But when Rachel needed to go home—for a week! All of a week!—suddenly the countess rediscovered her maternal feelings.
The woman had the maternal feeling of a weasel.
“I am sorry, madame,” Rachel heard herself saying, in cold, elegant French. If she had been teaching, she had also been learning, and her French, by now, was as aristocratic as madame’s own. “But that will not do. If you will not give me leave, I will be forced to tender my resignation. At once.”
The countess paused in the doorway, her diamonds glinting coldly in the light of the great chandelier. “You may collect your wages from Gaston.” As an afterthought, she added, “Leave the keys with him when you go.”
Rachel gaped after her. “But—”
Surely it was less trouble to lose one’s governess for a week than to hire a new one?
Apparently not. “Good-bye, Mademoiselle Woodley,” said Madame de Brillac, with precisely the degree of condescension due from countess to wayward employee. Another look from those cold, flat eyes. “I trust you will not bother me for a reference.”
A reference? Fury gripped Rachel. What did it matter about the reference? Anne-Marie—Amelie—How was she to tell them?
She could run after the countess; she could beg her to reconsider. And what? And stay at Brillac? Let her mother suffer alone?
The image tormented Rachel: her mother, lying helpless, too wracked with chills to move. There was no phone in the cottage; there wasn’t even electricity. The cottage sat at the very end of the village, isolated from the other houses, its nearest neighbor the vicarage. It might have been days before anyone realized her mother was ill, days in which her mother, sweat-damp and miserable, battled the disease alone, too weak even to boil water.
The hall was heady with the scent of hothouse flowers and a cacophony of competing perfumes. Rachel’s head swam with the horrible sweetness of it. No time to waste on ifs and might have beens; the train wouldn’t wait for her.
There wasn’t much to pack in her own little room, only a few skirts and shirtwaists, a handful of books, a hat that had the claim of being a “Paris hat” only by its origin, but not any pretense to style. It all fit in the one carpetbag, a hand-me-down from the vicar.
And then, good-byes.
Anne-Marie, all big brown eyes. “Why are you leaving us?” In French, but it was no time to enforce English, just time to enfold her in a quick hug.
“Because she doesn’t like you.” Albertine jeered very effectively, but there was something in her voice, so young beneath the scorn, that made Rachel wish she had tried harder with her, had had more time. It wasn’t Albertine’s fault that she was so very like her mother.
Rachel tried to put it as simply as she could. “My mother is very ill. She needs me at home.”
“But we need you,” said Amelie. She thought a moment. “Sophie will miss you.”
Oh, Sophie. Sophie was full of pronouncements. Rachel would miss Sophie. She would miss all of them.
Perhaps, once her mother was on the road to recovery—
Rachel squelched that thought. The countess wouldn’t take her back. And, even if she did, Rachel had learned, two families ago, that it didn’t do to get too attached. Amelie might nestle close to her now, but in another few years, she would be ready to put up her hair and let down her skirts, and Rachel would be on her way to another family, carpetbag in hand.
She might live with them, teach them, even come to care for them, but they weren’t her family.
The only family she had was her mother.
By dint of shamelessly lying to the chauffeur, telling him madame had authorized her use of the car, Rachel made it to the station in time for an eleven fifteen train to Paris. The train lurched and swayed; it was deathly cold in the car, the windows so fogged with her breath that she couldn’t see out. Outside, she knew, the trees were starting to sprout their first green buds, but she could see none of that, only the ghostly reflection of her own face, her unfashionable hat drawn low around her ears to keep out the chill, her cheekbones too high, her mouth too wide, her hair dark against her pale face.
There was nothing remarkable in that face, just another nursery governess, another woman in a shabby skirt, clutching a carpetbag on her lap. Nothing remarkable except to her mother, who loved her.
On and on through the darkness the train went, the rhythm of the wheels, the puff of the engines, a steady backdrop to her anxiety. Slow, slow, so painfully, horribly slow.
Once, once upon a time, so very long ago, there had been three of them. Rachel could just remember those halcyon days. It couldn’t have been summer always, but that was how she remembered it. They had lived in a little house with a garden, and if her father was frequently away, he always came back again, sweeping her up into his arms and spinning her about while Rachel squealed and clutched at his coat.
Until that last time, when he hadn’t come back at all.
He had died somewhere, far, far away. He had been a botanist, her father. Something to do with rare plants, or at least that was what her mother had told her. He had fallen ill on one of his collecting trips, in a far-flung country that was just a little spot on the globe, dead of tropical fever.
Sometimes, when she was young, Rachel used to look at those specks in the vast blue of the atlas, specks with names like Martinique and St. Lucia, St. Croix and Mustique, and would wonder on which of them her father was buried. She had, as girls did, spun fancies for herself. Her father wasn’t dead at all, just missing. He hadn’t been a botanist, but a secret agent, off on a deadly mission. Or the heir to a lost kingdom, one of the smaller European sort, forced to go underground to evade the forces of the rebels who had taken over his homeland.
Her father was a daydream, but her mother was real. She was a cool hand on Rachel’s brow when she was ill; a voice reading Peter Rabbit; a firm hand bundling her into her coat and off to school. More recently, she was an English postmark on a letter, a package in the post: a pair of warm gloves, a piece of the Christmas pudding for luck. Little things that made Rachel feel less far from home.
Her mother was very good about the little things.
Rachel hunched forward in her seat, urging the sleepy train to move faster. Good heavens, did they have horses towing the blasted thing? What was the point of a train at all if it didn’t go any faster than that?
It was past two in the morning when the train decanted Rachel into the chill of the Gare du Nord. The ticket windows were shut, the bookstalls closed. Only a handful of stranded travelers were scattered around the echoing room, sitting on their trunks, sunk into the collars of their coats, their bundles clutched to them.
The train to Calais, according to the board, was due to depart at three.
Rachel could feel the hours stretching ahead of her. Maddening that they could zap a message across wires in a matter of minutes, but human travel was little faster than it had been a century ago. She had always enjoyed the novels of H. G. Wells. Now she found herself wishing for one of his time machines, something to whisk her back to five days ago. No, earlier, before that, twenty-three years ago, when they were all three together. She could stop her father going away, stop her mother getting sick.…
And what then? History did strange things when one played with it. They would never have lived at Netherwell; her entire upbringing would be different. Useless speculation to beguile the extra hour. Rachel shivered and hugged her carpetbag closer.
She didn’t need to fight for a seat on the train to Calais; at that hour, it was all but empty. Only another twelve hours—how long those twelve hours seemed—and she would be back in Netherwell, back at the cottage in which she had grown up.
And her mother … her mother would be sitting up by now, demanding to be let out of bed, to be allowed to do something, for goodness’ sake. Like all healthy people, her mother made a dreadful patient.
Apples didn’t fall far from the tree, Mrs. Spicer, who “did” at the vicarage, always liked to say. If
Rachel was impatient, she came by it honestly. She couldn’t picture her mother sitting still; she was always moving, doing, working.
Well, she had had to, hadn’t she? Just as Rachel had to work now. Botanists, it seemed, weren’t too plump in the pocket. Whatever legacy her father had left, it had been enough to cover the essentials of rent and food, no more.
Even now, as a nightmare, Rachel could remember those dark days after her father died, her own childish voice, bleating, “Where is Papa? Where is Papa?” Her mother’s face, still and set, her eyes red-rimmed, but her mouth firm. The hurried departure from their home, taking only those things that were most precious: her mother’s piano, her father’s chess set, the pawns bearing the marks of small teeth, where Rachel had used them, as a baby, to ease her aching gums. The gold brooch at her mother’s breast, with its intertwined E and K.
Through it all, her mother had never broken, never wavered. She had comforted Rachel’s tears, packed their few belongings, saw them settled in a new home, set about finding a way to make their meager ends meet. She’d gone on.
Dawn. The sun was rising just as the train chugged into Calais, tinting the water of the Channel rose and gold. Rachel stumbled off the train, her legs stiff, her hands cold in her leather gloves. There was something about dawn, about the right sort of dawn, that made all the frights of the night seem so much nonsense. If her mother had grown worse, Jim would have let her know, surely? There would have been more than just the one telegram.
On board the Channel packet, she lifted her face to the salt sea air, relishing the slap of the wind against her face. It was an ill wind … But this wasn’t an ill wind. It smelled of England and visits to the seaside.
A change in London, and then another in King’s Lynn. With each stop closer to home, Rachel felt her anxiety subside. The air still had the bite of winter to it, but the sun poured down like a blessing, and Rachel felt her feelings lift at the sight of it, despite the itch of clothes worn too long. If her mother had been that ill, Jim would have sent another telegram, found some way to find her.
The local train dawdled its way along, decanting housewives with piles of shopping and chattering girls from the school. Rachel had been one of those girls once. Swinging off the train at Netherwell station, barely a pause before the train was off again, she could imagine herself that schoolgirl again, satchel in hand, a straw boater on her head. Her boots crunched on the well-worn path, rich with the scent of mulch and loam, just a hint of coal smoke in the air.
There was a shortcut through a copse of trees, a place where the leaves twined overhead, forming a natural arch. Rather than leading into the village proper, it deposited Rachel only yards from the cottage, close enough that she could see the familiar gray stone, softened with its fall of ivy, the smoke rising from the chimney.
A sense of indescribable relief flooded Rachel at the sight of that smoke. There was light in the old, leaded windows, a warm glow that made her quicken her step, the carpetbag light in her hand.
The stones in the walk were cracked and old. With the ease of long practice, Rachel wove her way around the wobbly bits. No need to knock; the door was never locked.
“Mother?” She flung open the door. There was no hall. The front door led directly into the sitting room, that wonderfully familiar sitting room, with the hideous red plush furniture they had let with the house, and the fire that always smoked.
Someone was bent over the fire now, wielding the poker with a tentative hand.
But it wasn’t Rachel’s mother. Rachel’s mother wouldn’t have been so gingerly with the fire; she would have thwacked it smartly into submission. This woman was too short, too slight, her hair a strawberry blond instead of brown streaked with gray.
Rachel let her carpetbag drop. “Alice?”
Alice started, the poker catching on the edge of a coal. “Rachel!” Rachel’s best friend thrust the poker back into its rest. “Thank heavens. I’d begun to think something had happened to you.”
No time to explain now. Rachel started for the stairs. “My mother. Is she—”
Rubbing her sooty hands on her skirt, Alice scurried between Rachel and the stairs. She held up a grimed hand. “Rachel. I’m so sorry.”
TWO
The pity on Alice’s face awoke a host of nameless terrors.
“Where is she? Upstairs? In bed?”
Sick, wasted. Well, that didn’t matter. Rachel was home now. She would take care of her. She knew a bit of nursing. They had all done their bit in the local infirmary during the war, emptying basins, rolling bandages. She could plump pillows, force broth down her mother’s throat, hold her to life by sheer force of will if necessary.
Not that it would be necessary. Her mother had enough force of will of her own. Enough for three. Enough to beat anything, even influenza.
Alice lifted a hand to stop her, then let it fall. “Rachel … she’s gone.”
“Gone,” repeated Rachel. What did gone mean, anyway? Gone to hospital? Gone to the vicarage?
A coal crackled on the hearth, the sound resounding like a shot in the quiet room.
“I’m so sorry,” Alice said again. Her blue eyes looked bruised, ringed with dark shadows.
The stillness of the cottage pressed in on Rachel like the grave. No footsteps upstairs. No crinkle of sheets. Only the crackle of the fire and the nameless darkness of grief.
“Dead. You mean she’s dead.” Not at the vicarage, not in hospital, not popped out to the shops for a bit of butter.
Rachel couldn’t wrap her mind around it, that the absence would be more than a temporary one, that she wouldn’t hear her mother’s step on the stair, her voice calling down from the landing. Her smell still lingered in the air, dried lavender and strong tea.
Alice gave a very small nod.
“When?” asked Rachel, in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own.
“On Friday.”
Four days ago. Four days. When had it been? Had it been while Rachel was giving Amelie her bath? When she was grilling Albertine on the kings of England? While she was doing her hair, darning her stockings, any one of a hundred inconsequential things?
Her mother had died and she hadn’t been there.
Alice shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with the silence. “We did wire you. Neither of us could understand why you hadn’t—”
“I know.” Rachel’s chest was tight; she felt as though she couldn’t breathe. “There was some confusion about the telegram. A delay.”
If only, Rachel thought savagely, she had giggled and tittered when Hector had pinched her. If the telegram had been relayed right away … If she had made the very first train …
If, if, if. A whole legion of ifs.
Alice saw the look on Rachel’s face and misinterpreted it. Defensively, she said, “Jim did try to ring the Paris house, but there was trouble with the connection.”
“We weren’t in Paris; we were in Normandy.”
They were always in Normandy; if Alice had bothered to read her letters, she would know that. But Alice was of the opinion that France was France; such petty distinctions as city or country eluded her.
Oh, God, she was being ghastly. It wasn’t Alice’s fault. There was only so much that Alice and Jim could do, and she had been away, a Channel’s width away.
Alice was still speaking. “Jim did everything he could, but by the time anyone realized she was sick, the disease was so advanced—”
“I know.” Rachel’s eyes felt gritty. She rubbed them with the back of her hand. Smoke from those trains, those endless trains. “He had other patients to tend to, I know.”
She had to remind herself of that, that there were others ill, other mothers, daughters, husbands, when all she wanted to do was grab Jim by the collar and demand to know why he hadn’t tried harder, why he hadn’t tried again and again and again, until he might have got someone with the brains enough to ring through to Brillac, who might have told her, who might have given her a c
hance to make it home—
Even now, she couldn’t quite comprehend it, that there was nothing she could do. How could there not be any way to go back, to fix it?
“Oh, Rachel, you can’t imagine!” Alice’s normally sweet-featured face was drawn; there were circles beneath her eyes and hollows under her cheeks. “There were so many sick in the village, and no nurses nearer than King’s Lynn. All the Trotter boys were down with it, and Mrs. Spicer. Charles had chicken pox, and I was half frantic trying to keep Annabelle out of his room, what with Mrs. Spicer sick, too, and Polly under quarantine. By the time my father mentioned that your mother hadn’t been to church—”
“You don’t need to explain.” Stop, stop, stop, Rachel wanted to say. She didn’t want to hear it. And what did it matter, any of it? The words tore out of her, unbidden. “She was my mother. I ought to have been here.”
Alice put out a hand to her, heedless of the streaks of soot. “Oh, my dear.”
Rachel felt tears stinging the backs of her eyes and hastily blinked them away. “The funeral—I’ll need to see to the arrangements. The undertaker—”
Alice’s eyes shifted away. “The funeral was yesterday.”
The floor tilted, the low ceiling rushing down at her. Rachel grabbed for the banister, feeling the room heave like the deck of the Channel ferry, the sitting room veiled by a gray haze. “What?”
“Rachel! I ought to have made you sit down first—and you’re still in your coat! When was the last time you ate anything?”
Rachel breathed deeply, in and out. “Sometime around Calais, I think. No, there were biscuits just past London.” The sick feeling was subsiding a bit, although she still felt clammy. She forced herself to focus. “The funeral was yesterday?”
Alice ducked her head guiltily, although Rachel couldn’t imagine why she should feel guilty. It was Rachel, Rachel who hadn’t attended her own mother’s funeral. “We couldn’t reach you. We tried, really, we did.” She added, hesitantly, “We didn’t want to leave it too long.”