Watching it, he turned his mind from the League of Nations to the latest death-by-influenza figures, which showed that the Spanish-flu pandemic – which had taken nearly as many lives as had been lost in the war – was now officially over, and without ever having touched Outhwaite.
It was something to be deeply grateful for, but the thing he was most deeply grateful for was the news Blanche had given him earlier that morning. ‘I’m pregnant, Gil darling!’ she had said, her face radiant. ‘And I’m sure it’s a boy. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it just unbelievably splendid?’
It was so unbelievably splendid that as he thought of it now he felt dizzy with joy. Even if the new baby wasn’t a boy, it would mean a fourth daughter, who would be as loved and cherished as his other three daughters; and, if it was a boy, it would mean the continuance of his family name and an heir for his ancestral home.
For a moment he felt dizzy at his good fortune. Even sending Thea and Olivia to St Ethelburga’s had turned out to be inspired, for they had both settled down there without a beat of homesickness and had come home for the long summer holidays full of new slang expressions and bursting with happy chatter about new friends.
‘Georgiana Middleton, Olivia’s class monitor, is an absolute screech,’ Thea had said to him and, slightly more alarmingly, Olivia had assured him that, ‘Our French teacher, Mademoiselle Moreau, is divine, Papa. Simply everyone is in love with her!’
St Ethelburga’s was close enough to the sea for them to be taken swimming once a week. As well as tennis, they were also playing lacrosse. All in all, he was very satisfied with St Ethelburga’s – and with his daughters’ ability to adapt easily to new circumstances.
Other things had also gone well. For several months after the war had ended wounded officers had continued to convalesce at Gorton. The last of them had left in May and since then, under Blanche’s careful direction, the wing of the house that had been given over in its entirety to them had been restored to its former use, and Gorton Hall was now ready for as many weekend house-parties as he cared to give. Or would be, once it again had a full complement of staff.
In the aftermath of the war the servant problem had become acute. Where butlers, footmen, chauffeurs and gardeners were concerned, the problem was to be expected, for they had gone off en masse to fight for their country and far too few of them had returned – and of those who had returned, far too many were permanently disabled. What hadn’t been expected, though, was the acute shortage of female domestic staff.
With men away at the front, many of the jobs done by them had been taken over by women. They had acted as tram conductors, as postmen. In factories they had manned lathes, made weapons and in a whole host of industries had proved they were as capable as men. After enjoying that kind of freedom – and wages – few of them wanted to return to domestic service, where they had no choice but to live in, the pay left a lot to be desired, the hours were long and they were at the beck and call of an often tyrannical housekeeper or butler.
Tyranny wasn’t, of course, an issue at Gorton Hall, and neither were excessively long hours or pathetically poor pay. Because of this, although they were short-staffed where maids were concerned, they were managing.
It was male staff that presented the difficulty. Heaton the butler was elderly, and had intimated to Gilbert that in the not-too-distant future he would like to retire and go and live with a married daughter at Bridlington. Their two former footmen had died of wounds at Ypres and so far, despite several classified advertisements in The Lady, had not been replaced. Under Charlie’s direction, two jobbing gardeners were doing their best with the flowerbeds closest to the house, but their three former gardeners had all been killed at the front.
Thinking of them, and of the ultimate sacrifice they had made, Gilbert reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket for his pipe and tobacco pouch. The first thing he had done, on returning home from France, had been to fund the erecting of a war memorial to Outhwaite’s dead.
The memorial, made of Yorkshire stone, stood on the corner of the village green and among the names inscribed on it were those of Tom Bailey and Dick Wilkinson, his former footmen, and William Beveridge, Colin Graham and Albert Dixon, his former gardeners.
He tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and lit it. Not one of the five had been over twenty-one. They had been fine young men with all of their lives before them.
His free hand clenched so tightly that his knuckles were bloodless and then, as Caesar and Pluto skittered around him restlessly, he blew a cloud of blue smoke into the air and, keeping the dogs happy, resumed his walk.
On reaching Gorton he approached the house across the east lawn, and Violet, who had been playing a lone game of hopscotch on the terrace, hurtled down the wide shallow steps and across the grass to meet him.
‘Papa!’ she called out, racing towards him. ‘Where have you been? Why didn’t you take me with you? A tinker-lady woman came to the kitchen door this morning, selling pegs. Mrs Hiscox was ever so cross when she found out. She said she didn’t know what the world was coming to!’
Mrs Hiscox was Gorton’s housekeeper and, as Violet collapsed breathlessly against him, he put an arm around her and hugged her close.
‘Thea and Olivia have taken Rozalind into Outhwaite to meet Carrie,’ she said, the sun making a burning bush of her fox-red hair. ‘I could have gone with them, but I wanted to try and catch up with the tinker-lady so that I could have my palm read.’
‘And did you?’ There was alarm in his voice.
Violet shook her head. ‘No. I hadn’t even got as far as the lane before Jim came after me and brought me back. I don’t think he had any right to, do you?’
‘Yes,’ he said emphatically. ‘If he hadn’t, you could have found yourself in Lancashire, selling pegs alongside her!’
Violet was tempted to say that selling pegs in Lancashire sounded like good fun, but there had been such strength of feeling in her father’s voice that she thought better of it. Only hours ago she’d heard Cook telling Mr Heaton about a moving-picture show that her daughter had seen in Richmond. It had starred Charlie Chaplin and was called The Vagabond. The only person she could think of who would take her to see it was Hal, and she was going to ask him to do so. She would have to persuade him to keep it a secret, though, for she knew without asking that her father would be appalled at the thought of her jaunting off to Richmond to sit in the dark watching Charlie Chaplin.
To take her father’s mind off the tinker-lady she said chattily as they neared the house, ‘Is Mr Hardwick happy in the hospital, Papa? Has he got his new face yet?’
‘I don’t think he’s happy being so far away from Yorkshire.’ Gilbert saw no reason why he shouldn’t be absolutely truthful. ‘Whenever I’ve visited him he’s said how much he misses all his friends at Gorton.’
‘I expect he means Jim and Hal and Miss Cumberbatch.’ With her hand in his, she skipped along at his side. ‘And us, as well. He does miss us as well, doesn’t he, Papa?’
‘I’m sure he does, Violet. As for his new face, he’s undergone one operation, but he’s going to have to have many further operations. He won’t be back in Yorkshire this year, but hopefully he’ll be back sometime next year.’
Gilbert wondered if he should prepare Violet for the fact that, however skilled Mr Gillies’s surgery, Charlie was never going to look as he had once looked, but that he would look a whole lot less scary. He decided to leave it for the moment. Next year, before Charlie returned to Gorton and when Violet would be a year older, would be time enough for such a forewarning.
Violet cut across his thoughts. ‘And then Charlie can ask Miss Cumberbatch to marry him, Papa. I know he wants to.’ Unaware of what a thunderbolt she had dropped, she skipped off, intent on heading at the first opportunity for the Crosby farm, and Hal.
‘Why do we have to walk all this way down the river-bank to meet this friend of yours?’ Buttercups brushed the hem of Rozalind’s linen smock. ‘It would have be
en much easier to have met her at the bridge.’
‘The bridge isn’t our meeting place.’ Olivia swatted a bee away. ‘The vole place is where we meet. It’s our secret place,’ she added helpfully.
Rozalind rolled her eyes. A year older than Olivia, she thought meeting at ‘secret places’ pathetically childish.
‘It’s a breeding place for voles,’ Thea said, having seen Rozalind’s exasperated look towards heaven. ‘And it’s somewhere Hal can meet us.’
Rozalind still hadn’t met Hal – and saw no reason why she should. ‘I don’t understand these friendships you’ve made since I was last at Gorton. Why would you make friends with a village girl and a boy who is a farm labourer? I’m not surprised Uncle Gilbert and Aunt Blanche object, and that you have to meet out of sight of the house.’
Instead of being indignant, as Olivia expected her to be, Thea burst out laughing.
‘It’s not like that at all, Roz. When Papa was a little boy, Carrie’s granny was his nanny, and when Carrie’s father was killed in Flanders, it was Papa’s idea that Carrie spend time with us at Gorton. She’s one of the family now. As for Hal, you’ll like him when you meet him, and neither Mama nor Papa objects to our being friends with him.’
Rozalind was intrigued. As a small girl she had always enjoyed her visits to her English cousins, and after an interval of nearly five years she was enjoying this visit just as much as she had her earlier ones. Her parents were divorced and, compared to Gorton Hall, the Fifth Avenue mansion she lived in with her mother and stepfather was lifeless and dull, her mother being too busy with her social life ever to spend time with her.
At Gorton Hall things were very different. There her Aunt Blanche, with her husky voice and gentle smile, was the centre of everything; always interested in whatever it was that her daughters – and Rozalind – were doing. She would picnic with them, ride out on the moors with them, and was the very best audience when they plundered the dressing-up box to put on a theatrical performance.
Only the previous evening they had acted out one of the funniest scenes from Twelfth Night. She had been Malvolio, wearing yellow stockings cross-gartered in red. Thea had been Maria, Olivia had been Olivia (having refused to be anyone else) and Violet had been Sir Toby Belch, with a pillow stuffed up her smock to give her a middle-aged paunch.
By the time the scene was over, her uncle had tears of laughter streaming down his face and her aunt was giggling so much she had hiccups. Afterwards Rozalind and her cousins had gone down to the kitchen, and Cook had made them mugs of hot milky cocoa and given them toasted crumpets slathered with butter.
Back home in New York she didn’t even know where the kitchen was, and the cosy, loving jollity of the previous evening was something quite unknown.
‘There’s Carrie,’ Olivia said suddenly to her. She broke into a run, shouting at the top of her voice, ‘Carrie! Carrie!’
A hundred yards or so away a girl who had been sitting on the river-bank rose to her feet. Even from a distance Rozalind could see that she wasn’t wearing her hair down, but in a waist-length thick plait. As they drew nearer she couldn’t decide whether the rope of hair made her look older than her years – like Olivia, Carrie was twelve – or younger.
Close to, she saw that Carrie had a sprinkling of light freckles across the bridge of her nose and that her eyes were a clear blue and held the same kind of frank curiosity about their meeting as she was feeling.
Carrie shot her a wide smile. ‘Hello,’ she said with disarming friendliness. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but when it was the war and you couldn’t visit I used to ride the bicycle that was yours.’
‘Until it got too small for her,’ Olivia said, ever helpful. ‘We’ve all got new bicycles now – and so have you. We could go down to the village on them this afternoon, if you like.’
‘Of course I don’t mind that you rode my bicycle, Carrie.’ And to Olivia she said, ‘Does the village shop still sell butterscotch?’
‘Of course it does. And it now sells sherbert lemons too. You can get a big paper cone of them for tuppence.’
‘First, though, we’re going to show you the voles.’ Thea linked her arm in Rozalind’s. ‘We’ve been watching them every summer for years now. Hal showed us where to find them.’
As they walked towards the part of the bank where Carrie had been sitting, Rozalind said to Thea, ‘When will I get to meet Hal?’
‘Sunday probably. He has a little free time then, but not much. There’s never any free time when you live on a farm. There’s always too much work to do.’
‘And on an evening,’ Olivia said, ‘when he’s finished bringing the cows in for milking, he has lessons with Miss Calvert.’
Rosalind’s eyebrows rose questioningly.
‘She’s the village schoolmistress.’ There was a note in Thea’s voice that Carrie had never heard before. Pride on Hal’s behalf. ‘Hal could have gone to a grammar school,’ Thea continued. ‘Miss Calvert is the village schoolmistress and she said he would easily have won a scholarship, only his father wouldn’t let him sit for one. He said a grammar school would put fancy ideas in Hal’s head.’
‘And would it have?’ They had reached the vole spot now.
‘Not ideas that we think are fancy,’ Olivia chipped in stoutly. ‘Last week he applied for a job on the Richmond Times.’
They flopped down into deep grass.
‘As an office boy?’
Olivia giggled. ‘He might have to be an office boy to start with, but Hal intends to become a journalist – and after he’s worked as a journalist in Richmond he’s going to go to London, to be a journalist on a national newspaper.’
It was such pie-in-the-sky moonshine that it took all Rozalind’s self-control not to raise her eyes to heaven again. She said drily, ‘That’s a bit of a big ambition for a farmboy, don’t you think?’
Thea’s cat-eyes narrowed. ‘Not really, Roz. Hal’s ultimate ambition is to be not just any journalist, but a political journalist reporting on parliamentary affairs.’
Carrie sucked in her breath. If it was, he had never told her about it – and she had always assumed Hal told her everything.
For the first time it occurred to her that perhaps she wasn’t his closest friend any longer, and that perhaps now Thea was. The thought gave her an odd feeling in her tummy. Until now she had always thought that the four of them were all friends together, with Hal perhaps being an extra bit closer to her than he was to Thea and Olivia, and that if he was a little less close to anyone, that he was a little less close to Thea on account of how annoyingly bossy she could be. Now it seemed she had got things wrong – and she didn’t know how she felt about that.
‘And what do you want to be when you leave school?’ Rozalind suddenly asked her, wondering if, like Hal, Carrie also had high-flown ideas as a result of her friendship with the Fentons.
Carrie put her complicated feelings about Hal and Thea to one side and gave Rozalind a sunny smile. ‘I’m going to go into service.’
It wasn’t the answer that Rozalind had been expecting, but it certainly proved one thing. Carrie wasn’t the least bit uppity. A little later, when they had said goodbye to Carrie and were walking back along the river-bank towards the bridge, she said to Olivia, ‘I like Carrie Thornton. I can see why you’re friends with her.’
‘Goody.’ Olivia hugged Rozalind’s arm. ‘That means we’ll be a circle of five, not four.’
Rozalind was fairly sure she wasn’t going to feel the same way about Hal as she did about Carrie, but decided that Hal was a subject she was going to leave well alone until she had met him. Instead she said, ‘Your maths are out, kiddo. When you include Violet you already are a circle of five.’
‘We never do include Violet.’ Olivia wondered if she could start using American slang. ‘Kiddo’ would be a great word to use at St Ethelburga’s when she was with anyone younger than herself.
She shielded her eyes, looking to where a motor car was speeding from th
e direction of Outhwaite towards the bridge. ‘I think that’s Dr Todd’s car,’ she said to Thea. ‘He’s going very fast, isn’t he? He must be on his way to an emergency.’
Knee-deep in buttercups, they all came to a standstill, watching to see if, after it had crossed the bridge – which it did at ferocious speed – the car would continue on the road or turn in at the entrance to Gorton Hall.
In a cloud of dust it turned in between the pillared gates.
Rozalind sucked in her breath.
Olivia said uncertainly, ‘I expect one of the maids has had a fall and hurt herself. Or maybe one of the new gardeners has injured himself with a scythe or a billhook.’
‘But maybe they haven’t.’ Beneath her turbulent chestnut hair Thea’s face was very pale. ‘Maybe something has happened to Mama, or Papa – or to Violet.’
For a brief second they were all frozen into immobility – and then they began to run, racing up the grassy slope that led to the bridge; pounding over the bridge’s ancient cobbles. Then, not following the road and approaching Gorton via its long elm-lined drive, they cut across its parkland, running with wings on their heels and a premonition of fear in their hearts.
Chapter Seven
MAY 1924
The Fentons’ London town house was en fête with flowers sent down from Gorton. In the marble-floored hallway silver hanging baskets overflowed with frilled white roses. Pink peonies decorated the grand staircase, weaving with heady fragrance in and out of its wrought-iron balustrades. Pale-lilac anemones with indigo hearts massed the fireplaces. Hothouse freesias, sharply yellow, decorated beautifully laid supper tables. On every available surface were vases of wax-white orchids and bowls of carnations and lilies-of-the-valley.
Thea stood in the hall, breathing in the perfumed air, appreciative of all the effort that had been made.
‘Charlie must have had his gardeners working night and day to ensure everything was in bloom at the same time,’ Rozalind said, reading her thoughts.
A Season of Secrets Page 7