The Summer Before the War (50 page)

“No, they will surely have us escorted away,” said Agatha. “See where they are keeping families behind that fence?” Back towards the main road, a small group of people waved and called out. But they were too distant to hear anything or make themselves heard. “We should ask a nurse.”

She stepped from behind the ambulances and consulted a nurse in a severe navy blue uniform and frilly cap under a scruffy man's greatcoat. The nurse looked around and nodded. Then she went over to a man with a clipboard and asked him a question. While he was consulting his papers, Beatrice scanned the myriad faces for Hugh's. It was alarming how many men looked, at first glance, as if they might be him: a similar turn of the head or line of jaw, a pair of gray eyes under a heavy bandage, a hand reaching out from a man whose face was burned beyond recognition. For a moment she feared she had forgotten what Hugh looked like. Perhaps he had faded from memory as her father's face kept doing this winter. Fading so she had to stop, sit down, and will back every feature, every quirk of the eyebrow, until she had his face again for immediate conjuring.

She saw John Kent first, walking from behind the last ambulance in the row, speaking to the driver. Agatha saw him too, and began to run towards him. Beatrice turned to follow, but Hugh's face appeared in her path. She did not see from where he came. She felt her heart leap as she looked him up and down for injuries. She did not bother to be shy; there were too many hurt to consider one's manners.

“Beatrice,” he said. She ran into his arms, and he embraced her hard, his head sunk on her shoulder and his shoulders shaking as he tried not to break down.

“Are the others with you?” she asked, her face pressed to his hair. “Daniel?”

“Daniel is gone,” said Hugh, his voice hoarse. “I could not bring him home, Beatrice.”

“I am so sorry,” she said. As she comforted him, she saw Agatha struggling to look in the back of the ambulance. Her husband pulled her away and spoke in her ear. As he held her tight, her knees buckled and she threw her head back in a low cry that seemed to come from the deepest core of pain.

“We must go to your aunt,” said Beatrice, and Hugh hesitated for a moment, as if unwilling to let her go. But then he put his chin in the air, pretending that he could see perfectly well out of eyes blurry with unshed tears, and they hurried to help John and his distraught wife.

It was bittersweet to follow the ambulance home to Rye, to see it draw up outside the Wheaton home and to see Lady Emily and Eleanor sobbing with joy and pain, cradling Harry Wheaton in their arms. Agatha climbed from the front seat of the ambulance as if she had become a hundred years old in the journey of a few miles. John supported her arm. She could only shake her head slowly at Lady Emily. And Lady Emily could only kiss her cheek, as if both ladies had been struck dumb by death. Hugh helped unload the stretcher cases as Major Frank examined the patients' labels and directed their disposition about the hospital.

“This one doesn't belong here,” said the Major. “He's a private, and this is an officers' hospital.”

“He's a local boy, Major,” said Hugh. “Served as batman to both Harry here and my cousin, Daniel. It was my cousin's last wish that we see him home.”

“Understand the sentiment entirely,” said Major Frank. “But can't be done. No mixed wards, you know? Have to send him on by train to Brighton.”

“No, you can't,” said Hugh. “He'll never last the trip, and besides, his family doesn't have the money to traipse to Brighton to care for him.”

“My hands are tied,” said the Major. “From the shape he's in he probably should never have made the Channel crossing.”

“You'll put him in the private wing of the house,” said Harry Wheaton. His voice was slurred from exhaustion and pain. His stump oozed at the edges of the bandage, and he was obviously in more agony than he was showing. “Put a cot in my father's study. Easy for the nurses to get to and his family can come and go through the garden doors.”

“Harry, you'll not put the farrier's son in your father's study,” said Lady Emily. “How could you think of such an insult to your dead father?”

“Not his study anymore,” said Harry.

“I beg your pardon!” said his mother.

“I beg yours, Mother,” said Harry. “But my father, the Colonel, took care of his men, and I should do the same.” He gestured to the orderlies holding the stretcher on which Snout lay unconscious, his cheeks flushed and his chest wheezing with each breath. “Chop, chop. In the study, if you please.” As the stretcher was carried in, Harry added, in a low voice, “Perhaps if I had stood up for the scrawny little blighter earlier…”

“I'll let his parents know,” said Alice. “And I'll take Miss Nash home.”

As Beatrice climbed into the sidecar, hitching her baggy breeches up once again in full view of a puzzled Lady Emily, Hugh came to grip her hand in his.

“Once again duty divides us, it seems,” he said. “I must make sure Snout is settled and then go to my aunt and uncle.”

“Do not feel any concern for me,” she said. She returned the pressure of his hand. “I am so grateful you are here to help them. Daniel is an unbearable loss, Hugh.”

“When I have seen to both, may I come to you?” he asked.

“I would be happy,” she said. “I will wait up for you.”

“I may not leave you again,” he said. He squeezed her hand fiercely. “I know now that I am home.”

“I will not let you go,” she said, and felt no blush of hesitation as she looked into his face. As Hugh left, Alice fired up the engine and walked the machine forward until it caught.

“I'll be sending Minnie round for a midnight chat with her father,” said Alice. “Someone'll need the Vicar first thing in the morning.”

Beatrice went home and lit a fire in the grate and under the kettle in her small kitchen. She took her meager dinner, left out under a damp towel, and shaped it into the semblance of a cold supper. She unearthed a bottle of sherry, given her by a pampered boy whose leg was now blown off. When the kettle sang, she took it to her basin and scrubbed the dirt and day from her body. Dressed in a loose gown, her hair brushed and down around her shoulders, she barred the doors to her landlady's rooms and sat in the dark firelight, nervous but not afraid, to wait for Hugh. This was the confusion of war, thought Beatrice. That some should sit mourning in a drawing room, or smoothing the brow of a dying boy, while in a cottage on a cobbled street, two young lovers could only choose to stand against the shocking burden of death and loss with their love and their passion.

Hugh and Beatrice were married the next day, walking together to church on a morning unexpectedly mild, as if to celebrate the vernal equinox, when the world balances perfectly between light and dark, and spring signals fresh life. The war seemed to have swept away and rendered useless all the normal etiquette of mourning and marriage. Hugh telephoned his uncle in the early hours but gave him every option to remain at home. They came to church, the Kents, and Celeste; and though they were swooning with their grief, they offered no remonstrance but only tender words of affection and happiness. Alice Finch and Minnie Buttles came out to sign the register for them, and the Vicar made the ancient ritual short and simple, unadorned by superfluous hymns and prayers.

The boy, Snout, lingered for a week, his lungs succumbing slowly to pneumonia brought on as a corollary to a trench fever unrelated to his later wound. Hugh spent long hours with Dr. Lawton at the boy's bedside and consulting with the hospital doctors. Snout's family was a constant at the Wheaton house, going silently in and out of the garden. His invalid mother was carried in every morning and seemed to grow stronger as she fought for her son's life. His great-grandmother came in with herbs and teas, foul-smelling concoctions that eased his breathing but could not defeat the infections. She rubbed his chest with salves and made such prayers and incantations that the hospital nurses, gliding in and out, whispered of witchcraft.

Such is the slow accumulation of sorrows in a long war that the requests for memorial services begin to outweigh the marriages and the parishioners begin to keep their black coats brushed and hung at the front of their wardrobes. The church bulletin, hand-delivered on Tuesday, announced that Sunday's communion service would be another memorial for two officers fallen and buried overseas; Colonel Archibald Preston Danforth Wheaton, commanding officer, Second Battalion, Fifth Division, Royal East Sussex, of Wheaton Hall, Rye; and Lieutenant Daniel Sidney Bookham, also of the Second Battalion, Fifth Division, Royal East Sussex, of Rye and Lansdowne Terrace, London. The bulletin highlighted
KILLED IN ACTION
, an enticement to attend not dissimilar to the greengrocer's sign announcing “fresh from Devon” or “picked today.” But first there was a boy to bury.

The funeral service for Richard Sidley was on Saturday. Beatrice felt guilty that she faced the somber ritual with the warm heart and flushed cheeks of a newly wedded woman. She and Hugh had lain in each other's arms to the last moment that morning, watching the clock's hands and finding excuses, and shortcuts to their dressing, so they might snatch an extra few moments away from the world.

Now they stood in the cobbled street outside the church and waited for the funeral cortège to arrive. Agatha had insisted she was well enough to attend and stood between her husband and Celeste, her face white and old against her black coat. Celeste, too, looked older than her years, but she held up Agatha's arm with quiet strength, and it seemed to Beatrice that she had already acquired the resilience of a mother in these past days.

Much of the town seemed arrayed on the narrow pavement; even the Mayor and his wife had come, and he was somberly dressed with the mayoral chain of office tucked inside a dark greatcoat. Many of Snout's schoolfellows stood scuffing their boots against the curbs. Some of them looked sheepish, as if they were visited by every taunt and shove they had inflicted on the poor boy. And now the coffin came slowly up the street, borne on the undertaker's best dray and covered with the Union Jack and the town flag with its prancing lions. Behind the coffin, Snout's mother rode in a pony cart, his father leading the stout pony by the head. Beside him, Snout's sister, Abigail, carried an armful of lilies and, somewhat strangely, a large jar of coins tucked under her arm.

A stir among the crowd of townspeople greeted the turning in to the street of Snout's great-grandmother, driving her barrel-topped caravan wearing a scarlet coat fastened with gold sovereigns and a heavy black skirt stiffened by many black and red petticoats. Her gray hair was braided about her head, and a top hat perched above, covered with a long black lace veil. The wagon was bright with new paint, its wheels picked out in red and gold. The horses in the shafts pulled together, their flowing manes and the feathers on their feet brushed to silk and streaming in the breeze. The harness jingled with bells, and the leather shone with waxing.

Behind the caravan, a line of Gypsies, gathered from all over the county, marched. First a young boy leading a riderless horse, a pair of boots tied across its back. Then the men walked, with grim faces, their black coats bright with red scarves, flowers, and gold buttons. Behind them came carts with floral tributes, wagons filled with elderly women and children, and in the rear, young Gypsy girls and their mothers, each in her best dress with hair braided and tucked under a dark shawl or mantilla. The men remained outside the church, a dark army silent and severe. Only the occasional whinny of an impatient horse, the tossing of its head and harness, broke the quiet of the street. Beatrice saw some of the good people of Rye melting quietly away, too proud to share the sanctuary of the church with the Romanies. Others hurried in, and Beatrice watched idly to distinguish who was there to mourn, who to be seen by others, and who was chiefly anxious to have the service done, so they might spread the story of the Gypsy mourners to all their friends.

The church's familiar liturgy covered Richard Sidley in the comforting blanket of conformity, and he was laid to rest in the churchyard on the hill with all the usual solemnity and respect due to a fallen soldier and a local boy. Mrs. Stokes stood with Snout's father, her grandson, at the graveside, both as still and erect as the stone angels on the neighboring monuments, and her people stood apart from the graveside and were as silent as the cemetery itself. Beatrice tried to remain as steadfast. But at the Vicar's recitation of John 14:2, “my father's house has many rooms,” she leaned against Hugh's strong arm and wept into his sleeve for a boy who gave his young life for a country and a town that did not always know his value.

Later, as the mourners were leaving, Beatrice saw Mrs. Stokes embrace Agatha. The two women spoke quietly, and Agatha kissed the old woman again on the cheek.

“It's always us old women who must bury our children,” said Mrs. Stokes. “Why does the good Lord not take us instead?”

“Why indeed,” said Agatha. “We are not as strong as He thinks.”

“When I see Him at last, I shall give Him a piece of my mind,” said Mrs. Stokes. “Be it into the pit with me, I shall have my say.”

The evening light slanted across the flat marshes, and the cold of dusk was a reminder that summer was still far away. It was less than a year since Hugh Grange had first gone to the station to meet Beatrice. Now, coaxing the pony trap out across the marsh, he looked at the curve of her cheek and the way her hands folded across her lap, and he could not believe that she was his wife. The price of their happiness had been steep, but not enough to extinguish their hopes. He would have to return to the front in a few days, and they could not be sure his name would not one day be listed with the fallen. But today and tomorrow he was married and in love, and he would live each moment as if it were a year.