In Distant Fields (55 page)

‘Come for a walk, Kitty, please?'

‘Harry …' Kitty protested feebly, looking back at the house where she knew Partita would be watching them. ‘Of course I can't come for a walk. Besides, I have work to do. I can't just drop everything. You really are impossible sometimes.'

‘Of course I'm impossible. Would I be Harry if I was possible? Besides, have I asked you to drop everything just because I'm here? Do you even know it was you I came to see? I might have come to see my father – or the Duchess. Or Partita – or even Percy, our magnificent peacock here. Don't jump to conclusions, Miss Rolfe – won't do you no good, not never.'

‘Stop putting on silly voices, Harry,' Kitty chided him, finding herself becoming quite flustered. ‘And tell me what you want exactly?'

‘How do you know I want anything, Miss Rolfe?'

‘Because I can tell by the expression on your face – and stop calling me Miss Rolfe.'

‘Yes, miss.'

‘Harry …'

But it was no good – as always the particular expression now on Harry's face made her start to laugh and once she began to laugh she knew she was undone.

‘Fine,' he said, taking her by the arm and
walking her back towards the house. ‘What I want is a multitude of things but I don't think we have the time to discuss them all – except the most pressing of them, and that is to find out if you will come out with me tonight? I only have a forty-eight-hour pass, and lucky beyond belief to get that.'

‘Come out with you?' Kitty echoed, putting a hand automatically to her neck. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Oh, surely you know what going out with someone entails, Kitty? We get all dressed up to the nines and—'

‘I don't understand, Harry. I don't understand why you – why do you want to take me out?'

Harry didn't bother with an answer. He simply raised his eyes to the heavens and laughed.

‘Harry …'

‘Father suggested – there is some sort of hop this evening at The Wycombe,' he said. ‘The hotel on the road into town? I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I went dancing. I would
love
to go dancing. And most – most of all – I would
love
to go dancing
with you
.'

‘Should I?' she asked Partita later that morning when they had a break from their work. ‘I'm not sure whether I should go dancing. It really does not seem at all seemly, at this time. I'm really not sure I should go, Tita.'

‘If you think it's unseemly then you must go. No fun in doing anything seemly, surely?'

‘You're as bad as Harry.'

‘Come along – if it's a lesson in protocol you want, then we'd better consult the oracle. We had better speak to Mamma.'

But the Duchess was quite adamant.

‘Of course you must go. You can't be hidebound by the latest news, my dear, you know you can't. You're a young woman, you must go dancing.'

Kitty shook her head. ‘It really doesn't seem right.'

Circe stood up and went to Kitty, taking her hands in her own. ‘Kitty, what is right during a time of war? A war that has taken so many, that is not right. You must have some gaiety in your life. You can't become an old maid because Almeric was killed. Truly, you can't.'

‘Even so …' Kitty dropped her eyes.

‘Almeric loved Harry, Kitty, you know that.' The Duchess touched Kitty briefly on the cheek. ‘He loved you. Most of all he loved fun. Off you go.'

Partita helped Kitty get dressed for the evening, just as they both always used to when Kitty first came to stay at Bauders, fussing round her as if she was a mother sending Kitty, her favourite daughter, out on a date, while Bridie stood back to sigh, cluck or admire, depending. If they made Kitty change her dress once, they must have made her change half a dozen times until finally, in a state of mock exhaustion, Partita declared Kitty ready, while Bridie sat down fanning herself with a hand mirror.

‘Sure you will pass the mustard always providing you doesn't go fiddling with your hair. Oh, how me poor old feet are killing me.'

‘I didn't ask you to help me, Bridie. You volunteered.'

‘And sure wasn't I born with me arm stuck up in the air? Don't worry, Miss Kitty – I'll call in the favour when I gets married. You can help me get dressed.'

‘Of course I will.'

‘Me, too,' said Partita. ‘We can get our own back for all the sighs and groans we've had to put up with from you.'

‘Any news on that front, Bridie?' Kitty wondered, taking one last look in the glass. ‘How is Tully?'

‘Ah, he's going to be fine, thank you, Miss Kitty. ‘The wonder is he got off so lightly. I mean ‘twas dreadful, the Lord only knows, but when you think … No, he's going to be just fine and dandy, and God and everyone willing, we'll be wedded as soon as we can.'

‘Wed, Bridie,' Partita corrected her. ‘You will be wed as soon as possible.'

‘Not me, Lady Partita.' Bridie raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘Me, I intend to be well and truly wedded.'

‘You won't guess who I'm working for, Kitty,' Harry remarked as he drove them to the hotel. ‘Not for all the tea in China.'

‘Dr Charles,' Kitty promptly replied, taking the
wind clean out of his sails. ‘Dr Richard Charles, to be precise. And if you're wondering how on earth I know – my mother mentioned it in her last letter.'

‘Don't you think that's amazing?'

‘Astonishing, to say the least,' Kitty agreed.

‘Yet you didn't mention it?'

‘I wanted to win all that tea.'

‘He's a fine doctor and a brave man. No one to touch him, not in my book.'

‘Really?' Kitty stared out of the window at the passing countryside. ‘I don't know very much about him, other than the fact that he was in general practice and my mother ran off with him.'

‘Your mother – your mother ran off with him?'

‘Yes. I really could not blame her, although it was something of a shock at the time. My father – my father is completely horrid, you know. Although I believe he has been trying to make amends in the trenches. His men love him, apparently. Which is just as well, because very few other people could. And it all goes to show something good can come out of something – or in his case
someone
– so terrible.'

‘You would admire Dr Charles. He's become a brilliant surgeon. Like so many thrown into the work, he has proved himself to be quite extraordinary. He could operate not just under fire, but with shells exploding round him, and not make a mistake.'

Kitty was silent. Her mother and Dr Charles
was still not a subject that she enjoyed either to think about or talk about.

‘It's all in the past Harry.'

Harry pulled on the brake.

‘Good. In that case let's not talk about it any more,' he agreed. ‘Let's just have what we haven't had for centuries – fun.'

The hotel ballroom was crowded but the band good, playing all the latest music including a selection from the latest hit musical in London,
Chu Chin Chow
.

Harry and Kitty danced and they talked; they talked while they danced and they danced while they talked. In the end they just danced, and the slower the music got and the more they danced, the more they both knew where the dancing and the talking was leading them.

As Harry drove them back to Bauders he started to wonder if he had forgotten how to kiss a girl, but as soon as he started to kiss Kitty, he realised that he hadn't forgotten at all but, more than that, he had never kissed a girl the way he was kissing Kitty, nor had he been kissed the way Kitty kissed him.

The parkland was lit by a full moon, there was an owl calling somewhere in the distance, and then as they began to walk back towards the house in the small woodland close a nightingale sang a heavenly song.

‘You see,' Harry said
sotto voce
, as they listened. ‘It's so beautiful it's almost unbearable. You could
almost wish him to stop, to put you out of your sublime agony.' He turned to Kitty. ‘You feel the same.'

Kitty felt quite the same. More than that, for the first time in her life she felt at peace, knowing that, in some strange way, not only had Harry come home, but so had she.

At last the ones who were destined to come home had come home, while those who had fallen had to be left where they had fallen, so many were they. Finally Gus came home, as his mother knew that he would.

All the young went to greet him at the station, Jossy driving ahead with Trotty pulling the trap, and the rest piling into whatever they could find. Once back at the castle gates, the pony was taken from the shafts, and everyone pulled the trap up to the castle doors where his father and mother were waiting to greet him.

James was long home, recovered from his ordeal and nursed to health by Allegra, to whom he was now married. Valentine – the dark horse of them all – had also returned, quietly and without fanfare, reunited with Livia. Dr Charles was home, his war done and the VC and bar he was awarded for showing exceptional courage in the treatment of the wounded under fire was put
modestly away in his desk drawer, never to be again referred to either by himself or Violet.

Tully was home to Bauders, healthy and fit once more, and looking forward to marrying Bridie, when they had saved up enough money for some furniture, both of them determined to stay working at Bauders.

Pug was home to Elizabeth, minus an eye, lost in one of what he was in the habit of referring to as ‘mes skirmishes petites, my deahs'. Pug, having been filled with a glass eye, happily revived the use of his long-abandoned monocle, which he allowed to drop from his glass eye whenever registering shock, horror or dismay.

‘And even Scrap has survived!' he wrote to a friend. ‘Bit greyer, bit wiser, but still with us.'

Finally, too, Peregrine came home, released at last from his captivity, even leaner than when he had left but, in Partita's eyes, still as elegant, and a great deal more handsome, if that were possible.

‘I so very nearly made it,' he told the welcoming party at Bauders. ‘So nearly made it. There we were in a heavy mining area and making my way, because I speak fluent French and luckily Jerry couldn't really distinguish between a Belgian accent and a French one, I so nearly made it. Then as I was sitting in a bar actually in the port where I was to get on this cargo boat, I allowed myself to have a large brandy. And while I was drinking it, I dropped my matches just as a German officer was walking
by. He very kindly handed them back to me, and I thanked him. In English – whereupon he invited me to journey with him to a really rather flea-bitten sort of prison camp, from which I was then transferred to an officer camp in a very draughty
Schloss
– which I duly survived, as you can see – thanks to your unending stream of parcels.'

‘Thank heavens for Nestles milk, butter and Cadbury's chocolate.'

‘Thank heavens to each of you, to all of you, for your letters. Letters are what kept us all going, right the way through – even Mamma's!' He turned to Partita. ‘Come on, Mischief, time I took you for a walk.'

Just as Kitty and Harry had done, the two of them walked, at first in silence through the castle grounds, until eventually Peregrine turned to Partita.

‘I meant what I said about letters, Mischief, especially your letters.' Tie stopped and looked at her for the first time in her life with real love. ‘You are so like your letters, you know, or rather your letters are so like you. But not the child I once knew, the grown-up woman.'

Partita looked away. ‘I hope I'm not
that
grown up, Perry. I hope Mischief is still around somewhere, although I do admit I have a hard time trying to find her sometimes. All the gaiety goes out of one when one sees so much suffering. You don't mean it to, but it does.'

‘We are bound to have changed, but perhaps
in some strange way, we have changed for the better? Perhaps that is what heartbreak is all about? Getting better, becoming more as we should be as a result, more caring, more loving?'

Partita shook her head, all impatience once more. ‘No, I don't believe that, not for a single second. That is just something that happens by accident. It's not something that
should
happen. No war should happen, especially not a war like this war. No, not ever, never should a war like this war ever happen again. What a bunch of fools we have been led by, and we can't even bring our boys home. Almeric, think of Almeric, Perry, he has to stay out there, all alone. Not a day goes by when I don't think of that.'

No one was more aware of this fact than Miss Gertrude Jekyll and her partner, Mr Ned Lutyens, so that even as Peregrine consoled Partita, and very eventually, she allowed him to take her in his arms and console her as a lover does best, the designer and architect were thinking of how best to treat the boys who had to stay out there, who would never return. It was a question that concerned them both deeply.

However many had returned, against all the odds, there was still one person who had not – Jossy's youngest boy, Ben – and nor was there any news of him.

They knew he was safe, of course – that at least was known – but they had no idea when he was due to arrive nor why he had been so delayed,
and nothing anyone could do helped to unravel the mystery.

The war had ended with the Armistice signed on 11 November, yet they were still waiting, until one fine, crisp December morning they had the call.

It was midday when the telephone rang with the last of the good news to be relayed to Bauders.

‘My dear, Jossy's Ben is home at last.' The Duke walked into the library unannounced to find Circe.

‘Ben is home? Oh, John, that is fine, so fine.'

‘We will all go to meet him, I think, we will all go. After all, he is the last to come back, and that is not nothing, is it, Circe?'