The Summer Before the War (41 page)

“That poor, poor girl,” said Minnie Buttles.

“So regrettable. Such a lovely girl,” said Mrs. Fothergill. “But this is a respectable town, and something must be done, ladies. Mrs. Turber has expressed to me, with the utmost discretion, that she would like her out of the house in a week.”

“I will not have her thrown in the street,” said Beatrice.

“You don't have a choice, my dear,” said Mrs. Fothergill. “The school governors are looking askance at the continuation of your arrangement. Your employment is to be discussed at the very next meeting.” She fanned her face with her handkerchief and added, “I can only imagine what Lady Marbely might say on the matter.”

“It was not her fault,” said Minnie.

“Is this not the cause for which our armies entered Belgium?” asked Alice Finch. “To avenge such outrages?”

“We do not shrink from our larger duty,” said Mrs. Fothergill. “But it is impossible that in her condition the girl should continue to be received in our drawing rooms.”

“Will you not speak for me, Mrs. Kent?” asked Beatrice. She could not manage a voice above a hoarse whisper. Her horror at the crudeness of the conversation was compounded by the shame of being afraid for her own position.

“I could not imagine until now that England might fall,” said Alice Finch, leaping to her feet. “But what is England if you will not stand and protect one innocent girl from the wounds of tyranny?”

“Some people's social eccentricities have received more protection in this town than they have any right to expect, Miss Finch,” said Mrs. Fothergill, her face gleaming with triumph at Agatha's silent acquiescence. “Perhaps you would care to take her in?”

“It would put my father, the Vicar, in a very strange position,” said Minnie as Alice sat down again abruptly and glared. “But we will try if no other home can be found. Perhaps Mrs. Kent can take her?”

Agatha shook her head.

“Were she one of our peasant refugees, we might certainly overlook the situation,” said Lady Emily. “But she and her father dine in our homes and she mixes with our own daughters. I must agree with Mrs. Fothergill that to simply move her to another home will not solve the problem.”

“Mrs. Kent has attempted to hide this disgraceful situation from us for days,” said Bettina Fothergill, her eyes glittering with pleasure. “We could not count on her to confine the girl in an appropriate manner.”

“Where is she to go?” asked Beatrice, her sick feeling of shame challenged by a small flame of anger. “She has already been driven from her home. She is among strangers here. Having suffered so much, is she really to suffer again at our hands?”

“In a new place no one would know her history,” said Agatha, speaking at last. “It might be for the best for both Celeste and her father to make a fresh start.”

“It would have to be sufficiently far and secret,” said Lady Emily.

“Beyond the reach of less scrupulous persons who might be tempted to forward their gossip,” said Alice Finch, glaring at Bettina Fothergill, who only nodded vigorously in agreement.

“Mr. Tillingham is well connected to the national refugee committee,” said Lady Emily. “I am sure he can help arrange for our guests to be accommodated through some other committee.”

“A shame for the poor, dear Professor,” added Mrs. Fothergill. “Such a learned man does not deserve such troubles.”

“Who is to talk to Mr. Tillingham?” asked Minnie. “I should die of embarrassment to speak of it.”

“Mrs. Kent is our finest diplomatic voice,” said Alice Finch.

“I believe Mrs. Kent may prefer to do the honorable thing and resign from our little committee,” said Bettina Fothergill, and now she adopted a casual tone as if it were all one to her. “If so, she would not speak for us.”

There was silence around the table. As Lady Emily contemplated her own gloved hands, Mrs. Fothergill smirked. Beatrice thought she looked like a house cat whose mouth is stuffed with a child's pet parakeet. At last Agatha spoke, addressing Lady Emily directly.

“You will have my letter of resignation tomorrow,” she said. “Mrs. Fothergill may speak for you instead of me.”

Lady Emily nodded but did not speak.

“It would be bad for the image of our town should it become known in certain circles that the Mayor and I have any hand in such a removal,” said Mrs. Fothergill, flustered. “If Bexhill got hold of it…”

“I'll talk to Tillingham,” said Alice Finch. “I'll tell him what you propose, but I shan't pretend to agree with it.”

“I see Mr. Tillingham coming down the garden,” said Lady Emily. “Let us adjourn now and leave Miss Finch to her unpleasant duty.”

“Just advise him of the urgency and the need for complete discretion,” said Mrs. Fothergill. “They must be quietly gone in a week.”

As the meeting dispersed, Agatha hurried away without speaking to anyone. To see such a formidable force in defeat left Beatrice weak and nauseous, and for a moment she felt as if the rock on which the town was built, rising so immutable from the sandy soil of the marshes, might itself crack and shift beneath her feet.

Two days later, Beatrice came home from school to find her little parlor full of nuns. Abigail was bringing them more hot water for their tea, and Mrs. Turber, hovering in the passage, drew Beatrice aside to say, “They've had two plates of bread and butter and an entire seed cake. So much for a life of poverty and contemplation.”

“What are they doing here?” asked Beatrice. She and Celeste had visited the three nuns at their lodgings to bring them small supplies and to offer translations for their hostesses, the Misses Porter. But Beatrice had not thought to ask them to tea, and they had never called. Celeste was behind the tea tray, offering cups, but she was so pale and unhappy that it seemed no spiritual cheering up was being accomplished by the visit.

“Her father brought them, and then, quick as you like, he went away,” said Mrs. Turber. “Such a wonderful man; I feel so bad for him.”

“If only his daughter was not ordered from her home,” said Beatrice, “he would be much less to be pitied.”

“It's a terrible shame,” said Mrs. Turber. “Of course, if it was just my reputation I would keep her…” This was such an outrageous untruth that Beatrice was forced to pause and admire Mrs. Turber as one might admire an artist's brushstroke while despising the picture.

“I shall go in and join them,” said Beatrice. “Please ask Abigail to bring me a cup.”

After some talk it became clear that the nuns were to travel north in a few days to join a group of their order who had been invited to take over part of a large convent. They were as excited as schoolgirls to resume their normal cloistered life and were thrilled that out of the ashes of their flight they were to bring to their order such a wonderful new acolyte. With the slight delay that comes with even the best understanding of another language, it took Beatrice an extra breath to realize that they were talking about Celeste.

“Celeste, it isn't true,” said Beatrice.

Celeste gave her a look of pain and defeat. “It is my papa's decision that I should take my vows,” she said. “He says I will bring great joy to him and I will have the innocence of an angel in God's eyes.”

“Do you want to take vows?” asked Beatrice.

“They are not a silent order,” said Celeste slowly. “I can sing and I can learn to play the organ.” The oldest nun spoke in French to tell Beatrice that Celeste's father had made his decision and that she was to have new shoes and a thick wool cloak for the journey, and that the people of Rye had pledged twenty pounds to the order.

“And what of—of the child?” asked Beatrice, stumbling to speak the word to Celeste for the first time.

“Their order takes in unwed mothers and finds homes for such babies,” said Celeste, her hand moving unconsciously to lie on her stomach. “They do not ask why.”

“You do not have to do this, Celeste,” said Beatrice. “We will find another way.”

“If I do this, my father can stay here, with Mr. Tillingham,” said Celeste. “Otherwise they say we must both make a long journey, and his health, it is not so good.”

“Of course, it's a brilliant solution for him,” said Beatrice. “But what about what you want?”

“Did you not serve your father faithfully until his death?” asked Celeste. “Is it not the daughter's place to bring the father ease?”

“My father never asked me to sacrifice the rest of my life and…” As she spoke the words, Beatrice remembered her father telling her they were going home to his family, halfway through her last year at their California university. She had pleaded gently, but he had already booked the tickets, a job usually hers, and told the landlord where to send their furniture. In his knowledge that death was coming for him, he had turned to his childhood home as if it were a talisman. She was not sure of all he had bargained to be taken back into the family fold. She knew only that he had been persuaded to put her inheritance in trust and that he had signed papers. She did not care about money, but it had pierced her to the heart to know that after all the years of being his helpmate, he had not given her freedom. He had traded her future for a few months of nostalgia. She looked at Celeste, sitting amid the rough linen robes and starched wimples, and she could only be honest. “I think it is a father's task to protect us, but if he fails, if he betrays us, we must protect ourselves.”

The nuns, not understanding any English, munched on the last of their cakes with the satisfaction of those who ask only simple pleasures in life and began to rustle their robes and collect their small belongings for departure. As they left, Celeste bowed her head to receive a kiss from each of them. Beatrice nodded but did not offer to take their hands in farewell. They were amiable old women, for whom the sudden interruption of a contemplative life had surely been as traumatic as for any refugee, and she bore them no ill will. But they represented a prison for Celeste.

“There must be another way,” she told Celeste. “I will not forsake you.” Even as she said the words, she knew it was not a promise she could keep. If she was to lose her job, and with her allowance stopped, she would have no recourse but to return to Marbely Hall.

“I wonder if even the walls of the convent are high enough to hide my shame,” said Celeste in a whisper. “Even if God forgives, I must always remember.”

Daniel's poem in
The Times
was of great satisfaction to Agatha, as proof, finally, of his true calling as a poet. It was also much remarked upon around the town of Rye as the newspaper was passed from hand to hand, and this was some compensation for the indignity of being eased from her committee by Bettina Fothergill.

In London, the poem was quoted and reprinted in other papers, to accompany the funeral photographs, and when John came down from town he reported that he had heard it set to a popular tune and sung at one of the music halls to great applause. It was not popular, however, with Lord North, and a stiff letter to
The Times
from the great man objected to the crass vulgarity of reporting his son's death with photographs displayed without permission and with florid verses of a disgraceful nature. He did not bother to write to the lesser press, but perhaps his solicitors did, because several of the illustrated papers printed small apologetic retractions. The objections of the family seemed only to add life to the poem, and Agatha found herself congratulated all the more by neighbors whose interest in the literary form was piqued by the spicy hint of scandal. Even Emily Wheaton paused after church to congratulate her, and while Agatha was alarmed to see the effects of popular attention breaching even the reserve of the gentry, she was pleased that all heard their exchange and that it signaled to a scowling Bettina Fothergill that Agatha was perhaps no longer in disgrace.

Agatha had written to Daniel at his barracks, congratulating him on the poem's publication in a muted way, so as not to sound too delighted about a success that had been contingent on a young man's death. She was surprised to receive in return a telegram saying he was transferring from the Artists Rifles and would be coming home on the Friday evening train with Uncle John.

She was waiting at the station when the evening train from Ashford came in. Usually she would have just sent Smith with the car, or even left Daniel to walk up the hill on his own, but on receipt of his telegram that he was homebound, she had given Jenny and Cook a flurry of orders and told Smith that she would accompany him on the station run.

It had felt good to order the sheets aired, fires laid in the bedrooms, and hot water bottles filled. The large mutton joint she had been saving for Sunday was ordered to be dressed for the oven, and she and Cook had stood in the larder and debated between opening tins of salmon or smoked oysters and whether the occasion warranted a jar of white asparagus. Cook was of the opinion that the master of the house, and the young man, would both feel more fussed over if provided a steamed pudding, and Agatha agreed to the use of some of their dwindling reserves of sugar and a pot of cherry jam. Deviled eggs and some late lettuce would fill out the menu, and Cook promised custard for the pudding.

Such domestic logistics seemed a preferable response to the paralysis and fear that had overwhelmed her at the news of young Craigmore's death. As if to prove the truth behind an old cliché, the blood had run cold in her veins; Agatha had felt it pumping through her extremities, as if it would escape, and her hands had gone numb. She was not sure how she had arrived home, but she seemed to remember Beatrice Nash supporting her arm to the inn door and John pressing her hand all the way home in the car. If the coldness and the fear were an excessive response for a young friend of Daniel's whose pleasant face she had seen all too briefly, laughing in a hop field, she was not keen to probe further. But in the last few days, she kept thinking of him, and his loss reminded her of the day in early summer when she had seen a fat honeybee staggering in awkward patterns across the stones of the terrace. She had been bold and compassionate enough to scoop it up on a big blue, quilted hosta leaf and carry it to the lawn, but the bee had continued to struggle and buzz in the grass, like an angrily pressed doorbell, until its tiny threadlike legs crumpled and it died. Later the gardener told her that the hive had collapsed, all the bees dead inside their combs, and that there would be no more honey for the year.

The train arrived, comforting in its ordinary timetable and its progress along straight rails, the regularity of its taking in and disgorging of passengers at uniform brick stations, the hiss of the steam and the acrid smell of cinders. John and Daniel appeared, Daniel carrying his kit bag and still wearing his uniform. She waited as the stationmaster saluted, and Daniel and John shook hands with him and exchanged some pleasantries. Then they saw her waiting, and their smiles broke some reserve in her. She hurried down the platform like a schoolgirl and did her best to envelop both of them in a crushing embrace, crying and laughing all at once.

“Steady on,” said John, gently extricating himself in order to pick up the hat she had knocked to the ground. “Where's my wife and her famous diplomatic reserve?”

“Life is too precious to waste it anymore with etiquette,” she said. “I shall now kiss you in public, John Kent.” As she did so she waited for Daniel to make some outrageous quip, but he was silent, and when she withdrew from her husband's embrace she saw that her nephew's smile could not hide a grim exhaustion. She kissed his cheek and tucked one hand under his arm, taking John's hand with the other. “Shall we go home?” she asked.

“If you could drop me at Colonel Wheaton's house first, I'm to report in right away,” said Daniel. “But don't worry; I should be home in time for dinner.”

“Colonel Wheaton's?” asked Agatha. Neither Daniel nor John seemed to want to meet her eye. She stopped with her hands on her hips. “What exactly does this mean?”

“I've requested a transfer to Colonel Wheaton's outfit, effective immediately,” said Daniel. “Aunt Agatha, congratulate me. I'm going to France.”

After dinner, Agatha sat on the terrace in the gathering dark, wrapped in a coat against the late October chill, and contemplated how painful the last rays of a sunset could be to a sorrowing heart. John sat on a nearby bench, drinking his brandy as if nothing were happening. She did not speak to him. She could not speak to him. He had done only what he thought necessary to help Daniel, and yet she felt it as a deep and cutting wound, a betrayal. At the far edge of the lawn, Daniel was almost a shadow, a flat silhouette against the sunset sky, smoking a cigar and thinking his own thoughts.

“If there had been some better option, I would have steered him away,” said John. She could feel him looking at her. No doubt with the honest, open expression he used to such effect in the diplomatic world. She did not reply but only drank her tea and stared out at Daniel and the sky beyond. “I promise you it was for the best,” he added.

“He is going to France,” said Agatha, the words cold in her mouth. “You promised me he would never see France.”

“I promised to do my best to find him a safe berth,” said John. “But the circumstances changed, Agatha. He was to be discharged.”

“An honorable discharge,” said Agatha.

“Well, yes, of course they said so,” said John. “No one suggested there was any case to answer, but there would always have been a question hanging over the whole thing. Lord North's interference made that clear.”

“He would have been safe,” said Agatha.

“At what price, my dear?” said John. “A life without honor is no life. And I guarantee you a discharge, however honorable, would have been taken as evidence that there was some truth to the wild complaints of Craigmore's father.”

“To suggest that Daniel is a corrupting influence is ridiculous,” said Agatha. “To defame him simply because he is a poet?”

“Lord North is distraught to the point of madness, and to him I'm sure all bohemians are suspect,” said John. “A discreet assignment to Colonel Wheaton's regiment was much the best option, and Wheaton was happy to oblige me, believing as he does that I had some hand in getting him and his territorials commissioned as regulars.”

“Did you?”

“I shall not say, so that you may preserve your faith in my powers of influence.”

“Your influence has failed to protect Daniel, so I shall have no more faith in it,” said Agatha. “I will not let him go to France, John.”

“Agatha, we've talked about this before,” said John.

“Yes, yes, my boundaries as an aunt,” she said. “I held my tongue at Hugh's enlistment because he is a doctor and will be well behind the lines. Daniel, however, is different. For God's sake, John, Wheaton's men are bound for the front line.”

“One step at a time,” said John. “They are still in training. No embarkation orders have been issued.”

“Young Craigmore is dead. The fishmonger's boy is dead. I count five funerals to every wedding in this week's social columns.” She could feel her voice crack as she spoke. She dropped her chin to hide the trembling of her mouth. She did not want to play the weak and weeping female, and yet when she thought of Daniel, waving from the window of a troop train, she felt a lifetime of strength and resilience evaporate, leaving her as hollow as a dry straw.

“You must bear up, my dear,” said John. “I will do what I can, but we must be subtle. Daniel is no less patriotic than the next young man and would be pained to find us against his going.”

“I would sooner go myself,” said Agatha.

“That would surely put the Germans to flight,” said John. “Unfortunately, they won't have you.”

“Because I am a woman,” said Agatha.

“Because you are too stubborn and opinionated,” said her husband. “Imagine an army of Agatha Kents—all refusing to do as they are told.”

“You exaggerate,” she said. But though she knew her husband was deliberately diffusing her misery, she was comforted. It was their way. It had been so when he plucked her from the misery of her life after the death of her fiancé.

It was the uniforms that reminded her now. They had been in a hurry to marry because her fiancé's regiment was posted unexpectedly to Suez, and she had been sitting in her wedding dress, waiting in the quiet afternoon for her father to come for her. There was a small munitions explosion at the railway station. A man in a captain's uniform came to tell them. And then the long months in Gloucestershire, where they hoped her sister's help would wake her from her dangerous lassitude. She could still smell the wilting jasmine in her bouquet. And she hated Gloucestershire, to which she had returned only once, for her sister's funeral.

John had loved her in spite of her best efforts to rebuff him. He took her away to exotic foreign postings, where she became a stronger woman. Even when they knew they would have no children of their own, and she tore her hair and blamed herself, he held her sanity together with his small jokes and his kind words. She was always free to beat her fists on his chest and rail against the world, and he would calmly prevent her from her own undoing. She was ashamed to have been as surly tonight as if he had already failed her. She sighed. “I suppose I should leave all to you and just take pleasure, as I have always done, from each day that Daniel and Hugh can be with us.”

“In so doing I believe you have collected more maternal happiness than a mother of ten,” said John. “While I enjoy all the benefits of being an uncle without having to pay any of the expenses that accompany fatherhood. I believe we are both blessed.”

“Now who's exaggerating?” said Agatha, who pretended to be unaware that John made modest contributions to the nephews' educational expenses and slipped them substantial drafts at Christmas and on birthdays. While he enjoyed promoting frugality and hard work, he would, she knew, move heaven and earth for either boy. So she smiled and kissed his hand and did not show that she feared this time, with the earth shifting all over Europe, he might fail her.

In the days that followed, such rumors flew about impending embarkation orders for Colonel Wheaton's troops that Agatha grew horribly anxious. While she had every confidence in her husband, he had sent no word, and what if his help came too late? Determined to set in motion a little scheme of her own to rescue Daniel from his foolish stubbornness, she arrived at the Wheaton residence one afternoon with her biggest smile, and a large basket of sausage rolls and cheese straws.