Read sample Gather the Bones

Prologue

Paul turned his head on the pillow and watched as Evelyn Morrow, clutching her purse to her chest like a shield, followed the nurse past the rows of beds. Her gaze did not move from the woman’s starched back as if she was unable to bring herself to look around her at the carnage the war had wrought.

The breath caught in the back of his throat and a coward’s voice in his mind whispered: Not here, not now.

He knew she had been watching and waiting for him to return to the world. Through the haze of drugs and delirium, he had been aware of her standing sentinel by his bed, clad in black from head to foot, a shadow. He knew he had to face her, but he lacked the strength to match her grief against his.

Feigning sleep, he shut his eyes.

‘Now, only a few minutes, Lady Morrow. He is still very weak,’ the nurse said. ‘I will be at my desk if you require anything.’

Paul heard the efficient clack of the nurse’s heels on the linoleum floor as she returned to her place at the end of the ward.

Through the pervading scent of carbolic, he could smell his aunt’s perfume and once again he stood on the platform at Waterloo station, a small boy clutching a battered suitcase. A beautiful woman in a blue gown had bent down and taken his hand, enveloping him in a cloud of lavender.

She hadn’t kissed him then and she didn’t kiss him now. Lady Evelyn Morrow just stood at the foot of his bed, looking down at him.

‘Paul? Can you hear me?’ Her tone commanded obedience and his eyes flickered open, meeting hers, dark pools behind the black netting that covered her face.

Evelyn clutched the metal bar at the end of the bed and the feather on her hat began to quiver as her whole body shook with the force of her emotion. ‘You promised.’ Her voice rose on a crescendo of despair. ‘You promised you would keep him safe. Where is he? Where’s my son? Where’s Charlie?’

Paul felt her grief as a palpable force, sending shock waves down the rows of beds that lined the ward. He wanted to say, ‘I promised. I know I promised but I couldn’t keep it. Charlie is gone.’

His fingers tightened on the starched sheet and his breath came in short, sharp gasps as the words formed and then stuck fast.

The chair at the nurse’s station scraped on the floor and her hurried footsteps beat a rapid tattoo on the linoleum floor.

‘Lady Morrow. Really, I must protest. Come away with me this instant.’

The nurse placed a firm arm around Evelyn’s shoulder, leading her away. Evelyn shook off the encircling arm and turned back to look at him, the tears Paul knew she had probably not allowed herself to shed were now spilling down her face.

‘Lady Morrow, please. You are overwrought. I’ll fetch you a nice cup of tea.’ The nurse’s tone softened and with her arm around Evelyn’s shoulders, she led the woman into the glassed-in office at the end of the ward.

Paul turned his head on the hard, lumpy pillow, feeling the starched linen crackle beneath his cheek. In the bed next to him, a young subaltern who had lost both his legs lay immobilised by the stiff sheets and blankets. The impeccable bedclothes, pulled up to his chin, hid the reality of his horrific injuries from his visitors, reducing the war to something neat, tidy, and manageable.

In the office, beyond the line of beds, the nurse handed a cup to Evelyn. The door opened and the Matron of the hospital entered the little office and began to berate the errant visitor for her unseemly behaviour. Lady Evelyn Morrow sat hunched in a chair like a schoolgirl and even through the glass snatches of the scolding—inappropriate behaviour and upsetting the patients—filtered out into the ward.

The nurse returned to Paul’s bedside, making a pretence of straightening his pillow.

‘Really,’ she tutted as she fussed over him. ‘I would have expected better from a lady.’

‘Outward displays of grief should be reserved for the lower classes?’ he murmured.

‘Pardon?’ the nurse replied.

‘Tell her I want to see her,’ Paul said.

The nurse straightened. ‘Are you sure?’

He nodded and with a sniff, the nurse bustled back to the office. She whispered in Matron’s ear and the older woman stiffened, casting a quick glance in Paul’s direction. Evelyn looked up as the Matron spoke. She too glanced through the window toward him and rose to her feet, tucking her handkerchief back into her purse.

Her back straight, Evelyn looked the Matron squarely in the eye and her words, audible through the glass, echoed down the long ward. ‘I assure you, there will be no repeat.’

Once more the nurse, this time in the company of Matron, conducted Evelyn to his bedside. A rustle of anticipation rippled through the ward and Paul imagined the faces of the other patients turned expectantly toward his aunt. If nothing else, her outburst had provided an entertaining highlight in an otherwise dull day.

‘Now, Lady Morrow,’ the Matron said as Evelyn took the seat beside Paul’s bed. ‘I am sure I don’t need to remind you, Major Morrow is easily tired. A few minutes, that’s all.’

Paul looked up at the ceiling while his mind framed the words. He knew what had to be said and that the words would not bring her the comfort she sought.

‘Evelyn?’

She raised her eyes and once more they looked at each other, these two strangers, bound together by ties they could not sever.

‘Evelyn...I’m sorry...’ he said, shocked at how weak his voice sounded.

She leaned toward him. ‘No,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I was unfair on you, Paul. It is I who should apologise.’

‘I know what you want to ask me,’ he said.

Evelyn did not hesitate. ‘Is he dead?’

Paul closed his eyes as he struggled with the simple word that would give her the answer she sought. He had no tears of his own to shed for Charlie. Three and a half years in the trenches had robbed him of the ability to show sorrow and his own grief for his cousin ran too deep for such an outward display.

He heard her breath catch and knew she had read the answer in his face even as he answered. ‘Yes.’

Her lips tightened in a supreme effort to control herself. ‘What happened, Paul? Please tell me how he died and why I cannot bury my son.’

He turned his face away from her. ‘I don’t know, Evelyn. God help me, I don’t remember. I just know he is dead.’

Evelyn sat in silence, watching him. As she rose to leave, in a gesture that would have seemed foreign to her in the long days of his childhood, she placed a gloved hand over his good hand. Her fingers tightened on his, binding him to her.

Chapter 1

Helen Morrow took a deep breath, her hand tightening on her daughter’s. She felt a corresponding squeeze, looked down into Alice’s upturned face, and smiled. Why were children so much braver than adults?

She raised the knocker on the old oak door and let it fall. The sound reverberated around the quiet courtyard and she took a step back as the door opened to reveal a small, round woman wearing a spotless white apron over a flowered dress.

Before Helen could speak, the woman’s face lit up with a smile.

‘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, not 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 is 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 greying 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 recognises 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, 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 honour?’ 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 a 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 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 stood up. ‘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. ‘It will be strictly out of bounds. Sir Paul is not to be disturbed, Alice, do you understand?’

Alice nodded.

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. ‘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 the 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 onto 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 watercolours, 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 the 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 jewellery 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, and she held her breath for a moment.

As she took a step toward the chairs, the whispering ceased and she let out her breath and straightened her shoulders before crossing to the windows and pulling them shut.

‘Come on, Alice,’ she said. ‘We’ll be late for supper and I don’t want to annoy your grandmother on our first day.’