by Peter Albano
Guessing the reason for the visit, Randolph came erect. “Out with it, man. Speak up!” He downed the remainder of the Johnnie Walker. Sergeant Major York refilled the glass.
Freeman spit it out. “Lieutenant Geoffry Higgins was killed in action on thirty-one May in battle cruiser Lion off Denmark. He died heroically. . .”
“Don’t give me that tripe, Captain,” Randolph said. “He’s still ‘gone west.’”
“’Gone west’?”
“Bought the farm,” Reed explained.
“Oh,” the staff officer said. And then quickly, “The general has granted you a seven-day leave beginning immediately.”
Randolph stared at the glass, spoke to it. “Give my thanks to General Blair. However, I have two new flight lieutenants—Armstrong and Cartwright. They need a lot of training or they’ll be two new dead pilots within a fortnight.”
Reed nodded knowingly. “Major Higgins,” he said. “Lieutenant Southby and I can take them in hand.”
Randolph drank, shaking his head. “A week, David. I’ll remain a week.”
“But, sir,” Freeman began. “The general. . .”
Randolph silenced the staff officer with a wave. “My brother will still be dead seven days from now.” He came to his feet slowly, unseeing eyes like highly polished topaz staring through the captain. “Sorry, Major,” he heard first from Reed, then York, and finally Longacre. Choking back the crushing sense of loss that only a brother can feel for the death of a brother, Randolph stood and turned, desperate for the solitude of his room. Walking toward the door he stopped, picked up the bottle of Johnnie Walker, and left the room.
IV
Fenwyck was sylvan tranquillity when Major Randolph Higgins returned. Standing before the great door, his eyes feasted on walks bordered with roses, violets, primroses, and bluebells. Cutting the lawn into rigid geometric patterns, a low maze of hedge crossed and recrossed the great green expanse that rolled like a peaceful emerald sea to stands of oak, beech, and elm to the distant north while nearby cherry and apple orchards bordered the lawn to the south and west. Stately and subdued and waving gently in the breeze, treetops in the forest were gilded by the afternoon sun with glimmers of silver and gold, contrasting with the rioting colors of blossoms in the fruit orchards and the colorful flowers bordering the walks. All was immutable, in harmony, and mocked the horror of the Western Front. Like all men fresh from the killing, Randolph felt a mélange of envy and resentment clutch at his guts.
Before the major could raise the heavy knocker, the door was opened by a liveried Dorset. “Welcome home, sir,” the butler said, taking Randolph’s bag.
“Thank you, Dorset,” Randolph said, shaking the servant’s hand. As he stepped into the entry, his mother and father burst from the study. Crying his name and sobbing, Rebecca clutched him, kissing his neck, his cheek, his lips.
Randolph held her close, whispering gently, “I love you, Mother.”
“At last—my son, my son. You’re home,” she sobbed back.
He felt his father pounding his back and grasping his hand and shouting, “Welcome home, son.”
Then a procession of servants trooped past, Pascal the chef, Caldwell the chauffeur, Sanders the grounds keeper, and finally a flushed Nicole, who curtsied and smiled, her warm black eyes glowing like chips of black diamonds reflecting sunlight. Randolph smiled thanks back at their choruses of “Welcome home, sir.”
Pulling at his tunic, Rebecca led her son to the drawing room. Quickly, she pulled him down on the black and gold Regency sofa, grasping his big hand in both of hers. Walter moved to a breakfront. “Whiskey?” he said, reaching for a bottle.
“Johnnie Walker, please.”
Walter handed Randolph a glass of the amber liquid and then stood in front of the great pedestal clock, nursing a snifter of cognac filled far beyond polite levels. He looked very old, the veins of his face glaring red through cheeks rouged by too much alcohol. His stomach hung down over his belt and the overtaxed buttons of his shirt strained in their holes, pulling and wrinkling the broadcloth. Once-alert eyes were watery and dim as if he were only partially awake.
Rebecca’s appearance shocked Randolph. It seemed she had aged ten years in a few months. Her skin had shrunk and faded to translucence, cheekbones protruding above deep hollows. New lines of terrible suffering sagged downward from the corners of her eyes and mouth and her eyes were fearful and filled with pain like an animal caught in a cruel steel trap, unable to free itself and tortured by its own struggles. “Geoffry’s dead,” she said as if she were trying to convince herself of the horrible truth.
“I know, Mother. And Brenda?”
Walter drank deeply and said, “She’s upstairs—in her room.” He drank again. “She had a high fever and lost the baby last night. The fever killed it.”
Rebecca turned her head to Randolph’s shoulder. He sipped his Scotch and then held his mother’s head. He could feel her shaking. She pulled away, turned her tear-streaked face to him. “This damned war,” she gasped. “It killed Geoffry—kills everything. Even my unborn grandchild.”
“Rot, Becky,” Walter spat. “We must all serve. I’m too old for this one, but in ‘eighty-three at Khartoum. . .”
“Please, Walter,” Rebecca interrupted with a harsh timbre in her voice Randolph had never heard before. “We haven’t heard from Lloyd in a fortnight. . .”
“I know,” Walter said impatiently. “There’s a lot happening on the Somme.”
“True, Mother,” Randolph said. “It’s only natural mail would be slow.” Randolph felt his mother shudder.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. I know there’s a lot happening. It took you a week to come home.” And then turning away with her hand over her mouth, she said, “I’ve seen the casualty lists.”
Silence filled the room, interrupted only by the precise ticking of the Berthoud movement of the antique clock. Walter broke it. “Geoffry was mentioned in dispatches. May be up for a DSO.”
Randolph emptied his glass. His mother was crying again. The observer—the young pilot came back. The gore. The smell. They had mothers, ran through his mind. “I would like to see Brenda,” he said simply.
The pain had been horrible; wrenching and spasmodic and then the life was gone. She had lost her baby. Doctor Mansfield had been there. Examining her again. “Lucky it was small, only nine weeks,” she had heard him mutter to the nurse, Hilda Breckenridge. While the nurse took notes, his examination had been swift and businesslike. “Bleeding normal, temperature down to one hundred two, pulse and respiratory rates slightly elevated, skin moist.” She felt fingers pushing behind her ears. “Mastoids normal.” The fingers moved to her neck. Then a quick command, “Otoscope.”
“Yes, doctor.”
A hand turned her head and a tiny light pierced the gloom, finding her ear. “Slight inflammation has developed. Possible otitis.” The hand turned her head. She felt a stick in her mouth, gagged, and tried to turn away. Firm hands turned her back and again the light. “Slight exudate on the pharynx and tonsils.” The stick was removed, the light went out, and the doctor continued. “Watch for bloody sputum and chest pains. If she starts a lesion, the pain can give us its approximate site.”
Brenda heard Rebecca’s voice from the gloom in the corner of the room. “Does she have pneumonia?”
“Her lungs are not engorged or solidified,” Mansfield said. “But the flu can very easily turn into lobar pneumonia and we’ve been guarding against this. She has developed some suspicious symptoms since my last examination and we will treat them.”
“Will you bleed her?”
“No, Rebecca. I don’t believe in venesection and, anyway, she has lost blood. We’ll continue with creosote carbonate and caffeine sodium benzoate.” He rummaged in his bag. “Here, Hilda, we’ll start her on Dover’s powder.”
“Those drugs—you never told me
?” Rebecca asked, a tremor in her voice.
The doctor’s voice was edged with impatience. “Dover’s powder is always used in cases of pneumonia or suspected pneumonia. It’s a bracer—will strengthen her. Creosote carbonate helps the body fight leukopenia—loss of white blood cells—and caffeine sodium benzoate is a stimulant.” Rebecca remained silent while the doctor turned to the nurse. “Give her the Dover’s three times daily after meals.”
“Yes, sir. Diet?”
“Continue with the diet I prescribed on my first visit—whites of eggs, plenty of milk with extra cream and sugar, gruel, eggnogs. . .”
“Continue the morphia?”
“Yes. But only in case of extreme pain. No more than one-sixth grain every six hours. I’ll leave you enough for three days.”
“Yes, sir. I almost ran out.”
“Call me if she bleeds excessively or has severe abdominal or chest pains. And also”—he thumped his knuckles on his bag—”call me if her temperature reaches one hundred four or her respiration rate exceeds thirty-two per minute.” His voice was tired and strained.
“Yes, doctor.”
The case snapped shut and Brenda heard the doctor move to the door. He spoke to Rebecca. “She’s not dying, Rebecca. We’re giving her the latest treatment and the most modern drugs. She’s a strong young woman and if she’ll take her sustenance and gets plenty of bed rest, she should make a nice recovery.”
There was a rustle of taffeta and Brenda sensed a new presence in the room. She heard Nicole’s voice. “And we will pray, Monsieur Docteur.”
“I don’t care if you dance around her bed with a bone through your nose and a potato in each hand.” Rebecca gasped. Hilda tittered. “Just follow my instructions.” He left.
Day and night blended into a pervasive twilight where the big, blond nurse who had been there for days and days either sat at her side or drifted about the room like a wraith. It had been an eternity. The heat. The aching. The damp sheets. The doctor’s visits. The examinations. The pills. The needles. The dim light either from the filtered sunlight or the small lamp that burned all night while Hilda dozed in a chair. Rebecca, a praying Nicole, Walter, and her sons Rodney and Nathan appeared and faded; two-and-a-half-year-old Rodney wide-eyed and uncomprehending, standing on his toes and grasping his mother’s hand while the governess, Bridie O’Conner, cuddled eleven-month-old Nathan. For them she must live, take the medication, force herself to eat. But her stomach refused food. At first, she even threw up water.
Finally, Randolph appeared with Rebecca and Walter. Loss of weight made her brother-in-law look taller, his tailored uniform creased in places where muscles had once bulged against the cloth. And there were new lines on his face, too, incipient creases of pain and cruelty that came to life when a shaft of sunlight struck his face, forcing him to squint. His once dreamy eyes had a hard glint as if he were finding it difficult to appear at ease. His big rough hands enveloped hers and she felt his lips against her forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “We both loved him.”
She looked up into the hard eyes rimmed with fatigue, whites veined red; eyes that had seen too much, suffered too much. They were fogged, inscrutable, beyond sorrow; perhaps, beyond feeling. “How many have you killed?” she asked in a low voice that stung like dry ice.
She heard her mother-in-law gasp. “Brenda, Randolph came home from the front to see you.”
“See here,” Walter flustered.
“It’s all right,” Randolph said, staring down, wiping his face with an open hand as if weariness was a mask he could pull off and discard. And then with the deep airy voice of a man who had seen the garden of hell, he said, “She understands—she knows.”
Silence oozed through the room like heavy oil and Brenda could hear her breath laboring through the congestion in her chest. She captured his eyes with hers, blue pinpoints fixing and holding him like twin gun sights. Wordlessly, he broke away and left the room.
By the second day of Randolph’s leave, Brenda had recovered enough to eat full meals and sit by her window. By the fourth day, she walked in the garden with Bridie and Nicole and laughed like a little girl, watching Rodney chase butterflies through the flowers and tumble on the lawn like a blithe spirit while Nathan crawled or tried his first uncertain steps. Even Rebecca brightened and Walter smiled over his cognac. But Randolph was restless. Especially after his daily calls to Colonel Courtney Covington at Whitehall. Oswald Boelcke and his Jasta 2 had appeared over the Somme and were on a rampage. Flying the new Albatross D-1—a sturdy machine with two synchronized Spandaus firing through the propeller—the Jagdstaffel had shot down eight B.E. bombers and six F.E.2b Bristol scout planes in four days.
Nicole’s animation and barely suppressed excitement made Brenda smile inwardly. Whenever Randolph appeared in Brenda’s room or joined the women in the garden, the French maid devoured him with her eyes and warm blood colored her cheeks. One afternoon, dusting paintings in the “Dutchman’s Hall”—a small alcove off the hall at the head of the cedar Chippendale grand staircase hung with two Van der Weydens, three Van Dycks, a pair of Rembrandts, and a single vivid impressionistic painting by the madman, Van Gogh—Nicole, duster poised, stopped Randolph with a husky “Bonjour, Monsieur Higgins.”
In the full bloom of her beauty, she appeared more beautiful than ever. True to her genesis in Monoesque—a small town near Toulon in the Cote d’Azur—she had huge dark eyes under thick brows set in a lovely face molded to the line of her ancestry. Black hair like silk pulled back severely in a chignon accented her high cheekbones and skin tinted by her Latin blood the color of old ivory. In the dim light, her nose appeared straight and her nostrils delicately chiseled, her mouth curved uncertainly with a slight sensual pout to the lower lip. Her breasts were large and pointed, a tight white apron nipping her black taffeta dress in at the waist, flaring to fully formed womanly hips and buttocks that flowed sinuously when she walked.
Randolph eyed her from head to toe with cold, calculating eyes. “Good afternoon, Nicole,” he said simply. He made as if to pass her. A small white hand restrained him.
“Have you forgotten where my room is, monsieur?”
His gaze collided with hers like ice dropped into hot tea. “No, Nicole. I’ve had other things on my mind.”
“Le galant homme no longer likes Nicole,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice, eyes suddenly liquid.
“No, no,” he hastened. “It isn’t that, Nicole.”
“Then what, monsieur?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said huskily, tearing himself away and turning to the door of Brenda’s room.
On the fifth night of Randolph’s leave Brenda was awakened by the buzzing of a huge fly, the rumble of thunder and flash of lightning. Pulling on a robe, she stood at the French windows and stared toward the coast in the direction of Faversham and Chilham. The buzz was engines in the sky, the thunder was antiaircraft guns, and the flashes exploding shells and searchlights reflected by the clouds. She heard hurried footsteps in the hall and Nicole’s excited shout. “Zeppelins! Zeppelins, madame! The master says you are to come downstairs.”
“Nathan? Rodney?”
“Bridie is taking them downstairs now, madame.”
Hurriedly, Brenda descended the dimly lighted grand staircase to the entry where Walter, Rebecca, Randolph, Dorset, Hilda, Bridie and the boys, and most of the servants were gathered. “Everyone to the wine cellar!” Walter shouted.
“Nonsense, Father,” Randolph said, halting the entire group in mid-stride. “They’re over Faversham, Father. Almost ten miles away. I don’t think the kaiser is out to bomb Fenwyck.” And then with a festive ring Brenda had not heard for years, he said, “Let’s go outside and watch the show.”
Walter tapped a silk slipper on the marble of the entry. “All right—women and children to the wine cellar.”
Nicole and mo
st of the female house servants turned to the cellar with Bridie and the boys in the lead, but Brenda followed Walter, Randolph, and Rebecca out onto the great Tudor porch fronting the house. Silently, the foursome stood at the corner of the stone surface and stared to the north and west. High in the sky a cigarlike shape was illuminated by searchlights, bright, probing fingers that converged on the great airship like phosphorescent sticks. All around the Zeppelin the bright flashes of archie winked like tiny stars with the lifespan of a millisecond.
“Faversham—why Faversham?” Walter asked himself. “They usually bomb London.”
“The wind, Father.”
“There isn’t any wind, Randolph.”
“There is up there, Father. They’ve been blown to the south and east of London by the Arctic gale and they’re emptying their bomb bays before they reach the Channel. Dover may catch it, too.”
“How high?”
Randolph remained silent for a moment. “Fifteen—twenty thousand feet.”
“It must be cold.”
“Freezing. Those Germans are brave men.”
“They’re vermin, Randolph, and our guns will exterminate them.”
Randolph chuckled humorlessly. “Look at those bursts. Thirteen-pounders and three-inch. They don’t have the range. Most are below it and the others are wild.”
“Then why bother with the guns?” Walter snapped.
“It’s good for civilian morale.”
“But some Zeppelins have been destroyed. Sublieutenant Warneford got the VC for blowing one up with bombs over Belgium.”
“True, Father. But it’s hard to get above one and drop the bombs accurately enough. He was lucky. The latest thing is incendiaries. By now, most of our interceptor pursuit planes should be equipped with them.”
“Ignite the hydrogen?”
“Of course, Father.”
Rebecca spoke for the first time. “And they burn to death.”