A Forgotten Place

by Charles Todd

  I paused for several minutes to look at the photographs in their ornate frames. Rachel’s parents, standing by the house door, smiling at the camera. Her mother had a sweet face, but a firm jaw that Rachel had inherited. Her father was tall, with the look of a man who was thoughtful by nature, although his broad shoulders indicated physical strength as well.

  And a young man in uniform. Her brother? The obligatory Army photograph, I thought. Another one, a Lieutenant standing by Rachel, his arm around her. I picked that one up for a closer inspection. Tom was younger than his brother, with the same dark hair, but with a rounder face and a warm smile that was quite appealing. I could see why Rachel had fallen in love with Tom. Searching for a resemblance to the Captain, I finally decided Tom looked more like their sister. Hugh’s face was longer, stronger.

  That meant the young soldier must be Rachel’s brother. He closely resembled the little boy with her in the next photograph. They were grinning, ankle deep in the surf in the bay, squinting up at the camera and into the sun. The boy had something in his hand, although I couldn’t see what it was. A shell, I thought, scuffed up in the sand.

  A much older photograph of an elderly couple, dressed for an occasion, stared back at me from the last frame. Rachel’s grandparents? Unsmiling and yet somehow conveying happiness. Someone’s birthday, perhaps? Or a wedding anniversary?

  The carpet sweeper made short work of the carpet in the front room, and a broom and dustpan worked nearly as efficiently in the rest of the downstairs. I found a bucket and mopped the floor in the entry, where we’d tracked in rain during the storm. Then I climbed the stairs.

  My room took me no more than ten minutes, and I debated whether or not I should clean the other two bedrooms.

  It would give me something to do—and I felt the need to earn my keep. I wasn’t sure Rachel and Hugh could afford to care for me and feed me for very long, although the servings had been generous. At least I could take on a little of the burden of upkeep.

  But in the end, I didn’t feel I could intrude on their privacy, and mopped the landing instead.

  That done, I discovered vegetables in a bowl in the pantry, and set about preparing them and dressing them down with goose fat for roasting.

  Hugh came in first, in a whirl of cold air, and he was aghast to see me with rolled-up sleeves, my hair swept up in a knot on the top of my head, and my cheeks flushed from working.

  “Good God—Bess—you shouldn’t be doing this.”

  I’d done far more—and far worse tasks—as a probationer in the hospital where I’d trained, but he wasn’t to know that. I was the caring angel, the Sister who brought comfort and healing.

  It was rather sweet, and I smiled. “Nonsense,” I said bracingly. “I can’t sit in the parlor and stare at the four walls all day. And I’m much better at these tasks than I would be working with the sheep.”

  “But you’re a guest of the house.”

  “Even guests like to be useful. Rachel can’t do everything. If I can lend a hand while I’m here, so much the better.”

  I could see he wasn’t convinced. But when Rachel came in, she said, “Oh, how thoughtful, Bess! But you needn’t have done so much. I can manage.”

  “Of course you can,” I said lightly. “I just found time on my hands. And my instructors at the training hospital would have been horrified to see me idle. They felt that a probationer who didn’t look around her to find what needed doing without being told was not fit to serve.”

  She had taken off her coat, put it on the rack, and gone to the sink to pump water to wash her hands. “I’d have been glad to train as a nurse. But Tom didn’t want me to, and my parents worried about me going quite so far away.” She shrugged. “Just as well. I was left with the house and land to see to, when they died.” After a brief hesitation she added almost shyly, “What I really love is my weaving. Did you see?”

  I hadn’t. I’d been careful to stay in rooms that I had ready access to, and not to appear nosy.

  Rachel turned and, next to the cooker, opened a door that led to a small room, possibly where the cook or scullery maid might have stayed, once upon a time.

  “My mother was a weaver,” she said, lighting the lamp on a small table by the door. “And she taught me.”

  It had been turned into a workroom, with a spinning wheel and a small loom. On a shelf to one side, I could see her finished work, neatly sorted by color.

  “She knew how to make her own dyes. I’ve the recipes for them in a book there on the other shelf. There’s been no time—” Rachel broke off. “Not that I’m complaining, of course.”

  I walked across the room and touched the folded items. The wool was soft, light, and the colors were those of the sea at dawn or as rain swept it, or as moonlight caught it. And here was a soft apricot of first light, a warm deep rose, a fresh green of early spring, a soft yellow of daffodils. Blending and mixing and sweeping together with an eye to what worked, so that the shawls and scarves and caps were breathtakingly beautiful.

  I said as much. Rachel, blushing a little, ducked her head at the praise. “I’ve sold a few pieces to people who come to walk or fish or watch the seabirds. They seemed to like them.”

  And so they should have done. I only hoped that Rachel had been paid what these pieces were worth.

  The little room was warm, cozy, even with the cold wind outside, tucked as it was behind the cook stove.

  She blew out the lamp as I walked back into the kitchen. “I find it rests me, to work in here. But that’s not often this time of year. In the late spring and the summer, even into the autumn, the sheep fend for themselves, and there is more opportunity.”

  Still, the garden they depended on to fill the root cellar would need tending in the warmer months, weeding and hoeing and watering. And there would be endless other tasks to be done, repairs to be made inside and out. I could see why Hugh’s help had been a godsend. And the new dog, sleeping now next to the older one, was another support. But she must need still more help, a woman to tend the house, a man to help with the heavier work. Where they were to find such help, and how they were to pay for it, was another matter entirely.

  The next day was Sunday, and Rachel came down dressed for morning services. “Would you care to come with us?” she asked. “I’m afraid Rector is a little long-winded. But it shouldn’t be more than an hour and a quarter.”

  After what I’d witnessed yesterday, I thought it best not to attend the services. The less the local people saw of me, the less likely they’d be to consider me a threat.

  “I’m still tired from yesterday. If you don’t mind, I’d rather rest.”

  Rachel nodded. “I’m still tired as well. But I have to go. And so does Hugh. If we didn’t, they’d think it was a guilty conscience and hound us even more. But if you stay, would you mind putting the roast into the oven in half an hour? It should be ready by the time we come home.”

  “Of course,” I said. Hugh came in then, shaved and dressed in a dark suit of clothes, his empty trouser leg pinned up out of his way. I’d only seen him in uniform or his work clothes. He seemed different, somehow.

  I could see how his education had put him outside the circle of those he’d lived among in the valley. As the old expression went, neither fish nor fowl or nor even good red herring. No longer fit for the coal face, and yet not really one of those who owned and ran the mines. Offered a clerical position because he was good with numbers, but having nothing in common with those he’d grown up with, nor those he now worked for. I began to understand why he and the others had looked at the war and the call to arms as a way out of that black land with its narrowness born of poverty and an employment that meant not seeing the sun from one season to the next.

  Hugh had become an officer. Had he felt he finally belonged somewhere? Would he have stayed in the Army if he hadn’t lost a limb, a career soldier?

  For that matter, had he ever really known where he belonged? His education had opened some doors—and slam
med others firmly shut. And at the end of the war, he surely understood where he must return.

  It was such a different world from where I had grown up, in Somerset and India and Africa and other posts of Empire. I found myself wondering what my father would have to say about Hugh.

  Rather a lot, possibly . . .

  After breakfast, I watched them join the steady stream of people walking up to the church.

  It had such a sturdy look, built by the Normans to last. Perhaps the Romans never made it this far, but Wales was full of castles, big ones that guarded river crossings and the tops of hills. I remembered that many of them had changed hands often. The Welsh being more warlike, and smart enough to let their enemies build superb fortifications before coming in to capture them and make them their own.

  There was no real attempt to decorate the outside of the church. There might even have been hermits living in this part of Wales at one time. Perhaps that was why arches and architectural features hadn’t caught on. They were out of step with the past.

  In fact, the church had no windows to speak of . . .

  No windows. Once inside, worshippers wouldn’t be distracted by anything happening outside. Wind or weather or someone skipping the service and enjoying himself.

  Or someone walking in the churchyard . . .

  Through the front room window, I made certain that Griffith went to the service, and that there were no stragglers from the sloping Down above the strand.

  And then I waited another half an hour, to be absolutely certain.

  Finally, dressed in my coat, wearing my wool cap instead of my nurse’s white cap, I slipped outside, walked slowly up what passed for the road, and stepped into the churchyard.

  It didn’t take me long to find that new grave. I was careful not to walk too close, where my boots might leave an imprint in the soft earth.

  There was no marker. It might not exist as a grave.

  And I found the other one, a little distance away, already beginning to heal enough that it was harder to pick out.

  Two men who had come to grief here, washing up in the bay, and were given no resting place, no identification, not even a small cross to comfort their souls.

  Surely the men and women who’d attended morning services today must know the bodies were there. Or had that been the reason for such a clandestine burial at first light? People might guess, but they hadn’t been a party to what had been done.

  Men cast upon the bosom of the Deep, as an old sea chantey called their end, hadn’t found a safe haven even after they came ashore.

  I wondered why.

  I didn’t linger there. I left the churchyard and hurried back to the hedge by the Griffith cottage.

  Looking down on the calm blue bay, with its fringe of lacy froth, I saw that any sign of the Corporal’s boat had disappeared too, except for a patch here and there of bruised grass where the dismantling had been done. But that would soon heal.

  I walked on a little way down toward the abandoned coast guard station. I could just pick out Ellen’s cottage. I was tempted to go on and explore in that direction, but I wasn’t really certain that I should. The service might end before I’d made it back up that long slow incline. And right after the body had been removed and so hastily buried, it wouldn’t be wise to be seen down there. I wasn’t precisely sure what my curiosity would set in motion, but there was something distinctly sinister about bodies disappearing, and I had no intention of finding my own winding up in an unmarked grave.

  Or of causing trouble for Rachel and Hugh . . .

  Retracing my steps, I went to the pen where the ewes were confined, and they grazed quietly, uninterested in graves and morning services or even me watching them. They hadn’t even bothered to sneeze when I approached.

  I got myself inside before there was even a chance of the service ending early. It was one thing not to attend, but quite another to be wandering about on my own as if I was taking advantage of Sunday services to pry into village affairs when no one was looking.

  Which of course I had been doing. But there was no need to advertise that . . .

  It occurred to me as I shut the heavy front door behind me and listened to the silence of the house around me that I was already learning to fall in with the ways of this godforsaken corner of Wales. Whether I agreed with them or not.

  I was just hanging up my coat and pulling off my cap when it struck me that we only had that man Griffith’s word that my driver had left suddenly in the middle of the night.

  I hadn’t walked all the way around the church, had I? There might be another grave on the far side, his motorcar tucked away in some outbuilding on the Down, where I couldn’t see it.

  A cold that had nothing to do with the chill in the house swept over me.

  Nonsense! If my driver went missing, someone would have come down from that Swansea garage by this time to find out what had become of their motorcar and their man. And taken me back with them.

  Somehow that thought wasn’t as comforting as it ought to have been . . .

  Sunday dragged on. Sheep were no respecters of Sabbath quiet. As soon as the meal was finished, Rachel went out to have a look at the ewes while I cleared away and began to wash up.

  Hugh stayed to help me, and after we’d finished with the teacups and saucers, I said, “Did you know? They’ve buried both bodies in the churchyard. I saw the graves. Will they put markers up, do you think? Or hope that those men are soon forgotten?”

  He showed no surprise. Or even shock. “Leave it alone, Bess. It’s different out here. There’s no way to find out who he was. At least he’s in the churchyard, not buried along the strand somewhere.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. He saw it in my face, and said, “The appearance of another body has at least given the people here something else to think about than whether or not Rachel and I killed my brother. It lends weight to the fact that the first body might also be a stranger.”

  I could see why he felt so strongly about what had happened to the two dead men. But I still found it hard to accept that they were hastily buried, no service, no gravestones, as if they had never come ashore here.

  They must have belonged to someone. A wife. Parents. Sisters and brothers. Families that would always wonder what had happened to two men. Even if they no longer mattered to the Army, they had been wearing British uniforms when they died, and someone somewhere ought to care.

  After a moment, I said, “This is a strange part of the world. But you seem at home here.”

  “My home is in the valley, Bess. But there’s no place for me there. Not any longer. I can’t work in the pits, and my sister has her hands full. I refuse to be a burden on her. And that’s all I was. Rachel has taken me in. Out of the goodness of her heart—out of a need to have someone, even a man with one leg, to help her keep this house and her land—out of pity. God knows. But I’m grateful. I can’t judge these people because they’re her people, at least in some sense of the word. She had nowhere else to go either, when Tom was killed, except to this house. We’re both refugees, in a way. And I—”

  He broke off as the outer door opened and the dogs came racing down the passage and into the kitchen.

  “All’s well,” Rachel said, coming into the kitchen after them. “I think it’s getting colder. I hope not. One can’t take ewes a cup of tea, can one, and ask them to carry on?”

  She was smiling as she said it, pulling off her scarf and coat, then divesting herself of muddy boots before taking them out to the kitchen passage.

  “The stove’s still warm,” I said. “Shall I put the kettle on for you?”

  She shook her head. “I think I might work on the loom for a bit. It always soothes me. Even if it’s Sunday. Do you mind, Bess?”

  “Not if you don’t mind if I bring out the board and the iron, and press my aprons.”

  “Hugh?” she asked.

  But he said, “I’ve work of my own to do.”

  “A wicked lot we are,” Rachel s
aid. Then with a shrug she added, “There isn’t much else to do out here, except work. I think that’s what I miss most. At least in a town there were places to walk, gardens—even the cinema or stopping in a shop for tea and a bun.”

  “I should think some enterprising soul might consider that this village needed a tea shop.”

  “There was one for a while. Mr. Griffith and his wife opened up part of their cottage as a tearoom. She looked after the kitchen while he served. It never quite caught on, and so they closed it. She died early in 1914. When the war began, he talked about opening it up again for the men at the coast guard station, but nothing ever came of it. Then word came that his son was dead. You can see why he shut himself away.”

  “His son died in the war?”

  She was putting on slippers before going in to work at the loom.

  “He was one of the first to enlist—didn’t wait for any of the other young men out here. We were surprised. He was always such a quiet lad, never any trouble. I couldn’t picture him as a soldier. But they say the quiet ones have hidden strengths. Still waters, and all that.”

  And so began our afternoon, the three of us finding something to do that kept our hands busy, giving us no time to think. I was beginning to see that it might be for the best, not thinking.

  Because before very long I would be due back at the clinic.

  And what would Matron have to say, if I didn’t return?

  Chapter 7

  The wind picked up after midnight, rattling my windowpanes.

  I was still awake. I would have given much to go down and make myself a cup of tea, but I didn’t want to disturb Rachel or Hugh. My hot water bottle was only lukewarm, in spite of being wrapped in a towel, and I could already feel the drop in temperature outside.

  I listened for the sound of the sea. It might lull me to sleep, I thought, but the wind was louder.