The Shifting Fog

  ‘You know I’d be just as much use as you. I’ve always been good at making strategic decisions, you said—’ ‘This is real, Hannah,’ said David abruptly. ‘It’s a war: with real guns, real bullets and real enemies. It’s not make-believe; it’s not some children’s game.’

  I drew breath; Hannah looked as if she’d been slapped.

  ‘You can’t live in a fantasy world all your life,’ David continued. ‘You can’t spend the rest of your life inventing adventures, writing about things that never really happened, playing a made-up character—’ ‘David!’ cried Emmeline. She glanced at Robbie then back at David. Her bottom lip trembled as she said, ‘Rule number one: The Game is secret.’

  David looked at Emmeline and his face softened. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, Emme.’

  ‘It’s secret,’ she whispered. ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Course it is,’ said David. He tousled Emmeline’s hair. ‘Come on, don’t be upset.’ He leaned to peer into the decoration box.

  ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Look who I found. It’s Mabel!’ He held aloft a glass Nuremberg angel, with wings of spun glass, a crinkled gold skirt and a pious wax face. ‘She’s your favourite, right? Should I put her up on top?’

  ‘Can I do it this year?’ Emmeline said, wiping at her eyes. Upset though she might have been, she wasn’t going to let an opportunity pass.

  David looked at Hannah pretending to inspect the palm of her hand. ‘What do you say, Hannah? Any objections?’

  Hannah looked at him squarely, coldly.

  ‘Please?’ said Emmeline, jumping to her feet, a flurry of skirts and wrapping paper. ‘You two always put her up, I’ve never had a turn. I’m not a baby any more.’

  David made a show of deep consideration. ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Emmeline.

  ‘Eleven . . .’ repeated David. ‘Practically twelve.’

  Emmeline nodded eagerly.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. He nodded at Robbie, smiled.

  ‘Give me a hand?’

  Between them they carried the decorating ladder to the tree, seated the base amongst the crumpled paper that was strewn across the floor.

  ‘Ooh,’ Emmeline giggled, beginning to climb, the angel clutched in one hand. ‘I’m just like Jack climbing his beanstalk.’

  She continued until she reached the second to last rung. She stretched the hand that held the angel, reaching for the treetop, which remained tantalisingly aloof.

  ‘Bully,’ she said under her breath. She glanced down at the three upturned faces. ‘Almost. Just one more.’

  ‘Careful,’ David said. ‘Is there something you can hold onto?’

  She reached out with her free hand and clutched a flimsy bough of fir, then did the same with the other. Very slowly, she lifted her left foot and placed it carefully on the top rung.

  I held my breath as she lifted her right. She was grinning triumphantly, reaching out to place Mabel on her throne, when all of a sudden our eyes locked. Her face, poking above the treetop, registered surprise, then panic as her foot slipped and she began to fall.

  I opened my mouth to call out a warning but it was too late. With a scream that made my skin prickle, she tumbled like a rag doll to the floor, a pile of white skirts amid the tissue paper.

  The room seemed to expand. For just one moment, everything and everyone stood still, silent. Then, the inevitable contraction. Noise, movement, panic, heat.

  David scooped Emmeline into his arms. ‘Emme? Are you all right? Emme?’ He glanced at the floor where the angel lay, glass wing red with blood. ‘Oh God, it’s sliced right through.’

  Hannah was on her knees. ‘It’s her wrist.’ She looked about for someone, found Robbie. ‘Fetch some help.’

  I scrambled down the staircase, heart knocking against my ribcage. ‘I’ll go, miss,’ I said, slipping out the door.

  I ran along the corridor, unable to clear my mind of Emmeline’s motionless body, every gasped breath an accusation.

  It was my fault she’d fallen. The last thing she had expected to see as she reached the treetop was my face. If I hadn’t been so nosy, if I hadn’t surprised her . . .

  I swung around the bottom of the stairs and bumped into Nancy.

  ‘Watch it,’ she scowled.

  ‘Nancy,’ I said between breaths. ‘Help. She’s bleeding.’

  ‘I can’t understand a word of your gabble,’ said Nancy crossly. ‘Who’s bleeding?’

  ‘Miss Emmeline,’ I said. ‘She fell . . . in the library . . . from the ladder . . . Master David and Robert Hunter—’ ‘I might have known!’ Nancy turned on her heel and hurried toward the servants’ hall. ‘That boy! I had a feeling about him. Arriving unannounced as he did. It’s just not done.’

  I tried to explain that Robbie had played no part in the accident, but Nancy would hear none of it. She clipped down the stairs, turned into the kitchen and pulled the medicine box from the sideboard. ‘In my experience, fellows as look like him are only ever bad news.’

  ‘But Nancy, it wasn’t his fault—’

  ‘Wasn’t his fault?’ she said. ‘He’s been here one night and look at what’s happened.’

  I gave up my defence. I was still breathless from running and there was little I could ever say or do to change Nancy’s mind once it was made.

  Nancy dug out disinfectant and bandage strips and hurried upstairs. I fell into step behind her thin, capable frame, hurrying to keep up as her black shoes beat a reproach down the dim, narrow hall. Nancy would make it better; she knew how to fix things.

  But when we reached the library, it was too late.

  Propped in the centre of the sofa, a brave smile on her wan face, was Emmeline. Her siblings sat either side, David stroking her healthy arm. Her wounded wrist had been bound tightly in a white strip of cloth—torn from her pinafore, I noted—and now lay across her lap. Robbie Hunter stood near but apart.

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Emmeline, looking up at us. ‘Mr Hunter took care of everything.’ She looked at Robbie with eyes rimmed red. ‘I’m ever so grateful.’

  ‘We’re all grateful,’ said Hannah, eyes still on Emmeline.

  David nodded. ‘Mighty impressive, Hunter. You should become a doctor.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Robbie quickly, ‘I’m not fond of blood.’

  David surveyed the red-stained cloths on the floor. ‘You did a good job pretending otherwise.’ He turned to Emmeline and stroked her hair. ‘Lucky you’re not like the cousins, Emme; a nasty cut like that.’

  But if she heard, Emmeline made no sign. She was gazing at Robbie in much the same way Mr Dudley had gazed at his tree. Forgotten, at her feet, the Christmas angel languished: face stoic, glass wings crushed, gold skirt red with blood.

  The Times

  25 FEBRUARY 1916

  An Aeroplane to Fight Zeppelins

  MR HARTFORD’S PROPOSAL

  ( FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT )

  IPSWICH, 24 FEB.

  Mr Frederick Hartford, who will be giving an important speech in the Parliament tomorrow on the aerial defence of Britain, gave me today some of his views on the general question at Ipswich, where his motor-car factory is located.

  Mr Hartford, brother of Major Jonathan Hartford V.C. and son of Lord Herbert Hartford of Ashbury, thinks that Zeppelin attacks are to be warded off by producing a new light and fast type of one-seater aeroplane, of the kind proposed earlier this month by Mr Louis Blériot in the Petit Journal.

  Mr Hartford said he does not believe in building Zeppelins which, he says, are awkward and vulnerable, and, on this latter account, are capable of operating only at night. If the Parliament is amenable, Mr Hartford plans temporarily to suspend his manufacture of motor cars in favour of the light-weight aeroplanes.

  Also addressing the Parliament tomorrow is financier Mr Simion Luxton, who is similarly interested in the question of aerial defence. In the past year Mr Luxton has financed two of Britain’s smaller motor-car manufactu
rers and most recently an aeroplane factory near Cambridge. These factories have already commenced the manufacture of aeroplanes designed for warfare.

  Mr Hartford and Mr Luxton represent the old and new faces of Britain. While the Ashbury line can be traced as far back as the court of King Henry VII, Mr Luxton is the grandson of a Yorkshire miner, who started his own finance business and has since had much success. He is married to Mrs Estella Luxton, American heiress to the Stevenson’s pharmaceutical fortune.

  UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN

  That night, high in the attic, Nancy and I curled up close in a desperate bid to stave off the icy air. The winter sun had long since set, and outside the angry wind shook the rooftop finials and crept, keening, through cracks in the wall.

  ‘They say it’s going to snow before year end,’ Nancy whispered, pulling the blanket up to meet her chin. ‘And I’d have to say as I believe them.’

  ‘The wind sounds like a baby crying,’ I said.

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ Nancy said. ‘It sounds like many things but never that.’

  And it was that night she told me the story of the Major and Jemima’s children. The two little boys whose blood refused to clot, who had gone to their graves, one after the other, and now lay side by side in the cold hard ground of the Riverton graveyard.

  The first, Timmy, had fallen from his horse, out riding with the Major on the Riverton estate.

  He’d lasted four days and nights, Nancy said, before the crying finally stopped and the tiny soul found some rest. He was white as a sheet when he went, all the blood having raced to his swollen shoulder, eager for escape. I thought of the nursery book with its pretty spine, inscribed to Timothy Hartford.

  ‘His cries were hard enough to listen to,’ Nancy said, shifting her foot so that a pocket of cold air escaped. ‘But they were nothing next to hers.’

  ‘Whose?’ I whispered back.

  ‘His mother’s. Jemima’s. Started when they carried the little one away and didn’t stop for a week. If you’d only heard the sound. Grief to make your hair turn grey. Wouldn’t eat, nor drink neither; faded away so as she was almost as pale as he, rest his soul.’

  I shivered; tried to accord this picture with the plain, plump woman who seemed far too ordinary to suffer so spectacularly. ‘You said “children”? What happened to the others?’

  ‘Other,’ Nancy said. ‘Adam. He made it older than Timmy, and we all thought he’d escaped the curse. Poor lad hadn’t though. He’d just been swaddled tighter than his brother. There wasn’t much his mother would allow him do more active than reading in the library. She wasn’t planning on making the same mistake twice.’ Nancy sighed, pulled her knees up higher to her chest for warmth. ‘Ah, but there’s not a mother alive who can stop her boy getting into mischief if mischief ’s in his mind.’

  ‘What mischief did he get up to? What was it killed him, Nancy?’

  ‘In the end all it took was a trip up the stairs,’ Nancy said. ‘Happened at the Major’s house in Buckinghamshire. I didn’t see it myself, but Sarah, the housemaid there, saw it with her own two eyes, for she was dusting in the hall. She said he was running too fast, lost his footing and slipped. Nothing more. Mustn’t have hurt too bad for he hopped himself up, right as rain, and kept on going. It was that evening, Sarah said, that his knee swelled up like a ripe melon—just like Timmy’s shoulder before—and later in the night he started crying.’ ‘Was it days?’ I said. ‘Like the last time?’

  ‘Not with Adam, no.’ Nancy lowered her voice. ‘Sarah said the poor lad screamed with agony most of the night, calling for his mother, begging her to take the pain away. There was no one in that house slept a wink that long night, not even Mr Barker, the groom, who was all but deaf. They just lay in their beds, listening to the sound of that boy’s pain. The Major stood outside the door all night, brave as anything, never shed a tear.

  ‘Then, just before the dawn, according to Sarah, the crying stopped, sudden as you like, and the house fell to a dead silence. In the morning, when Sarah took the lad a breakfast tray, she found Jemima lying across his bed, and in her arms, face as peaceful as one of God’s own angels, her boy, just as if asleep.’

  ‘Was she crying, like the time before?’

  ‘Not this time,’ Nancy said. ‘Sarah said she looked almost as peaceful as him. Glad his suffering was over, I expect. The night was ended and she’d seen him off to a better place, where troubles and sorrows could find him no more.’ I considered this. The sudden cessation of the boy’s crying. His mother’s relief. ‘Nancy,’ I said slowly, ‘you don’t think—?’

  ‘I think it was a mercy that boy went faster than his brother, is what I think,’ Nancy snapped.

  There was silence then, and I thought for a minute she had fallen to sleep, though her breathing was still light which made me think she had not and was just pretending. I pulled the blanket up around my neck and closed my eyes, tried not to picture screaming boys and desperate mothers.

  I was just drifting off when Nancy’s whisper cut through the cold air. ‘Now she’s gone and expecting again, isn’t she. Due next August.’ She turned pious then. ‘You’re to pray extra hard, you hear? ’Specially now—He listens closer near Christmas. You’re to pray she’ll be delivered of a healthy babe this time.’ She rolled over and pulled the blanket with her. ‘One that won’t go bleeding itself to an early grave.’

  Christmas came and went, Lord Ashbury’s library was declared dust-free, and the morning after Boxing Day I defied the cold and headed into Saffron Green on an errand for Mrs Townsend. Lady Violet was planning a New Year luncheon party with hopes of enlisting support for her Belgian refugee committee. She quite liked the idea, Nancy had heard her say, of expanding into French and Portuguese expatriates, should it become necessary.

  According to Mrs Townsend there was no surer way to impress at luncheon than with Mr Georgias’s genuine Greek pastries. Not that they were available to all and sundry, she added with an air of self-aggrandisement, particularly not in these testing times. No indeed. I was to visit the grocery counter and ask for Mrs Townsend of Riverton’s special order.

  Despite the glacial weather, I was glad to make the trip to town. After weeks of festivity—Christmas, and now New Year—it was a welcome change to get outside, to be alone, to spend a morning beyond the range of Nancy’s endless scrutiny. For after months of relative peace, she had taken particular interest in my duties of late: watching, scolding, correcting. I had the uneasy sense of being groomed for a change I was yet to see coming.

  Besides, I had my own secret reason for welcoming the village chore. The fourth of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels of Sherlock Holmes had been printed and I’d arranged with the peddler to purchase a copy. It had taken me six months to save the money and it would be the first I had ever bought brand new. The Valley of Fear. The title alone made me thrill with anticipation.

  The peddler, I knew, lived with his wife and six children in a grey-stone back-to-back that stood to attention in a line of identical others. The street was part of a dreary housing pocket tucked behind the railway station, and the smell of burning coal hung heavy in the air. The cobblestones were black and a film of soot clung to the lampposts. I knocked cautiously on the shabby door, then stood back to wait. A child of about three, with dusty shoes and a threadbare pullover, sat on the step beside me, drumming the downpipe with a stick. His bare knees were covered in scabs made blue by the cold.

  I knocked again, harder this time. Finally the door opened to reveal a rake-thin woman with a pregnant belly tight beneath her apron and a red-eyed infant on her hip. She said nothing, looked through me with dead eyes while I found my tongue.

  ‘Hello,’ I said in a voice I’d learned from Nancy. ‘Grace Reeves. I’m looking for Mr Jones.’

  Still she said nothing.

  ‘I’m a customer.’ My voice faltered slightly; an unwanted note of inquiry crept in. ‘I’ve come to buy a book?’

  Her eyes flickered, an almost impercepti
ble sign of recognition. She hoisted the baby higher onto her bony hip and tilted her head toward a room behind. ‘He’s out the back.’

  She shifted some and I squeezed past, heading in the only direction the tiny house afforded. Through the doorway was a kitchen, thick with the stench of rancid milk. Two little boys, grubby with poverty, sat at the table, rolling a pair of stones along the scratched pine surface.

  The larger of the two rolled his stone into that of his brother then looked up at me, his eyes full moons in his hollowed face. ‘Are you looking for my pappy?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He’s outside, oiling the wagon.’

  I must have looked lost, for he pointed a stubby finger at a small timber door next to the stove.

  I nodded again, tried to smile.

  ‘I’ll be starting working with him soon,’ the boy said, turning back to his stone, lining up another shot. ‘When I’m eight.’

  ‘Lucky,’ the littler boy said jealously.

  The older one shrugged. ‘Someone needs to look after things while he’s gone, and you’re too small.’

  I made my way to the door and pushed it open.

  Beneath a clothes line strung with yellow-stained sheets and shirts the peddler was bent over inspecting the wheels of his cart. ‘Bloody bugger of a thing,’ he said under his breath.

  I cleared my throat and he spun around, knocking his head on the cart handle.

  ‘Bugger.’ He squinted up at me, a pipe hanging from his bottom lip.

  I tried to recapture Nancy’s spirit, failed, and settled for finding any voice at all. ‘I’m Grace. I’ve come about the book?’

  I waited. ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?’

  He leaned against the cart. ‘I know who you are.’ He exhaled and I breathed the sweet, burnt smell of tobacco. He wiped his oily hands on his pants and regarded me. ‘Fixing my wagon so it’s easy for the boy to manage.’

  ‘When are you going?’ I said.

  He gazed beyond the clothes line, heavy with its sallow ghosts, toward the sky. ‘Next month. With the Royal Marines.’ He brushed a dirty hand across his forehead. ‘Always wanted to see the ocean, ever since I was a boy.’ He looked at me and something in his expression, a sense of desolation, made me look away. Through the kitchen window I could see the woman, the infant, the two boys staring out at us. The dimpled glass, dull with soot, gave their faces the impression of reflections in a dirty pond.