Daisychain Summer

ELIZABETH ELGIN

Daisychain Summer

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

Copyright © Elizabeth Elgin 1995

Elizabeth Elgin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006478874

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780008271190

Version: 2018-11-12

Dedication

To my grandsons

James, Simon, Matthew, Martin and Tom

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Peace for Our Time

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

1

1920

She should have told him long before this. When she held their firstborn in her arms she had said it would be, yet that baby was four weeks old now, and still he did not know. Nor had he asked. It was as if he had pushed that part of her life behind him; locked it in a small, secret corner of his mind, never to be spoken of again.

‘Whatever it was,’ Tom had said, ‘is in the past. It’s you I want, Alice. Just you.’ And in that moment she had known that one day she would tell him the truth of it, explain how it had been so he might understand – and forgive.

‘Very well, if you choose not to know. But since you are taking me on trust, I’ll make you a promise, Tom. The day I hold our firstborn in my arms, then you shall know – every last word of it …’

Yet was this really the right day on which to tell him? Why not yesterday, or tomorrow? Why today, the first anniversary of their wedding?

She dropped to her knees beside the cot. She spent so much time just gazing at her daughter, trying to believe the wonder of her birth, the ease of it and the joy. And Tom, eyes moist, holding her close, telling her how happy he was.

‘She’s so beautiful, so perfect.’ The tiny fingers had twined around his own and claimed his heart. ‘I thought newborn bairns were – well …’

‘Ordinary?’ she smiled. ‘They are. Every one of them. Pink and puckered, or looking as if they’ve been in a fist fight. But there’s one exception – your own. They are always born beautiful, and perfect.’

‘I love you,’ he’d said, huskily, and she knew that when the midwife came to shoo him from the room he would go to his hut, and weep. Tom was like that. Hard on the outside and given to sudden anger, yet soft and gentle inside.

‘And might a man be told his daughter’s name?’ Alice should choose, he’d always said, if they had a little lass.

‘Daisy Julia Dwerryhouse,’ she announced promptly.

‘Daisy Dwerryhouse.’ He liked the name, truth known. ‘And Julia for –?’

‘For my best friend – her godmother.’

‘You’ve asked her?’

‘No, but she’ll come. She didn’t get to our wedding. I want her here, for the christening.’

That had been when the midwife bustled in, bearing a cup of sweetened gruel, announcing that the new mother needed to sleep and that he could come up, later, and see them again.

Alice lifted the sleeping child, kissing her as she laid her in her pram, raising the hood against the bright August sunlight. She had wanted to buy the magnificent perambulator long before Daisy was born, but no! she had been told. Didn’t she know it was bad luck to have the pram in the house before the babe – the first babe, that was?

So Alice had chosen a model in shiny black, with large wheels and the body suspended on leather straps and paid a deposit on it, explaining that it wasn’t convenient, yet, to have it delivered, and so flushed with excitement had she been that the awfulness of it only struck her on the way home.

Five guineas, the pram would cost, to be paid for with her own money; her private money Tom didn’t know about – money Giles had given to her. Sir Giles Sutton, Julia’s brother, who died not of war wounds, but because of them; a stretcher bearer and the bravest of the brave. Giles, whose name reminded her that today she must tell Tom what she should have told him before they were married, yet had bitten back the words because she hadn’t wanted her secret to lie between them on their wedding night.

She gazed at her child, a small smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Beautiful, her little one, with eyes blue as Tom’s and a newly-grown haze of hair that promised she would be as fair as he was. And did you ever see such a mouth; pink as a rosebud, puckering into little sucking movements as she slept.

Reluctantly, Alice turned away. She had a man to feed and a cake to ice for the christening, Sunday week. It might have been nice, she thought, taking the cake from its tin, sniffing its richness, if the christening could have been tomorrow; the date on which they were married. But she wanted Julia to stand godmother and a christening on a wedding anniversary might seem they were flaunting their happiness in the face of a woman whose husband had not come back from the war.

Julia did not travel south for their wedding. Alice had forbidden it. I love you dearly, she wrote, but my joy would be your sadness. Come instead when our babe is christened – if the good Lord grants us one quickly –

Hastily, she rewrapped the cake, glad that food rationing was over. Eighteen months after the Armistice the very last commodity was de-rationed. Sugar, it had been, and many the housewife who spent the whole day baking cakes the likes of which had not been seen for five years. And with sugar on sale to all again, they could really put the war behind them – or try to, though with some the scars were slow to heal.

She glanced through the window, smiling. The man who stood beside the pram never passed the gamekeeper’s cottage without stopping. Tom’s employer had been besotted by Daisy before she was a week old. ‘She is exquisite,’ he’d said as Daisy Dwerryhouse fixed him with her eyes, and since then Mr Hillier called often to peer into the pram and smile his pleasure. Once, he had held her, then passed her quickly back, shaking his head sadly.

‘Foolish of me not to marry and have children of my own, Mrs Dwerryhouse. Too busy making my way in the world,’ he’d whispered shakily, making for the door.

Ralph Hillier. So rich that folk hereabouts said his pocket was bottomless. Poor, lonely man. Alice welcomed him with a smile.

‘Good morning, sir.’ She bobbed a curtsey. Not being servile, but mindful of her position and Mr Hillier’s position and to put their strange friendship onto its proper footing. To remind herself, too, that he owned the house in which they lived and paid her husband’s weekly wage. ‘She’s asleep – again.’

‘No matter. The vicar tells me she is to be christened next Sunday. Would you think me presumptuous if I gave her a small gift?’

‘Why, not at all! Thank you for your kind thought.’

‘Hmm.’ He liked his gamekeeper’s wife. There was a dignity about her he couldn’t fathom; that, and her way of speaking that lifted her above her class. ‘Daisy Julia, isn’t it to be?’ he asked, seeing in his mind’s eye the name and date inscribed on the silver christening mug he had already ordered from a Bond Street jeweller.

He left, smiling almost shyly, raising his hat, thanking her, and she stood at the door until he reached the garden gate, nodding her head deferentially.

Poor soul. Alone in that great house. Pity he couldn’t marry some war widow with children of her own; heaven only knew there were plenty of them around, Alice frowned.

She looked at the watch pinned to her apron; the one she had looked at so often when nursing, in France. Tom would be home soon for his dinner; would arrive promptly at noon because that had been the time of their wedding. They were given no choice. There was to be a service of thanksgiving in the church at two, followed by sports for the children and a splendid tea for all, the vicar had said. She and Tom had chosen to marry, though they hadn’t known it at the time, on the day the entire British Empire was to celebrate the victory of the Great War – and another reason, she had conceded, for not asking Julia to be there.

Alice raked the fire, then pulled out the damper to redden the coals, placing the vegetables on the hob to simmer. Last year, just about this time, she had been brushing her hair, twisting it into a knot, tilting her rose-trimmed hat this way and that before she was satisfied enough with its angle to secure it with a hatpin. A bride in waiting, ready to walk to the church, yet one year on she was a wife and mother, fervently grateful for something she thought she had lost for ever. Blessings she had in plenty – and a secret, still to be told. It hung over her like a confession unwilling to be made, because the penance might be more than she could accept.

Tom came home one minute before noon, dipping into his gamebag, telling her to close her eyes. She knew what he had brought her, had hoped he would remember.

‘Just to let you know I haven’t forgotten,’ he smiled, giving her the flowers, tilting her chin to lay his lips gently against hers.

He had brought her buttercups, the flower so special between them. He had picked one and held it beneath her chin, so long ago. Seven years, if you counted.

‘You’re my girl, aren’t you, Alice – my buttercup girl,’ he’d whispered, kissing her for the first time.

‘Alice?’ His voice invaded her thoughts. ‘You were miles away, lass.’

‘No, love – years away.’ She felt her cheeks pinking. ‘I was remembering when you first gave me buttercups. And I know I shouldn’t be thinking back – not today, especially – but there’s something I want to tell you, Tom; something I promised more than a year ago.’

‘To love, honour and obey?’ he teased.

‘No. Something else I promised and I’ve made up my mind to tell you, today.’

‘And what if I don’t want to know?’

‘You must know, Tom. For both our sakes. What I did – it wasn’t what you thought …’

‘How do you – did you – know what I thought?’

‘Because I saw betrayal in your eyes, and it wasn’t like that.’

‘I still don’t want to know, Alice.’

‘And I still want to tell you. When I held our firstborn, I said it would be.’

‘Sweetheart.’ He reached for her, holding her tightly. ‘This has been the best year of my life – don’t spoil it?’

‘But you’ve got to know about the child, Tom – how it really was.’

‘You call him the child, always. He’s Drew, Miss Julia’s son, now. He’s a Sutton.’

‘Yes.’ Oh, he was a Sutton, all right! ‘But Tom, will you let me tell you? Not meaning to hurt you, but won’t you hear me out? I love you so much, you see, that I can’t bear to have this thing hanging over us.’

‘All right, then. We’ll talk about it tonight – there’ll be no pleasing you, until we do. When Daisy is in her cot, we’ll talk about it.’ He nodded towards the mantel clock, smiling. ‘And round about now, a year ago, you were saying, I will – so what have you to say to me?’

‘I love you, Tom Dwerryhouse; so much that it’s like a pain inside me, sometimes. I love you so much that I’ve got to tell you.’

‘And I love you so much, wife darling, that I’ll listen – but later. So does a man get a kiss, and his dinner, then?’

They sat either side of the fire, Tom with a mug of ale, Alice twisting the stem of a wedding present glass, gazing down at the last of the Christmas sherry.

‘Happy anniversary, lass. Thank you for Daisy and for the twelve-month past. It’s been good, but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’

‘I know it. But will you love me as much when I’ve told you?’

‘Dammit, woman!’ He hit his knee with his hand. ‘Can’t you let sleeping dogs lie?’

‘You said that tonight you’d listen …’

She rose to kneel at his feet, her hand on his knees, remembering the quickness of his temper, the highs and lows of his emotions. ‘It has always bothered me, Tom, that you thought I married so soon after your death – after they told me you’d been killed, I mean.’

‘Aye – and I’ll admit it bothered me, an’ all. When the war ended – when I got back to England – I came to Rowangarth, looking for you. I thought you’d have waited. Even though you thought me dead, I’d never have imagined that so soon after, you’d take another man to your –’

‘To my bed?’ she interrupted, sharply. ‘Make a child with him?’

‘Since you put it that way – yes.’ He winced at the directness of her words. ‘But Alice love, must we rake up the past? It’s you and me, now, and Daisy. That war is over, and best forgotten and all the misery it caused.’

‘I was in France, too, don’t forget. I saw the degradation of men treated no better than animals. But it can’t be forgotten until what it did to you and me is brought into the open, Tom.’

‘You’re set on me knowing, aren’t you? Even if you hurt me?’

‘You won’t be hurt – angry, more like. Reuben knew about it, and Julia. And Nathan Sutton, an’ all. They’ll bear out my story.’

‘Seems the world and his wife knew; everyone but Tom Dwerryhouse. When you walked in on me that day at Reuben’s house – why didn’t you tell me, then?’

‘When I’d just seen a ghost? When you were standing there, back from the dead? And you didn’t help any, Tom. You turned away from me as if I were beneath contempt – tipped your cap to me and called me milady. You knew how to hurt!’

‘I’d come looking for you. I couldn’t go to Rowangarth; I was dead – or so the Army had told my folks.’

‘I understand that, and that you were a deserter. You had to be careful, or they could have had you shot.’

‘Not any more. The war was over, by then. They’d have put me in prison, though – still could …’

‘There’ll be an amnesty for you, soon – for all deserters. The newspapers say so.’

‘Happen. But we are talking about now, and about you and me. I went to Reuben’s house. I thought he’d get word to you that I was back. I couldn’t wait to see you, touch you …’

‘And instead he told you I was married and had a child; that I was Lady Sutton, newly widowed.’

‘Something like that. It was as if he’d slammed a fist into my face. You wedded and bedded and though your being a widow made you your own woman again, I knew you’d never leave your son and come away with me, even if you still loved me – and it seemed you didn’t.’

‘But I did leave my son. I left him with Julia and her ladyship because Rowangarth was where he belonged – his inheritance. And I followed you here, Tom, wanting to tell you the truth of it, even then.

‘You’ve said I never use my son’s name – always call him the child – and you are right. I had little to do with him – I was ill after he was born. I wanted to die. I tried to. I’d been nursing Giles, you see. He died in the ’flu epidemic’

‘Died of it – like my mother did.’

‘Just as she did, Tom.’ She rose to her feet, backing away from him, returning to her chair, standing behind it as if to shelter from the fury she feared would come.

‘I had a difficult confinement, Tom. When my pains started, we couldn’t get the doctor. He was working all the hours God sent – half of Holdenby was down with that ’flu. Julia was with me from start to finish. She’d just delivered the child when Doctor James arrived.

‘There was only time to tell Giles he’d had a son before he died. Her ladyship was sitting beside his bed. She said, afterwards, that he’d gripped her hand, as if he understood.’

She stopped, taking in a shuddering breath, tilting her chin defiantly, wondering, now that she had started the awful business, where it would end.

‘Go on,’ Tom urged.

‘I had a fever. Doctor James said I’d taken influenza from Giles. I was so ill they kept the baby away from me – didn’t want him to get it. Julia was in a bad way. She’d just come back from France. Andrew had been killed only days before the Armistice and it was as if she wasn’t with us; as if she were sleep-walking, all the time. I thought she’d die of a broken heart.

‘But the baby saved her sanity. She had to look after him, you see – find milk for him, make sure he lived. By the time I was well enough to get out of bed he was six weeks old – and Julia’s. They’d bonded, each to the other. The child was the son she would never conceive and I was content to leave it that way.’

‘It didn’t bother you that some other woman had your bairn?’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘It was like giving him away.’

‘Yes, it was. But I didn’t want him – didn’t want to touch him, even. When I was well enough to think for myself, I was even glad there’d been no milk in my breasts for him.’

‘Alice!’ He slammed down his mug, spilling ale over the hearthstone. ‘How could you – your own son? There must have been some affection for Giles Sutton? You must have felt something for him, or how could you have got that child?’

‘I had great affection for Giles – always. I worked at Rowangarth for his mother, remember, and when he was brought to our hospital wounded and more dead than alive, I asked Sister if I could stay with him. He was in another world – on morphine. They used to give them morphine, Tom, to let them die peacefully – those who were lucky enough to be got to a hospital, that was.’

Her eyes filled with tears and she was back again in France with the stench and the horror and the hopelessness of it all. Then she pulled her sleeve across her face, sniffing loudly, facing him defiantly.

‘Yes, I felt affection for Giles Sutton, I’ll not deny it, and pity, too. And I think I could have cared for the child, if it had been gently got. But that bairn wasn’t the result of love or affection, Tom. When Giles was brought to our hospital, I was already four weeks pregnant. And before you pass judgement,’ she hastened, ‘before you say what I can see in your eyes – let me tell you just one thing. The child – Drew Sutton – was got the night I’d been told you were dead. Your sister wrote to tell me. Julia was in Paris, on leave with Andrew. I had no one to turn to, so I ran out of the nurses’ quarters, half out of my mind.’

‘And someone …?’ His face was chalk white, his lips so tight with distaste he had difficulty speaking.

‘Yes. Someone. He smelled of drink; his eyes were wild. He didn’t know what he was doing – I’ll swear it.’

‘He must have!’

‘Don’t, Tom? Let me tell it the way it was?’ she whispered dry-mouthed. ‘We nurses were quartered in what had been the schoolhouse of a convent. There was a shed at the back where the nuns once kept their cows. He dragged me in there. I didn’t have a chance and anyway, I think I wanted him to kill me. You were dead, and I wanted to be dead, too.’

She walked across the room to stare out of the window, taking in gulps of air, holding them, letting them go in little steadying puffs. Then, hugging herself, she turned to face him again.

‘I fainted. I must have done, because when I could think clearly again, he’d gone. But it had happened – there was no telling myself it hadn’t – and I got myself back to the schoolhouse. It was dark, by then, and when I got upstairs, Julia was back.

‘She was waiting there, with Nurse Love. I’d thrown your sister’s letter down, and they’d read it. They were kind to me. Julia held me – then it all came out. Not just about you being reported killed, but about him, and what he’d done to me. Julia took my uniform off – it was all dirty and torn – and got me into a bath. Nurse Love wanted to tell Sister, have the Military Police arrest him, but Julia said not to.

‘She was livid, though. You know what she could be like, when she had a temper on her? She said to wait a bit – that with luck no harm had been done. She was only thinking of me. She knew I’d been through it before, you see.’

‘But she was wrong. Harm was done, it seems, and you passed that child off as Giles Sutton’s. How could you, Alice?’

‘Because Giles didn’t die, did he, though it might have been better if he had – with hindsight, that is. He survived to become only half a man. He told Julia one night that he would never father a child, though I think I’d known it, all along. I’d helped dress his wounds, you see. There were no niceties in those wards, in France. And she told him that life was cruel, because I was carrying a child I didn’t want.’

She looked into his eyes, hoping to find understanding there, or pity, even, but there was none.

‘Anyway, Nathan had been coming in every day, to see Giles,’ she rushed on. ‘He was stationed only a couple of miles away – an army chaplain, you’ll remember – and Giles told him about me and the terrible mess I was in; said it was on his mind to ask me to marry him – say the child was his. The baby would be the one her ladyship had always wanted, and if it was a son, so much the better.’

‘So you were glad to wed him, Alice – let him claim the child as his?’

‘Not glad. Grateful, more like. And I didn’t say yes, right away. I had this feeling inside me that I was going to hear from you or about you. I couldn’t accept you were dead, you see. I thought that one day you’d come back.

‘Julia stood by me. She’d wanted me to go to Aunt Sutton to have the baby and maybe get it adopted into a good home. Then Giles came up with a better idea – to marry me.’