Shining Threads

by Audrey Howard

  ‘Oh, dear, sweet Lord . . .’ Charlie began to walk towards him and Laurel sat down again abruptly, her eyes enormous and glittering in her ashen face. His Aunt Jenny put her hand to her mouth and for the first time in his life – another first, he thought dully – he saw her weep. She seemed to be incapable of movement, standing beside the table in her elegant silk gown, crucified, it seemed to him, by some dreadful emotion which surely could not have been aroused merely by his homecoming.

  ‘Oh, my sweet boy . . .’ he heard her say, amazingly, then he saw nothing else, felt nothing else but the strong, steady, infinitely loving, endlessly compassionate arms of Tessa Harrison as she put them around him, enfolding him in the first scrap of peace he had known since his brother had died in his arms. His own arms were about her, clutching desperately, for surely the strength which had held him upright from Scutari to this moment was about to slip away, finally, and only she could keep him on his feet.

  Tessa . . . Tessa . . . Tessa . . .’ he said over and over again, his face buried in her shoulder, the soft, sweet-smelling curve of her neck, her gown already wet with his agonised tears.

  ‘Sit down. For Christ’s sake, sit him down,’ Charlie was saying harshly, his own arms ready to support him should Tessa’s prove inadequate.

  ‘Darling, come . . . let me hold you . . .’ He felt her turn for a moment, frantically, to Charlie who hovered beside them, bidding him open the door . . . the morning room more comfortable . . . more coal on the fire . . . hot coffee . . . Then he was in the depth of the soft sofa, the fire warm on his bare feet – he had no socks, of course, but where had his boots gone? – and her arms were still about him, her shoulder there for him to lean on. His aunt’s hand, steadier now, was holding a cup of something hot and delicious to his lips, while Laurel . . . and Charlie . . . were weeping and all the time he shook like the trembling aspens which lined the lake. He must pull himself together, regain his composure for at least as long as it would take to tell them of what had happened, and suffer again that frozen state of senseless, unfeeling shock he had known for the past eight weeks and in which he could endure the telling. Then, and only then, would he let it all wash over him, re-live it, fall into the nightmare which, when it was told, would surely once and for all be done with.

  ‘Darling, can you speak of it now?’ Tessa said, her lovely grey eyes as soft and shadowed as the drifting veil of the mist which so often covered Friar’s Mere. There was a lingering desolation in the expression on her face, as if she knew what he was to tell her and was not certain she would ever recover from it, but it must be said. ‘We are not sure . . .’ Her voice was but a whisper. She looked up swiftly at her mother, not smiling for that would be impossible now, but with a memory of the past when Drew and Pearce Greenwood had played boyish pranks, changing places as easily as two coins from the same mint. They had relished the confusion, or sometimes the lack of it for quite often no one was aware that a trick had been played.

  So, who was this in her arms? Which loved man? No matter which one, she would mourn the other until her dying day.

  ‘Which . . . who . . . ?’ Her voice cracked with the depth of her sorrow.

  ‘Pearce died in the hospital at Scutari.’

  It was said and she could not bear it, and neither could he.

  They sat for almost an hour with their arms about one another, saying nothing. On the other side of the fireplace Jenny Harrison sat in a low, velvet, button-back chair, a ladies’ chair in a ladies’ room, and watched them compassionately. Charlie had his arms about Laurel who was weeping as though her heart was broken. The morning-room had long been a family room, less formal than the drawing-room where guests were received, and it seemed appropriate now that the family should begin their grief here. The room had a lived-in air, homely and slightly untidy with books lying about, today’s newspapers crumpled on a low table, sheet music standing open on the piano, playing cards in a box, not opened since Pearce and Drew went away. It was here that Drew Greenwood began to feel the emptiness, the dead and sterile shell which had been left when Pearce died, begin to fill with what he knew would be his own agony. He must speak of it before the pain became too much for him.

  ‘We were in the last bombardment of Sebastopol,’ he said simply, staring into the fire, his eyes far, far away on the barren plain which they had come to know so well. ‘What a lark, we thought, on that first day. What fun to be there, amidst the excitement and adventure, away from the mills and the deadly boredom of the hours we spent in them,’ and away from you whom we both loved, Tessa Harrison, though he could not say it, of course. ‘We couldn’t wait to leap on our mounts and follow the soldiers, the cavalry, to fight in the glorious battle we were convinced it would be.’

  He paused, capturing that unbelievable, almost forgotten, carefree youthfulness. ‘We lost our horses on that very first day. Do you remember them, Tessa? Such lovely animals who had not been trained for . . . They were terrified . . . We killed them, Pearce and I, just as surely as if we had put a revolver to their heads. It would have been more humane if we had done so. Mine got a sabre thrust in his belly . . . he was screaming. I don’t know what happened to Pearce’s: I didn’t ask. You got like that, you know. You never asked anyone what had happened to them. At the end of the day you simply slipped into your tent and if the next time you were mustered there was a face missing, a dozen faces you had known the day before, you didn’t ask.’

  ‘No . . .’ Tessa’s hand soothed his forehead.

  ‘I saw Lord Raglan once, you know.’ His voice was soft, his thoughts not marshalled into any particular order, just uttered as they came into his head.

  ‘Did you, darling?’

  ‘We were always wet. For months we were wet. In the trenches . . .’

  ‘Why were you in the trenches, Drew? You were not soldiers.’

  ‘No . . . I don’t remember now.’ He passed his hand over his face as though in a dream. How could he tell them the reason he and Pearce could not come home? How could he tell them the reason they went in the first place? ‘It was . . . there was nothing else to do. They thought we were soldiers so they fed us what there was.’ He looked down at the odds and ends of his uniform. ‘We lost all our clothing . . . a shell, and the dead have no use of . . . what they wore. Those boots belonged to an officer. I did him a kindness so . . . as he lay dying he said I must have them. A decent fellow. From Norfolk I believe.’

  ‘And then . . . Pearce . . . ?’

  ‘Yes. Well, we survived two years almost though thousands and thousands didn’t and then . . . there was to be an attack on the Redan. There were 12,000 men there to defend it, we were told and we were to send only 4,000 stormers and supporters. If it had been . . . different, we might have laughed. A handful of men expected to take and hold an open work defended by thirty-two battalions of Russian infantry! But we did it . . . we did it. The Light Division and the 2nd Division. We got in but instead of storming on after the retreating Russians we were ordered to extend on the parapets and begin to fire . . .’

  His voice tailed away as in his memory he re-lived that fatal day, that fatal hour, that fatal order which had, finally, cost his brother his life.

  ‘They came back at us. They pressed us closer and closer. We ran out of ammunition and were forced to throw stones . . . stones against bullets and shell and sabre and bayonet . . .’

  There was a long and dreadful silence as the five people in the pleasant room observed quite clearly the pictures one of them had conjured up.

  ‘We were forced over the parapet and into a ditch, every one of us who was left. Those who could, scrambled up, running the gauntlet of fire, of grape and musketry. The Russians were cheering, manning the parapets which we had just left, firing into the chaos of bleeding, falling soldiers, into the heaps of our men who lay in the ditches unable to crawl out. They even brought up two field-pieces and . . .’

  Again he fell silent, his mind beginning to close instinctively against the pain of w
hat came next, knowing he must tell it, but not sure that he could finish.

  ‘Leave it, Drew. Let it rest now. Let us get you to bed . . .’

  ‘I felt a blow to my arm. I thought . . . I didn’t know I’d been hit until I fell. There were dozens of us there . . . one on top of the other, dead and wounded. Pearce was shouting that we should make a run for it but something pinned me down. I didn’t seem able to extricate myself though I felt no pain. I didn’t know I’d been hit, you see. “Come on, brother,” he shouted again. “Don’t just lie there or must I carry you, you lazy devil.” He was grinning, you know how . . . he was. He had bent down, ready to heave me to my feet when the shell hit the . . . a dozen yards away. He caught the full blast . . . his legs . . . were . . .’

  ‘Oh, God, oh, dear God . . .’ Was it Tessa or her mother who cried out?

  When I came to I couldn’t find him. I went crazy, I think.

  My arm . . . my arm . . . was I don’t know . . . bloody and . . . somebody held me down while they dressed it. ‘Then I ran from man to man . . . hundreds of them lying on the bare ground. It was a lovely day . . . autumn. The sun shone on them . . . Dear God . . . I found him two days later. They were about to put him on a ship for Scutari. His . . . feet . . . please, Tessa, hold on to me . . . his feet were gone, both of them, and . . .’

  ‘Drew . . . oh, Drew . . . please, I cannot bear it . . .’

  ‘. . . so I went with him. I stayed with him on the hospital ship but . . . the surgeons tried . . . he would not heal . . . the gangrene had . . .’

  Tessa wept blindly, clinging to him now, tortured by the picture of handsome, dashing Pearce Greenwood brought down to the pitiful agonised creature, dying by inches in a foreign land with no one but his brother to care what happened to him. And yet, who else would he have chosen, had he had the choice, but this man who was part of him, who had shared the same womb, the same cradle, the same rip-roaring childhood and reckless youth? This brother he had loved and who had loved and comforted his pain until the end.

  ‘He died in November. It took him two months. They kept . . . taking off a bit more. But I was with him, he was in my arms when he went.’

  His voice was spent, his head drooping, his face quite blank, empty of pain, of regret, of everything but the need to fall, for the moment, into oblivion.

  ‘What have you been doing since then, lad?’ Charlie’s voice was neutral as though he was holding himself, and Drew with him, by a tight and tenuous thread to the world of reality, to this world in which they now were and in which they must spend the rest of their days without Pearce Greenwood.

  ‘Nothing much, really. We buried him . . . the nurses were kind. They came to his funeral. Then I stayed on. I could not bear to leave him, you see, by himself in that land which had killed him. I helped in the hospital . . .’

  ‘Why did you not write?’

  ‘I wanted to tell you myself . . . about him.’

  ‘We were so anxious. Your mother was . . . and your father tried to find out what had happened to you . . .’

  ‘Did he? How strange.’

  ‘Why do you say that? You are his . . . were . . . his sons . . .’

  ‘He took no great interest when we were here.’ It was said with no rancour, just a great and engulfing weariness. He sighed, his face grey like the ash in the fireplace, his eyes deep in liver-coloured hollows.

  She heard him screaming from his room along the corridor. She had fallen into a light, haunted doze, the night almost gone, exhaustion and grief overtaking her at last, and when the sound began she sat up in bed with her heart pounding, disorientated, with the tail end of the dream she had been in still lingering in her frightened mind.

  They had been up on Badger’s Edge, the three of them, sharing the easy laughter which was part of their companionship. The horses had cropped the grass close by, their reins dangling and the dogs sprawled about them, dozing with their muzzles resting on their paws. How lovely it all was, she had been thinking, as Pearce’s eyes, as blue and brilliant as the turquoise in the necklace her aunt wore, smiled into hers, when the sky, the great familiar vault which had hung over them all their lives in every colour from the palest oyster to the deepest purple, simply erupted, emptying hundreds of bodies from its glorious arch, pouring them down upon their heads, flinging them willy-nilly about the plateau until they were heaped in great obscene piles. Heads and limbs were twisted in unnatural angles from their torsos, flaccid and writhing, and from beneath them, sticking up into the soft summer air, was one living hand. It clenched and twisted, begging to be let free and she could hear his voice . . . Pearce’s or was it Drew’s, from somewhere beneath . . . Pearce . . . ?

  Oh, God! Oh, dear God. It was Drew and his voice was becoming more shrill with every passing second.

  She bumped into her mother on the landing. The night was as black as pitch, no light filtering through the heavy curtains which shrouded each window. Briggs, as was his duty last thing at night, had extinguished every lamp and the corridor was like a long, dark tunnel. There had been no thought in her mind of lighting the candle at her bedside nor any of the lamps which stood about her bedroom, since her instinct had been to get to him as quickly as she could, to extricate him from the mass of corpses which were slowly burying him alive and under which his mind was slipping into madness.

  How did she know? How did she know?

  There were tables along the passage, each with its own lamp, and after crashing into her mother, no more than a pale, shapeless shadow against the open doorway of her own bedroom, her hip caught one, sending it in a spray of splintered glass to the floor.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ she heard her mother gasp and from some dark place above them came the sound of quavering female voices asking what was to do and a deeper one, male, ordering them to be quiet and get back to their beds where they belonged.

  He was still asleep when they stood over him, she and her mother, his mouth a blacker hole in the blackness in which he lay. He was clawing at his bedclothes, his hands tearing and twisting, his arms pushing at something, his head moving frantically from side to side as he gasped for air. The screaming had subsided to a low, frantic moaning and when her mother lit the lamp at his bedside his eyes flew open and stared up into the flickering shadows the light cast on the ceiling. He became perfectly still, not even breathing for a moment, then his head turned slowly on the pillow, so slowly and carefully it was as though he was desperately afraid of what he might see.

  Tessa knelt down beside him and put a hand on his cheek, stroking it, brushing back his sweat-drenched hair, making small noises in her throat, the noises all mothers make to frightened children, saying nothing which made much sense, but soothing him with the sounds, calming him.

  ‘Tessa, oh Tessa . . .’ His breath shuddered violently in his throat.

  ‘Yes, darling, I’m here.’

  ‘I was . . .’

  ‘I know . . .’ With delicate tenderness she put her arms under his head and drew him towards her, cradling him against her with a little sigh. She put her lips gently to his brow and he lifted his own arms and clung to her, his face in the soft, sweet-smelling division between her breasts, her hair falling about him like a protective shield. She felt his stiff body fall slowly into peace and his breath drift from his mouth against the curve of her breast. He was thin, frail, and his bones felt brittle beneath her hands. Her heart was squeezed with love and pity and on her face was a look her mother had never seen before.

  She watched them for a moment, Jenny Harrison, then, making a decision which even then she was not sure was right, turned and walked from the room, closing the door behind her.

  19

  Laurel watched them anxiously as they walked hand in hand from the terrace and down the smooth sweep of lawn which led through a series of terraces flower beds and smoothly clipped box-hedges; beyond the massed rhododendrons and ornamental rose beds to the rougher grass which surrounded the lake. Her face was creased with doubt and in he
r eyes was an expression of unease.

  ‘Really, Aunt Jenny, do you not think it is time Tessa put away those extraordinary garments she insists on wearing and dressed in a manner more suitable to her station in life? I had hoped she might be going to do so recently but since Drew returned she is as improperly dressed as ever. She is nineteen now and surely too old for such things.’

  She stood at the window of the morning room. It was Sunday and breakfast, a leisurely affair on this one day of the week when the mills were closed, was almost over. She would go up to the nursery floor soon to direct the activities of her nursemaids, of Nanny who was in charge of baby Joel, of Henry and Jane, of the governess Miss Gaunt who gave lessons to six-year-old Robert and five-year-old Anne, of Miss Copeland who had been her own governess, and Tessa’s, and still helped out in the schoolroom. Miss Copeland was over sixty now but still very useful in her own supervision of the young woman who had come to take her place and Laurel would not have dreamed of pensioning her off to some cottage on the estate. Anyone who was able to perform some task which would leave Laurel with more freedom for her many social obligations would always be found a place in her household.

  ‘What were you saying, dear?’ Charlie was deep in yesterday’s newspapers and did not even look up. He was well accustomed to his wife’s anxiety over almost everything her cousin did, or said, and was once again reminded of the deepseated and strange feeling of insecurity she had unconsciously acquired as a child. It made him gentle with his wife, perhaps more indulgent than he might otherwise have been. He held her in considerable affection, a protective and obligatory affection which had never faltered. He made love to her when she would allow it, not often for she had conceived six times in nine years, bearing five live children, and she wanted no more. He knew she did her best, running this house and her children with efficiency and a certain good humour; this was what she wanted and was a way of life she understood. But, and he knew he must be honest about it, she was somewhat jealous of Tessa Harrison, and it soured her life.