by A. M. Howell
“Get dressed,” Mrs Gilbert hissed. She pulled the window shut with a bang. “You can scrub the cottage floors while I’m at the Big House.”
Mr Gilbert was rubbing his chin, like he was trying to remove a stubborn mark. His eyes were soft, like they were when she had arrived yesterday. He opened his mouth to speak. Clara held her breath. Was he going to defend her? But before he had the chance, Mrs Gilbert grabbed his arm and hustled him towards the door.
Clara sat rod-straight, her arms clasped around her knees. She strained her ears to hear Mr and Mrs Gilbert’s whispers from the floor below. Only the odd word drifted up the stairs.
“…what’s done is done…” (Mr Gilbert.)
“…harder than I thought…” (Mrs Gilbert.)
“…must do as her parents ask…” (Mr Gilbert.)
“…is it for the best?” (Mrs Gilbert.)
A tear slipped down Clara’s sore cheek. She wiped it briskly with the edge of her sheet, which was worn in places but was clean and smelled of rose water. She had only been slapped once before in her life, by her mother after she had run into the road at the school gate and almost got bowled over by a horse and cart. Her mother’s slap to the back of her legs had hurt, but it had been a well-deserved warning, like a bee sting. The cheek slap Mrs Gilbert had dispensed had been full of fiery intent.
The crocheted blanket on Clara’s bed was like the garden outside her window, a patchwork of muted browns, earthy greens and dusky yellows. It was homemade, a muddle of dropped stitches in places. How could Mrs Gilbert’s angry red fingers have made something so lovely? Clara reached down the side of the mattress to the gap in the stitching. The envelope was still there, but she wished with all her might it wasn’t and that it was with its rightful owners. Pulling it out, she held it to her cheek and closed her eyes and tried her hardest not to think about home. As her mother said, this was just for a short while.
The water in the pail wobbled as Clara carried it up the stairs. She kneeled and began to scrub at the wooden floorboards on the landing outside Mr and Mrs Gilbert’s bedroom. The chestnut-brown branches on the bottle-green wallpaper gave the effect of being in the woods on a gloomy winter’s day and did nothing to lift her already low spirits. Is this the type of adventure you thought I’d be having? she asked her mother in her head. Why is Mrs Gilbert so mean? She doesn’t seem to like me one small bit. But then again, she had accidentally pulled out a clump of Mrs Gilbert’s hair, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that, after a bad start, things had deteriorated even further.
Clara poked the door of Mr and Mrs Gilbert’s bedroom open with the toe of her boot. “Hello, Mr and Mrs Gilbert’s room,” she said softly, laying a hand on a dark wooden dresser. When Mrs Gilbert last came to stay, Clara had been told to call her Aunt Elizabeth. Why could she not address her as Aunt now? Referring to her as Mrs Gilbert seemed odd and rather formal, like she was addressing a teacher at school. Her nose wrinkling, she stood at the window, watched the light dance on the small lake which formed a watery boundary to the southernmost edge of the gardens. Moorhens chattered in the reeds. Geese squabbled. Leaves from the trees whirled to the ground, drifted into the water and floated away like small boats on an exciting journey. It made her spirits lift a little.
On Mr and Mrs Gilbert’s double bed lay another beautiful crocheted blanket. Except this one was duller than the one on her own bed, a cross-looking haze of greys and blacks. Clara was somehow not surprised that Mrs Gilbert did not like brightly coloured things.
When she had swept and scrubbed the floor, Clara slipped back onto the landing. There was a door next to the Gilberts’ bedroom. Clara turned the brass knob. The door didn’t open. It was locked. A frown pulled at her forehead. Mrs Gilbert had told her to scrub all of the floors in the cottage, hadn’t she? She bent down and peered through the small keyhole. The room was decorated in the same dark-green wallpaper as the hallway. A wooden bureau sat under the window. On top of it lay a pile of papers. They looked like envelopes. A made-up bed stood against one wall. The fireplace was swept and laid. “Hello, little woodland room,” Clara whispered.
“What are you doing?” Mrs Gilbert stood at the end of the landing in stockinged feet. Her cheeks were flushed and strands of hair were escaping from her cap.
“I was just…cleaning…like you asked,” stammered Clara, standing up.
Mrs Gilbert’s eyes were bright, like someone had lit a fire behind them. “Leave that room alone, do you understand?” she whispered, taking a step towards Clara.
Clara took a step backwards and clutched at the wall. Was she going to be slapped again?
“I said, do you understand?” Mrs Gilbert repeated. Her eyes were grey as flint.
Clara nodded until she felt her head might wobble off and roll down the hall.
Mrs Gilbert glared at Clara, opened her bedroom door and slammed it so hard a small chunk of plaster fell from the wall and plopped onto the floorboard near Clara’s feet. Clara picked it up and laid it in her palm. She gazed up at the place on the wall it had fallen from. A flap of wallpaper covering the plaster had come loose. Standing on tiptoes, she reached up and carefully peeled back its edge. Paper had been layered on paper. Underneath the woodland scene was the branch of a different tree, the curve of an orange mandarin and delicate white blossom. Clara chewed on her bottom lip. Why would anyone want to wallpaper over the beautiful spring walls and turn them into winter?
The rap at the door of their small terraced house had come two days before Clara had been sent to stay with her aunt and uncle. Clara’s mother had been busy tending to her father, so Clara had taken the letter from the post-boy with the blue cap and serious-looking eyes, telling him she would give it to her parents immediately. The sender’s name and address were printed smartly in the bottom left corner: War Office.
Clara stared at the typeface now, wondering about the words waiting to be read inside. A hard lump of guilt lodged in her chest. She hadn’t meant to hide it. She had slipped it into her pocket just until Father’s cough settled. Just until Mother’s eyes looked a little brighter. But it hadn’t and they hadn’t and now she had been sent away and it was too late to do anything about it. She had intended to give it to Mrs Gilbert…but after the slap, the thought of explaining the circumstances in which she had taken the envelope (and Mrs Gilbert’s possible reaction) made her stomach wobble. Perhaps her only option was to wait a little, return it to Mother and Father in person. Mother had said that she would only be with the Gilberts for a short while. But what if waiting a few days made matters even worse? What if the news inside was so important they needed to know immediately?
Clara blew out the candle on her window sill with a heavy sigh, rested her chin in her hands and looked out over the gardens. Her skin burned with guilt as she watched the moon, low and shiny and bathing everything in a shimmery blue light. She imagined her guilt and confusion floating out into the blackness with the spiralling candle smoke. Her mind was whirring, going around and around like a train on a circular track.
A soldier in a smart green uniform striding down a terraced street.
A fistful of hair.
A dog with bared teeth looming over her.
A locked woodland room.
The envelope.
Clara sucked in breath after breath of chilly air.
Boom!
Rat-tat-tat-tat!
Clara grasped the window sill, her heart hammering against her ribs in time to the sudden sound of gunfire.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Boom-boom!
Boom-boom-boom!
It must be the Rifles Regiment on a night exercise. Mr Gilbert had told her (over boiled eggs at breakfast that morning) that many of the Regiment’s highly skilled gunners had been killed at the Second Battle of Ypres the year before. Some of those men had worked for the Earl and he had been devastated by the losses. Determined to do his bit for the war effort, he was allowing a hundred of the Regiment’s new soldiers to camp and train on
his land. Mr Gilbert had leaned across the table and told Clara softly she should prepare herself for the sound of rifles being fired long into each night, as the Regiment prepared to move out to France, perhaps to the Somme battlefields.
As Mr Gilbert spoke, Clara had thought of Father’s daily newspaper, brimming with news about the Battle of the Somme. The early reports had been positive, told of few casualties and many successes. But Clara’s father had shaken his head and said the reality was quite different and that she shouldn’t believe all she read. If her father was right, that meant there was a chance some of the new soldiers camping and training on the Earl’s estate would not return. She had placed her spoon down, her appetite for breakfast suddenly gone.
Startled by the rifle fire, a flock of birds roosting in the trees whirled into the air. They looked like mystical winged creatures as they squawked across the planting beds. The mute scarecrows listened and watched, straw heads tilted in surprise. Someone else was watching too, his head tipped to the spectacle overhead. Clara squinted. The boy! He was sitting with his back to a low wall opposite the hothouses. The birds disappeared, and the boy turned his attention to something lying in his lap. It was too dark and she was too far away to see what it was. The boy hunched over, giving it his full attention. Suddenly he stood up, pushed whatever he had been looking at into his jacket pocket and disappeared.
Clara blinked, leaning out of the window as far as she dared. The still air folded around her like a blanket. How could he have vanished again? Was he a ghost? A magician? His head bobbed up and he reappeared. Clara rubbed her eyes.
The boy shook out a blanket in the way you might shake out a dusty rug. He spread it on the grass and lay down, turning his face to the blue moon as if it was the sun bathing him in warmth. Clara watched him as the booms and rat-a-tats echoed on, deeper into the woods now. She was watching him like a spy. It felt wrong, but she could not tear her eyes away. Clara watched and watched until her eyes grew leaden and started to close.
Climbing back into bed, she pulled her own blanket tight around her shoulders. There was something intriguing about the boy that made her want to find out who he was. She listened to the far away rat-tat-tats and booms until she drifted into an uneasy sleep full of gunfire and soldiers, her mother and father, unopened letters and locked doors and a boy who liked to lie under a moon masquerading as the sun.
“Under no circumstances are you to go near the Earl’s hothouses.” Mrs Gilbert’s voice echoed in Clara’s head the next morning, as she slinked around the perimeter of the hothouse where she had last seen the boy. She saw the stooped shoulders of Mr Gilbert and several of the other gardeners as they pulled up parsnips from the planting beds on the other side of the garden. A man was sitting having a smoke near the fruit trees, a white-and-brown spaniel curled at his feet.
Clara pressed a hand to one of the glass panes. It was damp. She drew a small circle, with dotted eyes and a nose and a smiling mouth. She bumped her fingers along the windows until she turned a corner and came to the entrance of the hothouse. Near it was the stump of a felled tree, the bark furry with moss. Clara skirted around it and down the five stone steps which led to the door. Her breaths came a little faster. She brought a hand to the cheek Mrs Gilbert had slapped. It still smarted when she pressed on it.
She tentatively gave the door a push and it swung open with a creak. A wall of soupy warm air hit her in the face. She drew in a breath. She drew in another and the tightness in her neck began to dissolve. The boy wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. He only appeared at night, like a fox or a badger.
She blinked at the two raised planting beds in front of her. Thick metal pipes rose from the ground and travelled under the length of the beds. One of the pipes near her feet gurgled. She bent down and touched it. “Ouch.” She pulled her thumb away from the heat and sucked at it.
On top of the planting beds sat pots containing spiky oval fruit within crowns of long sharp-looking leaves. Pineapples! Clara smiled and walked down one of the planting rows, past a bench of gardening equipment – metal watering cans, a wicker basket, a small trowel and fork.
As she neared the end of the hothouse the pineapples grew larger and larger. They were like the matryoshka dolls she had received in her Christmas stocking one year.
“You know they are supposed to sit inside one another, don’t you?” Mother had said with an amused smile.
“But I feel sorry for the smaller ones. They don’t want to be in the dark,” Clara had replied, lining them up in a row on her window ledge.
Clara bent down and pressed her thumb onto the hard, spiky husk of one of the pineapples. “Hello, fruit,” she said softly.
For Clara, pineapple was a treat. She had often seen whole ones for sale at the fruiterers, but the only pineapple she had tasted had been canned, so sweetened and swimming in syrup that the yellow flesh had made her teeth ache. Last year one of her mother’s friends had rented a home-grown pineapple as a centrepiece for her son’s wedding party. Clara had circled around it, oohing and aahing with everyone else. It was as if they were viewing a precious monument in a museum. “It cost me a week’s pay to rent this,” her mother’s friend had said proudly. To rent a beautiful fruit and not be able to taste it seemed like the stupidest thing in the world to Clara. When the wedding party had moved into the garden for some raucous (and out of tune) singing and dancing, Clara crept back into the dining room and stood in front of the pineapple. She had reached across and touched one of its spikes. The sudden urge to pick the pineapple up, take a knife to it, chop its flesh into tiny pieces and nibble on it had been overwhelming.
The very same urge was filling her now. She pushed her fingers deep into her apron pockets (Mother had packed her three pinafore aprons, instructing that one should be worn each day to protect her day dresses from the outdoors) and felt the tip of the envelope. She sighed, pulled it out and sank to the floor, her dress skirts and apron puffing around her like a mushroom. She nibbled on a fingernail. Should she open it? It wasn’t one of the feared pink telegrams that Mrs Buxton over the road had received to inform her of the death of her son. The poor woman had taken to her bed and four months later was still in it, her bedroom curtains tightly drawn. But surely letters from the War Office could only mean one of two things: injury or death? Finding out the truth would change everything. Was she ready for the truth? Were any of them?
Heavy feet thumped down the steps to the hothouse. There was a muffled cough at the doorway.
Clara scrabbled to her feet and pushed the envelope back into her pocket. Curling her nails into her palms, she held her breath as the door to the hothouse swung open and a flood of fresh air rushed down the steps.
A young man wearing a gardening jacket with a mustard-yellow lining stared at Clara from the top of the hothouse steps, his forehead as furrowed as the newly seeded planting beds outside. He pushed his round spectacles up his nose as Clara continued to hold her breath, waiting for the telling-off which was surely about to come.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked.
Clara racked her brains for something sensible to say. Should she say she had been cold and had come inside for the warmth? Yet it was warm outside, the October sun emitting a welcome glow that in a few weeks would be gone. Maybe she should say she had been passing and heard a noise and came in to investigate? Or she could just tell him the truth – that she had been curious as to why Mrs Gilbert was so adamant she should not go near the hothouses.
“I was…curious,” Clara said eventually.
His eyes narrowed. Clara saw that the lens of his left eye was covered in a milky film. The young man walked towards her. “You’re Alfred’s niece, aren’t you?”
“Alfred?” Clara said in confusion, trying not to stare at the man’s cloudy eye.
“Mr Gilbert?”
“Oh, yes,” Clara said, a flush rising up her neck like a vine.
Now the man was closer, Clara saw he was barely a man at all, maybe sixteen
or seventeen.
He leaned on the workbench. “I guess being curious is as good a reason as any. I’m Robert, one of the under-gardeners. And you are…?”
“Clara,” she replied with a shy smile. “Um…I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what’s an under-gardener?”
Robert smiled and picked up a metal trowel from the bench. “I suppose I’m an assistant to Mr Gilbert. I know this and that about plants and equipment. Though there are plenty of others better at gardening than me. If I’m honest, all the ins-and-outs of it can get a bit confusing sometimes.”
“Yes, I imagine it must,” said Clara.
“So…what do you make of the hothouses? The Earl’s pride and joy they are,” Robert said, jabbing at the soil around one of the plants with the trowel.
“They are lovely. The plants are…so different to what is grown outside,” Clara said.
Robert looked up. “The Earl is a collector of tropical plants. I think he imagines himself to be an explorer – although he doesn’t find these plants himself. He sends people overseas to do that.”
“Does he visit these hothouses often then?” Clara asked, glancing at the door. It would not do at all for the Earl to catch her in there. Imagining Mrs Gilbert’s reaction made her clutch onto the edge of the planting bench.
“Not any more.” Robert placed the trowel down, reached across and stroked one of the pineapple leaves. “You’ll more often find him sitting in the summer house now.”
“The summer house?” said Clara.
Robert jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the door. “It overlooks the lake. A small brick building with big windows and doors. It’s heated, just like these hothouses, but it’s not for growing plants. The Earl and his family use it for entertaining their guests, or as a place to sit on a fair day.”
