But a tomato does not have such gorgeous freckles across its nose,’ Mr Barker says, kissing the article in question.

  ‘Red hair may mean red skin all summer long,’ Sarah says, ‘but in the winter I have a face so pale I could pass as a countess.’

  ‘I find it hard to imagine that,’ Mordiford says with the shadow of a wink at Elen.

  ‘And I find it impossible to imagine you as an earl, which one day you shall be. What sort of earl will you make, do you think?’

  Elen stares down at her plate. She doesn’t want to imagine what sort of earl he would make. She wonders if this is part of Sarah’s plan, to remind her of the hopelessness of her affections. Mordiford picks up a piece of bread and tugs it apart. He replies, ‘Nothing like my father.’

  Elen feels a sense of relief. He also wants to stop the conversation dead, but Sarah, her face flushed with sun and wine, gives no quarter. ‘Come now, that is no reply. What a capital sight it would be to see you spruced up like the Duke of Marlborough, all wig and perfect manners.’

  Elen does not see the Duke of Marlborough – she sees the Earl of Duntisbourne in his finery, the tang of corruption on his breath, tobacco on his hands, the sickly scent of rose water coming from his clothes.

  ‘I care nothing for life at Court,’ Mordiford says bitterly. ‘It is a hellish place of gossip and manipulation and there is none so fiendish as your namesake, Sarah Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough’s wife herself, when it comes to that.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Sarah says with a flash of her eyes to encourage him to tell more.

  The captain will not be led. Instead he says, ‘I can assure you when my father decides to do me the great service of finally meeting his maker, I have no intention of taking up where he left off.’

  Elen gives Sarah a warning look but she returns it with a cussed stare. ‘You cannot throw your responsibility so carelessly aside,’ Sarah says. ‘There is no choice for a man such as you.’

  ‘There is always a choice. My grandfather ran the estates in a very different way. He loved Duntisbourne as a great piece of real Wales where people toiled and cared for the land, not as some pleasure palace for the wicked to indulge their sinful practices away from the prying eyes of Court. My grandfather never entertained and he never curried favour. He took care of the land so that he could pass it on replenished. The tragedy is that he passed it on to my father.’

  Elen thinks, I could easily fit in to such a life. If Sarah is pushing the conversation to warn me, she has done the exact opposite.

  ‘Ah,’ Sarah says to the table in general, ‘the captain means to live as a gentleman farmer with all the charm of a recluse.’

  ‘It is not such a poor notion,’ he says. ‘But enough of this. I am a soldier now. By the time Marlborough has brought France to her knees, I may never have to return to England.’

  ‘What can you mean?’ Elen says, frowning at him.

  ‘As you well know, it is the custom for senior officers to lead their men forward from the front,’ he says, avoiding her eye and addressing the others. ‘Our exposed position claims a far higher proportion of death and injury than among the regular soldier.’

  ‘You are not wrong,’ Mr Barker says. ‘Losses among the officers at Schellenberg alone were devastating, and that was merely a skirmish. Forty high-ranking officers lost their lives that day.’

  ‘You can be sure the higher I climb, the more likely it is that I may never have to face the prospect of becoming earl.’ Elen stares across at him, willing him to return her gaze, but he does not.

  ‘Heavens above,’ Sarah says, ‘does the thought of becoming earl appal you so much that you’d rather die on a field of battle than return to your estates?’

  ‘The countryside around here is very different from the Welsh marches,’ Elen says desperately to turn the conversation. ‘Where I grew up, it was all small valleys and compact little hills, whereas here they have these vast, open plains and big skies. You have travelled to many exciting places, Dr Argyll, have you not? What would you say was the most impressive country you have seen?’

  ‘That is a most difficult question to answer,’ Dr Argyll says. ‘I have always been a great lover of Europe, but often it is the very strangeness of a place that impresses. I suppose if I have to make a choice it would be Dekhan in India. That place impressed and horrified me in equal measure.’

  ‘India?’ Mr Barker says. ‘That is a far-flung spot.’

  As the conversation meanders off down this different route, Elen looks back at Mordiford, still playing with his bread, his mood morose. Slowly he raises his eyes. With a swift glance to his side to ensure that the attention of the others is no longer on him, he mouths a faint ‘thank you’, then closes his eyes in a lazy blink of bliss as a smile of secret understanding spreads across his lips.

  Chapter 8

  As dusk creeps in earlier each evening, Elen knows this paradise is nearing an end. The others seem to feel it too – Mr Barker announces the splint is ready and Dr Argyll loses interest in the insects out in the meadow.

  Elen is woken one morning by the sound of a cart. A local driver waits in the yard with a high-sided wagon pulled by two oxen. He has been sent to transport them to Nördlingen as soon as possible. He hands her a message for the surgeon. The order is more in the form of a request, but Mr Barker and the doctor are in agreement that their brief furlough has reached an end. As Elen helps to load the wagon, she notices that the swallows are massing, preening and chattering, also readying themselves to leave, and she feels a terrible melancholy.

&nbs
p; Although the bulk of their equipment left weeks ago with the army and convalescing soldiers, by the time the ox cart has been loaded, there is no space for the captain to sit now that his leg is immobilised in Mr Barker’s excellent splint.

  ‘Let me travel in the malbruch,’ the captain says, pointing at the two-wheeled trap, which has been left behind by the army. ‘The pony is quite docile enough for Miss Griffiths to handle and we shall follow directly behind.’

  Sarah is about to raise an objection, but Mr Barker and the doctor say this a capital solution. ‘If we set off within the hour,’ Dr Argyll says, ‘we should cover the distance to Nördlingen easily before nightfall – but keep us well within view, Miss Griffiths. The route is straightforward, but I would hate you to get lost.’

  ‘I would love you to get lost,’ Mordiford murmurs as Elen settles the last few bags around him on the platform of the malbruch.

  ‘Hush! The others will hear and you shall end up with Mr Barker as your driver.’

  ‘It is an excellent notion though, is it not? Once we are in Nördlingen, there will be precious little opportunity for us to be alone. Make sure you have stowed bread and wine. Let us at least mark the end of this oasis of happiness with a picnic supper before we arrive at the city walls.’

  ‘They will not leave me unchaperoned.’

  ‘We have our chaperone…’ and Mordiford taps the wood of his splint. ‘Even the suspicious Sarah cannot imagine I could wreak much havoc encased in this. I am as safe as a hobbled horse.’

  Elen hesitates, glancing over her shoulder, but Mordiford continues, ‘I warrant I am not much of a companion. Indeed, throughout our whole acquaintance you have hardly known me stood on two legs.’ She smiles despite herself. He grasps her hand and says urgently, ‘Please, I beg you. Will you not agree to spend one evening alone in the company of this melancholic soldier with a plooked face and crooked leg?’