Helen looked at him.
“Maybe it’s too many cooks,” he said. “Maybe you should help Maddie and me with the letters and leave the speechwriting to Ned. He loves all that intrigue.”
She looked over to me. “Dinner?”
Mr. Waters started to answer and then saw that Helen was addressing me and nodded instead.
* * *
Helen took me to the dining carriage through the other staff offices. They were richly appointed: dark wood paneling, leather upholstery, heavy velvet drapes, much more ornate than Mr. Waters’s office. I said as much.
“Yes,” Helen said. “Rupert does what David does, and David likes simplicity. This is all terribly fussy, don’t you think? I’d say the admiral and Ned probably did their own decor.” She laughed.
In the dining room, which was in the middle carriage, we were served pea soup with bread and sweet, lukewarm tea. I realized I’d hardly eaten any breakfast and no lunch and so the food was sustaining. There was fresh bread and a slab of butter each.
“How are you enjoying the H.R.H. circus?” Helen asked.
“It’s all so extraordinary,” I said. “I didn’t want to say in front of Mr. Waters, but I’ve never done anything before. I was at school, then at Christie’s, and now . . .”
“Oh, that’s dear,” Helen said. “Truth is, it’s we who are fortunate to have you, Maddie Bright.”
I’m sure I beamed.
We were about to leave to go back to work when a tall, slim naval officer in whites strode through the carriage from the front.
“Dickie!” said Helen, stopping him in his tracks just after he’d passed us by. He whipped his head around. He had a happy face, eyes that looked at a person directly. “I thought we’d conspired to leave you in Sydney,” Helen said.
He walked back to us. “Sadly, no,” he said. “Although the old salt may have tried.”
“Halsey?” Helen said.
“Yes, Halsey. He and Grigg are now officially convinced I am a bad influence on H.R.H. It’s my great achievement to be the cause of something they actually agree on.”
He leaned down and spoke more quietly so that only Helen and I would hear. “As if David needs any influencing at all to be bad.” He laughed at his joke. “But unfortunately for me, Halsey has written to the King that I am the problem, and Grigg has done the same with the PM. It was my poor mother who told me. Me, sweet boy that I am. Let’s face it. If we were to talk honestly, I think you and I know what’s what.” He flashed a Cheshire cat grin.
He noticed me then. “And who’s this?” he said, to Helen not me.
“I’m Maddie,” I said, “sir.”
“You don’t have to ‘sir’ Dickie,” Helen said. “Maddie, this is Louis Mountbatten, Prince Edward’s cousin. Dickie, Maddie Bright is the daughter of the poet Thomas Bright. Will you sit with us?”
“And I know Thomas Bright?” He sat down beside Helen, who shimmied over to the window to make room for him.
He smelled fresh, like Sunlight soap.
“You should,” Helen said. “If you read poetry you would. Maddie’s taken on the role of correspondence secretary for a few days until we catch up.”
“Well, good for you,” he said, smiling at me. “I was brought on the tour to write those letters, according to Grigg yesterday. At least, he thinks I was.” He laughed then. In fact, I realized a slight smile hadn’t really left his face since he’d come into the carriage. “I’m more the black sheep of the family sort.”
“That’s the royal family,” Helen said, “where the sheep are generally pretty white.”
“Just so. Anyway, I am on my way to see H.R.H. Is there a problem with the arrangements tomorrow? The admiral and I think we should talk about a new nation, a new capital, one of our friends—like in Ottawa. But Grigg, apparently, is worried about whether the Fenians or the other Bolshies are in control.” He considered this. “Are there any other Bolshies?”
Helen laughed. “Ah, so it’s you and the admiral getting in David’s ear. I wondered. Well, Ned has to think of the political ramifications, and I’d just like a bit of poetry.”
Dickie laughed. He leaned in to light Helen’s cigarette and then lit his own.
“Grigg doesn’t seem to like me much, to be honest,” he said then.
“No. He thinks you’re stirring the pot. And you are! Do you know what he told me the other night?”
“No, do tell.” He looked at me as he spoke. “Maddie and I love gossip, don’t we?”
I nodded and giggled. It was as if he’d read my mind.
“David wrote to his mother that he had to give you a dressing-down after one of the balls in Melbourne. He told Ned he’d done that. Something about you and the drink being too well acquainted. Anyway, Ned told me the only reason David likes you on the tour is that there’s someone who behaves worse than him.”
Dickie laughed, throwing his head back. “Ah well, David knows what’s really happening, and so does the admiral. And Waters has always been decent to me. I’m not worried. I can afford to have an enemy in Ned.”
He stood then. “Maddie, it is such a relief to know someone is writing those letters. I was terrified they were leaving it in the hope I’d become suddenly inspired. Ships. I like ships. I’m so glad you’re here.” Leaving his cigarette between his lips, he reached out a hand. I shook it.
He took the cigarette from his lips and blew smoke up to the ceiling of the car.
“And, Helen, I’ll see you tonight, I hope.”
He left us.
“Dickie is so dashing,” I said.
“He’s just a sweet boy, really,” she said. “This is all a bit beyond him. Let’s face it, it’s beyond me, and I know how the world works. Dickie’s nineteen, just a baby.”
I didn’t remind Helen I was even younger, seventeen.
* * *
It was late that night before Helen finished working with the prince on his remarks for the next day. She came out of his private study and into our office.
“Finally, we get a speech he’s happy with,” Helen said to me. “And then, five minutes ago, he said he really doesn’t need to speak at all tomorrow.”
Mr. Waters, who’d been working at the desk beside me, looked up but didn’t say anything.
“I’m serious. We’re back to, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I don’t think the week off helped at all,” Helen said, looking at Mr. Waters now. “I think he’s worse.”
“He’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep,” Mr. Waters said. “What’s he doing now?”
“James is in there.” James was the prince’s valet. I’d met him during the afternoon when he came in looking for the prince. “I think he’s planning to go to bed. But I am serious. The admiral and Dickie have been bothering him about what to say.”
“Good then,” Mr. Waters said.
“No, not good then. There are too many whispers in his ears. It’s my job and Ned’s job, not theirs. Or yours.”
Mr. Waters didn’t reply.
“You’re still up,” Helen said to me. I didn’t like to say I didn’t know where I was sleeping and hadn’t wanted to ask Mr. Waters. I didn’t even know where the servants’ compartment was. I was happy to keep working, but I was getting tired. My little bag was still beside the desk. I hadn’t stopped except for the quick dinner break.
I’d started typing once Mr. Waters had read the first twenty draft replies and pronounced himself happy with them. He made changes along the way and it helped me learn. He said we’d give typed versions to the prince, “in the hope he doesn’t change them.” He smiled as he said it. “But, Maddie, he probably will. He’s quite particular about some things, and no one can quite work out what they’ll be on any given day. I did show him the standard letter and he was awfully happy, so bravo.”
I didn’t care if he rewrote them f
rom scratch. Having a chance to write something he would read was enough for someone who, until a week ago, had one experience of work: having been fired from Christie’s Cafe for bathing a customer in his tea.
“Come on,” Helen said now. “You need your sleep.” She looked at Mr. Waters. “No one likes a sycophant, do they, Rupert?” Her voice took on an edge.
“Certainly not,” he said, either failing to notice the edge or choosing not to. “Off you go, Maddie. To bed.”
I picked up my bag and followed Helen down the corridor past the other offices, the government carriage and the dining carriage and kitchen.
Helen was the only woman on staff and she had a large compartment with its own bathroom at one end of a carriage. The train had been fitted out for the prince’s tour and they’d specified the need for female staff accommodation, she said.
“I got the steward to make up the second bunk. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”
I knew that Helen would have had the whole compartment to herself if it hadn’t been for me. “It’s very kind of you,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“It’s like school. We can be just like school chums.”
“Really, I’d be more than happy to sleep with the servants.”
“It wouldn’t be right,” Helen said. “You’re one of the prince’s personal staff now. You bunk with the staff. Anyway, I’m glad for the company.”
We changed into our nightdresses—mine poorly mended, Helen’s a lovely apricot silk with a matching long gown she draped neatly on the hook behind the door—and crawled into our bunks.
Helen hung her head over the edge of her bunk. Her blond curls fell around her face. “See? Like boarding school.”
“I never went to boarding school,” I said.
“My parents sent me,” she said. “I think Mummy wanted me out of the house after she remarried. God, I hated it, but home was worse by then—a horror, actually.” She looked terribly sad, and I wasn’t sure what to say. “I just wanted to go back to America. I hated England. I hated it.”
“Didn’t you say you were an orphan, like the other Helen Burns?” I said.
“I did,” she said, “but only for the sake of a good story.”
I laughed. “You can’t just make your life up.”
“Why not?”
“I loved school,” I said, thinking suddenly about Daddy, who’d taught us English. I sighed.
“Did you tell me you knew Mr. Waters before?” I said then, wanting to change the subject. I had spoken to Mr. Waters during the evening while Helen worked with the prince on his speech. I had noticed him watching the door to the prince’s study.
“Yes, in the war,” Helen said. “Rupert was wounded in France. I was working at a hospital.”
“That sounds like a plot for a romance,” I said.
“Not really, no,” she said. “I . . . It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does,” I said. “We’re writers! So is he Rochester to your Jane, or Heathcliff to your Cathy?”
“Rupert? Heathcliff?” she said, as if I’d suggested he was a peacock. “No, no, no. He’s Edgar. No, not Edgar. St. John. He’s St. John not Rochester. Can’t bend.” She sighed. “Do you really want to know?”
She looked upset.
“Yes,” I said. “He seems so kind, and so sad.”
“He is kind,” she said. “Rupert is kind to a fault. And he is sad.”
She sighed heavily, looked away from me, out into the black night. “Rupert and I fell in love,” she said, looking back at me. “But it wasn’t enough.”
“What do you mean? Enough for what?”
“It wasn’t enough to cleanse me.”
From Autumn Leaves by M. A. Bright
FRANCE, 1918
“Will you walk with me?” he said.
“You’re not supposed to be over here. This is the drivers’ quarters. Some of the women don’t like your type.”
“What’s my type?”
“Male.”
“I see. There’s not much I can do about that.”
“You can leave,” she said, but she was smiling. There was a tooth, on the left, a little crooked.
“I knew you’d look fetching in that coat up close.”
It was early Sunday morning. She was wearing her goatskin. Miss Ivens had ordered them for the drivers in the second winter. She didn’t care what it looked like. On those frigid nights, it was a relief to be warm.
“From a distance, I took you for a bear, a Russian one,” he said.
“I’m not sure I like that,” she said. “And I don’t know why it has to be Russian.”
“Standing on its back legs. Or perhaps a centaur rather than a bear.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.” He smiled shyly. “Please, will you walk with me?”
The look on his face. There was something uncomplicated about him, something altogether good, she thought.
She could tell him about complication; complication that would knit his brow more or less permanently. But instead she smiled and said, “Yes, let’s walk.”
She wanted uncomplicated, she thought to herself. But it wouldn’t be fair on him. He was a gentleman. She knew that much. She was never going to be with a gentleman. She’d been spoiled for that. It was the perfect word, spoiled. It was what happened to rotten fruit.
* * *
—
He had survived. Against all odds, he had survived, and he had her to thank for it.
“You’re very quiet,” she said.
“I need time to muster up my courage,” he said.
“Is the muster worth waiting for?”
He nodded. “Oh yes. It’s the quiet ones who have wisdom.”
“That makes no sense,” she said.
They walked across the abbey grounds in silence, toward the village. There was a mist low on the ground, although the sun would soon burn it off and already the chill was lifting.
They came to the edge of the forest. “How do you think the trees work out where they should stop?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How come the forest is always this big?” He gestured with his arm, the one that wasn’t injured. “And we are in the forest or out of the forest. There’s no partly forested.”
“I suppose it’s soil that changes,” she said.
“I never thought of that. I thought it was an intelligence that only trees have. They know how to live in a community.”
She laughed. “I think I prefer your version.”
She picked up a twig. “Last year, there was a craze among the French soldiers to make bracelets out of pine needles. They wove them together and gave them to the nurses and drivers. They’d sing songs to us. It was rather sweet. Perhaps the trees here do know how to live in community. You may be right,” she said.
She looked across at him. “Have you rounded up your courage?”
“I have,” he said, turning to face her. He tilted his head, shaking it lightly. He held up his left hand, the injured one. She wanted to tell him to be careful. He smiled. “You saved my life. I don’t know how to repay you.”
He was stuttering. He wanted to punch himself.
She didn’t seem to notice. “I drove you here,” she said. “Miss Ivens saved your life, or Henry. I think Dr. Henry did your surgery. I didn’t even know how ill you were until we got here.”
“Still, you were supposed to leave me there.”
“I was,” she said.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’m not very good at doing as I’m told. That’s the first thing.” She had a flash of memory then, her stepfather the last time, the time she screamed as soon as he came into the room.
She still doesn’t know where that scream came from, how she managed
it.
Her mother was at the door then. “What’s wrong?”
“A nightmare,” she told her mother while looking at her stepfather. “I had a nightmare. I don’t want those nightmares anymore.”
Her mother looked at her stepfather, said nothing. Nothing.
“And if I’m perfectly honest, I liked you,” she said to him now, putting thoughts of the past away.
“So if you hadn’t liked me, you’d have left me there?”
“Quite possibly,” she said.
“I like you too,” he said.
“But that’s because I saved your life. You are beholden to me.”
“No,” he said, serious now. “I want to tell you this. Since we met, there hasn’t been anything else on my mind but you.” He flexed his jaw. He must get these words out.
“No,” she said, putting a finger to his lips. “We mustn’t talk like this. We mustn’t.” She could smell the soap on his skin. “There is nothing there.”
“In you?” he said, incredulous. “You feel nothing for me?”
“No,” she said. “Yes. Nothing like that. I feel you were a soldier who was wounded and I drove you to the hospital, which is my job. Your feelings are perfectly understandable but they’re really nothing to do with me. You are grateful. Be grateful to Miss Ivens. She established Royaumont. Be grateful to Dr. Henry. She saved your arm.” She swallowed hard. “But now, you must talk about other things.” Her voice was strained; she could hear it.
Other things? He had thought of nothing else but her, the way her hair fell forward onto her face when she bent down to him, the way she spoke, the sweet smell of her breath.
He’d found out what he could from the nurses. Most of them wouldn’t talk to him, but there was one who’d been her friend. She’s the life of the party, the nurse said. Always up for a good time. You’ll have trouble with that one, mark my words.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll stop the talk, if you tell me about yourself.”
“Nothing to tell,” she said. “Nothing you’d want to hear about anyway.”
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