Chapter One
“How very nice, Mrs. Jackson.”
Iyntwood’s elderly butler settled into his chair by the window. “Why, it’s almost
like old times again.” George Hollyoak’s glance took in the claustrophobic and over-furnished
room: shabby velvet chairs jostled with a heavy mahogany desk, taking up far too much space in front of the win- dows, both of which were swathed in heavy curtains in a dusty but strident red plaid.
The dowager Countess of Montfort had died two years ago and her character, or that of the late Queen Victoria,
whom she had revered, was still heavily imprinted on the dower house furnished as a faithful replica of the old queen’s
beloved Balmoral Castle. Bright
and, to Mrs.
Jackson’s flinching eye, brash
tartans dominated most of the reception
rooms on the ground floor of Haversham Hall.
Mrs. Jackson was encouraged to see George Hollyoak
sitting in her new office. It had taken weeks to coax him to visit her and now after all sorts of silly excuses
here he was. Though even with her old friend and mentor sitting at his leisure
with a cup of after- noon tea in his hand it wasn’t really like old times, no matter how much they all wished it were. The war had changed everything. Her face must have reflected her thoughts as she followed his
gaze around the oppressively furnished room. “Perhaps
not quite like old times.” Her guest smiled as he observed
a shaft of dust motes dancing thickly in the late summer sunlight. “I must say you are looking well, Mrs. Jackson, and so very smart in your uniform: Voluntary Aid Detachment or Red Cross?” This was the first time he had acknowledged that Iyntwood’s
dower house had been transformed into an auxiliary hospital.
“The hospital comes under the jurisdiction of the Red Cross, but I trained with the VAD. I am not an assisting
nurse, so I am spared the traditional starched apron and the rather claustrophobic cap,” she answered. Long aprons and linen caps, in her experience, were worn by cooks, and although Mrs. Jackson was not a snob, she was conscious
of little things like rank and station.
In acknowledging Haversham Hall’s new status the old man evidently felt he might ask his next question. He leaned forward, curiosity bright in his eyes. “And how are you finding
life in your new abode?”
Mrs. Jackson hesitated before she answered. She had never liked Haversham Hall; it was as overbearing as the Victorian age it had been built in and an ugly building in comparison to the Elizabe- than elegance of Iyntwood. But she had made the adjustment from being a senior servant to Ralph Cuthbert Talbot, the Earl of Mont- fort, at his principal country-seat, to the rank of quartermaster at Lady Montfort’s new hospital far more easily than she had an- ticipated. The real challenge had come when their first patients had arrived, but this was something she was not prepared to share with Mr. Hollyoak—not just yet.
“It is not as diferent as I thought
it would be. Haversham
Hall is not Iyntwood,
but it is a building
I am familiar
with, and my duties here are similar
to those of my position
as housekeeper at Iyntwood.”
That’s not strictly true, she thought, but it will do for now.
Her new job was not at all like her old one, any more than this
hospital was like many of the others that had sprung
up all over the country in the many private houses of the rich and titled, speedily converted
to cope with an unceasing flow of wounded men from France. At Haversham
Hall Hospital there were no wards lined with rows of beds, no operating theaters with trays of steel surgical instruments, or hastily installed sluices and ster- ilizers. Certainly there was an occasionally used sick bay and a first aid room in what was known as the medical wing, but they were merely a token adjunct. And it was these diferences that were the cause for Mr. Hollyoak’s initial reluctance to visit her and for his searching question, “How are you finding life in your new abode?” because Haversham Hall Hospital was not a conventional Red Cross hospital, not by a long stretch of the imagination.
She raised her teacup to her lips and took a sip. If she was to help a man whose conventions were deeply
mired in the nine- teenth century to understand
the value of the hospital’s purpose, she must proceed with cautious
tact. She decided to start with
a prosaic
description of the practicalities.
“I am responsible for the running of the hospital’s housekeeping and for ordering all supplies, which means I spend most of my time sitting at my desk filling in requisition forms; the bureau- cracy of wartime, her ladyship calls it. But we have plenty of nice young women from the Voluntary Aid Detachment to help with the housekeeping as well as some of our nursing duties. And I certainly need to be well placed here on the ground floor of the house to su- pervise them.” She did not add “every step of the way” because that way of thinking made her resent how difficult
it was to work with inexpert help. To go with her cheerful tone she exhibited her most optimistic smile. VAD girls from nice middle-class families were a nightmare to train in comparison
to sensible, sturdy village women who were ready to roll up their sleeves and had no roman- tic illusions about their part in the war efort.
Having given her visitor the briefest outline of her duties, she
decided that she would wait for him to display
genuine interest— enthusiasm would be too much to hope for—in what they were accomplishing here before
she continued. She ofered Mr. Hol- lyoak a plate of sandwiches: delicate triangles of egg with cress. She had prepared them herself, mashing the hard-boiled egg finely with a narrow-tined fork and adding just the right amount of salt, pepper, and cress to spread on lightly buttered crustless bread. He took a sandwich and closed his eyes as he chewed and swallowed the first bite.
“Perfect,” he said and smiled his appreciation, “quite perfect.
I need not say how much you are missed at Iyntwood.” He took an- other bite of sandwich and then slowly shook his head. “The house simply isn’t the same without
you.”
She detected
real regret in his voice that she was no longer his second-in-command in a servants’ hall now stafed
entirely with women. She knew how hard it had been for him to adapt to her temporary employment by the Red Cross, if it was indeed the Red Cross that paid her generous salary and not, as she suspected, the Earl of Montfort.
Perhaps this
is why I am reluctant
to talk about the hospital, because I find my new life so stimulating, and how ever inefficient they are, I enjoy working with young and lively women whose backgrounds are as varied as our duties. However terrible this war was, it had certainly
opened up a new perspec- tive to those from other walks of life and in particular the staid and confined life of an upper servant
to the aristocracy. All of this would be difficult to explain to a man whose retinue
of per- fectly trained footmen was serving in the trenches of northern France.
“I know it’s wrong of me to say so, Mrs. Jackson,
but Iyntwood seems so quiet, so empty now that we are not formally entertain- ing the way we used to. We all work, just as hard, perhaps even more so, to maintain
standards but only because we have to make do with far less staf. I am sometimes
hard put to remember our
gracious lives before that terrible day in 1914.” Mr. Hollyoak
looked down into his empty teacup before he put it on the table between them and she poured him a second cup.
“I am quite sure that none of us will ever forget that day, Mr. Hol- lyoak.” She nodded her head in commiseration of the old man’s many losses. Others might remember the fourth of August, when Britain rallied to the flag, as one of the loveliest days of a perfect summer, the sort of day that Englishmen wrote poems about when they were far from home. But what fixed it in her memory was that it was a morning on which her ladyship had triumphed in a particularly tricky inquiry
at neighboring Bishop’s Hever and a murder of such audacious cunning that just remembering it still raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Tea poured, she ofered her guest
the sugar bowl and silently counted the three sugar lumps he extravagantly stirred into his tea. Mr. Hollyoak
had always had a sweet tooth and sugar was in short supply these days.
“No word from Dick Wilson, I’m afraid, Mrs. Jackson. It’s been nearly a month now, and Dick was always like clockwork
with his letters before—we would have heard by now if there was bad news, wouldn’t
we?”
So it wasn’t just curiosity that brought you here, then. More than likely the old man had come to see her out of loneliness, perhaps for solace.
Iyntwood’s hall boy at age eighteen had been one of the first to join the British Expeditionary Force to France in 1914. She took a sip of tea. “Sometimes the post is a bit erratic,
Mr. Hol- lyoak. Do you remember
when we didn’t hear from John for nearly two months? And then dozens of letters came, all in one go, each
and
every one of them asking us to send socks?”
He nodded, willing to hope that all was well with the youngest member of his servants’ hall. “I certainly do.” A faint smile as he remembered
their fastidious second footman’s complaints after a winter of rain-filled trenches. “That boy has enough socks for a battalion now.”
She cut him a piece of Victoria sponge cake. “Ah, Mrs. Jackson, you spoil me.” He sighed with contentment. “No time for a good sponge cake belowstairs at Iyntwood
now that Mrs. Thwaite’s kitchen maids have all left to become munitionettes at the Ban- bury factory.” Her face betrayed no irritation but she inwardly bris- tled at the term “munition-ette,” as the suffix made the dangerous job sound diminutive—dainty, even. Is that what they are calling them now—what’s wrong with “munition workers”? They are prob ably required to wear ridiculous little caps with frills, like waitresses at a Lyons Corner House, when they pack those shells with their bare hands. She shrugged
of her annoyance
and presented a pas- sive face as she listened to Mr. Hollyoak’s gentle grumbling
about lowered standards. “Lord and Lady Montfort are most careful not to overburden the staf these days, but Cook is so run of her feet without her kitchen maids that she is threatening to go and join them in Banbury. She says at least she would know what was ex- pected of her.” He shook
his head that someone
of Mrs. Thwaite’s age and status
would even consider factory
work.
The image of the cook’s angry red face flashed into Mrs. Jack- son’s mind. “She’s the last person in the world to be in charge of explosives I would have thought,” she said before she could stop herself.
Mr. Hollyoak chuckled. “Always a bit heavy-handed with the pots and pans is our Mrs. Thwaite, but the lightest touch when it comes to pastry and puddings. But, never mind all of that . . . how is life finding you these days . . . I mean, how do you . . .” he groped for the right phrase. “I mean what do you make of all this?” He waved the last bite of Victoria sponge around her office, clearly indicating that he was now ready to hear more about the hospital. Mr. Hollyoak was well aware, as everyone was in the village and the county, that Haversham
Hall Hospital had been one of Lady Montfort’s bright ideas right from the start, which was probably why he was picking his words so carefully. Mrs. Jackson set down
her cup and saucer. She had no difficulty
in recalling how grim her ladyship’s mood had been when she had returned
from visit- ing an old family friend in Scotland. It had been a bitterly
cold evening in early December
last year. She was certainly a woman on a mission, if there ever was one, when she came back from vis iting that terrible place.
“I have never seen such tragic young men,” Lady Montfort
had announced to her housekeeper as she stood in middle
of her sitting room, still wearing her hat and gloves and with her fur huddled closely around her neck. “It was heartbreaking to see them, sitting so meekly in their corners, seemingly quite unaware of where they were.”
“How is Mr. Barclay faring, m’lady?”
Everyone belowstairs at Iyntwood was fond of Oscar
Barclay, a particular friend of the Talbots’ only son, Lord Haversham, who had alerted his mother to Mr. Barclay’s plight: a casualty
of the Battle of Loos, in France, and now a patient at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland.
“He is sufering from what the army refers to in their ignorance as shell-shock and what the doctors call neurasthenia, Jackson. I hardly know how to describe what has happened
to that wholly decent and kind young man; you simply wouldn’t
recognize him. So pitifully thin . . . he shakes at any loud or sudden sound. When he tries to speak—he hardly uttered
a word the whole time I was there—he stammers so, his mouth trembles,
and he . . .” Lady Montfort’s eyes filled with tears and she stared fiercely of into a corner of the room until she had regained
her composure. “The hospital was generous enough to put me up in the staf wing while I was there. It is a dreadful
old building: run-down, drafty, and cold. All night I could hear those poor young men crying out like souls in torment . . .” She had tailed of and Mrs. Jackson
had al- most reached out to take her hand, that was how distressed her ladyship
had been. “They say nothing about their sufering, noth- ing at all.” She had managed to continue in the flat monotone
people of her class used when they were embarrassed about dis- playing emotion. “They politely lock down into stammering or silence.
There is no release for them it seems—even when they manage to sleep they wake screaming
from their nightmares as they relive over and over the horrors of battle.” Lady Montfort had gazed down at the carpet for a moment
to bring herself
back under complete control. “One of the doctors at Craiglockhart, his name is Brock, believes that the act of functioning—of doing simple and useful tasks that engage the mind and body in healthy activities—is often successful in helping
these men to mend, or at least recover
something of their lives. All the way home on the train I kept thinking about them and what the doctor told me they were doing for them. It made me think that we might be of use.”
However distressed
she was, the Countess of Montfort was a resilient woman. High-strung? Certainly, and Mrs. Jackson
was the first to acknowledge her ladyship’s little ways, but her mistress was not without
an inner strength
and vitality that never left her, even during these terrible
days of war. She had rallied from the horrors of her trip to Scotland, and after several
long walks in the frosty woodlands
on the estate with her husband
had persuaded Lord Montfort not only to ofer up Haversham Hall to the War Office as a hospital for those
young men who were on the road to recovery from neurasthenia, but to make a substantial donation to its running and upkeep.
Mrs. Jackson had no intention of trying to explain the innova- tive new treatments used at the hospital
to her doubting friend sitting across from her. It had taken her a while to overcome
her natural skepticism in the first weeks of her employment, especially to this new “talking cure” that the doctors had come up with. It had barely made any sense to her at first and it was the last thing in the world she would repeat to the old butler.
She got up and opened the window to let a little air into the slight
stuffiness building in the room. “I have made the adjustment quite nicely,
Mr. Hollyoak, I am glad to say. It was difficult
at first. I was completely unprepared for how deeply distressed our first patients were when they came
here.”
The old man cleared his throat. “If I may just say this,
Mrs. Jack- son, I am veteran of the Boer Wars and I am unfortunately fa- miliar with the distress war wreaks on its soldiers. Conditions were indescribable at the Siege of Ladysmith when I was deployed there during the African wars. Our sufering was considerable, but none of us shrank from what we had to do. Why, most of us sur- vived by eating rats and existing on a canteen
cap of water a day. Typhoid carried of at least one-third of our number, maybe even more. But you see, Mrs.
Jackson, real men do not hesitate to fight to the bitter end, no matter how hideous the conditions are. I am not saying there were no cowards in my day, of course there were and we gave them very short shrift.” Mrs. Jackson concealed a smile and respectfully nodded along as he remembered his war. How often had Mr. Hollyoak regaled the servants’ hall with graphic and bloody tales of the African wars? He had described getting over typhoid as if he had shaken of a chill caught on some sort of Boy Scouts camping trip. But what it boiled down to was that in Mr. Hollyoak’s opinion, real men didn’t complain, even under the worst of conditions, they merely
got on with it; only a cow- ard would hide out in a place like Haversham
Hall Hospital and talk about the horrors of war with his
doctor.
She summoned patience and tried again. “I understand, Mr. Hollyoak. Until I came to work here I thought of our patients as cowards too. Now I have to say I have had a complete change of mind. Every one of our officers say they want to return to the war as soon as they are able. Our job here, you see, is to help them function so they can lead their men in battle.” She saw Mr. Hol- lyoak’s look of disbelief and she stepped it up a notch. “They know they are thought of as cowards, they are painfully aware of it. What
is the expression they use in the navy—swinging the lead?” Mr. Hollyoak acknowledged malingerers with a fervent
nod. “We are low in numbers
this week as thirteen
of our twenty
patients passed their Medical Board review and are now on their way back to the Western Front, to Mesopotamia, and Egypt. They went will- ingly and with brave hearts.”
She caught his eye and tried to hold his gaze but he turned, reaching for his cup. When he had it in his hand she sought his eyes again. “Strangely
enough, most of them here were decorated for bravery—before they became seri- ously ill.”
He raised his eyebrows
and took a sip of tea. Yes, I thought
that might surprise you. “There were six Distinguished Service Orders alone among our first fifteen officers, twelve of them mentioned in dispatches, and four Military
Crosses in our second group. One of our officers was even recommended for the Victoria Cross. And it is quite remarkable that straightforward, useful work in the open air does so much to help
restore our patients
to normal life—we call it
‘cure through function.’ ” He smiled
politely and gestured with his teacup to the comfortable country house they were seated in, as if to say, Who wouldn’t want to hide out the war here?
His eyes wandered
to the little clock ticking
away on the chim- neypiece.
She was losing him. She sought to change the subject. “Well, enough
of my work.
It must be wonderful to have Lord Haversham at home—is his arm healing well?” The old man brightened up at the mention of Lord and Lady Montfort’s son, who was home on medical leave from the Royal Naval Air Service with a fractured
arm.
“Just plain ‘Captain
Talbot’ is the title Lord Haversham
prefers these days,” he said with paternalistic pride. “The highest scor- ing ace of his squadron and decorated
three times, but of course he plays all that sort of thing down.”
“He was always a modest young man.” Mrs. Jackson
did not want to precipitate another saga of heroic acts of derring-do from
Mr. Hollyoak.
Any man who fought in this war had her admira- tion, and Mr. Hollyoak
did rather go on. “I am glad to hear that all is well at Iyntwood, Mr. Hollyoak.
It certainly looks like Lady Althea is doing a lot for the county with her Women’s Land Army.” The war had curtailed the Talbots’
youngest daughter’s love of travel, and now that she
was safely
marooned on the family estate she had involved herself
in representing the government’s volunteer force that provided local farmers with labor. “I can’t believe the jobs those young women are taking on, can you, Mr. Hollyoak?” She took
a bite of cake. “Up at dawn
and out in all weather. You have to take your hat of to them, don’t you? I sim- ply don’t know what our farmers would have done without them, especially with this bumper harvest.”
The old butler sighed and pursed his lips. His handsome old head was imposingly leonine and when he slowly shook it from side to side, as he did now, it gave him all the appearance of an ofended biblical elder—Moses when he returned from Mount Si- nai to find the children of Israel had relapsed into drink and idol- atry sprang to Mrs. Jackson’s
mind and she bit the inside of her cheeks to stop herself
from laughing outright. “They wear riding breeches.” Mr. Hollyoak put down his empty cup with some fi- nality. “Most immodest and unattractive in the female form.”