Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  She spotted it in her peripheral vision at first, then it flew closer and closer, almost dancing in front of her eyes. It was off-white in colour, no more than an inch in length, and she recognised it immediately from Malcolm’s sketches on his bedroom wall: a male Ghost Swift moth.

  The moth continued to flutter in front of her, before leisurely flying over to the bed of lilac Michaelmas daisies beside her. After a short moment, he pulled open his wings in a grand gesture of display, and her subconscious reminded her of Mrs Leonard’s words about seeing Malcolm if she looked around her.

  Harriet smiled, and a tear ran down her cheek.

  Chapter Five

  20th August 1919, Sedlescombe, Sussex

  Harriet withdrew a handkerchief from her sleeve and ran it slowly across her forehead. Needing some respite from the high midday sun, she slowly sauntered towards the shade given by the canopy of a pair of elders. The trees, along with a shed and a low picket fence to keep the chickens out, provided a natural separation of her vegetable garden from the long stretch of flower-bed-lined lawn, which led back to the house. She sat at one of a pair of white iron chairs and placed the trug full of produce, which she had just picked, onto the matching table and tossed her head back, grateful for the breeze meeting the nape of her neck. The purplish elderberries above her were plentiful this year and would soon be ripe enough to make a good stock of elderberry and blackberry jam, using her mother’s old recipe. Harriet exhaled and looked at the house. This was a spot to where she would often retreat, when she needed a moment to escape the mayhem of running a household containing four oftentimes helpless men. She smiled at the amalgamation of memories playing and merging in her mind; memories, which seemed now to belong to a different lifetime.

  Her recollections were interrupted when a Ghost Swift fluttered past her, braving the daytime instead of keeping to its usual rounds at dusk. It was yellow with brown hindwings: a female, Harriet identified. She watched closely, as it flew over her neat line of round lettuces, and was incredulous to see some tiny droplets being expelled over her vegetables. She leapt up, intent on chasing it away, realising that the moth was releasing her eggs. She would need to crush them before they hatched and devoured her lettuces. She marched over to the vegetable garden, keeping sight of the moth as she went. Then, she remembered the male Ghost Swift, hovering and practically dancing in front of her a few days ago, and she stopped. Her outrage suddenly and decisively softened, and she watched the moth disappear over the back fence into the meadow and woodland beyond.

  She cursed herself and her irrational thoughts, which were jumbling in her mind and which were being irritated and heightened by the heat. She wiped her brow once again and went to return to the shade of the elder trees, when she heard her name being called from the house. She knew the voice and inwardly sighed. It belonged to Hannah, her sister-in-law. She was well-meaning enough but the bond between them really only existed because Hannah had married Harriet’s brother, Herbert.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Harriet called, not really in the right frame of mind. She picked up the trug of gathered produce and began a slow and reluctant saunter to the house. She presented a fixed wooden smile all the while she walked. ‘Lovely day,’ she greeted, as she drew close enough to be heard.

  ‘Far too hot for me,’ Hannah countered. She was sweltering in a long pale dress and straw hat, one of the few fortunate women of the village not to be enduringly attired in black. ‘I wondered if you had time to spare for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Of course,’ Harriet replied.

  ‘My! What a wonderful lot of courgettes and tomatoes you’ve picked,’ she said, eyeing the trug, as she followed Harriet inside. ‘Ours have been a veritable disaster this year.’

  ‘Take some,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve plenty.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure.’

  ‘Very sure,’ Harriet answered, filling the kettle with water.

  ‘So, how have things been with you since John’s passing? Hasn’t been an easy few years, has it?’ Hannah asked, placing a hand on Harriet’s arm, making it difficult for her to make the tea.

  Harriet tried to ignore Hannah’s blatant condescending tone, offering her a stony rictus. ‘Not great, no, but I’m keeping strong, like everyone else.’

  ‘Oh, you are such a brave thing,’ Hannah said, pulling what Harriet supposed was a sympathetic grimace, but which left her sweaty and leathery face contorted like a grotesque. What her brother, an energetic and handsome man, had ever seen in her, Harriet had never been able to ascertain.

  Harriet placed the teapot, cups and saucers and jug of milk onto the tray and headed towards the back door.

  ‘Oh,’ Hannah said, ‘I rather thought we might stay inside in the cool.’

  Harriet nodded her agreement and moved to place the tray down on the kitchen table.

  ‘How about the parlour?’ Hannah suggested. ‘North-facing, it’ll be lovely and cold.’

  Harried looked at her sister-in-law with growing suspicion. Hannah had never, in the twenty-odd years of knowing her, suggested that they take tea in the parlour. As Harriet walked along the hallway towards the front of the house, her suspicion began to morph into a clearer idea of why she might have come.

  ‘I’ve just seen Fraser loitering around the village green, staring longingly into Ditch’s like a love-sick puppy,’ Hannah commented with a laugh. ‘Does he know that Louise is betrothed to Peter Wolf, I wonder?’

  ‘He does, indeed,’ Harriet confirmed, setting the tea things down in the one small clear space on the table not taken up by the paperwork surrounding the enquiries into Malcolm’s death.

  ‘Good Lord above!’ Hannah exclaimed when she spotted the raft of documents. She pulled off her hat, wafting it in front of her face, as she leant in for a closer look. ‘What on earth is all this?’ Her gaze flitted quickly between all the maps, photographs, postcards, letters, notelets and official military paperwork, then she stared at Harriet, waiting on the answer.

  Harriet knew now that somebody—probably Fraser—had told Hannah about her investigation, but for now she played along with the pretence that Hannah was discovering it all for the first time. ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to Malcolm, and all of these—’ she gestured to the table, ‘—are the jigsaw pieces that I need to help me build a picture of his last days.’

  ‘Notes from the medium, Mrs Leonard…’ Hannah read, immediately shooting a disbelieving look at Harriet. ‘Good Lord, Harriet. A medium? Surely not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did this medium tell you, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘All kinds of things,’ Harriet answered, pouring the tea into two china cups.

  ‘So, you believe in all of that now, do you—this spiritualist nonsense—that’s risen up, as if from nowhere, since the end of the war?’ Hannah enquired, not attempting to hide her own misgivings on the subject.

  ‘I… I’m not sure. Maybe, yes.’ The truth was, Harriet didn’t know what she believed anymore. Her feelings on the matter were a tangled and complicated mess. The visit to Mrs Leonard had left her unsettled and more confused than ever. The mention of finding a red star and a poppy was just bizarre and made no sense. The physical description of Malcolm, however, was accurate but, as she had thought at the time, could just as easily have been applied to any number of men. The obvious identifying scar above Malcolm’s left eye, sustained following a fall from a tree when he had been nine years old, had conveniently gone unnoticed by Mrs Leonard and Kaifa, her strange alter-ego. But then there was the fact that she seemed to know that Harriet had visited her under a false name. ‘So would anybody with half an ounce of sense,’ Fraser had later scorned. ‘What fool would turn up to one of those impostors using their real name?’ She had wanted to say Arthur Conan Doyle, but had not thought it a great defence and so had kept her mouth shut. The one thing, which Mrs Leonard had imparted and which had really shaken Harriet’s equilibrium, had been the reference to a laboratory. A referenc
e, which in itself was a very specific detail that had taken on much more significance since Timothy Mogridge had divulged the precise nature of Malcolm’s wartime work. ‘I’m a sceptical believer,’ she had explained to Fraser, following their discussion into the matter. ‘Well you can’t be; it’s an oxymoron,’ he had replied. ‘It’s like saying you’re an Atheist Christian.’

  Now Harriet noticed Hannah raise her eyebrows disapprovingly at the revelation.

  ‘Hmm… What else have you got here, then?’ she asked, prodding a finger at the table.

  Harriet picked up a document, drawn up by Fraser, which pulled together everything, which they had gleaned so far, into a working chronology of Malcolm’s last months, and used it to explain everything to Hannah up to the point that they had now reached. Yesterday’s post had returned Harriet’s own undelivered letter, which she had written to the gas laboratory in Woolwich: she had surmised that the end of the war had thankfully brought about its closure, but that still left her enquiry unanswered.

  Hannah smiled. ‘Well, now you know what you know, you can put the matter to rest.’ She picked up her cup and saucer and took a sip of tea, wandering towards the front window.

  ‘What do you mean? I’ve barely started,’ Harriet retorted.

  ‘Goodness, ought you not leave things as they are?’ Hannah asked, spinning around.

  ‘No,’ Harriet said, smiling politely. ‘Perhaps if you’d lost two children, Hannah, you’d understand.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Hannah seemed to concur, drinking more tea and evidently considering Harriet’s statement. ‘But we’ve all lost something, haven’t we?’

  The question was pointed, demanding a counter-question from Harriet, since, as far as she knew, Hannah had not lost anybody close to her in the conflict. Neighbours, extended family, yes, but her own children or husband, or brothers, no. ‘Everybody?’ Harriet pushed.

  ‘Look at Herbert and me—with the shortage of young men out there, there’s no hope of our Dorothy and Mercy ever getting married…and with that denial of matrimony comes the loss of Herbert and my ever seeing any grandchildren. Our line of the family, I am very certain, Harriet, will end when our spinster daughters leave this life for the next.’

  Her sister-in-law’s insensitive comments stung Harriet’s heart. She stood from the table and took a deep breath. She hurried towards the door and, without turning around, said, ‘Will you see yourself out, Hannah? I’ve suddenly come over all funny and need to have a lie down.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Do you need me to fetch anything?’ she called after Harriet. ‘Water? A doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall I take some tomatoes and courgettes off your hands?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet shouted back, rushing up the stairs into her bedroom and closing the door. She collapsed onto the bed, her thoughts black and thunderous, yet more determined than ever to pursue her search.

  ‘Ma?’ a quiet voice said, with an accompanying tap of the door.

  The word lacked the rougher Scottish edge of John’s voice; it had to belong to one of the boys.

  ‘Ma?’ he repeated.

  Of course, it had to be one of the boys; John wouldn’t be calling her Ma now, would he. It sounded as though it could be Fraser but, their being born only a year apart, she often confused the sound of his voice with that of his brother, Malcolm.

  Then, like the collision of two steam engines in her mind, her thoughts reassembled with a thud, which made her wince and sit up sharply. There was, of course, only one person left in this world to whom the voice could belong: Fraser.

  ‘Yes?’ she answered, taking stock of herself. She was fully dressed, lying on top of her bed in broad daylight. Then she remembered why she had gone there in the first place: her sister-in-law’s unsolicited visit.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know the second post’s been—there are a couple of official-looking letters you might wish to see.’

  ‘I’ll be down presently,’ she replied.

  She heard the floorboards outside her room groan, as Fraser crossed the landing to the staircase. Harriet took a few seconds of breathing deeply, then stood up and made her way downstairs. She gingerly stuck her head into the parlour, sighing with relief to find it mercifully devoid of her thoughtless sister-in-law.

  She found Fraser reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, the second post stacked beside him.

  ‘Did you put your Aunt Hannah up to coming here and prying?’ Harriet asked, doing a good job of masking her annoyance, as she approached the table and picked up the post. The top envelope had been stamped with the words: RED CROSS.

  Fraser looked up and frowned. ‘Of course not, why would I?’

  Harriet shrugged. ‘Maybe the same reason you informed the Reverend Percival about my visit to Mrs Leonard?’

  Fraser rolled his eyes. ‘Ma, you might not like it but you’re the talk of all the village.’

  ‘Am I, indeed?’ Harriet muttered with a wry smile, sliding John’s bronze paper knife into the back of the envelope.

  ‘Any number of people could have put Aunt Hannah up to snooping around. I’m past caring,’ Fraser informed her.

  Harriet withdrew a single sheet of paper, headed with the details of the International Red Cross: ‘Dear Mrs McDougall,’ she read aloud. ‘First of all, we would like to express our deepest sympathies with you and the unenviable situation in which you find yourself. As an organisation, we strive to do all we can to assist family members seeking answers about their loved ones’ actions in the Great War. I have searched our extensive archives, which cover various institutions, including the Voluntary Aid Detachment, British Red Cross Convalescent Hospitals in the United Kingdom, the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Department and copies of records from the International Prisoner of War Agency in Geneva. I regret to inform you that these searches have not borne a successful result in providing details of your relative. Owing to the nature of the conflict, the International Red Cross does not consider the records in our care to be in any way complete. Therefore, an unsuccessful search of these archives does not guarantee that your relative did not come into contact with these agencies. On behalf of the International Red Cross, we wish you well in your endeavours…’ Harriet mirrored Fraser’s look of disappointment.

  ‘What about the other letter?’ he asked.

  Harriet briefly examined the grand swirling handwriting on the front and felt the quality of the envelope, before carefully running the paper knife through the top of it. She saw the address detail at the top of the embossed letter and emitted a light gasp. ‘The Duchess of Westminster!’

  ‘What does she have to say?’

  ‘Dear Mrs McDougall, Thank you for your letter. You are correct in your assertions about my wartime employment. Indeed, I was away from my usual post at the Number One British Red Cross Hospital at Le Touquet in early July 1917. If my memory of this feverish time serves me correctly, then I was based briefly at the Essex Farm Advanced Dressing Station. As I am sure you will appreciate, however, the vast number of men passing through my care often precludes me from individual recognition—’

  ‘Well, thanks very much,’ Fraser interjected.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ Harriet responded lightly, her eyes having read ahead, ‘—I would suggest that you arrange a convenient time to visit me, bringing along a picture, should you have one, of your son. Yours respectfully, Lady Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster. Well, I never did!’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’ll remember him,’ Fraser commented.

  Harriet ran her fingers through her hair. ‘I must send her a telegram at once,’ she said, hurrying down the hallway. She began to form the wording of the telegram—brief and concise—in her head, as she marched to the parlour, when someone knocked on the door, startling her and making her lose the words intended for the telegram. ‘Now what?’ she mumbled under her breath, as she tugged open the door, half-expecting to see her sister-in-law back to check that she was feeling better.

>   ‘Sorry, Mrs McDougall. I had nowhere else to go.’ It was Timothy Mogridge, wearing the same ratty clothes, his eyes red, swollen and moist. In one shaking hand he held a lit cigarette, in the other a small brown suitcase. A tear escaped down his cheek, and he hurriedly removed it with his shirt sleeve.

  ‘Come in, dear Timothy. Come in.’

  Chapter Six

  24th August 1919, London

  Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane was like nothing Harriet had ever seen before. It was palatial, a sprawling stone edifice of varying architectural style, but unquestionably truly magnificent. As she stood at the bottom of the wide stone steps, which led to the front door, she took a look down at herself, all at once unexpectedly feeling wholly inadequate. She had purchased a new black dress and black straw hat specifically for this visit, hoping that a chic, sophisticated appearance might somehow endear her to the Duchess.

  ‘Mrs McDougall?’ a voice enquired.

  The front door was open—goodness only knew for how long it had been that way—and behind it stood a solemn-faced footman, dressed immaculately in black and white livery. He was young—in his early thirties, Harriet guessed—and a scarred hairless gully above his right ear silently articulated some past inexpressible horror.

  ‘Good morning,’ Harriet beamed. ‘I’ve an appointment with the Duchess of Westminster,’ she added, all at once unsure of exactly how she should address her upon coming face-to-face.

  The footman smiled. ‘Please, come inside. Lady Grosvenor is expecting you.’

  As he closed the door behind her, with a heavy-sounding clunk, Harriet had to stifle a minor gasp at the interior of the hall. Dominated by an ornate mahogany staircase, which rose, separated into two, then curled around to a stone balustraded first floor, the hallway was monumentally vast. Light poured down from a domed glass roof, illuminating a range of exotic tapestries and oil portraits, all of which adorned the walls.