All true, thought Sophie. His duty? Doubt chilled her. Was she causing a scandal for this man — this good man — by smuggling him away into the night? She should have encouraged him to simply go home. He’d have done what she suggested, just as he would do what Emily suggested; he’d had his will torn away with his flesh.
‘Miss Higgs, I think our train is approaching.’ Somehow the captain had followed them down the platform and placed her hand on his arm again. ‘Thank you for your kindness, Mrs Sevenoaks, and please do give my apologies to your husband. But as Miss Higgs has said, there is an emergency back at Wooten. Her Grace is an old acquaintance of my mother’s … I’m sure you understand …’
The train hissed to a halt behind them. The three of them were far enough down the platform to be next to the first-class carriages. The captain had the door open while Emily’s mouth still hung agape, her husband suddenly hurrying down the platform.
‘Again, so many thanks for all your kindness, and my utmost apologies.’ Captain McIntyre shut the door as Sophie sat down next to a well-upholstered woman in blue tweed, then moved up to make room for him. She scrubbed the last of her tears away hurriedly, leaving a soot mark on her glove.
The train creaked, then began to chug. She didn’t even bother to watch Emily’s face disappear as they pulled away from the platform.
‘Thank you, Captain McIntyre,’ she managed at last.
‘Perhaps you would consider calling me Angus.’
‘My name is Sophie. Sophronia.’
‘You don’t really want to be called Sophronia?’
‘No.’
‘I presume there is a dowager duchess and a Wooten Abbey waiting for us?’
‘Yes, of course, Captain … Angus.’
‘Pity,’ he said lightly. ‘I hoped you were the adventuress Mrs Sevenoaks was implying, luring me into the unknown.’
Her breath was back in her body. She liked this man. Admired not just what he must have done, to be so decorated, but also the courage it must have taken to pull his spirit back into himself and outface Emily so swiftly. He hadn’t been escaping his duty when he’d manoeuvred them into the train. He’d been rescuing Sophie.
Emily would be an enemy now. She might even have the skill — and will — to make it hurt.
‘I’ll make it up to you, if I can,’ she said lightly. ‘The next ten days will be good ones.’
‘I believe they will be.’ His body was warm next to hers.
Chapter 50
Age might wither us, but never love.
Miss Lily, 1916
MAY 1916
‘It has been more than seven years,’ said the dowager duchess — her glance might even have been flirtatious — ‘since I took tea alone with a man. I am speaking of my husband, of course.’
‘Except I am here too this time, Your Grace,’ said Sophie. She nibbled at a meringue. A miracle: meringues in wartime. She wondered if they were a gift from the kitchen for the wounded hero or for Her Grace, or even for Sophie Higgs. Perhaps all three.
‘A widow like myself needs a chaperone,’ said Her Grace, winking. Sophie had never imagined that the dowager even knew how to wink. ‘Do try a buttered crumpet, Captain. Crumpets should always be eaten hot.’ For a moment her voice was Miss Lily’s; or perhaps it was a voice they had cultivated together decades earlier.
Angus took a crumpet, licked butter from his lip, then met Sophie’s eyes.
He had been at Wooten for eight days. They hadn’t kissed yet. Both knew it was a ‘yet’.
He slept alone in the groom’s cottage. Sophie suspected he slept badly: her bedroom in the pensioners’ quarters looked across the courtyard and his lamp was usually still lit when she went to bed.
Her Grace had not suggested that Captain McIntyre breakfast with them, and he used the simple facilities in the cottage to extend his solitude until lunchtime.
At first Sophie had thought that he might want to spend all his time alone, but that first day, after she had checked on baby Sophie and Doris, both blooming, walked the wards and found them running smoothly and professionally under the VADs’ charge, she had gone down to his cottage ‘to see you have settled in, Captain McIntyre’. She had found him sitting in the cottage’s one easy chair, grinning up at her.
She caught her breath. This was the real man, the one whose shadow she had seen the previous night, his eyes bright and head slightly cocked as he heard a lark out the window.
‘I believe in the Abbey, and the cottage. Now, where is this duchess? I’ve never met a duchess,’ he added.
‘This one is a dowager.’
‘All the better.’
The duchess greeted him in Nanny’s sitting room, as she might a friend of her granddaughter. She instructed Sophie to show him the old water mill, ‘where we used to grind all the wheat from the district, not just the estate’, a good hour’s walk away.
From that day on it had been their routine: a dutiful checking that there was no urgent work needed (she suspected Her Grace had ordered everyone to hide anything urgent from her), followed by a cup of weak tea with the dowager.
Then a walk into a world of green leaves unfurling and clouds puffing along the sky, and birds she’d heard for the nearly three years she’d been in England, though no one had ever thought to tell her their names.
Luncheon in the VADs’ kitchen, where he relaxed as the women flirted with him, and Sophie sat back and let them, for he was hers, and they both knew it. He would talk to some of the men, and she liked that too; even though he had escaped the recruiting drives, duty continued, quiet, personal.
Afternoon tea with Her Grace, delicacies that none of them had bothered with for two years but some of which had miraculously appeared again — maids of honour, the cherished ginger nuts, sponge and teacake — the ingredients hoarded in the locked storeroom for when His Grace returned, but some spared now. Her Grace had dined on a tray in her room since Alison’s death, but now she hobbled to the morning room, where the dinner table was set with pre-war formality.
She felt disloyalty to James Lorrimer only once, when a letter arrived from him — short, like all his letters. He was still in the United States; work was going well, but not as well as he would have liked. He was always hers. The letters were a contract of sorts.
I will write when Angus leaves, she thought. I may know what to write then. She had been counting each day and knew Angus had too, although they never mentioned it.
On day nine there were letters for him on the morning-room table: two, one on plain but good stationery; the other in a buff War Office envelope. She carried them over to his cottage.
‘Come in.’ He waved an egg spoon at her. ‘Sorry, late start today.’ He stopped as he saw the letters in her hand. ‘Sit down. I’ll pour you tea.’
‘Thank you.’ She didn’t want tea, but sipping it would give her something to do while he read his letters.
He read the plain one first, smiling, then glanced up. ‘It’s from my mother. Would you like to read it?’
She nodded, touched, and took it. It was a simple letter: a woman trying to find enough subjects to fill a weekly page when all she really wanted was to send her love and a spell to guarantee his safety.
At the end she had written: Please do give my very best regards to your friend Miss Higgs. I look forward to meeting her very much. Please give my thanks to Her Grace too, if you think it appropriate. My love always, dear son, Mother. At the end of the page was scrawled: Your loving father too. A wild cat has been at the pheasants. Putting the traps out today.
She could see his flash of homesickness. ‘Any regrets about coming here instead?’
‘A few.’ She liked his honesty. ‘But it was the right decision.’ He looked at the letter. ‘I miss the river most.’
She nodded. ‘I think one is either a sea person or a river person.’
‘So you’re a river person too? Which river?’
‘The one on our place, Thuringa. Twists like a pale brown sn
ake in the sand —’ She stopped, embarrassed.
‘Mine’s a brown one, but clear — the peat dyes it. Trout as long as your arm too. Are there trout in yours?’
‘I don’t think so. There are perch in the deep holes. Our cook bakes them with butter and almonds. My father caught one that was nearly four feet long.’
‘Your fish beat my fish, then. The biggest trout I ever caught was a three-pounder. I think I enlisted for that river. I know it seems mad. But the thought of enemy boots marching on that land …’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose each of us has our own image of what Britain is. That’s mine. And a stretch of moor.’ He looked at the buff envelope both of them had been avoiding. ‘Better open this one.’
He read it swiftly. He looked back at her. ‘I have to report to the medical officer on Friday. I have a feeling he’ll say I’m fit for duty again.’
Something cold breathed across her bones. ‘Back to France?’
‘But with any luck not to the front. I … I need to be honest with you. I wasn’t just with the Sevenoakses out of duty. The colonel has connections. He said he could get me a staff position over in France.’
‘And I made you offend them.’ What have I done? she thought.
‘The staff job is mine anyway. It’s confirmed now.’
‘Thank goodness. It’ll mean less danger.’ She hadn’t realised she’d said the words aloud.
He looked her straight in the face. ‘You deserve the truth. I’m a coward, Sophie. I hear the sound of the guns in my sleep, even when I’m not asleep sometimes.’ He tried to smile. ‘Don’t think I’ll ever watch fireworks again. I … I didn’t know if I could face going back. The staff job, well, it’s a nothing job. I should be ashamed to take it.’ He shrugged. ‘I am ashamed.’
‘That’s not cowardice. It’s sense.’
‘Except I accept the need to fight. Don’t you?’
She spoke slowly, trying to articulate what she felt but had never put into words. ‘I think so. I didn’t, before the war. I thought war was a stupid game men played. Maybe I still do. But something deep inside me says that I’d fight, if I had to, if soldiers were invading. Broom handles, carving knives …’
‘I profoundly hope I never meet you holding a carving knife. If we don’t fight this war, we lose it. Losing it would be a horror like this island has never seen. The war may be fought in stupid ways but …’ He shrugged. ‘At least the Hun’s high command is as dunderheaded as ours.’
A year back she’d have wanted to discuss the quality of their leaders. Now she just watched the man as he looked for words.
‘I’ve become the kind of man who wants others to do the fighting for him.’
‘You’ve earned that.’
‘No. I …’
She had to know. ‘Angus … you really did what they said, didn’t you? Rescued those men?’
‘Yes.’ He said it simply and honestly. ‘But it didn’t make me a hero.’
‘It makes you a man who has earned time away from the front. Besides,’ she added lightly, ‘you’ll raise the ability level of the administration by several notches.’
He almost smiled. ‘Thank you for that.’
She gave him the most perfect smile she could, a smile that would bring him back from the war and all that had happened there, all that might happen there. ‘I arranged something special for today. One of the maids says there’s a badger’s set beyond the apple orchard at the Home Farm.’
It was as though she had given him gold and rubies. ‘Badgers only come out at night. Dusk is the best time to see them.’
‘Wombats too. They’re like badgers,’ she added. ‘Except they aren’t. I’ve ordered a picnic for us too. We can go there late this afternoon and wait. The apple trees are still in bloom.’
‘Apple blossom, badgers and Sophie Higgs,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there could be anything more perfect in the world.’
‘Your river, perhaps?’
He looked at her, suddenly serious. ‘There are other beautiful places in the world. Perhaps I need to learn to love more than a river.’
Chapter 51
The past is never simple, and the future never clear. I learned years ago to live each second as it happens. Even the bad ones can have fragments of beauty at the edges.
Miss Sophie Higgs, 1918
Wooten was still dressed for spring. The apple blossom drifted in the sunlight, as though reluctant to reach the ground. Sophie lay back and watched it: pink petals, white petals, blue sky. Grass tickled her neck. It could have been anywhere, any time, a moment before Eden.
She shut her eyes and felt a petal rest on her cheek, and then another on her nose. She sneezed and sat up, to find Angus looking at her.
‘I thought you were going to sleep. I must be poor company.’
Sophie smiled. ‘Never.’ She opened the basket.
Angus peered over her shoulder. ‘Good Lord!’
Cook had done them proud, glad perhaps to be preparing a meal that wasn’t stew for three hundred. Cold roast chicken nestled in vine leaves from the succession houses, a loaf of bread, yellow butter oozing moisture in still more vine leaves, a tomato, a chunk of cheddar cheese studded with walnut halves, hothouse peaches cushioned in crumpled napkins.
‘I haven’t seen anything like that since … well, ever, I suppose.’
Sophie broke open the bread and took up a knife for the butter. Even here, she thought, I move my hands like butterflies.
Suddenly she wanted to be gauche: the old Sophie, the real one. But this is real too, she thought just as suddenly. That me is gone. I’m no longer that Sophie any more than I’m Miss Lily’s ideal.
‘What’s this?’
‘Quince paste. Here, try a bit.’ She sliced a piece, then felt his fingers, warm on hers, as he took it. She would have liked to put it to his lips herself, but that would shock him.
‘It’s good. Good Lord,’ he repeated, almost reverently. ‘This is real bread.’
‘Baked this morning, from Cook’s precious pre-war larder. Try it with cheese and the quince paste. One day there’ll be real bread again everywhere.’
‘I suppose.’ He leaned against an apple tree, brushing away the lichen that fell onto his shoulders. ‘I’ve never eaten like this at home.’
‘Your mother isn’t a good cook?’ Suddenly she realised she might have insulted him by assuming his mother did her own cooking. But he was smiling.
‘Terrible. And somehow she teaches every maid to cook as badly.’
‘Miss — A friend of mine says that you need to be able to cook if you’re to manage a household, even if you never lift a pan. I can make French bread, and roast chicken with chestnut stuffing too.’
She realised she was trying to impress him with her qualifications as a wife. He must have been aware of it too, for he was silent, even when she passed him a leg of chicken and a napkin. He bit it, wiped his fingers. ‘Are you a good cook?’
‘I like cooking. It’s … real. Solid. You can’t cheat when you cook. Cooking is something you can depend on.’
‘Any good with venison?’
‘I know to make sure it’s either rare or cooked long and slowly, and it must be well hung if you’re going to stew it.’ She smiled. ‘I want to try the same recipes with kangaroo one day.’
‘What’s Thuringa like?’
She looked around, at the spring-green trees, the dappled ground. ‘Harder. You can see the bones of the land. Sky so blue you can almost reach into it.’
He looked at her with enormous understanding. ‘You love it.’
‘Yes.’ She was shocked at the depth of longing that had shot through her. ‘Angus … I’m not, well, I’m not what I look like.’
‘Smudged?’
‘What?’ She brushed her nose. The blossom had left a gold trail of pollen. ‘No. My family aren’t top drawer back in Australia. Rich, but that means mixing only with other businessmen and their families. It’s almost an accident that I’ve spent my time in En
gland with the aristocracy. I even had to relearn my accent before I was … acceptable.’ She paused. ‘What will you do when the war’s over?’ The question was spoken before she had considered it, realised it was exactly what it sounded like: an invitation for him to turn to her and say, ‘Marry you, if you’ll have me.’
Instead he quirked a smile. ‘Quietly rot in the soil of France.’ He laughed at her shock. ‘You don’t need to be good at figures to know the odds out there. One in three survives each time we go over the top. And I’m very good at figures.’
‘But you’ll be in a staff job.’
‘War moves around, Sophie,’ he said gently. ‘And things aren’t good. I read yesterday’s papers.’ He must have seen them in the VADs’ sitting room, she realised, while she was in the wards. ‘The Dublin uprising will mean more of our troops in Ireland. We’re being annihilated out in Mesopotamia — we need conscription just to get more men, but the conscripts will be dead in a year too.’
She inhaled. ‘All right. What would you do if you could choose?’
‘Tend the land. Like my father, and his father. We may not have land of our own but we know how to love it.’ He shrugged. ‘Isn’t that what we’re fighting for?’
‘But the Germans don’t destroy land. They farm it, like us.’ She thought of Dolphie, his face as he spoke of the woods at home. She had tried so hard not to think of him, an enemy soldier. Please let him be safe, she thought. And Hannelore.
‘War destroys land. It’s dead country over there. Dead trees and mud.’
‘But things will grow again when the war is over.’
‘When will that be? This year, next year, some time, never? It’s destroying this land too, the war.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Look around you. No one to mend the fences, clear the drains. Sodden land turning sour, rabbits taking all the grass, the best horses gone to war, and the best timber too. Forests that have been there for thousands of years turned into pit props. It’s eating us all, the war.’
Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies Page 38
