When he snatched a few moments to write, it was poetry that spewed from his heart and the lines he scrawled were for her. There was no holding back; to do so would have been an insult to her intellect. Instead, Kit penned savage imagery that would doubtless sicken and appal her. He was determined, as was she, that there would be no gulf of understanding to bridge when he returned. There would be no need to explain or to pretend it had been a jolly boys’ jape. She would have seen the Front through his eyes and shared the horror.
He often pictured her walking along the cliffs with the salt wind snatching her hat and turning her skirts into sails. She’d turn onto the sharp steep path and climb down to their cove, where she’d open the letters and pore over the stanzas. He visualised her biting her bottom lip, and those curls of damson and fire falling into her eyes and then being pushed impatiently away. The image of her sitting on the rocks reading his poetry was so vivid that he would be jolted to find himself in a narrow bunk rather than at her side.
Kit had kept alive for her. He lived for Daisy’s letters, with their news of a world once familiar but now as remote from his own reality as anything written by Homer or Sophocles. The anecdotes about Mrs Polmartin trying to catch chickens made him smile and the description of the storms that chased across the bay transported him back to those long-lost days of boating and swimming. They seemed like fairy tales now. Kit’s world had become one of gunfire and death and eyes gritty with lack of sleep, but Daisy was his lifeline back to another time. Her letters and love would lead him back. Kit swore he would return to Rosecraddick. He wasn’t going to die here in the alien mud. He would go home to Cornwall and one day lie beneath the soil there, but it wouldn’t end here. It couldn’t. He would do anything, anything, to leave this place alive. He was going home. He was.
The gods had heard Kit and granted his wish, but how they must have laughed. Like Tithonus granted immortality but not youth, he had been gifted life shrouded in a living death. Kit had little memory of that last day at the Front. It was like any other, with the long hours of waiting, the cold and the rain and the sudden flurry of activity when the orders came. His legs dead from inactivity, Kit staggered from the outpost trench to the main trench, a route he’d taken a hundred times before, when a shell exploded and launched him into the air like a surprised khaki-coloured bird in full flight. Kit knew he must have lost consciousness, and he certainly owed his life to whichever men had risked theirs to drag his mangled body back to safety, but after this there were just echoing chambers of emptiness. Even his dreams had been blank. When he eventually awoke in the hospital, he wanted nothing more than to sink back into them – or, more fitting still, sink into that restful mud where in centuries to come a farmer might plough up his bleached bones. Anything was better than a half life. A half-remembered line of poetry drifted through his memory.
Oh happy men that have the power to die.
They had taken him home to Rosecraddick Manor. He’d known this because the smell of the salty air and the cries of the gulls had seeped into his dreams. Nightmarish scenes of rotting flesh and bloated corpses, blackened and familiar as he passed them on routine patrol, were smudged by images of rolling waves and inland seas of rippling wheat, wooded hills and warm brown eyes. Voices and movements, light and shade. And then the bowel-loosening realisation that all he once was and all he’d once hoped for had been blasted away.
Dr Parsons was here at times. Emmet the butler too. Shame and embarrassment were soon forgotten and, although they never spoke, Kit felt the other man’s pity; it hurt even more than the wounds. Reverend Cutwell sometimes came to pray, but Kit turned his face to the wall. Hadn’t God turned His face away from Kit and all the men at the Front? Prayers were meaningless. There was no God. Or at least, not the loving forgiving kind. Mars and Pan and Odin were real now, and they had taken from him all they wanted.
Kit’s face was bandaged and his eyes were closed beneath the linen, but he learned to identify his visitors by the way they entered his room: the awkward clearing of his father’s throat and the tap of his stick over the boards, or his mother’s scent, the cloying violets summoning a flood of childhood memories and uncurling weakness deep in the pit of his belly. Although she couldn’t hold his hand, he sensed her sitting beside him. He heard her cry, and beneath his bandages damp crescents bloomed as Kit wept too. Everything had changed. All was dust.
Drifting on the opium-laced tide, Kit sometimes overheard hushed conversations he was never meant to hear. His father gruff and disappointed; better to have a dead hero son than this maimed shell. The doctor, concerned and wanting to send Kit to London to a specialist hospital. His mother, adamant that he would stay at home with them. Emmet said nothing but Kit knew from the gentleness of his touch, as tender as any woman’s, that he alone understood the depth of Kit’s despair. Kit had called for Daisy in his nightmares, but when he was awake he shuddered at the thought of her seeing him so reduced and without coherent speech. If she ever heard him try to call her name, nothing would keep his Daisy away – and what good could come from two lives being shattered?
This room, the furthest from the family quarters and above the solar, was his world now. Nobody was to know he was here. His father was revolted by his son’s injuries and ashamed to hear him making mangled sounds and sobbing with nightmares. This wasn’t the stuff of jolly japes and giving the Huns a good thrashing. This was something that the Colonel didn’t – couldn’t – understand. Real soldiers didn’t wake up screaming or shake with nerves. They came home in flag-festooned coffins or with crutches and medals. They were heroes and to be paraded as such, sons to be proud of. The pieces of Kit that had returned couldn’t be slotted back into any pattern his father might recognise. The Colonel’s only answer was to hide his broken son away. Kit understood and he didn’t blame the old man. He was damaged inside and out. A ghost of his old self. Better if he had died that day.
Sometimes as he lay in silence Kit thought maybe he had died after all. Words had left him and snatches of verse ebbed and flowed through his mind. The days slipped into weeks and months. Emmet changed his dressings and spoon-fed him small sips of soup and gruel that made him splutter and puke. He might walk again, Dr Parsons thought, and some of his sight was coming back too. In time a man could learn to live without an arm, but the damage to his face could never be undone. There were no mirrors in his room but Kit didn’t need them to know that the reflection wouldn’t be pretty. It was surprising how indiscreet people became when they thought you were unconscious.
He was a creature doomed to live in the shadows. He could never expect Daisy to love him like this, and neither would he want her to. His beautiful girl deserved more and Kit would never expect her to keep her promise to marry him. Far better that Daisy Hills believed he had died in action; perhaps then she could find happiness with another man. It was a thought that pained him intensely, but she was made for love and passion and deserved more than a life sentence as his nursemaid. Kit wanted his Daisy to be happy.
There was nothing ahead for him now but a gaping void. The emptiness terrified him more than his injuries. He was learning to stop himself from thinking about Daisy, knowing that if he kept the memories locked deep inside he might just be able to keep control. If he gave into them, he would tumble into a dark place from where there would be no returning. Kit’s soul belonged with hers and wrenching it away when he longed for her so much was a second living death.
In his sickroom, hidden away from the life of the house, it was hard to know how much time had elapsed. A few months, Kit thought, although he wasn’t sure. Some days passed in a blur of pain and others dragged so slowly they were little deaths in themselves. On one occasion his mother sat by the bed and took his hand in hers, and coughed out desperate, angry tears and a mangled confession about burning letters. His letters to Daisy, Kit had realised. Daisy must have come to find him, and been closer to doing so than she would ever know, and his mother had shooed her away like a cockroach. His br
ave Daisy. How much courage must it have taken for her to come here, knowing how his parents felt about her?
“I was afraid, Kit. She was so determined and so adamant you were still alive,” his mother had pleaded. “God forgive me, but I was cruel to be kind. I only wanted her to go away and to leave us in peace. It was the best thing for everyone.”
His mother was right but Kit had wept into his pillow that night as he’d thought of Daisy scrabbling in the fireplace, the heat searing her hands as she tried to save his letters. His mother hadn’t said as much, but he knew this was what Daisy would have done. Then she would have walked away with her head held high, as dignified as any duchess his parents might have hoped for him to wed. Kit knew that Daisy had gone away, because Reverend Cutwell had mentioned it, but he hadn’t wanted to hear any more. Like the past, his future with Daisy was a foreign land; it was one he would never see again. It was best to put her from his mind.
Little by little he had started to walk about the room. When not plagued by headaches, he could read for a while – and often he stood in the window gazing over the gardens. Yet he was careful to avoid being noticed, even by the servants. Accordingly, Kit kept to the shadows. Once he was strong enough to walk greater distances unaided, he ventured about the house, albeit only at night. With a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his injuries and a bandage to conceal the worst of the damage, he was almost amused at this new incarnation of himself as a gothic creature – Quasimodo maybe, or perhaps Frankenstein’s creature, created not by science but by war?
He couldn’t compose poetry anymore and he had set Daisy free, but something in Kit couldn’t rest. Maybe it was the writer in him or maybe it was the ego screaming that he shouldn’t be forgotten; whatever the reason, he felt compelled to record his empty days. For whom, he did not know. For himself perhaps, as a kind of solace.
On his late-night wanderings Kit collected the things he needed, piece by piece, and stored them in his room. The brief excursions exhausted him for days afterwards, but once he had what he needed there would be no reason to leave again – or at least, not of his own accord.
Paper. Ink. A pen. His leather portfolio from school. Laudanum pilfered from his mother’s still room. These were prizes he would secrete away until the time was right to use them.
He knew of a perfect hiding place, too. In the old wainscot by the fireplace was the long-forgotten priest hole. Kit had discovered it by chance as a boy and hidden there for hours while his nanny hunted everywhere for him. The tiny room had been musty and dry and cramped, even for a small boy. He’d shivered to think of a grown man crouched there, holding his breath and clutching his prayer beads in his shaking fingers as the house had been searched. Still, it was ideal for his purposes now. Kit’s left hand, maimed and clumsy, had fumbled with the mechanism and something close to delight had filled him to see that the door worked as well now as it had in his childhood. Thanks to the ingenuity of its craftsman (Nicholas Owen, he presumed), Kit was able to secrete the stolen items away and nobody would ever be the wiser.
With these things in his possession Kit knew what he had to do. He would have to do his best to write with his left hand. The first attempts were shaky and childish and he hurled them onto the fire in a fit of frustration. Days passed. Chest infections burned and chilled him without mercy, while nightmares held him in an iron grip. By the time he was ready to try again the leaves had fallen from the trees and the fields were scalped. Even the year was fading away. It was fitting.
Kit knew he had to focus; he couldn’t allow himself to drift on the tide. Each day that he turned his head away from the spoons of broth Emmet fed him was a day he became weaker. Before long there were whispers of tubes and force-feeding. Dr Parsons visited and the vicar too. Kit would have to act soon.
It was a drab December night when Kit finally knew he was ready. The wind hurled rain against the windows and puffed its icy breath beneath the door. Carpets lifted in the hallways and Kit’s candle flickered. He retrieved his items from the priest hole, hauled himself to the table and spread out the paper. Then he exhaled slowly and allowed himself to think about Daisy. This time he wouldn’t slam the doors on his memory or close his ears to the pleas of his heart. What harm could it do for this one final night? She would be the last thought he would ever have and her name would be the last mangled sound he would utter.
Unbidden, an image of Daisy laughing up at him came to Kit. She was so vivid that for a moment she was real again and he was whole and able to hold her close, smell the honeyed warmth of her skin and feel her soft curves pressed against his chest. He shut his eyes but the vision departed as swiftly as it had come, drifting away from him like dandelion seeds in the summer breeze. Others followed: a flash of slim thigh kicking through blue water, a glint of red curls, hands linked, a boat rocking gently in a hidden cove…
Tears dripped onto the paper. Kit dashed them away with the back of his left hand, then picked up the pen so that his heart could speak for one last time. He hadn’t intended to write to Daisy – she would never see this letter, would never know that he had come home as he had promised – but in these last and darkest hours there was nobody else he wanted to tell his story to. She was the only one who mattered.
My darling Daisy…
The script was clumsy and his hand lagged behind the racing of his thoughts, but he no longer cared. The moon rose and the sky was dusted with stars as Kit began his letter; when he’d finished it, the stars had hidden away and the first larks were calling.
Time was running out.
Kit felt strangely relieved as he folded the paper and pressed it against his lips. Maybe there was something to be said for confession after all? Others who had hidden away in this room must have known this, and the sense of comradeship soothed him.
Kit tucked the letter into the portfolio, then placed this tenderly on the floor of the priest hole. It seemed fitting that his last confession of love should hide there, away from prying eyes. Then he clicked the door shut and darkness swallowed his letter for who knew how long? Maybe forever? It no longer mattered. Writing it was the part that had counted, Kit realised. It was an unburdening of the soul. Wasn’t that what his best poems had really been about?
He wondered whether Daisy would keep his poems a secret or whether she would share them. He would never know, of course, but Kit trusted her with the innermost workings of his mind just as much as he’d trusted her with his heart. Daisy would always do what was right; her integrity was one of the things he loved so much about her.
It was also why he had to make this final choice for them both.
The sun was rising now and the sky beyond was peachy with promise. Morning was coming for some, but for him an eternal night would follow. Kit was gladdened by the thought of rest because he was so, so tired. He was tired of being sick. Tired of pain. Tired of needing Emmet for the most basic of functions. Tired of hiding from windows and reflective surfaces. Tired of dreams that left him shaking and cold with sweat. And most of all he was tired of longing for the woman he knew he had to let go.
Kit picked up the bottle of laudanum and raised it in a toast. No nectar could be sweeter.
“To you, Daisy.” The words rose from the depths of his soul; they were the clearest sounds Kit had spoken for months. “Be happy, my love.”
As he drank deeply and the room began to blur, Kit’s last thoughts were filled with flame-red curls, laughing brown eyes and butter-soft kisses. He drifted away on the waves, just as a mermaid girl had once drifted into his heart, and when they found him shortly afterwards, it seemed as though his poor damaged lips were smiling.
Chapter 12
Chloe
Matt and I stand in the window, the letter laid out on the crumbling wooden sill. I’m struggling to make sense of everything because there’s been too much too fast: a torrent of new facts sweeping away what I thought I once understood and leaving behind the detritus and silt of a new realisation.
Kit Rivers was
n’t lost in action at all but had been terribly, catastrophically injured. His wounds had been life-changing and, to his mind, too awful to inflict on the woman he loved.
I stare at the letter. The spidery writing is shimmering and blurring and I’m in danger of falling apart right here in this dusty room. Grief scoops out my chest. I know it makes no sense because Kit died a century ago and Daisy’s long gone too, but the emotion that flows with the ink is as raw now as it was on the night Kit Rivers sat down to write his last words. Although nothing has changed in this room – the builders are still hacking away at plasterboard while the radio plays in the background – everything is altered. The passing of time hasn’t soothed anything: Kit’s suicide is devastating.
Kit was angry as he wrote, frantic to pour his words out onto the paper before the dawn and exhaustion caught up with him. The writing judders at times, and the pen spat inky tears onto the paper and gouged out sections as he rammed the nib against the page. There’s a lifetime of love, regret and longing here. On these pages are the same commitment to tell the truth that scalds through his poetry: an honesty that meets horror face on and never flinches. It’s awful to know that moments after he scrawled his name at the foot of the page Kit had shut his letter away, not knowing whether it would ever be found, and reached for the laudanum. He was determined to set Daisy free in the only way he believed possible. As my fingers brush the paper I shiver, knowing that the last hand to touch it was Kit’s own.
“You were wrong, Kit,” I murmur. “She didn’t want to be set free. Daisy wanted to be with you and she wouldn’t have cared how injured you were, because she loved you.”
Daisy’s instincts had been right all along: her heart, her loyal and true heart, hadn’t misled her. Kit Rivers had survived. He had lived and while she’d searched far and wide for him he had been only steps away. What an awful, tragic truth. Worse still, his decision hadn’t set her free at all. For as long as Daisy lacked answers, she would continue to seek him. Unknowingly, Kit had bound her to him as tightly in death as he had in life.
The Letter Page 38
