by Mary Mackie
‘A son,’ he croaked. ‘Blast, Rose, you’ve given me a son!’
Biting my lip to stop the crazy laughter that welled up in me, I said through my tears, ‘Are you pleased?’
‘Pleased? Why… I could fly!’
He leapt up and in a whirl of motion ran from the room. I heard him thudding down the stairs and out by the front door, where he could be heard yelling, ‘It’s a boy! A boy!’ to the gardeners and then to the yardman – and to Ben Chilvers, who happened to be passing by and took the news back with him to Dersingham.
Basil’s undisguised delight touched me and deepened my fondness for him. This was something we truly shared, our love for our son.
‘Let me hold him,’ I begged the midwife as she cleaned the baby’s face. ‘Please… just let me hold him.’ I wanted him now, before someone could snatch him away from me.
Though she would have preferred to wash him properly, and me too, before she let me handle him, she swathed his naked body in a blanket and placed him in my arms.
Great bewildered eyes stared at me from that little wizened face. He was a tiny, warm bundle, weighing scarcely anything but oh so alive, so very dear. My son. Such a flood of feeling welled inside me that it rose and swamped me from toes to scalp, waves of emotion, fierce protective love and a sweet, sweet fulfilment. This tiny scrap of a person looked at me and laid claim to my aching heart.
‘Hello, monkey,’ I murmured, awarding him the pet name which Mama thought disgraceful but which, to him and me, was a secret way of saying that I loved him utterly.
* * *
During my lying-in I was touched to receive a visit from the Princess of Wales and her three older children. Though still pale and sad after the recent loss of her own baby, she smiled on me and admired Georgie, and even held him in her arms, while the young princes, Eddy and George, and four-year-old Princess Louise, wandered curiously about, peering in cupboards and wardrobes, clambering on the furniture and generally behaving ‘like a band of wild Indians’ as Mama complained later. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have allowed children of mine to behave in that way, but Princess Alix was so gracious and indulgent, laughing at them even as she chided them, and kissing Georgie’s little hands, that I lay marvelling at her presence in my humble bedroom.
* * *
My little monkey occupied me almost exclusively during that summer. He was not a big, lusty child, but he grew fair and healthy as any mother could wish. I delighted in watching him develop. The times when we were alone together while he fed at my breast were so sweet that I often sat on, holding his small, tender warmth and watching him breathe, long after he was replete and snoozing.
Basil took an equal delight in the child. He never thought it unmanly to bounce his son on his arm or play, ‘Piggy went to market’, to make Georgie give the funny little giggle that we all adored. I began to understand why people said that a child could cement a marriage. Certainly Georgie brought Basil and me closer.
‘One would think he had fathered half a dozen children already,’ Felicity Wyatt remarked with amusement. ‘He handles Georgie so capably. My own papa never had anything to do with any of us until we were of an age to hold a rational discussion.’
She and her mother and sisters called frequently, drawn by the magnet of the baby, over whom they all cooed and sighed. Kitty was especially fond of him and never minded if he was sick all over her skirts.
My mind being fully occupied with my son, I was for the first time grateful to have McDowall as a farm manager. Everything seemed to be going well with the farm. I took Georgie out to show him the fields and the orchards, the barns and the yards, the docile cows and the woolly sheep, the baby pheasants parading after their mother, the rooks flying, and the hares… the hares, of course! I could laugh even at them now, seeing Georgie’s delight in them.
Mama seemed happier than she had been for years, with three grandchildren to cosset. She divided her time between Orchards and Thetford. When she was with us, Narnie frequently came to visit – so frequently that she all but lived with us, but I was too content to object. Life had settled into a calm pool and I was reluctant to stir the mud that waited below the unrippled surface.
* * *
Johnny’s presence caused the only unease in those halcyon days. During his first summer vacation from university, he came home out of curiosity to see his young nephew, for whom he stood godfather. He went out a good deal, off to see the Esham people, or to spend days with George Pooley, but he was with us more than he had been since Father died. He remained a difficult, withdrawn young man, and to Basil he was cold and often deliberately rude.
One evening at supper, Johnny regaled us with accounts of loose talk he had heard in the backrooms of Cambridge – treacherous, anti-royalist talk, grievances against the Queen but mostly against her oldest son, his wild lifestyle, his sexual adventures, his gambling ‘with our money, granted out of the nation’s coffers’. The mutters had even repeated the calumny that the death of the infant prince had been a ‘wretched abortion’.
‘Don’t you dare repeat such lies at my table!’ I exclaimed.
My brother flashed me an angry look. ‘I didn’t say I believed it, I said it’s what people are saying. Lots of people. Sequestered here in Norfolk you don’t hear the half of it. Mr Dilke even stands up in Parliament and makes republican speeches. People are starting to hate the whole royal family. They call them “a bunch of Germans”. They’d like to see ’em all hanged.’
At this Mama cried out in horror, her hands to her throat.
Basil leaned to lay a comforting hand on her arm. ‘Don’t worry, Mother H. It’ll all pass over. It’s a storm in a tea-cup.’
‘Oh, is it?’ Johnny retorted. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘I get about. I know what goes on.’
‘You wouldn’t know a republican from a rhinoceros! You can’t even read without a finger on the page to guide you.’
Throwing aside his napkin, Basil got to his feet, his face flushed. ‘I won’t be spoken to like that in my own house!’
‘Whose house?’ Johnny too leapt up, sending his chair to crash against the sideboard. Mama was in tears, biting her knuckle.
‘It’s me that’s the legal tenant here!’ Basil shouted.
‘Only while my trustees let you stay!’
‘Then perhaps you’d like us to go? I don’t need this place, you know. I can be gone tomorrow. Rose and I—’
‘Oh, please!’ I jumped up in alarm. ‘Stop this arguing. You’re upsetting Mama. This is your home, Johnny. Of course it is. No one disputes that your rightful place is here. Please stop and take a deep breath before one of you says something he’ll regret.’
They glowered at each other, dislike and distrust singeing the air between them. In the end, it was the more mature Basil who sighed, ‘She’s right. Like it or not, boy, we’re family. We can’t fall out over this.’
‘And don’t call me “boy”,’ Johnny said bitterly. ‘I wish you’d all stop treating me like a child!’
My brother proved to be right about the unrest that was growing under the banner of republicanism. Newspapers and magazines told of crowded meetings, vitriolic speeches, violent demonstrations… The danger came fully home to us when we were offered police protection, a guard at our door in case anti-royal agitators took it into their heads to strike at the prince through his Sandringham properties. We ourselves refused the offer, but Basil slept with a shot-gun at hand. After Georgie was born, he didn’t spend a night away from home. Not for months. We were more harmonious than I had ever dared to hope.
* * *
Since my father died, with Sir Arthur Devlin increasingly eccentric, hostilities between Orchards and Ambleford had dwindled into a lingering rivalry between the Devlin men and ours. This culminated, in the summer of 1871, in a fist fight at one of the local inns, followed by a court case in which four men were fined – two of ours and two of theirs. As a result, Geoffrey Devlin wrote to Basil to su
ggest that each of them should pay his own workers’ fines and that any remaining ill-feeling might be dissipated by a cricket match.
Basil, being an excellent bowler, welcomed the challenge, and the match was organised for September. Johnny was still with us and, despite disagreements with Basil, was eager to play his part in defeating the detested Sir Arthur’s men. Sir Arthur himself was by that time out of reach, growing ever more eccentric and confined indoors because of ill-health.
I didn’t attend the cricket match, my excuse being breast-feeding Georgie, but I heard all about it later when Basil and Johnny came rolling in hilarious with ale and victory. The match had been going to Ambleford until Ben Chilvers, called in to bat for our team, came out to face his father’s bowling. Arms flailing like a windmill, Amos had thundered down the pitch, bowled – and Ben cracked it for six. He had continued to score heavily, while Amos grew angrier and angrier, ball after ball scorching down the wicket to be sent sky-rocketing, for sixes and fours, until the match was well won.
The Ambleford team’s disappointment had been drowned in Mr Geoffrey Devlin’s hospitality, though during the celebrations Ben Chilvers had had to leave – one of his children had been taken ill.
‘Which one?’ I asked in sudden unease.
‘Alice,’ Basil said. ‘But it’s just some childish ailment. Probably a cold. You know how Chilvers dotes on all his three.’
That was true enough, but even so I was concerned for little Alice.
As an afterword to the cricket match, that evening a drunken Amos Chilvers came shouting up to the house, accusing us of turning his son against him. He threw a half-brick through our conservatory window with a great shattering of glass and, when Basil went out with a shot-gun, Chilvers offered to fight him hand to hand. He swung one wild punch and fell down, too drunk to stand up. Basil and Johnny dragged him to one of the outhouses, locked the door and left him.
‘You remember all that trouble there used to be between us and Ambleford,’ Johnny said later. ‘And that fire that was started and blamed on me. I often wondered if Amos Chilvers was behind it. Victor used to tell me how Chilvers hated Father. And the troubles did stop after Father died. Don’t you think we ought to tell the Devlins what sort of man they’re employing?’
‘You can’t blacken a man’s name without proof,’ Basil said.
‘We’ve got proof! He was here tonight, shouting threats and abuse. He broke a window.’
‘He was drunk,’ I said. ‘He was upset. Besides, if he was the one who caused the trouble I’d rather not give him cause to start it again. Let him sober up and then let him go. He’s an old man, eaten up with ancient grievances, but he’s still Ben Chilvers’ father.’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ Basil decided. ‘When he’s sober, I’ll let him know what we suspect. And I’ll tell him if he doesn’t leave us be he’ll be for the high jump next time.’
Amos Chilvers was let go next day, still truculent, but silenced by whatever Basil had had to say. After that I forgot him; more important worries arose when it became evident that little Alice was sickening for something a lot worse than a childish cold.
It was the beginning of the terrible ’71 epidemic of low fever.
Four
The source of the typhus was thought to be a drain near Wolferton Creek, where the chapel folk had had their Sunday school outing and some of the children had been found playing in the dirty water. But whatever the source, its effects were all too evident: throughout the local villages, men, women and children took sick. In the heat of late summer the disease spread like gossip.
With harvest being brought in at the same time, every able-bodied person was needed either in the fields or nursing the sick. As I went about my tasks I saw young Reverend Lancaster fumblingly binding sheaves, and old Billy Morton, who was eighty, driving a laden wagon; Milky Mickleborough, though nearly blind, climbed up to thatch my stacks when Benstead fell sick. Everybody helped.
The Wyatts lent their aid in nursing, too; we went from house to house about the villages as need arose. The beautiful Chloe, bent over a steaming tub, possing bed linen, was something to see, as was young Verity spooning medicine into Bessie Rudd, who had run her farm single-handed for as long as I could remember, and Felicity weeping over a dying child. So many pictures in my memory. So much sorrow.
Young Alice Chilvers recovered. We rejoiced at that, but her father and little brother had fallen sick, too. Benjie threw off the illness, but his father lay near to death for days until the crisis passed and his mind cleared again. I shared Pam’s relief that her family had been spared.
Between working in the fields and tending the sick to all hours, to my sorrow I lost my milk and was forced to begin feeding Georgie with cow’s milk. But that did mean I could leave him more in Narnie’s care and not have to keep hurrying home every few hours.
‘It’s not right!’ Basil ranted at me. ‘Your place is here with your son! If you bring the fever home to him—’
‘I shan’t!’ I cried, though that was my deepest fear and I watched Georgie constantly for any sign of fretfulness. I was careful always to change my clothes when I came in hot and dishevelled from a house of sickness, and to wash all my exposed skin, and keep our room well aired. Miss Florence Nightingale’s ideas about hygiene and cleanliness had been instilled in me by my aunt Agnes.
We lost Bessie Rudd, and Annie Mickleborough the laundry-woman. We lost several old friends and some younger ones. Someone mentioned that one of the McDowall children was down with the disease, too, but when I called at the house on the corner of the lane Mrs McDowall would hardly open the door.
‘Yes, it’s our Stella,’ she informed me through a two-inch gap. ‘But it’s all right, Mrs Pooley, I’m nursing her. She’s doing all right. You’ve enough to worry about without concerning yourself with us.’ Somewhere in the house a child cried out for her and she glanced round, clutching a shawl round her throat. ‘I’m coming, love!’ she called and looked again at me. ‘Thank you for calling, Mrs Pooley, but if we need you we’ll send. I can look after my own.’ And she closed the door in my face.
Had I imagined it, or had she been bruised around the eye and on her throat – bruises she had held the shawl to hide? Had she suffered an accident, or was she sickening, too?
‘She’s fine,’ McDowall said when I asked him. ‘Och, she had a wee bit of a fall, that’s all. Rushing to attend the child. It’s always happenin’. She worries too much, does Mary. Makes a real martyr of hersel’. Take it slow, says I, but she willna’. You know what some females are like.’
Partridge shooting continued, though in the heat of that autumn the sport was thin, the birds scarce and wild. Nevertheless there were volleys off in the woods as I drove back from Dersingham one October day and was accosted by Amos Chilvers. He stepped out of a hedge and grabbed the pony’s bridle, stroking its nose and murmuring to it in a way that calmed it – I had forgotten his reputation as a Whisperer, master of the old horse magic.
‘What is it you want?’ I asked, keeping my head up and looking him straight in the eye.
‘Just a word, that’s all.’
‘A word about what?’
Taking off the round-crowned hat he habitually wore, he reached inside his fustian jacket and brought out a carving – a fine carving of a horse standing alert with ears pricked. This he presented to me, eyes bright and watchful over a rough moustache now wholly grey. ‘It’s for the boy.’
‘Why…’ I was so astounded that I found myself accepting the gift. ‘Thank you. It… it’s quite beautiful. Georgie will love it.’
‘It’s nothin’.’ He stepped away, unable to look at me for embarrassment. ‘For a Hamilton, yore not so bad. Well, don’t let me hold you up. Go you on!’ This last was for the pony as he clapped his hat on its rump and it set out again, barely giving me time to gather the reins.
The incident caused me a deal of puzzlement. Was the gift a way of apologising, or of saying thanks because I had helped to
nurse Ben and the children? I should never fathom Amos Chilvers.
The wooden horse stood on a corner of the dressing-table, where Georgie could see it from his cot. He lay smiling at it, talking gurgling baby talk, his little dimpled hands working as if he would like to grab it if only he knew how.
October became November. The last of the funerals was held; the last invalid began to regain strength. As the days went by without new fever cases, Mr Lancaster held a special service of thanksgiving that the toll had not been worse.
But the typhus had not done with us yet. When the Prince of Wales came to Sandringham for the shooting, he was already sickening with the disease. Within days he was desperately ill. His groom, who had also fallen prey to the illness, died of it. The prince looked likely to follow him. The news was grave.
After the warm autumn, winter arrived fierce and early, with heavy snows that froze solid, forming a thick white icing over the land. Amid those snows, the royal family gathered – brothers, sisters, cousins and spouses crammed into Sandringham House and spilled over as house-guests at other villas on the estate. The impending drama drew journalists, too, and crowds of ordinary folk from near and far to wait in apprehension by the gate for the bulletins which, during days of highest crisis, were issued every few hours.
And then Kitty Wyatt also became ill. She was with us at Orchards, nursing Georgie, when she first complained of feeling unwell, so Felicity took her home. By the evening, Kitty was feverish, her skin erupting in red spots. When I called the following morning to see what news there was, Mrs Wyatt wept silent, helpless tears. Was her darling Kitty to be the last, belated victim of the low fever?
