The Golden Chain

by Margaret James

  There’d been some talk about him going back for a week in June to take examinations. All his masters had set him so much work his luggage weighed a ton. But, thought Ewan, since I don’t intend to go to Oxford …

  Agnes had arranged to let their house until September, bringing in some welcome cash, but making Ewan feel even more gloomy. Now he would be stuck in rural Dorset, sponging off his father’s relatives and missing the place he loved, until the best of the year was past.

  They travelled down first class, which in Ewan’s opinion was a waste of the money his mother said they didn’t have. They had a compartment to themselves. While Mrs Fraser stared out of the window, occasionally getting out her powder compact and touching up her paintwork, Ewan lolled across three seats and read his pocket Shakespeare, a tiny copy printed on the thinnest India paper. It had been his father’s, had gone with him to the trenches, and it still smelled of dirt and smoke and blood.

  As Ewan read accounts of battles and tales of love, he wondered if he was ever going to live up to his father, a highly-decorated hero who had died of war wounds, even though he’d taken years to do so.

  It didn’t look as if another war was in the offing, or at least not yet. So he wasn’t going to be able to cover himself with glory on some distant battlefield. He wondered what it would be like to fall in love.

  ‘Ewan, what are you doing?’ demanded Agnes, suddenly. ‘You’ve got that strange look in your eyes again.’

  ‘I’m just reading,’ Ewan said, hoping she didn’t want to talk to him, or rather lecture him.

  ‘You always have your nose stuck in a book. You’re always dreaming. There’s life out there, child – real life!’

  Yes, shooting and fishing in Dorset, and they won’t compare with anything in Scotland, Ewan thought, but didn’t say. He didn’t want to provoke his mother into delivering yet another sermon.

  Agnes rearranged her furs, peering at him over the turned-up collar of her coat, like a petulant marmoset in lipstick.

  ‘It’s freezing in this carriage,’ she complained. ‘I wonder where the guard can be? Maybe there isn’t one on this awful train. Ewan, I don’t feel well. I’m sure I’m feverish. I think I must be going to start a cold.’

  Daisy had yet another cold. Since they’d come back to England, she almost always had a cold. This was not surprising, for she was always freezing, even if she wrapped herself in layers and layers of woollens, wore scratchy home-made cardigans and thick, hand-knitted socks. The spring her dad had promised them was taking its time to come.

  Getting up late one morning, she found her mother in the kitchen, discussing the week’s meals with Mrs Hobson, the woman from the village who helped Rose with the household chores.

  Daisy liked Mrs Hobson, who had obviously decided the Denham family needed lots of jumpers, socks and cardigans, and also feeding up. She cooked them wholesome stews with plenty of suet dumplings, carrots and potatoes, and always welcomed Daisy to the kitchen with biscuits and a glass of milk.

  Mrs Hobson came to Melbury House each weekday morning, and she and Rose did everything between them – dusting, cleaning, scrubbing, laundry, peeling endless piles of vegetables, and laying all the fires.

  Daisy came home from school most afternoons to find her mother resting with her feet up on the sofa, pale with fatigue and looking drained.

  ‘I thought I heard some footsteps,’ Mrs Hobson said, beaming as Daisy snaked a hand across the kitchen table to grab a fresh-baked scone. ‘You’re not at school today, then?’

  ‘She was up coughing half the night, so I thought I’d keep her off this morning. This old place is so damp. I’m surprised we haven’t all had pneumonia this winter.’ Rose brushed Daisy’s fringe out of her eyes and felt her forehead. ‘You’re not so feverish now. If you’re feeling better, you could go to school this afternoon.’

  ‘Maybe not, it’s double Latin.’ Daisy grinned. ‘I’ll go for a walk along the beach, or into Charton and blow my germs away. Unless I can do anything for you, Mum?’

  ‘Thank you, darling, but I think we’ve finished,’ Rose replied, although she must have known she’d never finish, that she would never manage to run Melbury House as it was intended to be run, with a live-in staff of five or more, and extra help besides.

  ‘If you go to the village, you must always use the road from Melbury,’ she reminded Daisy. ‘I know the other way is shorter, but that gated road is private. It’s on someone else’s land.’

  ‘Where’s my dad?’ asked Daisy, pretending not to hear what Rose had said about the road.

  ‘He and Mr Hobson are marking out a vegetable garden. Alex has lots of plans for it this year.’ Rose smiled ruefully. ‘I think he means to keep you children busy.’

  ‘I’ll go and see what they’re doing.’

  Daisy went to fetch her coat, but as she walked along the service passage the women’s voices floated after her, and she couldn’t help hear what they were saying.

  ‘She’s grown up very pretty,’ said Mrs Hobson. ‘I always knew she would.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ Rose agreed. Then Daisy heard her mother sigh. ‘Of course, it’s rather difficult for me, coming back here and having to see the people I used to know. I expect there’s lots of gossip in the village?’

  ‘Well, there’s still a bit,’ admitted Mrs Hobson. ‘But not as much as when you first came home. You and Mr Denham and the children are living here so happy and respectable that I’m sure there’s nothing much to say.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Rose.

  ‘Mrs Denham, I dare say it’s not my business, but does Daisy know what happened all those years ago?’ asked Mrs Hobson.

  ‘She – Mrs Hobson, look at the time, we must get all that ironing done,’ said Rose.

  Chapter Two

  Daisy and her brothers had been taught to think of England as the mother country, and as their real home. So when they’d first been told they were going home, they had been thrilled.

  Their picture books of England had shown them green fields, purple hills, romantic castles, black and white half-timbered villages, bustling cities, golden beaches, lakes and snow-capped mountains. They couldn’t wait to see this paradise.

  Two or three times while they were growing up, their father had been to England on official army business and to see his guardian Henry Denham, who lived in Dorset.

  Alex had sent or brought back lovely things – gorgeous dolls and pretty clothes for Daisy, cricket bats and armies of toy soldiers for the boys, and lots of other games and toys from Hamley’s, which from his descriptions sounded like Aladdin’s cave.

  Once, Rose and Alex had gone together to visit Mr Denham, who was dangerously ill. They were away three months. Mr Denham died while Rose and Alex were in England and, when they came back to India, Daisy, Robert and Stephen had never seen their father look so sad. But the presents that time had been wonderful, and they longed to see the place where all these things were made.

  So, when they first arrived in England, docking in Southampton on a drizzling, dismal autumn day, everything had been a disappointment.

  It was so cold and damp. They were used to cold, for when they had spent seasons in the hills, it had been sharp and chilly on frosty autumn mornings. But they’d never known the dripping, miserable damp of cold, grey England.

  ‘We’re going to live in a beautiful old house,’ Rose had explained, and got them all excited. ‘Your father’s guardian left it to him several years ago, but there’s been no one living in it since. So it will be a little shabby now, but we’ll soon get everything spruced up.’

  Melbury House turned out to be a hideous old ruin, too far gone, thought Daisy, for any sprucing up, even if it was a fine example of a Jacobean mansion.

  ‘Look at the period detail,’ Rose said brightly, as she and their
father took them round, pointing out elaborate plastered ceilings (cracked and green with mould, the plaster falling off in dirty, icing-sugar chunks), the Grinling Gibbons staircase (full of woodworm, so there was to be no sliding down it, for fear it would disintegrate), and the enormous, curtained beds, made on site to fit the first floor bedrooms, swagged and draped with velvet (rotting and full of spiders).

  On their second day at home, while their parents shivered in the drawing room, trying to keep warm beside a smoking, choking fire, and saying they must get the chimneys swept, Daisy and the twins did some exploring of their own.

  Above the second storey, the main staircase had collapsed, but they went up the service stairs and up on to the roof. They found that some of it was missing, the slates blown off or broken, the wooden beams exposed.

  ‘We can’t use that part of the house,’ admitted Alex, when they’d pointed out to him that rain was getting in, and this must be the reason everything was rotten. ‘The rooms on the third floor are past redemption, and nobody’s used them for centuries.’

  ‘Why don’t you get the roof fixed?’ Daisy asked him.

  ‘Money,’ said Alex. ‘Or rather, lack of it.’

  ‘I always thought we had a lot of money?’

  ‘We never had a lot,’ said Alex. ‘But we had enough – until the Crash. The stock market, Daisy, it’s a very fickle thing. You need a clever broker in these troubled times.’

  ‘So is your broker stupid?’

  ‘He made some very unwise investments. Listen, you fellows, don’t go on the roof,’ said Alex, who seemed to want to change the subject. ‘It’s far too dangerous.’

  By the end of their first week in Dorset, they all had streaming colds. Rose was ill all winter. She had tonsillitis, followed by bronchitis, followed by influenza, followed by tonsillitis, round and round in circles.

  Alex was still getting over wounds he had received in an anti-British riot the previous summer, and everyone was miserable and sluggish, unwilling to do anything but sit and dream of what they’d left behind.

  ‘But we’d have had to come to stinking England, anyway,’ muttered Robert grimly, as Daisy and the twins cleared away the breakfast things one chilly April morning.

  ‘If Dad was in the army still, and if they hadn’t lost most of their money in the Crash, you’d have gone to be finished off in Switzerland,’ said Stephen. ‘So you’d have been all right. But Rob and me, we’d be at some old boarding school in Kent, like the Fielding boys from our cantonment. Colin Fielding said you have to fag for older fellows, and everyone gets flogged. So we’re quite glad we’re broke.’

  ‘It’s Rob and I,’ said Daisy.

  She decided she would make the best of England. It was too wet, too cold, too dull, too quiet, but once in a while a clear, bright day made everything look better.

  Then, the sky shone crystal-blue, the dew-sprinkled grass was the most brilliant shade of green, and in all the copses pale daffodils glowed yellow.

  Tiny, fragile things, these Easter lilies – as the local people called them – were nothing like the gorgeous regal lilies which had grown like weeds in India. But they were pretty, just the same, and in a way she liked them better. They were modest, charming, not fleshy and demanding, shouting look at me.

  She went to school in Dorchester, catching the early morning train from Charton. She usually walked home from Charton village along a well-maintained and gated road that went past Easton Hall, a splendid stone-built mansion. Its gleaming paintwork and new roof suggested that the people who lived there must be very rich. They must have clever brokers, she decided.

  Daisy didn’t know them, because they didn’t mix with local people. They even had a private pew in church, with its own special entrance near the choir stalls, which no one else could use. There, boxed into a sort of holy hen house, the Eastons did their worshipping in secret, out of everybody else’s sight.

  Rose had told Daisy several times she mustn’t go that way because the gated road was private and she would be trespassing. But Daisy took no notice. She wasn’t doing any harm, and this was the short way home.

  One Friday afternoon, as she was walking back to Melbury House, she saw somebody sitting on the gate that lay ahead. A boy about the same age as herself, she thought, or maybe a bit older, he didn’t have a hat on, and his red-brown hair was glinting copper in the sunshine.

  Most probably a poacher, she decided, a poacher or a vagrant. Maybe that was why her mother didn’t like her coming home this way. She might meet tramps and undesirables.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the vagrant said. He looked quite respectable close up, or at least clean and decent, anyway.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Ewan Fraser.’ The boy held out his hand. Daisy didn’t take it. People might look clean, but they could still have terrible diseases – living in India had taught her that.

  ‘Daisy Denham.’ Then she thought, perhaps he’s not a vagrant, after all. His clothes look quite expensive. But he sounds Scottish, which is odd, considering this is Dorset. He must be one of the unemployed, come south to look for work.

  ‘I live at Melbury House,’ she added, pointing to the chimneys in the distance, hoping this would make him think again before he robbed her, and silently daring him to smirk, or make some smart remark about life in ruins.

  ‘I’m staying with some relations here,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ Daisy frowned. ‘I haven’t seen you in church.’

  ‘I’m an atheist,’ said the boy. ‘So I don’t go to church.’ Then he looked Daisy up and down and smiled, and Daisy thought, he’s got no manners, atheist or not.

  ‘Daisy Denham, Melbury House,’ he said, reflectively. ‘You must be the girl my mother and Lady Easton talk about, when they think no one’s listening.’

  ‘Your mother and Lady Easton?’ Daisy was astonished. ‘I don’t know Lady Easton, and I’ve never met your mother. Whatever do they say?’

  ‘Oh, how you’re very talented, and such a splendid dancer, and how it’s not surprising, considering who your mother is – the usual sort of women’s chat.’

  ‘I see,’ said Daisy. She thought, how very odd. She’d never known Rose was any good at dancing. In fact, she’d never seen her mother dance.

  At parties, or at any other sort of social gathering in India where children were allowed, Rose had always sat and gossiped with the other memsahibs. She had never danced.

  Perhaps she danced with Alex when the children were in bed? Maybe they wound up the gramophone and danced alone, in pale, romantic moonlight?

  ‘I need to get across this gate,’ she said.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ asked Ewan, as he moved aside.

  ‘I don’t think it’s any of your business,’ Daisy told him, holding down her skirt as she climbed over, and hoping she wasn’t showing too much leg.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ said Ewan. ‘But may I walk with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I must hurry. I have lots of things to do.’

  Daisy jumped down, and then she walked on briskly, feeling warm around the neck, wondering if the boy was following, and sort of hoping that he might be.

  But when she glanced back furtively, she saw he was still sitting on the gate, and now he had his back to her and was staring out across the fields.

  She’s very pretty, Ewan thought, as he gazed towards the water meadows, which were glowing green and golden with bright yellow kingcups in the sharp spring sunshine.

  He took out his Shakespeare and found Romeo and Juliet, which was currently his favourite play. He longed and longed to play the hero, who was his ideal of a man – a fighter who was handy with a rapier, a lover who bewitched a woman with a single sentence. If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine – he rolled the lovely words around his tongue
.

  But he’d have a girl to play his Juliet, not some wee tinker in a wig, seconded from the lower school. Daisy Denham, now, she would be perfect.

  He said her name out loud, and then he whispered it. She was as young as Juliet. Or anyway, she looked it. She was certainly as beautiful. She had a grace and dignity befitting the daughter of old Capulet.

  She had lovely hands, small and neat, well-shaped. He’d noticed them as she had climbed the gate.

  Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss …

  Ewan sighed, and wondered if he was about to fall in love, if love was a disease, and he had caught it.

  If he had, he didn’t mind. In fact, he welcomed it. Love would be a distraction from the boredom of this tedious place.

  He started reading through the play again.

  Daisy hurried on along the road, feeling hot and bothered.

  The boy who had been sitting on the gate – he had been very handsome. She’d never seen such beautiful green eyes. They had glowed like emeralds in a maharajah’s crown. Such long, dark lashes, too – wasted on a boy, of course, who had no need of lashes, anyway.

  The way he’d looked at her as well, so bold and so appraising, what a cheek he’d had. But clearly he had liked what he had seen.

  When she got home, she found her mother sitting in the kitchen, making one of her everlasting lists. ‘Mum,’ she began, ‘when you were younger, did you – ’

  ‘You’re very early, darling.’ Rose glanced up, and Daisy saw how tired she looked, how there were lines developing at the corners of her eyes. ‘Good day at school?’

  ‘Yes, it was all right. I got a merit mark in geography, Mum, when you were younger, did you like to dance?’

  ‘My goodness, yes. I loved it!’ Rose smiled dreamily. ‘In those days before the war everything was – well, I can’t describe it! But we had such balls, such parties. All the men wore evening dress or uniform and, as for the women, you should have seen them, lace and silk and flowers and jewellery – gorgeous.’