The Letter

by Ruth Saberton

  “Christ,” Matt groans. “Poor man. What a mess. What a bloody, tragic mess.”

  Horror stalks around the edges of Matt’s words. He can’t speak of it outright and I understand. It’s easier to allude to what happened to Kit than to meet it head on.

  “He was here all along. That was why Daisy was never able to feel that he’d died in France and why the records were so vague. I can’t bear it, Matt. It’s so cruel,” I whisper.

  “They must have brought him home secretly, while pretending he died in action,” Matt says. “Colonel Rivers was still influential within the regiment so it wouldn’t have been impossible to arrange, especially in the confusion of battle. There were fewer servants at the Manor too, so less eyes to see what was happening. I’d imagine it would have been relatively simple to have said it was the Colonel who was incapacitated, especially since he’d already been unwell.”

  “I don’t understand it. Kit was injured but he was still alive! Why did they feel they had to lie? He was still a hero, even if he was so badly hurt.”

  Matt spreads his hands hopelessly. “It was a different time. There wasn’t the understanding of these things that there is now. Bear in mind that this was the first time that a war had been fought like this. Those kind of injuries had never been seen before and there was no precedent. There are countless stories of young men who were so dreadfully altered that their wives and sweethearts rejected them – and many more turned to drink or took their own lives. They were ashamed of what they had become.”

  “But that’s awful!”

  “Awful yes, but true. For some a return to civilian life was almost impossible. Their injuries were so frightening to behold, so dreadfully conspicuous, that they were socially marginalised and even referred to themselves as ‘broken gargoyles’. Thanks to medical advances and the work of men like Daisy’s father in field hospitals, they survived shrapnel wounds and other injuries – but piecing shattered lives together was often far harder.”

  He’s slipping into lecturer mode, but I know Matt Enys well enough to appreciate that for him this can be a means of coping. Losing himself in his work is just another way of bearing grief. Some of us run away. Others spend a lifetime searching and some, like the one my heart is breaking for, can only see the darkest of answers.

  “I’ve never heard about this before.”

  “No, I’m not surprised. It wasn’t commonly spoken about then or wholly understood. Plastic surgery was only in its infancy, although there were specialist hospitals. Some men wore special masks to hide missing jaws or noses or mouths; some never spoke again and many had to have specialist nursing and feeding for the rest of their lives.”

  “That’s what Mr Emmet was doing for Kit?”

  Matt nods. “I think so. He’d been the Colonel’s batman and I imagine he would have been stoic when it came to battle injuries. He was also fiercely loyal to the family and wouldn’t have breathed a word to anyone. The other servants probably wouldn’t have been allowed in the vicinity, so they’d have assumed it was the Colonel who was unwell.”

  “When Daisy visited the Manor, Nancy’s sister told her that the Colonel was behaving oddly and had shut himself away,” I recall. “Only it wasn’t him at all, was it? It was Kit. And they had so few servants left at that point anyway that there weren’t enough people to think too much of it. Oh! It’s horrible to think Kit was shut away in the shadows so close to Daisy. I know she wouldn’t have cared what he looked like as long as he was alive! She loved him!”

  “But don’t you see? This wasn’t just about love – or rather, not in the sense that we’ve come to understand it. It wasn’t about the injuries either, or at least not in the obvious way that we might assume. Kit knew his parents didn’t approve of Daisy and that they’d never have allowed him to marry her. Defying them meant having to get a job to support both himself and Daisy, and then, hopefully, their children. That was what Kit had had in mind, if you remember. But with his injuries, those plans were scuppered. How could he take care of Daisy and provide for her? How could he find work? He was dependent on his parents now.”

  “Daisy would have worked! She would have provided for them both!” Tears of frustration spring into my eyes. “Why did Kit deny her the chance? Why was he so selfish?”

  “Do you really think that of him? He was a proud young man, Chloe. Women didn’t even have the vote, although the tide was starting to turn, and Kit would have had certain ideas about what was expected of him as a husband. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a burden on his wife and he wouldn’t want to see Daisy struggle. Kit believed he couldn’t deny her the future she deserved. He thought he was setting her free. He was ill too and traumatised. Shut away from everyone, and with no counselling available, is it any wonder he became desperate?”

  I’m silent because I know Matt’s right. It’s too easy to see Kit with my twenty-first-century eyes, but he was from a different era. I also know from what Daisy wrote in her diary just how highly principled he was and how adamant he’d been that he would forge a career that would keep her and the family they hoped to have. Could he have denied her the life they had imagined? Could he have let her go without or live a life of hardship?

  Kit Rivers couldn’t. No matter how much he’d longed for Daisy, he loved her too much for that – just as Neil had loved me too much to want me to be alone mourning him for the rest of my days.

  A tear rolls down my cheek and splashes onto the dusty floor, and my heart aches for Kit’s misplaced courage. Unable to burden Daisy, and knowing that his elderly parents would struggle to care for him, he’d taken the only choice he believed remained.

  But he was wrong. So terribly, terribly wrong. There was so much still to live for. Kit’s death was a waste of love and life and talent. Worse, in taking his life, Kit had taken Daisy’s future away – the last thing he would have wanted. Nowadays there would be all kinds of help and support available for him but, as Matt says, the early twentieth century was a very different time. Suddenly I feel thankful for Perky Pippa.

  “So Kit overdosed.” I’m not asking, but Matt nods anyway.

  “Laudanum.”

  “I’ve heard of that. Isn’t it the stuff all the romantic poets were off their heads on?”

  “That’s right. It seems crazy now, but it was a popular drug in the nineteenth century and pretty much prescribed for anything from menstrual pain to settling babies. It was better regulated by the early twentieth century, but I imagine Lady Rivers would have been stockpiling it for years, and with the local doctor in on Kit’s secret it wouldn’t have been difficult to come by. I bet they had gallons of it at the Manor.”

  Secrets. Secrets. I turn to Matt as sudden understanding dawns. “Reverend Cutwell knew Kit was alive! That’s why he left everything to Daisy. He felt guilty for lying to her about Kit.”

  “When Kit died the Reverend would have felt a whole lot worse,” Matt says grimly. “So many secrets taken to the grave. The loyal servant who never spoke a word. The doctor bound by the Hippocratic oath and the vicar who could only tell God. When the Colonel died there was only Lady Rivers left, and of course she would never breathe a word. No wonder the poor woman nearly went out of her mind with grief. She must have blamed herself for sending Daisy away when Daisy was the only person left who could have given Kit hope and something to live for.”

  I’ve wanted to hate Lady Rivers for what she did that day. It was cruel and spiteful but fear does strange things to people. Even Daisy, shocked and distressed, had written that Kit’s mother looked frightened. A cornered vixen, she’d snarled and threatened in order to guard her cub.

  “She was trying to protect Kit the only way she could, but she got it wrong, didn’t she? Daisy would still have loved Kit and he would have had something worth living for.”

  “No wonder she spent a fortune on his window and published any poems she could find. She must have felt she had a lot to make up for,” Matt says. “I wonder where they buried Kit in the end?”<
br />
  “The churchyard?” I suggest.

  “Maybe. I guess we’ll never know without Reverend Cutwell to tell us.”

  While the builders carry on around us, ripping away the centuries and oblivious to the impact of their discovery, Matt and I look out of the window, across the courtyard and to the rosemary garden planted by Lady Rivers – a grieving mother who would spend the rest of her days tortured by the knowledge that she’d turned away the only person who could have kept her son alive. That garden where she spent so much time during her last years must have been her only solace.

  A rosemary garden for remembrance.

  Suddenly I feel as though I’m trying to clutch smoke in my hands: there’s something there, something real and tangible, and if I can only catch it and hold on I think I’ll know the answer to Matt’s sad question.

  The garden…

  The garden!

  I grab Matt’s hand. “I think I know where Kit is!”

  He doesn’t question me, and without saying another word I lead him through the manor house and out through the gardens. Wood pigeons’ calls tremble in the air and the sun feels warm on my skin, but I don’t pause to enjoy these things; instead, I tug Matt across the lawn and through the door in the wall that leads to Lady Rivers’ rosemary garden. We brush against the plants and the air’s heavy with scent. Memories bloom just as the original designer intended, until we arrive at the centre where the seat invites reflection. I’ve walked this path a hundred times before but I never realised until now what I was looking at. I can’t believe we missed it. Kit Rivers has been hiding in plain sight all along.

  Captain Christopher ‘Kit’ Rivers

  Beloved Son

  1896–1916

  ‘Their name liveth for evermore’

  “This isn’t a memorial, Matt. It’s Kit’s grave.”

  Matt’s holding my hand so tightly that it hurts. He’s shaking.

  “I think you’re absolutely right. He was here all the time. He was always here. Poor Daisy; he wasn’t far from her and he wasn’t far from us.”

  As we stand in the garden, bathed in the spring sunshine, my heart aches for Daisy Hills, whose lifelong search for Kit led her everywhere but back to the starting place. Sometimes the thing we long for the most is where we least expect it to be, there all along and simply waiting for us to recognise it. I know that Neil, if he were here, would agree. When Matt pulls me into his arms and rests his chin on my head, I close my eyes and allow the peace of the garden to wash over me. This sense of coming home isn’t just about Kit.

  “We found him for you, Daisy,” I tell her quietly and from the depths of my heart. “Wherever you are now, I really hope you know that.”

  And when the soft breeze whispers back to me through the rosemary fronds, I feel certain that she does.

  Epilogue

  Chloe

  Frost sparkles on the path and rimes the shivering rosemary bushes. Amidst them a poppy wreath lies on the memorial stone, shockingly scarlet against the pale marble. The day is bitingly cold and nips at my face as I walk through the silent garden, my gloved hand held tightly in Matt’s. Above us the sky is a blue dome where gulls soar and freedom beckons, the freedom that Kit and Gem and Dickon and millions of other young men fought for, and for which they paid the ultimate price.

  Impossible to think that World War One ended all those decades ago today. At 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the people of Rosecraddick gathered at the war memorial on the cliffs to lay wreaths and pay respects to the fallen men of the village. Their faces may be unknown to us now, but their names live on and we will never allow them to be forgotten or their stories to fade with the years. After we observed the silence, Matt read Kit’s poem God Hid His Face and the powerful words punched the air and the gut alike, just as Kit had always intended. His writing, and that of all the other soldier poets of the Great War, will make sure that we never forget. Whether we understand or learn from the mistakes of the past is another matter. Kit’s verse warns the reader over and over again of the ultimate cost of failing to do so.

  As we remembered the dead, I glanced across the bay and watched the waves hurling themselves onto the hidden coves where Daisy and Kit once swam and picnicked and made love. Sometimes I think I see them out of the corner of my eye or hear the swish of skirts or the sound of laughter. Daisy and Kit are always out of reach yet never far away. I’ll turn to catch them, but no matter how fast I spin on my heel I’m never quick enough. They’re already gone, running through the churchyard to the cliff path or tearing away in a big motorcar, scarves blowing in the wind and rounding the corner in the lane so fast that all I catch is a blue blur.

  The memorial stone in the walled garden was lifted and the remains of a young man was discovered beneath. The body was sent away for a forensic examination, but Matt and I hadn’t needed to wait for the test results to confirm that this was Kit Rivers. I stayed away when the tent was erected and the white-suited figures arrived, but Matt was there and he saw the medals still pinned to scraps of khaki and the remains of once golden hair. The forensic report noted that there’d been catastrophic damage to the skull and right arm, but we’d already known this from Kit’s letter and none of it came as a surprise.

  At this point the story had been picked up by the national and international media. There was a surge of interest in both Kit’s poetry and the ill-starred romance with Daisy, on a scale that would have seemed impossible just a few months earlier. His tragic death provoked sympathy and raised questions about the treatment of war veterans that were as poignant now as they had been then. I think Kit would have been proud that his story is making a difference.

  The opening of Rosecraddick Manor attracted huge numbers of visitors, as did the airing of the BBC documentary. Shortly afterwards, a major publisher bid a significant amount for the Lost Poems. The Kit Rivers Society which, sure enough, had been willed the rights to his work by Eunice Rivers-Elliott all those years ago, suddenly found itself in possession of more money than it could ever have imagined. Not only that, but more funding became available for the manor house. Already, plans are in place for a bigger tea room and an extended Great War exhibition. Matt’s even been approached by a Hollywood film director keen to use the story. Daisy and Kit’s romance has gripped the public’s imagination and there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was his muse and the great love of his life. Daisy Hills is no longer lost in history’s labyrinth, and her search for Kit is over.

  The Lost Poems have received much critical acclaim. Perhaps eventually Kit Rivers will even be spoken about in the same breath as Owen and Sassoon and Brooke. Yet he’s far more than this to me – he’s as real as I am or as Matt is. He’s not just a gifted poet and a visionary: he’s the young man who drove fast, loved to sail and fretted over his troubled relationship with his father. He’s the boy who wandered the lanes and cliffs, and fell in love with the red-haired girl who floated in the sea in her shift like a mermaid come to life. That Kit, the real Kit, needed to be laid to rest at home. When there was talk about Poets’ Corner, Matt argued passionately against it. Kit belonged at Rosecraddick, he said. This was where he was born and it was the place he loved and where he’d chosen to die. There was simply nowhere else he ought to be. He belonged in Cornwall.

  Christopher “Kit” Rivers was finally laid to rest on a late August day once the crowds of visitors had left and Rosecraddick Manor’s gates had closed. There were only a few of us present: the Hills family, Kathy Roe and some of the key members of the Kit Rivers Society, and Sue Perry took the simple service. As she intoned the familiar words, I twined my fingers with Matt’s and let my mind wander away from graves and death to scenes from Daisy’s diary. Happy memories of swimming and hiding out in hay barns on rainy days, of making promises, of kisses as soft as butterflies’ wings, and of the golden glow of a long-lost summer.

  I thought about Daisy and Kit and how they’d known a love that was stronger than war and time
and even death itself. My journey with Matt was just starting out, but I was certain we also knew that depth of feeling – and hopeful that the years would be kind and allow us to tell a story of our very own. Once Sue had finished her part, I stepped up to the grave and dropped the lock of hair Daisy had so treasured onto the small oak box that held Kit’s remains. Following that, the Hills family released the sparkling daisy ring into the darkness.

  “It seems right,” Dave’s father had explained afterwards, looking rather embarrassed. “I know lots of people will think we’re crazy burying a diamond ring, but it feels that it should be there. My aunt was a funny old stick, set in her ways and very determined, but she loved that poor young man right until the minute she closed her eyes. Her engagement ring belongs with him. That way, a part of her will be there too. I think she would have liked that.”

  Matt had nodded. “I’m certain she would.”

  So now, on the eleventh day of November, all these decades after the so-called “war to end all wars” was over, Matt and I stand by Kit’s grave and quietly think about the lives that were given so freely. Not just the lives of the boys either, but those of their wives and sweethearts and mothers whose worlds also changed forever. There were so many sacrifices and so many lost stories, so many broken hearts and shattered lives, that it’s impossible to count them all, and so many events that were beyond the control of this lost generation. By remembering Daisy and Kit, perhaps we can go some way towards honouring them all – and maybe we can learn something too? I can only hope so; that way their sacrifices weren’t in vain.

  So Daisy and Kit’s tale is told. All those years ago, Daisy’s ashes were scattered in the bay by her brother and she floated amid the sea spray and the cry of the gulls until Kit was finally able to join her. They’re together now and they’re free. I can’t explain how I know this; it’s simply a certainty that resonates deep within me. It’s the same knowledge that tells me that Neil, my much loved and forever missed husband, is at peace too – and it’s the same conviction that says Matt and I were also destined to be together. Love has no limits. Love isn’t bound by time. And, ultimately, love is why we are all here today and why we carry on.