Page 27 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)

She felt the cold weight of those words in her stomach.

Would people really mind? But it was not a question.

She knew they would. Mrs Bellerby at White House Farm, where he had lodged and worked as a prisoner of war, had approved of his clean habits, good manners and helpfulness, but how could that weigh against her three fine sons who had perished in the mud of the Western Front?

At Huntsham Farm, Joe Walton had a patch over one eye and half his left leg missing; his brother Matt had fallen at Passchendaele to German artillery fire.

Younger people, who didn’t remember the war, and sophisticated people, who travelled and read and thought objectively, might be minded now to forget, or to say that the Germans had suffered enough and should be taken back into the fold.

But the older people who had lived through it, and the simpler people, would never be able to get past the horror of it, would never forgive.

To them, the Germans were a pariah race, and they would hate them with a visceral hatred until life ended.

In Paris, in London, even, Eric Chapel was a man without a past. But the people of the Morland Place Estate would recognise him, and they would never accept him. Yes, it was true: she lived in the one place he could not follow her.

The place to which she would be returning tomorrow when Queen Mary set sail from Pier 90. This was their last day together. Her throat closed up with tears.

‘Stay with me,’ he said abruptly. ‘Don’t go back.’

‘Stay in New York?’ she said. Her voice sounded strange to her.

‘It need not be New York. We can go anywhere in the world.’

‘How would we live?’

‘I can paint anywhere. Paris. Rome. Florence.’ He smiled.

‘Los Angeles. I could work in Hollywood again. Or we could buy a farm. An orange orchard in Spain. An olive grove in Campania. The light in Italy is wonderful. I see a small whitewashed cottage among the olive trees. A steep track down to the sea. The air is scented with pine and myrtle and salt. We have a lemon tree, and the smell of the blossom is piercing. We grow grapes, too and keep a few chickens. You wear a faded blue linen dress, and your skin is golden from the sun, and your hair silvered with it. Life is simple, our needs are few. We have each other. We grow together like those olive trees whose trunks wind round each other. And at night we sleep by the open window, with the smell of the warm earth and the sound of the sea.’

She saw it, too, just as he described it. Why should she go back? Her heart was here, with him. It would tear her apart to leave him. Life is short, too short not to seize your happiness when you found it. Their future together as he had drawn it for her was as tangible as a taste in her mouth.

But …

‘I have a son,’ she said, in a flat voice.

He was not willing yet to let it go. ‘You will bring him too. He will love the life. And we’ll have other children – brothers and sisters for him.’

‘I can’t, Erich. I can’t. It’s not only my boy. It’s – Morland Place.’

‘Sell it,’ he said. ‘Sell it, and we’ll buy another place, where we can be together.’

But I am the Mistress of Morland Place .

It was not something she could say to him, because it was something out of the deep past, something almost sacred, passed down from generation to generation, that an outsider would not understand.

Her father before her, and his father, and his, going back into history, the land and the people and the house all bound together, to be held together through conflict and disaster, peace and prosperity, the erosion of time and the accretion of memory.

She owned it, but it owned her far more, because her blood and her bones were made by it.

When the men of her family had gone to war, it was to preserve Morland Place and to preserve England, and they were one and the same.

They had given their lives, and though she was a woman and could not fight, it still demanded her life.

The Master or Mistress was the keeper of faith. She could not betray that.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘They all depend on me. The estate, the tenants – the family. I have to go back.’ She saw he did not understand, and there was nothing she could do about that.

The piece of land his forefathers had owned, which should have been his, had been seized and sold after the war; his very country – the Germany he had known – was no more.

He was without a place in the world, so the whole world was his place; anywhere was the same to him now.

She understood, as he looked at her, that he wanted her to be his place, as he would be hers.

Agony though losing him would be, the loss of her to him would be infinitely worse.

‘I can’t,’ she said again, and it was like dealing a death blow.

* * *

Her trunk was at the Customs shed, sent by the Plaza.

Erich looked very pale in the bright June light, as though the colour had been washed out of him.

He pressed his lips to hers, then held her very close, and she leaned against his hard body and thought How can I do this?

Finally, they released each other. There was so much to say, and nothing that could be said.

‘It should be raining,’ he said. The sunshine was heartless.

‘What will you do?’ she asked, her voice light and hollow.

‘Just go on. What else is there?’ They looked at each other. He said, ‘I think I’ll go back to California. It will be easier there. Nothing seems very real in Hollywood.’

He lifted her hand, turned it over and kissed the palm.

And folded her fingers down over the place.

And then, without another word, he turned and walked away.

She watched until he had disappeared into the crowd.

Her throat hurt so much she put up a hand to rub it.

Just in that moment she wished to die, so that she would not have to face the life she was going to.

If her father had been alive, he would have met her at Southampton with his motor-car.

Probably there would have been a picnic basket and he would have regaled her with delicacies on the journey – foie gras and quails’ eggs and strawberries.

She missed him sharply as she came out of the Customs shed to no greeting.

In truth, there was no great hardship in travelling first class by train, but she felt lonely and lost. She wanted Papa to make everything right for her, as he had always done.

There was time to wait at King’s Cross to send a telegram to say what train she would be on.

So, when she stepped down from the carriage at York, the first thing she saw was Jessie’s smiling face.

And before she’d had time to speak she was hit full broadside by Alec, who flung his arms round her waist, crying, ‘Mummeee!’

She bent and scooped him up, and kissed him. He buried his face in her neck and said tremulously, ‘Don’t go away again.’

She felt a pang of guilt. How nearly she had not come back! No, it would never have come to that. ‘I won’t,’ she said.

He emerged, like the sun after rain. ‘I can jump twelve inches now on Mr Pickles. But she doesn’t always want to. Josh says she’s an idle beggar.’ Mr Pickles, despite the name, was a mare.

The porter was dealing with the luggage, and Polly let Alec slide down as Jessie came up to greet her. ‘I thought you’d like to be met,’ she said. ‘Uncle Teddy always met me from the train.’

‘I was thinking about that at Southampton,’ Polly admitted. ‘How is everything?’

‘All serene,’ said Jessie. ‘Bertie and I kept an eye on everything, but there was no need. Your John Burton is terribly efficient. And Laura’s been playing big sister to Alec. I’ve got the car outside.’

‘Can I drive it?’ Alec asked, taking Polly’s hand to tug her along faster.

‘Not today,’ Jessie said.

‘I bet I could,’ he said boastfully.

‘You need to get taller so you can reach the pedals,’ Polly said.

‘Josh says he’ll teach me to drive Mr Pickles.’

‘She doesn’t have pedals.’

‘Stirrups are pedals,’ Alec said, and dropped Polly’s hand to run ahead shouting, ‘Pedal-pedal-pedal!’ at the top of his healthy young voice.

‘I don’t think he’s missed me a bit,’ Polly said, smiling.

Jessie linked arms with her comfortably. ‘He did.’

They followed the porter towards the exit. Polly looked around at all the familiar things that seemed oddly smaller than she remembered. She supposed it was having been surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean for five days. Thousands of miles of ocean that separated her from Erich. She ached.

Jessie glanced at her face. ‘Is it nice to be home?’ she asked. ‘Or rather not?’

‘I haven’t taken it in yet,’ Polly said. ‘Nothing seems real.’

‘A bit of a contrast to Queen Mary ,’ Jessie suggested.

‘But that was the unrealest thing of all.’

Jessie drove, and Alec sat on Polly’s lap, reassuringly heavy, growing bony as he entered boyhood from infancy.

His seat bones grinding her thighs were actually painful when he fidgeted, which was all the time.

He was beginning to smell like a boy, too, a slight metallic scent, and his voice was always too loud – he hadn’t learned to modify it yet.

Her son. Her blue-eyed, fair-haired son.

She squeezed him in a hug, and he grunted in surprise.

They turned onto the track, and there was Morland Place ahead of them, the stone honey-coloured in the June sunshine. It was waiting for her. Like Alec, it seemed to be saying to her, Don’t go away again . But when Alec said it, it was love. Just then, Morland Place felt like duty.