A Duty to the Dead

My father said, “They’ve answered.”

And I turned over the envelope. The sloping handwriting was unfamiliar, but the return address I knew all too well.

Opening the letter, I scanned the contents quickly.

“It appears that Jonathan Graham is willing to see me.” To conceal my relief, I added dryly, “He’s probably bored to tears, or else he’s already got his orders to return to the Front. I’m to come at my convenience, and Thursday next will do very well.”

My father laughed, then added, “You aren’t ready to drive.”

My own motorcar, the one I’d fought my father for, was now in the stables, collecting dust, tucked safely out of range of the zeppelin raids on London.

Since the Colonel refused to sanction the purchase, I’d had to ask one of my male friends to advise me. I wanted the independence a motorcar could give me.

I hadn’t counted on it breaking down during my first visit home.

My father, I told you so written all over his face, had brought Simon Brandon with him to ferry me home while he consigned the offending motorcar to a nearby smithy. Simon Brandon was younger than my father by more than twenty years. He’d risen in the ranks to become the Colonel’s regimental sergeant major, and was nearly as domineering, but much easier to cajole. He treated my mother like the Princess Royal, and rumor had it that he was in love with her, because he’d never married. As usual, rumor had got it wrong.

“I can manage quite well,” I told my father now. “There were times when I drove ambulances in France, and anything at Gallipoli that needed being driven. Including an officer’s motorcar, when he lost his leg.”

“My dear, it’s the train or else I drive you.”

I didn’t want him going to Kent with me.

“Very well, the train, then.”

“I’ll see to it. Meanwhile, Simon’s invited you to luncheon.”

My father drove me to the station and saw me off with misgivings he kept to himself. My mother had scolded me, warning me against taking a chill, worried that the Grahams wouldn’t look after me properly, wanting to keep me home and safe for as long as possible. She didn’t see me off, claiming the press of getting my uniforms ready before my orders came. But I knew she was afraid of crying. If it had been left to her, I’d never be out of her sight again. It was a measure of how frightened she’d been.

She had said to my father once when she thought I was not within hearing, “With that arm broken, she would have drowned.” It had been a cry for comfort, but my father had answered her, “And she didn’t. Don’t make her timid, my dear. Courage will keep her safer than fear.”

My mother had said to me afterward, “Your father is a fool.”

When I asked her why, she’d shrugged. “Men generally are,” she’d retorted, and changed the subject.

I had found myself wanting to hug her, but I didn’t dare, knowing she would have wondered why, and probably guessed. She is good at reading hearts, my mother.

The train’s carriages were filled with eager young men on their way to war, leaning out their windows and talking excitedly to others boarding at each station. I looked at their faces and felt sad. The captain of artillery sitting next to me said under his breath, “Little do they know,” when a rousing cheer went up as we pulled out of the next small town.

We weren’t winning, and the killing would go on and on. That was the fate of trench warfare, of a stalemate neither we nor Germany could break.

I’d seen that the captain wore one arm in a sling as well, and I asked him where he’d served. “France,” he answered. “I’m on my way back again.”

“Is your arm healed?”

“Near enough. I don’t have to carry a rifle or a pack. It’ll do. How is yours healing?”

I had to admit it was not doing as well as I’d hoped.

He knew Jack Franklin, as it turned out, and we spent the journey to London in conversation. Jack had been our neighbor before he’d married and gone to live in Warwick. My father had had high hopes for him in the Army, and Captain Banks promised to give Jack our best wishes when next they met.

In London I changed trains for Tonbridge, and we rolled through a dreary rain that lasted almost all the way, lashing the windows and dampening my spirits.

After Sevenoaks, I was alone in the compartment, and I removed my sling, tucking it in the small case beside me. Flexing my fingers, I gingerly tested my arm. If I was careful, it would do.

The early dark caught up with me long before I’d reached my destination, but through the rain-wet windows I could see rolling downs, the lights of farms, and the houses of villages through which we passed with only the briefest of stops.

The fruit trees were bare, but I had seen clouds of blossoms, coming up from Dover the spring we arrived in England from the Colonel’s last posting in India, and their beauty had taken my breath away after the dry featureless expanse of the Northwest Frontier. Now the hop fields were flat and hardly recognizable save for the oast houses, like broken windmills. In one pasture, sheep huddled, backs to the wind and almost invisible in the shelter of a stone wall. A man in a cart crouched wretchedly under his umbrella as he waited for the train to thunder past a crossing. I think my resolution dropped with the weather and I wished myself home again, sitting by the fire in comfort.

In his letter, Jonathan Graham had told me that I would be met. But when the train pulled into Tonbridge the winter dusk had turned to darkness, and there was no one waiting as I stepped out onto the windswept platform. For a mercy the rain had stopped. I could see the station master talking with the engineer, and so I walked into the booking office where it was warmer. It too was as empty. Then through the front window I saw the flicker of a lamp in the street beyond and heard the sound of a horse being turned. I went through to find a small dogcart there, and a driver muffled to the teeth against the cold.

“Miss Crawford?”

“Yes, I’m Miss Crawford.”

He grudgingly got down to fetch my valise and my small case from the platform, then returned to hand me up into the cart. But I shook my head. “I’ll ride with you, instead.” Reaching for the blanket folded on a seat, I realized that it was colder than I was.

Without a word he settled me into the seat next to him. As he climbed up to join me, his bulk blocked the worst of the wind. I huddled beside him and set my teeth to stop them from chattering. In the cold air, my arm ached. Broken bones tend to do that.

The horse snorted and began to walk on, and I said to the man holding the reins, “What is your name, please?”

“Robert.”

It was all the information I got for several miles as we left the lights of Tonbridge behind and the darkness settled around us like a cloak. The blanket across my knees began to unthaw and I kept my gloved fingers cradled in an edge of it. I watched houses and then the occasional farm pass by, windows lit, people no doubt just sitting down to their tea. I felt remarkably alone, and even unwanted. I could sense Robert’s hostility and in a way understood it-it was my fault he’d had to drive out on a night like this.

We must have traveled five miles or more beyond the last village when we came to a large, rambling house set back in the trees behind a high wall. It was brick, and every window seemed to be blazing with light. At first I thought it must be my destination, ready to welcome me, but as we passed by, Robert must have sensed my surprise.

“The asylum,” he said, and fell silent again.

The horse trotted on, the sound of his hooves and the cart wheels filling the night.

Robert reached behind him into the cart and brought out a rug I hadn’t seen in the darkness at the station. He thrust it toward me, and I took it, gratefully wrapping it over my shoulders. The wind seemed to cut straight through my traveling coat, touching my skin with sharp fingers.

Some time later, the cart’s nearside wheels dropped off the road into a deep rut. The jolt caught me off guard, and I was nearly thrown from my seat onto the verge.

Robert’s hand came out in the nick of time and caught me, holding me back as the horse regained the road and