Watching Kit circulating at the reception following the ceremony, Eleanor knew that, for the moment anyway, her friend was truly happy.
“Will you marry, Eleanor, do you think?” Jane asked her, and Eleanor flushed. Once again Eleanor saw Dirk’s face, this time gazing down at her in the moonlight with the sound of the nightingale’s song all around them. It hurt so very much, she thought her heart might break.
She shook her head, doing her best to keep the pain from her face. “I don’t suppose I will, no.”
“Me neither,” Jane agreed. “One simply doesn’t have the energy for it these days, does one? Or the courage. Unless you’re Kit, of course.”
Courage. Eleanor felt she’d had to find so very much of it in her life, and tomorrow she would need to find still more. For tomorrow she was going to visit her father.
Chapter Twenty-Three
LEO HADN’T THOUGHT MUCH beyond finding Eleanor and securing her as his life partner. When she’d rejected him, he wasn’t sure what to do next. For a full thirty minutes, he had stayed in the woods, smoking cigarette after cigarette as he recalled the way she had lain so passively in his arms. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Eleanor’s lips were warm, it would have been a bit like kissing a corpse.
A corpse. The thought was an unfortunate one. Instantly, Leo was back in his mother’s room with the smell of slaughter in his nostrils. Rose. When he’d killed her, he’d hoped to silence her forever, but it hadn’t worked. Everything always came back to Rose, and he knew now that it always would. She may be dead, but he would never be free of her.
Leaving the trees and keeping close to hedgerows to be out of sight, Leo had made his way to he knew not where, living the life of a fugitive, diving into bushes whenever anyone came into view and stealing food whenever he could. He dared not show his face, knowing he would be arrested for desertion if he did so. But as the days dragged into weeks and the weeks into months, Leo had been unable to come up with a plan for his future direction. Looking increasingly wild, like an unkempt, hunted animal, Leo had finally made the decision to head for Paris. Somehow it seemed important to have someone to blame for the current mess of his life. With Rose gone, there was only his artist friend Severini. Severini, who had told him to go to war simply as a means of getting rid of him. Severini, who had almost got him killed.
The new sense of purpose had made Leo quicker and perhaps less cautious as a result. Twenty miles from Paris, he was arrested by the military police and charged with desertion. After two days in a prison cell, with his court martial set for the following day, the door to his cell opened. The captain who had arrested him stood on the threshold. He was accompanied by another man, a tall man with dark hair, dressed in civilian clothing.
“Cartwright,” the captain said, “this is Mr. Loreson, a journalist. He’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
The man called Loreson was looking at him as if he they had already met, and Leo was immediately intrigued.
“Why not?” he said laconically, as if the captain had asked him for permission. “It will help to pass the time.”
The captain frowned, then nodded. “I’ll leave you to it, then, Loreson,” he said. “Just knock on the door when you want to come out. And don’t accept any nonsense from the prisoner, will you?”
Dirk’s clothes were clammy against his skin. It had been foolish in the extreme to arrange this interview. When he’d first heard Leo Cartwright’s name in the bar, he had felt sick to the stomach. After he’d asked the captain a few questions, it was quite clear that the prisoner was indeed the same man who had drawn the portrait of Eleanor. Dirk felt even worse still, vividly picturing the man kissing Eleanor in the trees. But no matter how bad he had felt in the bar, it was nothing to how he felt now, now that he was alone with the man.
“Well,” Cartwright said, “have you come to talk to me or just to stare?”
What Dirk felt like doing was tearing the insolent man from limb to limb. His hands were, in fact, clenched at his sides in an effort to stop himself from doing just that. He could tell that Cartwright noticed.
“Do we know each other?” the man asked him with a frown, and Dirk did his very best to pull himself together.
“Not to my knowledge,” he said, sitting down on the only seat in the room. “You might have seen me in the field. Until recently, I was reporting from the Front.”
“I haven’t been at the Front lately,” Cartwright said.
The man was smiling. Smiling. Dirk longed with all his heart to hit him. “You freely admit to being guilty of desertion, then?” he said.
Cartwright’s smile turned into a sneer. “Ah, that’s for the court martial to decide. I’m hardly likely to admit to something that’s going to result in me getting shot, am I?”
Dirk badly wanted to get rid of that smile. “I went to an execution last week,” he lied, drawing on the stories the captain had told him. “The man was so terrified, he messed himself. They had to drag him out from the hut he’d been locked up in all night. The stench was unbelievable. I can still see the tracks his boots made in the dirt as they pulled him along. And all the time, he was wailing. On and on. Right through them pushing him down into the chair, right through them pinning a red circle over his heart. The sound really got to you after a while. Some of the guys in the firing squad were shaking. Or at least, I guess they must have been, because when the order came to shoot, they missed the red disc. The man was peppered with bullet wounds but still alive, blood all over the place, body jerking and twitching. The commanding officer had to go over to finish him off. I tell you, anything would have been better than that so-called humane execution. Even murder.”
Cartwright’s expression had remained frustratingly impassive while Dirk spoke, inspiring Dirk to embellish the gory details. It was only at the very end of his speech, when Dirk mentioned murder, that the horrid man’s eyes seemed to widen, and a muscle twitched in his cheek.
“You don’t think murder is the worse thing, then?” he asked.
Dirk blinked. It wasn’t the response he’d expected, and his reply was purely instinctive. “Oh no, not by any means. Cruelty is much worse than murder.”
“Cruelty,” Cartwright repeated, his eyes taking on a faraway expression. “Cruelty, worse than murder.”
“Yes,” Dirk said, pushing the point home because he sensed he was making some impact at last. “Much, much worse.”
It was a long moment before Leo spoke again. “She was cruel to me,” he said at last.
Dirk heard the anguish in his voice and experienced a sense of triumph. “Who was?” he said. “Eleanor?”
Cartwright’s eyes immediately snapped back into focus. “No, Rose. I made her pay for it, though. Only now…” He paused. “Eleanor? The nurse? Do you know her?”
Dirk cleared his throat. “I know a nurse called Eleanor, yes,” he said.
“A VAD? Works at Casualty Clearing Station Number Six?”
“Yes, I…I believe she does,” Dirk stumbled. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”
Leo’s eyes were going out of focus again. “I thought she was different,” he said, his voice sounding distant. “I thought I’d be able to trust her. But she turned out to be a deceiving witch, just like Rose was.”
The blood was pounding around Dirk’s head. He had no idea who Rose was, and he didn’t care, but suddenly he wanted to grab the man and shake the truth out of him.
A terrible suspicion was beginning to grow in his head, a suspicion that made his legs feel weak. Was it possible that he had gotten it completely wrong back in the trees in that sultry heat? That his jealousy and his insecurity had prevented him from seeing the truth of what was actually happening?
“What did you do to Eleanor?” he demanded, and his words seemed to bring Cartwright’s eyes back into focus.
“I didn’t do anything to her;” he said. “She led me on, made me believe she wanted me. But when it came down to it, she was just a tease. Women li
ke her really need to be careful. They could end up getting their heads stoned in, playing with a man like that.”
Dirk knew with a terrible certainty that he had, indeed, got everything horribly, terribly wrong. The man was abhorrent. Why would a girl such as Eleanor even look at him? She wouldn’t.
“Private Leo Cartwright, you have been charged and found guilty of desertion in the face of the enemy. The verdict of the court martial is that you are to be shot at dawn.”
Leo laughed when he heard the verdict. Desertion! If they only knew what a minor offense it was compared to everything else he’d done.
But next morning, when they marched him outside into the early morning sunshine, he wasn’t laughing any longer. Even though they’d plied him with rum, he was still stone cold sober when they sat him on the wooden chair and pinned the red disk over his heart. He hadn’t fouled himself, but this was small consolation, and try as he might, he couldn’t help but remember the rest of the journalist’s story. The shaking hands. The peppered corpse. The twitching.
They were coming to blindfold him now, and before his vision was obscured, Leo looked at the firing squad, staring into each face in turn. Some of the men met his gaze head on. Good. These, at least, would score a direct hit. One of the twelve, a man with a darker complexion than the others, looked oddly like Gino Severini.
As the blindfold blocked out the sunshine, Leo thought how very ironic it was that he, Leo Cartwright, was about to experience the ultimate experience. Death. An experience to end all experiences. It was such a waste that he would never have the opportunity to express that experience through paint.
“Take aim…”
Leo heard the sound of the soldiers’ response to the command, and the time for thinking was over. Suddenly it was all terrifyingly real.
“Fire!”
The shots rang out, all but three finding their target.
“Odd how even the most hardened types call out for their mother at the end,” the captain said to Dirk as they wrapped Leo’s body in a blanket and took it away.
After the execution, Dirk made his way straight to Casualty Clearing Station Number Six, only to find that Eleanor no longer worked there. As he traveled on to Royaumont, Dirk made a decision. He would try his utmost to work things out with Eleanor; he would throw himself at her mercy, beg for her forgiveness, give her anything she wanted. But if she couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive him, if she didn’t want to join her life to his, then he would return to America, as his father wanted him to. That way, he could at least try to right one wrong. And without Eleanor, he could never be truly happy anyway, so what did it matter where he lived or what he did?
Eleanor was so good and so vulnerable. How could he have believed she would deceive him? He was a fool ever to have believed it so.
At Royaumont, Hilda McPherson greeted him coolly. “You’re alive, then, Mr. Loreson? We wondered when we heard nothing from you. I know Eleanor believed you dead. I’m afraid she’s not here. She’s gone to her friend’s wedding in England. We don’t expect her back for another week.”
“A week!” Dirk looked at Hilda McPherson in dismay, his mind already moving on. “Where is she in England? Can you give me the address of where she’s staying?”
“No, I cannot,” Hilda said sternly, then relented a little as she took in Dirk’s devastated expression. “I don’t have the address, Mr. Loreson. But even if I did have it, I don’t think I should give it to you. Eleanor was very ill when she arrived here, and what she needs now above all else is stability. I was against her traveling to England at all, but she was set on it.”
“But stability is exactly what I want to offer her, Dr. McPherson,” Dirk said beseechingly. “I love her. I want to marry her.”
“Do you indeed?” Hilda said, sounding unimpressed. “And how is Eleanor likely to feel about your generous offer after such a long absence?”
Dirk’s head drooped in shame. “I…don’t know,” he had to admit, and Hilda nodded.
“Exactly.”
“I would never have been absent for so long if it weren’t for the fact that…Look, it’s all been the result of a misunderstanding.” An all-too-familiar wave of pain rose up within him.
“Misunderstandings have a tendency to reoccur,” Hilda said coldly. “And moreover, they are not conducive to stability. I suggest you leave Eleanor alone.”
Dirk lifted his eyes. “I respect you for caring so much about Eleanor’s welfare,” he said. “It’s…some consolation to know she’s had such a good friend these last months. But I can’t leave her alone, not without speaking to her first. I have to try to explain. And then…if she tells me to go, I assure you I will. I won’t trouble her again. I’ll never forget her, but I won’t try to be a part of her life if she tells me she doesn’t want me. I give you my word.”
There were fresh graves in the churchyard. Eleanor looked at them, reading the names of the young men who had been brought home from France by their families. She, too, was home from France. Except that perhaps this had never felt like home.
Eleanor walked slowly along the path toward the back of the churchyard until she reached the little gate that led to the vicarage garden. To her surprise, she found it was choked with weeds. And then she remembered that it had been she who’d kept them clear. She who’d mainly used the shortcut from the vicarage, en route to assist with the flowers or the cleaning of the church.
So, her absence had had some affect at least. Not that she had wanted to be remembered. On the contrary, she had wanted her father to forget her just as she had strived, unsuccessfully, to forget him.
So, why are you here? Asked a voice inside her head, a voice that sounded a lot like Hilda McPherson’s.
“I need to face up to what happened,” she’d told her friend back at Royaumont on the eve of her departure. “I don’t think I can ever completely move on in my life until I do that.”
Brave words, and relatively easy to say over tea in a former French chateau. But the reality of being here was very different. Still, she was here, and no matter how much she might wish now that she had taken Hilda’s advice to wait, it was too late. She had to see this through.
Stamping down the worst of the weeds and tugging the gate open enough to squeeze through, Eleanor hardly noticed when one of the nettles sprang back to sting her. Then she was in the garden, and there it was: the greenhouse.
Very slowly, she walked toward it and stood in front, possibly on the very spot where her stepbrother had attacked her. Somehow it was the waiting she remembered, rather than the attack, just as it was the waiting that always haunted her nightmares. That tiny space between the greenhouse and the wall, a space that wasn’t large enough for anyone to get into. Terror had squeezed her into it.
How strange it was that a terror capable of shrinking the body so that it could fit into a tiny space could also have been capable of swelling to outsized proportions within her as she had waited, with every sense alert, for any sign of his approach. Until the moment when the hairs on the back of her neck warned her that the waiting was over.
“Eleanor!”
The voice came not from eight years previously, but from the present. Jolted out of the nightmare of her memories, Eleanor turned slowly to face her father.
He stood looking at her, hands on hips, wisps of his white hair blowing about in the breeze. An old man.
“Well, well,” he was saying, “I might have guessed you’d come crawling back home.”
“Hello, Father,” she said, and then another voice came into her mind: Dirk’s. On The Sussex.
“You’re such a good person, Eleanor.” She knew he’d spoken the words with the utmost sincerity, just as she knew that her instinctive denial of them was due in part to the man standing before her. Along with her stepmother, her father had been convinced she was guilty and wicked, that she was wholly to blame for Reginald’s behavior.
But now, standing at the scene of that traumatic attack eight years prev
iously, she finally knew it wasn’t true. It had never been true. She had never done anything to give Reginald the idea she would welcome such attentions from him.
“You’re wrong,” she told her father now, and her voice had a strength it had never possessed before when she had spoken to him. “I haven’t come home.”
“I can’t forbid you to speak to Eleanor, of course,” Hilda McPherson said. “Whether she speaks to you or not must be her decision. Come back here in a week’s time, and I shall ask her what she wants to do. But if she tells me she doesn’t want to see you, you must respect her decision.”
“Of course,” he said. The doctor gave him a brusque nod and walked away.
A week. He would surely go crazy. What could he do to fill the time? If only he knew where Eleanor was in England. England! He would go to there. That way he would at least be in the same country as her, and even though it was hardly likely they would bump into each other, he could pass the time by investigating Leo Cartwright’s background. For somehow, dead though the man was, he wasn’t at rest, at least not in Dirk’s mind. For one thing, there was the mystery of Rose. Who was she? And had Cartwright treated her as abominably as he’d treated Eleanor?
“Where are Reginald and my stepmother?” she asked.
Her father raised his eyebrows. “So, you’ve finally decided to regain your memory, have you?” he said.
But she refused to rise to the bait of his taunting voice. “Where are Reginald and my stepmother?” she repeated in that same, newly strong voice.
Suddenly, her father seemed to crumple. “I don’t know,” he answered at last. “Your stepmother stopped writing to me five years ago.”
“But where did they go?” she persisted. “At first? After…it happened?”
“To Switzerland.” He pulled his lips together in a sneer, making one final attempt to ruffle her. “But don’t bother to try to find them. I hardly think they’ll be pleased to see you.”
A Nightingale in Winter Page 25
