A Season of Secrets (7 page)

That wasn’t how people were thinking of things yet in the centre of Outhwaite. It seemed that everyone was out in the streets sharing in the relief that at last the agony
was over.

‘No more knitting khaki socks!’ one woman shouted elatedly as Thea bicycled past her. ‘And no more black-edged telegrams!’

As the bells of Outhwaite’s Anglican church continued to peal, another, far different bell could be heard. It was the school bell. The congestion in the main street grew worse as children,
let off lessons for the rest of the day, began racing exuberantly down it.

Unable to make any further headway on the bike, Thea dismounted and began pushing it. Hal saw her before she saw him.

‘We’re over ’ere!’ he shouted from the crowded pavement.

Carrie was with him and, as Thea began eagerly making her way towards them, Hal shouted, ‘We’ve news I bet you ’aven’t ’eard yet! The Kaiser ’as abdicated! Me
and Carrie are off to buy a bag of sherbert lemons to celebrate. Are you coming wi’ us?’

With Thea and Olivia both on their way – if they were fast enough – to spread the news that the war was over, and with Hermione Cumberbatch having declared her
intention of walking into Outhwaite to join her friends at the Methodist chapel, and with Heaton in full control of organizing the bringing up of crates of champagne from the cellars so that
officers and nursing staff could celebrate suitably, Blanche was able to turn her thoughts to the person who mattered most to her in the whole wide world. Gilbert.

She closed her eyes, thanking God that he had survived the war – and that he had survived it with distinction. In the autumn of 1916 he had led his men through the German front-line system
of trenches, during which he had suffered the wound to his arm that had left it virtually useless. Despite being so severely wounded, he had remained in command and had gone on to mount a
successful assault on the second objective, a strongly fortified village. Though wounded twice more, he had held the village throughout the day and the following night, and only when reinforcements
had arrived had he finally left the line, even then having refused to do so before issuing final instructions.

For his gallantry he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order. His citation for the award, published in the
London Gazette
a couple of months later, described the events and
concluded with:
The personality, valour and utter contempt for danger on the part of this Officer enabled the lodgement of the most advanced objective of the Corps to be permanently held, and on
this rallying point the line was eventually formed.

Blanche had snipped the piece out of the paper and had pasted it to the back of the photograph of Gilbert that stood on her writing desk in the private sitting room adjoining her bedroom.

Looking at the photograph now, she thought of the future. It was more than four years since they had all lived together as a family. Thea had been eight, Olivia seven and Violet four when the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo had plunged the world into the most terrible war ever known.

Since then Gilbert had only spent a handful of short, snatched days with their daughters and those days had been nearly always in London, for whenever he had leave he hectically caught up with
as many of his friends in government as he possibly could. It meant he had no real knowledge of the huge changes that the Great War had wrought at Gorton Hall. Thea was now twelve, Olivia was
eleven and Violet was nine. When they had last all been together at Gorton, Thea and Olivia had never left the gardens and parkland unless in the company of Hermione Cumberbatch, Nanny Erskine or
herself. Now, outside the schoolroom and in the company of Hal and Carrie, they ran as wild and free as if they, too, were village children.

It hadn’t seemed to do them any harm, and she doubted if Gilbert would object too strongly to the unusual amount of freedom their children now enjoyed. He had also not objected to her
having employed Charlie Hardwick.

Tenderly she ran the tip of her finger over the silver frame of Gilbert’s photograph. When he came home there would be much more to think about than the sometimes tricky management of her
household staff. Though Gilbert loved Gorton with a deep passion, he had another passion too, and that passion was politics. He had written to her a week after arriving in Flanders:

By Raymond, he had meant Raymond Asquith, whose father, at the time, had been the prime minister. Now David Lloyd George was prime minister, and Raymond, loved by everyone who
knew him, had died in battle two years ago, at Ginchy, on the Somme.

A husband with a political life would mean far more time spent in London. It would also mean resuming the high-society social life they had enjoyed before the war. Blanche’s heart beat a
little faster as she thought of the dinner parties and supper parties – of all kinds of parties – of the theatre and opera. Before the war, balls were commonplace in all the great
London houses. It was at one such ball, at Londonderry House, that she and Gilbert had first met.

Unlike the millions of women who had been widowed, she had a future to look forward to, with a husband she loved with all her heart. Thanking God for her many blessings, she seated herself at
her desk, drew a sheet of pale-blue notepaper towards her and picked up her pen. Her eyes brimming with tears of thankfulness, she wrote:

APRIL 1919

As Hal walked across the yard to where his father’s pigs were penned he could faintly hear the village school bell being rung. It was something he no longer needed to pay
any heed to, for it was April and, ever since his thirteenth birthday in February, his schooldays had been behind him.

He had a heavy bucket of pig swill in either hand and put them down on the ground in order to open the gate of the pen. Though learning had always come easily to him, he hadn’t been sorry
to say goodbye to the long bench seats of the classroom and the slates and chalk – and it wasn’t as if he’d stopped learning, for thanks to Miss Calvert he was now learning in
earnest.

Every weekday evening, after he’d brought the cows in for their milking, he ran over the fields to Outhwaite for one-to-one lessons with Miss Calvert in her pin-neat little terraced home.
She’d wanted him to sit for a grammar-school scholarship, but his dad hadn’t been having any of it. ‘He’s needed on t’ farm,’ he’d said bluntly to her
when, to Hal’s embarrassment, she had come to their farmhouse to speak with him about the scholarship exam. ‘Even if ’e weren’t, no lad o’ mine is going to a grammar
school to ’ave fancy ideas put in ’is ’ead. Folks like us don’t do things like that, and the sooner ’e realizes it, the ’appier we’ll all be.’

Nothing Miss Calvert could say would change his dad’s mind – and as Hal had known it wouldn’t, he was neither surprised nor disappointed. Instead he was determined. Outhwaite
might satisfy Carrie, who wanted nothing more than to be in service at Gorton Hall and to live the rest of her life in the Yorkshire Dales, but ever since he could remember he had known that a life
in Outhwaite – or even in Yorkshire – was never going to be enough to satisfy him.

At the sight of the buckets, the pigs had begun stampeding towards him and he snatched the buckets off the ground, kicked the gate of the pen closed and barrelled a way between them to the
trough.

‘There, you greedy blighters,’ he said, pouring the contents of the buckets into it. ‘Get your mucky snouts into that.’

The pigs did so with gusto as Hal watched them. Miss Calvert was a good teacher, and he was a hard worker. Not being allowed to go to a grammar school wasn’t going to hold him back. In
another few years he wouldn’t be milking cows and feeding pigs. Exactly what he would be doing he didn’t know, but whatever it was would involve being a socialist and fighting to make
the world a different place, one where the divisions of class ceased to exist.

It wasn’t Miss Calvert who had taught him that only via politics could the world be changed. It had been Miss Cumberbatch.

For a long time after he had become friends with Thea and Olivia he had known nothing about Miss Cumberbatch, other than that she was Thea and Olivia’s governess. On the rare occasions he
caught sight of her it was always when she had come into the village to do a little shopping, or to attend church.

He’d thought her an odd-looking woman, tall and thin and raw-boned, her mousy-coloured hair worn in a severe bun. Her nose, as thin as the rest of her face, was abnormally long and Olivia
had told him it twitched whenever she became impassioned about the subject she was teaching – something that Olivia said happened often.

‘She looks like a witch,’ he’d said, and Olivia had giggled and said, ‘She does a little bit and she can be awfully strict, but she’s very fair. I like her, and so
does Thea.’

It was only when Charlie Hardwick had begun working at Gorton and living on the estate that Hal had begun taking real notice of Miss Cumberbatch. He knew, via Thea and Olivia, that the reactions
at Gorton to Lady Fenton’s invitation to Charlie had been extreme.

Miss Cumberbatch’s reaction hadn’t been extreme, though. She had gone out of her way to run into him and to introduce herself to him. ‘According to Charlie, she didn’t
even flinch when she first saw him. She simply told him she was pleased to meet him and that she hoped he would be as happy working at Gorton Hall as she was,’ Olivia had said.

Hal had been impressed at Miss Cumberbatch’s strength.

The pigs had finished jostling each other to get at the food and, with the trough now empty, were barging at him, trying to get their heads into the buckets on the off-chance there was still
something left in them.

He kneed them away, lifting the buckets out of their reach. Not only had Miss Cumberbatch made friends with Charlie herself, but by helping Thea and Olivia to overcome their revulsion at the way
Charlie looked, she had paved the way for them to become friends with him as well. And his own Uncle Jim had also made a difference.

‘You like me well enough, don’t you, Hal?’ he’d said, one arm thrown affectionately around Hal’s shoulder. ‘And you like being wi’ me, don’t
you?’

It had been such a silly question that Hal hadn’t even bothered replying to it.

Understanding the reason why he hadn’t, Jim had said, ‘If I’d ’ad two legs the same length and gone to Flanders, like Charlie did, and if what ’appened to Charlie
’ad ’appened to me, you wouldn’t ’ave stopped wanting to spend time wi’ me, would you? You wouldn’t ’ave let me be all lonesome, would you?’

‘Course I wouldn’t,’ he’d said stoutly.

‘And why is that?’ Jim had asked.

Hal had been flummoxed at first, and then he’d said, ‘Because, though you’d look like a monster, you wouldn’t be, would you? You’d still be Uncle Jim.’

Jim had hugged his shoulder. ‘That’s right, lad. And behind Charlie’s monster-face, Charlie is still Charlie. I’m helping him wi’ his gardening late this afternoon.
Why don’t you come and help the two of us out?’

He had, and it was via Charlie that he’d got to know Miss Cumberbatch – and Miss Cumberbatch had turned out to be a long-distance member of the Women’s International League,
and political to her fingertips.

He shut the pen’s gate behind him, aware that he’d been dawdling and that when he joined his father, who was waiting in the fallow field for help with the ploughing, he’d be
given a clout around the ear.

Carrie was also well on the way to being in trouble that morning, for she should have been on her way to school and instead she was on the doorstep of her granny’s
cottage, staring aghast at Thea, who had bicycled from Gorton to give her some news that wouldn’t wait.