Page 101 of The Housekeeper's Secret

Kate Furniss.

That’s it then, Eliza thinks numbly. She’s found. There really is no reason to stay.

Surrey

July 20th 1916

The sun is warm on Jem’s face. He can smell lavender and honeysuckle, and hear the sounds of an English summer: the lazy hum of bees, the murmur of voices, and the distant trickle of tea being poured. (Or is it lemonade, on a day like this?)

The convalescent home is an old manor house belonging to a lady gardener of some renown, and apparently the herbaceous borders are some of the finest in England. (He has no mental image of what that might look like.) All he knows is there are no howitzers or Lewis guns, no exploding shells or teeth-rattling volleys of bullets, no shouted orders and no swearing. It unsettles him, the quiet. It plucks at his overstretched nerves as he strains to identify each innocuous sound, to make up for the fact that he can’t see.

The creak of a wicker chair beside him. The rustle of starched cotton. He knows the nurse is still sitting beside him, but he jumps as she unexpectedly touches his hand.

‘Sorry, Lance Corporal. Did I wake you?’

He shakes his head sharply, registering the needling pain at the back of his head that pounces every time he moves. His eyes are hidden by bandages, which is why she has to ask, but it annoys him even so. As does the kindness in her voice. The pity. He’s more comfortable being shouted at.

(On your feet, man! Forward! FORWARD!)

He hears paper being folded, and pictures her (a fresh-faced outdoorsy type, he imagines) putting Eliza’s letter back in its envelope. ‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t want to reply now, I’ll leave this in your locker. Probably best to let things settle for a bit. Think it all over and decide what to say.’

She thinks Eliza is his sweetheart, and the news that she is leaving Lane End Cottage to move in with a friend from the factory will be a knife in his heart. She feels sorry for him, but he imagines she feels sorry for Eliza too, and secretly doesn’t blame her for freeing herself from his perpetual bad temper and obstinate despair. Given that it looks like he might be here for some time (Tricky things, head injuries, Dr McAllen says; impossible to predict how long recovery will take—or, Jem presumes, if it will happen at all), he probably should explain, but in that moment, it seems so overwhelmingly complicated that he wouldn’t know where to begin. How much to say. And anyway, if she thinks he’s been jilted, it at least goes some way to excusing his surliness.

‘It’s good news about your friend though,’ the nurse goes on brightly. ‘The one you carried in from no man’s land. That was exceptionally brave, especially when you were so badly injured yourself. It’s marvellous that he’s doing so well. You saved his life.’

He manages to nod dumbly. It is good news, of course. Does saving Joseph make up for not being able to save Jack? He’s not sure his mother would think so, though it occurs to him that if he had somehow managed to protect Jack from Hyde’s sadistic games and Henderson’s cold-blooded cruelty, he couldn’t have shielded him from British recruiting sergeants or German artillery.

It was all for nothing.

He had thought it was up to him to keep everyone safe and make everything right. The arrogance and the innocence of that. He has sacrificed his own happiness to discover that, in the end, he could no more control the actions of aristocrats or the decisions of politicians than he could change the course of the tides or bring the moon down from the sky. The only thing he had any power over was how he conducted himself.

And it’s too late to change that now.

‘Can I get you some tea?’

The way she phrases the question makes it sound like she’s asking his permission for something she’d like to do. It seems like a small thing to agree, and the itch of anger it provokes is illogical and unfair. He’s aware of her getting up, and wonders if she’s sharing a conspiratorial roll of her eyes with one of the other patients nearby, one of the nice ones, who flirt and tease and behave like decent human beings.

He doesn’t know why he can’t be like that. A decent human being. Perhaps it isn’t in him, and never was. Dr McAllen says that anger isn’t unusual after an injury like his. (Severe concussion is where the brain gets shaken inside the skull… We can’t see the damage, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t significant and will make itself felt in any number of different ways, both physical and psychological…) He appreciates the explanation but suspects it is overgenerous and not very accurate.

It wasn’t the trench mortar explosion that has made him like this, it’s everything that came before. Dr McAllen might be right—he may recover from the head injury and regain some vision, but he is afraid the damage sustained by losing Jack, losing Kate, and absorbing the fallout from what Joseph did will be permanent.

In the darkness, behind the dressings, he can suddenly see the bleakness of the future in front of him, and his head is filled with the panicked pounding of his heart. It seems he is destined to lose everything he cares about. To be separated from those he loves most and to spend his life trying to find them again. Looking for clues and for answers.

He has even lost her photograph. He can’t bear to think of something so precious trampled in the mud, but there must be a lot of mothers thinking the same about their boys. The dragonfly brooch, its wings a little bent now, has found its way back to him with the rest of his things. It’s in the locker by his bed, though he might as well have told them to get rid of it.

It’s not the prospect of living in darkness he can’t come to terms with, it’s the prospect of living without hope. Because how can he find Kate when he can’t see to look for her?

‘Here we are…’

The nurse is back, her voice artificially hearty. He is aware that his hands are bunched into fists on his lap and, through the ebbing wave of despair, makes a conscious effort to relax them, to at least attempt to appear like a normal human. He hears a cup being set down on the table at his elbow, a few murmured words he doesn’t catch, and the creak of wicker as she sits.

His senses prickle. Just as he is wondering if there is someone else there he catches a whisper of scent. Vanilla… nutmeg… roses…

His throat closes and a fist of emotion hits him in the chest. He turns his head and a hand touches his cheek.

‘It’s me,’ she says softly. ‘I’m here.’

Epilogue

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