The Gates of Rutherford (3 page)

“At home,” she told him. “Preparing to go to France.”

“What for?” William felt furiously irritated that she referred to the little Chelsea love nest as “home.”

She gave him an indulgent smile. “You know full well,” she said. “America is coming to the war. He is going to Arras. The push that's going on. So that he can report back to his New York newspaper. ‘In the teeth of battle, the true picture of war, how we are needed' . . . all that.” Her voice had traces of sarcasm and anxiety. “He says he will try to find Harry to speak to him.”

At the mention of his son's name, William searched her face. “Have you heard from him?”

“Not a word this week.”

“Nor I.”

“John says that pilots must be trained in the States. He wonders if Harry might be sent there. As an instructor.”

“To America?”

“It would keep him out of France, at least.”

“It is a possibility, I suppose. If they come in.”

“John doesn't doubt it.”

William was not interested in what Gould thought.

Together, he and Octavia surveyed the garden in silence, watching as more petals drifted from the trees and lay discolored on the ground.

•   •   •

H
undreds of miles away in France, Harry Cavendish had been thinking of Rutherford early that morning.

When he was a little boy, he had used to wander the great house at night. He doubted very much that his parents had ever known. In the
dark now, staring at the sky just before dawn, he tried to remember how far he had gone along the winding stairs that led down to the kitchens, or along the gallery outside the upper bedrooms, or up the forbidden narrow steps to the roof. He must have been seven or eight when he had first discovered the way out onto the lead-covered valleys between the Tudor chimneys, and seen the rolling vastness of the Yorkshire Dales spread out, pinpricked with occasional lights, below him.

Sometimes he would wake in the morning and it would be hard to guess whether those discoveries had been real or only a dream. Even then, as a small child, he was intrigued by height, and a desire to fly. To stand at the edge of the roof and launch himself outwards and feel the air rushing underneath him.

It had been another dozen years before that fascination became a reality.

He was watching the airfield now, a beaten expanse of mud that had once been grass, just behind the town of Arras. His little sister was getting married today, he thought. Charlotte, the last person on earth whom he ever imagined to be shackled to a man and give up what poor rights she had. Still . . . if it was what she wanted, who was he to criticize her? He had met Michael only once, and although the former soldier was now permanently robbed of his sight, he seemed a determined sort of chap.

Even so. Charlotte a wife. Harry looked at the first streaks of dawn in the sky, a few short lighter glimpses among the clouds heavy with snow. Seventh of April, 1917. Just north of here was cider country, fields of apple trees. Somewhere beneath him, going east, he knew that the chalky earth was being tunneled; New Zealand and English engineers burrowing among the networks of underground quarries, the
boves
of the French. Beyond them was Vimy Ridge, where bombardment had started in the last ten days of March.

You wouldn't know it now. All was silent; whatever activity was
out there—and there was plenty—was smothered in the dark hours and by the threatening weather.

But God, his body ached. He shifted marginally from foot to foot, feeling the jarring in his joints. His knees grated as if bone skated over bone. It was two years since he had been shot down, danced along the ground in a shattering kite, rolled along the edge of a trench, and stood up somehow, yelling at the Northumbrians who came to carry him out.

Two years since he had met Caitlin. Two years since the series of operations in England. And, like a sickening addict, he had only thought of being back here and flying again. Having another chance at the Boche, skimming his old Farman over the flattened landscape.

Harry sighed, looking backwards and forwards along the line of silent planes—those flimsy-seeming craft. The waiting was the worst; he felt it now in the seemingly two-dimensional shapes of the planes, their silhouettes populated by ghosts. Harry watched the young recruits go up—they would be out as soon as they arrived—and he would try to ignore their youth and their enthusiasm. He trained them as best he could. But he would give them few words, because his words were all saved for the letters he would have to write later in the day. Fifty percent were dead within forty-eight hours of taking their first kite to the skies.

He had spent last night trying to compose something different to the parents of the man who had crashed behind enemy lines yesterday.
“A fine fellow of utmost bravery. . . .”
Had he said that last week or yesterday? Or the day before? A fine fellow indeed. Whoever he was. They all seemed the same to him . . . interchangeable characters. All about twenty, square-shouldered, the captain of the cricket team, the kind of good egg all-rounder beloved of his school. A school that he had left not so long ago. The description might fit any or all of them. Fine chaps indeed, but Harry had struggled to remember this
particular recruit exactly. Had he been the one from St. Albans or Edgeworth? Haringey or Twickenham? Carlisle or Cardiff? He hadn't been able to recall him. There were just too many molded in the same form, sprung from the same background, trudging through his mind waving their grinning and youthful good-byes.

And now would come Arras.

The word was that dominance in the air was vital for reconnaissance in this battle. More important than it had ever been, to accent the element of surprise. They simply had to get up there and go deeper than they had ever anticipated, drawing out the tumble of scribbled lines below them until it all made sense, and one could verify the lines of communication and support. They had to fly low and they had to fly slow to get as much information as they could. It was bloody dangerous, as his list of letters continually proved.

But last month something very odd had happened.

Harry was used to the Luftstreitkräfte—after all, why wouldn't he be after his weeks of flying last year, and his months of observing this year?—and he thought that he recognized them almost by instinct. Thought he could sense them in the sky, feel the malignity of all of them, German and British alike, feel their dribble of decay, of fumes, of smoke and fuel, of manic obsession, of curdling courage left in the sky like streamers. He thought he knew that even better than he knew their actual shape and size or coloring—or the black and white crosses on the bodies and the tails. But he didn't know the red plane above Arras that so many now had reported in the dogfights. Manic indeed, and deadly.

Some of the recruits called it a flying circus. The maneuvers were so deliberately scheduled, like a dance. Trained like performing animals. Jumping to the crack of a whip. Snapping their spines in unnatural arches and dives. Caged and uncaged birds. Beasts of the air. Broken birds on the ground. Wings and talons.

He laughed momentarily at himself. Was he asleep, dreaming? Such bizarre pictures he had in his mind.

He looked down at his feet to steady himself, to bring himself literally back to the ground and reality. One leg was foreshortened by his injuries. They had taken away some sort of ligament and a shattered bone—he had never asked, he hated the details. His mother had fussed over him so, and for most of his recovery he had wished Caitlin back by his side. With her nursing training she was routinely expressionless and calm, giving him her sweet smile only when it truly counted. He knew that it continued to be hell for her in the hospital trains and the first aid stations, and so he supposed his minor wounds—the breaking of both legs, the endless surgeries afterwards—did not move her so much as it moved his mother and sisters.

He missed Caitlin greatly. He had not heard from her in six weeks. Louisa had written to him that she was expected as a guest at Charlotte's wedding, and he was acutely jealous. She could go to see Charlotte and the rest of his family, but she was not allowed to come and see him. That was accepted; that was all right. But to not write to him was a mystery. She had written to accept her wedding invitation, so putting pen to paper was not beyond her.

He stopped this line of thinking, noticing the bitterness in his mind. He must not blame Caitlin. In her work, she was under tremendous stress. More so even than himself. It was very good of her to make time to attend the wedding. But God . . . how he wished that it had been
their
wedding. He would make her his own, he decided. He would stop this sense of loss and prevarication once and for all. She confused and preoccupied him so much; she kept her thoughts to herself. He did not know how to read her; he only knew how much he wanted to be with her.

He glanced at his watch; tried to make out the time in the grey dawn light. Five forty. He shivered involuntarily. One was always
waiting these days. For the dawn to come, for orders. For scrambles up and setting down. For the onward-rushing flights, for the scream of the artillery. And for it all to stop. Time was full of strange beginnings and endings.

He had a strange notion suddenly then that it was, indeed, all over. That the end had finally come, and that the grass had grown again over the fields, blotting out the trenches, leaving only the merest shadowed scribble in the contours. That the troop stations were all closed, and the railway had returned to the sleepy lines in the countryside that they had once been, threading between villages, traveling slowly between the orchards and houses and chugging slowly over the bridges on the rivers. Time had pulled a merciful blanket over the misery.

And that he was standing here at the very edge of time itself, propped against the frame of a door, looking out into the murk and wondering what it was that would soon meet him. Perhaps, he thought, it was true. It would be true one day, after all. And that he stood here unknowingly, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow invisible to all but himself. He thought that he was long dead, and all the planes had gone, and nothing moved at all over the earth but the cool, dark wind.

He abruptly stood straight and shook himself free of the feeling. “Enough,” he hissed to himself.

He lit a cigarette, and tried not to think at all.

•   •   •

A
t the Ritz it was the middle of the afternoon, and Charlotte was alone in an upper room, pulling off the veil, the dress, and the white satin shoes.

On the bed lay the clothes she had chosen for her going-away: a long hemp skirt that finished an inch or two above the ankles, a white
blouse, and a dark blue jacket. Dressed only in her underthings, she surveyed the pile and the suitcase that lay on the floor alongside. Her mother had insisted on buying her a trousseau. “Not of the old-fashioned kind,” Octavia had told her. “But just a few little delicates, darling. A nightdress, petticoats, stockings. They're lovely . . . look. Nice lawn and fine cotton. Irish linen. Don't you like them?”

She had shown them to Charlotte a month ago, and Charlotte had been painfully aware of how much Octavia had restrained a natural instinct to indulge her own fashionable impulses. If it had been completely up to her mother, the trousseau would have been an avalanche of lace and silk. “It's all very utilitarian,” Octavia had said, seeing her daughter's hesitation. “Nothing outrageous. I know you shouldn't feel comfortable in anything like that.”

Charlotte had relented, seeing how much Octavia wanted to please her, and she had wrapped her arms around her mother, laid her head on her shoulder, and thanked her. “It's very beautiful,” she had murmured.

She looked at herself in the cheval mirror now: rather awkward, very slight. Her shingled hair stuck out at odd angles. She took up a brush from the dressing table and began brushing vigorously, the bristles prickling her scalp. Octavia had wanted to bring her own maid to attend to Charlotte, but there the line had been firmly drawn. “Mother, it is 1917,” Charlotte had told her sternly. “It's nonsense to be gussied up by a maid. I don't need it. I'm certain that I can dress my own hair.”

But the more she stayed alone in the room, the worse things became. She couldn't fasten the skirt properly; the blouse was too voluminous. At last, not knowing what was the matter with her, and realizing that sooner or later Octavia would indeed come up to see to her, Charlotte slumped down on the bed and wept. “Mother,” she murmured, and then kicked the suitcase in frustration and fury.

There was a sudden knocking at the door.

Charlotte froze, hastily rubbing away a tear. “Who is it?”

The door opened a tiny crack, and a wide, smiling face looked in at her. “It's me, pumpkin.”

“Oh, Christine! Well, you might as well come in.”

“Might I? It looks a perfect cavern of destruction. What a mess you've made of a decent room.” And, laughing, Christine Nesbitt came into the bedroom. She was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses. “What's the matter?” she asked. “You've not been weeping?” She walked over to the bed. “If you have, I shouldn't blame you,” she commented blithely. “Here, have a drink. You'll feel so much better.”

She poured the wine, and sat down next to Charlotte. “Bottoms up. Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged wimmin.”

Charlotte stared at her, then, despite herself, burst out laughing.

“That's better,” Christine said. “Here's another one. May you be in a heaven an hour before the Devil knows you're dead.”

“Amen.”

They drank.

Charlotte had known Christine for six months. All those weeks ago, on one of her three volunteer days at St. Dunstan's Hospital, Charlotte had spotted a slight figure—she'd really thought that it was a boy at first—perched on a bench in the park, engaged in what looked like very earnest conversation with a Navy man who had recently arrived.