The Black Mountains (37 page)

“No! She can't be!” Ted argued foolishly.

He looked down at her again. Her face was unmarked, except for a small cut on the temple, and she looked more childish and innocent than she had when she was asking him for money. But it was true. She was dead all right. Here, in the brightly lit foyer, there was no mistaking it.

A sudden wave of nausea enveloped him. Gently he laid her down on the floor and stood looking down at her. She was so young, so young, and there had been something so infectious about her—cheeky, irrepressible, bubbling with life although she must have spent too many nights waiting outside pubs for her drunken whore of a mother. And now one bomb dropped by a Zep had snuffed all that out like a candle.

“The murdering bloody swine!” Ted muttered.

“Hey, mate, you'd better sit down.”

To Ted it seemed that the voice came from a long way off. Around him, the brightly lit foyer became a jumble of jarring sounds and disembodied faces—a magic lantern show with each facet reflecting a different, fragmented part of the whole.

Without knowing how he got there, Ted found himself lying on a bed of coats. The throbbing of his leg had increased, and when he glanced down he was surprised to see scarlet flesh beneath torn cloth.

“My best bloody suit!” he muttered foolishly.

Then the foyer seemed to go away from him, and darkness closed in from the edges of his consciousness.

FOR TWO WEEKS Ted was in hospital in London. His legs had been cut by shrapnel and flying glass, and he was suffering from delayed shock. But it was all they could do to keep him there. As he lay immobile, day after day, anger and frustration grew in him, and Jack, who came to London to visit him when the news of what happened was telegraphed to Hillsbridge, was shocked at the change in him.

“He's so bitter,” he said to Charlotte when he got home. “As if he was suddenly all full of hate. And he kept going on and on about a little girl who was killed, as if he couldn't get her off his mind.”

That just about summed it up. Ted's anger had centred around the two main incidents of that day when the bomb had fallen on the Strand—losing Rebecca, and the death of the unknown child. Alfred Church and the Hun seemed like one and the same—The Enemy. And Rebecca and the child—both were helpless victims.

But what could he do about it?

After all his reasoning, the answer came in a flash. He would leave the pits and enlist, and it would be a way of killing two birds with one stone.

On the one hand he would be building a future for Rebecca and himself. He would be out of the mines and the life of bondage to which they sentenced men—and their wives. And when it was all over, there would surely be employers only too willing to give a chance to young men who had done their bit for king and country.

And at the same time he would be able to help avenge the deaths of the beggar child and the seventeen others who had been killed by that one bomb in the Strand. Seeing the war at first hand had made more impression on him than all the talk in the local pub in Hillsbridge, and he was so angry at the brutal waste that, next to finding Rebecca, he was determined to seek his revenge on the faceless Hun.

Fate was a strange thing, he thought. If the bomb had dropped ten minutes earlier, he would have been in the pub bar, and he would probably have died over the remains of his steak, kidney and oyster pudding. But he had not died. He was alive. And he was young and strong, and when his legs were healed, he'd be fit too.

And so, two weeks later, when he climbed out of the train at Bath, he went off to find a recruiting office and enlist with the Somersets. Perhaps he was no closer to finding Rebecca, but he believed, fervently, it was the best thing he could do.

Ted was not the only Hillsbridge boy to enlist that October. When he came home and the news spread along the rank, Redvers Brixey decided to do the same.

Mrs Brixey was as distraught as Charlotte.

“I'd go and fight the Kaiser myself if I thought I could keep him out of it!” she said.

But the boys had signed on, and that was it. Within a matter of days, they had left for Salisbury Plain, the camp where Fred had done his training, and there were two more empty places at the dinner tables in the rank.

“I can't get used to having to do so few vegetables,” Charlotte said to James one morning as she peeled potatoes in the scullery. “I keep filling the saucepan up and then remembering it's only you and me and Harry to eat them.”

“Well, I shan't want many, anyway,” James told her.

November had arrived, dank and chill, with cold, gusting winds and rain that washed rivers of coal-dust along the gutters. James had been obliged to stay off work for over a week now due to a bad chest cold.

Charlotte cast a quick, worried glance in his direction. He
wasn't
eating as well as he used to, hadn't for weeks now, but she supposed that was hardly to be wondered at.

She knew that, as well as being ill, he also missed the boys. He didn't say much, that wasn't his way, but they'd been with him in the pits for so long now it was bound to be strange without them. There was still Jim, of course, but he was a getter in his own right, and more often than not was working in a different seam. And when he'd finished his day's shift, he was always in a hurry to get home to Sarah and the children.

“It was all over that girl, you know,” she suddenly said to James, as if stating a new fact. “From the first time I saw them together, I knew no good would come of it.”

James nodded, saying nothing, and she went on. “ He took it too serious, that's the trouble. Now if only he could be a bit more like our Dolly …”

Dolly had another boyfriend, a nephew of Cook's, who was in the Marines and had come to visit her while home on leave. But although he had been all for getting engaged before he went back to the war, Dolly had refused to be tied down.

“Amy said he begged and begged her,” Charlotte said. “ But you know our Dolly. She won't be hurried. And I think she learned her lesson over that Evan Comer business, though she's still got him on her mind, I know. She saw him in town the other day, on his crutches, and it quite upset her.”

“That girl will go all around the orchard and finish up picking a crab-apple,” James said sagely. “ Just see if I'm not right.”

“Crab-apple—that reminds me!” Charlotte carried the pot of potatoes into the kitchen and set it down on the hob. “ I promised Amy I'd get her some new ribbons to go on her petticoat.”

“What have petticoats got to do with crab-apples?” James asked, puzzled.

“Nothing,” Charlotte replied. “It just reminded me, that's all. Amy's petticoat is muslin, and you use muslin to strain the fruit when you're making apple jelly. Now, I wonder. Have I got time to run down to Fords before we have dinner? It's Amy's half-day, and she might come down this afternoon to see if I've got it.”

“If it's her half-day, why doesn't she do her own shopping?” James grumbled.

“Because it's Wednesday, early closing,” Charlotte said. “ Now, if I put the potatoes on, you could watch them for me, couldn't you?”

“I could, but I don't see it's necessary for you to run about after her.”

Charlotte did not reply. She did not want to have to explain that with the boys away in France, she felt she wanted to do all she could for the children who were still with her. She had thought a lot about them all lately, wishing she had had more time to spend with each of them. But there had been too many of them, too close, and she had always been kept so busy. And now they were grown up, all but Harry, and it was too late.

She put on her coat and hat and went out. Charlie Durrant was just crossing the yard to the privy, reading the pieces of torn-up newspaper that he was taking with him to go on the wire behind the door, and she thought what a shrunken old man he had become since he had retired in the summer. They passed the time of day, and she hurried on.

In the hill, she saw Edgar Hawker, the telegram boy, pushing his bicycle as he climbed the steepest part of the hill, and her heart began to thud with sick dread. She'd always had this awful feeling when she saw a telegram boy—they so often-brought bad news—and since Fred had been at the Front it was a hundred times worse. But Edgar passed her without comment, and as she turned to watch him, he went through the gateway of one of the cottages in the hill.

Charlotte heaved an audible sigh of relief and went on. The town was quiet this morning. As she passed the Rectory gates, she saw Caroline Archer going up the drive, and smiled to herself. She still wasn't leaving the new Rector alone, then. But at least Charlotte felt she had little to fear from her these days.

Up the hill to the drapers she went, pushing open the door and making the bell jangle.

The girl assistant who served her was dark and pretty, but Charlotte could not help noticing the curious looks the girl gave her as she measured and cut the lengths of ribbon, and when Charlotte got out her purse to pay, she said in a low, hurried voice, “I am right, aren't I? You are Ted Hall's mother?”

Charlotte's eyes narrowed. “ Yes. Why?”

“Because … oh, look, my name's Marjorie Downs. I live next door to Becky Church, or next door to her mother and father, anyway. Becky's not there any more. But I've found out where she is now, and I promised Ted I'd …”

“Ted's enlisted in the army,” Charlotte said shortly. “He's in training on Salisbury Plain.”

“Yes, but you must write to him. Couldn't you just pass on an address?” Marjorie said urgently. “ I was going to send the message to you by Rosa Clements, the servant. But somehow I don't quite trust her. And it's very important to Becky—and Ted.”

Charlotte hesitated. From the moment Marjorie had introduced herself, she knew what was coming and wished she could have avoided it. With a gut instinct she knew Rebecca could never make Ted happy, and she thought that the sooner he forgot her the better. But now the matter had been raised again. If she refused to pass on a message, Ted would never forgive her.

“All right. Tell me what it is and I'll put it in my next letter,” she said.

With a quick look towards the millinery room, Marjorie wrote on the bill pad and passed it to Charlotte, who glanced at it while the young girl finished folding the ribbon.

“Wycherley Grange, Wycherley.”

“Where's that?” Charlotte asked.

“Oxfordshire. Didn't I put it?”

“No, but it doesn't matter. I will,” Charlotte said.

And taking the ribbons and the address, she left the shop.

TO TED and Redvers, it seemed that it had rained ever since they arrived at the camp on Salisbury Plain. Everything was grey, from the heavy skies merging on the horizon into the misty hilltops to the hastily erected hutments and tents. Underfoot was mud and sodden, squelchy turf, and even the sheets on the narrow camp beds felt clammy and damp. Ted and Redvers, billeted in one of the hutments, were lucky. The men in the tents were much worse off. The large bells were on the side of the hill, and when it rained really hard the water ran in one side and out the other.

But the sergeant-major made no allowances. He drilled them relentlessly, and when the rain dripped down his neck, or his socks were damp, he only shouted at them the louder, marching them up and down the flat valley floor until their legs ached and they thought their gun-carrying arm would drop off.

It was not all drill, of course. There was shooting out at the rifle ranges, and bayonet drill, and bomb-throwing practice which took place in an isolated spot some three miles away from the camp. The boys enjoyed that. There was something satisfying about hurling a missile and seeing it explode in a cloud of smoke. But when the weather was especially bad, three miles was a long way to march. And that particular November afternoon, when they got back from bomb-throwing, they were all exhausted and soaked to the skin.

“Why did I let you tall me into this?” Redvers asked Ted as they towelled life back into their numb bodies. “I must have been off my trolley.”

“I didn't talk you into anything,” Ted retorted. He sounded snappish because there was clean underwear to be put on, and he hated the scratchy tightness of it, and knew he'd be itching all night.

“Cheer up, lads, here comes t' mail!” Wally Gifford, a taciturn Geordie who shared their billet, announced.

“Shut up, Gifford, you've no business here anyway,” Redvers chided him good-naturedly, and Wally laughed.

“You're right enough there, lad,” he agreed in his flat tones. He had thought he had joined one of the northern regiments, and it was still a mystery to him how he had come to find himself in the Somersets.

The mail was distributed, and they all fell upon it eagerly. But Ted, seeing his letter was from Charlotte, left it on his bunk until he was properly dressed. He was as keen to get a letter from home as anyone, but Charlotte wrote regularly, and he thought the gossip from the rank and the tales of Harry's latest pranks could wait until he was warm and dry.

At last, shivering in his tight undershirt, he sat down on his bunk and slit open the envelope. It was as he had thought—all the usual family gossip. But at the bottom of the second page, almost reluctantly, Charlotte had added a postscript.

I saw Rebecca's friend Marjorie today, and she told me Rebecca is now at Wycherley Grange, Wycherley, Oxon. But according to Marjorie, things are as difficult as ever, so what you do is up to you.

For a moment he stared at it, almost unable to believe his eyes, then he let out a whoop that made the others turn to look at him.

“Wha's up wi' you, lad?” Wally asked, unsmiling, and Ted could have bitten off his tongue.

“Oh, nothing, just a girl I thought I'd lost contact with,” he said, but it was too late to cover up the way he felt, and besides, Redvers knew all about Rebecca.