Authors: Alison Stuart
“Mrs. Charles,” she exclaimed. “Welcome to Holdston. I’m Sarah Pollard and you must be Miss Alice.” She turned a beaming smile on the child before standing aside to usher them both inside the cool, dark hallway and through to a grand room, smelling of beeswax and dominated by a long table and a large fireplace emblazoned with carving. “We expected you on the later train. Sam was all set to take the car to the station to meet you.”
“We caught the bus from the station and walked. Sorry if that caused any inconvenience,” Helen said
“Oh none at all. You’re here and that’s what matters. Come in, come in. Leave your suitcase. I’ll take it up to your room. Lady Morrow’s in the parlour. I’ll show you through.”
Helen removed the pins from her hat and set it down on top of the case. She took off Alice’s hat and fussed over the unmanageable fair hair that refused to stay confined in a neat plait.
“Are you ready to meet Grandmama?” she asked her daughter, with what she hoped was a confident smile. She didn’t need Alice to see the nerves that turned her stomach into a churning mass of butterflies.
They followed Sarah Pollard’s ample girth across the wide, stone-flagged floor. Helen looked up at the portraits of long dead Morrows who glared down at her from the wainscoted walls. If Charlie had lived, she would have been the next Lady Morrow and her portrait would have joined theirs, a colonial interloper in their ordered society.
Sarah opened a door and announced her. A slender woman, in her late middle age, her graying hair piled on her head in a manner fashionable before the war, rose from a delicate writing table by the window.
“Helen. You’re earlier than I had expected,” Lady Evelyn Morrow said. “I would have sent the car for you but you are most welcome to Holdston at long last. And you.” She turned to the child. “Let me look at you, Alice.”
Alice looked up at her mother, her eyes large and apprehensive. Helen gave her a reassuring smile and with a gentle hand in the girl’s back, urged her forward for her grandmother’s inspection.
“You’re not much like your father,” Lady Morrow concluded.
Helen could have listed all the ways in which Alice was, in fact, very much like her father, the father she had never known, from the hazel eyes to the way her upper lip curled when she smiled, and her utter lack of concern for her own safety. She must never stop forgetting.
Sarah Pollard bustled in with a tea tray and Lady Morrow indicated two chairs. Alice perched awkwardly on the high backed chair, her feet not quite touching the floor. Her eyes widened at the sight of the cake and biscuits piled high on the tea tray.
“I trust you had a good voyage?” Lady Morrow enquired as she poured the tea into delicate cups.
“Yes.” Helen smiled. “It was a wonderful adventure. Wasn’t it, Alice? We thought about Cousin Paul as we sailed through the Suez Canal. He must have some incredible stories to tell about the archaeological digs.”
The lines around Evelyn’s nose deepened. “If Paul has incredible stories, he does not share them with me, Helen.”
“But he writes to me and tells me all about them,” Alice said. “Every Christmas and every birthday. Last birthday he sent me a little glass bottle from...where was it, Mummy?”
“Palestine,” Helen replied. “He said it was Roman.”
“Does he indeed?” Evelyn’s eyebrows rose slightly. “I am glad to hear he recognizes his responsibility to you, Alice.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting him. They told me he was with Charlie...” Helen began.
Evelyn stiffened, the teacup halfway to her lips. She set the cup down and folded her hands in her lap. “If you are hoping that Paul will shed any light on what happened that day, Helen, then you will be disappointed. Paul was badly injured in the same action and has, apparently, no memory of–” her thin lips quivered, “–the incident.”
Helen caught the sharp edge of an old bitterness in the older woman’s voice. “I see,” she said.
“You and I, Helen, must mourn over an empty grave,” Lady Morrow said.
She rose to her feet, walked over to the piano and picked up one of the heavy silver-framed photographs that adorned its highly polished surface.
“Did you ever see this photograph?” She handed it to Helen. “I had it taken before Charlie went to France in March 1915. Paul was home on leave and Charlie had just taken his commission.”
The photograph showed two young men in the uniform of infantry officers, one seated and the other standing, a photograph like thousands of others that were now the last link with the dead. Helen had a single portrait of Charlie, taken at the same photographic session, sporting an elegant, unfamiliar moustache and grinning from ear to ear, like an over-anxious school boy, keen to join the ‘
stoush
’, kill the ‘
bloody Bosch
’. She felt a keen sense of pain that reverberated as strongly as it had on the day he told her he would have to return to England.
“I can’t leave them to fight the Huns, Helen,” he said. “Damn it, I have a duty to England.” The drunken words came back to her and she could see Charlie in the kitchen of Terrala with his arm across her brother Henry’s shoulders, as they celebrated their mutual decision to join the war.
Henry had already enlisted in the Australian Light Horse and Charlie told her a few days later that he intended to return to England to join his cousin’s regiment.
“Do you think I would leave Paul to uphold the family honor?” he said.
And he’d gone.
Even as she had stood on the dock at Port Melbourne, the cold winter wind whipping at her ankles, she had known he would not return. She wondered if his decision to go would have been any different if they had known she was carrying his child. Probably not.
She turned from her husband’s smiling face to his cousin, Paul Morrow, the professional soldier, never destined to take the Morrow title until one day in a muddy field outside Ypres had turned his fortune.
The long months of war had already begun to leave their mark and, while he affected a smile, she saw no warmth in his eyes. In normal circumstances, with the strong jaw and good bone structure, it would be a handsome face but he looked tired and drained, and years older than his cousin, although he was the older by little over a year.
Yes, Paul Morrow had survived, but at what cost, she wondered?
“Is Paul here?” she asked. “When he last wrote to Alice, he said he would be in Mesopotamia for the digging season.”
“The digging season is over for the year and I expect him home in the next few days.” Evelyn rose to her feet. “Now, let me show you your bedroom, Helen. I’ve given you the green room. As the nursery wing is shut up, I thought Alice could sleep in the dressing room. It’s so hard with just the two of us.” Her voice wavered and she looked past Helen to a point just beyond her shoulder before recovering her composure and continuing. “Much of the house is shut up, but Sarah can let you have the keys and you are free to go wherever you want, except my rooms and, of course Paul’s rooms. When he returns, he will also be working in the library.” Evelyn looked at Alice. “Then it will be strictly out of bounds. Sir Paul is not to be disturbed, Alice, do you understand?”
Alice nodded and looked up at her mother.
* * * *
Upstairs in the green room, Helen found Sarah Pollard unpacking the suitcase.
“I can do that,” Helen said.
Sarah looked at her with such appalled surprise at the suggestion, Helen took a step back.
“You’ve not brought much with you,” Sarah commented as she set Helen’s silver-backed hairbrush and mirror on the dressing table, along with the photograph of Helen and Charlie on their wedding day.
Helen refused to display the photograph Charlie had sent her of him in his uniform, ready for war. She wanted nothing to remind her of why he had died, even if she did not know the circumstances of his death.
Sarah paused for a moment looking down at the photograph. “Oh he was a fine man,” she said. “Everyone he ever met liked him.”
Helen’s throat constricted and to distract herself, she looked around the room. The faded green curtains and bed coverings on the old half-tester bed gave the room its name. A small bookshelf of leather bound books stood against one wall and the heavy mahogany dressing table dominated the other. A door led through to the room Evelyn had called the dressing room, where an iron bedstead, covered in a pink eiderdown, had been set up for Alice.
Helen stooped to look out of the low window at the view across parkland, at the unfamiliar richness of the English countryside. Summer wrapped the world in a thick green plush, unlike home where summer bleached the land and everything living in it.
“Can we go exploring now?” Alice pleaded.
“Supper will be at six,” Sarah said. “Her ladyship eats a main meal at lunchtime and takes only a light supper. She said to tell you there’s no need to dress.”
Helen smiled. “That’s fine.” No one dressed except for the most formal meals at Terrala.
Sarah handed over a bunch of keys before leaving and Helen and Alice started at the top of the house, opening all the doors and peering into the dark, dusty rooms. The old house was built in the shape of a letter C with a front wing facing the main entrance, the side wing dominated by the Great Hall through which they’d entered and the back wing which housed the kitchen on the ground floor and more bedrooms above. They found the nursery and Alice gave a squeal as she rushed toward a magnificent dollhouse.
“Do you think Grandmama will let me play with it?” she asked.
“I am sure she will,” Helen said, taking the opportunity to search a bookshelf for suitable books for Alice. She was delighted to discover the complete set of books by E. Nesbit. There seemed to be books in every room in the house.
“Daddy told me there were secret hidey-holes and passages,” Helen said, caught up for a moment in a childish marvel at the antiquity of the house.
Alice’s eyes shone. “Did he say where?”
Helen shook her head.
“Perhaps Grandmama or Uncle Paul will know,” Alice said.
When Paul Morrow’s birthday and Christmas letters had begun arriving for Alice, Helen had decided to accord this distant, but important, relative an avuncular title. It seemed easier for a small child to comprehend than Cousin Paul and, knowing the close bond between Charlie and his cousin, it also seemed more appropriate.
On the upper floor of the house, Helen and Alice passed the solid, oak door that Evelyn had pointed out as Paul Morrow’s rooms occupying the corner between the front and the side wings. They also walked through a gallery lined with faded tapestries and paintings, a large airy parlour over the old gateway into what would have been the inner courtyard, and then into the passage leading to Lady Morrow’s rooms at the end of the wing. A narrow, winding staircase at the end of the passage led them down to a locked oak door. Helen tried most of the keys on the ring, until one massive iron key turned reluctantly in the lock.
When the turn of the handle still did not shift the ancient door, Helen leaned her shoulder against the wood and pushed. The door creaked reluctantly and opened on to a large room dominated by two massive bookshelves taking up the spaces on either side of an old fireplace. A long, low window looked out over the moat to the driveway. Ancient framed maps and paintings of Holdston Hall crowded the remaining wall space. Several smaller family portraits were dotted among the maps and watercolors, including two head and shoulders studies of a man and a woman painted during the Georgian era and a couple of later Victorian models with severe, frowning faces.
Helen walked over to the Georgian pair and studied them closely. She could see at once that they had been painted by different hands, probably at different times and yet they had been framed identically and hung together as if in life they had belonged as a pair.
The man had obviously been a Morrow. Like the other portraits of Morrow forebears, dark hair tumbled over his handsome aristocratic brow and he glared at the artist, his stiffness emphasised by the high collar of a scarlet uniform. Charlie’s fair hair, inherited from his mother, made him quite a cuckoo in the family portrait gallery.
In contrast to the formality of the male portrait, the woman beside him glowed with life. A fierce intelligence burned from her light grey eyes. A tangle of chestnut curls framed her face and her mouth lifted in a half smile as if any moment she would burst into laughter. She wore a green gown that exposed a great deal of décolletage in a manner fashionable in the early part of the nineteenth century and no jewelry except a slender gold chain, with a locket hanging from it, nothing more than a blur of gold under the artist’s brush.
Helen shivered and pushed the windows open, admitting a breeze that carried with it the waft of warm grass and the sounds of the country–birds and the distant hum of a steam engine driving a threshing machine.
Along with these comfortable, familiar sounds drifted another faint sound, a whispering, a woman’s voice half heard, the words indistinct and undecipherable.
Helen frowned and tilted her head to listen, turning back into the room.
“Can you hear something, Alice?” she asked.
Alice looked up from turning an old globe on the table.
“No,” she said.
Helen looked around. The whispering seemed to come from within the room, not through the open windows. She stood transfixed, staring at the two wing chairs by the fireplace. The whispering grew more insistent, more urgent. Wrapping her arms around herself, Helen gripped the sleeves of her cardigan. The back of her neck prickled, her breath almost stopped.