Rosie Thomas - Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection - The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White

But now Isabel was saying ‘Where can we go?’ in a thin voice that suddenly sounded lost. ‘It’s Nanny’s day off, do you remember? And it’s after four o’clock, so we can’t see Miss May, and Cook doesn’t like us to go in the kitchen in the afternoon …’

Her voice trailed away.

‘Up to the nursery,’ Amy answered with conviction. ‘Everything will be all right there.’

Slowly now but still hand in hand they walked the length of the drawing room, past the sofa where their mother sat before dinner when they came down to kiss her good night on the evenings when there were no guests, through another salon hung with pictures and past spindly gilt furniture, and out into a great space where a wide staircase curved away above their heads. Isabel and Amy turned their backs on the cathedral-like quiet and slipped through a discreet door hidden in the shadows under the stairway. Beyond the door the corridor was narrow and stone-flagged. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of another door banging, hurrying footsteps and an urgently raised voice. They began to walk faster again, making for the stairs leading up to the sanctuary of the nursery wing.

The day nursery was on the west side of the house, and the blinds were half drawn against the light. Long bars of sunshine struck over the polished floor and the familiar worn rugs.

The last time he had been at home, Airlie had draped himself with them, playing bears on his hands and knees, laughing and puffing and telling the girls that the same rugs had been on the floor when he was a baby. When the game was over he had stood up and brushed the fluff from the new uniform he was so proud of. Amy remembered the smell of wool and leather, and the creak of his highly polished Sam Browne belt.

At first sight the nursery seemed empty, but then there was a rustle and the door of one of the tall cupboards swung to. A girl emerged from behind it, round-faced under a white cap, her arms full of folded linen. She saw their stricken faces and let the linen fall in a heap.

‘Miss Isabel, Miss Amy, what’s wrong then?’

Bethan Jones was the new nurserymaid. She was sixteen years old and had come to Chance from her home in the Welsh valleys only a month ago, and the little girls barely knew her except as a quick, aproned figure fetching and carrying for Nanny. Her soft Welsh accent sounded strange to them, but they heard the warmth in her voice now. Amy ran to her at once and Bethan’s arms wrapped round her.

‘There now. Tell Bethan, won’t you?’

Bethan pulled her closer, rocking her, and looked across at Isabel, still standing at the door.

‘What is it, lamb?’

Isabel was torn between what she believed was the right way to behave, and what she really wanted to do, which was to run like Amy and bury herself in Bethan’s arms. She took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and said formally, ‘I am afraid that a telegram came. My brother Airlie has been killed in France.’

Amy felt Bethan flinch as if from a blow, but still she didn’t fully take in the words.

‘The poor boy,’ Bethan said simply. ‘The poor, poor boy.’

She held out her hand and Isabel stopped trying to behave in the right way and ran to shelter beside her sister.

‘What does it mean about Airlie?’ Amy asked, and seeing Isabel’s wet, crumpled face she began dimly to understand that nothing at Chance would ever be the same again.

‘It means that a German soldier shot him with a bullet, and hurt him so much that he’s dead, and we won’t ever see him again,’ Isabel said. ‘Never, never, because they will bury him in the ground.’ Her voice rose, shrill with horror, and her fingers snatched at the blue cotton of the nurserymaid’s uniform skirt.

‘Hush, darling,’ Bethan soothed her. ‘Don’t talk about it like that. Amy, it means that your brother was a brave, brave man and you must be proud of him. It’s a terrible war, but we should be thankful for all the brave soldiers who are fighting for us and pray for it to be over so that they can come safe home again. Do you understand?’

But how could they? Bethan answered herself.

‘Listen,’ she said softly, ‘your brother wanted to go to war to fight for England, and all the things that he believed are right. All good men do. If I was a man, I’d go. My brothers went as soon as they could, and … and my fiancé is in France too. He’s a private in the Welsh Division, the 38th, and when he comes home we’ll be married. It’ll be hard at first, but we’ll manage a place of our own and then you can come and see me, wouldn’t you like that, to come to Wales and see the valleys? There’s nowhere like it, you know. Ah, it’s not beautiful country like this, all cornfields and great trees, but it’s the best place on earth.’ Bethan closed her eyes on the nursery and saw the ranks of tiny grey houses clinging to the steep valley sides, the black slag hills and the skeletal towers of the pit winding-gear, and the sudden moist flashes of green between the laced black fingers of the mine workings. ‘He was doing grand, Dai was, before the War came,’ Bethan whispered. ‘More tonnage out of his pit than ever before, and him with a job at the coal face. There’s none to beat Welsh steam coal, you know. None in the world.’ And she lowered her head so that her cheek was pressed against the little girls’ smooth hair, and cried with them.

When Nanny Macleod came back from her afternoon off she found them still sitting on the nursery floor, and with their three faces identically stained with the runnels of tears.

For three days Chance was as silent as a crypt. Gerald Lovell saw no one. He sat in his library, looking out across the lawns to the trees of the park, his head tilted as if he was listening for a sound that never came. On the third afternoon he went outside, keeping to the shade of the avenues of trees as if he couldn’t bear to feel the sun’s warmth on his head. He walked painfully to the little church enclosed by the estate, and in the shelter of the thick stone walls he read the memorial tablets of Lovells spanning the centuries. Almost every one of them, lords of the manor and their ladies, old men and matriarchs, children dead in infancy, unmarried daughters and weakly younger sons, had been put finally to rest in the family vault. Even that was denied to Airlie. Bitterness rose like nausea in Gerald Lovell. There could be no burial service here for Airlie as there had been for Gerald’s father, as there would be one day for Gerald himself, with the family in heavy mourning in the big, square, screened-off family pew, and the church filled with neighbours, tenants and estate workers paying their dutiful respects. The letter from Airlie’s commanding officer following the telegram praised him for his heroism. Airlie had died beneath Thiepval Ridge and was buried with his comrades. ‘A soldier’s grave for a fine soldier,’ the captain had written as he must do in an attempt to comfort the families of every one of the men dead under his command. There was no comfort in it for Gerald. There could be no fittingly solid coffin for Airlie, made from one of Chance’s own oaks and heaped with flowers from the scented July borders. Airlie had been hastily huddled into the ground with the mutilated bodies of a hundred, perhaps a thousand others.

Gerald lurched against a pew end, the pain like a living thing inside him. His head arched backwards, and over his head he saw the dim, greenish-black folds of an ancient banner. He reached up with a curse and tore the cloth from its staff, the fibres splitting into tiny, dusty fragments that drifted lazily around him. The gold-thread-embroidered letters were tarnished with age, but still legible.

‘Regis defensor ,’ Gerald said loud. ‘The King’s Defender.’ His sudden laugh was shockingly loud in the silent church. ‘Is that what he was doing, defending the King? I could have done that just as well. Why wasn’t it me? Oh God, Airlie, why not me instead?’ He lifted his hands above his head and tore the black banner in two, and then again, letting the shreds of it fall around him until only the gold thread remained, and then twining that around his fingers and pulling it so tight that his fingers went as white as candles. Then, just as suddenly, the fit of rage left him and he dropped the thread, turning away from the debris and walking out of the church as if it didn’t exist.