Flora's War

by Audrey Reimann

  He was sound asleep when Ruth came in, white and terrified, shaking him by the shoulder, whispering, ‘Gordon! Elizabeth has gone …’

  He sat up with a start. ‘Gone? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I heard something. I looked. Her bed is empty. I can’t find her. Oh, Gordon, I’m afraid …’

  He shook his head, the better to clear his thoughts and waken his sensibilities, then, ‘She must have gone to the bathroom. Have you–?’

  ‘I have looked everywhere.’

  He got out of bed, found his dressing gown, hastily tied it about himself and went ahead of Ruth to search the house. Elizabeth did not have the confidence to venture outside alone. A cold dread came upon him as they went first to Elizabeth’s bedroom, to check that Ruth was not mistaken, then to every room on the bedroom landing.

  There was no sign of her. They went carefully down the unlit staircase to the drawing room, where the electric light switches were located. They flooded the second floor with light and searched with more fear and urgency. There was nothing to be seen. Down the staircase they went again, this time joined by the officers, whom they had awakened.

  Gordon was sick with apprehension. Elizabeth was not an impulsive person who might, upon a whim, do anything. Foreboding was heavy on him now, contracting the muscles in his stomach, fogging his mind with dread as the search of this last floor proved fruitless. Elizabeth would not have gone down to the servants’ quarters. She had never done so unaccompanied. She would have to have taken the lift and fumbled her way.

  It was when he began logically to try to guess Elizabeth’s movements that he thought again of the lift. He ran back to the bedroom floor, found the outer gate open and lift descended. If Elizabeth had fallen, she could be unconscious, lying on top of the cage at the foot of the shaft. ‘Call the police,’ he cried. ‘Tell them we need a mechanical engineer with an understanding of hydraulics.’

  The chief engineer said, ‘I’ll check the lift shaft.’ And it was he who found the broken body of the love of Gordon’s life. Elizabeth had fallen to her death.

  He didn’t know how he got through those last days. The police at first were not satisfied that the death was accidental. Everyone was questioned: he first, and by his distraught state they were convinced of his devotion to Elizabeth; Nanny Taylor, who had spent a restless night and was adamant that, even from two rooms away, she had heard Elizabeth sobbing; Ruth who had given Elizabeth a sedative so as not to risk one of her fits. Ruth said that Elizabeth was asleep when she left her side for half an hour to do her nightly tour of the stables. Ruth never, ever used the lift. She did not even know how to operate the gates.

  The police had been dogged in their questioning. They asked if Elizabeth had ever threatened to take her own life; Gordon said absolutely not. Ruth recalled occasions when Elizabeth had said she would rather be dead than go on living without all she held dear, but this was not held to be significant. Then they enquired who had prescribed sedative medicine, and when told that it was a common remedy that could be made up and sold by any chemist they asked, ‘What would be the effect of an overdose?’

  They were told that a large overdose would make the patient disorientated. A massive overdose would be fatal but no patient could have swallowed such an amount of the bitter medicine and Elizabeth’s post-mortem showed no trace in her blood of the strychnine agent, which one would expect to find in an overdose. They turned their attention to the lift.

  ‘Were the gates always fastened?’ they asked. ‘Who, other than Lady Campbell and Nanny, used the lift?’ For the first time since the lift was installed, the outer gates on the bedroom floor had been left open. If Elizabeth had stumbled by accident into the shaft then the gates must have been opened by somebody on that floor who then went to the ground floor and called the cage down.

  The only servant who used the lift was the cook, Mrs Stewart, who sent food up to the dining-room floor on a laden trolley. Lady Campbell or Nanny invariably called the lift to take them to the top bedroom floor at night and there it stayed until it was called to the kitchen for breakfast.

  The whole household had undergone two days of police questioning before the procurator fiscal’s office decided that there was no case to make and the matter was closed. As far as the police were concerned, however, the case was unsatisfactory.

  As for Gordon, it had changed his life. And now, here on the ship, he was being reminded of Ingersley by the need to discipline one of her sons. But it would not do to go over it again and again. It was time to stop mourning. Gordon took down the photograph of Elizabeth and put it away. That done, he went to the wardroom on the quarter-deck and called for the stoker mechanic to enter.

  Andrew stood to attention in front of his hero. His head was still light from the whiff of gas the doctor had given him but not so light that he couldn’t grasp everything that was coming to him.

  The captain spoke coldly, without signalling acknowledgement of their past connection. ‘You are charged with common assault. Have you anything to say?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The captain was not asking for an explanation. All Andrew could do was to accept his punishment, which could be as severe as fourteen days on number eleven’s, the cells, or twenty-one days’ detention in the military prison in Valetta.

  ‘You are charged with being drunk and disorderly. You are also charged with causing an affray. Have you anything to say?’

  ‘No, sir.’ So, Pearce had claimed that he, Andrew, had attacked him. Pearce had got him on three charges. Sir Gordon Campbell glanced at the record sheet. ‘I see that you make an allotment of ten shillings a week to your mother.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And your own pay is four shillings and sixpence a day.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You will lose all leave this tour and will forfeit seven days’ pay. I am letting you off lightly since this is your first offence.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Andrew saluted and left the captain’s presence.

  Sir Gordon had let him off lightly. He would not get a single day’s leave until they returned home in three weeks’ time. But when they did – he would get his own back. Pearce would cross the Forth by rail or ferry to spend every drunken night at the Black Bull, the sailors’ bar in Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. Andrew would find him when they were outside the jurisdiction of the Royal Navy.

  Andrew walked up to the South Lodge from the station at North Berwick, his navy bell-bottoms swinging about his ankles, kit bag slung across his shoulder, a fitter, harder lad than had left the estate. Far beyond the wall on his right, Irish reapers were scything wheat. He could hear them, distant and faint, calling to one another in singsong voices. Two years had passed since he’d worked in the fields, and now that he was here, he realised he missed it; missed the raw scent of turned earth in the spring and the summer sounds that were drifting across the fields to him. But he did not miss working as a labourer.

  Before he turned in at the gate he had to move aside to let Ruth Bickerstaffe and Mike Hamilton ride through on their horses. Hamilton ignored him but Ruth stared down her nose directly at him. Then she tossed her head and looked away, pretending she had not seen him. Andrew knew she had; he recognised the startled look in her eyes. He’d seen it before – a long time ago, when he’d stumbled upon her tryst with Hamilton in the dairy. Now he smiled, wondering if they saw him as a threat.

  Ma was in the big house kitchen. She beamed with pleasure at the sight of him, and at the sight of the kitchen maids’ interest in him. ‘Aye,’ she said when he took her arm and escorted her back to the South Lodge, ‘ye’re a son to be proud of. So you are.’ When they were inside the lodge and she’d followed him up to his room to help him unpack she suddenly cried out, ‘My heavens! What’s those great ugly marks on your neck?’

  ‘It was an accident, Ma. In the boiler room. Looks worse than it is. It was my own fault.’ He would not tell Ma that he had been charged by the Commander. He changed the s
ubject. ‘I want to take you out – Portobello funfair, a day on the beach, tea at Crawford’s if you like.’

  ‘I can’t take a day off,’ Ma said. ‘The Commander’s bringing half a dozen officers home next week – and the harvest’s in full swing too.’

  ‘Aye, but they have a tractor now. Haven’t they cut down on workers?’

  ‘There’s still as many men to cook for at reaping time.’

  ‘I see Ruth Bickerstaffe’s still here,’ Andrew said.

  ‘He can’t do without her. She runs the estate. They’d have to close the house and let everything go if she went back home,’ Ma replied. Then, in a hushed whisper, ‘It’s not a happy house. The staff don’t like her – she’s very hard on everyone. Only happy and smiling when she’s on that horse. Rides it every single day, she does – rain or shine.’

  Was he, Andrew, the only person at Ingersley who knew what was going on between Hamilton and Ruth Bickerstaffe? It was possible. She’d been swift and ruthless in getting rid of him once he’d rumbled them. There were five hundred acres to get lost in, and many hiding places. It amused him to think that her nightly trips to the stables had only confirmed in others’ minds Ruth Bickerstaffe’s concern for her horse, but seeing Ma taken in by the woman Andrew knew as a dangerous, scheming bitch, he put his arm about her. ‘Why don’t you pack it in?’

  His lovely little ma smiled. ‘I’ll never leave Ingersley. The Commander will never be a man of the land. Without Ruth Bickerstaffe the place would go to pot. We’d none of us have work.’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s work to be had in town.’ Since Hitler had marched into Austria, the country had been rearming. Andrew said, ‘There’s houses to rent all over the place. The factories have gone over to making munitions. They’re crying out for workers.’

  ‘Factory work’s for the young,’ Ma said. ‘Nobody would leave here.’

  ‘Course they would. These big estates will never get people back into service once they’ve been independent – once they’ve made a go of it without a lord and master controlling everything.’

  ‘Oh! Dinnae talk like that, Andrew. We’ve a good home here. I’ve got fifty pounds in the bank. It’s all thanks to you, son.’

  ‘I’ll look after you, Ma.’ He put an arm about her.’ ‘But I’m going to spend the last week with Greg,’ he said. ‘You won’t mind?’

  ‘I don’t mind. But don’t go into those Edinburgh sailors’ bars …’

  Greg’s noisy family lived above their baker’s shop on Liberton Brae, and his three younger sisters chattered incessantly as they followed Andrew up to the room he would share with Greg.

  ‘What’s that place?’ Andrew asked, looking out from the dormer window over the high wall opposite.

  ‘It’s the industrial school. Girls’ reformatory,’ Greg said, then, turning to his sisters to shoo them away, ‘If you don’t leave us alone you’ll be sent to Guthrie’s.’ The girls went giggling down the stairs and Greg came to stand beside Andrew.

  ‘What do they do to get locked up in there?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Bugger all! They lock up lasses who’ve done no harm to anyone as far as I can tell,’ Greg said. ‘Lasses can’t get away with high spirits. They can’t retaliate when they’re bullied.’

  ‘Not like us, eh?’ Andrew said. ‘Let’s go down the town in our uniforms this afternoon. We stand a better chance of finding girls that way.’

  ‘We’ll be charged if we’re in uniform when we do Pearce,’ Greg said.

  ‘We’ll deal with Pearce tonight.’ Andrew unfastened his shirt, pulled his tunic over his head and felt the scar – the purple gash that went from his left ear and across his throat and would mark him for life. And as he thought about it, his mouth tightened into a determined line. Pearce had it coming to him.

  Chapter Four

  Flora had been working in the laundry for three weeks, banned from sewing for the impertinence of singing, and banned from the kitchen work she enjoyed for cutting the bread too thinly and spreading the margarine too thickly. Today, in the midday summer heat, ten girls stooped over tubs, benches and sinks, but Flora’s attention was not on the hard labour of scrubbing, wringing and rinsing by hand clothes from the never-reducing heaps of dirty linen. Sweat poured down her face as she glanced up through the steamy window of the stone-flagged cellar to the sewing-room balcony where her belongings were stowed. Every day she wondered that nobody else had seen the brown paper parcel, so clearly not a part of the plant pot that hid it. She felt sick inside, seeing them there.

  If her belongings were discovered before she could escape, all would be lost. She’d be charged with theft and sent to prison. There was no hope of going through the window again. The day after she’d stolen her records the dormitory windows had been fitted with iron bars. No explanation was given. She could only guess that someone outside thought they saw something on that night. The rules in the laundry room had been tightened up. They were not allowed to talk, except in answer to Miss McNair, the vicious-tongued laundry mistress, who stalked the room looking for misdemeanours to punish.

  All the same it was noisy. Mangle rollers thudded, iron gearing clanked, girls grunted and sighed in the steamy air, heavy with the vapours from washing soda and bleach, which caught the back of Flora’s throat.

  She straightened up and with her free hand swept the red hair from her damp forehead, where it had escaped from the length of tape that held it back. She rested the scrubbing brush for a moment on a stiff pink corset and looked beyond the wet slatted wooden bench and the dripping tiled walls, through the open window to the fifteen-yard stretch of grass and the sky above the boundary wall. It helped just to look at that wall and the sky when the panic that came from being enclosed, surrounded, came upon her. To take her mind off her fears and the sick feeling of dread she had lived with for three weeks, she began to hum ‘The Skye Boat Song’.

  ‘Flora Macdonald, stop that noise. Get back to your work!’ Miss McNair’s harsh voice barked.

  Flora cast her eyes down and returned to the scrubbing.

  ‘Look at me girl, when I speak to ye.’ The laundry mistress had come to stand between Flora and the window. ‘What did I say?’

  Flora made herself answer quietly and calmly, ‘I’m to work harder.’ Inside, she was churning with protest.

  ‘And faster. Ye’ll be nae use to man nor beast. Ye’ll never find a place.’ Miss McNair’s thin lip curled up in scorn. ‘And who do you think you are, that you can sing as if you haven’t a care? Wouldn’t we all like to sing? Oh, yes! But we have to learn that we cannae please ourselves. Who wants a singing laundry maid? Who’ll take you into service if you show no respect?’

  Flora was almost at breaking point. She threw down the pink corset and the scrubbing brush, and in doing so accidentally knocked the bar of coarse yellow soap to the floor. Miss McNair drew breath sharply. Flora protested, ‘I don’t have to scrub and serve. My gran said I was to refuse …’ Blood rushed to her cheeks. The room fell silent; scrubbing and mangling stopped as the girls waited for Miss McNair to explode.

  ‘Your grandmother’s dead, girl. Time ye took stock of yer situation.’

  ‘My gran wanted better for me.’ Flora spoke in a whisper, but the outbreak of rebellion that had been simmering rose up in her.

  ‘She must have had grand ideas. Was it she gave you your name?’ Miss McNair made the sarcastic smile that never reached her eyes. ‘Flora Macdonald, indeed! And nae bonny prince to save. Ye’ll come to nothing, lass.’ She looked past Flora at the other girls, who laughed to get on the right side of her.

  Hearing their sniggers, Flora turned, fiery, tearful and furious, on them. ‘I’ll show you! I’m better than you lot. You bunch of yellow-bellies. Cowards!’ They had all, all the girls, claimed they hated Guthrie’s and Miss McNair, yet not one had said a word in Flora’s defence.

  ‘Right!’ Miss McNair spat as she snapped the word. ‘I’m no’ havin’ this in my laundry.’ She pointed to the oldest.
‘You’re in charge while I take this wicked girl to the headmaster.’

  A stream of sweat trickled slowly down between Flora’s shoulder blades. She ran a clammy finger inside the harsh linen neck of the grey laundry dress. She braced her shoulders. Adrenaline was pumping into her blood, making her finely muscled body ready for fight – or flight.

  ‘D’you hear?’ The thin, woman’s eyes were steely. ‘I said come with me.’

  She would have to make a break for it. If she were taken to the headmaster the next step would be prison, for certain. Her mouth was dry but she licked her lips before replying in a slow, deliberately surly voice, ‘Why? I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘“Nothing wrang”, is it?’ Miss McNair said, loudly, so all would hear. ‘Then why d’ye imagine they sent you here to have your character reformed? Nobody gets sent to Guthrie’s for “nothing wrang”.’

  ‘I ran away. That’s all,’ Flora said. ‘And so would you have.’

  There were a few seconds of silence while Miss McNair’s thin mouth hardened into a contemptuous line and she indicated with a bony index finger the wet floor. ‘On your knees. Pick up your brush. And the soap,’ she ordered.

  If Flora never disobeyed another order in her life she would not get down on her knees for Miss McNair. This was her last chance. A metallic taste was in her mouth and her legs were shaking but she bent double as if to reach for the soap that had fallen at Miss McNair’s feet. Then, in a flash, she ducked under the bench and came up on the other side, face to face with the furious laundry mistress, who had to back away quickly, saying, ‘What d’you think you’re doing, girl?’

  Where her agility and her nerve came from, Flora would never know. She put her right hand on the windowsill and smacked her left into Miss McNair’s face, sending the woman shrieking and reeling back to land heavily on the slippery wet flagstones. Then Flora was on the sill and squeezing feet first through the sash opening at the top.