In a Field of Blue

by Liviero, Gemma

  Mother and Peggy were surprised to see me join them on the platform as the train pulled up, but I believe they both could read me. They each wore a new scarf, and Mother, though exhausted, seemed happier, having also spent much of the day at leisure.

  Apparently the doctor’s appointment had gone well. As usual they could not find anything specifically wrong with her, and I had to wonder how much of her condition was simply in her mind. She was prescribed further medication to help her relax. Again I thought the timing of my mother’s improved condition had much to do with the arrival of Mariette and Samuel.

  The train was busy, and Mother and Peggy talked the whole way, especially about the friends they had called on for lunch and the play they had seen, but Mariette was solely on my mind. Had she and Laurence spent the day together? Had they ridden to the beach? I shivered a little and fought to swallow back my fears.

  The rest of the trip home is blurred in my memory, perhaps because everything after that seemed to happen so fast, and what started as a productive day turned into a chaotic search for answers.

  The nightmare began when Bert met us at the station. He was flustered, the boy in the front of the vehicle with him.

  “Something has happened,” he said, and when I questioned him, he could not say exactly, only that he believed a fight had occurred between the other two adults. Bert had been away with Samuel visiting the neighboring farm on the trap. On the return, the boy had fallen asleep. As they arrived, he heard Laurence shouting out Mariette’s name, and he put the boy asleep on the hay in the stable, with Missy beside him, while he went to investigate. He had then found the great hall in a state of disarray and Mariette gone from the house.

  He was clearly concerned and eager to return home. The boy sat in the back now, sheltered by the two women protectively. Mother had one arm around the boy and her free hand against her chest anxiously. I sat in the front and willed the car to travel faster.

  When we arrived at the property, it was well lit up, and Laurence’s car was parked at the front as if in readiness to leave, the passenger door flung open.

  I ran inside first to the drawing room and then to the hall. A Grecian statue that had been in the family for several generations was in pieces on the floor. Mother and Peggy had followed me, and I suggested that Mother go straight to her rooms, but she refused, wishing to investigate the situation herself.

  Up a level, Mariette’s room was empty, her bed made, and the two dresses that I had bought her hanging over a chair. Laurence’s room down the hallway from her still had his things. Though his bed was unmade, and it looked as if he would return.

  I heard Mother calling to me from the front entrance of the house. I ran down to see Laurence walking toward us up the gravel drive.

  “What happened?” I asked, approaching him.

  He did not answer, nor did he look at me; instead he pushed roughly past me.

  I grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him toward me, finding strength I did not know I had, that perhaps I had never felt the need to use before.

  “Where is Mariette?”

  “She is gone. The whore is gone.”

  My response was reflexive. I lunged to punch him in the face, but he ducked fast and gripped my wrist to block me before pushing me so hard that I fell backward onto the ground. When I tried to right myself, he shoved me hard back down again.

  “The girl, the one that you wish to marry, is gone,” he barked above me. “She is not who she says she is. She is only after my money.”

  I was disappointed that he knew of my desire to marry her and wondered fleetingly why Mariette had released something so personal.

  “Where did she go?” I shouted, righting myself.

  “She left through the pastures,” he said. “I offered to drive her, but she insisted on walking. Let her go!” When I ran for him again, he grabbed both my wrists. “You can’t even fight, Little Brother. You did not even see the war.”

  It was a fact he constantly rubbed in my face. Not just that I had been too young to serve, but that I was not a fighter like he was. Perhaps he was right. Not until that moment had I ever had the urge to fight for anything. Perhaps I had never wanted anything or anyone as badly as I had wanted Mariette.

  “Which way did she go?” I said, shaking myself free.

  “Toward the station and lost in the hills for all I care. You will not find someone who doesn’t want to be found. Let her go!”

  I was seething with anger, but my desire to find Mariette was stronger, and I ran in the direction Laurence had come from, calling her name, calling her back, wondering why she would walk the tracks at night toward the train. It was dark; what remained of the moon was obscured by clouds.

  With no response I returned to the house to retrieve a lantern. Mother was anxious, and Peggy stayed with her and Samuel, who had begun to whimper, while Bert and I both took lanterns to scour through undergrowth, along narrow paths and the paddocks and pastures in the direction of the town. I wondered why she did not take the more direct road to town. Was she running from Laurence? Was this her best chance of hiding? I assumed the worst: that it was some kind of escape.

  We returned to the manor when the search along walking tracks seemed too slow and hopeless. Bert then drove to search the road, while I saddled Sheriff and rode across neighboring meadows and hills.

  There was no sight of her as I rode all the way to the station. She was not there, and the station guard who was locking up for the night saw no woman who fit her description. The next train would not be until morning. She had disappeared. I wondered if she had continued walking southward, knowing that she would be waiting all night for the train. It did not make sense that she would leave the boy. Sheriff galloped me back to the house, where I believed she would return.

  By the time I arrived back at the house, my mother and Laurence were in the great hall, standing by the French doors. Peggy had wrapped a shawl around Mother, who was distressed, and Samuel was asleep on a sofa.

  “Laurence, what did you say to her to make her leave?” I asked.

  “You were always naive. You couldn’t see what I saw.”

  “You have done or said something, and you must admit what it is!”

  Mother stood frozen, unable to look at anyone.

  “Please,” said Peggy. “Do not fight here in front of your mother. Rudy, let’s hear his explanation.”

  “As I was explaining to Mother while you were gone,” continued Laurence, “I questioned her about a few things, and I believe it was why she left. I asked about her family. I told her that I had ways to verify her story and call out her lies. That I had many contacts in France who could locate the truth. It seems that the very idea has spooked her, and she has left perhaps to hide the truth.”

  I reminded him about the wedding certificate and the photograph of them together.

  “A marriage that is not registered, a photo that shows she met him, and an orphaned boy mean only that Mariette has attempted to think of everything.”

  “She has a will signed by Edgar, too,” I said.

  “What?” said Mother.

  “It is legitimate. I know it is.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Mother.

  “Where is it now?” asked Laurence.

  “I don’t have it. But I saw it.”

  “What you saw was obviously a forgery. She knew that too, else she would have shown it to Mother. She may have learned of this house, but there is no proof they are married nor that she is who she says she is. Who’s to say that Edgar didn’t marry someone called Mariette and she has stolen her identity, perhaps from that woman’s corpse. And who’s to say that when she learned of Edgar’s death that she didn’t do away with the supposed wife and steal a document? Who’s to say that someone else didn’t steal Edgar’s name?”

  “She would not leave the boy.”

  “She is a wandering fraudster, you fool! Isn’t it obvious? She doesn’t care about the boy. It is highly probable
that he isn’t even hers, stolen like the clothes she wears.”

  After Laurence stormed away, Mother began to weep, and I moved to comfort her. I was afraid from all this talk she would lose any belief she had in Mariette.

  “Mother, don’t listen to these lies,” I said, my arm around her. “I believe her. You must believe her, too!”

  Mother shook her head, unable to speak, and she put her hand toward Peggy to help her back to her room. I felt I had lost Mother’s faith once more.

  I moved to the sofa where Samuel was sleeping soundlessly and reached down to touch his face. I felt an immense sense of love, distraught that when he woke I may not have any answers to his questions. I carefully picked him up so as not to wake him and carried him up to the guest room to lay him on Mariette’s bed. There was still the scent of her perfume in the room, and as I looked around for some evidence that would give me some clue to her whereabouts, I told myself that she would come back.

  A search in the guest room turned up no note or clue as to her disappearance. I picked up the yellow dress and put my face to the fabric, where the sweet smell of her remained. I held it for several moments in despair. She could not have just disappeared. She would come back, I told myself before remembering the papers disturbed in the drawer of Edgar’s desk and searching there, too. Surely she would have left the will at least, anything that would protect the boy. The will seemed his only chance now that she was not here to speak for him.

  I heard a motorcar roar away down the front drive, and I rushed to the windows across the hallway to watch Laurence leave into the night. I carried such fury toward him that I callously wished he had never returned from war. A shout coming from the other side of the house distracted me from my dark thoughts, and I followed the disturbance toward Mother’s room. She was in her nightgown already and Peggy beside her.

  “My jewels are gone,” she said, ashen-faced. “All of them!” Then she collapsed in Peggy’s arms, sobbing.

  “But it couldn’t be, surely?” queried Peggy.

  Surely not! The girl that I had come to love was not capable of deception and thievery. I could not reconcile this event with the girl I knew or in the days following, as the mystery surrounding her arrival and departure became thicker with conspiracies and confusion.

  “We will get to the bottom of this,” I said. “She will come back.”

  It took me near a full day before I went to the police, at the insistence of Mother and Roland. I needed to gather courage to believe she was not coming back, but I was incapable of relating her to the missing jewels. Until that point I was convinced that she had stormed off and would return when she was calm.

  I sent a telegram to the newspaper to tell my supervisor I would not be returning to work. I did not ask for permission, nor did I think that the job would be there when I eventually returned to Manchester. It didn’t matter. The future at that moment seemed to me very grim, and the only comfort was from Samuel, who needed more comfort than any of us. It would take a huge effort on both Peggy’s and my part to appear unaffected so as to distract the boy from his misery also. Bert of course was his savior, and I saw him more than once lift the boy to hold him gently while he cried for his mother.

  Mother had fallen ill again, and her headaches had returned. She had asked, the day following Mariette’s disappearance, that the boy and she not cross paths until she was feeling better. I was disappointed she thought so ill of Mariette, believing that she had simply tried to gain money and jewels and land an innocent child on our family. I was not convinced that we had the full story yet. Laurence was good at lying, at skewing an outcome in his favor, but when I tried to speak to Mother about it, she refused to listen in those early days after the disappearance.

  I had spent moments believing that Mariette’s disappearance was far more sinister and wondering what lengths Laurence had gone to to frighten her away.

  Bert one day brought a piece of torn lace that he had found in one of the garden beds that I felt certain matched the black dress of Mariette’s. I kept it and examined it for days, believing it would offer a clue to her vanishing, before handing it over to the police, along with a banknote Bert had found scrunched and thrown from view. We were informed a few days later that these particular banknotes, long since withdrawn from circulation, had been used as illegal tender recently. The banknote, as suggested by Peggy, may well have been the property of one of Laurence’s guests, but I could not rule out that it may also have belonged to Mariette, and speculated whether she was practiced in such fraud elsewhere.

  There had been very somber moments when I had suspected a worse fate, then consoled myself that even Laurence did not cross certain lines. When asked by the police, Laurence had written a statement to say she had left of her own free will, which gave them very little option but to treat the case as a matter of theft by a foreign fraudster.

  And as the week went by and there was no sign of Mariette, I started to accept the notion that she would never return. I searched often in the woodlands, even along the lake, expecting to see the worst. And then I had to ask myself if I ever really knew her, and I did in fact question myself whether she was really the boy’s mother, Laurence’s words ringing in my ears.

  Just as suddenly as Mariette had entered my life, she was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  By the following weekend I found it difficult to get out of bed to face the day. I was weary with nervous exhaustion and overthinking every second I had spent with Mariette. The only news I begged to hear was that of her whereabouts. I was done with Laurence. Mother of course wasn’t. He was still her son, a living one and the one who would eventually take ownership of the estate. The boy—it was doubtful then without Mariette or solid evidence—would not be considered a threat to Laurence’s inheritance.

  Peggy sought me out one morning when I was drinking tea on the terrace, my head sore from too many whiskeys taken late the night before. I had not shaved for several days, and I stayed up late so often that it seemed unnecessary to change out of my crushed shirt and trousers. This new appearance was not by my design but merely due to the fact that my mind was often elsewhere, tortured with loss and self-pity, and in such a case as this, one’s grooming is often the first to go.

  “I would like you to see something,” she said with a peculiar expression that I could not read.

  I followed Peggy up to the top floor and into Edgar’s annex room, which brought back fresh feelings of loss.

  “I was cleaning here,” said Peggy, “and opening the window to let in some fresh air when I noticed that something had been wedged between the bed and the wall.”

  She passed me the book I had seen with Mariette.

  I touched the hard cover that had seen better times, the corners crushed and fraying, and the colors, green and maroon, mottled, as if they had been spotted by rain. Upon opening the cover and reading the first few lines, the discovery of its author gave me hope for potential further clues. I turned the pages one by one to see Edgar’s writing. Deeper into it, the words became more illegible and haphazard, and sometimes in French.

  “It looks like it was placed there deliberately,” said Peggy. I remembered when I had first caught Mariette here. Maybe then she had first placed it in the desk drawer, the reason the papers there had been disturbed. And perhaps she later moved it to make sure it was safe.

  The pieces of the puzzle about Edgar and his life seemed to be cruelly drip-fed by Mariette as if I couldn’t cope with everything at once, and I felt a small resentment that she didn’t show me this earlier. I had to wonder just what else she had kept from me.

  I eagerly returned to my desk to examine thoroughly its contents, the pages appearing brilliantly gilded under the glowing afternoon light. As I began to read, I was transported back in time to some secret place in Edgar’s mind. It wasn’t a diary, that’s not what Edgar used it for, but rather to note down his feelings, poetic and vague as they sometimes were.

  I read Edgar’s writings
one by one, deciphering their meanings and searching for names and descriptions that might help me learn more about him and perhaps Mariette, too. The pages were soiled by hands stained with battle dust, smudges and fingerprints, and in places the ink bleeding and paper crumpled from water damage. The book, kept in a satchel I daresay for the most part, gave me some idea of what the soldiers had been exposed to, the elements and the conditions endured by both the book and the men on the battlefields.

  He described the curious mélange of buoyancy, doggedness, and torment affecting the town residents near the front line. With little embellishment needed, he had captured the cold, the frailty of the human body, and the unforgiving, unrelenting sound of shelling in his words. I was there for a moment, sharing what he experienced, grippingly real, sensing the vibrations in the ground, seeing the ghostly shapes of an enemy emerging from fog, and feeling numb and despairing from the cold that permanently clung to his bones. I shared the fear of the unknown, of the future of mankind, of whether there would be another sunrise. Though half the book was empty, I felt that there was so much more he should have said, should have told me.

  Dispersed between his stories were poems, sometimes just the first lines of something he intended to write, as if, waiting in the trenches, he was called up suddenly; as if disturbed by whistling sounds of incoming shells; or as if, by reliving the past, he had found it too painful, thus forcing him not to think. I believe I am mentioned in one of them, though not by name. My brother sends his unburdened thoughts. / He is not to know. / He is innocent.