In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Miss Fotheringham.’

  The look hardened. ‘Miss Fotheringham will be teaching at this time. What is the nature of your business?’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s a matter of some urgency. Might I see her for just a few moments?’

  ‘Your name?’

  I gave it. She led me into the entrance hall and directed me to a small waiting room with windows looking back down the drive. There was a photograph of the college staff and students, dated September 1901, above the fireplace, but no trace of Miss Fotheringham in the list of names. Three girls in ankle-length white dresses ambled past the window, carrying tennis rackets. One glanced in at me, but seemed not at all abashed.

  The door opened behind me and I turned round. A woman of about Leonora’s age stood there, dressed, like the girls, all in white. Perhaps she too had been playing tennis. She was dark-haired, with a dimple to her cheeks that suggested a cheerful disposition. But, on this occasion, she wasn’t smiling.

  ‘I’m Grace Fotheringham,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Franklin?’

  ‘I’m sorry if this is inconvenient.’

  ‘It’s certainly irregular. But I was told it was urgent.’

  ‘It is. I’m looking for Leonora Hallows. I believe you know where she is.’

  She walked past me and gazed out of the window. ‘Leonora has told me about you, Mr Franklin. How did you know where to come?’

  ‘Does it matter? Can I see her?’

  ‘She needs rest, time alone, away from her family.’

  ‘I’m not a member of her family. And you may as well know that I shan’t leave until I’ve seen her.’

  She looked at me for a moment, as if seeking to confirm what I’d said. Then she spoke in an undertone. ‘She’s staying at my cottage in the village. Sea Thrift. In Shore Road, just beyond the post office. She’ll be there now.’

  ‘Then I don’t need to bother you any more, Miss Fotheringham. I’ll bid you good morning.’

  ‘One thing …’ I stopped at the door. ‘Leonora is my friend, Mr Franklin. I don’t want her upset any more than she already has been.’

  ‘Tell me, how much has she told you?’

  ‘If you mean do I know she is with child, the answer is yes.’

  ‘As to the identity of the father?’

  ‘That is none of my business. As far as the locality is concerned, her husband has only recently been killed.’

  ‘You are a friend indeed, Miss Fotheringham. I am pleased to have met you.’ I meant it: I could see why Leonora had turned to her.

  I retraced my steps to the post office, then turned into Shore Road. Sea Thrift was a small, thatched stone cottage behind a flint wall surmounted by a straggling hedge flecked with red valerian. The entrance was a wrought-iron gate set in and shaped to a stone arch in the wall. Through its bars, I could see a well-kept garden of trimmed grass and brightly stocked flower borders beneath canopies of pink cherry and green lime. To one side, a wicker chair had been placed beneath the overhanging eave of the house and there, reclining in the late-morning sunshine in a lilac dress, was Leonora. There was nothing in the world, or the place, or her pose, to tell of the turmoil she must have felt.

  She looked up at the first creak of the gate. A King Charles spaniel by her chair pricked up its ears but did not so much as yap.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said lamely. Then I saw that she was suddenly breathless. ‘I’m sorry. Did I surprise you?’ I closed the gate behind me and walked into the garden. Still she did not speak. I stood awkwardly in front of her. ‘Fletcher told me where you were. I’ve just come from the school.’

  ‘I thought I could trust Mr Fletcher,’ she said at last, her face strangely expressionless.

  ‘You can. He had no choice but to tell me.’

  ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Everything. I know John is still alive.’ Still no change of expression, but a faint catching of the breath. ‘I think you should have told me sooner.’

  ‘How could I? You must know what it means.’

  ‘May we talk? About what it means?’

  ‘I see that we must.’ She rose from the chair and, for the first time, smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Tom, for deceiving you. I hope you don’t think too badly of me.’

  ‘No.’ I tried to smile as well, but the expression froze as it formed. It seemed, somehow, too banal for the moment. ‘There is much that I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Let us walk a little.’ She led the dog into the house through some french windows, then closed them behind him. He regarded us mournfully from a footstool as we walked away. ‘I have taken Swinburne out several times already. Like his namesake, he is not noted for his energy.’ She closed the gate behind us as we emerged into the lane. A dog-cart clopped by, with a plump, red-faced parson at the reins. He raised his switch in acknowledgement.

  ‘I think I see what sort of a refuge this place is. But you can’t hide here for ever, Leonora.’

  ‘I shan’t try to. Indeed, they have now heard from me at Meongate. They should have had a letter this morning telling them I am safe and well, though not where I am.’

  We turned down past the post office. The butcher in the shop next door raised his boater. Leonora smiled at him and spoke to me in an undertone. ‘As you see, I am already known and welcome here. Bonchurch is a tight-knit, friendly community sympathetic to my plight. You will appreciate that, if the truth were known to them, I would once again be an outcast, and would disgrace my friend, who has risked a good deal by taking me in.’

  ‘There need be no question of it. But is that what you feel from Meongate – an outcast?’

  ‘Entirely. I could not remain there, for all manner of reasons. Though I am sorry to have left in the way that I did. Here, for the moment, I am safe. I am Grace’s war-widowed friend, sadly with child. Respectable and plausible. But what of you? How did you find me so soon?’

  As we went on past the gates of East Dene, down a sloping, even rougher track towards the sea now visible beyond the trees, I told her of the sequence of events that had led me to her. None of it seemed to surprise her, perhaps because, in so many ways, she’d been there before me.

  By now, we were on a path that led through the grassed and shrub-strewn hummocks of some long-ago landslip, the sea below us to our right, sucking at the shingle of a hidden shore. Behind us, across the fields, the gables and roof-trees of East Dene were clearly visible. There, I imagined, in some tall-windowed classroom, Miss Fotheringham would be teaching French with distracted refinement, wondering the while how her friend was faring.

  ‘I do not begrudge you the truth,’ Leonora said. ‘I want you to know that. John had no right to deceive you as he did. Alas, I cannot account for all that he has done – or may have done. I do not fully understand him any more.’

  ‘But you have seen him. You have known for a long time that he is not dead.’

  ‘Yes. For a month, I thought him so. The news came from France in early May. There was a memorial service at the church. You wrote to me and I wrote back. Then it happened.

  ‘It was a Saturday: June the tenth. Mompesson was staying at Meongate for the weekend. He’d become an even more frequent visitor since the report of John’s death. And it was apparent to me long before then that he wanted somehow to become a member of our family. I don’t mean by being Olivia’s lover. That was distasteful but not unusual. No, he wanted Meongate, a hold on the title if he could not have the title itself. As soon as I became a widow, I presented an attractive target. At first, I was too distraught to notice, or to care. At worst, his attentions distracted me from my grief. Olivia came to hate me then, I believe, to fear she would be set aside for a younger woman. As a matter of fact, I doubt he would have felt the need to forgo her even if I had agreed to marry him. But let that pass. To all of this I remained oblivious, until that night.’

  I interrupted to stem the flow of her account. Suddenly, I didn’t want to kno
w too soon. She had held back so much for so long that I was ill-prepared for its revelation, all of a piece, as we stood on the sloping, uneven ground above the sea. ‘Wait. All of this I’ve only been able to guess at. You speak of Mompesson wanting some way into the family. Why? What for? What was he after?’

  ‘I too can only guess. He didn’t confide in me – or anyone else, I dare say. But his own family had land and wealth in Louisiana before the Civil War took it all from them. Was he jealous of us because of that, do you suppose? He had a talent for making money, but talent alone couldn’t give him social status. Is that what he wanted from us?’ She turned and took a few paces down the slope. I didn’t close the gap, sensed instead that it was necessary if she was to tell me what had happened.

  ‘That Saturday night, I went to bed early. I usually did when Mompesson was visiting us. The strain of being polite to him exhausted me. I fell asleep more quickly than I had done in weeks.

  ‘When I woke, I thought I was dreaming. John was there, above me, his hand over my mouth to prevent me crying out. An illusion, a nightmare: what else could it be? But then he spoke and I knew that he really had returned. And when he spoke, I knew that something had changed in him. The husband I had thought dead was still alive, but yet not whole, not restored to what he had been.

  ‘“I am not a ghost,” he said, “and I am sorry you should ever have been led to believe I was dead.” He sat on the bed and took his hand from my mouth. I did not cry out, though I could have done, for joy at his survival. I thought – in so far as I thought at all – that there had been some absurd mistake which he could now put right. He told me he had entered the house secretly. Nobody but I knew he was there, or still alive. It was, he said, how he wanted it. And all that mattered to me in that moment was that my love had been returned to me. When I held him in my arms, I held a miracle.’ She turned round and looked at me again. ‘Can you imagine what that meant to me, Tom?’

  ‘Did he tell you what had happened, how he had survived?’

  ‘Later. I had slept a little and woke to find him standing by the window, smoking a cigarette and watching dawn break over the park. I saw him then more clearly than before: rough clothes, unshaven, no uniform, no luggage. With a shock, I realized he had the look of a fugitive. And something in the way he looked at me – the instant before he noticed I was awake – made me realize something was wrong.

  ‘“I’m going to have to leave you again,” he said. “Officially, I must remain dead.” The he told me. His death was no bizarre misunderstanding, but a fraud. He had deserted. He said that he had thought of doing so often, that the war was an ugly, brutal farce he could no longer tolerate. When the opportunity had come, he had taken it. Cut off in no man’s land, he had left his papers on a dead companion and stolen away from the battlefield. He wouldn’t go into details, wouldn’t say where he’d been since then. He had come to me in the hope that I could somehow absolve him of the guilt that he felt, somehow divine what it was that he should do.

  ‘But I couldn’t. That was when I failed him, at his time of greatest need. I love him and he loves me. I was – I still am – overjoyed that he did not die in France. But it isn’t as simple as that, is it? Doesn’t some part of you resent him as a traitor? Wouldn’t the whole world condemn him as a coward if they knew how he’d cheated death?’

  What she’d said was true and I could only admit it. ‘John’s right: the war should not be allowed to continue. But, as long as it does, it will demand its due. It isn’t cowardly to seek a way out. In fact, it takes a special kind of bravery. But you’re right too: the world wouldn’t understand such an act.’

  She sighed. ‘That’s what I told him: that, sooner or later, he would be found, that what would happen then would be worse than to lose him in the war, however dreadful, however pointless.’

  I thought of the punishment meted out to deserters. ‘It is so. It may still be so.’

  ‘I urged him to go back to his regiment. Then he might have some chance of talking his way out of a charge of desertion. He said he didn’t think it would work, that they wouldn’t believe whatever story he invented. So I asked the question I most dreaded putting to him. If he did not give himself up, how could we remain together? If he was to stay in hiding, how long must I go on pretending he was dead?’

  I expected her to continue, but she did not. A silence fell, clarifying the rustle of the grass in the breeze around us. She seemed to need some prompting. ‘What was his answer?’

  She shook her head. ‘He had none. He said that he saw the sense of what I was proposing, that what I’d told him only confirmed what he’d so often told himself. Yet something seemed to hold him back, something beyond mere indecision. It wasn’t as if he was hesitant, or nervous, or even much afraid. There was a calmness about him, a detachment I found more disturbing than anything else.

  ‘Then he said he’d have to go. It was beginning to grow light: he couldn’t risk being seen. I tried to win from him some promise to do as I’d advised him, or, failing that, some agreement to meet me again, but he said he could guarantee nothing, beyond his love for me. Before he left, he mentioned you.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He’d spoken of you before, of course, so your name wasn’t new to me. “Franklin may come to see you,” he said. “If he lives. If he remembers. Keep the truth from him at all costs. But trust him. He deserves that.” He was right: you do.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’ve been no help, to either of you.’

  ‘That’s because John can only help himself. He left that Sunday morning and I’ve not seen him or heard from him since. I saw him slip into the trees at the edge of the park after one backward glance and I prayed then that he might not stray too far from me. I felt sure he would, after all, give himself up. Instead … nothing. No news, no word from him. To the world he remained dead. As the days passed, so did the tension of waiting. I began, at times, to think I’d only dreamed his return. But it was not so. My own body gave the lie to it. When I realized that I was pregnant, I realized also the impossibility of my position. I could not keep John’s secret without seeming to have betrayed him. I could not sustain his family’s belief in him without destroying their belief in me. And the one man I needed most to confide in – whose mind might have been changed by my news – I did not know how to find.’

  ‘As you say: an impossible position.’

  ‘But about to become worse. At the beginning of August, Mompesson showed his hand. He had often asked me to go for a drive with him. I had as often refused. This time I had no choice. “I wish to speak to you about your husband’s supposed death,” he said. “Would you not rather do so in private?” My blood ran cold. He knew.

  ‘He drove out along the Winchester road and stopped near the golf course. There he told me. He had seen John leaving Meongate that Sunday morning in June. He knew he was alive and that I also knew. Now, he had had him traced to an address in Portsmouth. He would not give it to me, but this he made clear: unless I cooperated, he would go to the authorities. John would be seized and shot as a deserter. He left me in no doubt of it. Unless, as I say, I cooperated.’

  She turned away again and looked out to sea. ‘What choice did I have? I couldn’t call his bluff, because he wasn’t bluffing. I couldn’t warn John, because I didn’t know where he was. I could confide in no one. I was obliged to meet the terms that Mompesson set upon his silence. They were more severe than I’d imagined. He did not want money. He wanted me. You know something of his ways – I shall not speak of them. He wanted to use me as he would have done the slaves he felt were his birthright, denied him by history. For John’s sake – for no other reason, I promise you – I agreed to let him have his way.

  ‘That was not the worst. There was a heavier penalty still. He wanted to marry me. It was absurd, yet horribly cunning. We would know it was a bigamous marriage, of course, but nobody else would, so long as the secret was kept. And how could I not keep the secret? How could I not agre
e? When he found out – through Olivia, I think – that I was pregnant, he was delighted. Everyone would assume he was the father: he would make it his business to ensure they did. So the marriage would hurt Lord Powerstock just as it pleased Mompesson.

  ‘At heart, though, he still wanted Meongate more than he wanted me. I began to see how he might have planned it. To marry me was only the start. Posing as the innocent, he could then expose John and ruin both of us. Such a blow would kill Lord Powerstock, clearing the way for Mompesson to marry Olivia and acquire the estate and privileges he desired. By keeping John’s secret, I was only serving Mompesson’s ambition. Perhaps you think it fanciful, but that is how it seemed to me.’

  ‘It sounds all too likely.’

  ‘Shall we walk on a way?’ She moved off and I followed, trailing slowly along the overgrown path. Three girls, carrying butterfly nets, seemingly bound for East Dene, passed by and bade us courteous good mornings. When they’d gone, Leonora resumed. ‘I didn’t know what to do. There seemed no way out, no one to turn to. When you came, with your gentlemanly offers of friendship, it only made matters worse, only reminded me of the bitterness of my plight. I feared it might be so when Lord Powerstock said that he’d recognized your name on one of the lists Lady Kilsyth circulated, but I didn’t try to stop him inviting you. Besides, time was running out. When Mompesson next came, he set a term on my compliance. I was given until last Friday to surrender myself to him.’ She shuddered visibly in the warm air. ‘That was to be followed by an announcement of our engagement.’

  ‘I had some inkling of it. I overheard part of your discussion with him in the rhododendron glade.’

  She stopped and glanced at me. ‘But you could not have guessed what lay behind our words.’

  ‘Only that he had some kind of hold over you.’

  She nodded and moved on. ‘As truly he did. I think he enjoyed giving me so much time to contemplate what would happen.’

  ‘Before he left, he boasted that you would agree to marry him.’

  ‘A measure of his confidence, and a warning to you, no doubt. After he’d gone, I racked my brains for some way to defeat him. it seemed to me that my only hope was to contact John. All I knew was that he was somewhere in Portsmouth. But why? A naval town seemed a strange place for a deserter to hide. I thought about all that he’d said, went over it again and again. There was nothing in it to suggest why he’d gone there. Then, out of the blue, it came to me. Charter happened to say something about John’s mother. That wasn’t unusual. But it reminded me of her work in Portsmouth. It made no sense, but it was John’s only connection with the town. I resolved to go there, in search of a clue as much as of him.’