Summerset Abbey: Spring Awakening (Summerset Abbey Trilogy) (27 page)

As she sliced up the potatoes she had brought home from the grocer, she realized that it didn’t much matter if they didn’t speak of Sebastian. He meant little to her now. A tender memory. A fragile regret of something that might have been but was not. Andrew and Horace. That was what her world had narrowed down to right now. Andrew and Horace.

Whereas she’d at first felt trapped and, admittedly, terrified as her baby made itself known to her, she’d melted before the waves of love that wee scrap of humanity growing within her had engendered. Whenever the distance between her and Andrew grew too painful, she would shut herself in their bedroom and take out the modest layette she had put together: the soft, miniature
gowns with the silky, blue feather stitching, impossibly small knitted bootees and caps, a stack of fresh, clean diapers, and the snowy-white bibs edged with lace and covered with embroidered pictures of Little Boy Blue and cows jumping over the moon, which were Victoria’s special offering. Prudence would run her fingers over these fine things and feel tremors of joy strumming through her body as from a finely tuned guitar.

She tried not to think about how many times she’d buried her face in the soft flannel receiving blankets and sobbed.

Prudence glanced toward where Andrew sat, all too often now, in his favorite chair, reading the newspaper she had brought for him. She recalled the last conversation she’d had with Eleanor.

“He doesn’t move enough.”

Eleanor had been blunt but Prudence had shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to do. He doesn’t talk to me like he used to. Just comments on the war news he gets from the newspapers.”

“Does he go outside?”

Prudence shook her head. “Rarely. But then I don’t either.”

Eleanor had frowned. “Don’t let his condition or yours make you a hermit. I know the weather is nasty, but you need fresh air, even if he won’t go out. Has he tried his new prosthesis?”

Prudence admitted that he had not. “He keeps struggling with the cheap one. Says he prefers it.”

Eleanor’s nose wrinkled and she’d sniffed, “Stupid, stubborn men.”

Prudence wanted to agree, but she didn’t let herself. How could she possibly know what he was going through or the adjustments he was having to make? How could she fault him for anything?

She put the potatoes in the pan and glanced toward the prosthesis
in the corner. The specialist, who had brought it and made sure it fit, had told her that Andrew’s behavior was quite common. He said she should leave it out as a reminder to Andrew that he didn’t have to suffer with the cheap one. The specialist didn’t know that Andrew’s distaste for the new leg was a protest against Prudence’s ordering it and paying for it without consulting him.

Prudence added some onions to the potatoes and then the ground beef she had already fried. Muriel had taught her to make a pan supper when she didn’t feel up to cooking anything else. Basically, she’d just cut up anything on hand, fried it in lard, and seasoned it with salt and pepper. Even Prudence couldn’t mess that up if she watched it. She interchanged pan suppers with boiled suppers, which was the same concept only tossed in a pot with water and boiled until done. If Andrew got tired of pan or boiled suppers, he never said anything.

But then Andrew didn’t say much of anything anymore.

“I hope you’re hungry!” she said cheerfully as she put some water on to boil.

“Mhm,” he answered.

“What did you think about Rowena coming over? I think it’s pretty wonderful, the way she apologized and all.” Prudence didn’t really want to discuss it, but she wanted him to talk to her and would talk about Rowena or anything else. Anything besides what was going on in the war.

He glanced over the top of his newspaper. “As long as you are happy with it, I am happy.”

But he isn’t happy
, she thought sometime later as she set his plate on the table. She used to let him eat in the chair, but Eleanor had thrown a fit when she saw it, waggling her finger at the both of them.

Andrew came to the table now.

She gave him tea and then chipped off a piece of ice from the icebox to add to the water he liked to have with his meals. “Do you need anything else?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you.”

Prudence wanted to scream. All the warmth she had felt from Rowena’s visit had disappeared, buried beneath the frustration, anxiety, and sorrow she felt about her marriage. She laid her hand on her belly. Not a comfortable and happy home to bring a baby into.

Andrew leaned forward, a frown on his face. “Is the baby all right?” Andrew showed concern for the child, but little of the excitement Prudence felt. Occasionally, she would force him to feel the baby’s movement within her, so as to see the look of wonder that would cross his face. That look kept her hope high that all would be well once the baby came.

She nodded. “Everything is fine.”

He went back to eating, his eyes straying to the newspaper.

She wished she could understand why his spirits had sunk so low that he would no longer speak to her. She had even visited the Royal Veterinary College and received assurances that her husband would still be welcome when he was ready. She had excitedly rushed home to tell him, only to see him greet the good news with the same indifference with which he now greeted everything else.

Other men had lost legs and were still out living their lives the best they could. What was it? Sometimes he almost became himself with other people, but never with her. Was he still angry over her asking the Buxtons for help?

The food she was eating stuck in her throat and she took a sip of water. She might as well have been chewing on sawdust for all she cared. She set down her spoon and watched him eat.

He raised his head. “Are you not hungry?”

His carefully polite voice pierced her heart and she shook her head and asked, “What’s wrong?”

He looked down at his plate. “Everything is fine. It’s good.”

Prudence couldn’t take it any longer. “I’m not talking about the food!” she almost cried out, the careful control she’d mastered beginning to crumble. “Do you think I care about the food? What’s wrong with
you
?”

His mouth twisted and he motioned with his fork to his leg. “I think that is obvious.”

“I didn’t mean your leg!” Her voice rose. “I meant what is wrong with
us
. Are you still angry with me for asking Victoria for help? Do you blame me for what happened to you? Why won’t you talk to me? Why do I feel like you resent me so?” Hot tears began rolling down her cheeks.

Andrew turned toward her and she was stunned by the pain she glimpsed in his eyes. “What is it?” she cried.

His face shuttered again and he shook his head. “Nothing. I just . . . I look at this prosthesis and all I can think about is how you went behind my back to the Buxtons as if we were some sort of charity case. As if you don’t trust me to figure things out for us, to take care of you. I didn’t know when I married you that you would be so . . . oblivious to my pride. I mean, I knew we came from different stations in life, but I never thought you’d be so . . . so sneaky. And just . . . selfish.”

His words fell like shards of ice between them. She wanted to cross her arms over her chest to protect herself, but the damage had been done. She sat in bewildered silence as he heaved himself upright.

“I’m not hungry. I’m going to go lay down.” She started to get up but he waved her down. “No, I’m fine. I can do it myself.”

She stared at the plate in front of her, unable to watch
him make his slow, painful way into the bedroom. The baby quivered inside her as if he knew things were not well with his mother. Prudence sat for a few minutes listening to Andrew in the bedroom until the flat was so quiet she could hear the ticking of the clock on the mantel.

*  *  *

Victoria stood on the bow of the ferry. In the distance she could see British and French battleships guarding the precious waterway between Calais and Dover. It made her feel safe. Her time in France was over and she was happy to be heading home. She’d had enough of the blood, the filth, the desperation, and the constant, pulsing fear that pervaded every moment of her day, knowing that men were dying in her care, that she, too, could die at any moment. Gladys cried herself to sleep nightly, and though Victoria couldn’t blame her, she could not participate lest she begin screaming and never stop.

It wasn’t Gladys’s pain that scarred her; it was the men’s tears. Quiet tears over their pain, or their missing limbs or comrades they had seen bleed to death right next to them. She’d held their hands and let them talk, even though she knew that had they met socially back home, they would never have used such language or described the events in such unholy detail. But somehow, when on their backs on an iron cot, with the sound of other men groaning in pain all around them, they needed a confessor. So in perfectly calm voices they shared the most unimaginable images, images Victoria saw in living color every time she closed her eyes.

She was afraid she would never unsee them.

And, always, her worry over Kit gnawed at her stomach like an ulcer.

Dame Furse and the other VADs who had gone over with her were inside. They no doubt thought her crazy to be standing out in the bracing wind, but she had spent far too much of the past few months indoors. She needed the fresh air to wipe the cobwebs from her brain.

Of course, some aspects of nursing were wonderful. The Red Cross nurses had come to appreciate the lesser-trained VADs for what they could give the men. Victoria was always in demand because she could go about her duties while reciting stories and poetry. The gratitude of the men bruised her heart with tenderness.

The white cliffs of Dover became visible on the skyline and her heart quickened. She wanted to be in her own little flat with her friends. She wanted to work in her own little hospital where the men recovered, not died. She wanted to be there when Horace was born, and she wanted to visit Summerset, her family, and Nanny Iris on the weekend.

And she wanted to be where Kit could find her. After sobbing for what felt like days, then spending several more wanting to spit on the ground he trod upon, she realized that, if nothing else, she would rather be a friend in the fringe of his life than to do without him again. Perhaps she deserved this fate after treating him so badly. As long as he came home safely, she didn’t care whom he fell in love with. Well, she did. But she would rather have him in the arms of someone else than missing from the earth, no matter how painful it would be to see her Kit with another woman. She wondered if he ever called his new lover a minx, or if he quoted poetry to her. She shook the thoughts from her head and pulled her coat tighter as the wind picked up. She looked again at the cliffs as they came nearer and nearer. She couldn’t help but feel that the young woman who had left home
so long ago was very different from the one who was returning. A year ago she had wanted to be a botanist, before setting her sights on teaching following her stint at Holloway. She had longed for independence, for a grand adventure. Now she was returning from the greatest adventure she hoped she would ever have, and all she wanted was to be with the people she loved, to know that they were safe. How she had changed.

But then, there wasn’t an Englishman or woman alive who wouldn’t irrevocably be changed by this war.

By the time she reached her flat that night she was dead on her feet. “Susie?” she called when she walked in. The warmth of the flat welcomed her. The late-March wind had been brisk and her cheeks were stinging with cold.

“You can leave the trunk there,” she said to the taxicab driver, who had lugged it up the stairs. She paid him and locked the door behind him. “Susie,” she called again.

Susie rushed out of the back bathroom. “I’m sorry, miss, I was cleaning the bathtub and couldn’t hear you over the water. Oh, thank God you are home!”

Susie threw her arms around Victoria and she could feel water from the wet rag trickling down her neck. “Susie, you are getting me wet! Whatever is the matter?”

“It’s Miss Prudence! She has gone into labor early!”

Victoria’s blood froze. She whirled around back toward the door, but Susie caught her by the arm. “They’re not at the flat, miss. Miss Eleanor took them to the hospital. Something was wrong.”

“Which hospital?”

“Miss Eleanor didn’t say. She just rang me on the telephone and told me to tell you that she was taking Prudence to a hospital to see a doctor.”

Susie’s eyes were as round as saucers, and Victoria wanted to shake her. “Why didn’t you ask where they were going or what was wrong?” she cried. Susie’s face puckered and Victoria gave her a fierce hug. “I’m sorry, of course this isn’t your fault. I’m just upset.”

Victoria tried to think, but fear paralyzed her. What if something happened to Prudence? She couldn’t bear it.

Susie nodded, taking Victoria’s coat. “Would you like a cup of tea or something to eat? You must be hungry, right?”

The eagerness in Susie’s voice told Victoria that the girl was willing to do anything to distract her from her worry. Victoria nodded. “Tea would be wonderful.”

Susie started toward the kitchen, then paused. “Do you think Prudence will be all right, miss?”

Victoria nodded, but the fear that had settled in the pit of her stomach said otherwise. “Of course. Prudence is as healthy as a horse. I have an idea. Why don’t you let me warm up and drink some tea, and you can teach me how to make some of those lemon biscuits I like so much. We can take them over to Prudence and Andrew as soon as the baby comes.”

Susie nodded and hurried down the hall, while Victoria went into the sitting room. Holding her hands to her face, she concentrated on breathing. She didn’t feel as if she were going to have an asthma attack, but the careful breathing helped calm her.

What hospital would Eleanor have taken Prudence to? How had they gotten there? She held her hands out to the fire, thinking hard. “Thank you,” she said absently when Susie handed her a cup of tea.

Susie was heading back out when Victoria had a sudden thought. “Did the driver take Eleanor to Prudence’s house?”