Page 6

T he same spring sun was almost hot on Silas’s back, warmth blooming along his shoulders through his linen shirt.

He looked over the patio, at the series of small tables set up on the ancient flagstones, each containing two or four men hunched over various projects, their shoulders bent as they placed puzzle pieces, extended arms to daub at a water-coloured cloud, paper clipped to a small easel.

Some only sat silently, faces hidden by oversized fedoras or gauze wrappings, others paged one-handed through books, awkwardly making their way through whatever novel the nurse had been able to turn up for them.

At least this grand library was being used for something other than smoking cigars, thought Silas, remembering Ophelia’s disgust at her father’s disinterest in his own estate’s massive collection of books and manuscripts.

These men’ll be a sight more grateful for the distraction than Blackwood ever was, always more content to spend his days hunting and gambling than improving his mind.

“What d’ya think of this, then?” A man by the name of Scott interrupted Silas’s thoughts, holding out a roughly whittled figure.

The matron was of the firm belief that working with one’s hands could lend the recovering men a measure of quiet solace while also giving them the chance to strengthen injured limbs.

Silas took the figurine, turning it over in his hands.

There was a head, a roughed-in face, and slouching legs that gave the figure a slightly comical feel.

“Not bad for a budding artist,” Silas said with a grin, Scott laughing in reply.

“P’raps there’s a spot for me at the Royal Institute yet,” he said, affecting a plummy accent.

Returning the figure to Scott, Silas flexed his own fingers gratefully against his thighs, thinking that in the end a shattered leg wasn’t so bad a thing to suffer.

The nightmares were even beginning to improve, their regularity and intensity fading a little with each passing month.

He still caught himself starting at certain noises, but life here in the hospital had begun to feel more solid to him, the muck and mayhem of the battlefield more like a terrible dream he was finally awakening from.

“So yer ’bout to light out, Larke?” Scott said, his brows gathered in concentration. His fingers worked slowly at the little figure, methodically scraping away at the wood.

“That’s what the nurses tell me,” said Silas noncommittally.

“Back to your family then?”

Silas hesitated, not sure what he wanted to share with the other man.

He felt ashamed to have joined the army, leaving his mother and siblings, and angry that his injury made him unable to properly provide for them now.

What the hell was the good of being the eldest son if he wasn’t even able to keep them safe and secure?

“I’m not sure that I’ll have the chance to see them,” he said, settling on a half-truth.

“Seems I’m to be seconded by the army for farm work.

With so many men away at the front, farmers are having a hard time getting enough crops sown and harvested, and this last winter nearly did us all in, as you know. ”

“Oh, aye,” said Scott agreeably. “’Tweren’t one letter from home where my Margie didn’t mention the trouble of getting flour and such.

Felt as though she and the little ’uns might as well be in the trenches eatin’ rations with me, such were the shortages.

” He sighed over the memory and patted his shirt pocket where Silas knew he kept his letters from Margie.

The memory of rations in the trenches made Silas’s stomach clench.

He felt guilty at his relief to be standing in the Somerset sun and not the muck of France.

It made being put to work on some farm an appealing prospect; perhaps the physical labour would exhaust him enough to stop his mind from spinning endlessly every night, to quiet the guilt that crept in when he thought about his mother and siblings.

“With so many convalescing soldiers well enough to work, but not return to the front, it makes sense for us to help with the farming. That’s the gist of the letter I received, in any case,” Silas said.

Scott nodded. Silas wondered whether he had received a letter of his own, or perhaps his injury prevented him from being recruited for the task.

“I’m headed back to the front m’self,” he said quietly. “Got my papers earlier this week.”

“Ah, I’m an arse, Scott. I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed.

“’Tis what it is, Larke. Could just as easily have been you than me, eh? That’s the bloody mess of it all.”

Silas nodded, wishing he had some pat reassurance for the man, but Scott had already been there, seen it all.

Nothing Silas could say would make the return any less horrible.

The situation on the ground beggared belief, and Silas fought the rising bile at the memory of standing knee-deep in the frigid mud, rats skittering over men’s bodies in the maze of trenches, the haze of gun smoke and gas residue hanging like a pall over it all.

“Mr. Larke?”

Silas blinked and found himself back at Hartwood House, the matron watching him from inside the doorway. He stood slowly, giving the stiffness in his foot time to dissipate, and made his way toward the house.

“The cart is waiting out front. You’ll find all the particulars regarding your farm billet in the envelope on the hall table.”

He felt caught out, embarrassed. “Yes, Matron. I’ll be on my way then.”

She regarded him sharply for a moment then moved briskly past him and out into the sun.

He saluted Scott with a casual hand, shouldered a small satchel, and strode toward the front hall, not wanting to linger lest this assignment slip from his grasp and he find himself in Scott’s position.

He still felt half a man, limping along with his shattered leg, returning to a country that seemed wholly unprepared to face the damage suffered by so many of its sons.

At the doorsill, he straightened and tried to step into the future with a confident stride.

Wincing as he stepped up into the cart, he tossed his bag into the back, and refusing to look back as they headed down the drive, he reminded himself that all the memories that now cut like glass had started out as wonderful.

Let that be the lesson, he thought. Beautiful things can be turned to mud just like everything else.

The cart pulled gratingly along the narrow lanes, jolting and bumping past views alternately opening into wide vistas of undulating hills freshly fuzzed with the green of spring, sheep and the odd cow dotting the expanses between dry stone walls, or narrowed by head-high walls of hawthorn, blackberry, and crab apple.

In those moments, the horse’s bony hips shimmied along in a half-light shaded green by the wildly sprouting hedgerows, and Silas allowed himself to remember what life on a farm in spring felt like.

It had only been a collection of months since his last spring at his parent’s farm, but the intervening time had seen him first, in the most basic of military training, then the battlefields of France where spring anywhere felt like a wild, half-remembered dream, and then an entire spring missed while he lay abed, recovering.

The mud and madness of war had threatened to cover over anything he tried to hold dear, and so he had shut those earlier years, the ones he shared with his family as a young man, away.

Not allowing himself to dwell on the memories felt like the only way he could protect them, keep them safe from the horrors he witnessed unfolding all around him.

Sitting in trenches dug through what was once vibrant French countryside felt bizarre; a terrible echo of the life he had left at home, the life he had allowed himself to imagine unfolding peacefully, perhaps in the company of a loving partner.

He hadn’t allowed himself to think of Ophelia in that role.

Her father had put paid to all that anyways.

Making his way slowly down the lane, the wooden cart seat under him so familiar he could have been back in his life before the war, he was struck by the feeling of being forcefully pulled away from the estate.

Each hill and bend took him farther from Hartwood House, farther from his attempt to secure his family’s future, and he felt the weight of the decision pushing at his back, a magnet working in reverse.

He shrugged at the discomfort and fished in his pocket for the address of the farm where he was to be stationed.

At the next village, he’d need to catch a small bus to take him all the way to the town of Banbury, but for now he could settle in and let the rhythm of the cart lull him, let himself watch the countryside scroll past like the pages of a children’s picture book.

Soon enough, he found himself nodding off, head jerking awkwardly forward when he woke himself from a dream. The driver, silent as a tomb, almost entirely still but for the occasional click he gave to his ageing horse, chuckled as Silas jolted awake when they pulled up to the small station.

“Gods, man, have ye not slept lately?”

“It’s been a while,” Silas agreed. “Sorry that I made poor company on the trip.”

The man waved this away with a grimace. “I’ve no love for prattle, get enough o’ that at home. Some quiet does a body good.”

He reached around to pass Silas his bag, and tipping his hat, slapped his reins on the horse’s bony rump and passed out of the station onto the road.

Silas waved at his retreating back and turned to join the queue for the bus.

It lumbered into view, an awkward amalgam of a horse-drawn cart and a double-decker automobile.

Only a few of the vehicles remained in England, all others having been commandeered for troop transport at the front.

Silas was surprised by the sick taste rising in his throat, the unsteady tempo of his heart.

It’s only a bus, get a hold of yourself.

There’s none here to harm you. Steady on.

He blew out a calming breath and stepped up into the vehicle.

“Tickets!” called a young woman in a loose navy-blue tunic, hat set at a jaunty angle on her dark hair.

She brandished a hole punch and taking Silas’s proffered ticket, clipped it with an efficient flourish.

He smiled at her and took a seat toward the back, thinking his ankle might not handle the climb to the second floor.

She wasn’t much older than his sister, Delphine, he observed.

Wish she’d taken on a post at home as well.

Better than her driving ambulances in France.

Well, safer anyways. But he knew Delphine would never settle for safer.

She had always wanted to be at the center of everything, even as a child.

He had only learned of her decision to join the nursing corps once she had already been accepted and travelled to France—a single cheerful letter urging him not to worry and to stay safe.

Entirely worrisome and entirely Delphine.

He knew from his mother that his sister sent her a postcard regularly with the same cheerful message.

He imagined them standing in an ever- thickening stack on the kitchen shelf, always within reach and well-thumbed.

His mother had been suspicious when he announced that he would be enlisting; as a farmer, he was considered an essential worker and could be exempted from serving overseas, and that was what he had planned to do.

He had seen too many farms fall into ruin when their farmers were called away, and he knew that his father would have wanted him to preserve what his family had built over the generations they had served as tenants at Wood Grange.

He relied on the rush of other young men enlisting to cover his tracks, to convince his family that he, too, was caught up with patriotic fervour and the promise of adventure.

In other circumstances, it would have been true; he loved the land he had grown up on, wanted to defend his country.

Even the pageantry of the uniforms and the weapons stirred something masculine and protective in him, though that proved short-lived in the face of reality.

Ironic then, that Blackwood refusing to grant him essential labour exemption and forcing him to enlist not only broke his link with the land but opened his eyes to the utter madness of war, the empty patriotic bellowing of the upper classes over the broken bodies and minds of men they considered expendable.

When he returned, leg barely usable, the only thing he wanted from England was a quiet place to lick his wounds and make a plan to reclaim the scraps of what had been taken from him.

It was his duty, he told himself, as the eldest son to protect the others, no matter the cost to himself, no matter what he might be called to give up.

Being sent to help out on another family’s farm made him all the more aware that what he wanted most—to be able to work the leasehold again, reassure himself of his mother’s and brother’s wellbeing—was again just out of reach.