by Charles Todd
The shop was on the ground floor, living quarters on the two above that. The window, dusty and uninteresting, gave the impression that the shop was not faring well. Or possibly even had been sold up, the name left on the glass.
Simon knocked once, then twice, and after a time, a light came on in the passage by the stairs, spilling out through the fanlight above our heads.
A middle-aged woman opened the door, staring out at us in the gathering dusk of evening. “Yes, what is it?” Her voice was tired.
Simon asked simply for Mr. Gessler, the photographer. “Is this his shop? The sign in the window leads us to believe it is.”
“My father or my son? If it’s my son, he’s in France somewhere.”
“What we’re interested in is an old family photograph. We were hoping your father was still alive and could tell us something about it.”
“He’s taken hundreds of photographs. How would he be able to identify any of them now? He’s close on ninety.”
“Still,” Simon told her, “it would be worth a try. And worth his while.”
Her face brightened at the mention of money. With her son in the war and her father too old to work any longer, she must be in need of it.
Stepping back, she let us precede her into the passage, and she motioned toward the steep, carpeted stairs. “The room to your left, at the top,” she told us.
We climbed the stairs, listening to the squeak of age on tread after tread, and then at the first-floor landing found ourselves in a large room overlooking the street. It was simply furnished, with well-polished early Victorian pieces, heavy and dark.
An elderly man sat by the window, wrapped in blankets in spite of the summer heat, his hair thinning and his hands blue-veined with age. But his eyes were still a very bright blue. He greeted us with pleasure, turning his chair slightly so as to face us. I realized that it was on wheels.
Simon introduced himself as Brandon, without his rank, and gave my name as Miss Crawford.
“We’re trying to identify a photograph,” he said. “One that’s been in the family for some time, but there’s no one alive now who can tell us when it was taken or by whom. Your label was stamped on the backing. We wondered if you had any records of the photographs you’ve taken, where they were taken, and for whom, or even who had paid for them.”
Mr. Gessler held out his hand and Simon gave him the photograph, now back in its frame.
The old man bent his head over it, studying the images. “It was a very long time ago,” he said. “I don’t recognize the faces. But perhaps there is a way.”
He opened the back with ease, drew out the photograph, and looked at the stamped name of his shop.
“This was taken just after we came to Winchester.” He turned to his daughter. “Bring me the red box,” he said, then turned back to us. “We used the red ink when we first arrived, but it proved to be difficult. See here, where the middle of the word Winchester is missing. And so we tried a dark green, and it was more reliable. That’s why I can tell you the photograph was taken exactly twenty-three years ago. There’s no doubt of it.”
His daughter came back carrying a narrow drawer with a row of cards from back to front and set it down before her father. As she did, I could see that the upper left-hand corner of all the cards in the tray had been marked with a red triangle.
Mr. Gessler’s gnarled hands were unsteady as he went through the long rows of cards, moving backward in time as we watched. But his eyesight was still very good, for he found what he was searching for, and drew out a thick packet of cards.
He handed them to Simon as if they were rather large playing cards, and I leaned nearer so that I could look over Simon’s shoulder.
He went through the cards quickly, scanning the names elegantly printed in black ink. These apparently represented orders, for they listed the name and address of the person who was the client, the number of poses taken, the number of final prints purchased.
A great many of the orders appeared to have been bridal photographs or christenings, for in each case the name of a church was written in. A parade of people’s lives, and the events they wanted to remember. Attached to one card was a newspaper cutting, showing a horse that had come in second in the Derby. Ears pricked forward, he stood there like a champion, a smiling owner holding the bit. Mr. Gessler must have taken the photograph used in the cutting.
Each order had a line for the price to be written in, and another line showed the date paid. Below these was a box at the bottom of each card to check if a frame had been selected.
Simon had nearly reached the end of the packet when he stopped, and held one of them up so that I could read it.
Caswell, Mrs.
Reading on, I saw that she had ordered four poses and had settled on one of them. And she had arranged for ten of her final choice, asking for each of them to be framed.
“But what did she do with ten of the same photograph?” I asked. “And where are the others?”
My question was directed to Simon, but Mr. Gessler held out his hand.
“Let me see.”
We passed the card to him. He frowned, staring at it, and then the memory came back.
“Yes, the children, as you see. She paid for copies, a frame for each. Seven of the frames were ordered without glass, as I remember. See? NG7.”
But the one I had bought from the charity booth was protected by glass.
“All these children were hers? There isn’t much of a family resemblance, is there?” Mr. Gessler’s daughter asked doubtfully, looking at the photograph we’d brought with us. “Perhaps it’s a church school class.”
Mr. Gessler scratched his chin. “It’s too long ago. I don’t remember. If it hadn’t been for the ink, I couldn’t have told you anything about your photograph. It’s too bad, but there you are.” He was fiddling with the card he was holding, and it slipped from his fingers, landing facedown on the floor.
Simon picked it up, then passed it to me.
And there it was, on the reverse. In the same crisp black hand.
Special requests: Seven frames packed in cotton wool and sealed in oiled cloth for posting to India and Ceylon.
But there were no addresses. No way of knowing where the photographs had been sent.
Simon spoke to me, saying only, “The Middletons.”
And I knew at once what he meant. Hadn’t Mrs. Standish sent her husband a photograph of Alice and Rosemary opening Christmas presents? One, surely, taken by the Middletons?
Had the Caswells fostered children of Anglo-Indian families, seeing to their education and their prospects for English parents stationed in India?
Fees were charged, of course. Schoolmasters and retired rectors or vicars sometimes augmented their income in this manner. Or householders with impeccable social standing and thin purses.
It would explain the overly large nursery that Mrs. Reston had mentioned, as well as why this photograph had been taken—to assure anxious parents at Christmas that their offspring were alive and happy in their surrogate homes.
I looked closely at the photograph before Simon returned it to its frame.
The row of young, unformed faces stared back at me. But if one of them was Lieutenant Wade, I couldn’t see the likeness.
Chapter Nine
We were silent, Simon and I, most of the way back to Somerset. It was very late when we reached the drive up to the house. A light shone from the downstairs windows, left burning for me. Most likely Simon would be on his way to London tomorrow with my father, and I knew he was tired, with not many hours left to him to sleep.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It seems that the more we learn, the less we know.”
“Don’t apologize, Bess. Go to bed and put this behind you for tonight. Shall I carry your box and the chair to the cottage? You can offer your mother the sausages and the cheese
as a sop for being late.”
He was smiling, I could see the flash of white teeth in the reflection of the headlamps. I could also see the lines beneath his eyes.
“Yes, please.” I reached out to touch his arm. “Thank you,” I said, and then he was coming round to my side to take the sausages and cheese while I got out. I walked up to the door, knowing he would wait until I was safely inside, even here in the peaceful quiet darkness of Somerset. But there had been a time when this house had held danger. I remembered it too well.
I closed the door and stood there, listening to the sound of the motorcar reversing and going down the drive.
My mother’s voice startled me. “Bess?”
She was standing on the threshold of the drawing room, no lamps lit.
“Is everything all right?”
“Simon was kept in Portsmouth longer than we expected, and then we had to go on to Winchester. I’m sorry if we woke you.”
If it had been any other man keeping me out until this hour, my father would have been waiting in the drawing room as well. But this was Simon, and I was safe with Simon. My mother on the other hand had a sixth sense about some things, and her worry hadn’t been for the company I was keeping. It had been for whatever had taken me so often from home on such a short leave. . . .
“I haven’t been to bed,” she said. “It’s always hard for me to fall asleep when I know your father is leaving.”
“Where to this time?”
I could see her shrug, the soft peach silk of her dressing gown rising and falling as she lifted her shoulder.
“When do we ever know? But he says, London.”
I held out the basket I was carrying. “There was a market in the square where we stopped going down,” I said. “I couldn’t resist. Village sausages and cheese, and flowers too.”
“I’ll take them through to the kitchen. Thank you, my darling. Good night.”
She kissed me lightly on the cheek and went through the door behind the stairs, on her way to the kitchen. I wanted nothing more than to follow her, make a cup of tea for both of us, and tell her everything.
But not yet.
Two days later when I took the train to London—neither Simon nor my father had come back—I left a little extra time and went directly to Somerset House. It was where all the birth and death records were housed.
I didn’t know anyone there, but I was soon chatting away with an older man whose son had been wounded at Passchendaele. A Sister Hitchcock had stopped the bleeding from his leg wound and saved his life. I thought I could have asked for the moon and he would have tried to give it to me.
Instead I only wanted to look at the records for Lieutenant Wade’s family. I wasn’t really sure how this would help me, but I had known him just as an officer in my father’s regiment and the son of a gentle man who had let me sit in the cab of one of the huge steam locomotives that ran across India.
I left Somerset House with a few bits of new information. Mr. and Mrs. Wade had had three children. A boy, Robert, older than Lieutenant Wade, who had died in Simla, India, at the age of eight. And a sister, Georgina, who had died at the age of six in Petersfield, Hampshire.
Had the Wades lost a child to the heat and pestilence of India, then decided to insure the future of their remaining children by packing them off to England where their chances were better?
They wouldn’t have been the first family to do so. And still one of their children had died, in spite of all that could be done. Like Alice, in fact, in the care of the Middletons.
I tried to remember something that Lieutenant Wade had said to us when he learned of Alice’s death. It had seemed odd at the time. But it was lost. My mother might remember, but I wasn’t ready to confide in her.
I carried another bit of information away with me. Lieutenant Wade’s mother’s name had been Ferguson, and his dead brother had been named for her father—Robert Westin Ferguson Wade.
There was always a possibility that if Lieutenant Wade was alive and using another name, it could well be that of his brother. Who would think to look in the English cemetery in a hill station for a long dead child?
Hadn’t Lieutenant Wade’s parents arranged in their wills to be buried beside their child, in the cool mountain air that smelled of pines rather than dust and cow dung and the bare feet of thousands of people over the centuries? My parents and I had gone to Agra for the memorial service for the Wades, but I hadn’t made the long journey north. Hadn’t seen the small grave next to theirs.
I posted a letter to Simon before meeting my train to Portsmouth. I wondered what he’d make of what I’d learned.
Back in France once more, I had little time to think about Lieutenant Wade. Rumors of an armistice were traveling that invisible circuit that kept all of us informed or misinformed as the case might be. But the shelling was as intense, the attacks and retreats, and the lines of the wounded were just as long. I looked into the haggard faces of men who had been too long at war, and I prayed every night that if the end was in sight, it would come soon enough to spare as many as possible.
Twice I went to Rouen with convoys of wounded, and on the second journey there, I was given two days of leave. Not long enough to go home, not even long enough to go to Paris.
I found a bed in the Base Hospital run by the American doctors and nurses, and I heard more gossip there. But no one knew how much was true and how much was wishful thinking. The word armistice figured largely, but not victory.
One of the Sisters who had come to Rouen with me was celebrating her birthday, and we decided to go to one of the small restaurants in the older quarter. It was called La Poule Rouge, The Red Hen, and it was said to have the finest omelets in France. We set out just after noon, and as we passed by the Cathedral a funeral was in progress, the bell tolling the years of the dead person’s life. Twenty-six. A soldier, then. And this was borne out by the caisson and trappings of the horses that pulled it. The son of someone important, to have a military funeral in the Cathedral or one of its chapels.
We hurried by, and soon found La Poule Rouge tucked between a wine shop with dusty windows and an apothecary. Its sign was old, a large wrought-iron hen that had once been painted red, and her beak and feet were a dull, worn gold that gleamed only in spots.
The restaurant was like so many others, tables arranged here and there in no obvious pattern but far enough apart to offer a little privacy. The floor was checked blue and white, and the wooden chairs were worn, but the cloths covering the tabletops were spotless. I could smell bacon frying, and my mouth watered. I couldn’t remember when I’d last tasted it. At home, surely.
There were perhaps a dozen people at the other tables, all engaged in quiet conversation. In a corner at the back was a British soldier, a Corporal, seated with a young French girl at least fifteen years younger than he was. She was quite pretty, and it wasn’t surprising that everyone glanced her way as they came through the door.
I noticed the sling on the Corporal’s arm first, and the fact that the girl with him was cutting up his omelet for him, before I looked at his face.
“What is it?” Sister Emery asked me as I stopped short and she bumped into me.
“Nothing,” I said, catching up with the middle-aged woman in black who was about to seat us. “Pardon, madame, but could we sit there, near the window?” I quickly asked as she started toward a table near the pair.
I don’t think she was pleased with the suggestion, but she turned and led us to the table I’d pointed out.
Sister Emery was happy with the choice and sat down. I took the chair across from hers.
“The other would have done very well,” she said. “But I’m glad you asked for this table.”
“Yes, I always prefer to be near the window too,” I told her, and took the menu being handed to me, opening it before she could say any more.
The Cor
poral was in profile to where I was seated, and I could see him over Sister Emery’s head.
It had to be Lieutenant Wade. Ten years older, gray already showing at his temples, and I found myself thinking for a second time that the scar that marked his face appeared to be an old one, a narrow white line that looked as if it had been drawn in chalk. I could see it far more clearly here than I had in the German trench.
As if he felt eyes on him, he turned slightly, but I had already raised my menu. I glanced surreptitiously at the window glass, but I wasn’t reflected there.
We chose the fine herb omelet with cheese, and a rasher of bacon. But there was no bacon, the woman serving us reported. Only enough to flavor the omelet.
Disappointed, we thanked her and asked for tea. But there was no tea, and in the end we had a glass of cider with the omelet.
It was delicious, steaming hot and still moist when it came. Sister Emery began to eat with an appetite, but I was distracted by the Corporal on the far side of the room.
Would he remember me from the German trenches? He couldn’t have seen me the night Teddy’s ambulance slid into the shallow ditch. I was behind the headlamps, and he would have been blinded by their barred glare.
The German trenches were another matter. If it hadn’t been for that encounter I could have crossed to his table and pretended to have mistaken him for someone else. I might even have discovered the name he was using.
Frustrated, I tried to think of a way to learn the man’s name. I could see that he was wearing the uniform of a sapper, just as he had been in the trenches. Dangerous work at the best of times. He must have been there to look for traps or mines before the British fully occupied the German lines. The general opinion was, the Germans set charges before abandoning their trenches. Not only to keep any secrets from falling into our hands but also to keep our side from digging in as they themselves had done and making it that much harder to retake the line.
When had he hurt his arm? And how?
Remembering that this was Sister Emery’s birthday and that she was a long way from her family in Northumberland, I tried to make it a jolly occasion. We finished with a plate of cheese and biscuits and somewhere the restaurant had even found a stem of fresh grapes to add on the side.
