Shadows & Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  His swoon was only momentary, though his colour was still bad, and as I knelt on the floor beside him, I saw that his knee was indeed swollen like a balloon over the top of his high laced boots. There was nothing I could do except help him up off the floor on to the sofa and give him some of Lyall’s hoarded brandy before I roused Amos and sent him running for the doctor.

  I was past tiredness now. It was all part of this terrible, terrible day.

  When I reached the convent next morning, I went straight to Lyddie’s room. She was lying on her back in the bed and the mound of her stomach was flat. Sister Mary Evangelist came in behind me and told me that the baby, a little boy, had been stillborn. Lyddie did not open her eyes, scarcely breathing as I stood by her bedside. I looked at her still, white face, and took her hand in mine. I did not need the nun to tell me she would not live.

  And so it was, through the fortunes of war, that the Fox’s and Harry Chetwynd, from a remote part of the English countryside, were brought together in this dusty little town on the South African veld.

  “Bless my soul — Harry Chetwynd!”

  “Dr Fox, by all that’s wonderful!”

  They came from the same village in Shropshire. They were near neighbours and friends of long standing. Even more amazing, Robert and Barty were here in Mafeking, too.

  “So you left the regiment, then, young Harry?” asked Dr Fox.

  “Yes, sir, twelve months ago. Didn’t suit me, after all.”

  “Never thought it would, my boy.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing wrong with what you’re doing, telling the world what’s happening to us here,” said Dr Fox, “as long as you don’t go knocking yourself up like this all the time – though there’s nothing much wrong with the knee, either, that a bit of rest won’t cure.” He strapped up the joint and left it at that. Not so with Louisa, who came to see Harry first thing next day and exchanged hugs with him and so overwhelmed him with questions he held up his hand in defence. She wanted especially to know everything about their families – his brother Sebastian, still at school, and her elder sister and the baby left behind. Which was how I came to know what had brought father and daughter to Africa.

  There was no privacy in the cramped rooms which Harry had been allotted to share with several other war correspondents, and Lyall told him he was welcome to use his house whenever he needed quiet to concentrate on his reports. It was empty enough during the day, for Lyall himself could not bear to be in the house now, and spent most of his time living with a rifle in his hands, crouched in a trench behind a rampart of sandbags. I suspected he was as much afraid as I was of the darkness left behind after Lyddie had died.

  Harry took full advantage of the offer. If he wasn’t at the house when I returned after finishing work at the convent, he would often arrive during the evening, his quick stride announcing his arrival, his hat immediately flung on to the nearest surface. So darkly handsome, and debonair despite the difficulties of keeping up appearances in the present circumstances, stirring the dark shadows with his magnetic personality.

  We were too often alone. I knew it, and the thought of it spelled danger to me. But his presence brought in a breath of the outside world and re-awoke in me a longing for something I had long been suppressing. And he alone – perhaps because he knew nothing of my previous life – could lift my spirits when I felt depressed by the misery all around us and the sadness of being here, without Lyddie, so far from home and the people I loved. At first, I thought him flippant and often cynical, though his unfailing good humour and his malicious asides still had the power to amuse me. I was not sure yet whether I liked or approved of him.

  But Harry was a mass of contradictions. He was different; he questioned. He didn’t believe everything we were told and didn’ t think that people back home should be told it, either. He let me see the despatches he contrived to have sent out by a native runner. I expected a hidden cynicism, but didn’t find it. He said the truth must be told, though I wondered, as I read, whether such heresies would ever be published. The readers of the Daily Bugle would undoubtedly rather read more stories of the valour and praise of the gallant commander in Mafeking over their breakfast tables. Well, Harry was fair enough in giving praise where it was due – and much was due to Baden-Powell. But for his continual encouragement and cheerfulness, morale would have become non-existent as the circumstances of our penned-up, hazardous and yes, despite the danger, often monotonous life wore us down.

  More than ever, Hugh allied himself to his leader. When the colonel was rallying the men in the trenches, or braving the enemy by showing himself on the redoubts, Hugh was never far away; he sat with him when he led a council of war; together they invented new gadgets, some schoolboy trick to fool the enemy, such as moving a searchlight devised from a biscuit tin from place to place so that it appeared we had dozens. The dapper, familiar figure of B-P in his wide brimmed hat with its four pinches in the crown and his cheery smile was seen everywhere, opening baby shows and sports days (designed to keep up morale), perching by the river bank in odd spare moments to make the most appealing and lively drawings in his sketchbook. And Hugh usually contrived to be in attendance somewhere, though he did not go so far as to do comic turns in the Sunday concerts, as Baden-Powell did.

  “What a prince of good fellows!” said Harry, handing me a copy of his latest report, “Plucky chap, what’s more. Nothing we British admire more than pluck. Nil desperandum.”

  I couldn’t help smiling, something I rarely did these days. The other railway towns of Ladysmith and Kimberley had also been besieged at the beginning of the war, but Kimberley had been relieved after four months and Ladysmith after five. Whereas we in Mafeking had become so accustomed to the non-arrival of relief which was reported a few days away and then never arrived, that we had almost ceased to believe it ever would – that we should all die here, trapped.

  We had no news of our families in England, while they, one assumed, held their breath and prayed for us. I was very much afraid that Ned might have enlisted, and like his sister, have died far from his loved ones.

  As supplies of everything dwindled, Harry became adept at winkling out anything that was scarce: even a bottle of French scent for me in a pretty, cut-glass bottle, for instance. Scent! A sweet breath of what now seemed a lost life. How on earth had he managed to get hold of it? Charm, I suppose. He wouldn’t say. (When I opened it later, it had gone off, so someone had been hoarding it too long, but I kept the bottle.) I was shocked, however, when he brought things like corned beef, coffee and even tea, which had become scarce as gold dust. I should have refused them. Instead, to ease my conscience, I gave them to Amos and Lemuel, whose families were by now in dire straits as far as obtaining food went, far worse than we whites were: to put it bluntly, they were on the verge of starvation.

  As the siege and the eternal, everlasting shelling dragged on into its fourth, fifth, sixth month, rescue did not come and we lived among constant noise, dust and confusion and danger, we whites were rationed to a pound of meal a week to make bread, no more than a spoonful or two of sugar, a cupful of coffee beans and half of tea. A tin of bully beef, and that was it, if you were honest. Many were not, and got their food by the back door. There was also something called ‘sowens’, a sort of meal made by grinding up grain husks, which you then sifted and blew away as much as you could of the chaff, to make gruel, but even with the most ingenious methods to make it palatable, it was sorry stuff. Nowhere was there any starch to be had, because it was now used to enrich and thicken soup. The sight of a horse carcase hanging from a tree waiting to be butchered became a common sight. Horsemeat sausages, when they were available, had begun to taste like a luxury.

  “What’s all this about not letting the natives share the rations?” Harry demanded, a snap in his eyes.

  A good deal of brutality existed towards the blacks’ condition. People shrugged and said the niggers were used to fending for themselves, they were expert cattle
raiders, and they would eat anything that moved. I began to believe this when I saw one of the Fenji tribe kill one of the silent yellow dogs that abounded in the town by hitting it on the head with a stick. The smell of its roasting was perfectly sickening. Someone swore they had smelled roasting human flesh, too: how they knew it was human, I couldn’t say, but there was no doubt of the Kaffirs’ desperate situation. The men and women were gaunt as spectres, the children pot-bellied, their eyes protruding. It broke one’s heart to see them begging for food and to have nothing to give them.

  To be fair, Harry was not alone in his condemnation of the policy, even among the war correspondents. A good deal of moral pressure was building up to augment their rations. The mistake, Harry thought, had been to believe that this could ever have been simply a white man’s war, which need not involve the native population. They had been expected at the onset of real trouble to decamp and leave the white man to it but they did – or could – not. They had been drawn in, willy-nilly, excluded from their traditional way of life, prevented from escaping the beleaguered town by the surrounding Boers, unable to graze their cattle, or having to watch them picked off or stolen by enemy raiders. They had no previously hoarded stores, as we had, and no other means of obtaining food was available to them.

  “Well, it looks as though B-P will soon be relieved of part of the problem, if he has his way. His latest policy is to ‘encourage’ some of the blacks – several hundred women and children, I believe – to leave and find what food they can in the north.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard. With an offer of food for their journey — nine slaughtered horses.”

  “What a prospect,” said Harry in his sardonic way. “Either be shot by the Boers when you try to leave, or stay here and die of starvation.”

  To give him his due, B-P believed the Boers would play the game and not shoot women and children. But the Boers were not British and had never heard of playing the game. The great exodus was driven back and the women shot if they did not obey.

  “Ah well, nil desperandum,” Harry said. This time we didn’t laugh. By now, we could read each other’s thoughts.

  He had never again approached any moment of intimacy, after that tender gesture when he had pushed back my hair. But when our hands accidentally touched, or our eyes met, I thought of things that were not good for me to think.

  What more is there to say?

  Except that, just before the siege ended after seven long months, Harry Chetwynd and I inevitably became lovers. That Hugh came home unexpectedly one day and found us together. That he went out without a word and the next day, leading his men in a daring – and some said reckless – sortie against the Boer positions, was shot and killed, earning himself the Victoria Cross for his valour.

  1909

  SEPTEMBER

  I never believed that I would write these words, but I must. I could never rid myself of the feeling that Dr Harvill was using me as an experiment, but now I have to say that I shall remain forever in his debt. The cloud under which I have lived for over a year has at last lifted.

  Rosa watches me like a hawk. She tells me to be calm, and has brought me a tisane, which she swears will soothe my nerves, but my fingers can hardly hold the pen steady enough to write. When I came to that part of this re-creation of my past, that point where Hugh was killed, and I faced what I had done – caused a true, honest and brave man to lose his life because of my faithlessness – that was when I knew I had come to the end of my journey of self-discovery, for that is what it has been. Memory did not come suddenly, with a blinding rush. First I would recall one thing, then another. Scenes, events and memories of people I had known piled themselves on top of one another in no sort of sequence. Only gradually did they begin to form some of order in my mind, until I no longer had to question each recollection. I had regained that basic human right – the right to a past.

  And the best – and the worst – of it was that it brought Ludovic back. Ludo.

  While we in Mafeking waited for supply trains to bring us food, mourned our dead and wondered what the last seven months had accomplished in bringing the war to an end, England apparently went wild with people pouring into city centre streets to celebrate Mafeking’s relief and honour the hero of the hour — Colonel Baden-Powell. Especially was this so in London – and of course, Yorkshire – where church bells rang and mill buzzers hooted not only in Dewsbury and Bridge End, but in Bradford and all over the West Riding in honour of their own heroes who had been caught up in the siege – and no doubt the townspeople crowded into the streets and the marketplaces there, too, to celebrate. Never mind that the war was still going on, Britain was in the grip of jingoism. Young men were still being urged to volunteer; to go out in the name of Queen and country, to be slaughtered or to die of fearful wounds, dysentery, enteric fever and gangrene.

  I wished for nothing more, now, than to shake the dust of Africa from my feet. What I did not want to do was to go back to Bridge End, Willie Dyson and, above all, the Crowthers. How could I return without Lyddie? How could I return to them at all – those dear people who valued integrity above all else – as a grieving young widow, knowing how I had betrayed my marriage vows, and where it had led? But I had nowhere else to go.

  Until I remembered the letters we had received from Rouncey before the siege, saying that she had returned to England from America and was now teaching young women students at the Royal Holloway College, at Egham Hill in Surrey. I wrote to her to ask if she had any suggestions as to how I might live, and she offered me a home.

  On Hugh’s death, I had been left with a considerable amount of money at my disposal, leaving me in no doubt that I need never be in want again for the rest of my life, but the thought of keeping that money filled me with so much revulsion and shame, I would not accept it. His family, who did not, of course, know the full story of his death, and my part in it, thought I was deranged when I agreed to take only what was necessary for my journey home. Maybe Rouncey would really be as glad to have me live with her as she said, and I felt that if I could act as her housekeeper (her own housekeeping skills being nil) my presence there need not be a burden.

  “I didn’t ask you to live with me to be my servant, Hannah, but as a companion. But if you feel you must do something to earn your keep, you may help me with the book I’m writing. It hasn’t yet progressed very far beyond a huge accumulation of research documents, and they badly need sorting and classifying. What do you say to that?”

  I wasn’t sure whether I was qualified to do what she was asking, but I didn’t dare to say so; nothing, in Rouncey’s view, was ever beyond your grasp if you put your mind to it. Should I demur, I’d be faced with a brisk injunction to get my head down and buckle to, as I bad so often been told to in the schoolroom. I smiled at the thought. Her energy and determination were already passing them-sleves on to me and I began to feel that the prospect ahead might have something more to offer than a mere solution to the difficult situation in which I presently found myself. I discovered that her writing was concerned mostly with the rights of women; apart from gathering material for her book on the subject, she wrote leaflets for the Women’s Social and Political Union, supporting their constant pressure to be given the vote. We lived together in her little house near the college for nearly three years, and I learned Mr Pitman’s shorthand and how to work a typewriter to help with her voluminous correspondence.

  “There’s to be a WSPU meeting in Grosvenor Square next week. Shall we go, Hannah?” she asked one bitter, early December day. I looked at her doubtfully. She hadn’t been well lately and still had a hacking cough; the weather was appalling. Snow had drifted in the lanes round the cottage, telegraph wires had come down, the post couldn’t get through, but she would go. We had a slow, cold journey to London only to find the meeting cancelled. We stayed overnight with friends of hers, who were as worried as I was by her cough. The next day, by the time we had trudged the three miles from the station through a blizzard back to the cott
age, it was evident she was very ill indeed; with pneumonia, as it turned out. When she died, three days later, I was bereft.

  I had to leave the cottage because the owners wanted it for their son, who was getting married. Rouncey had left money to the WSPU and the rest, which amounted to nearly a hundred pounds, to me. It was enough to enable me to furnish a room I had found, and to provide me with a little cushion in case of need. With my typewriting skills I soon found a job in a firm which imported fans and Imari porcelain and lacquered goods from Japan. Twenty of us women sat in rows clattering away at our heavy, noisy machines all day long. It was hard, concentrated and extremely dull, repetitive work for which I was paid very little – and the noise, after the peacefulness of the cottage, was deafening. But I had my independence.

  Three months later, on a lovely spring day, when I was standing in front of a flower seller, heart-stopped by a heavenly scented mimosa, which we had called acacia in Mafeking, and wondering whether I could afford to buy a bunch, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Harry Chetwynd.

  I may be condemned as self-seeking by agreeing to live as his mistress in this pretty house he bought for me in St John’s Wood, being grateful for whatever time he could spare to come to me. True, it was a far cry from the shabby little room I rented, from the hard, ill-paid work at the office and the everlasting din of all those heavy machines – but I would not have done it had not my heart leaped at the sight and touch of him as I looked again into those laughing eyes.

  The attraction between us was very different from the sort of love which had existed between Hugh and myself — a love which, had I not been so foolish and wrong-headed as to fail to recognise it, would have outlasted life itself. I accepted from the start that Harry could not marry me. He was perfectly honest with me, but promised that even in the event of a convenient marriage being forced on him, it would make no difference to us. We existed for nothing but ourselves; it was only when Ludo was about to be born that the fly appeared in the ointment. By now, I had ceased to believe that I could ever bear a child, and when I found I was expecting one, my attitude changed. I did not want him or her to be born out of wedlock. I wanted Harry to be proud of us and for his family to meet and acknowledge us. Demanding this, I saw a side to Harry I did not like.