In front of the porched-in hall door, on the gravel and on the lawn surrounding it, horses shifted about nervously. Big Irish hunters; a pony or two with small, determined boys and girls on their backs; owners and grooms. It was an impressive sight: the sturdy horses, glossy bay or chestnut; the horsemen in black coats, hats, and boots, and cream riding britches; the brown of the grooms’ jackets and flat caps; interspersed with the odd red coat that she knew she should call “pink.” Farther away, and on the lawn, the hounds waited, kept in place by hunt servants.
The sweep in front of the house was large and generously covered with gravel. Daisy, who now knew how much a load of gravel cost, wondered that Ambrose had not, instead, invested the money in repairing the roof. The sweep might become bare and muddy, might even sprout the odd dandelion, but it was not likely to deteriorate to the extent that it infected the rest of the house.
Daisy and Mickey turned off toward the stables, around the back of the house, and down a short stony hill into the stable yard. Mickey unharnessed the pony and put it in a stall, and he and Daisy walked back up the incline, past some overgrown rhododendrons, to the front of the house.
The first person Daisy recognized, and he was in front of her smiling before she knew how to—or even if she should—return his greeting, was Sir Guy Wilcox. He was dressed for hunting and a red poppy was stuck in his buttonhole. Armistice Day. His black coat, the stock tied at his neck, and his gleaming top hat made him seem even more distinguished than he had at the Powers’ lunch party.
“Mrs. Nugent. Daisy—I hope I may call you Daisy?”
Daisy felt herself start to blush. She would have avoided Sir Guy if she had seen him first. Now, cutting him would be embarrassing and ridiculous. Nevertheless, she had no intention of allowing their acquaintanceship to become less formal or more intimate.
“Oh,” she said coolly. “Good morning, Sir Guy.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Armistice Day,” she said, her eyes indicating the poppy, made from a stiff red cloth around a black center. “I hadn’t realized.”
“Yes,” he said, “the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”
Daisy glanced at Mickey—they were surely close enough to matters with which he concerned himself for a small, not necessarily uninteresting, fact to be produced—but he was looking thoughtfully at the hounds at the end of the lawn. The hounds, quarreling among themselves, were exhibiting more excitement and tension than were the humans who stood about, holding cups and glasses in one hand and the reins of their mounts in the other, talking and waiting for the hunt to move away.
“I thought I might try and find a cup of tea,” Daisy said at length, stamping her feet lightly to emphasize the cold. “Can I bring you anything?”
Somewhere on the way to the open front door, Mickey wandered away and Daisy entered Ambrose’s house for the first time, alone.
Although the light in the hall had been turned on—a large opaque glass bowl coming to a metal-covered point in the center and suspended by chains from the ceiling—it was, at first, hard to see anything; the light outdoors had been hard and bright. When Daisy’s eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, she saw that the atmosphere of the hall was completely masculine. Two old dogs, kept indoors because of the hounds on the lawn, were sleeping deafly by the embers of the fire. The large one looked like an old and lumpy black hearthrug.
The dining room, too, suggested that it had been many years since a woman had been mistress of Dysart Hall. Even the food and drink spread on the handsome and very long table seemed masculine: sandwiches, a visibly dry seedcake, decanters of whiskey and of a dark red liquid that Daisy thought might have been cherry brandy or port.
The older women were clustered around the fireplace, their tweed suits and thick stockings not warm enough for them to want to stand about outside. Some of them, Daisy supposed, were her neighbors; most of them knew who she was; none of them spoke to her. Daisy poured herself a cup of tea, drank it, and went back outside.
Ambrose, both hands free—his horse presumably still in the stables—stood close to the hall door. He was talking to a woman; their momentarily frozen silhouettes suggested a tableau vivant or, perhaps, a game. The woman held a tray supported by a strap around her neck. Daisy fumbled in her handbag for money.
“All right,” Ambrose was saying as Daisy joined them. He was holding up a pound note in a way that suggested that a bargain had not yet been struck. “If you’ll buy a lily from me next Easter Monday.”
The woman tittered nervously, not quite sure how serious he was. After a pause Ambrose put the pound into the box and chose his poppy. Daisy, too, bought a poppy and the woman moved on. Ambrose waited until she was almost out of earshot before he spoke.
“Bloody sauce,” Ambrose said, securing the poppy in his buttonhole. “English, of course.”
Daisy raised her eyebrows, but Ambrose was undeterred.
“And an almost complete ignorance of history. Does she think Ireland doesn’t have her own fallen to remember?”
Daisy hesitated, not because she felt the need to remind Ambrose she was English but because it seemed, if she could find the right words, a moment when Ambrose might answer some of her questions. How English was Ambrose? How did he manage to spend so much time on leave? And Patrick? Did he, like Ambrose, fighting in the English army, feel as strongly about Ireland as Ambrose seemed to? Or was Ambrose’s objection to the Englishwoman about manners? Form? And what, if anything, lay beneath the apparent acceptance of Sir Guy Wilcox by the Anglo-Irish?
“Is the lily the Irish equivalent of the English poppy?” she asked instead.
“Yes, except in England you buy a poppy on Remembrance Day, the day the Great War ended. Here you buy a lily on Easter Monday, on the anniversary of a revolutionary beginning, the Post Office Rising. Both in aid of soldiers’ charities. The other difference—which is why that silly woman was confused—is that there would also be a bit of a class thing. You see—”
They were interrupted by the arrival of a maid. A maid who, Daisy noticed, looked more cleanly and neatly turned out in this bachelor establishment than did either of those employed at Dunmaine.
“If Hugh Power shows up, see if you can get that woman to try and sell him a poppy,” Ambrose said, over his shoulder, as he followed the maid back to the house.
Daisy rather hoped Hugh Power would come to the meet, but she suspected that he didn’t hunt, that he thought of hunting as English, a decadent sport of a decadent former enemy. She thought it unlikely he would disapprove of it as a blood sport; she suspected, given the right circumstances, Hugh Power could shed blood.
Reluctant to search out Mickey, the only person, other than Ambrose or Sir Guy, familiar to her, Daisy strolled away from the front door to look at the horses.
The horses were nervous, anticipating the excitement of the hunt. They danced about, their weight crunching the gravel, and Daisy was careful to avoid being either trodden on or kicked by one of their cold steel-shod hooves. A hard-faced woman on an overexcited gray mare swore at her when she got in the way and Daisy, rather shocked, went to look at the hounds.
The hounds seemed undoglike and independent. Daisy knew that each, as a puppy, had for a time lived with a family, separated from the pack. Mickey, always reliable with hard facts, had told her that this was called “walking” a hound, and that hounds were referred to as couples even to the extent that a single hound was half a couple. Despite this exposure to humans and domestic life, they appeared to remain pack animals, aware of, but not subservient to, their human masters, obedient only when the rules were enforced by the hunt servant’s whip.
Daisy was lost in thought when Ambrose came back. She was thinking about Patrick and what he had said about blood sports, about whether she would ever ride well enough to hunt, what it would cost to keep a hunter—a great deal, she suspected—and whether she would, in some distant postwar time, be among the frighteningly competent women on horseback t
hat surrounded her.
“Daisy—”
“Patrick said he never wanted to indulge in a blood sport again as long as he lived,” Daisy said, wincing inside at the “as long as he lived” bit.
“Did he?” Ambrose said thoughtfully. “He’s a good chap—bit more imagination than I have.”
“But it looks as though it must be exciting,” Daisy said tentatively, even a little longingly.
“It is,” Ambrose said firmly. “Daisy, I need—come with me.”
He took her by the arm and steered her back toward the house. Two people tried to get his attention on the way but he waved them away. Daisy felt curious, then frightened, as she began to understand the urgency implied in his actions.
“Let’s go into the study,” he said, indicating a door on the other side of the hall from the dining room and a little past where the staircase swept into the hall. He closed the door behind them.
“Sit down, Daisy,” he said, although he remained standing himself, his back to the unlit fire. From the corner of her eye, Daisy could see Mickey sitting immobile in an armchair; she was too agitated to acknowledge his presence.
“What is it?”
“Corisande just telephoned—” Daisy could see that Ambrose’s ruddy complexion was paler than usual.
“Tell me, Ambrose. Quickly,” Daisy said, her mind running through the full gamut of disaster. From the most terrifying, news of Patrick, through the possible illness of either of her parents, a domestic disaster at Dunmaine, to the most probable—news of Maud’s sudden sickness or death.
“It’s James Nugent. He was killed. Rufisque. Covering the re-embarkation. A hero’s death—he’s being recommended for a decoration.”
It didn’t seem possible. Although she was sad, her primary reaction was not one of grief; it was more one of incomprehension. James was someone she hadn’t, when she lay awake at night, fearing and anticipating the deaths of others, ever imagined dying.
“James,” she said. “Oh, his poor mother.”
Pity now mingled with the dislike Daisy felt, to a degree that varied with her own mood, for every member of the English Nugent family and for the condescending, shabby, and humiliating way they had treated her.
“How did you find out?” she asked at last.
“Corisande telephoned,” the first words that Mickey had spoken since she entered the room. His tone and face as devoid of expression as ever.
Corisande had telephoned Dunmaine and a maid had told her they were at Ambrose’s lawn meet? Corisande had telephoned Ambrose, who was not related to the Nugents, before she had telephoned her own family? Corisande’s first instinct on hearing of James’s death was to use it to have Ambrose’s complete attention in the form of sympathy? What difference did it make?
“I have—ah—there are people—the meet,” Ambrose said, after a moment.
“Yes, of course,” Daisy said. “Your guests, you must look after them.”
“I thought I’d—ah—send them on their way. No point in telling them something like this—what good would it do anyone?”
Ambrose left the room, his hunting boots noisy on the parquet floor, and Daisy and Mickey were left alone.
He was rather a spoilt little boy. Daisy could hear Patrick’s voice and his casual summing up of James as they had walked down the stairs at Bannock House to dance together for the first time. She remembered how aware she had been of his closeness to her, how his hand had brushed against hers, how she had glowed with his attention.
Then she remembered the plaque in the church at Bannock, the memorial to an even younger Nugent who had also given his life for his country. She started to weep softly. Weeping for the vague and formidable Lady Nugent; for her pale aggressive daughters; for James, who would never again shoot a pheasant or creep into a pretty girl’s bedroom; for all the never agains; for Patrick; for herself; for all the poppies and the lilies; for the whole brave, lonely, and inarticulate bunch of them; for the hopelessness of it all.
She wept for James, then for families all over England who had lost husbands, fathers, children. For the Londoners bombed nightly. For those who, whatever the outcome of the war, had already lost the center of their lives, someone who could never be replaced. For mothers who could never be comforted. She wept for families in occupied countries, for parents no longer able to protect their children. She wept for all the horrors of war, and hopelessness of living in a world where men could do this to one another. She had been brought up with the assumption of happy endings; now she understood that anything was possible, that these horrors could happen anywhere to anyone.
She continued to weep quietly for some time, quietly enough for Mickey, slumped, blending into an old and shabby armchair, either not to notice, or to be able to pretend not to notice, her tears. Outside she could hear the hunt moving off, the crunch of gravel, a voice raised, the yipping of the hungry, eager hounds. After a while, Ambrose, now wearing an old and rather worn tweed suit instead of his smart hunting clothes, came back. He gave Daisy his handkerchief and rang for the drinks tray.
PART THREE
Spring 1941
Chapter 15
WHEN AMBROSE ARRIVED, Daisy was sitting at the desk in the library. She was trying to write a letter to her grandmother. He greeted her warmly, but he did not hug her as she had throught he might. She offered him a drink.
“It’s quarter past three. To offer me a drink suggests either you have been brought up in a convent or consider me a dipsomaniac. So unfair when I came over to take you for a ride.”
“I don’t know how to ride—”
Ambrose looked at her with interest.
“You’re not frightened of horses, are you?”
Daisy shook her head; it had never occurred to her that one might fear domestic animals.
“Good. Put on some old slacks and thick socks so your ankles don’t get pinched, and I’ll get that old cob of Patrick’s saddled up.”
When Daisy came downstairs, dressed rather as she had as a Land Girl, Ambrose was waiting in front of the hall door with his own mare and the reassuringly fat and unclipped cob.
“There are two good rides, one through the woods and one over the moor. Let’s go over the moor today, so you can see where you are.”
There was an awkward and undignified moment when Ambrose gave her a leg up onto the sturdy Osbert. Daisy had imagined that his boost and her spring would land her gracefully in the saddle of the mercifully immobile horse; this turned out not to be the case and she was sliding back toward the gravel when Ambrose shoved her into position. He stood back, panting a little.
“Sorry,” Daisy said; it was the first time she had ever thought of herself as heavy, but she knew she would not feel slim again until she had been reassured by a looking glass.
“You’ll get the knack of it; it’s harder than it looks,” Ambrose said reassuringly, and then added, “There’s a mounting block in the stable yard.”
Ambrose led the way to the end of the avenue. Then, just before the gates, he turned along a narrow path between the high stone wall and the edge of the woods.
“Don’t let him get too close; Cissy might give him a little kick to encourage him to keep his distance. They’re so much bigger than we are that they can hurt you without meaning to. A little love nip from Cissy left me with a bruise that took two months to fade. Just remember that they bite and they kick, and don’t let them fall on you and you’re not likely to come to any harm—until we get you out hunting at least.”
That was unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, even apart from a lack of reckless courage and the new austerity measures Daisy planned for the household. There was, in a family photograph album, an image of Corisande seated sidesaddle on a sleek, fit, and clearly well-bred horse. Not only the contrast between Corisande’s mount and the comfortable old armchair on whose back Daisy was now seated, but Corisande’s posture, her elegant habit, her hat—with, or maybe Daisy had imagined it, a small veil—her hair, anc
hored safely but attractively, like a dancer’s, made Daisy feel she had a long way to go, on many fronts, before she would make her debut on the hunting field. She had no intention of appearing at a meet, mounted on a horse with a reputation as a nurserymaid, and floundering about like a bag of laundry on a day when her sister-in-law and Edmund made a vice-regal appearance.
“Don’t let him do that,” Ambrose said sharply, interrupting her musings. He was referring to Osbert’s—it seemed to Daisy harmless and reassuring—new activity, the tearing of succulent greenery from the bushes they passed and his meditative munching as he plodded along, an exemplary distance behind the heels of Ambrose’s mare.
Soon the path led them past a field, then through a wooden gate that Ambrose dismounted to open and close behind them, then uphill along a stony and deserted lane. Ambrose’s mare showed signs of not quite convincing fear at arbitrarily chosen objects: a stone gatepost, a cow looking over a gate, a dog barking in a farmyard.
When they had ridden about a mile, all of it gently uphill, the thick hedges on either side of the lane gave way to low banks topped by a single strand of rusted barbed wire. The unpaved but hard surface of the road became cart track. Now packed-down earthen tracks ran on either side of a strip of rough grass and weeds, the height of the growth limited by the hooves of the horses and donkeys that pulled the cart and by the load they drew. But it was, however, high enough for Osbert to pause from time to time and lower his head to snatch a mouthful of the grass. Each time he did so, Daisy found herself grabbing hold of the pommel of her saddle to avoid sliding, head first, down his sturdy neck.
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