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Chapter 44: But the Rest of the Dead Lived Not Again
THE ARCADIA, OUT OF CALAIS, AND HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADIAN MARITIMES
Spring 1918–Spring 1919
Jones refused to tell her, however much she asked, what he’d paid, whom he’d bribed, to get documents for them all, and clothes, and berths—all plausible enough to get them home instead of arrested.
“No, Iven,” he said irritably, when she asked for the fourth time. “I won’t tell you. It’s done, anyway. You’re going back to Canada where you belong, and Godspeed.” The spring air was warm around them. They were standing on the deck of the ship. Freddie and Winter had already gone below. Winter was still feverish. He was a wealthy young American, according to his papers, maimed in combat. Laura was his nurse, and Freddie his servant. To the east, the war convulsed the very air; they could faintly hear the guns, even there in the port at Le Havre.
Laura said, “I am in your debt, then.”
Jones was smoking restlessly, not quite looking at her. “Winter’s wound—the stitches will—”
Laura took a step nearer him, and his voice died away. She said, “I am capable of managing Winter’s stitches.”
“I know,” he said. He tossed his cigarette overboard, watching her.
Very carefully, she touched his face, palm to cheekbone. She was angry at him for being high-handed, but perhaps it was merely her reflexive distrust of someone trying to help her. It was a novel experience, after all. He didn’t move. Come with us, she hadn’t said. Jones was like her. He knew his duty, and while he still had strength, he would not turn aside. Laura’s duty lay below, with the last of her family, resurrected.
“Write me,” he said. “Let me know how you get on.”
“If you do the same,” said Laura.
They paused again. Finally Laura huffed, and pulled his head down and kissed him. Four years ago, her behavior would have shocked the deck; now no one even looked their way. When Jones drew away, his eyes were brilliant. The whistle blew for departure.
“Hell,” said Jones, and kissed her once more. Then he turned, and walked down the gangplank and away.
· · ·The voyage was slow, and quiet, and private. They kept to their staterooms. Laura would wake up, weeping, remembering the voyage out, and Pim. But Freddie comforted her, and Winter too. Winter was observant, in his quiet way, and they’d come and sit together in the library when no one else was there. Winter proved to have a bone-dry sense of humor that carried them all through the harder moments. Such as when Freddie, gravely, asked Laura, the first night, if she’d tell him about himself. Told her why.
So, evening after evening, she told over their childhood for Freddie and Winter too. Inconsequential memories. Funny memories. She told him about the boy he’d been, and had the painful pleasure of seeing her brother—if not become the person he’d been—at least begin to resemble him.
She saw how it was between Freddie and Winter. She didn’t begrudge it, not really. But it made her lonely.
· · ·They arrived in Halifax in late spring.
Laura, lacking anywhere better to go, took them all straight to Blackthorn House, hoping to throw herself on the sisters’ mercy, at least until she could plan their next step. It still stood square and stern on its plot, rambling and old, in sight of the sea. Laura and Winter and Freddie were all wearing the civilian clothes that they’d got in Belgium, although now they were sweating in the clear sun.
All through the taxi ride, Laura was thinking, I’ll have to get work. Lord knows what I’ll do about Freddie and Winter…Freddie’s officially dead, and Winter…. Her thoughts had run along much the same lines all through their trip across the ocean, without a solution. Worry nagged her still, so much so that she hardly saw the house even as the taxi dropped them off. Or at least she didn’t see it until Winter frowned and said, with the censorious tone of a punctilious German farmer, “Look at the garden.”
Laura looked, really looked, at the garden that had been the Parkeys’ pride and joy. At this time of year, the irises ought to have just been coming in, and the poor climbing roses, with the peonies nearly done, but still rippling in colorful profusion, in the wind off the water. But the garden was overgrown, unweeded. The red beetles had got at the planting of lilies that stood by the door, and their stems stood sadly naked. And the house—there was something strange in the house’s stillness.
The door was locked. Had the door ever been locked?
No one came to Laura’s knocking.
Finally Laura groped, not really expecting to find it, for the hidden latchkey, behind a loose piece of siding. To her surprise, it was still there. Hesitating, she put it into the lock. The door swung open.
The house was empty, and still. Dust, and dust sheets, covered the furniture. “Miss Parkey?” called Laura. “Miss Lucretia? Miss Clotilde?”
Silence. The deep hush of a house that contained only its ghosts. Had they died?
“What’s this?” said Freddie from the front hall, a few steps behind her. “It has your name on it.”
Laura turned. Saw a letter on the hall table, addressed, in an elegant, slightly shaky hand, to Miss Laura Iven. A much thicker envelope lay beneath the first. Laura snatched the letter up and slit it with her pocket lancet.
She saw the same handwriting on the letter, which read:
My Dear Laura,
So you’ve got back, have you? Well done. We’ve gone, you know. But we’ve left you a few things. You’ve earned them. Take your rest, my dear.
Yours sincerely,
Agatha Parkey
Laura stared at the odd missive. Stared and stared, and finally handed it to Freddie while she opened the second envelope, only to stare in astonishment at a will leaving the house, effects, and funds of Agatha, Clotilde, and Lucretia Parkey to one Laura Elizabeth Iven.
· · ·So they had a place to live, after all. When Laura went to the Parkeys’ lawyer, she learned, to her shock, that they had money to live on as well. Enough for respectable clothes, and for proper food, to bring all three of them back to some semblance of health.
It was even enough money for Laura, walking dazedly through the vast, dusty old pile, to think, Could I do it? Could I open a sanatorium here? Could I help the people the war broke?
But not yet. There were a thousand details of life to work out first. Winter, on the second day, went outside to the toolshed, found the heaps of rusty gardening implements, and set about cleaning and sharpening them. Overnight, it seemed, the garden was trim and weeded and fertilized with fish meal. They had not time to sow a spring crop, Winter explained to her, but they could have lettuces. Parsley. Cabbage. Even potatoes.
He brought flowers into the house every day.
Freddie helped Winter in the garden. But Laura had bought him a sketchbook and an easel, pencils and chalk, and later oils, and soon he was busy with his paintings. The images were jagged, done in violent colors, and made Laura’s skin crawl. But Freddie was always a little happier, a little livelier, after finishing one.
And so they mended, bit by bit, in their little rambling haven of a creaky old house. Across the ocean, the war went on, through that summer and into the autumn. The Allies are advancing now, Jones wrote Laura. They’ve had a victory near the Marne. I resectioned a bowel today, poor man, we shall see…
It feels like the end,Kate wrote. But people are still dying.
They were. People died and died and died that summer. From influenza, and hunger, and war. The horsemen galloped, disembodied, and the old world writhed in torment, giving birth to the new.
They never spoke of Faland. Freddie would not speak of his time in the hotel, except once he painted a jagged room of peeling gilt, and colors soaring like sound over the abstract canvas. Laura saw him looking at it, with a strange sickened longing on his face. Then he thrust his palette knife into the painting and ripped it end to end.
“It’s over,” said Laura. “It’s all right.”
“But I’ll never hear music like that again,” said Freddie, and he looked ashamed of himself for saying it.
Laura crossed the room and took his hand.
It was September when Laura and Freddie finally went together, alone, at dusk to see where the house in Veith Street had been. It was suppertime, and everyone was indoors. Freddie was muffled up so the neighbors wouldn’t recognize that dead soldier, Wilfred Iven.
Laura had bought herself a motorcycle and a motorcar, and practiced in determined laps, until she could drive both rather well. So she and Freddie motored down to Veith Street and got out of the car, and stood together, in silence, where the house had been. There was nothing left, really. The timber had been cleared away by their enterprising neighbors; anything beneath had long since been taken up by others or hauled away for scrap. There was only a cellar-hole, and memories.
Laura said, “We should sell it. The land will be worth a bit. Or perhaps I shall build a new house—not like ours, different from ours—and rent it to boarders. Young women, maybe.” Build something new, she thought. Something else to remember. For all her memories of this house from before had folded into the one—blood and glass and smoke.
Freddie nodded, not looking at her. “I remember how it was—what I saw. In the hotel. When the ship exploded. Was it really like that?”
“It was,” said Laura.
Her mother had not come to her, dreaming or waking, since she’d led them away from Faland’s hotel. A miracle for her beloved children, who never imagined that the world contained either the mysteries or the doom that she had believed in so fervently.
For the first time, Laura asked, “Was the pillbox like—like what I saw, in the hotel?”
“It was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mother was right, you know,” Freddie said. “About the world. Requiescat in pace.”
And he bowed his head into his palm, and for a moment neither spoke. Laura put an arm round him and he put an arm round her, and for a moment, they were as united as they’d ever been in childhood, as though Armageddon had never come between them. Then Laura said, “Come on. Winter’s waiting for us.”
And she saw, with pleasure and a little pang, the light come into Freddie’s face.
They turned and left Veith Street together, for the last time.
· · ·Laura had thought that they would get better there. The house had a silence that was conducive to healing. They would build new lives there together, and new selves. Gardener, painter, nurse. They’d be all right.
But September became October, and Laura began to wonder whether Freddie was indeed healing. Day by day, his art grew stranger, and he grew thinner, and paler, and he was often silent, holding a book in his lap without reading it. Sometimes she’d hear him moving restlessly about the house after she’d gone to bed, and hear Winter’s measured step, going to find him, hear their voices together in the darkness.
October became November.
It was the eleventh of November, an early morning, when they were all awake, and gathered at the breakfast table, when the bells began. Every bell in the city, church to church, rising and rising, a wild clamor. Laura heard feet running, people shouting.
She’d been dishing out eggs when the noise began, her head full of schemes for solariums and treatment rooms. She dropped her serving spoon at the noise and put her back instinctively to the wall. Winter and Freddie both leapt for the cover of the table. They were all three of them frozen for a moment, staring at each other.
Laura realized first. “It’s over,” she said. “The war’s over.” The joy was palpable in the noise in the streets. But she didn’t feel it. For a moment she could almost smell the bog-reek of the hospital, feel blood under her fingernails. See Pim’s blue eyes, blank with mad rage.
Winter had bowed his head. Freddie reached out and covered his hand with his. We won, screamed the people outside. Don’t they know, Laura thought, we all lost?
But it was over. The fighting would stop. The killing would stop. And perhaps the world had learned. Perhaps this was the war that would end war. Perhaps.
For long minutes, no one spoke.
Then Freddie burst out, passionately, as with something long thought but never given voice, “We can’t stay here.”
Laura was still bemused by the noise. For a moment, she didn’t understand. Then she did, and the realization struck her like a blow. Winter sat slowly back in his chair, his eyes concerned. Freddie went on talking, the bells outside a strange backdrop to his voice. His words tripped over each other; he spoke as though his courage would fail if he stopped talking.
“Laura—we can’t stay here. In Halifax. I can’t stay in Halifax. It’s too—too loud here. Too many noises. Too many walls. I can’t— Wilfred Iven’s dead, remember? How can I make a new life, hiding?”
Laura whispered, “I don’t know.” People were still whooping outside. “Where would you go?” she asked, with an effort.
“Cape Breton,” said Winter, in a tone that meant they’d talked about this, planned it. All those nights, when Laura had heard their voices. Don’t be angry. She had no right to be angry. Winter went on, carefully, “It is wild. Isolated. No one will care who we are. There will be sheep. And cattle, perhaps. And snow. And silence. Peace, there, for us. Wilfred can paint.”
Laura nodded slowly. She said, her voice harsh, “You know I can’t go with you.”
“I know,” said her brother. She could see the love in his face, and regret. But mixed with that was eagerness to be gone. For a moment, there was that petty anger again, that she’d saved him for someone else.
She let that feeling go. “Just promise me—” Her voice cracked, and she tried again. “Promise me that you will live. And try to be happy.”
Freddie glanced at Winter, and the light that came into his face was brief and blinding.
They left the next spring, with the melting snow, bearing the deed to land near the wild, rocky coast of Cape Breton Island.
· · ·And then Laura was alone, where she’d begun.
Until, one day, when the peonies were blooming, there came a knock on her door.
Laura went to answer it. Standing there, she saw a man with close-cropped hair and eyes infinitely dark. Something in his face lightened, when he saw her. “I have come to call in a debt,” he said, stiffly. “From a woman who insists she owes me.”
Laura stood staring at him. A smile kept trying to climb onto her lips.
“Come in,” she said. “And tell me.”
