The Victory Garden: A Novel

by Rhys Bowen

  “Where would you go? You have nowhere.”

  “Actually, my friend Clarissa has invited me to live with her as soon as she returns from nursing in France. And until then, I’m sure Nell Lacey will let me stay at the Red Lion. I’ve enough money saved to pay my way.”

  She didn’t wait any longer, afraid that the old lady would see the distress on her face. Instead, she ran from the room, all the way down to the cottage.

  Emily shut the cottage door behind her and stood, catching her breath. She was still in shock about what had just happened, and looked around her at the little room that had now become a haven. There were jars of herbs on the table, the recipe book open beside them. Shadow the cat came over to rub against her leg. And now she’d have to leave it all and start over.

  “I was going to move in with Clarissa anyway,” she told herself. “At least now I don’t have to do it with regret and guilt about leaving the old lady alone.”

  But her gaze still lingered on the herbs. She had just started to do something worthwhile. She had been looking forward to the spring, when new plants would shoot up and new flowers would bloom. Now she would never know what effective cures she could make. The healing garden would go dormant again. The cottage would become empty and unloved. And Susan Olgilvy’s legacy would be forgotten.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “I should pack up my belongings,” Emily said to the cat. “I’d like to take you with me, but I don’t think you’d want to move away from here.”

  She went up to the attic to retrieve her suitcases and lugged them down the stairs with some difficulty. Her growing waistline had affected her balance, she noticed, and she came down the steep steps with extreme caution. Once inside her bedroom, she started to fold items of clothing, stacking them on the bed before packing them into the suitcases. Her heart was beating very fast now. What if Nell Lacey said no? What if there was no room for her at the pub? Then she told herself that Alice would not let her be turned out into the cold. She’d offer to share her room and her bed if necessary. And Clarissa would be home any day now, if she wasn’t back in England already.

  Emily looked up when she heard a knock on the front door. She just prayed it wasn’t another woman wanting her sleeping draught. She didn’t feel up to spreading the news that she was leaving the cottage and soon leaving the village. She went to the front door, and recoiled when she saw Lady Charlton standing there, leaning on her stick and breathing heavily.

  “I’m sorry,” the old woman gasped. “I was wrong. I don’t want you to go.”

  “You said some terrible things. You drove your grandson away.”

  “I know. I was stupid.” She paused. “May I come in? I am not used to hurrying any more.” She put her hand to her heart.

  Emily stood aside to let her come in. She pulled out a chair and aided the old lady into it.

  “You shouldn’t have walked all this way,” she said. “I’ll make you some mint tea. It’s very restorative.”

  She went through to the kitchen where a kettle was on the stove and poured hot water on to a sprig of mint picked from a plant that was growing in a pot by the sink. She stirred honey into it, then came back through and handed the mug to the old woman. “You’re right,” Lady Charlton said after taking a sip. “Very restorative. I’d forgotten.” She paused, then reached out to Emily, taking her hand. “You won’t leave, will you? I’ve come to depend on you. I enjoy your company.”

  “You could have had your grandson’s company if you hadn’t rejected him.”

  Lady Charlton took another sip of the hot tea. “I know. I don’t know why I behaved that way. The shock of seeing him, I suppose. He and I often butted heads, and he did tell monstrous lies when he was a little boy . . . like how an owl flew into the room and knocked over my favourite vase. He had a great imagination.”

  “Do you really believe anyone would make up a prison camp?” Emily asked.

  “I suppose not. And he did look dreadfully thin.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” Emily asked. “Are you going to risk losing your only grandson forever?”

  “What do you think I should do? Write to him and apologize?”

  “That would be a start,” Emily agreed.

  “But I wouldn’t know where to find him.”

  “His regiment might help. And I know that he is living with a group of friends in London. A group of writers.”

  “Writers!” The old woman gave a snort of disgust. “If his father could hear that, he’d turn in his grave.”

  “Not everyone has to follow the same path in life,” Emily said. “Justin can’t be his father and grandfather. If he needs to write to express the horrors he has lived through, then why should you begrudge him that?”

  “Why do you always have to be so insightful and so right?” the old woman snapped. Then she held out a bony hand to Emily. “You will stay, won’t you? And help me find him and bring him home?”

  “I will stay for now,” Emily said, wincing as she thought of leaving Lady Charlton when Clarissa returned. “And I will help you find him.”

  A letter was written to the army, but they had no forwarding address; in fact, they had him listed as killed in action. So Justin had been right. The administrators at the prison camp had never contacted his regiment. Emily felt such incredible sympathy for him. She had seen the unbearable hurt on his face when his grandmother had talked to him with such scorn. To have endured those conditions in which every day could have brought torture or death and then be rejected by his own family member was so harsh. Then she realized that they were two of a kind. She, too, had been rejected by her family. If she had any way of making this right for Justin, she would do it. But she had no way of tracking him down in London. She could hardly go to the city and wander around the neighbourhoods where writers might live. They could be anywhere.

  Right after the letter had arrived from Justin’s regimental commander, she received a letter of her own from Clarissa. She opened it with excitement, only to read:

  I’m back on British soil. I can’t tell you how good it is to get a proper cup of tea and scones and jam and a hot bath. Bliss. However, I’m not being released from duty just yet. I’ve been sent to a hospital in the East End to help with the influenza crisis. Apparently, the flu has crossed the Channel, and in the crowded conditions of the city, it is spreading rapidly. They do not have enough hospital beds and are sending nurses like me out into the homes to do what we can. Frankly, there isn’t much we can do. When the disease strikes, some people are dead in a couple of days. And it’s not always the frail and elderly. In France, I watched strapping young men just fade away as if the life had been sucked out of them.

  I’m glad you’re safely tucked away in the country. Take care of yourself. I won’t risk coming to see you in case I bring the disease with me. In the meantime, I’m going to write to hospitals around the country to see who might offer me a position. Not in the East End, I think. I have had enough of squalor!

  Emily put down the letter. In a way, she was glad that she didn’t yet have to break the news to Lady Charlton that she was leaving. Christmas was approaching, and there was food in the shops again. Mrs Trelawney went into Tavistock and returned with the news that she had reserved a turkey at the butcher’s. She had also bought fruit to make the Christmas pudding. Emily found herself thinking of Christmas at home. Before the war, there had been so much food, a tall Christmas tree with glass ornaments on it and presents. There had been Christmas parties with parlour games and much laughter. An image came into her head of her brother, Freddie, being very silly as he played charades. How he had loved life. So had Robbie. If he had returned from France, they would have been married by now and on their way to Australia.

  Instead, here she was, thinking about what she could give her new friends as Christmas presents. She certainly had no spare money to buy anything. A shilling bottle of Woolworth’s Ashes of Roses would hardly be the sort of gift she could give Lady Charlton.
She also wanted to give Alice something, and Daisy, which probably also meant giving something to Mrs Trelawney and Ethel. And Mr Patterson, too. He had been very kind to her, and she enjoyed their occasional visits and discussions about books. It was when she was with him that an idea came to her. He was telling her that he planned to build more hives, and maybe sell his honey at the village shop as he used to do before the war.

  “If you do that, will you have more beeswax?” she asked. “Because any wax that you have to spare I can use to make my ointments and salves.”

  “I have some now, if you’d like,” he said. “One of my colonies has abandoned me, I’m afraid, so I have the comb that they’ve left behind.”

  Emily took it home excitedly and experimented with making a hand cream. She knew it would be better with fresh flowers, but the lavender and sage still retained their sweet smells. And she had a recipe that Susan had written.

  Marigold hand cream.

  Take one ounce of marigold petals and add one pint of good-quality oil. Place in a bain-marie. Simmer gently for two hours. Strain off the oil and pour into a saucepan. Add one ounce of beeswax and stir until well absorbed. Pour into clean jars.

  It was not the season for marigolds, but she did have lavender, rosemary and sage. She experimented with almond oil from the chemist. When she had produced what she felt was a satisfying consistency, she scooped it into the smallest jars and cut ribbon from the good dress she had brought with her to tie around them. She was quite satisfied with the result.

  When she came across Christmas cards in the village shop, she found herself thinking again of her parents. Would they be worried about not having heard from her? Even if they thought she was still with the land girls, wouldn’t they be expecting her to come home for Christmas? She picked up a card. Should she send them one to let them know she was all right? But then they’d see the postmark and come to find her, and that could not happen. Instead, she bought a card and addressed it to Miss Foster-Blake. Inside, she wrote that she was well and had been invited to live with a friend, so her future was secure.

  “You will be spending Christmas Day here, I hope,” Lady Charlton said.

  “I will certainly be happy to have Christmas dinner with you,” she said, “but I don’t want Alice to feel left out. Mrs Lacey has gone up to London to have Christmas with her husband in hospital, and Alice has been left alone running the Red Lion for her.”

  “Then invite her, too. The more the merrier,” Lady Charlton said. “I presume the public house will be closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.”

  “Are you sure?” Emily asked. “She is a working-class woman from London.”

  Lady Charlton shrugged. “The war is over, and I expect we’ll find a good many things will change. Since I have no family to share my feast . . .”

  “I have tried to find Justin,” Emily said, “but it’s hopeless. How does one start in London? My friend Clarissa has been sent to work in the East End, but I doubt she’ll have time to do any investigating for me. Do you think you should hire a private investigator to track him down?”

  Lady Charlton sighed. “I think we have to accept that Justin wants no communication with me at the present. When I die, he will take over this house anyway and can do what he likes with it. Until then . . .”

  “Don’t talk about dying.” Emily reached out instinctively to her. “You’ve a lot of life in you yet.”

  “One never knows.” She sighed again. “If you’d met my husband, you would have thought him a vibrant, lively man—one who loved life. And yet he sickened and died so rapidly.”

  “Just like those with influenza are doing now in London.”

  “So one hears. We must pray it doesn’t come to us.”

  “I think we’re too remote for anything to find us, including influenza,” Emily said, smiling.

  Emily went to see Alice at the Red Lion and extended the invitation to her. Alice gave her a look of horror. “Oh, no thanks, duck. I mean, ta all the same, and it was nice of you to think of me, but I couldn’t see myself sitting at a dinner table with a titled lady. I’d be scared every time I opened my mouth that I’d put my foot in it.” She chuckled. “Anyway, some of us have been invited to Mrs Soper’s to celebrate. Not that we’ll feel that much like celebrating—even those whose men have come home.” She drew closer to Emily and said in a low voice, “You remember Johnny Hodgson who came home, and how happy his wife was to see him? She came to the pub with him the other evening, and she told me quietly that she’s worried sick about him. He wakes up at night screaming and in a cold sweat. He has these awful nightmares, you see. He hears the guns. It frightens the children.”

  “How sad,” Emily said. “I don’t suppose anyone gets over being in the trenches in a hurry. But, Alice, I wanted to spend Christmas Day with you, really. But I couldn’t say no to Lady Charlton.”

  Alice put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Don’t give it a second thought. And I tell you what—you come down to the Lion on Christmas Eve. We’re all going to have a bit of a party, a good old sing-song with sausages and hot toddy.”

  “All right,” Emily agreed. “I’d like to do that. I’ll bring Daisy with me. Ethel, too, if she wants to come.”

  Ethel let it be known that she never went near public houses, and neither did Mrs Trelawney. So on Christmas Eve, Daisy and Emily set off together. It was an almost exclusively female gathering, apart from the two old men and one of the labourers who had returned. Emily noticed he drank a lot and didn’t say much. But the gathering was a merry one.

  Alice took Emily aside and gave her a gift of balls of white wool, needles and knitting patterns. “I reckon we all better get started on the knitting if this poor kid is going to have anything to wear,” she said.

  “Oh dear, I don’t even know how to knit,” Emily said. “My nanny tried to teach me once, but I was hopeless.”

  “I’ll help,” Daisy said. “I’m a good knitter.”

  They opened their presents from Emily and were impressed with the hand cream.

  “It smells really nice. And my hands still haven’t recovered from all that digging potatoes,” Alice said.

  Emily was pleased.

  “I don’t have anything for you.” Daisy looked worried. “But I’m going to help you look after the baby when it comes. I would have liked to train as a nursery maid.”

  They walked back up the hill together in companionable silence, their footsteps echoing on the frosty ground.

  Christmas Day dawned, bright and frosty. It had snowed on the moor, and the uplands sparkled white as Emily walked with the others to church. Whether Mrs Bingley welcomed her or not, she was going to attend on this day. They sang the old carols lustily while Mr Patterson hammered out the tunes on the organ: “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Once in Royal David’s City,” “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.”

  Afterwards, Emily and Lady Charlton took sherry before Christmas lunch. Emily handed the old lady her present and was surprised that Lady Charlton seemed so touched. “What a delightful gift. Hand-made. The best,” she said. “And I have something for you. Come with me.” She led Emily upstairs and along the corridor to the far end, where she opened a door to a bright room. It was the former nursery, with a rocking horse in the window, a shelf of toys and books and, in the middle, a bassinet draped with lace.

  “This is now yours,” she said. “I hope you will move into the house before the baby arrives, and we shall acquire a nursemaid for him.”

  “How lovely.” Emily could hardly say the words, knowing that by the time the baby arrived she would probably be with Clarissa.

  When they came downstairs again, Lady Charlton took her not into the sitting room, but along the hall to the library. “I want you to choose something,” she said. “Anything you like.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Emily stammered.

  “Please. It would give me pleasure to know that some of our prized possessions were going to you instead of an auction, or bein
g disposed of by my grandson one day.”

  “But didn’t you say it’s really his house now? I couldn’t take anything belonging to him.”

  “These artefacts are all mine. Collected by my own hand on my travels around the world, and I want you to have one.”

  Emily hesitated. She was loath to take a book, but the artefacts were equally precious.

  Lady Charlton went to one of the display tables. “You seemed particularly interested in Egypt,” she said, and opened the glass top. “I think you’d enjoy this scarab. It is a symbol of good health and good luck.” She handed Emily a golden scarab encrusted with semi-precious stones.

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” Emily stammered. “It’s much too valuable.”

  “I insist you must have it. I want to give it to you, and you wouldn’t deny an old woman some pleasure, would you?” She pressed it into Emily’s hand. “My husband gave it to me in Cairo. It had come from a pharaoh’s tomb, so one gathers.”

  The object felt heavy and cold in Emily’s hand. She stood staring at it.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could try ‘thank you.’”

  “Oh yes. Thank you.” And impulsively she hugged the old lady, who turned quite pink.

  They celebrated with a huge traditional Christmas dinner: turkey, chestnut stuffing, roast potatoes and root vegetables, followed by the Christmas pudding carried flaming to the table with a sprig of holly in it. When Emily went back to the cottage that night, she thought about her parents. This was their first Christmas without her. Were they missing her? Thinking about her with regret? She felt a great longing for them, for her home and for security. “But I can’t go back,” she told herself. “I can never go back.”

  And she thought of Robbie’s parents, facing Christmas without their son. Again, she was tempted to write to them. When the baby is born, she decided. I’ll send them a photograph, so that they know. Her hand moved to her belly, and the baby responded with a sharp kick.