A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  Miss Cumberbatch, who as a staunch Methodist was eager to hurry to the little Methodist chapel in Outhwaite’s High Street in order to give thanks to her Maker for her country’s deliverance from evil, gave an affirming nod of her head.

  Gleefully Thea and Olivia scampered from the room. ‘I’m going to find Hal,’ Thea said as they raced upstairs to their bedroom for hats and coats. ‘You go and tell Jim and Charlie.’

  ‘But they’ll already know! How could they not know? The singing and cheering the officers are making can probably be heard as far away as Richmond!’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Still running, they skirted around two housemaids who, with piles of clean linen in their arms, were dancing a jig and singing the national anthem. ‘It’s the being the first to share in the news with them that matters now.’

  Once in the bedroom, Olivia hurled herself into a coat and crammed a beret on her head. It was a Monday, so Thea would be heading to the village school in order to find Hal – and if she found Hal in the school playground, it meant that, of the two of them, she would not only be the first to share the news with Hal, but she would also be the first to share the news with Carrie.

  Without waiting for Thea, who was still hooking up the buttons on her winter boots, Olivia ran from the room. It was too bad that she wouldn’t see Carrie before Thea did, but she would have the kudos of being the first of the two of them where Jim and Charlie were concerned.

  The entire west wing of Gorton had been converted into wards and sitting rooms for convalescing soldiers, and as Olivia shot past the double doors of the main sitting room she could hear, above the singing and cheering, the sound of champagne corks popping. It was a sound that hadn’t been heard at Gorton since before the start of the war, and that it should be heard now would, she knew, have been her mother’s idea.

  Once outside the house the sound of Outhwaite’s church bells was clearer than ever. Olivia paused, breathless from running, wondering who she should seek out first. She knew where Charlie would be, because for the last month or so he had been busy building a walk-through rockery of large boulders and tree-ferns where the ground shelved down on the far side of the east wing’s grand lawn. It was a project Jim sometimes helped him with, and she decided to head for the rockery-in-the-making in the hope that she would find not only Charlie there, but Jim as well.

  Taking a deep breath and beginning to run once again, she headed for the east wing’s grand lawn, reflecting on how odd it was that Charlie and Jim had become such good friends. Because Charlie had enlisted at the first opportunity and suffered such a horrendous legacy for having done so, and because Jim hadn’t seen a day of fighting, everyone – even her mother – had expected that even if Jim was able to come to terms with Charlie’s nightmarish disfigurement, Charlie would want nothing to do with him.

  Olivia hadn’t been there when her mother had taken it upon herself to make the potentially difficult introduction, but much later, when she had finally been able to be in Charlie’s presence without shuddering and wanting to run away from him, he had told her how Jim had made things easy between the two of them right from the beginning.

  ‘The instant folks see me, they can’t hide their feelings, no matter how hard they try. And truth to tell, I don’t know which of their feelings is the worst: horror, fear or pity.’

  He had been taking a break from scything grass that hadn’t been tended since the last of the gardeners had left for the front.

  With his hands around a mug of steaming tea he’d said, ‘There was shock on Jim’s face, but nowt else. Then Jim said, “Holy hell, mate! But you well and truly copped it!” and he shook my hand and said he’d show me around so that I could get my bearings. It was the way he said “mate” that made things grand between us, right from the off. Jim might have a bit of a roving eye for the ladies, but he’s a champion bloke and, if he could have enlisted, he would have.’

  By the time she was only halfway across the great east lawn Olivia was too out of puff to continue running. She staggered to a halt, taking in great gulps of air. There was a smell of damp leaves and wood smoke, and the grass beneath her feet was rimed with the remainder of the previous night’s frost. She set off again at a fast walk, beginning to hope that although Charlie would have realized the ringing of church bells meant good news, he might still be unaware it meant the war was finally over and that, if he was, she would be the one to break the news to him.

  Ground at the far end of the lawn, where the rockery was being built, shelved down to a stream that eventually ran into Outhwaite’s river. She found Charlie and Jim at the bottom of the dip and, though it was obvious they had been working, their shovels and pickaxes had been cast aside and Jim was sitting on one of the giant boulders while Charlie leaned against an adjacent one. Both of them had cigarettes between their fingers.

  ‘It’s over!’ she shouted, holding onto her beret and slipping and sliding down the slope towards them. ‘The war is over!’

  Charlie nipped his cigarette out. ‘We reckoned it was when the bells began ringing.’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s kind of you to come and tell us, though.’

  ‘I wanted to be the first to break the news to you.’ She came to a breathless halt in front of them, confused by his lack of emotion. ‘Why aren’t you singing and cheering? Everyone at Gorton is.’

  ‘Aye, well, they’ll probably calm down a bit when they think on what’s been achieved and at what cost.’

  The expression in the one eye that was now visible – the other eye had long been covered by the black eye-patch from the dressing-up box – was bleak.

  Seeing her confusion, Jim tossed the butt of his cigarette into the stream. ‘It might be victory, but what’s the prize? Millions dead, and God alone knows how many more millions wounded and maimed. And for what? You tell me, Olivia lass, because I’m jiggered if I know. Officers may be singing and cheering this morning, but it won’t be long before they’ll be remembering today as a day of mourning – and you can’t be jubilant when you’re mourning.’

  That wasn’t how people were thinking of things yet in the centre of Outhwaite. It seemed that everyone was out in the streets sharing in the relief that at last the agony was over.

  ‘No more knitting khaki socks!’ one woman shouted elatedly as Thea bicycled past her. ‘And no more black-edged telegrams!’

  As the bells of Outhwaite’s Anglican church continued to peal, another, far different bell could be heard. It was the school bell. The congestion in the main street grew worse as children, let off lessons for the rest of the day, began racing exuberantly down it.

  Unable to make any further headway on the bike, Thea dismounted and began pushing it. Hal saw her before she saw him.

  ‘We’re over ’ere!’ he shouted from the crowded pavement.

  Carrie was with him and, as Thea began eagerly making her way towards them, Hal shouted, ‘We’ve news I bet you ’aven’t ’eard yet! The Kaiser ’as abdicated! Me and Carrie are off to buy a bag of sherbert lemons to celebrate. Are you coming wi’ us?’

  With Thea and Olivia both on their way – if they were fast enough – to spread the news that the war was over, and with Hermione Cumberbatch having declared her intention of walking into Outhwaite to join her friends at the Methodist chapel, and with Heaton in full control of organizing the bringing up of crates of champagne from the cellars so that officers and nursing staff could celebrate suitably, Blanche was able to turn her thoughts to the person who mattered most to her in the whole wide world. Gilbert.

  She closed her eyes, thanking God that he had survived the war – and that he had survived it with distinction. In the autumn of 1916 he had led his men through the German front-line system of trenches, during which he had suffered the wound to his arm that had left it virtually useless. Despite being so severely wounded, he had remained in command and had gone on to mount a successful assault on the second objective, a strongly fortified village. Though wounded twice more, he had held the village throug
hout the day and the following night, and only when reinforcements had arrived had he finally left the line, even then having refused to do so before issuing final instructions.

  For his gallantry he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order. His citation for the award, published in the London Gazette a couple of months later, described the events and concluded with: The personality, valour and utter contempt for danger on the part of this Officer enabled the lodgement of the most advanced objective of the Corps to be permanently held, and on this rallying point the line was eventually formed.

  Blanche had snipped the piece out of the paper and had pasted it to the back of the photograph of Gilbert that stood on her writing desk in the private sitting room adjoining her bedroom.

  Looking at the photograph now, she thought of the future. It was more than four years since they had all lived together as a family. Thea had been eight, Olivia seven and Violet four when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo had plunged the world into the most terrible war ever known.

  Since then Gilbert had only spent a handful of short, snatched days with their daughters and those days had been nearly always in London, for whenever he had leave he hectically caught up with as many of his friends in government as he possibly could. It meant he had no real knowledge of the huge changes that the Great War had wrought at Gorton Hall. Thea was now twelve, Olivia was eleven and Violet was nine. When they had last all been together at Gorton, Thea and Olivia had never left the gardens and parkland unless in the company of Hermione Cumberbatch, Nanny Erskine or herself. Now, outside the schoolroom and in the company of Hal and Carrie, they ran as wild and free as if they, too, were village children.

  It hadn’t seemed to do them any harm, and she doubted if Gilbert would object too strongly to the unusual amount of freedom their children now enjoyed. He had also not objected to her having employed Charlie Hardwick.

  Tenderly she ran the tip of her finger over the silver frame of Gilbert’s photograph. When he came home there would be much more to think about than the sometimes tricky management of her household staff. Though Gilbert loved Gorton with a deep passion, he had another passion too, and that passion was politics. He had written to her a week after arriving in Flanders:

  When this ghastly murderous debacle is over, I intend becoming more active in the House of Lords. Where politics is concerned, Raymond is of the same mind and intends standing for Parliament. Only politics can ensure there will never again be a hell on Earth such as the one we are now enduring.

  By Raymond, he had meant Raymond Asquith, whose father, at the time, had been the prime minister. Now David Lloyd George was prime minister, and Raymond, loved by everyone who knew him, had died in battle two years ago, at Ginchy, on the Somme.

  A husband with a political life would mean far more time spent in London. It would also mean resuming the high-society social life they had enjoyed before the war. Blanche’s heart beat a little faster as she thought of the dinner parties and supper parties – of all kinds of parties – of the theatre and opera. Before the war, balls were commonplace in all the great London houses. It was at one such ball, at Londonderry House, that she and Gilbert had first met.

  Unlike the millions of women who had been widowed, she had a future to look forward to, with a husband she loved with all her heart. Thanking God for her many blessings, she seated herself at her desk, drew a sheet of pale-blue notepaper towards her and picked up her pen. Her eyes brimming with tears of thankfulness, she wrote:

  My dearest darling,

  We heard news of the Armistice an hour or so ago and I am mad with relief and joy. Outhwaite’s church bells are ringing non-stop. The convalescing officers are toasting the news with champagne and their singing and cheering are about to lift the roof off.

  Thea is on her way to share the moment with Hal, and no doubt with Carrie as well. Olivia has hared off to give Jim Crosby and Charlie Hardwick the news. Violet was out for her morning walk with Nanny Erskine when the news came over the wireless. Wherever they are, they will have heard the church bells and so Violet, too, will know by now that her papa will be coming home soon – and coming home for good.

  Those words are such magic to write, my darling. I can hardly believe that soon you will be in my arms again and there will be no more agonizing partings. For the rest of our lives, until we are both old and grey, we are going to be so happy, Gil. As I think of the future that is waiting for us my heart is full of the very deepest joy.

  All my love, now and forever, your very own devoted Blanche

  Chapter Five

  APRIL 1919

  As Hal walked across the yard to where his father’s pigs were penned he could faintly hear the village school bell being rung. It was something he no longer needed to pay any heed to, for it was April and, ever since his thirteenth birthday in February, his schooldays had been behind him.

  He had a heavy bucket of pig swill in either hand and put them down on the ground in order to open the gate of the pen. Though learning had always come easily to him, he hadn’t been sorry to say goodbye to the long bench seats of the classroom and the slates and chalk – and it wasn’t as if he’d stopped learning, for thanks to Miss Calvert he was now learning in earnest.

  Every weekday evening, after he’d brought the cows in for their milking, he ran over the fields to Outhwaite for one-to-one lessons with Miss Calvert in her pin-neat little terraced home. She’d wanted him to sit for a grammar-school scholarship, but his dad hadn’t been having any of it. ‘He’s needed on t’ farm,’ he’d said bluntly to her when, to Hal’s embarrassment, she had come to their farmhouse to speak with him about the scholarship exam. ‘Even if ’e weren’t, no lad o’ mine is going to a grammar school to ’ave fancy ideas put in ’is ’ead. Folks like us don’t do things like that, and the sooner ’e realizes it, the ’appier we’ll all be.’

  Nothing Miss Calvert could say would change his dad’s mind – and as Hal had known it wouldn’t, he was neither surprised nor disappointed. Instead he was determined. Outhwaite might satisfy Carrie, who wanted nothing more than to be in service at Gorton Hall and to live the rest of her life in the Yorkshire Dales, but ever since he could remember he had known that a life in Outhwaite – or even in Yorkshire – was never going to be enough to satisfy him.

  At the sight of the buckets, the pigs had begun stampeding towards him and he snatched the buckets off the ground, kicked the gate of the pen closed and barrelled a way between them to the trough.

  ‘There, you greedy blighters,’ he said, pouring the contents of the buckets into it. ‘Get your mucky snouts into that.’

  The pigs did so with gusto as Hal watched them. Miss Calvert was a good teacher, and he was a hard worker. Not being allowed to go to a grammar school wasn’t going to hold him back. In another few years he wouldn’t be milking cows and feeding pigs. Exactly what he would be doing he didn’t know, but whatever it was would involve being a socialist and fighting to make the world a different place, one where the divisions of class ceased to exist.

  It wasn’t Miss Calvert who had taught him that only via politics could the world be changed. It had been Miss Cumberbatch.

  For a long time after he had become friends with Thea and Olivia he had known nothing about Miss Cumberbatch, other than that she was Thea and Olivia’s governess. On the rare occasions he caught sight of her it was always when she had come into the village to do a little shopping, or to attend church.

  He’d thought her an odd-looking woman, tall and thin and raw-boned, her mousy-coloured hair worn in a severe bun. Her nose, as thin as the rest of her face, was abnormally long and Olivia had told him it twitched whenever she became impassioned about the subject she was teaching – something that Olivia said happened often.

  ‘She looks like a witch,’ he’d said, and Olivia had giggled and said, ‘She does a little bit and she can be awfully strict, but she’s very fair. I like her, and so does Thea.’

  It was only when Charlie H
ardwick had begun working at Gorton and living on the estate that Hal had begun taking real notice of Miss Cumberbatch. He knew, via Thea and Olivia, that the reactions at Gorton to Lady Fenton’s invitation to Charlie had been extreme.

  Miss Cumberbatch’s reaction hadn’t been extreme, though. She had gone out of her way to run into him and to introduce herself to him. ‘According to Charlie, she didn’t even flinch when she first saw him. She simply told him she was pleased to meet him and that she hoped he would be as happy working at Gorton Hall as she was,’ Olivia had said.

  Hal had been impressed at Miss Cumberbatch’s strength.

  The pigs had finished jostling each other to get at the food and, with the trough now empty, were barging at him, trying to get their heads into the buckets on the off-chance there was still something left in them.

  He kneed them away, lifting the buckets out of their reach. Not only had Miss Cumberbatch made friends with Charlie herself, but by helping Thea and Olivia to overcome their revulsion at the way Charlie looked, she had paved the way for them to become friends with him as well. And his own Uncle Jim had also made a difference.

  ‘You like me well enough, don’t you, Hal?’ he’d said, one arm thrown affectionately around Hal’s shoulder. ‘And you like being wi’ me, don’t you?’

  It had been such a silly question that Hal hadn’t even bothered replying to it.

  Understanding the reason why he hadn’t, Jim had said, ‘If I’d ’ad two legs the same length and gone to Flanders, like Charlie did, and if what ’appened to Charlie ’ad ’appened to me, you wouldn’t ’ave stopped wanting to spend time wi’ me, would you? You wouldn’t ’ave let me be all lonesome, would you?’