by Pamela Bell
‘Get off me!’ she cried and raked her fingers down his cheek. ‘Get off, get off, get off! I hate you!’
Face stinging from the scratches on his cheek, Joe cursed and clamped a sweaty hand over her mouth as he levered her legs apart with his knee.
‘Keep still, damn you!’ he grunted.
Half suffocated by his palm, Maggie was tiring, but she wouldn’t give up. She bit at his hand, she scratched and she hit, but she couldn’t shift him and when he thrust into her, everything went dark with pain and disgust.
Later, she couldn’t have said how long it went on. She lay, defeated, gagging under the stench and sweat of his hand, while Joe bucked and plunged and grunted and felt shame swamp her. She who had prided herself on her independence had not been able to save herself from this. She was nothing now, just a lump of flesh Joe could do what he liked with, and so she squeezed her eyes shut and blanked out her mind and endured until he emptied himself inside with an inarticulate cry.
He flopped on top of Maggie, almost crushing her, before rolling off her at last. ‘Next time just do as you’re bloody told,’ he said.
Beaten, bloody, Maggie levered herself agonisingly off the floor. Without a word, she crawled to the door and retched into the dust. The sun was still slanting its gentle light into the farmyard. The swallows were still darting after insects. Fly had fallen silent. Frank, it seemed, was still asleep. Somewhere high on the hill a lamb was bleating for its mother.
Maggie’s head was ringing. She was torn and bleeding and pain hammered at her but worse, far worse, was the sense of degradation and disgust. She had felt cleaner spreading muck on the fields.
Somehow she made it to the trough. Greedily she drank water straight from the pump, letting it splash over her face, only to vomit it all up a minute later. The rag Frank had used to wash earlier had been wrung out and draped over the pump to dry. Maggie used it to wash herself all over, scrubbing furiously at herself as if she could rub away the memory of how Joe had pinned her down and made her powerless.
She wouldn’t go back to the house. She couldn’t. She staggered to the barn instead and heaving open the heavy bar, she practically fell inside into the familiar smell of straw and cows. In her kennel, Fly whined.
Maggie opened the door and let the dog lick her in wordless comfort. They curled up in the straw together.
And in the morning, Joe had gone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘What’s that?’ Rose lifted her head, started by the strange rumbling sound. It had started as a low hum but was getting louder and louder. In quiet Beckindale, where the clanging from the smithy, the peal of church bells and the bellowing of calves being castrated vied for the honour of loudest noise, the sound was disconcertingly out of place.
She had slipped out to meet Levi Dingle in the ruins of the old watermill by the bridge. When they had first arranged a meeting, he had suggested the summerhouse in the grounds of Miffield Hall. Rose was surprised that he knew of it.
‘It would be private,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone ever goes there.’
She and Mick had. It had been their special place, and she didn’t want to spoil those memories with anyone else.
‘It’s too far,’ she said. ‘The mill ruins are more convenient.’
Something ugly flashed across Levi’s face, something that gave Rose a jolt, but the next moment he was smiling, and she decided that she must have imagined it.
‘Whatever you want, Rose,’ he had said.
She didn’t like Levi calling her Rose. Oh, she and Mick had made a joke of him calling her Miss Haywood rather than Rose, but she hadn’t meant it, and Mick had known that. Her name in Levi’s mouth felt uncomfortably intimate but Rose didn’t feel able to insist that he should address her as Miss Haywood.
She found Mick’s brother unsettling. They had been meeting for three months now, whenever Rose had a letter to send to Mick, or Levi had one to pass to her. He always brought her a present although all Rose wanted was the letter from Mick. Today it was a posy of flowers.
‘Thank you, Levi. They’re charming,’ she had said, forcing a smile. She couldn’t wait to be alone so that she could read Mick’s letter, but it seemed rude to rush away, especially when she knew how lonely Levi must be.
The farrier was the only other person who would talk to him now that Ava had suggested that he had shot himself in order to avoid going to the front. Naturally, the rumour had spread like wildfire, and Levi was firmly branded a cowardly shirker. Rose had tried to counteract the gossip by suggesting that he was the victim of an accident and should be pitied, but Ava had merely looked contemptuous.
‘Oh, my dear Miss Haywood, you are such an innocent. Of course every shirker has a hard luck story. You really mustn’t let a man like that, an Irishman too, take advantage of your trusting nature.’
Rose had clenched her fists but how could she insist that she knew the truth without giving away her relationship with Mick?
So when Levi invited her to sit down, she never made an excuse to leave, although Mick’s brother made her uncomfortable at times. He was an intense young man with an unnerving habit of staring at her. Mick had told her that Levi was a dreamer, but he didn’t seem dreamy to Rose. She sensed a core of bitterness and anger in him that left her feeling uneasy. He seemed to be dabbling in some questionable activities, too. Rose didn’t like to enquire too closely about where he had acquired a bicycle, or how he had been able to afford the box of chocolates that he had presented her with the first time they met.
‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ he had said. ‘Just let me know.’
Now Rose got to her feet and listened to the sound growing ever louder. Was this what it had been like for the poor people who had heard a strange noise and looked up to see a Zeppelin airship looming above them before it dropped bombs on them?
Don’t be ridiculous, Rose told herself. The Germans were hardly going to target Beckindale, were they?
Still, the sound was ominous.
‘What is it?’ she asked Levi.
‘Sounds like motor cars to me,’ he said, and they clambered up onto the tumbledown wall to have a better look.
‘You’re right. There!’ Rose pointed as the first truck came round the bend and drove carefully over the bridge. It had canvas sides painted with a great red cross.
‘It’s an ambulance,’ said Levi. ‘Lots of ambulances,’ he added as the first was followed by another and another and another until they formed a great snake winding along the narrow country lane and disappearing out of sight at either end.
‘They must be going to Miffield Hall,’ Rose said.
Rose watched the ambulances trundling past, appalled to realise just how many injured men were being transferred to the new hospital. Behind those red crosses were men who had been at front, who had been shot or had a limb blown off or breathed in vile poison gas. They would not even be the worst injured, but patients well enough to be recuperate. ‘There are so many of them,’ she said, shaken.
‘They’ll be wanting cigarettes,’ Levi thought out loud. ‘I’ll get hold of some in Bradford and sell them on. It’s not like most of them will be able to get down to the village shop, is it? I reckon I could make a tidy profit.’
Rose looked at him in dismay. ‘You can’t make a profit out of the fact that they’re injured!’
‘How else am I going to live?’ he asked bitterly. ‘I’m no use with this leg now, even if anyone in Beckindale would give me a job.’
‘I thought you were helping Will Hutton.’
‘For bed and board, but I’ve no money of my own unless I earn it using my wits,’ he told her. ‘Luckily I’ve got a few irons in the fire. I’ve got contacts in Bradford who can get me cheap cigarettes, chocolate and beer,’ he boasted. ‘I’ve got a nice little sideline going with one of the sergeants at the camp. He gets a cut, the new recruits get a few luxuries and I make a profit. Everyone’s happy.’
‘But isn’t the
black market illegal?’ Rose asked.
Levi shrugged. ‘You don’t get anywhere sticking to the straight and narrow,’ he said. ‘Mick taught me that.’
Rose wanted to protest that Mick would never do anything criminal, but she remembered how she had first met him, stuffing his kit bag with Lord Miffield’s apples. Perhaps he was a rogue, she admitted to herself, but Mick wouldn’t do anything bad.
Should she say something to Mick? He had asked her to be a friend to Levi, but she didn’t want to worry him while he was at the front.
‘Be careful,’ she said to Levi. ‘I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.’
‘I will be,’ he promised her with one of his disquieting stares.
‘And these flowers are lovely but you mustn’t spend any money bringing me presents,’ Rose went on.
‘I like giving you presents.’
‘That’s sweet of you,’ she said uneasily, ‘but it’s really not necessary. You’re doing enough for me already, keeping me in touch with Mick.’ She pulled a letter from her pocket and handed it to Levi. ‘Will you send this one back to him?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’d do anything for you, Rose. You know that. Anything at all.’
The last ambulance drove slowly over the bridge and disappeared up the lane that led to Miffield Hall. Rose followed it with her eyes. What if Mick were in the back? Or John? Oh, she was so tired of doing nothing! Every time she wrote to Mick she cringed inwardly at how little she had to tell him. You’re more of a rebel than you think you are, he had said, but she wasn’t rebelling. She was still waiting for her father to give her permission to do more than roll bandages and knit.
But that could change.
Abruptly making up her mind, Rose jumped down from the wall ‘I need to go.’
‘I’ll walk with you,’ said Levi instantly.
‘No, you mustn’t, Levi. You don’t know what my father’s like,’ she tried to explain as she did every time they met. ‘If he got wind of the fact that I was meeting you, he would be furious. I’d be all right, but I don’t want to think what he would do to you. I’m sure he could get you sent away from Beckindale. He’s got a lot of influence. Mick and I were always careful never to be seen by anyone.’
There it was again, that flash of dislike in his expression, so quickly veiled that she couldn’t be entirely sure that she’d seen it.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m not going back to the village.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Miffield Hall.’
The ambulances were pulled up on the gravel sweep in front of the hall where Rose used to jump down from the pony and trap, eager to see Ralph. They were all empty now, their drivers leaning against the bonnets and smoking cigarettes. The front door was open. Rose walked in and stood in the hall feeling disorientated. Where once Grieves, the butler, had crossed the tiled floor with a stately lack of speed, now orderlies and nurses in crisp aprons and starched caps rushed to and fro. A patient, his head swathed in bandages, was slumped in a wheelchair under the magnificent grandfather clock that must have been too old or too awkward to move. It ticked remorselessly over the bustle.
Nobody paid any attention to Rose. She had to catch a nurse by the sleeve to ask if she could see whoever was in charge.
‘Can’t you see we’re busy?’
‘I know,’ said Rose. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mind waiting.’
The nurse sighed. ‘Wait in there,’ she said, nodding her head at what had been Lord Miffield’s study.
‘What name shall I say?’
‘I’m Rose Haywood. Miss Haywood.’
‘I’ll tell Matron you’re there, but you might have a long wait.’
She bustled off, and Rose pushed open the door to the study. She had never been in there before, but she suspected she wouldn’t have recognised the room anyway. It had been roughly partitioned, and there were patches on the walls where pictures and bookcases had been removed. Rose sat on a hard chair and smoothed Mick’s letter out onto her lap. His spelling was terrible and his writing little better than a scrawl, but the recklessness and humour that had drawn her to him was there and she smiled as she read about being billeted on farms and kicking a pig out of its sty for a dry bed. That old pig was not hapy, Mick wrote.
She had read and reread the letter many times before the door opened and the matron came in. She was a formidable-looking woman with iron-grey hair. ‘Miss Haywood?’ she said brusquely. ‘I am sorry to keep you waiting but as you will have seen, we have had an influx of new patients today. What can I do for you?’
Rose had risen to her feet, Mick’s letter in her hand. ‘I want to help.’
‘Are you a trained nurse?’
‘No. No, I’m not.’
The matron sighed. ‘The men here are very badly injured, Miss Haywood. They need specialist care. I am sure you are anxious to do what you can, but my patients are my priority and I am afraid that without training you would just get in the way. Forgive me for being blunt.’
Rose was intimidated but she thought of Mick and held her ground.
‘I don’t want to get in anyone’s way,’ she said, ‘but there must be something I can do. What do the men do when they are recuperating? Couldn’t I read to them, perhaps, or write a letter for someone who can’t manage it?’
‘That may be possible,’ said the matron after a moment. ‘Many of the patients are blinded or have lost an arm, so someone to help with writing might be useful.’ She studied Rose critically. ‘You are a gently bred girl, I suspect, Miss Haywood. I must warn you that you would see some shocking sights on the wards. Do you have a strong enough stomach?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rose honestly, ‘but if I’m going to be sick, I promise to wait until I’m on my way home.’
A smile flickered over the matron’s face. ‘Very well. Do you have some time now? I know of one man who is very anxious to send a letter home and none of my nurses has had time to sit down with him.’
Rose stuffed Mick’s letter into the pocket of her jacket. ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ she said.
‘Rose, where on earth have you been? Your mother has been beside herself with worry.’
Her father was furious when Rose went home at last. Dazed with the enormity of what she had seen, she dropped into a chair and looked around as if finding herself in another world.
‘I’ve been at the hospital,’ she said.
At the vicarage, afternoon tea was being served in the drawing room. Outside the open windows, fat bumble bees drowsed over the lavender and Arthur, home for the summer holidays, was moodily cracking a croquet ball through the hoops on the lawn. Her mother poured tea from a silver pot into bone china cup and saucers while her father loomed in front of the fireplace, glowering at Rose.
‘Oh, Papa, if you had seen those poor men!’ The matron’s warning had not prepared Rose. She had gagged at the smell of carbolic soap which only partly masked the stench of blood and pus and vomit. A row of beds now stood in Lady Miffield’s drawing room where once they had taken tea. The carpets had been rolled up, the fireplace boarded over and the pictures and furniture put into storage. Now it was just an echoingly large room, the sound of groans and muffled cries of pain overlaid by the squeak of the nurses’ shoes on the new linoleum floor.
She saw men with bloody bandages covering the stumps of amputated limbs, men missing a foot or an arm or in one case both legs blown off below the knee. Others were wrapped like mummies, with only their nose and mouth uncovered. Rose couldn’t imagine the terrible damage that must have been done to their faces.
‘I sat with a sergeant today. He’s completely blind and in so much pain, but he wanted to write to his little girl, so he dictated to me and I wrote the letter for him. He loves her so much, Papa, and he wrote so bravely and cheerfully to her … it broke my heart!’ Remembering Sergeant Donald’s stoical endurance and the tenderness of his words to his beloved daughter, Rose had to choke back a sob.
Her father frowned. ‘This is exactly why I didn’t want you to go to the hospital, Rose. It’s too upsetting for you.’
‘I should be upset, Papa! These men have been injured fighting to protect us!’
‘I am well aware of what we owe them, Rose, but my concern at the moment is for you. I don’t like the idea of you being exposed to such scenes. I don’t want you to go back there.’
‘Of course I am going back,’ said Rose, taking a cucumber sandwich. ‘The soldier in the bed next to Sergeant Donald said I had a lovely voice and I promised I would go and read to him. Do you think he’d like some Dickens?’
‘Rose,’ her father said awfully, ‘I cannot permit it. Especially not after today.’
‘Why, what has happened?’
‘Mildred has just resigned!’
‘She’s going to be a plumber’s mate in Keighley,’ her mother added.
‘Really?’ Rose was astounded. ‘How marvellous of her!’
‘It is not marvellous,’ her father said, handing his cup and saucer to her mother for more tea. ‘Who do you think is going to cook and clean now? Now that all the girls have gone off to get jobs, we won’t be able to replace Mildred, so your mother will need you to help her run the house.’
Rose glanced at her mother. ‘We’re going to have to learn how to cook?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Edith composedly.
‘Gosh.’
‘So you see, you won’t have time to go back to the hospital,’ Charles said, accepting his teacup back with a nod of thanks.
‘I don’t agree.’ To his consternation, her mother looked him straight in the eye. ‘What if it were John lying in a hospital unable to see to read or to write to us? Rose has promised to go back and she should. I will manage the housework,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m sure she will help me when she can.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
In July, Frank enlisted.
‘But Frank, you’re only fifteen!’ Maggie said in dismay when he told her.
