“I think we’re in the west tower,” Nicole informed us between gasps. “It’s used for storage. I wonder if Miss Malson’s books—Wait…I think we’ve reached the top.”
Adam and I crowded together as the beam from Nicole’s flashlight illuminated a second landing and a Gothic-arched, heavy wooden door.
“If it’s locked,” Nicole declared, “I shall scream.”
“It’s not locked,” I said, under my breath. “Not anymore.” With those words came an awareness that I was no longer shivering. The deep chill had left my body. The queer flutter of butterfly wings had vanished, too.
Claire was gone. It was as if she’d brought me to a threshold she couldn’t bring herself to cross. She’d unlocked the door, but she needed me to take the final step.
I squeezed past Nicole, put my shoulder to the door, and shoved, to no effect. Adam joined me and together we got the stingy hinges to give, under protest, splintering the silence with a shrill, nerve-pinching squeal. Flashlights thrust before us, we edged cautiously into the room beyond the Gothic doorway.
The room was round, with white-plastered walls and a floor laid with wide, rough-hewn planks. The ceiling was low and divided by beams in a pattern like spokes in a wheel. Six wavy-paned windows pierced the walls, each little more than an arrow slit, and the only door was the one we’d used, coming in from the hidden staircase.
We stood apart as Nicole joined us, but no one said a word. Our bright beams striped the darkness, crossing and parting like klieg lights as we picked out the room’s simple furnishings: a thin gray mattress on a bed as narrow as Adam’s; an iron washstand with a plain white ewer and basin; a blanket chest; an unpainted deal table; a chest-high cupboard; a simple grate set in a white-plastered chimney breast. A wooden chair sat near the grate. Beside the chair stood an embroidery frame on a three-legged wooden stand.
“It’s not a nursery,” Nicole observed sagely. “I don’t know what it is.” She walked past us, placed her lantern on the table, and peered out of the nearest window. “We’re in the west tower,” she confirmed, “but this room isn’t marked in the floor plans. What made you think that Edward’s letters might be in this peculiar little room?”
I looked from the embroidery frame to the thin gray mattress and felt a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach. “Just a hunch,” I said. “I think Claire may have…spent time up here.”
Nicole turned away from the window. “She probably came up here for the view. Imagine Jared keeping this to himself.” She laughed, a small, bitter laugh. “Who was it who said that a wife’s always the last to know?”
“An unmarried idiot,” I stated firmly. “Nicole, Jared may or may not know about the staircase, but he’s never been up here. Look at the floor. It’s furred with dust, and the only footprints are ours. No one’s been up here in a long, long time.”
Nicole lit the camping lantern and the room was flooded with light.
“I suppose you’re right.” She looked askance at our footprints before adding snidely, “I doubt Jared’s strong enough to open the door on his own.”
I was about to comment on the imprudence of hanging a man before he was tried and convicted when Adam spoke.
“Ladies,” he said, kneeling before the wooden cupboard, “I think I’ve found what you’ve been looking for.”
He swung the cupboard’s doors wide to reveal row after row of brightly colored books. The rainbow bindings stood out in the dust-gray room as vividly as a cardinal on a snowy bough.
I recognized some of them on sight: Elizabeth Baumgartner’s fairy books, Hannah Manderley’s collection of fables, and, filling the bottom shelf from side to side, a complete set of Edith Ann Malson.
“Adam,” I said, “you’re my hero.”
Adam cleared the bottom shelf in a trice and piled the books on the table. We flipped through the pages with feverish speed, ignoring Monmouth Mouse, Romney Rat, and the rest of Edith Ann’s charming rodents, intent only on finding the letters her books had concealed.
We found nothing.
“Keep looking,” I said, and the real search began.
We fanned through every book in the cupboard, looked under the mattress, into the ewer, and inside the blanket chest. Adam stood on the chair and ran his hands along the rafters while Nicole rapped walls and I crawled on my hands and knees, hoping to find a loose floorboard. Adam even removed the grate and stuck his arm up the flue, but still we found no trace of the letters. The blanket chest held nothing but a sewing basket, the ewer nothing but dust, and there was nothing up the flue but spiderwebs.
With a disconsolate sigh, Nicole sank onto the blanket chest, and Adam perched on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. I stood over the table, staring down at Edith Ann Malson’s books, knowing that Claire was depending on me to ferret out her hiding place.
“What a pity.” Nicole brushed cobwebs from her velvet tunic. “We must have misinterpreted Edward’s note.”
“Or someone else found the letters already,” Adam murmured.
“No,” I said. “She was afraid that someone would find the letters. That’s why she hid them.” I gave Nicole a sideways glance. “What’s in the sewing basket?”
“The usual items.” She lifted the wicker basket from the chest and removed the lid. “Needles, reels of silk, thimbles, scissors…It’s not even lined with cloth. If it were, Claire might have sewn the letters into the—”
“That’s it!” I snapped my fingers. “Adam, get up.” I reached the bed in two loping strides, heaved the mattress up on edge, and ran my fingers along the seams until I found an irregularity in the stitching. “Nicole,” I said, “give me the scissors.”
The tiny embroidery scissors were sharp enough to slit the seam from end to end. I slipped a hand inside the mattress and caught my breath as my fingertips touched paper. I looked from Nicole’s face to Adam’s, then laughed in sheer exultation.
“They’re here,” I crowed. “We’ve found them!”
CHAPTER
We sat up all night in the library, bolstered by endless pots of tea and plates full of Claire’s Lace, first arranging the letters in chronological order, then reading them aloud, one by one.
Nicole and I sat on the sofa, Adam in the armchair nearest the fire. The letters lay on a low table between us, one hundred and forty-four creased and frail sheets, one for nearly every week that Edward Frederick Cresswell had served his king and country in the Great European War.
We soon left the reading to Adam, in part because he understood the war’s language and events and could explain them to us, but mainly because he was a man, reading a man’s words.
Emotions flickered like firelight across his face as he deciphered the smudged pencilings, as if he saw what Edward saw, felt what Edward felt, crouched beside him in the clinging mud as shells shrieked overhead, caught death’s stench in the softest summer breeze, watched friends reduced to ragged lumps of flesh.
An early letter, sent from training camp in October 1914, told us why Edward had made the decision to leave Claire.
I know you don’t agree with my decision to join up, but I can think of no other way to win your father’s approval. I haven’t the great fortune or the title he so ardently desires for you, but I have courage, strength, and the resolve to use them. Providence has given me a chance to prove myself worthy of you. Oxford can wait. My love for you cannot.
Some men have embarked upon this great adventure for God and England. I’ve done it for you alone. When I return a hero, your father will be forced to give us his blessing.
My greatest fear is that I’ll miss the shooting match. They’re saying it will all be over by Christmas.…
The war wasn’t over by Christmas. Edward was shipped to France on April 3, 1915, and sent up to the firing line ten days later. A mud-stained note headed “In the Trenches—Flanders” answered several more questions, including one we hadn’t thought to ask.
Sorry about the awful scrawl, but if you could see
my writing table, you’d understand. It’s a broken bit of duckboard, which is propped on my knees, which are propped on my boots, which are in turn planted in eight inches of muck. If I stay still long enough, I may sprout roots and branches.
I’ve sent you a small gift, purchased in London while awaiting final orders. Although he’s a Major, and I a mere Second Lieutenant, I hope he’ll remind you of your own dear Teddy, who misses you desperately.
“Good heavens,” Nicole exclaimed. “I believe Edward’s speaking of Major Ted.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Claire’s pet name for Edward must have been Teddy.”
“But you’ve always called Major Ted ‘Teddy.’” Nicole looked at me strangely. “It’s as if you knew his proper name all along.”
I knew who’d planted Major Ted’s proper name in my mind, but I couldn’t explain it to Nicole. For the time being, she needed to believe that the Wyrdhurst ghost was a myth concocted by the villagers. The truth would only frighten and confuse her.
Adam’s thoughts evidently ran parallel to my own, because he tossed out a plausible explanation.
“It’s a common enough name for a teddy bear,” he said. “I imagine that’s why he sent Claire a bear. It allowed her to speak his name without alerting her father.” He bent his head over the letter, adding, “I think you’ll find this next bit even more interesting.”
When I think of how I resented Mother for forcing me to spend the summer hols with Uncle Clive, I can only laugh. If she hadn’t insisted, I might never have discovered the moors’ indelible beauty—or yours. God bless her!
And God bless Uncle Clive. He’ll pass my gift off as his own, and deliver my letters in the usual manner. Who’d have thought we’d owe so much to Miss Malson’s mouse?
“Clive,” I said slowly. The name rang a distant bell, but I couldn’t quite place it.
Adam could. “Clive Eccles Aynsworth,” he said. “He was the schoolmaster in Blackhope. There’s a plaque in the church commemorating his death.”
“Clive Aynsworth catalogued Great-grandfather’s library,” Nicole interjected. She turned to me. “Didn’t you see his name on the back of the ledger?”
“I didn’t spend much time on the ledger,” I confessed.
“Clive Aynsworth was the perfect go-between,” Adam mused aloud. “As a cataloguer, he had easy access to Wyrdhurst and could carry books back and forth without drawing attention to himself.”
I called to mind the story Guy had told me beside the brush pile in Blackhope. “Josiah must have found out what he was doing, and decided to put a stop to it.”
“A full stop,” Adam added.
Nicole didn’t know what we were talking about. She’d never heard of the mysterious fire that had killed Clive Aynsworth. When I explained the villagers’ suspicions, she surprised me by accepting the grim tale as something well within the realm of possibility.
“Josiah’s temper was legendary,” she said. “He was known for flying into ungovernable rages. If he discovered what Clive Aynsworth was up to, he might well have taken matters into his own hands.” She gazed at Josiah’s portrait knowingly. “We don’t call him the old devil for nothing.”
The ebony clock chimed midnight, Adam added coal to the fire, and Nicole rang for more tea and cookies. No one mentioned turning in for the night. Our questions seemed less important now than Edward’s ongoing journey. I wasn’t sure about the others, but I felt compelled to accompany him until he’d reached his final destination.
A note of insouciance had brightened his first reports from the front. Six weeks later, the brightness had vanished.
Most machines take disparate bits and build them into something useful. The war machine takes something useful—a man—and smashes him into bloody bits.
I’ve seen things I can never tell to you, but that’s not the horror. The horror is that I no longer think them horrible. The stench, the filth, the blood, the rotting corpses of men better and braver by far than myself, all have become as familiar to me as the heather on the hills.
There are no heroes here. Only the dead, and those who soon shall be.
He survived the advent of poisoned gas in the Second Battle of Ypres, and carried on unscathed through the charnel house of the Somme, only to be wounded by a sniper during a period of relative calm. The wound was a minor shoulder graze, not the coveted “blighty” that would send a soldier home, but the time he spent recuperating in rest camp seemed to restore to him a measure of serenity.
They’ve fed us on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—my favorite, as you know—and let us sit quietly in the sun. We all pretend it’s thunder rumbling in the distance, instead of cannon.
I suppose I’m a real soldier at last, blooded but unbowed, able to snatch poetry from the tedium and the terror. An artillery barrage may be a nightmare, but it can be a beautiful nightmare, and war can be exhilarating beyond anything I’d imagined.
He returned to England several times on leave, but it wasn’t until June 1917 that he and Claire were able to meet face to face.
I hope now to get leave about June 25th. If the trains are running, I’ll be at the Ring on Thursday, when your father’s in Newcastle. Come to me, heart’s dearest.
I closed my eyes and saw once again the moors mantled with supple green grasses. I met Adam’s gaze and felt desire stir within me, but knew that it wasn’t my own. The passion I’d felt when I’d seen the Devil’s Ring had been the passion of young lovers tasting heaven after nearly three years in hell.
When Edward returned to the front, he wrote:
Your Lace made it all the way without a crumble. I’ve shared it out among the men, who think it the sweetest confection on earth. They’re wrong, of course—you are.
It all seems like a dream, the grass and the heather and the great gray stones—a perfect paradise with you as the presiding angel. I feared that I had changed beyond all knowing, but you knew me, you have always known me, and you helped me to know myself once more.
We’ve broken all of your father’s rules, but I can’t believe we’ve put our souls in danger. Our hearts were pure when we entered the Ring and will remain so, come what may.
This day was ours to hold fast in our hearts. I hope and pray there will be many more, but if there aren’t, this day, at least, was ours.
“He’s talking about the Devil’s Ring,” Nicole said. “Uncle Dickie took me there once. He tried to frighten me with a horrible old legend.”
“Those who enter the Ring must be pure of heart or risk losing their immortal souls to the devil.” Adam’s dark eyes sought and held mine. “I agree with Edward. He and Claire had nothing to fear from the devil. If ever hearts were pure, theirs were.”
I gave a small nod and he replied with a half-regretful smile. We needn’t fear for our souls, he was saying. Our embrace was a gift to Claire.
“You speak as if you know them,” Nicole observed.
“I feel as if I do,” said Adam. “Don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Nicole conceded. “Claire, more than Edward. She was young and lonely and…and afraid. For Edward, I mean.” Her expression became solemn, as if she’d realized that Claire’s problems weren’t so different from her own. “Please, Adam, go on reading.”
Adam bent to his task.
In July 1917, Edward and a fellow subaltern called Mitchell were given a temporary assignment at Corps Headquarters.
We’re well out of the danger zone, billeted in a rather grand château. With another push impending, it’s a perfect zoo, but we bathe daily, sleep in beds, and have sugar for our tea, so we’ve no call to complain.
The next letter, written two days later, proved intriguing.
Mitchell and I were cycling past the château’s walled garden this morning when a stray shell—one of ours, from the practice range—landed not a hundred yards from us. We dove for Mother Earth, were pelted with the usual debris—and something else, something wonderful.
The garden co
ughed up buried treasure! We could scarcely believe our eyes. It was as if a gift had fallen from heaven, and we quickly decided it would be impious to reject the deity’s offering.
You’ll think me reprehensible, my darling, but the château’s owner is dead, his sole heir was killed at Verdun, and I’m dashed if I’ll turn it over to “the proper authorities.” They’ve long since taken from me more than their fair share.
I’m posting my portion home to you, as a constant reminder of the vows we’ll take when next we meet, regardless of your father’s disapproval.
The hoped-for meeting never came, and the vows were never spoken. A newspaper clipping, folded in among the letters, gave notice that on Saturday, September 8, 1917, three years after he’d enlisted, Edward Frederick Cresswell was killed in action, in the Third Battle of Ypres, known to the soldiers who fought there as Passchendaele.
He’d just turned twenty-one.
“Poor Claire,” Nicole said softly. “She must have died of a broken heart.”
The last letter of all was written in a careful, copybook script quite different from Edward’s scrawl.
Dear Miss Byrd,
Please pardon me for writing, but I feel as if I know you. Ted talked about you always, and he showed your picture round every chance he got. He was a fine man, and I’m proud to have served with him. I know you’ll miss him sorely, but I hope you’ll take some comfort knowing that his men thought highly of him and that he’s resting now in a Better Place.
Yours truly,
2nd Lieutenant P. Mitchell
The first light of dawn was seeping into the room when Adam finished Lieutenant Mitchell’s letter. His voice was hoarse, his face drawn, as if the night’s journey had exhausted him. He placed the last frail sheet beside the newspaper clipping, rose from his chair, and crossed to the brass telescope, where he stood staring out across the gray and empty moors.
Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil Page 14
