by Abigail Agar
Bestowed by her words with the power to shape continents, the boy, whose name Vera suddenly realised she had forgotten, seemed to sit up a little straighter.
It felt almost like one of her father’s experiments; she had tried a new track and got a better result. She felt a little more confidence, glad she had not upset the young man.
‘Well, of course,’ he said, attempting to put an authoritative tone in his voice. ‘Nerves are part of the soldier’s life. It’s dangerous work after all, but compared to the thrill of the adventure of it, the joy of doing my duty – why, I feel lucky to be sent!’
He looked so much like a schoolboy pleased to have been picked to play cricket for his school, that Vera was forced to lift the over delicate china teacup to her lip and hide her smile behind the hand-painted china.
He is sweet, so keen. She wondered if her own uncertainties showed as clearly on her face.
The tea was a late picking and tasted bitter, even with the rich creamy milk which had come fresh that morning from the Ladislaw’s herd. Vera was making a mental note to tell Mishka to spend a little extra on a decent blend when a new game occurred to her.
What fun that might be, she thought.
Waiting for the boy’s eulogy of the military life to come to a close, she took a small breath to steady her nerves and asked: ‘Are you very good at shooting a musket?’
‘Of course, the British army trains with live ammunition. No one shoots straighter or faster than a Red Coat.’ He may have actually winked at this point.
Vera was unable to precisely tell, although she found the ease with which his ego could be aroused or stimulated, rather disconcerting. It was an aspect of his nature that she was struggling to understand.
‘Perhaps, you could teach me to shoot after this tea if you are not to be called away to the frontline before dinner time.’
‘To shoot? That hardly seems something for a woman in your place–’
‘Quite right!’ called a voice from the large armchair by the fire. Its back was turned to give them privacy while Maman pulled her needle through some appalling dull embroidery of a rural scene.
Rightly concerned that the two young people be the subject of scandal, much had been made of ensuring Maman’s presence during their meeting. On the other hand, the need to give the potential lovers some privacy had also been considered.
After all, two strangers coming to understand one another was a delicate process. So Maman had also made much of having the high backed armchair turned away from them so that she and her embroidery were wholly hidden from the scene, without risking any chance of scandal and, Vera suspected, to allow Maman to contribute as needed to the conversation.’
‘Nonsense, Maman. Father said he would teach me to shoot in time to go grousing with him. And to help him keep the crows away from the chicken coop. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt to have a military man’s opinion on my use of deadly ordinance.’
‘Your father is a fool. He treats you like a son sometimes, Vera. Can you imagine what Grandmamma would say to see the fruit of her loins learning to kill animals? Why she’d call you a poacher and fling you from the bosom. A daughter of mine, learning to hunt grouse before she has gotten to grips with the pianoforte or the French language. Never!’
‘My French is plus bon, ma mere.’ Vera laughed, turning to the young man, whose name she had forgotten. ‘Come now, Lieutenant. If you agree to teach me to shoot, as our guest, it will be unconscionably rude of Maman to reprimand you.’
‘Young man,’ began her mother in a voice that made the poor boy suddenly cower as if caught stealing by his own parent. ‘You will not–’
‘Of course, he will.’ Papa leaned out from a similar armchair on the far side of the room where he had been passing his time as a chaperone by napping over the financial pages. ‘He will save me the trouble, and should young Vera do something foolish, it shall be him at the wrong end of her blunderbuss and not I. I thank you, young man, for taking the education of my daughter into your eminent hands. I will, of course, join you in the garden to ensure that you are shooting only at the crows and not at my prize beef in the field next door.’
The drawing room in which they were sat opened into the garden through two large doors in the French style. It was a glorious English summer day, and the warm sun was perfectly countered by a soft breeze which drew the earthy smell of the cattle off the fields. Vera considered it highly romantic.
With some pride, Papa fetched his hunting musket, a beautiful German forged weapon nearly thirty-years old but meticulously kept. It had a fresh flint on it, and the wood was polished to a high sheen. The bronze casting on the butt showed two rabbits being chased by a lolloping hound, and it shone in the sun as Vera took hold of it.
Pulling a terribly serious face, Vera stood with the gun to her shoulder doing her best to look like the troops she’d seen marching through town. She laughed a little, and then caught the lieutenant’s eye.
‘You mustn’t mock my profession; you will upset me.’
He said it with a smile, but Vera could sense some genuine hurt in the cast of his gaze. Taking pity, she replied, ‘It will only be a mockery if I do not get it right. Show me.’
Smiling a little at her and with a tentative touch that betrayed his shyness, he took the musket and pushed it against her shoulders. ‘This is “attention”,’ he said. ‘When the command is to load, you move it like this.’ He guided the musket so the butt rested on her hip.
‘Then you prime the lock. He pinched off the paper hunting cartridge and let a little powder into the lock. Vera watched his hands moving dexterously, he seemed more confident in these little drill-square movements than he had seemed all afternoon at the tea table.
With a look of relaxed concentration on his face, she could appreciate the fine lineaments of his features.
As he showed her how to pour the powder, followed by the wadding, she found that she was getting a different kind of nervous, a gentle fluttering in her stomach.
‘The final step,’ he said, ‘is to slide in the ball and to add these four or five smaller buck shots, then we tamp it all down with the ramrod.’
Then he had her lift the musket to her shoulder, placing one hand on each of her shoulders and adjusting her stance. His hands were hot through the cloth of her dress, and she thrilled a little when he gently set them on her waist to straighten out her hips.
She felt the blush return to her cheeks and concentrated very hard on aiming.
Over the barrel of the musket, she could see the great oak they had chosen as a target. The gun was heavy on her forward hand and pressed uncomfortably into the shoulder of her dress. Under its weight, she could feel her hands shaking with the effort of keeping the cast iron barrel pointed at the tree.
The light glinted off the polished pan making the oak seem an impossibly small target, where a moment ago it had seemed childishly easy to hit and really very close indeed.
‘It will be loud,’ the lieutenant warned.
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Papa. ‘I am deaf in this ear.’
Vera’s arms strained as she closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.
In the darkness, there was a blood red flash which cast the thread-like pattern of her veins as shadows on the screen of her closed eyelids. There was a deafening bang that echoed immediately off the house behind her and again a split-second later from the hillside.
Then, from down the bottom of the garden, came an appalling scream of: ‘Murder!’
Vera opened her eyes in confusion and was immediately aware that she had missed the tree. The dark oaken bark was unscathed by her shot.
Instead, a brass fountain of Cupid further down the garden appeared to have taken most of the lead. The childish face of the statue had been almost entirely removed by the musket ball, and his chest and bow had been peppered with the buckshot.
It was just as well that Cupid had been placed where he had because beyond his shattered visage, Mrs Miniver – who it wou
ld appear had chosen that moment to visit the Ladislaw residence – had lost a good deal of the currant cake she was carrying to a stray round of buck.
Looking at the state of the small bronze statue, Vera dreaded to think what might have happened if he had not taken the bullets which she had accidentally fired right at Mrs Miniver.
And yet with the accident shown to have hurt no one, and only a few crumbs of cake to cry over, the sudden terror that had filled Vera’s consciousness receded, and in sheer relief, she began to laugh.
Mrs Miniver’s frightened face looked on in horror at what Vera was increasingly aware must appear a form of hysteria, but somehow this made her laugh harder.
Quite unable to help herself, Vera almost dropped the musket, which the lieutenant had to wrestle from her grasp to keep her from damaging it against a pot plant.
‘Could have killed me; the girl’s gone mad,’ spluttered Mrs Miniver. ‘Quite mad. Could have killed me. She’s quite mad–’ and so on, repeating her two key points to Mr Ladislaw who bowed over her and attempted to get her to drink some of the brandy which he, by order of Doctor Severn, had begun to drink throughout the day as a panacea for his nerves.
Perhaps she’s right, thought Vera who was quite unable to stop and explain herself apart from gasping out ‘I am so sorry,’ between the shuddering laughter which pressed out painfully against her corsets.
Mrs Miniver looked at her through a pair of thoroughly disordered spectacles, the old woman’s grey hair was pulling free of its pins and several long vines of grey were wafting around her face. She looked terribly old and frail, and suddenly Vera’s laughter stopped.
‘Quite mad,’ said the stunned Mrs Miniver.
‘You are absolutely right,’ said Vera, still catching her breath. ‘I am so awfully sorry. I was aiming for the tree, but I am so terribly clumsy. I put you in the most terrible danger.’
She felt tears welling up in her own eyes to match Mrs Miniver’s.
Now it was Mrs Miniver’s turn to look guilty, reflecting Vera’s own feeling back at her. Vera felt much better that they were perhaps growing a little closer over her foolishness.
‘You are quite right, Mrs Miniver. I must have been quite out of my mind to want to learn to do something so beastly as shooting, for the only people who shoot are those looking to kill someone or something. And murder, said Moses, is a crime.’
Vera was a little surprised by how quickly her feelings on this matter had changed, and she began to wonder if in fact her desire to shoot was another of her father’s ideas that she was parroting.
She scowled at the lieutenant whose face flushed red at first in embarrassment, then in anger.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Vera held up her hand and said, ‘No. That is quite enough. From now on, I will be a pacifist, supporting the total disarmament of all nations and a return to the vegetarian diet of Eden.’
I sound ridiculous, thought Vera, but her mouth seemed to be operating on its own as if the fear of having killed someone had cut it off from her.
Mrs Miniver was beginning to look worried. She looked up at Mr Ladislaw whose garden chair she had been carefully guided to sit in, and asked, ‘Is she quite alright?’
‘Oh, you know Vera,’ he said, his voice far more relaxed than his furrowed brow. ‘She is as alright as any of the women in the Ladislaw line. Warriors all, but as a result most dangerous in peacetime.’
Vera flashed anger. This is all his fault. Even as she thought it, she realised it was an embarrassed girl’s foolish attempt to regain dignity, but still her mouth went on without her: ‘Don’t speak of me as if I am not here, Father.’
Something about the situation had made her nerves decidedly mobile.
Is this what hysteria feels like?
She found herself jumping from one feeling to the next and trying to keep up with it. Something was stopping her from looking at the lieutenant whom she felt sure would have no desire to marry her at all after this.
Her father was mocking her in front of a man who he had picked out as a possible husband. She had been set upon by both parental disparagement and a kind of horse-trader’s empty promotion of his stock.
The embarrassment reached a peak, and unsure exactly why she was so flustered and angry, she turned and marched back to the house leaving Mrs Miniver to speak with her father.
Behind her, she could hear the lieutenant break into a half-run to keep up with her, with the unloaded musket still in his hands.
He really is quite sweet, even after that scene, she thought.
‘She’s quite hysterical,’ was the last thing Vera heard from Mrs Miniver before slamming the door behind her.
Miniver sounded very close to hysterical herself.
Chapter 2
Vera recovered quickly from her irritation with her father and found herself fonder of the lieutenant for his gentlemanly way of dealing with her foolish outburst.
He really is quite sweet, she thought of him as she sat the next evening in her father’s study while they spoke about Mrs Miniver’s visit. The study was a small room with shelves piled up with his zoological samples in jars of murky yellow formaldehyde.
The room just about accommodated the writing desk in which Vera rummaged around arranging writing materials for a letter she was attempting to draft.
Her father sat in the over-large armchair which further filled up the room and made getting to the bookshelves beyond it difficult. The window over the desk was open to keep the room from getting musty, and a cooling breeze was wafting through the deep orange beams of light that fell on the desk from the setting sun.
Vera looked at her father who was only half-reading the book in his lap, his brow furrowed with concern as he thought of something then clearing as he turned to speak to Vera.
Though she hated to be mocked by him in front of other people, in private his gentle jibes seemed affectionate and teasing rather than mean-spirited.
‘Poor old Mrs Miniver,’ he said, chuckling to himself. ‘She only wanted to drop by to let us know that the Forsythe girl is getting married to the Millers’ son. Naturally, she doesn’t approve and wondered if I could have a word with the priest, that he might have a word with the parents, who might have a word with the conjugal parties and call the whole thing off.’
Papa’s chuckle had turned to that slightly mocking smile which Vera knew so well. He would smile like that whenever amused by the world around him; he never meant anything by it, but Vera always hated to be laughed at.
He seemed to Vera to want deep down to be a severe and serious person but was never very good at it; his good nature would always spill out, washing away any chance that he might rule his household with an iron fist as his father had.
She watched his smile and felt very lucky to have been raised by a man who took her seriously. Mama never did, always wanting to marry her off as if she were a coin to be traded for something more practical.
‘She is a terrible busybody,’ Vera said, unable to avoid sounding more apologetic than insulting. ‘It’s only on account of her still hoping for Benjamin Miller for her Sally.’
‘Perhaps it would have been better if you had missed that poor Cupid’s statue and assisted Miss Forsythe eliminating the major source of opposition to her match with young Benjamin.’