by Clare Flynn
‘How can you even ask that? How can you expect me to look at Lavinia Bourne across the table every day?’
‘She’s a beautiful woman. Looking at her should be no hardship.’
He groaned in frustration. ‘You are beautiful. Yours is the only beauty I can see. She’s a painted doll.’ He lifted one hand and ran it down her face, his open palm caressing her skin. ‘So beautiful. I want to look at you all the time. I see your face when I close my eyes to sleep.’
‘I’m not beautiful, Kit. No one would say that about me.’
‘I say it and I’m the only one that matters.’
She shook her head in frustration. ‘I’m only telling you what I’m certain is best for you. It’s because I care about you. Marrying Lavinia Bourne is what you must do.’
‘Why does everyone think they know better than I do what’s best for me?’
She stroked his hair. ‘Because it’s how things are done. It’s the way of the world.’
‘The war has changed everything. We fought for freedom. Better men than me lost their lives. For what? So that the same old ways carry on? All this stupid, empty posturing and jockeying for position. What does it mean? What’s the point? No, Martha, after what I’ve seen and done I’ll never settle for a dynastic marriage. I’ll never compromise on my dreams.’
‘And what are your dreams?’
‘To be with you,’ he said quickly. ‘To travel with you. To pursue my career as a botanist. Imagine, my love, sailing to the East, seeing strange and wonderful things together. I want to live that life again and I want to share it with you. Only you.’
‘I’d not be much of a wife to you. Ten years older. Little education. Unable to bear you children.’
‘I don’t care about any of that. Not a damn thing. If we can’t have children then so be it. You’re more than enough for me.’ He stopped, thinking for a moment, then said, ‘But you don’t even know that you can’t have children – it could be that it was Walters who was infertile. Why do women always have to take the blame?’
Martha said nothing. Her face was pale. Kit felt her shiver. They went to stand together by the window at the rear of the cottage, looking out at the sunlight streaming through the trees and patterning the grass like embroidery.
‘I won’t go back there tonight. I want to stay here with you.’
‘No, Kit. Just because you don’t want to do your mother’s bidding, it doesn’t justify being rude to her and her guests. You told me she has a dinner party tonight. You can’t abandon her.’ She turned to him, running her finger down his cheek and over his mouth.
He made a low moan then bent his head to kiss her. ‘Will you grant me this one thing? Will you take me to your bed?’ he said.
Martha pulled away. ‘That’s not a good idea. It will make matters worse.’
‘You don’t want me?’
She looked into his eyes and whispered, ‘Of course I do. You’ve no idea how much. But I can’t.’
‘Are you afraid? Because of what Walters did to you? I’d never hurt you. I couldn’t hurt you.’
Martha pulled back, the mention of her late husband making her recoil. ‘I know you wouldn’t.’
‘It’s my leg, isn’t it? You don’t want me because I’m not whole.’
She moved against him, pressing her body up against his. ‘No, no, my darling. Why would you think that?’
‘Lord Bourne told me that Lavinia had misgivings about marrying a man with a missing leg. And who would want to look at it? I can hardly bear to look at it myself.’
Martha gasped. ‘Show me. Show me now.’ She reached for his hand and led him from the room, opening the door that concealed the stairway to the upper floor.
Her bedroom overlooked the forest. Outside, birds were singing, but Kit was conscious only of the soft sound of her breathing.
She told him to sit on the bed and she knelt before him on the floor, removing his riding boots.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to put you through this. Seeing my disfigurement. It would be better if you didn’t look. It’s not pretty.’
She ignored him, unbuttoning his jodhpurs and sliding them down over his lower body. She saw his hand was shaking so she kissed his palm, opened her blouse and pressed his hand against her breast. He groaned as his palm settled over the contours. Then she unbuckled the leather strap that attached his wooden leg to his stump and eased the prosthesis off. He turned away, not wanting to witness her inevitable disgust. But she ran the palms of her hands over the scars and the puckered skin, then lowered her head and kissed him there, her tongue and her lips setting his nerve endings on fire.
‘It’s part of you,’ she said, ‘so I can only love it.’
Kit gasped and lifted her chin so he could kiss her.
* * *
Afterwards they lay in each other’s arms, exchanging kisses and caresses.
‘That was the first time I have made love,’ he admitted.
‘It was for me too,’ she answered.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her.
‘I can’t call what Walters did to me making love. It bore no resemblance to what we just did. You’ve washed away the stain of the man who raped me. You’ve given me a beautiful gift and I will remember this afternoon and what we did together until my dying day.’ She rolled over and examined at his face with intensity, her own face serious.
‘What are you looking at? What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘I’m learning you. Learning your face. Drinking it in so that every inch of it is imprinted on my mind, and I can carry the memory of how you look now, like a treasure in my heart.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t need to do that. You’re going to come away with me.’
Her eyes were sad. ‘How can I do that? Don’t say that, Kit, it makes it worse.’
He fixed his eyes on her. ‘I mean it. We’ll go away together. We’ll marry and travel to the Far East. I’ll work on my cataloguing. I can teach you about it and you can help me.’
‘I’d like that,’ she said, stroking his hair back from his eyes.
‘We’d have to live simply. Prospecting for plants is not as lucrative as panning for gold. There’s no money in it. My father didn’t trust me. He knew I’d want to head off and follow my dreams, so he did everything possible to prevent that. He’s doing it now from beyond the grave. As you know, the estate is held in trust until I’m thirty and Mother holds the purse strings. Until then I have only a small monthly allowance and that’s contingent on my being fully involved in the management of Newlands and the family business.’
‘Won’t you need money to fund the trip?’
He nodded. ‘Maybe I can get a bursary from my college. I was planning to go to Cambridge next week to see my old tutor. I could talk to him and the dean of studies about it. And then there’s the Royal Horticultural Society. I’ve lots of avenues to investigate.’
Martha rolled onto her back. ‘I’ve never had money. What you haven’t had you don’t miss. All I want is you. Now that we are together like this I don’t want to think of being without you.’
‘Then don’t.’
‘But it will happen. Even if your college pays for your trip they won’t pay for mine.’
‘Then I’ll wait until I have enough put by. I won’t go without you. We can finish the work on the sunken garden. You’ll move into the cottage there and I will visit you every night.’
’That’s daft,’ she said. ‘And if you let me get in the way of your dreams you’ll come to resent me. Maybe hate me in the end.’
‘That can never happen. You are my dream now. My life without you is meaningless. My life until now has been meaningless. You’ve changed everything.’
She turned to him with her solemn face and her sad eyes.
He stroked her hair. ‘The two years I was in the war were the worst kind of living hell. Men climbing over the top of the trenches, walking forward, blindly, following orders, knowing with every mi
serable muddy step that they were moving towards certain death.’
She was listening intently.
‘Every day I would wake up convinced it would be my last. I used to pray that I would take a “Blighty” and get sent home to recuperate. We all did. None of us wanted to be there. So much for being brave. We were all terrified.’ He laughed but it was hollow. ‘If it was bad for us officers it was so much worse for the enlisted men. Many of them were boys.’
Kit closed his eyes, trying to blot out the memory. ‘Some days the smells were the worst thing: the foul stench of decaying flesh, the sulphur like rotten eggs, the stink of too many unwashed bodies crammed close together in filthy conditions. But was that really worse than how it felt? Waterlogged feet, lice in your clothing, blisters, boils, trench foot, the rub of your uniform against broken skin, the shiver of rats as they climbed over you while you slept. And my conditions were luxurious compared to what my men had to put up with.’
He went on to tell her about the sounds. The thud and pounding of guns, sometimes distant, sometimes close. The scream of shells. The ear-splitting sound of an exploding mortar. The weeping of young men as they tried to sleep the night before an attack, knowing they were unlikely to see home again, unlikely even to see another night.’
He turned his head and stared up at the ceiling. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear this.’
‘I do,’ she whispered.
But he shook his head. ‘I don’t want to think about it any more. I don’t want you to know. Better to try and forget. You help me forget.’ He rolled over and kissed her slowly, then moved his hands over her skin.
Chapter 9
By the time Christopher returned to Newlands Hall and changed into evening wear, his mother and her guests had begun dinner. When he entered the room, he was greeted by a stony silence. Lord Bourne narrowed his eyes at him and didn’t return his greeting. Lavinia and her mother talked to each other, ignoring him, Lavinia’s little retroussé nose lifted as though there were a bad smell in the room. Only Mr Harrington-Foster and Major Collerton pushed their chairs back and got up to shake his hand.
He sat down, drawing his napkin onto his lap as Bannister placed a plate of soup in front of him. Seeing that the rest of the company had by now been served with the fish course, he waved the soup away and asked to proceed straight to the fish.
‘I apologise. My horse stumbled taking a ditch, landed awkwardly and I think he’s slightly lame. I didn’t want to take any chances so I dismounted and walked him home.’
His mother appeared relieved that he had deftly covered up his tardiness for their guests, but was clearly not convinced herself by his lie. She knew that the chance of Hooker stumbling in clearing a ditch was as unlikely as her son allowing it to happen.
The tension at dinner was eased by the presence of the other guests. Harrington-Foster was a blustering bore, but his wife, a plump smiling matron, regaled them with stories of the goings-on in the village, where she had evidently established herself as benefactress-in-chief over the poor and needy. Christopher plied her with questions, gratified by the fact that this line of conversation was of no interest whatsoever to Lavinia, her mother or his own mother. In between, he talked across the table to Major Collerton, who had been too old for active service during the war, but professed a hobby interest in horticulture and wanted to hear about Christopher’s experiences in Borneo.
Annoyed at being neglected by all the gentlemen present, Lavinia, having failed to spark any interest among them to hear about her dogs and her doll collection, eventually enquired as to where Borneo might be. She was going through the motions, evidently intending, once she had secured an entry point, to manoeuvre the conversation in her own direction. When Christopher explained that it was a large island in South East Asia, beneath the South China Sea, her eyes glazed over.
‘I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go there. It sounds absolutely horrid. Full of natives and wild animals and creepy crawly insects and things.’
‘Isn’t that rather the point?’ said Collerton. ‘That’s why Captain Shipley has been so keen to visit the place. Not much of interest for a botanist to study around here.’
Lavinia smiled, as if she were thinking that Christopher would not be doing any more exploring once they were married. She said, ‘Well the only animals I’d ever want to study are Popsy and Petal.’ She threw a dazzling smile at Christopher. ‘Once you meet them, Captain Shipley, you’ll find them absolutely fascinating. Perhaps they might even tempt you to study them too! Then you wouldn’t need to go all the way to that horrible place.’ She clapped her hands and waited for the appreciative laughter which the assembled company provided on cue.
Christopher stretched his lips into a smile, then, duty discharged, resumed his conversation with Major Collerton until it was time for the ladies to withdraw.
As she left the room, Edwina pulled him aside and hissed at him, ‘Where were you? You were more than an hour late. And you haven’t even combed your hair. You look as if you’ve just got out of bed.’ Without waiting for a reply she swept out of the room.
* * *
He was relieved that the Bournes departed early the following morning for the trip back to the leaking roofs of Harton Hall.
His mother was far from pleased. She sat in grim silence all through her breakfast, then, as they drove to the service in the village church, she castigated his behaviour, speaking quietly to prevent the chauffeur hearing.
‘I was absolutely mortified. You missed cocktails altogether and were over an hour late to table. And don’t expect me to believe that ludicrous tale you spun about Hooker getting lamed. I’ve no doubt you’ll be saddling him up as soon as we get back from church.’ She slapped her gloved hand against his sleeve. ‘You talked to Major Collerton and Mrs Harrington-Foster throughout the entire meal and had barely a word for poor Lavinia. I could tell she felt humiliated, poor child.’
‘She’s not a child. She just acts like one. She’s older than me – she’s twenty-seven.’
‘Whatever. You might have made an effort. After dinner, she seemed positively glum. She went to bed early, for pity’s sake.’
‘She was missing her lap dogs. Nothing to do with me.’
‘A woman like her needs to be paid compliments. You really must make more of an effort, Christopher. Sometimes I despair of you.’
They pulled up outside the parish church and walked under the lychgate and along the stone-paved pathway into the building.
As soon as they were inside he saw her. It hadn’t even entered Christopher’s head that of course she would be there at church, along with the rest of the village and the Newlands estate. Strange how, in all those years of going to the Sunday morning service, he had never noticed her. He must have walked past her, Sunday after Sunday, as he did past all the other members of the congregation, seeing them as a collective entity and failing to register any as individuals. Even her. That seemed impossible now.
She was wearing the same brown felt hat and coat. As he and his mother passed her pew, on the way to his family’s designated seats at the front of the church, he looked at her, hoping for an acknowledgement, but she kept her head lowered as if she hadn’t seen him. Of course she would have been expecting to see him there, accustomed to seeing the arrival of the Shipley family every Sunday morning.
Throughout the service he wrestled with himself, but couldn’t help turning his head whenever he thought he might be unobserved by his mother, hoping that once he might look in Martha’s direction and find her looking back at him. But every time he turned towards her, she had her head bowed in prayer or was gazing straight ahead at the altar and the vicar as he officiated.
Afterwards, he steered his mother out of the church quickly, hurrying outside where he hoped to find Martha – maybe even manage a few words while his mother was having her customary conversation with the vicar. But once he reached the churchyard there was no sign of the gamekeeper’s widow. Christopher looked fr
om one group to another then went and stood in the lane looking up and down in vain. She had vanished.
When his mother appeared at his elbow, he said, ‘Go ahead without me, Mother. It’s a fine morning so I’ve a mind to walk. I’ll stop off at the stables and take a look at Hooker’s leg.’
Edwina Shipley tutted. ‘Please don’t insult me, darling. I’ve told you I know there’s nothing wrong with your horse’s leg.’ Then she smiled at him and slipped her hand through his arm. ‘But you’re right. It is a beautiful day, so I’ll walk with you. Rawson can take the motor back without us.’
He cursed inwardly, but could think of nothing to say to dissuade her.
As soon as they had left the village and entered the Newlands park, she took her hand from his arm and slipped it into the pocket of her coat, a habit from her youth she had never managed to lose. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
He was surprised but nervous about what might be coming.
‘I saw you. Turning your head to look at that woman. All through the service. The whole church must have seen you. Your head was like a swivel.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She sighed in irritation. ‘The Walters woman. The gamekeeper’s wife. The one you’re supposed to have evicted by now. Is that where you’ve been spending your time? Is that why you were so late last night? And gone most of the days on these mysterious rides.’
Christopher said nothing.
She sighed again. ‘I suppose you’ve been having sexual relations with her?’
He didn’t know what to say. There was little point in denying it.
Edwina shook her head. ‘Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Get it out of your system. Being a widow means she has experience. No bad thing, for Lavinia’s sake.’ She spoke briskly. ‘I was always grateful that your father wasn’t a virgin. Doesn’t make the act any pleasanter but at least if the man is experienced he knows how to get on with it. None of that fumbling about, working out what to do next.’ She gave a brittle laugh. ‘And with your handicap… it means you can work all that part out. Must be awkward – managing the mechanics of it.’ Again she laughed. ‘Listen to me. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation! But since your father isn’t here to discuss such matters with you, I–’
