Contents
So Much Owed
Shadow of a Century
Under Heaven’s Shining Stars
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So Much Owed
By Jean Grainger
Copyright © 2013 by Jean Grainger
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, or events used in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, alive or deceased, events or locales is completely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1490437743 (pbk)
eBook design by Maureen Cutajar
www.gopublished.com
For Betty and Hilda
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
Also by the Author
Acknowledgements
Other Books by the Author
Prologue
12th December 1918
From the outside, it was barely recognisable. Gaping holes in the walls and piles of smoking rubble had irrevocably altered the once imposing facade of l’Hôpital Saint Germain. The Allied propaganda machine had claimed the Battle of Amiens as a great victory – a turning point, spelling an end to the horrific futility of trench warfare. It was here in Amiens, the victors crowed, that the Germans had stumbled their first steps towards surrender. Yet as Dr Richard Buckley picked his way through the decimated city, he saw nothing about Amiens to suggest a city basking in the glory of victory. Instead, he found himself thinking: So this is what winning looks like.
He climbed what was left of the marble steps leading to the ornate entrance. Everything was so different from when he was last here four months ago. Gone was the officious Reverend Mother, who had vetted all entrants to the hospital with her suspicious eye. Gone too, the all-pervasive smell of beeswax and disinfectant that had permeated the quiet, ordered corridors of the past. Now the smell reminded him of Willy McCarthy’s butcher shop in Skibbereen, where he and his school friends had gone one day to see the farmyard animals being slaughtered. The sickly scent of their dying had haunted him for years. Now the same mingled odour of blood, flesh, bone and fear again assailed his nostrils. It no longer made him physically sick – one can get used to anything, it seemed – yet as he strode through the foyer and up the stairs, he found it a struggle to endure the anguished cries of the wounded all around him. Two years spent treating the casualties of war had done nothing to desensitise him to the suffering of others.
‘Excusez-moi.’ He tried to seize the attention of a passing nun. Like everyone else here, she looked exhausted; her once-white uniform was spattered with bloodstains, some brown with age. ‘Vous connaissez Solange Allingham…’
‘Non, Monsieur.’ She shook off his arm and hurried on.
He had been moved further up the line last August, to where his services were in even greater demand. It seemed the turnover of hospital staff in his absence had been so rapid that there was no one left here who knew him. Perhaps he should have worn his uniform, but he had taken it off the day the armistice was declared and had vowed never to put it on again. He wanted nothing to do with the sense of triumph expounded by the top brass. Not because he was Irish and, therefore, it was not his country’s glory, but because he was sickened by the whole bloody thing. He’d endured their congratulations at his decision to do the right thing, despite his nationality, with gritted teeth. It was pointless trying to explain his motivation had nothing to do with patriotism or a desire to defeat anyone, and everything to do with trying to alleviate suffering. Anyway, those men who aired such views were usually patients, and so he treated them as best he could and avoided any discussions on the subject.
HE TRIED AGAIN, THIS time approaching a young nurse with red hair who just might be Irish.
‘Excuse me – do you know Madame Solange Allingham?’
She stared at him as if amazed to see a fully intact man and answered him in a west of Ireland accent, ‘Yes, she’s in the theatre, but I think she’s due a break sometime soon. Whether or not she’ll get it is another thing. We’ve both been on duty,’ she glanced at the watch pinned to the front of her uniform, ‘twenty-nine hours now. If you want to wait, she’ll come out this way. If she comes out. Now, please excuse me. If I don’t lie down, I’ll fall down.’
Richard sat on a wooden bench and leaned his tall frame against the dark-brown wainscoting. He also was exhausted. He thought he should probably go to a ward, offer to help, but he simply couldn’t. He’d worked more or less constantly for two years, only going home on leave twice during that time, and apart from those brief visits, never taking a day off. He had treated the wounded day and night and only stopped when he felt his exhaustion was a danger to the patients. He would then sleep dreamlessly for a few hours and begin the whole bloody process again. The waves of battered and broken young men in front of him, many of them begging to die, never subsided. Some survived, a great many more didn’t, and thousands were left with injuries so horrific that perhaps death would have been preferable to life.
His tiredness was playing tricks on his mind. Every time a doctor came round the corner, he found himself thinking it was Jeremy. Even though he had seen so many young men die, Richard still found it hard to accept that his best friend had joined the rest. He had been so vital, so much larger than life – smiling and joking and keeping everyone’s spirits up. Yet it had turned out he was mortal like everyone else; apparently, he’d been killed in a bomb blast on his way to the hospital after a much-needed sleep. Even the nurse who had written to him with the news, herself so used to sudden death, had sounded shocked. Such a beloved doctor gone and so close to the end too – another week and it would have been all over.
Now Richard had nothing left to do but to collect Solange and bring her home with him. Jeremy should have been the one to take care of her after the war, but that was not to be. Solange Allingham had no one else to protect her now – her parents were dead, her brothers both killed at Verdun. Jeremy and Richard had talked about this – if either of them was killed. Somehow, Richard had assumed that if either of them died, it would be him. He was so dull and un
interesting, compared to his friend. Yet in the end, it had been the lively, ever-smiling Jeremy who had died. And now it was down to Richard to take care of his best friend’s sad, young widow.
Chapter 1
20th January 1919
Solange Allingham gazed out the window of the black Morris Oxford at the sodden fields. The endless journey through England by train and the choppy crossing to Ireland had barely registered with her. She could feel nothing except a dragging despair, deep within her. Even the rhythmic slosh of the car’s wipers seemed to beat out the mantra, ‘Jeremy is dead, Jeremy is dead.’ They had been planning to buy a vineyard in the Dordogne after the war; they were going to have a huge family – three boys, three girls. ‘Jeremy is dead, Jeremy is dead.’
Gradually, the green rolling hills of the southeastern counties of Wexford and Waterford gave way to rugged stone-filled fields. She kept on catching distant glimpses of a grey, cold ocean. Beside her, Richard drove in silence, his vivid green eyes focused on the wet road ahead, his sandy hair neatly cut and combed. How he and Jeremy had been such good friends amazed her. Her Jeremy had always been so bright and funny and full of life. This quiet, shy Irish doctor entirely lacked that sort of charm. When he spoke, it was always slow and deliberate. He was painstakingly methodical in his work, irrespective of any chaos that surrounded him. Yet she had seen injured soldiers stop screaming in agony when Dr Buckley spoke to them or touched them. ‘The gentle giant,’ Jeremy had dubbed him, and he was indeed big – well over six feet tall, with a deep voice she knew his patients found reassuring.
‘Not long now. We’ll be in Skibbereen by six, I should think. I hope you aren’t too uncomfortable?’ His eyes never left the road.
‘No, thank you.’ She hesitated, seeking the English words. Her mind felt like it was wrapped in wet cotton wool, and all she really wanted to do was sleep. ‘I am fine.’ In the weeks since Jeremy had died, she had barely spoken, in either her native French or her husband’s English. Not that she had learnt much English from Jeremy – he had always said he was too romantic and passionate to be Anglo-Saxon and so spoke in French to her most of the time.
All the nurses had been in love with the young doctor with his thick, wavy hair and warm hazel eyes; he had flirted outrageously with all of them, but they knew there was nothing in it – he only had eyes for Solange Galliard. He had pursued her relentlessly from when he was first assigned to the hospital, ignoring her protests that she was engaged to Armand De La Croix, the son of a local banker. Jeremy saw this as no obstacle whatsoever: she simply had to break off the engagement and marry him instead. It was impossible to do anything else, he’d claimed – she had bewitched him with her deep azure eyes and her black corkscrew curls, forever threatening to liberate themselves from the starched white veil of her nurse’s uniform. He told her regularly that she occupied his every thought, waking and sleeping, and, despite herself, she had fallen in love with the incorrigible English doctor. When he talked, he made her laugh till tears flowed down her cheeks, and when he touched her, she tingled with desire. She had married him and was the happiest girl on earth.
Back in 1914, the war had been seen as something to be over by Christmas. The girls had giggled with delight at the vast numbers of handsome soldiers arriving daily. It had all seemed so romantic, the men so gallant – a bit of a lark really, as Jeremy termed it. How wrong they all were. The fun and high spirits of those early days had quickly given way to scenes of unprecedented human misery. Those scenes would haunt all those who witnessed them for the rest of their lives.
Solange wondered if Jeremy would even recognise her if he were to see her now. Grief had taken its toll on the curvaceous body he had loved; her once round cheeks were hollow, and dark shadows circled her blue eyes. At twenty-six, her jet-black hair had become suddenly threaded with silver hairs. The person she had been before the war seemed a distant stranger to her now. She suspected the carefree girl of her youth had died along with that whole generation of young men. All gone now, and Jeremy gone with them.
‘There is a rug on the back seat if you’re cold.’ Richard’s voice interrupted her reverie.
‘No, thank you. I am fine.’ She realised her answer was a repetition of her response to his earlier enquiry so she added, with an attempt at enthusiasm, ‘Ireland is a very pretty country. Quite like Brittany in places, I think.’ She knew her voice sounded flat and colourless. She couldn’t help it.
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I’m glad you like it. Though, of course, when the sun shines, it’s much better. When we were students in England, Jeremy often came here on holidays. He complained that it never stopped raining. I tried to get him to consider moving here after the war, but he said he would rather get a suntan in France than rust in Ireland any day.’
They both smiled at the memory of him; his presence was almost tangible between them in the car.
‘Thank you for doing this for me,’ Solange began again. ‘You have been so kind. I cannot imagine how it would have been if I would have stayed in France. I don’t know if I can survive now, but at least here has no memories. I will try to be of service to you and your family.’
Richard drove and sighed deeply as if weighing up how best to phrase what he was going to say next.
‘Solange, I’m not bringing you to Dunderrig to be of service to us, I am bringing you to be a member of our family. Please understand that. It’s your home for as long as you want it to be. We, Edith and I, don’t expect anything from you, but I, we, both hope that coming here will help you. I can’t imagine how hard it must be, considering all you have lost. Not just Jeremy, but your parents, your brothers. It’s almost too much to bear. We just want to help, in any way that we can. Jeremy would have taken care of Edith had the situation been reversed. We talked about it, you know. What we would do if either one of us didn’t make it. I know if it had been me who was killed then you and Jeremy would have helped Edith. So please, you are family as far as we are concerned. You don’t owe us a thing.’
In the four years she had known Richard Buckley, this was the longest speech she had ever heard him make. His voice was cracking with emotion and it was clear his offer came from the heart. She hardly knew what to say – she sat in silent gratitude as he drove the narrow, twisty road.
‘Down there is Skibbereen, but this is where we turn off,’ he said, taking a slow right at a signpost marked ‘Dunderrig’. ‘I wrote to Edith to let her know we were arriving this evening, so she will be expecting us. Though naturally, she has been very tired of late.’
‘Of course. She has only a few more weeks to go?’ Solange enquired politely.
‘Two weeks, perhaps. No more than three. I would have given anything to have been here to help her. She has suffered badly with sickness throughout this pregnancy. And she had to cope with the loss of my mother and father too, within a few days of each other. Thank God the influenza spared my wife, if not my poor parents. She has had so much to cope with.’
‘It will feel strange for you to be home and not to see them. Even as an adult, you are never ready to lose your parents.’ She was conscious that her voice had grown heavy with her own pain and made an effort to be stronger for him. ‘But you must be very excited to see your wife after all this time.’
‘Yes, I am.’ A brief smile but nothing more.
She glanced at him, questioningly. Richard very rarely mentioned Edith; Solange had often speculated with Jeremy about what kind of marriage the Buckleys had – practical, passionate, romantic? When she wondered what Mrs Buckley was like, Jeremy told her that he had met Edith only briefly and explained how he had dragged his shy best friend to a dance while they were still at medical college in England. To his surprise, Richard spent his evening talking about Ireland with a cool but beautiful blonde from Dublin. Only weeks later they qualified, and Jeremy signed up for France and met Solange while Richard went to work as a doctor in Ireland and ended up marrying the Dublin girl. Solange’s only k
nowledge of Edith was based on the photo Richard had of her on his desk in the hospital; it showed a tall and elegant woman, beautifully dressed. She also knew that Richard had seen his wife very briefly eight months before, when in Dublin on leave – a leave that had been cut short before he’d been able to travel home to Cork to visit his parents, then still alive and well. Poor Richard. ‘And are you also excited to become a Papa?’
‘Yes. I am.’ The same answer, but this time the smile was warmer.
THE HOUSE WAS SET back from the road and was impressive in its size and architecture. While not a château by any standard, it still seemed to be a very large house for a couple to inhabit alone. It was built of a buttery stone with limestone edging, and despite its grand size appeared welcoming, with lights blazing in each window, promising a warm and inviting end to her long, tiring journey. The tree-lined avenue passed through gardens that were beautifully kept, even during their winter sleep. Large sections of the housefront were covered with crimson-and-gold creeping ivy and as they drew level with the large, bottle-green front door – the car’s wheels crunching on the gravel – Solange admired the blood-red Poinsettia spilling from pots in wild profusion on either side of the door. Perhaps Edith was a keen gardener. She hoped so because she loved gardens too – it would give them something to talk about.
Richard opened the car door and offered her his arm to assist her out. Standing, she found she was stiff and sore, and suddenly longed for a bath and a good night’s sleep. As he opened the front door, a plump, matronly woman with iron-grey hair and a currant-bun face came hurrying from the back section of the house.
‘Dr Richard, you’re home! You’re as welcome as the flowers of May. Let me have a look at you! God in heaven, you’re skin and bone! We’ll have to feed you up. Oh, ’tis wonderful to have you home, so it is. I can’t believe ’tis two years since you set foot in Dunderrig. Wouldn’t your mother and father be just delighted to see you, God rest them home safe and sound. They never stopped worrying about you, God be good to them.’ Tears filled the woman’s eyes.
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