The Dancing Years

Book 33: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Romance

Synopsis

1919. As the euphoria of the Armistice fades, the nation counts the cost: millions dead or disabled, unemployment, strikes and shortages. As prices and taxes rise, it becomes harder to remember what the war was for. Teddy tries to recreate balance but then a trip to France to see the place where Ned fell has unforeseen consequences; Polly, grieving for Erich Kuppel, persuades her father to send her to New York. Despite Prohibtion, the great city, pulsing with life, promises her a fresh start; Jessie and Bertie, detained in London by Bertie's job, long to start their new life together; Jack becomes a pioneer of civil aviation, but when the company fails he's faced with unemployment, with a growing family to support. The generation that saw things no man should see must find relief from their own memories. A new world is struggling to be born out of the ashes; but as long as the music lasts, they will keep on dancing.

Release date: November 4, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 640

Sample

May 1919

In the housekeeper’s room at Morland Place there was a large, ancient desk with a big leather chair, where generations of housekeepers had prepared their accounts, written letters, scrutinised tradesmen’s bills, and rebuked erring servants. The high walls were lined from floor to ceiling with panelled cupboards, where they kept good things locked away. When she was little, Henrietta had sometimes been sent here with a message for Mrs Holicar, and sometimes Holicar had given her a handful of raisins or a little bit of stem ginger in reward. The dim, cool room smelled, as it had then, of tea, coffee, spices and cake.

Henrietta had always been a small person, and age was shrinking her further: her hands looked tiny on the arms of the chair and her feet barely touched the floor. She was mistress of the house, running it for her widowed brother Teddy; and this morning she was interviewing housemaids. The war was really over: even six months ago it would have been a luxury beyond dream to take on more staff. Now the demobilised men were reclaiming the jobs girls had done for four years, and the girls were having to come back to domestic service.

The war had changed them, as it had everyone. The specimen before her now, a buxom, florid-faced young woman, was looking about her with a bold, assessing eye and no shadow of reserve.

‘Where were you before, Betty?’ Henrietta asked.

The answer came in a self-assured torrent. ‘Well, mam, Ah were working in t’ shell factory, but Ah never liked it there. Nasty, dirty work it were, and they were right strict if you were late on, or stopped a minute just to catch your breath. Treat you like dirt, them supervisors – ’rate you for just nothing at all! So the minute the Armistice went off, me and me friend Aggie put us coats on and walked out. That self an’ same minute! Ah’m not jestin’ nor jokin’! Ah wanted to go on t’ trams – I’d like that, me – but me mam said it weren’t right to be takin’ jobs t’ boys’d want, comin’ back from t’ war, so Ah went to work for Mrs Lloyd in Clifton, mam, as house-parlourmaid.’

‘I don’t know Mrs Lloyd. Have you a reference from her?’

‘Oh, yes, mam, a right good ’un,’ Betty said, handing it over.

Henrietta read it. It didn’t say anything specific, but seemed eager that Betty should be taken on by someone else. ‘Why did you leave Mrs Lloyd?’ she asked.

‘The work were too hard,’ Betty said with disastrous frankness. ‘And it were only me an’ Cook, there, and it were right dull, just the two of us. Ah like a bit more company, me.’ She looked round approvingly. ‘Ah thought a big house’d be better.’

Better for you, perhaps, Henrietta thought, not for us. Too flighty, too lazy, too sure of herself. And at – what, nineteen, twenty? – already too old to train. She imagined, with a shudder, how Sawry, the butler, would take to being looked in the eye and answered back. ‘I’m sorry, Betty. I don’t think you’ll suit. Thank you for coming. Send the next girl in, if you please.’

It took Betty a moment to realised she had been rejected, and then she shrugged, gave an exaggerated sigh and flounced off. ‘It’s too far from t’ shops an’ t’ cinema, anyroad,’ she declared, saving face as she headed for the door.

Henrietta sorrowed over the ruination of maids – another thing to be laid to the war’s account. But the next girl looked much more likely: younger, shy and hopeful, almost tiptoeing up and peeping about her in awe. She gave her name as Sally Gowthorpe.

‘Gowthorpe?’ Henrietta said. ‘From Walton?’ The girl nodded. ‘I had a sewing-maid who married a Gowthorpe from Walton. Would that be your mother?’

‘Me gran, ma’am,’ the girl corrected, making Henrietta realise in those few words how much water had passed under her particular bridge since she had been running Morland Place.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How is she?’

‘She lives at our ’ouse since Granddad passed on. It was her what said I should come up the Place, ma’am.’

‘How old are you, Sally?’

‘Fifteen, ma’am.’

‘And have you any experience of housework?’

‘No, ma’am,’ she admitted in a whisper, her eyes down. ‘Just helping me mother in the house and with the little ones, ever since I left school. But now me dad’s home from t’ war, he says I’ve to get a job. He says—’ She stopped herself, blushing, for talking too much.

‘Well, Sally, if you come here to Morland Place we’ll train you in our ways, so your lack of experience won’t matter a bit.’ In fact, breaking girls of habits learned in other houses was much harder. ‘I think you’ll suit us very well. You can start on the first of the month.’

By the time she reached the end of the candidates she had found another suitable novice, and an older girl she thought worth trying out as a sewing-maid: she would not do for a housemaid because she had a child and wanted to live out, but she was well-spoken, and seemed grateful for the work. Henrietta would have liked to find out her story, suspecting some deep misfortune, but it was not the time to ask. There were so many personal tragedies behind women’s faces these days.

At the end Sawry, the butler, came in. He had been interviewing footmen, an even more unimaginable luxury. The male staff had been shrinking with every army call-up, and Sawry had to do more and more, despite his advancing years.

‘Have you had any luck?’ Henrietta enquired.

He looked glum. ‘Not a promising morning, madam. I suppose it’s the war, but there wasn’t one of them had what I’d call the right demeanour for a servant.’

‘I suppose we should expect that,’ Henrietta said. A man who had been to France and fought in the trenches was not going to be like the men from before the war, who had never been further from their own village than Leeds market. Experience and wider horizons, not to mention facing death on a daily basis, would naturally rub away the deference Sawry had looked for in vain. ‘Was there no-one, then?’

‘Well, madam, there is one who might just do. He says he was a footman before the war, and he’s been batman to an officer since 1916. He’s well set-up, clean and smart.’

Henrietta cocked her head. ‘What are your doubts about him?’

Sawry shook his head, finding it hard to put into words. Daniel was all he had said, and intelligent besides, but there was something about the directness of his gaze, the self-assurance of his military bearing, which was not servantlike. ‘I doubt he’d stick, madam,’ was all he could say in the end.

‘Well, perhaps we could try him, at any rate,’ Henrietta said. ‘Unless you prefer to wait?’

Sawry’s legs ached all the time, and his back twinged from bending over the lamp-room table, having to fill all the lamps because there was no-one else to do it. He longed to be a butler and nothing else again. ‘I think we might try him, madam, if you approve. Would you care to see him? He’s waiting outside.’

Henrietta smiled inwardly. Sawry wouldn’t have had the man wait if he hadn’t wanted him taken on. ‘Yes, send him in,’ she said.

As she was crossing the great hall later, she discovered Teddy just come in, standing in a swirl of dogs by the side table, taking off his gloves.

‘Did you find someone?’ he asked her.

‘Two housemaids, young enough to train,’ she responded. ‘And a footman.’

‘Thank God! Poor old Sawry’s ready to drop.’ And his man, Brown, who helped out, was not getting any younger, he thought.

‘But Sawry doesn’t think he’ll stay,’ Henrietta added.

‘Why not?’

‘Too independent. I’m not sure, though. There’s something about him that I like – a sort of quietness. I think he may do.’

‘Was he in the war?’

‘He was someone’s batman. I wrote the name down – I thought it might be someone you know,’ she said. ‘And before the war he was a footman at Garrowby Hall.’

‘Well, that’s something we can check, at any rate,’ said Teddy. ‘But how old is he? If he was working before the war …’

‘Twenty-six,’ Henrietta said. Teddy shook his head doubtfully. ‘I think he has a story to tell,’ she mused, ‘but I doubt he’ll ever tell it.’

Teddy smiled. ‘You always think everyone has a story to tell. Is there going to be any tea?’

‘Come into the drawing-room and I’ll ring,’ Henrietta said, linking arms with him comfortably. They had been growing closer over the years. Ever since he had given her and her family a home with him, she had been running the house: his wife, Alice, a gentle, inactive person, had never wanted the job. But since Alice had died last autumn of the Spanish flu, Teddy had turned even more to his sister for comfort and companionship. They drew together as they had in childhood, in the shadow of their older brother.

‘There weren’t as many candidates for footman as I expected,’ Henrietta said, as they crossed the staircase hall. The dogs, knowing the time as well as anyone, followed hopefully. ‘I thought the boys coming home from the war would be looking for work.’

‘Demobilisation has a long way to go yet,’ Teddy said. He opened the drawing-room door for Henrietta. The sunshine coming in at the southerly windows struck a gleam from the mellow old furniture, and the clock on the overmantel ticked a calm, quiet welcome. ‘And with the women leaving the wartime jobs, there are plenty of vacancies to soak up the men,’ he went on, following his sister in.

‘There was one girl here today who said she’d left the munitions factory the minute Armistice was declared.’

‘There’s a lot of pressure on the women to give up their jobs, even if they don’t want to,’ Teddy said, taking up his usual stance in front of the fire, though the grate held nothing more than its summer fan of paper.

‘You mean their husbands won’t want them to work?’ she asked.

‘That’s one thing. And of course, the unmarried ones will be eager to get married. There’ll be a lot of weddings this year.’

‘Which means a lot of babies next year,’ Henrietta said. For years the news had all been of deaths.

‘And besides that,’ Teddy concluded, ‘it’s their patriotic duty to give up their job for an ex-soldier. It’s in all the papers.’

‘It was their patriotic duty to take the job in the first place,’ said Henrietta. ‘Dear me, they do put so much on women these days.’

‘You wanted the vote,’ Teddy said.

‘Not me,’ she disclaimed.

‘The point is, what with one thing and another, I don’t think there’ll be too much unemployment. The government’s giving three months’ unemployment insurance to all exservicemen, so they’ll have a chance to look around. There’s bound to be a post-war boom, so they’ll get soaked up quickly enough.’

‘Why will there be a boom?’ Henrietta asked, sitting down and absently caressing the spaniel’s head that was immediately thrust under her hands.

‘All the world will be hungry for our goods, and with the men coming back, the factories will be able to go into full production again,’ Teddy said confidently. As well as textiles factories, he owned three department stores called Makepeace’s, one in York, one in Leeds and one in Manchester. ‘There’s the servicemen’s war gratuity to be spent – anything up to forty pounds a head. They’ll want civilian clothes. And the women will want new dresses after four years of making do. What with all the weddings, and setting up new households – sheets, tablecloths, curtains – and baby clothes to come, we can’t fail!’

‘But won’t you lose the army contracts?’

‘There are still more than a million men in uniform. The army won’t get back to peacetime levels this year.’

‘But eventually?’

‘Oh, eventually I’ll need something else for my factories to do. But I’ve already thought about that.’ It was wonderful to Henrietta how her brother had become such a complete merchant. He had never been more than ordinarily bright as a young man, but he seemed to have a sort of instinct for business. ‘Ships, my dear – passenger liners! People have been confined so long, they’re going to be mad for travel. The liners will come out of military service and they’ll all want refitting. Sheets instead of army shirts.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the ocean racers back in business. White Star will come to me, after our long association, but I don’t see why I can’t make a bid for Cunard as well.’

Henrietta laughed. ‘Is there no end to your ambition? You’ll be monarch of the seas before you’re done.’

‘I’ve a son and a daughter to provide for,’ Teddy said. His nine-year-old heir, James, had had the flu as well, striking panic into Teddy’s heart, but he had recovered, and the illness had even caused a spurt of growth in the boy, who had shot up two inches since Christmas.

Polly, his beloved, beautiful daughter, had escaped the flu, though she had had a bad cold at Christmas. Physically she was well, but she was not herself, too quiet, mopish. She had always been so bright and energetic, up to everything: if anyone could be said to have enjoyed the war, she had. But now …

‘Hen, what’s wrong with Polly?’ he asked plaintively.

‘Oh dear, I don’t know,’ Henrietta said. She had noticed the change in Polly too. ‘Perhaps it’s just her age. Nineteen is a difficult time for a girl. Lennie’s still in France, and I don’t believe she’s heard from Captain Holford in a while—’

‘Lennie’s just a cousin and I don’t believe she ever cared for Holford,’ Teddy said sharply.

‘Maybe that’s what’s wrong,’ Henrietta suggested.

‘No, no,’ Teddy objected. ‘Girls get lovelorn when they’re in love. They don’t get glumpish because they’re not.’


‘Well, perhaps she’s just feeling a bit flat, now there’s not so much excitement. Perhaps she needs a change.’

‘There’s been too much change altogether in the last four years,’ Teddy objected.

‘The war’s affected us all, one way or another,’ Henrietta said. ‘Things can’t be the same again. We have to make the best of it.’

They were quiet a moment, and then Teddy’s face brightened as the door opened and Sawry and a maid came in with the tea things. ‘Ah, muffins!’ he said. ‘Now there’s one thing that never changes – and thank God for it! I tell you what, Hen – we ought to have a party. A grand victory ball. Invite everybody. That would cheer us all up.’

Henrietta caught Sawry’s eye, and understanding passed between man and mistress. The work involved in a grand ball … ‘We’d need at least one more footman. And a pastry cook. And kitchen-maids.’

‘Get ’em,’ Teddy said largely, oblivious to all difficulties.

In her house in Manchester Square, Venetia looked up from the eyepiece of her microscope as her son appeared in the doorway of her laboratory. ‘Dearest boy! I didn’t know you were here.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Oliver said. ‘I was in Sidcup. I’ve been up all night.’

He looked it. He had dark shadows round his eyes, his hair was ruffled, his clothing awry. ‘You are a little mal soigné,’ she agreed mildly.

‘Mal everything.’ He leaned against the door frame and kicked moodily at the carpet. ‘We lost Flighty.’

‘Oh, my dear! I’m so sorry. What was it?’

‘Immediate cause, heart failure. But it was the infection that sapped his strength.’ Oliver sighed deeply. ‘It’s probably a mercy that he went quickly, because sepsis was sloughing away everything. But after so long, and so many operations … He was one of our pets.’

‘I know, dear.’

Venetia understood the depths of the frustration Oliver felt. After serving with the RAMC in France, he had joined the specialist plastics unit at the Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, where servicemen with terrible face and hand injuries were given a chance of new life through the pioneer techniques of Harold Gillies. Oliver had always had an interest in plastic surgery, and his experiences at the Front had given it direction. The Sidcup unit was small and tightly knit. Venetia had visited several times and, like Oliver, had been impressed by the stoical courage of the men in bearing not only great pain and a future of multiple operations but their own disfigurement. They rarely left the unit, because their appearance made ordinary people turn away in horror; but inside ‘the zoo’, as they called it, they had acceptance, companionship and hope.

Harold ‘Flighty’ Bird had been an observer in the Royal Flying Corps until being shot down near Plug Street. The wreck had caught fire, which had robbed him of most of his fingers and half his face. He was one of the longest-serving members of the zoo, and had endured numerous operations to restore him to a semblance of humanity, and to give him hands with which he could at least dress and feed himself. He was always cheerful. He said of himself that he looked like the worst cheese-nightmare of your life, but self-pity got you nowhere.

Flighty was usually the first person a patient saw when coming round from the anaesthetic – mumbling, as they all seemed to, a string of filthy language.

‘Now then, none o’ that,’ Flighty would say, leaning over the bed. ‘Ladies present.’ And when they moaned, he would say, ‘Here, look at me! Now then, cock, if you can stand that, you can stand anything. You’re an oil painting compared with me, mate. Have a fag.’

Oliver had lately been engaged in giving Flighty a new nose, first raising a pedicle of flesh from his abdomen to his forearm, then raising it from the forearm to the forehead. Flighty had gone several weeks with his arm supported in that position while the blood supply established itself; he joked that it was the longest salute in the history of the army. When the pedicle was detached from his arm, it was to be moved down into position over the hole in his face where his original nose had been.

‘It won’t look too bad, though I says it as shouldn’t,’ Oliver had told him only a week ago. ‘Though I’m afraid your belly was not as hairless as a girl’s, Flighty old man. You’re going to have a nose you’ll have to shave every morning.’

‘I’ll take that, Doc,’ Flighty had said. ‘Just so long as I’ve got something to blow when I got a cold. Doesn’t arf make a mess when all you’ve got is a bleeding great hole in your phiz.’

But somehow, despite all precautions, sepsis had struck, and now Flighty was dead.

‘We take such care,’ Oliver said bitterly. ‘We do everything, everything, to keep things sterile.’

‘I know,’ Venetia said again. She had been one of the pioneers of antisepsis, fighting an almost lone battle at a time when surgeons operated in blood-encrusted coats down which they wiped their hands, and stropped their scalpels on their boot soles. ‘But these things happen, despite all our efforts.’

‘What we need,’ Oliver said, ‘is a reliable bactericide that will operate inside the bloodstream to kill the staphylococci.’

‘Obviously,’ Venetia said drily. ‘We’ve been wanting that ever since Lister told us infection wasn’t God’s judgement on bad behaviour.’

‘Well, you’d think someone would have discovered it by now,’ Oliver cried in frustration. ‘It must exist out there somewhere. Nature creates the problem, nature must contain the antidote. Why doesn’t someone find it?’

‘Why don’t you? You’re more than capable of doing the research.’

‘When would I have time?’ he said indignantly.

‘The same could be said for all of us,’ Venetia pointed out. She saw his black mood was passing. ‘And do stop kicking the paintwork, darling.’

‘Sorry.’ He gave her a weary smile. ‘Sinking into self-pity.’ He nodded towards the microscope. ‘What’s that? Koch’s jolly old bacilli?’

‘Happily, no. The absence thereof. One of my subjects seems to be curing himself. I can’t believe it’s anything I did. I’ve been looking for a cure for tuberculosis most of my professional life, and I’ve never even come near it.’

‘Maybe it’s the same thing,’ Oliver said. ‘Maybe something that could kill staph would also kill Koch’s.’

‘Perhaps. Just find it for me, would you, darling?’

‘All right, Mother dear. I’ll have a look later.’ He yawned. ‘Meanwhile, me for a bath and bed for a couple of hours. I’m off for a couple of days.’

‘I suppose that means you’ll be dancing until four in the morning?’

‘If I can find someone to dance with.’

‘Can’t you dance with Verena?’ Venetia had been pleased these past months to see Oliver, her chronically bachelor son, pay attention to Lady Verena Felbrigg, daughter of the Earl of Roughton, who was a nurse in the VAD. Venetia liked the girl immensely, and was keen to see her son settle down and be happy.

‘She’s on night duty. You have to admire her,’ he went on. ‘Other girls would have given up nursing by now, but her contract doesn’t end until July and she won’t break it.’

‘She’s a very good sort of girl,’ Venetia said. ‘Pretty, too.’

Oliver looked at her sidelong. ‘If you’re cooking up a romance for me, Mother dear, you should remember that I am very nearly out of a job, and in no position to ask anyone to be my wife.’

Venetia was secretly pleased: the fact that he had mentioned the word ‘wife’ was a good sign. ‘You won’t have any difficulty in getting something,’ she said.

‘With all the other demobbed army doctors to compete with? A guinea here and there for assisting is not going to add up to a life a chap could ask a girl to share – especially not an earl’s daughter.’

‘Take your fellowship,’ Venetia said calmly, ‘and then we’ll see.’

‘We’ll see, all right,’ he said gloomily, kicking the door frame again.

‘Oliver!’

‘Sorry.’ He stretched his shoulders. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it now. I’m off to bed. You keep dashed early hours, old thing, otherwise I’d suggest we meet for breakfast when I get up around half past eleven. But I suppose you’ve had yours?’

‘You suppose right. Besides, I shall be going out at half past eleven.’

‘Oh, Lord, yes, it’s the funeral, isn’t it? Look, I’ll have Ash call me at eleven, and I’ll escort you as far as the door of the Abbey, and go on and have breakfast at the club.’

‘Will you, darling? That’ll be nice.’

When he had gone, she didn’t immediately go back to her slides. His interruption had set so many trains of thought in motion. Poor Flighty – infection – Koch’s bacillus – a bactericide. At Morland Place, she remembered, the grooms put mouldy bread on horses’ cuts to make them heal cleanly; and her great hero, the surgeon Joseph Lister, had done experiments back in 1871, showing that bacteria would not grow in urine samples contaminated with mould. He had even cured a patient’s infected wound with a mould he identified as Penicillium glaucum. And a few years later in Paris, Pasteur had inhibited the growth of anthrax with a mould – though he identified it, she recollected, as Penicillium notatum. There was certainly something worth looking into there. Nature creates the problem, nature must contain the antidote.

The trouble was that Penicillium glaucum was a catch-all term for a certain class of moulds, and no-one knew what the active principle was, or in which moulds it could be found, still less how to extract it. Would the Penicillium principle kill Koch’s? She toyed with the idea of injecting mould into her subjects. But nothing anyone had injected into consumptives – tar, gold, God knew what else as well – had so far proved efficacious. The sanatorium treatment was all there was – absolute rest, fresh air, good food. All very well for the comfortably off, but the working classes could not afford a rest cure, especially one that might take months or even years.

No, prevention was definitely better than cure when it came to tuberculosis. Education about avoiding infection, and training in basic hygiene could only do so much: the disease was fostered by the conditions the lower classes lived in: cheek by jowl, foul air, poor nourishment. But vaccination: it had virtually eliminated smallpox, that terrible scourge of the last century. Oh, for a vaccine against tuberculosis, to clear the slums of the wasting death that snatched away children and young mothers and burly working men indiscriminately …

There had been some interesting work going on before the war in the Pasteur Institute in Lille – Calmette and Guérin had developed a culture of non-virulent bacilli from bovine tuberculosis. If a vaccine from cowpox could prevent smallpox, perhaps the same principle could work for human tuberculosis. Definitely worth looking into …

How tired Oliver looked! He worked tremendously long hours, and when he was off duty he would not rest, but went out ‘helling’ – as the American troops lingering in London called it: drinking and dancing and visiting nightclubs. Dancing seemed to have become the obsession of the young people back from the war – and those who had never gone. The mood of almost violent merry-making that had burst out at the Armistice seemed not to have died down. Everyone had something to forget.

Verena … She wished he would settle down with Verena, but of course it was true, he would be discharged from the army very soon and it would take time for him to establish himself in some specialty. She could afford to keep him, but she knew his pride would not let him, and he would never allow his wife to be kept. She must find some subtle way of helping him. And they would just have to hope that Verena would wait, and wasn’t put off by all this wild dancing.

Of course, Oliver was taking the loss of his brother very badly – worse than Venetia would have expected. He and Thomas had been close as boys, but their lives had grown apart, particularly since Thomas had gone to Russia as military attaché to the Romanov court. When the Romanovs had dis appeared, Thomas had disappeared too. The army had posted him as ‘missing believed killed’, and if he did not reappear – which for various reasons Venetia thought impossible – Oliver would inherit the earldom in a little under seven years’ time. He had never wanted to be earl, and helpless anger about that situation added to his natural sorrow for his brother.

As to Venetia, the war had taken not only her first-born, but her beloved husband, too. But she was sixty-nine years old, and if age taught you nothing else, it taught you to make the best of things. She had Oliver who, whatever he thought, would make a creditable earl one day, and might do sterling service in the House on behalf of his profession; and her lovely daughter Violet, who had given her four grandchildren.

And she had her work. The war was over, bar the talking, and at last she was free of those irksome committees and meetings and fund-raising activities. She had given the X-ray ambulances, which she had worked so hard to buy and equip, to the Red Cross; she had closed her office and refused all requests to take on other charities or public offices. The sense of liberty and uncluttered time at her disposal was almost dizzying. For almost the first time in her life, she was free to follow her interests and work at her own pace.

On that pleasing thought, she returned to the microscope, removed the slide and inserted another. She had two hours before she would have to go and get dressed.

The newspapers the next morning were full of the State Funeral. Teddy read out bits at breakfast, and passed around the pages with photographs. The body of nurse Edith Cavell, executed in 1915 by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers to escape from Belgium, had been exhumed on the 14th of May and conveyed with a military escort to Ostende, where it had been put aboard the destroyer HMS Rowena for Dover. Then on the 15th it had been taken by train to Victoria, put on a gun carriage, draped with the Union flag, and conveyed through the streets, with a company of soldiers and two bands, to Westminster Abbey for a state funeral at noon.

‘Venetia was there,’ Henrietta said. ‘She told me she’d been invited. I think she said she’d met Nurse Cavell while she was training.’

‘The King was represented by the Earl of Athlone,’ Teddy read. ‘That’s the Queen’s brother,’ he explained to his daughter, who was listlessly pushing buttered eggs around her plate.

‘Hmm?’ said Polly indifferently.

‘It wasn’t a very long service,’ Teddy said, still reading. ‘Just half an hour. But the crowds in the street were immense. The whole route was lined, both going to the Abbey and afterwards all the way to Liverpool Street. It says, “A profound silence fell as the gun carriage passed, and every head was bowed.” Strange that of all the people who died over there, only her body
should be brought back.’

‘Our soldiers are always buried where they fall,’ Jessie said.

She had been quiet lately, too, Henrietta thought, trying to examine her daughter without appearing to – ever since she had come back from spending Easter with Violet in London, she had seemed to have something on her mind.

‘All the same …’ Teddy said, but didn’t finish the thought. Morland Place had given its share: his son Ned – Jessie’s first husband – missing at Loos; Henrietta’s son Frank, fallen at the Somme, and his brother R