Dark Harvest Read online

  And now Caroline, whom he had privately hoped was home to stay, was clearly restless. Of course, when Reggie came home and they married, she would settle down. Wouldn’t she?

  He was equally sure of the second part of his role, but the path to it was less clear. He prayed for light. His parish must be held together somehow, so that when its menfolk returned, their jobs, their families, their way of life could remain unchanged. For this reason he was still in two minds about women doing men’s work. For a woman to take over her husband’s job to keep the business going seemed to him a different matter from what he suspected Caroline had in mind: organised use of women’s labour. But if it had to come, it would, and his task would be all the harder.

  ‘Call me Canute,’ he thought wryly, hoping it would not fall to him to convince Ashden that tides could not be turned by men.

  Caroline flung open her bedroom window, regardless of early March winds. The larch still had its winter brown cones, but as she looked out over the gardens she could see signs of life. Fred Dibble was idly kicking the compost heap. Poor Fred—though why, she wondered, should she think of him as poor? He seemed happy enough. Thank goodness all that nonsense about his being a peeping Tom had died down. Harriet, their housemaid who had first accused him, seemed much happier now Agnes Pilbeam had left and she was the housemaid-cum-parlourmaid. Less than a year ago Caroline had been standing at this very window, wondering what life held for her. Since then so much had happened—too much. The choice had been simpler then: stay in Ashden or go away. But then there had been no Reggie, no war. The war called her away, Reggie wanted her to stay in England, preferably in Ashden. Why couldn’t she be a VAD at Ashden Manor like Felicia, he had suggested hopefully at Christmas. She had laughed, not taking him seriously. Lady Hunney disapproved so strongly of their engagement that he must know such proximity would be impossible.

  Time to tackle the trunk. It had been carefully packed with the help of Ellen, her Dover roommate. She was going to miss Ellen’s cheerful company, but she was determined not to lose touch with her. Ellen hailed from the East End of London and had never seen a cow before her train journey to Dover. Caroline had solemnly promised her a much closer introduction.

  It was time to change for supper. Daringly, she extracted one of her new shorter-length dresses from the trunk. Well, not exactly new, she admitted. It was several years old, but it was fashionably full-skirted. With the skirt chopped off just above the ankle by Ellen’s nimble fingers and two rows of military braid tacked on the bottom by her less accomplished ones, she decided, as she swirled in front of the mirror, that she could grace the fashion pages of The Lady. She wondered idly if Lady Hunney wore short skirts yet and giggled at the image it conjured up.

  Outside she could hear voices, doors slamming, as the family arrived home from their various daily occupations. She drew a deep breath and threw open her bedroom door—the sign, that she was prepared for visitors. The fire in the hearth, specially lit for her return, obligingly crackled into life.

  It was Phoebe, naturally, who catapulted through the door first. The puppy fat had completely vanished now, leaving her figure comfortably rounded like Mother’s, unlike Caroline’s own more slender build. Five years her junior, Phoebe was now nearly eighteen.

  ‘You’re back,’ Phoebe cried happily, embracing her briefly. ‘I suppose you couldn’t sew on this button, could you?’ She held out a serge skirt which Caroline recalled had started life as a gown of Mother’s.

  ‘I could not!’ Start doing things for Phoebe and she would never stop. ‘How’s the tea business?’

  Phoebe pulled a face. ‘Boring. I know it’s for the war effort and it was my idea, but you’ve no idea how I groan inside at making yet more cups of tea and smiling my head off when I’m frozen half to death. And the rain in January! Caroline, you can’t imagine what it was like. In June at least I’ll be old enough to be a VAD like you and Felicia, and do something interesting.’

  ‘You’d find that can be boring too, and you’d be tied to a contract.’

  Of all of them Phoebe most longed to escape from Ashden, and had been going to finishing school in Paris when the war had intervened. Unfortunately Phoebe, when bored, was likely to get into mischief. Caroline had her suspicions that her sister’s boredom lay behind the departure of their nice curate Christopher Denis last year. They’d been landed with dour Charles Pickering as a replacement. Even Phoebe hadn’t considered setting her cap at him. Her idea of serving teas to train travellers had succeeded in keeping her occupied, but now Caroline recognised with foreboding signs of trouble.

  Phoebe giggled. ‘I’m glad you’re back.’ Caroline squeezed her hand, and arm in arm they walked down the stairs to dinner. ‘With Felicia going, and Patricia Swinford-Browne away, and Eleanor going to be a vet, I hate being left to dole out cups—’

  ‘A what?’ Caroline stopped in surprise.

  ‘Oh, that. Dr Cuss needs an assistant.’ Phoebe was delighted with the effect she had had. ‘Eleanor’s working for him.’

  ‘And what does Lady Hunney say to her daughter becoming a vet?’

  ‘Quite a lot. But Eleanor’s still doing it.’

  She’d been away too long, Caroline decided. She was missing all the fun. ‘You’ve got Isabel for company.’

  Phoebe raised an eyebrow and it was Caroline’s turn to laugh as she warmed herself at the stove in the entrance hall. Only a few weeks now and they would lose its comforting heat, when the ritual day came and Percy and Fred staggered outside with it for storage till autumn.

  The youngest sister, between George and Felicia, Phoebe always came off worst in battles with Isabel. Impossible though her elder sister could be, Caroline had always felt close to her, and realised she was eagerly waiting for Isabel to walk in. The front door of the Rectory had always been kept unlocked, so it was with surprise that she heard the sound of the bell. She turned an inquiring eye to Phoebe.

  ‘It’s Rector’s Hour,’ her sister explained. ‘It gets so busy now, Father decided he must regulate it by knowing who was waiting to see him. Besides, someone is pinching the coal. Father thinks they take a lump or two each time they come.’

  ‘Coal?’ Caroline repeated, horrified.

  ‘Mother says it’s because times are so hard and the family allowances don’t stretch far enough. There’s a coal shortage.’

  ‘I know. I haven’t been in Outer Mongolia,’ Caroline said patiently. ‘It affects Dover as well as Ashden.’ Sometimes Dover had felt like Outer Mongolia, a different world of sadness and horror, and she had to teach herself not to brood in her few free hours about the endless stream of stretchers being ferried from hospital ship to ambulance, to yet another train and another hospital. That each stretcher might be carrying Reggie had been her immediate fear, though she tried not to let it show as she raised a smile for those conscious enough to appreciate it. When it was her turn to do canteen duty, how she had longed to be back in the Rectory kitchen, listening to Mrs Dibble and Mother discussing the rising price of sugar over a cup of tea. She had vowed that when she returned, the kitchen would be the place she’d visit first, as if to reassure herself it was still there. And so it had been.

  The Rectory was a little different, though. Before the war the days had an order to them, the steady clock of Rectory life. Matins, Family Prayers and sacrosanct mealtimes, Evensong, Rector’s Hour—and so each day chimed away. The year too had its order, ruled by spring-cleaning (‘On the first of March the fleas do jump’ she was accustomed to hearing from Mrs Dibble as she prepared for the spring battle), bottling, preserving and harvesting, as well as by the Church festivals. She had loved it all. Now this life was threatened as the war became a reality for Ashden like the rest of England. The Kaiser’s raids in January had set off a Zeppelin panic. Mother had confided to her that Percy Dibble was sent out nightly to scour the skies before he was allowed to go to bed, in case the five hundred foot monster had set its sights on them.

  There was another
ring at the door. Caroline reluctantly moved away from the stove.

  ‘There’s Isabel,’ Phoebe announced confidently. ‘You can always tell her ring. She’s the Lord Kitchener of Ashden. Come forth, all ye who would serve Isabel—’

  ‘Phoebe!’ warned Caroline.

  Isabel’s face brightened when she saw Caroline. She was still the prettiest of them all, Caroline thought, with her fair curls and blue eyes and tall slim figure, though Felicia was undoubtedly the most beautiful. If only Isabel would smile more.

  She rushed to embrace her sister. Even in her excitement, she noted that the patriotic urge against buying new clothes had not affected Isabel; that full swirling taffeta skirt and elegant simple blouse had come straight from the dressmaker—and not the village seamstress, Mrs Hazel, either, Caroline thought indulgently. Behind her she could hear Felicia’s voice and the pounding of feet that declared George was on his way. And so, bursting with happiness, she went in to dinner.

  As her father said grace, she wondered what Reggie might be eating at this moment, and where he was. In a trench? In his billets behind the line? In an exotic estaminet? No, she would not think about Reggie now; she would join in the grace and appreciate where she was. As Harriet brought in the soup, she even gave thanks for Mrs Dibble, who for all her quirks and oddities had obviously been determined to provide her favourite dishes. George had teased her on the way in that they were reduced to nettle soup and stewed cow heel, but here was the familiar leek and potato, and even an early roast of lamb, normally only served for the first time at Easter.

  She listened to her family chattering about the events of the day and the latest village dramas, content just to be back here. At last George could wait no longer to ask what was uppermost in his mind. ‘Did you see any Zeppelins?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I’ve seen a few aeroplanes. British, that is. Oh, and a seaplane or two.’

  ‘You were lucky being in Dover,’ he moaned. ‘Everything’s happening there. Not like Ashden.’

  ‘It’s happening everywhere, George,’ her father pointed out. ‘Even here.’

  ‘The day a Zep appears over Ashden, I’ll eat my school hat.’

  ‘The shadow lies over us all,’ Elizabeth commented quietly. ‘They could strike anywhere. But this is not the time or place to discuss it.’

  ‘You always said we should talk over the important issues of the day at dinner. And the chaps at Skinner’s were talking about what we’re going to do when we’re old enough.’ Or before, he thought.

  Caroline caught a glance between her parents, an odd silence which her mother quickly smoothed over with a reference to the apple pie before them. ‘This is the last of the apples in the applety, as Mrs Dibble still calls it.’ The applety was one half of the hayloft above Poppy’s stable, where Percy and Fred carefully stored the apples from the orchard each September. ‘Goodness knows how much we’ll have to pay to buy more. Ever since the Kaiser announced he was going to start blockading food supplies, the general stores seem to be putting their prices up every week.’

  ‘What was all that about?’ Caroline later hissed at Felicia as they went upstairs for a private talk, before rejoining the family in the drawing room. George had left to escort Isabel home with a dimmed torch.

  ‘There was a stink in January because George announced he wanted to leave Skinner’s right away and go into the Royal Flying Corps.’ Felicia eyed Caroline’s bed, strewn with her Dover belongings, and opted for the armchair.

  ‘But he’s far too young.’

  ‘He’ll be seventeen next December, and that’s their minimum age. He fancies himself shooting down a Zeppelin, and is desperately hoping that the war will last long enough for him to volunteer. You can imagine what that’s doing to Mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It came about because he decided—without telling Father—to apply for one of those scholarships Skinner’s offers for Tonbridge School, so that he could train in commercial studies instead of going to Oxford as Father wants him to. Then he got cross because, being George, he left it too late and found he couldn’t apply after his sixteenth birthday, and Father refused to pay, so he’s had this idea instead.’

  ‘Commercial studies? He can’t even handle his pocket money.’

  ‘He wants to become a commercial artist. Did he tell you he sold a cartoon about a Zeppelin to Bystander?’

  ‘No. He’s not the best of letter writers.’

  ‘He was so proud of it, he wanted to put it in the parish magazine too, only Father forbade it.’

  ‘Why?’ In Caroline’s view, her brother was doing an amazingly good job of editing the magazine in her absence.

  ‘He doesn’t want Ashden infected by Zeppelin panic more than it is already.’

  ‘But surely to laugh at it is the best remedy.’

  ‘I agree, but he also considers the parish magazine is not the place to discuss war, and that I agree with too.’

  ‘But is it right to ignore it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Caroline.’

  Caroline glanced at her sister and realised she had been less than considerate. In comparison with Felicia’s problems, a parish magazine must seem small beer.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked gently.

  At first Caroline thought she had gone too far in asking about Daniel Hunney, for Felicia’s usually serene face clouded. Her sister was the only one of them who always preferred to keep her own counsel. When they were growing up, it had been taken for shyness, but the few weeks that Caroline had worked with her sister as a VAD had shown her that shyness hid a strength of purpose that outshone them all. Today, however, with her departure so near, she seemed glad of the chance to talk of Daniel.

  ‘It looked so hopeful. He went to a Belgian hospital in Calais for treatment, and had to have another operation there because the stump wasn’t healing properly. Now he’s back here, and they can’t fit an artificial leg until it does. Oh Caroline, the pain.’

  She did not say whether the pain was his or hers. Even now it seemed unbelievable that Daniel Hunney, Reggie’s strikingly handsome and energetic younger brother, who last year had had such high hopes of travelling the world after coming down from Oxford, now lay semi-paralysed in a hospital ward in his former home, and with only half a left leg. It was for his sake that Felicia had trained to be a VAD so that she could at least be near him, showing a single-mindedness in her devotion to him that was not returned. Or if it was, something—Caroline did not know what—had gone awry: the family had been shocked to hear of Felicia’s intention to work abroad as soon as her first contract was over. Under Red Cross rules, at nineteen she wasn’t nearly old enough to work overseas. Caroline had reminded her at Christmas, and all Felicia had replied was that ‘there are ways’.

  Though she had not said so, Caroline had a shrewd idea that she had arranged to join Aunt Tilly. Tilly had gone to join the FANYs, who since Christmas had taken over responsibility at Calais for transport of the wounded. Would her aunt be content to serve under orders? Caroline still found it hard to believe that the woman she had taken to be a retiring, submissive daughter to the formidable Dowager Lady Buckford was not only a suffragette but a militant, who had been in prison more than once.

  ‘An artificial leg, although he’s paralysed?’ Caroline queried.

  ‘The doctors still aren’t sure how permanent the paralysis is. Paralysis from gunshots can wear off, and the effects of Daniel’s shrapnel wounds too perhaps. Lady Hunney is insisting he knows that he’s to be fitted with a leg to give him an incentive to fight the paralysis. She’s installed some new machine called Zander apparatus which helps encourage movement. Not to mention a whirlpool bath worked by compressed air, which helps some of the pain coming from the missing limb. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But it works, and you know what she’s like.’

  Caroline knew only too well, and felt envious of Felicia’s freedom to travel, whatever the sad reason. Because she loved Reggie, Caroline had agreed to stay for there was
much for women to do here in England—if only the government would let them.

  My darling one,

  Your lovely letters of the 12th, 13th and 14th arrived together and I would have liked to read them in correct military order. I was too impatient for that and seized one sentence from the first, another from the second and another from the last …

  I wish I had something to tell you to show what a hero I have been, so that you would be proud of me. All is quiet though, leaving one too much time to contemplate whether in action one might fail to do one’s Hunneybest or, even as I write this, fall to a sniper’s bullet. I much prefer the action: one does what one has to do, and thinks after.

  The dawn is breaking here, the same dawn that is kissing you awake in Ashden. Lucky dawn, don’t you think? Oh my darling, remember our orchard, remember our Christmas, only remember, as I do, and then we shall be together.

  Caroline folded up the letter once again and blew out the candle, but sleep was a long time coming. If there had been no war she would have been married to Reggie by now, and though she respected his view that they should wait till the fighting was over, she couldn’t understand it. He loved her, she knew that, even more now than when they realised they were in love last summer. Daniel’s tragedy must have had a lot to do with Reggie’s decision for it had affected him deeply. During his brief leave at Christmas she sensed a part of his mind was still on the Western Front with his men, and he did not seem to have the energy to discuss their marriage.

  Her head told her that was the reason, but her heart could not share its certainty. He was fighting for their future, he had told her, fighting for what his forefathers had built and the future security of Ashden. Then why not marry and create an heir, she had thought rebelliously. Perhaps he did not wish to leave her a widow? Why not? If he were killed, leaving her like this was just as bad. She was sure that their marriage would give him extra determination to fight on. Did this work for her too? She supposed so, but most of the time she could only remember Reggie’s arms around her and his words ‘I love you’, which held her as a comforting blanket in the uncertain chill of March.