Philippa Carr: Voices in a Haunted Room

“That is not always a deterrent. I don’t think it would have been with Jonathan. I was not sure with you. Jonathan was the most attractive man I ever knew… or ever will. He was perhaps irresistible. He was not a good man… as David is. There was adventure in him. He would have his way, and he didn’t always consider other people. But he died for his country.”

I agreed with her—and so we accepted our lives, as we needs must.

When her child was born she became absorbed in him. He was her delight. She called him Jonathan, and that other Jonathan lived again for her in him.

She was happier now—and so was I. I had David; I had Amaryllis; we were a united family and I was grateful to be a member of it.

One day we had an unexpected visitor who came from the Continent. He had met Charlot, who had begged him, if he returned to England, to take a message to my mother. Both Charlot and Louis Charles had married and left the Army. They now had their own vineyard in Burgundy; and the message was that when there was peace between England and France we should all meet again. My mother’s happiness was great. Only then did I realize how deeply saddened she had been by the loss of her son.

We had lived through stirring times. We had seen Napoleon become the Emperor of the French, with almost the whole of Europe under his control.

We had shivered with apprehension when he had turned his acquisitive eyes on our island. We were to be the next, and the threat of invasion by those seemingly unconquerable armies hung over us.

But we had our great men. Lord Nelson was one of them. We had just had the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Trafalgar Bay, and there was a lightness in the air; bonfires were blazing from one end of England to the other.

Nelson, the national hero, had died on his flagship and that flagship was symbolically called the Victory.

We were a large party that night and the conversation was all of the victory at Trafalgar, which had removed the threat of invasion and stopped the conqueror in his uninterrupted progress through the world.

My mother proposed a toast to Lord Nelson, the dead hero.

“And there is another I should like to include,” she went on. “Jonathan Frenshaw. It is because of men like these, who give themselves, that we may enjoy our peaceful lives. They are the real heroes.”

And we drank to that, for it was true.