“Why indeed,” said Agatha. “We are not as strong as He thinks.”
“When I see Him at last, I shall give Him a piece of my mind,” said Mrs. Stokes. “Be it into the pit with me, I shall have my say.”
—
The evening light slanted across the flat marshes, and the cold of dusk was a reminder that summer was still far away. It was less than a year since Hugh Grange had first gone to the station to meet Beatrice. Now, coaxing the pony trap out across the marsh, he looked at the curve of her cheek and the way her hands folded across her lap, and he could not believe that she was his wife. The price of their happiness had been steep, but not enough to extinguish their hopes. He would have to return to the front in a few days, and they could not be sure his name would not one day be listed with the fallen. But today and tomorrow he was married and in love, and he would live each moment as if it were a year.
“Do you hear the lark?” she asked. A trembling song rose and fell above the grass, a sound he might have missed against the ring of horseshoes on the road. “They will be thick in the air again, when summer comes. An exaltation of larks, they call it.”
“I will be home again,” he said. “We shall lie on our backs in the fields and count birds.”
“I don’t think trying to count them is quite in the exalting spirit,” she said, and though she smiled her chin trembled for the sadness of the day.
At the shore, they climbed hand in hand across the dunes to find Mrs. Stokes’s family and friends gathered on the beach below. Aunt Agatha, Uncle John, and Celeste stood with Abigail on the edge of the crowd, and his uncle carried a small bundle in his arms. Hugh had helped him collect the items this afternoon: a book of Longfellow, much written in the margins and stained with the wine and late-night suppers of a college poet; a favorite velvet smoking jacket patched at the elbows and frayed at the sleeves; his army cap, which Hugh had carried home. They had not included any of Daniel’s poetry, it being valuable to the wider world, they hoped, but Aunt Agatha had sacrificed a precious cardboard folder filled with Daniel’s childhood writings. They were gathered to say goodbye to Richard Sidley in private, away from the prying eyes of the town, and Mrs. Stokes had honored Hugh’s aunt and uncle by including them in the ritual.
Uncle John stepped forward to climb the wooden steps of Maria Stokes’s caravan and place his bundle inside the open door next to her great-grandson’s small collection of clothes and possessions. Abigail then ran to add the precious jar of coins, and her father took a basket of sweet herbs and wildflowers from his wife and tucked it inside.
“He was my son,” said Snout’s father. “He was a scholar and a soldier and a good son to his mother.” He took a brand from the fire and held it high. “And underneath he was one of us, a proud Romany man.” He tossed the brand inside, and the caravan, fresh with paint, caught like a torch and was soon consumed in a ball of fire and smoke. The smoke, in defiance of the war, climbed high into the sky, and the caravan burned like a beacon. Men with a violin and accordion set to playing a low, wailing tune. And so they stood, as the light drained from the sky behind the town of Rye, and the crescent moon grew brighter in the east; and the ceaseless waves ignored the small rituals of mankind to run up on the shore and withdraw again, under the strange regular hand of gravity.
“Come with me,” he said, “and I will show you where your son lies.”
RUDYARD KIPLING, “The Gardener”
In the high summer of 1920, Beatrice and Hugh accompanied Aunt Agatha to the Continent. The fields of northern France and Flanders had already grown new coats of grass and hay to cover the mutilated nakedness of the battlefields. The first new crops had been planted in the less damaged areas, and red poppies nodded again in fields of wheat. All the hotels and guesthouses were full and festively decorated with fluttering pennants and bright awnings, and ladies dined under the awnings in the breezy, loose-fitting dresses that celebrated a new, more liberal era.
It was all the rage to visit the dead, scattered over the countryside in small-town cemeteries or patches of woodland, or often in what had been a field outside a clearing station. There was to be no repatriation of bodies. Instead, dignified new cemeteries were planned. In London, as in Rye, the talk was of new guidebooks and of finding just the perfect little pension, from which to tour the battlefields.
“Vieux Jacques and his wife took such care of us at Pension Michel,” Bettina Fothergill had repeated around town. Her only nephew, Charles Poot, had managed to acquire a government post in London and so sit out the war in comfort, but she had been to visit the grave of her husband’s cousin’s nephew, several times removed, and made up for her lack of proximity to sacrifice by asserting herself as an expert on the logistics of the visit. Beatrice noticed that those who had lost more were quieter about their pilgrimages, slipping away unannounced and coming back with a photograph of the grave site taken by some enterprising local photographer. Now that she was in France, she had more sympathy for the opportunistic locals, with their photographic services and their shrapnel souvenirs, and their farms turned into makeshift pensions—for in the shattered lands, it was still a scramble to make a living and feed a family through the winter.
Hugh left his patients to the retired Dr. Lawton, whose practice he had taken on. Some grumblings were to be heard around Rye, for though they admired the decorated young surgeon who had chosen to give up his London ambitions to live as a quiet country doctor, they were selfish beings and were inconvenienced by his taking his young wife away for a much delayed July holiday. Beatrice had been kept on at the school through the end of the war, teachers being in short supply, but as a married woman she was gently sent home at the armistice. She devoted most of her time to her writing now. Her small edition of Daniel Bookham’s poems, with a gentle introduction extolling his passion for platonic ideals and his two great loves, for his friend and for his wife, was well received and took its place amid the many volumes of poetry from poets who now lay beneath the fields of the Continent. She was also working on her novel, having received a small advance from her father’s publisher in gratitude for her work on Tillingham’s book. Uncle John had not accompanied them to France. Troubled with sciatica these days, he stayed behind with Celeste, who had become too much like a daughter, and her small son a grandson, to let her leave England when her father hurried away at the end of the war.