so that they can come safe home again. Do you understand?’
But how could they? Bethan answered herself.
‘Listen,’ she said softly, ‘your brother wanted to go to war to fight for England, and all the things that he believed are right. All good men do. If I was a man, I’d go. My brothers went as soon as they could, and … and my fiancé is in France too. He’s a private in the Welsh Division, the 38th, and when he comes home we’ll be married. It’ll be hard at first, but we’ll manage a place of our own and then you can come and see me, wouldn’t you like that, to come to Wales and see the valleys? There’s nowhere like it, you know. Ah, it’s not beautiful country like this, all cornfields and great trees, but it’s the best place on earth.’ Bethan closed her eyes on the nursery and saw the ranks of tiny grey houses clinging to the steep valley sides, the black slag hills and the skeletal towers of the pit winding-gear, and the sudden moist flashes of green between the laced black fingers of the mine workings. ‘He was doing grand, Dai was, before the War came,’ Bethan whispered. ‘More tonnage out of his pit than ever before, and him with a job at the coal face. There’s none to beat Welsh steam coal, you know. None in the world.’ And she lowered her head so that her cheek was pressed against the little girls’ smooth hair, and cried with them.
When Nanny Macleod came back from her afternoon off she found them still sitting on the nursery floor, and with their three faces identically stained with the runnels of tears.
For three days Chance was as silent as a crypt. Gerald Lovell saw no one. He sat in his library, looking out across the lawns to the trees of the park, his head tilted as if he was listening for a sound that never came. On the third afternoon he went outside, keeping to the shade of the avenues of trees as if he couldn’t bear to feel the sun’s warmth on his head. He walked painfully to the little church enclosed by the estate, and in the shelter of the thick stone walls he read the memorial tablets of Lovells spanning the centuries. Almost every one of them, lords of the manor and their ladies, old men and matriarchs, children dead in infancy, unmarried daughters and weakly younger sons, had been put finally to rest in the family vault. Even that was denied to Airlie. Bitterness rose like nausea in Gerald Lovell. There could be no burial service here for Airlie as there had been for Gerald’s father, as there would be one day for Gerald himself, with the family in heavy mourning in the big, square, screened-off family pew, and the church filled with neighbours, tenants and estate workers paying their dutiful respects. The letter from Airlie’s commanding officer following the telegram praised him for his heroism. Airlie had died beneath Thiepval Ridge and was buried with his comrades. ‘A soldier’s grave for a fine soldier,’ the captain had written as he must do in an attempt to comfort the families of every one of the men dead under his command. There was no comfort in it for Gerald. There could be no fittingly solid coffin for Airlie, made from one of Chance’s own oaks and heaped with flowers from the scented July borders. Airlie had been hastily huddled into the ground with the mutilated bodies of a hundred, perhaps a thousand others.
Gerald lurched against a pew end, the pain like a living thing inside him. His head arched backwards, and over his head he saw the dim, greenish-black folds of an ancient banner. He reached up with a curse and tore the cloth from its staff, the fibres splitting into tiny, dusty fragments that drifted lazily around him. The gold-thread-embroidered letters were tarnished with age, but still legible.
‘Regis defensor,’ Gerald said loud. ‘The King’s Defender.’ His sudden laugh was shockingly loud in the silent church. ‘Is that what he was doing, defending the King? I could have done that just as well. Why wasn’t it me? Oh God, Airlie, why not me instead?’ He lifted his hands above his head and tore the black banner in two, and then again, letting the shreds of it fall around him until only the gold thread remained, and then twining that around his fingers and pulling it so tight that his fingers went as white as candles. Then, just as suddenly, the fit of rage left him and he dropped the thread, turning away from the debris and walking out of the church as if it didn’t exist.
The last time he had held the banner had been the proudest moment of Gerald Lovell’s life. As the trumpets sounded he had stepped forward from the ranks of peers and knelt to wait for the procession. When he lifted his head he saw the slow approach of the archbishops and the bishops, and the swaying canopy held over the King’s head. And he had stood up, and led the long procession forward to the empty throne, the symbolic jewelled gauntlet clasped across his chest ready to throw down as a challenge to anyone who might threaten the King’s safety and happiness. Gerald Lovell’s father had undertaken the same proud, slow walk at the Coronation of Edward VII, and his great-grandfather, in the last month of his life, at Victoria’s. There had been a Lovell marching as the King’s Defender at every coronation since the title had been bestowed on the first Lord by the Black Prince on the battlefield at Crécy. The family had clung proudly to the title ever since, refusing any grander ones.
‘That is the end,’ Gerald said, as he came out into the sunshine again. ‘There won’t be any more, after Airlie.’ In that stricken moment he had forgotten his wife as completely as if she had never existed. The son he had begged her for while his tears stained the pink silk of her dress was forgotten with her.
Adeline was lying on the day bed in front of her open bedroom window, and she saw her husband walking back from the church like a man at the onset of paralysis. Since the moments under the cedar tree she had barely seen him, and although she had waited patiently and prayed that he would turn to her with his grief, he had never come.
They had been the loneliest days she had spent since the first weeks of her marriage.
Now the awareness of something other than loss was beginning to force itself on her attention. Adeline heaved herself upright on the day bed to ease the pain in her back, and at once felt a corresponding tightening across her belly.
‘Not long now,’ she whispered into the heavy afternoon heat. She lay back against the satin pillows, pushing the heavy weight of her hair back from her face and looking out into the sunshine. The park was deserted once more. Gerald had shut himself away again, alone.
‘It will be a boy,’ Adeline promised the sultry air. ‘It will be another boy.’
On the fourth day, the outside world intruded itself into the silence that shrouded the house. Early in the morning the local doctor’s little car chugged up the west drive from the village, and the doctor and his midwife were discreetly ushered upstairs. Almost immediately afterwards, Amy and Isabel in the schoolroom heard the purr of another car as the chauffeur drove his lordship’s big black car down to the station to meet Lady Lovell’s fashionable doctor off the fast London train.
The two doctors met at last at opposite sides of the bed, the London man in a morning coat and striped trousers, his wing-collar stiff against his throat, and the overworked local practitioner in the tweed jacket and soft collar that he hadn’t had time to change before the urgent summons came. The two men shook hands and turned to the patient. For all the differences in their appearance, they were agreed in their diagnosis. The baby was not presenting properly. Lady Lovell was about to suffer a long and painful labour and a breech delivery.
‘There now.’ The London doctor straightened up, smiling professionally. ‘You’ll be perfect. Just try and rest between the pains, won’t you?’
‘The baby.’ Her face was white, with dark patches under the eyes. ‘The baby will be all right?’
‘Of course,’ he soothed her. ‘We’ll get you your baby just as soon as we can.’
The morning cool under the trees in the park evaporated, and the sun rose in the relentlessly blue sky. The clockwork smoothness of the household arrangements ticked steadily on through the morning, occupying everyone from the august Mr Glass in his pantry to the humblest maid, but everyone was
