A Future Arrived
Authors: Phillip Rock
To Bettye
for her love and courage
Book One: A Past Forgotten 1930
Book Two: A Future Arrived 1938â1940
The Wartime World of
A Future Arrived
N
A
PRIL
M
ORNING
S
PRING CAME AT
last after a winter of snow and icy winds that had sent trees crashing in the tangled depths of Leith Wood and had blocked the narrow country roads with drifts. Some of the more isolated villages in the Weald had been cut off for days at a time, causing farmers and their wives to pen furious letters to those county councillors responsible for maintenance of the king's highway. Their children, kept from going to school in Abingdon by the appalling condition of the roads, had been less choleric about the matter. But all the troubles of January and February disappeared by the end of March. A west wind brought patchy blue skies, fleecy cumulus, and gentle, intermittent rains that melted the snow and set once placid streams tumbling with white water toward the rivers and the sea. There would be further discomfortâmud and sodden fieldsâbut what was that after so gray a winter? One could tolerate a bit of flooding here and there if it meant crocus and daffodil, budding elm and beech. If it meant spring and the joyous promise of summer.
Anthony Greville, Earl of Stanmore, was up at first light, as he had been every morning since the weather broke. There were a thousand things that required his attention and not enough hours in the day to supervise them all. There were stone walls that had tumbled in the frost, paddock fences that sagged and drooped, gravel paths and driveways that were rutted or scoured away by wind-drifted ice and snow, roofs that needed new slate, windows to be reglazed, walls painted, stables repairedâall the myriad tasks that accumulated in so large an estate as Abingdon Pryory during a long, hard English winter. His valet, stifling yawns, drew the earl's bath and laid out his clothes for the dayâmoleskin trousers, a flannel shirt of tattersall check, a well-used tweed jacket, and a pair of sturdy half boots waterproofed with neat's-foot oil. Bathed and dressed, he awaited his tea and toastâfour slices, extra crisp, the tea strong, amber brown Ceylon.
The rapid knock on his sitting-room door was too loud and insistent to be the maid with her tray of teapot, toast slices, and jam jars. The sound was startling and he opened the door himself. Gardway, the head groom, stood in the shadowed corridor, his usually cheerful, ruddy face turned pale and solemn.
“What on earth ⦠?”
Gardway, who had at one time been a steeplechase jockey of note, turned his cloth cap in his small, restive hands. “Begging Your Lordship's pardon, but Mr. Coatsworth has done and gone.”
“Gone?”
“Dead, sir. Poor old gentleman.” He shielded his mouth with his cap and coughed nervously. “I ⦠I thought you'd be wanting to know right off.”
Lord Stanmore stared down at the man. “Coatsworth dead?” His tone reflected his incomprehension. “That's difficult to believe. You're quite sure, of course?”
“I am that, sir. I went by the cottage on my way to the stables. Saw a light burnin' and popped in. He was sittin' up in bed. I ⦠did the courtesy of closin' his eyes. God rest his soul.”
“Thank you, Samuel. That was most kind.”
“I'll miss the old chap, I'll say that.”
“Yes. We all will. Does anyone else know?”
The groom shook his head and tightened his grip on his cap. “No, m'lord. I reckoned you'd be wanting to tell the staff.”
“Quite so.” He turned away from the door and stared across at the telephone. “I'd best call Dr. Morton ⦠and make arrangements.” The sky was the palest blue. A cloud hovered above Burgate Hill, framed in the tall windows of the room. Cloud and hill tinged rose with dawn. It would be a lovely day and Coatsworth would not see it. “I thought him eternal,” he said to no one.
There was a chill to the wind as he left the house. He turned up his coat collar and walked briskly along the flagstone terrace and down the broad, stone steps into the sunken garden with its marble statuary and rose shrubs still tied in their winter coverings of burlap. One covering had rotted away into windblown strips. He paused for a moment and plucked a desiccated pod from the bush and crumbled it to powder between his fingers.
He could sense death as he entered the cottage. Felt its presence in the gentle ticking of a mantel clock and the dust floating in a solitary shaft of sunlight. A comfortable, ordered room that said much for the man who had lived in it. Nothing extraneous. No bric-a-brac or mementos. A sofa, Morris chair, desk and straight-back chair. A bookcase with some well-used leather-covered volumes of Dickens and Shakespeare. A painting that he had given to Coatsworth one Christmas in the distant past.
A View of Leith Hill as Seen from Wotton Common
âby Thomas Piggott, R. A. Signed and dated 1891.
He felt loath to enter the small bedroom but did so. The bedside lamp still burned, casting its glow on the motionless figure propped against pillows. Gardway had touched nothing. Just the closing of the eyes. He stood close to the bed, reached out, and touched the once imposing head that seemed so shrunken now, so fragile in death.