The Wild Dark Flowers by Elizabeth Cooke Read Free Book Online Page A

kitchens were extended, and a new range added, and a proper laundry. Octavia Cavendish’s wishes had flowed through the house like fresh, cleansing water. Instead of a man’s house reeking of dog and dust and mildew came a glamorous, gilded home. Rutherford had emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
    “I see you are enjoying the day,” a voice said. Jolted from his reverie, Bradfield looked up into the face of Stephen Whittaker, the village vicar. He had not heard him walking towards him along the path. The man smiled. “May I join you?”
    “Please do.”
    Whittaker sat down. “Fine weather.”
    “It is indeed.” Bradfield was not the best at conversation; he was used to keeping silence. Opinions were rarely required of butlers.
    “What news at Rutherford?” Whittaker asked. “Your employers are well?”
    “Yes, quite well.”
    “The staff have been seriously depleted, I hear.”
    “Yes,” Bradfield agreed. “I have been speaking to Mr. Gray, the land steward, about it today. There is no one from the tenant farms whom we can bring up to the house; no one suitable. We have only Edward Hardy now as second footman. I need at least two others.” He paused. “Although I doubt that I shall find them.”
    “They are all enlisting,” Whittaker observed. “It is the same everywhere. My mother tells me that in London women have been taken on to drive the omnibuses, and to take tickets and so on. And they are making munitions in the factories, I believe.”
    “Good heavens,” Bradfield murmured.
    The two men sat in silence. After a moment, Bradfield noticed the agitation in Whittaker; he was sitting forward, his face pale. Bradfield saw how thin he was; the sunlight only made him look paler. His neck looked scrawny in the clerical collar.
    “I have been making a decision,” Whittaker suddenly announced.
    “Yes?”
    “A decision . . .” Whittaker’s voice faded away momentarily.
    “I ought to be in France. There is a need there for me.”
    “There is a need here.”
    Whittaker smiled briefly. “Oh, to utter platitudes. That is all. And two burials, but no marriages or christenings or confirmations—that does not constitute a busy life.”
    Bradfield was shocked. He gazed at the man, at the blue eyes that always looked on the verge of weeping. He knew that Whittaker was not entirely well; he had suffered tuberculosis as a child. He kept very much to himself, isolated here with his books and his prim daily walks that never muddied his polished shoes.
    “But surely you can’t abandon your parish here?”
    “I don’t see it as abandoning my parish, Mr. Bradfield. I see it as following my parish. There are chaplains in France, you know, doing essential work. Men like those who have left Rutherford will need me far more in France than they ever did here.”
    “I don’t doubt it. But . . .” Bradfield’s unease was as much for the feeling that England, in all its little villages and towns, was being pulled to pieces, its very fabric threatened, as it was for Whittaker himself. What would communities do without working men, or priests? What did cities do without transport drivers? What did homes do without women in them?
    “I have asked for a commission.”
    “Will you get it?”
    Whittaker put his head on one side, shrugging. “You mean my health.”
    “I do. Is it wise?”
    The vicar paused. He looked across the road to the fields beyond. Four horses were grazing in the narrow pasture between the river and the hedgerow. “These are going, too,” Whittaker said.
    “You mean the horses?”
    “Yes, the horses. Don’t you recognize them? They pulled the dray carts for the brewery.”
    Bradfield followed Whittaker’s gaze. He could not honestly say that he was familiar with dray horses.
    Whittaker turned in his seat to face him. “Do you know that they are shipping thousands of horses from America to France?” he asked. “And from India and China. From China! It is unimaginable, is it