The Gates of Rutherford (37 page)

Harry couldn't bear to see anything resembling that in Caitlin's face. He couldn't cope with it in his men—could hardly cope with it. It was what had driven something essential out of his own character, he knew. Hardened to necessity. He couldn't bear to look in her face and know she'd lost that crucial piece of humanity. Or was pretending at life.

The plane roared upwards, and he tried to stop thinking.

Sensitive and unpredictable, the Camel had to be kept strictly in a flying position to stop it rearing up. He tried to recall all he knew about the new Sopwith. Hold the nose steady. Resist the powerful torque of the rotary engine that wanted to haul the machine to the right. Balance the left rudder to prevent a spinning nosedive.

He was flying a knife-edge in more ways than one. Flying a machine he was unused to; flying without permission towards the English coast. Flying without sense of himself.

Ah, love, let us be true to one another! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams . . .

That was the ending of the Arnold poem. For a moment, the verse became alarmingly clear; he was nine years old again, and reciting it for his tutor. Funny how things came back to you. Funny what was lodged there in the back of your mind.

He glanced to his right; he had seen a sudden glassy reflection out of the corner of his eye. But there was nothing there now, only a bank of clouds below. The coast of Belgium looked terribly messed beyond Nieuwpoort and around the Yser, God help them.

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight . . .

He'd seen most of it, he thought. Most of what a plane could do. He wondered what else they would dream up for them, in time. He pulled the Sopwith higher, above a trail of smoke, a thin drift of cloud. He felt very tired; so tired that he could sleep. In a slow, rolling cadence other flights came back to him.

Going very low over Passchendaele. Ordered to fly in the tunnel created by the trajectory of British shells. To come out of the fire, as it were, to take the enemy by surprise. Flying in pairs. He'd watched his colleague go into the tunnel and followed him from the other side, and passed into a hell on earth. He was so low that he could see the wreckage of men and machines on the ground; even see the barbed wire. So low that he passed over a German machine-gun post and saw them diving for cover.

Flying towards a church tower . . . Where had that been? He'd had a juvenile idea that he could use the tower for target practice, and God had rewarded him by putting a sniper in the tower. A bullet came straight through the windshield. Missed him by a fraction of an inch.

Of course, some men had an aura of invincibility about them. Hardly human, he considered. Naturally one felt like that on first flying. The invincibility part. The feeling of eternity in an empty sky. One absorbed it. But only for a while. Sooner or later the look came to one's eyes, the “thousand yard stare” that the men on the ground talked about. The infantry got it after bombardments; numbness and shock. But the air crews got it when heaven came crashing down. When one realized there was a limit.

The flash again. He turned his head.

There was a Hun above him, and in the same moment that Harry realized what it was, there came a burst of machine gun fire. He felt the bullets hit his plane.
Good God, I'm done for
, he thought. He was utterly calm. He knew that his seat was positioned right over the fuel tank, and that if a bullet hit the petrol vapor, it would explode. But nothing happened. The bullet must have gone through the fuel.

He tried to swerve, to dive. But the tank was finished. He only had the gravity tank on the wing. But you couldn't climb, achieve height, with just the gravity tank.

He saw the German plane come back, rear up like a horse just yards away. For a second of absolute clarity, Harry admired the skill. He relaxed his hands on the controls. He looked down the silhouette of his enemy, the lines of the wings, the fragility of the machine, the arc that the plane was describing.

The sky was so clear, and the earth so small.

•   •   •

T
he German pilot landed behind Peronne an hour later, after chasing other Sopwiths up and down the Yser.

He was spattered with oil, and had run out of ammunition. The plane grumbled as he landed—there was a wheel fixed, hit by shrapnel from below. It brought the machine to a grinding half circle, and he scrambled to disengage the controls and jump free.

He ran back across the grass, pulled off his helmet, and stood there in the field, in the sunshine of the late afternoon, gasping for breath.

When he made his report, he told them about the Sopwith kill. They slapped him on the back to congratulate him, and he walked to his camp bed, and laid down on it, and closed his eyes.

But he knew that he wouldn't sleep again. Not the kind of sleep he needed. Not the oblivion he wanted. He wouldn't sleep because
he wouldn't forget that Sopwith pilot. They had been only feet from each other, and he had looked into the other man's eyes. The Englishman had been handsome, not very old. He had been headed, strangely, towards the coast, alone. Quite alone. And he had taken no real action. Once he had at last noticed him, he had not really evaded him.

The strangest thing of all—the thing that he could not forget—was how that Englishman had looked at him. So directly. He had looked at him and actually smiled. And, as the Sopwith had begun to fall, the pilot had held up his hand in an eerily leisurely fashion. The Sopwith had begun to spiral; he had watched it go down, vanish in the line of brown smoke for a moment, and emerge almost immediately, tipped on its end.

He had circled over the spot, and saw how suddenly, not a hundred feet from the ground, the plane had exploded. An orange bloom of fire; petals of dust and smoke as the impact came. Black stems of burning fuel. A ghastly drawing of a burning flower in the middle of a waterlogged field by the sea.

He would never get it out of his mind.

Because of the smile. The Englishman's smile.

And his casual wave of farewell.

I
t was snowing heavily when the train pulled into the station.

It was early in the morning, and the week before Christmas. The mail train serviced the villages all along the river valley right up to Rutherford, and on most days there would be other freight; the usual deliveries to the farms—feed or small machinery. But this morning the cargo was very different.

The stationmaster and his men had spent an hour in the early morning darkness shoveling the snow from the platform. Ice hung from the roof, and they worked in pools of bright light reflected from the waiting room windows. Then, as the morning finally dawned, and they heard the steam train coming along the line, the ramp was ready to put alongside the guard's van.

A small crowd from the village stood waiting. There was an air of expectancy because of the fame of the Shire horse; because it had been in the London and Yorkshire newspapers, and because an unheard-of species—several newspaper reporters—had come to the
houses grouped around the green and the church and asked what they knew of Rutherford.

No one liked to say very much. In any normal circumstances, they might have celebrated—brought out the bunting and flags. Perhaps had a little meeting at the village hall before the horse was taken up to the Park. But it didn't seem right anymore. They were glad that the Shire was back—who could not be glad at such a miracle?—but the return was mixed with grief. There were so many men who had not returned, and here was a horse, simply a horse, rescued out of the mire of France.

And so it was with mixed feelings that the crowd at the station watched the ramp taken to the train, and the doors open. A kind of sigh went around in the freezing air as the great grey Shire stumbled, feeling its way uncertainly down the short slope. Those that had known it before it had left over two years ago let a ripple of shock escape them. Its sides were scarred, and the ribs showed, even now. For a moment it hung its head at an odd angle. And then they realized that its sight was poor; that the movement of the head was an attempt to see clearly at all.

They murmured among themselves. Here and there a name. Here and there a word of admiration. They watched the American emerge from the van, and a photographer stepped forward. They posed, until the flashlight sent a violent tremble along the horse's flanks. John Gould took hold of the leading rein, and the horse followed like a child.

The crowd formed a line behind them both, and they crossed the station yard. Seen from above, they resembled a long dark thread among the whiteness of the snow, slipping on the wet ridges made by wheel tracks, walking the two miles out of the village, and at last turning in at the gates of Rutherford under the statues of the bluebirds, and the bare branches of the trees.

Far behind the followers, a man walked alone. He had waited until the station yard was empty before he had got off the train, and, when he did so, the stationmaster had stepped forward and shaken his hand. The station men watched him go, seeing the difference in him. They half expected him to falter or fall. But he kept upright, slinging his bag over his shoulder and walking with slow and concentrated determination.

It was only when he was out of their sight that Jack Armitage stopped to steady himself, to take a breath, and look around him. He had reached the village church, and ran his hand gratefully along the stone wall that skirted the graveyard. He waited while the clock in the church tower chimed eight.

And so he was the last to come down the long beech drive to the great house. Far ahead, he could see the head of the horse visible above the crowd. He finally smiled to himself, remembering the summers that he had walked behind Wenceslas, and the winters like these that had named him. The horse had been born in snow, a harsh and unexpected spring snow that had wreathed the parkland for weeks. His first steps had been taken out in the unmarked sweep of white that was the river pasture, and the name had been given to mark those memorable imprints on the ground, the line of hoofprints across the sleeping grass.

Jack slowed his pace as he got closer to the house.

The crowd had stopped at a respectful distance; there was no sound now. No talking as there had been as they walked the lanes. Just the soft hush of the rolling grounds, the snow-silenced hill, the frozen trees.

On the steps of the house, a group had been waiting to meet them.

Jack searched the figures, looking for only one. She was not there, it seemed. He glanced over at the house, seeing how the blinds were
still down. It had been more than three months now, but the mark of mourning—the drawing of blinds—would not leave Rutherford until the following year was out. Until the shock became a little muted, a fraction bearable. Until another summer had come and gone.

Lord and Lady Cavendish stood side by side, watching the procession. His lordship leaned heavily on a walking stick; his wife—for she was still his wife, Jack knew, if only in name—was wrapped in a deep-collared coat pulled so high around her face that only her eyes were visible, and her mouth was obscured. But he saw the same expression in both faces; even today, grief had disfigured her ladyship's beauty and his lordship's stoicism. They looked, Jack thought, like two mystified children. Helplessly human, diminished in size somehow. He pitied them, and hung back, guilty to be the one who was coming home. He was quite sure that it was not him whom they wanted to see.

Then the silence was broken. The door behind them opened, and a slight figure walked forward. It was Louisa, and she was holding Harry's daughter's hand. It took the child to do what the adults seemingly could not do, at least at first: breaking free of Louisa's grip, Sessy rushed down the steps and flung herself at Wenceslas, holding up her hands so that the horse lowered its head to perceive her. Streams of the horse's breath surrounded her; the warmth of life in a cold world. The little girl began to dance around, and the crowd watched her, and, like sunlight breaking through the gloom, there were smiles. Others grew close, stroked the flank of the Shire. Voices rose on the air.

John Gould walked up the steps, but stopped halfway up. He looked up at those above him, staff and family alike. “We've brought them home,” he said. And something about it working well—something that Jack could not catch. He was not concentrating. He was looking at Louisa.

She stopped next to her parents for a while, her arms crossed in front of her as if she were very cold. She and Jack regarded each other without a smile, without a hand raised in recognition. It was a stare deeper than all else. Deeper than words. And then, out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw his own mother and father walking towards him. At the last moment, his mother rushed forward. He hadn't known that he was falling, or even that he was so cold to the touch. He heard his mother exclaiming, felt a coat being wrapped around his shoulders. “I wanted to walk,” he told them.

Then down the house steps came Bradfield, marshaling Hardy and the hallboy Albert behind him. They were carrying hot drinks. On the trays were branches of holly and red ribbons. Jack saw one such raised to Wenceslas's head, and pinned to his bridle. Ribbons of red, he thought, in confusion. Red against soil and snow and hands and faces. He looked at his feet, took a breath. Felt his father's arm around his waist. It was nearly Christmas, that was all. That was all it signified. He was given brandy, and coffee that smelled incredibly sweet and rich. The household had made all kinds of little cakes and biscuits; he put one to his mouth, but couldn't stomach it. The brandy was scoring a white-hot circle in his stomach. He was unused to spirits. His vision swam.

And so it might have been a dream that Louisa came down the steps. It might have been a dream that she went to the horse and smoothed his neck, and whispered, “Good boy,” in that familiarly soft voice. The same voice she had used when they had cajoled Wenceslas towards the trucks that had carried him away. Sweet persuasion. He watched her hands.

And it might have been a dream, so much later. Later in the day as the afternoon light drained away. It might have been a dream because it was what had been in Jack's mind and what he had hoped for for so long. He had visualized her all the way from France and
all the way to the north of England, and all the way on the slow mail train weaving its way across the hills.

But he knew when he saw her come across the yard; saw her running despite the snow.

He knew when he opened the door of the stable, and she rushed into his arms and held him so tightly, and turned her face up to him, smiling, laughing, and taking his hands in her own. And then she buried her face in his shoulder and he felt a kind of shaking run through her. And he heard her say, “It's all right now, Jack. It's all right now.”

No, it was not a dream. Never a need to dream again.

For this was the real world at
last.