Page 9 of Coming Home to Roseford Villas
Leo grinned. ‘I’m thinking that way myself. I know you’re self-catering, but I can get you a sandwich if you want when I make one for myself.’
‘Oh, don’t go to any trouble,’ Rory replied. ‘I can see you’re busy. I can do something myself in a bit.’
‘It’s no trouble, honestly.’ Leo’s soft accent, that blurred the lines between his native Yorkshire and Australia, made Rory’s heart speed up a little more. ‘Let me put this away and I’ll run you something up.’ He glanced back down the garden. ‘I can sweep the rest up later.’
‘Only if you don’t mind,’ Rory replied. ‘I don’t want to put you out.’
‘Same old Rory,’ Leo said, and Rory noticed the soft tease in his voice. ‘You were always so determined not to take up any space, not to be any trouble to anyone. I thought you’d have grown out of that by now.’
Rory’s face flushed. So much for forgetting about the past. She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry on my account,’ she said quickly. ‘I can do my own sandwich.’ She was damned if she was going to give Leo the satisfaction of scoring a point from her about something so trivial. She tried not to let her eyes be drawn to the chiselled, lightly tanned chest and well-defined abs. She remembered just how smooth his skin had felt under her palms when they were excitable teenagers in the throes of first passion. The first time he’d slipped off his T-shirt when they were teens had been a revelation, and she remembered spending a long time just running her hands over his bare flesh. Irritatingly, he’d grown more muscular, and hadn’t seemed to have gone to seed in the intervening years.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Rory,’ Leo said softly. ‘I’m sorry. I had no right to tease you like that.’
‘It’s fine,’ Rory replied speedily. ‘And you’re right. I’m self-catering so I can sort myself out.’ Leo’s proximity was makingher head spin, and she kept trying not to breathe in the intoxicating scent of his work-warmed body where he stood not two feet away. It was a sensory overload that she wasn’t prepared for in the least.
Leo let out a brief sigh. ‘As you wish.’ The line fromThe Princess Bride, once one of their favourite films, wasn’t lost on her. He held her gaze for a moment longer, and then turned towards the garden shed, which was situated to one side of the garden just off the patio. As he did so, Rory couldn’t help a sharp intake of breath. Leo’s body, the body that she’d become so familiar with when they were sixteen, now had a most unfamiliar addition. There, running almost the length of his spine, was a mostly faded, but nonetheless noticeable, thick, vertical scar. Presumably it was from the car accident that Stella had mentioned. Far from feeling like the teenager she had been, she now felt the weight of time pressing heavily down on her. Eyes fixed to his back as he walked away from her, Rory shook her head. The cross currents between them had just taken a step into even more complicated territory.
12
I only offered to make her a bloody sandwich!Leo’s irritable thoughts followed him all the way back to the kitchen. Tired from lack of sleep the night before, and from working in the garden all afternoon, he knew his levels of patience weren’t as high as they should be. His back was giving him hell from all of the twisting and bending, too. His physiotherapist would have done her nut to see him pushing himself so hard, but Leo had always craved physical activity to quell his racing thoughts. And having Rory nearby had made them run at the speed of sound.Funny. She always had the power to calm me down when we were younger!
Towelling off the sweat with the T-shirt he’d stuffed into the back pocket of his tan-coloured shorts, he chucked it in the vague direction of the enormous washing machine in the utility room. His aunt Violet would have done her nut, as well, if she’d seen him doing that. Before she and Uncle Bryan had left on their overseas trip, she’d drilled him in the importance of order, routine and tidiness if he was to run Roseford Villas successfully.
He thought back over the conversation he’d just had with Rory. She’d seemed flustered, shocked even, to see him in thegarden with his top off.It’s not like she hasn’t seen it all before, he thought, but that was a long time ago. He’d noticed the way her eyes had widened when she’d taken in his bare chest, and in his discombobulation, he’d forgotten to feel self-conscious about the state of his body. The saunter back to Roseford Villas had been part annoyance, part defence mechanism, and it wasn’t until he’d got through the French windows and into the kitchen that he’d realised his scars had been on full display. Unwittingly, he’d shown her, literally, his most vulnerable side.
Carefully assembling the ingredients for his sandwich, he wasn’t surprised when his hands started to shake. It was a combination of PTSD and nervousness, he knew. He was so much better at identifying his own triggers now. Cutting right back on alcohol had seen to that. It didn’t mean he was foolproof at avoiding them, but he could at least recognise the signs. He hadn’t thought he was going to be disturbed when he’d been sorting out the hedges, and when Rory had returned, she’d caught him on the hop. Added to that his clumsy attempt to reassure her, which had actually done quite the opposite, and he knew he was on the top of an anxiety spiral looking down.
Calm down, he told himself firmly. This wasn’t worth getting dragged under for. He took a few deep, steadying breaths and leaned forward, palms flat on the cool surface of the worktop. This wasn’t a bad one: he wasn’t having flashbacks and his heart, though racing, was beginning to slow down. Simply showing Rory his scars had been a move towards a trigger, but he’d been able to retreat from it. Marta, his counsellor, would have been proud.
A few more breaths and he was back on a more even keel. Swiftly, he assembled his sandwich and gulped it down with a can of Coke from the fridge. There was plenty to do once he’d eaten – he really should bag up the debris from cutting the hedges and take it to the tip. Again, Aunt Vi’s voice rang inhis ears, urging him not to let things slide or get out of hand. She meant with the business, but he was aware that the advice applied to far more areas of his life than that.
13
After a somewhat less than peaceful night’s sleep, Rory was glad of the dawn. She was due at Roseford Hall at nine o’clock, where a curator from the British Heritage Fund would let her into the archives, and supervise and assist her while she researched the life of Edmund Treloar, whose portrait had inspired her. Although her story would be fiction, she’d been intrigued for years by his portrait, which hung in the Long Gallery at the hall, and an idea for a story had been percolating since she’d decided to actually try to write a novel. Months of staring at photographs of the portrait online had eventually given way to wanting to spend some time there, and when she’d written to the British Heritage Fund, they’d been more than happy to support her research endeavours. After coming face to face with Leo yesterday, Rory knew she needed something to take her mind off the confusion of the present.
She wasn’t particularly hungry, so as soon as she’d got dressed and got her things together, she headed out of the chalet and through the garden gate. If, by the time she got down to the main street, she felt peckish, she’d pop into Roseford Café for a bite to eat.
It was another gorgeous day, and for a fleeting moment, Rory felt regretful that she was going to be spending most of it closeted away in the archives of Roseford Hall, but nothing could dim her excitement atfinallygetting her hands on some primary sources to help her with her research. Part of her degree had been History, and she’d always adored the research side of the course. There was something particularly satisfying about touching things that previous hands had created, and it brought the subject to life far more than just working from textbooks or photocopies. The Treloar correspondence was a particularly rich seam of information. Edmund Treloar had been a prolific correspondent to friends and family during his time in the army, and many more letters had been returned to his loved ones after his tragic death in April 1915.
The correspondence that had caught Rory’s imagination was those unsent letters, in particular. She knew already, from the versions she’d read online at the Roseford Hall website, that they detailed a relationship between Edmund and Francesca Middleton, whom, if sources were to be believed, he was planning to marry upon his return from the Western Front. Francesca was the daughter of a local landowner, and she and her twin brother Frederick were often seen in the grounds of Roseford Hall, as both were friends with Edmund and his sister Maria when they were children. It made perfect sense that Edmund and Francesca should marry upon Edmund’s return from war. It was Edmund’s death that meant the title of Lord Treloar passed from him to his younger brother Richard and commenced the line of descendants that led to Simon Treloar holding the title today.
Rory had been fascinated by the tragic love story, cut short before it had really had time to blossom, and when she was considering writing a historical novel, it seemed only fitting to use Edmund and Francesca for inspiration. Although she wasplanning on changing names and details, the opportunity to see Edmund’s original correspondence was too good to pass up, and she was itching to get her hands on those final, unsent letters.
Anticipation about what she was going to see that morning was stopping her from thinking too deeply about Leo, for which she was grateful. Although Leo hadn’t been lost to her through death, at the age of sixteen the move across the world that had forced them to part had felt close to a bereavement. She could smile in embarrassment now when she thought back, through the somewhat clearer lens of adulthood, to the pain of that separation, but she couldn’t altogether dismiss what she’d felt back then. Everything felt that much more intense when you were a teenager, that much she knew, but it had hurt so much at the time. She couldn’t help drawing a slight parallel with what poor Francesca must have felt upon learning that Edmund had lost his life. Eventually, of course, she and Leo might have had a future, if they hadn’t been sixteen, but for Edmund and Francesca, that option had been cruelly ripped from them by fate and war.
Rory couldn’t suppress the shiver of excitement that thrilled through her when the archivist retrieved the box with Edmund’s last, unsent letters and diary contained within. With slightly shaky hands, she carefully removed the first of the lovingly preserved letters from the box and set it upon the table. Edmund’s handwriting was small, in the copperplate that was classic of the period, and it took Rory a few minutes to acclimatise to the densely written pages. But once she had, what a story they told!
Often, before she’d studied historical letters, she’d assumed there was a kind of reserve in the style and substance of them. A code of manners, or etiquette, that disguised true meanings for the sake of propriety. Looking closely at the first drafts of some of Rupert Brooke’s poetry during her degree hadrapidly disabused her of that notion. Handwritten documents, especially correspondence to loved ones, had a kind of visceral quality, and whether it was the knowledge that these letters from Edmund Treloar were never sent, that the emotions contained within died when he died, or whether it was just the very fact that they outlined such a doomed relationship, Rory wasn’t sure, but there was power in his prose.
A little while later, and Rory was feeling far more affected by what she’d spent the morning reading.Oh, Edmund.Her eyes swam with tears she was nervous to shed over the archived documents as she took in the full weight of what had happened before Edmund Treloar’s untimely death in the trenches with his comrades of the Somerset fusiliers. To think that, for the sake of a few more days, he’d have returned safely home.
When all of this is over, we’ll spend the rest of our lives together, Edmund had written.I don’t know how, or when, but I will not spend my life without you. To me, you are life itself. And, God willing, there will be a place for us.
How wrong he’d been. Rory shook her head. When she’d first seen Edmund’s portrait, she’d never imagined she’d find letters like this. A quaint story of the lives and loves of the inhabitants of the hall, with marriages, births and deaths, all within the grander tapestry of a family who extended back ten generations, was all she expected: a kind ofMiddlemarch-esque epistolary tale. But these final letters from Edmund were intimate, and showed a raw passion that embodied thecarpe diemspirit of a doomed generation. It was as if somehow he knew he wasn’t coming back to Francesca, and he was putting all of his cards on the table, giving her something to cherish, if he never made it back. It felt odd, then, given the intimacy of those letters, that they weren’t passed on to Francesca after Edmund’s death. Surely the family would have wanted her to have them, rather than keeping them to themselves?
I remember the evenings under the stars, and the way we swore we’d never be parted. The feel of your mouth on mine, and your hands, and everything else…Rory drew in a shorter breath. This man knew how to write a love letter, and no mistake. She wondered if Francesca had been as captivated by her lover’s prose as she now was, across the generations.
As she read further, Rory was drawn in by the account of a love affair that seemed so passionate. It was one half of a story: Francesca’s letters hadn’t been donated to the archive, but it was clear in Edmund’s impassioned prose to ‘darling, dearest F, whom I desire with every fibre of my being’ that one side of the partnership felt torn apart by the separation they suffered during wartime. Rory couldn’t help speculating what Francesca’s responses would have been: would she have allowed herself to be so passionate in reply as Edmund was? She found herself writing a response to one of the letters as she sat at the table in the archive room, trying to imagine what it would have been like for Francesca to be waiting patiently at home for word of the man she loved. Would she have lived for the sound of the letters hitting the doormat, for news of him, and lived in dread of the news that he’d been lost to the horrors of the war?
