The Scarlet Nightingale Read online

  Daneway was a large, solid, stone-built house, not especially grand and more accurately described as handsome rather than beautiful. A series of hipped roofs leaned together in a complex undulation of slate and granite that had withstood many an autumn gale and winter storm and would, with any luck, stand a few more yet. It sat – almost crouched – in a sheltered Devon combe; a grassy valley, fringed by thorn and sycamore trees that had been blown into lop-sided clouds by centuries of salt-laden winds. It was a house of many windows, with one particular dormer that faced southwards towards the sea. This was the one that Rosamund gazed out of most, for it was in her bedroom, right at the top of the house, and had a window seat on which were arranged a doll and two boats – a small wooden rowing boat, a three-master with cotton sails, and ‘Raggedy Ann’, a yarn-headed doll whose voyages were many and various on the deep blue chintz-covered cushion that passed as their sea.

  It was a quiet house as a rule, and she the only child, as had been the case since she was born. There had once been a brother, but she had never known him. Her parents seldom spoke of Robert, a nineteen-year-old who had died in the Great War before she was born. To Rosamund he was a shadowy figure – a ghost almost – and she had learned not to ask too many questions, for whenever she did, her father changed the subject and her mother left the room. Just occasionally she heard mention of the Battle of Arras, and it conjured up in her mind a medieval scene of knights in shining armour and heroic battles with lances and longbows, for to a child’s ear Arras sounded very much like arrows.

  It would be several years before she learned the full story from Celine, who had picked up snippets from the locals and pieced them together, turning them into a romance of sorts.

  ‘Have you never asked them yourself?’ asked Celine one winter evening as she brushed out Rosamund’s hair by the nursery fire.

  ‘No. I couldn’t possibly.’

  Celine shook her head and another hairpin somersaulted on to the nursery floor. ‘Well, your father, Valentine Hanbury …’ she used the full names of her employers as though she were relating a work of fiction, ‘was about thirty, I suppose. He was the only son of a Devon landowner and he was rather taken with this beautiful eighteen-year-old called Edith Tempest.’

  ‘The same age as you are?’

  ‘Don’t interrupt.’ Celine carried on with her brushing. ‘He swept her off her feet and married her in spite of the discouragement of his family.

  ‘Did they all hate her?’

  ‘They didn’t hate her – disapproving isn’t the same as hating, you know. And his sister – your Aunt Venetia – was the only one to encourage him.’

  ‘I like Aunt Venetia.’

  ‘Yes, me too,’ murmured Celine, lapsing into reverie for a moment before clearing her throat, putting on her teaching voice and taking up the story once more.

  ‘Valentine and Edith moved into Daneway almost immediately. The master’s mother and father were in their seventies and they soon came round, once they realised that Edith, who was the daughter of a local shipping agent, might be just what their son needed to moderate his impulsive nature.’

  ‘What is “impulsive”?’

  ‘It is what you are – doing things on the spur of the moment without thinking of the consequences.’ Celine tugged at a particularly stubborn knot in Rosamund’s blonde curls.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘Sit still and stop squirming and it will soon be over.’

  ‘Were you here then?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m eighteen, not eighty. With the house, they inherited a cook-housekeeper, a general maid and a chauffeur-gardener, as well as an estate manager and enough agricultural workers to manage 800 acres devoted to arable crops and livestock.’

  ‘You sound like a book.’

  ‘Do you want to hear this story or not?’

  ‘Yes. I like stories. Especially when I know the people in them.’

  Celine continued with the tale of how Valentine had taken to the role of gentleman farmer like a duck to water. How the Hanburys were a happy couple and became an established part of the country set – riding to hounds, wining and dining their landed neighbours and treating their staff with a respect born of local tradition. She explained how Robert was born a year after their marriage and that as his father settled into running the estate, there grew in the son a sense of adventure counter to the now more conservative ways of his father. Valentine took his new-found responsibilities seriously – both to the land and to his family. It was not long before the 800-acre estate – tired and unproductive on his inheritance – began to thrive under his stewardship.

  But as the father became more conscientious, so the son’s impetuous nature grew ever more pronounced. Robert was possessed of an eagerness and a lust for life that his father found inspiring – a reflection of his former self, perhaps – and his mother exhausting.

  ‘He was a human whirlwind, you see,’ explained Celine, ‘following first one passion and then another – learning to sail, learning to ride – and if you ever met him, he was passionate and enthusiastic; everybody said so. A bit like you,’ she added under her breath. ‘Then when he was sixteen the war came. And like a lot of his friends, he longed to join up and fight to save the land he loved. “Your Country Needs You” – that’s what General Kitchener said on the recruiting poster – and Robert was determined not to let his country down. But he had to wait until he was eighteen before he could join up, and then it was another year before he could serve on the front line.’

  ‘Did Mother and Father try to stop him?’

  ‘Oh yes. They did their best to put him off, and explained as much as they dared about the other members of the family who had fought in the Crimea and the first Boer War. But it was the eyes, you see.’

  ‘The eyes?’

  ‘Blue eyes just like yours. They shone out at his mother and father under the mop of fair hair and had a way of pleading that was impossible to resist. He’d been away just three months – twelve weeks – when he was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. His body never came home.’

  Celine stopped brushing and gazed wistfully at the flickering embers of the fire.

  Rosamund sat silently for a few moments before asking, ‘Were Mother and Father very sad?’

  ‘Of course they were.’

  Even Celine was at a loss to conjure up the true depth of grief that pervaded Daneway after Robert’s death. The sadness was of a scale that few outside the household could comprehend. The father became introspective and taciturn, the mother tearful and prone to bouts of hysteria. The estate ticked along under the stewardship of those men of the land too old or too young to fight, but the atmosphere in the house was of impenetrable gloom. It was as if Valentine and Edith were both marooned in separate worlds with little hope of reconciling themselves to their circumstances and to each other. Whenever Valentine would steel himself and make an approach to Edith, attempting to talk about their loss and rekindle any kind of mutual affection or empathy, she would wring her hands and dissolve into tears before turning from him and shutting herself away. Since Robert’s death, they had slept in separate rooms, and their joint encounters at meals were for the main part silent and introspective.

  It was many months before the dark clouds lifted and the Devon landscape gradually began to work its magic. They would never get over the loss of their only son, but the intensity of their grief gradually eased sufficiently for them to become companionable and to share a bed once more. Four years after Robert’s death, their daughter Rosamund was born.

  The event came as a surprise to them both, for Valentine was now fifty-four and Edith forty-two. There was no question of Edith being a hands-on mother. Her own parents had engaged a governess to look after her when she was small, and being an older mother, she would do the same. Valentine could not argue; the prospect of being a father to a daughter made him uneasy. He was glad, of course, for the child would ease the mother’s pain, but when it came to girls, their upbrin
ging would remain a puzzle to him. And so, within a few days of Rosamund’s arrival, Celine was engaged – recommended by Valentine’s sister Venetia as having done a good job for friends in Belgravia whose daughters were now of an age to look after themselves – with guidance from their mothers, of course. And it would also mean that Rosamund would be brought up to be bi-lingual, which, as Venetia pointed out, was always a good thing in ‘a lady’.

  ‘Do you think I made them less sad?’ asked Rosamund as Celine tucked her into bed.

  ‘Of course you did. Most of the time. Though you can be a trial on occasion.’

  ‘Will you stay?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If anything better turns up.’

  The look on Rosamund’s face told Celine that she had gone too far. ‘Of course I will stay. Who else will brush your hair and sort out your clothes and take you to the beach and teach you French and keep you out of trouble?’

  ‘Do you … do you love me?’

  ‘What a ridiculous question.’

  ‘But I want to know.’

  ‘I look after you, don’t I?’

  ‘That’s not the same.’

  ‘Too many questions …’

  ‘No. Just one.’

  Celine frowned and shook her head. ‘I suppose I must do.’ Then she smiled. ‘That or something like. Now go to sleep or the angels will decide you are not worth a centime.’

  By rights Celine should have been moved on to other, more junior charges, but she had become so much a part of the household they didn’t even consider it. The prospect of change appealed to neither Valentine nor Edith, who had come to rely on her ministrations as unofficial arbiter in the home – soothing the cook when a tantrum seemed imminent, or gently persuading the chauffeur-gardener that his clothes really did need cleaning with greater regularity than he seemed to believe. And so Celine remained, becoming something of a part-time companion to Edith and a confidante of Rosamund, somehow managing to juggle her two loyalties with tact and grace.

  From Rosamund’s point of view, learning French seemed pretty pointless. She could not imagine ever wanting to leave ‘Devonshire’, as she called it. But the lessons never seemed like lessons, and when you have been speaking French since you learned to talk (in the same way that Celine had done), there was little effort involved. Indeed, Edith would occasionally ask them to speak in English when they prattled on rapidly and gaily in the Gallic tongue which, to her, forever remained a mystery.

  As she grew into her teens, Rosamund’s relationship with her father grew, if anything, more distant. He was puzzled by his daughter’s character and found her impossible to fathom. She veered, it seemed, from being a headstrong tomboy to a flighty flibbertigibbet. She and Celine would for the most part behave as though they were sisters; the ten-year age gap seemed to shrink with the passing of the years. On ever more frequent occasions he had to have words with Celine, explaining that perhaps she had gone too far in acceding to the will of his daughter, whether it was being complicit in some activity involving a gallop along the sands on a horse known to be uncontrollable, or in turning a blind eye to an assignation with a local youth.

  While Valentine was exasperated and bemused by his daughter’s capricious nature, to Edith she was a total mystery: a curiosity deposited on them from another planet. While the mother was down to earth and steady, the daughter had something of her late brother Robert’s passionate nature about her. How Edith would have loved her daughter to be calm and biddable, steady and reliable, but it was not to be. Rosamund was headstrong, passionate, enthusiastic. Edith felt she had seen it all before, and something within her shrank back at the thought of history repeating itself.

  It was, I suppose, an idyllic childhood – growing up in Devonshire with the sea in front of me and the rolling green hills to left and right of our own particular combe. I’ve always loved that word – the implication that the valleys of Devonshire have their own character, which of course they do. And I have always referred to it as Devonshire, as in the days of old. Not Devon, which seems too staccato for such a lush and fluid landscape. Of all the shires it remains my favourite, but then it is a county replete with memories.

  I suppose I was what you might call a tomboy. I liked nothing more than riding bareback along the sands of our own particular bay, and staying out until it got dark, not that there was anything sinister about that, or anything that Celine de Rossignol would have called ‘inapproprie’. Oh, I did love her; more so as the years went by and our relationship changed from that of a governess and her charge to one more akin to that enjoyed by sisters. Not that ‘Semolina’, as I teasingly called her, was a pushover; she would let me know from time to time just how angry she felt when I had taken her for granted, or expected her to cover for me when I had committed some misdemeanour of which she and I knew my parents would disapprove. It was all very innocent, of course. At least in the early days. And she did teach me French, which I thought a huge bore. I did not realise then – how could I – that it would come to be of so much value in my life, and the cause of so much heartache and joy in equal measure.

  I hoped that I would get to know my father a little better as I reached my teenage years, but I suspect that he found me impossible to understand. To my mother, I was clearly a complete enigma. We were such different characters, you see; Mother was born during the reign of Queen Victoria and continued to harbour those mores – both social and domestic – all her life. She never really ‘let go’, and my father, being a good deal older than she, was similarly at sea when it came to understanding what made me ‘tick’. I doubt for one moment that he ever knew what I got up to during the day.

  When I was small I was woken, washed and dressed by Semolina (I really must stop calling her that now …) and we would then have lessons in the attic room next to my nursery before escaping mid-afternoon to play on the beach or walk in the woods. Celine had the room next door to mine – a tiny room in the eaves with a bed, a chest of drawers, a curtained-off cubby-hole for her always immaculately laundered aprons and dresses, and floral chintz curtains the same as my own. Most of the day she spent with me in my room, which was rather bigger than hers; it had a desk and two chairs as well as a bed and a dressing table where she would brush my hair each morning – thirty strokes a side (she said twenty was not sufficient and fifty was an indulgence). I was required to make my own bed each morning and to tidy away my toys each afternoon before we went down to tea. I was bathed once a week in front of the fire in the parlour in a copper hip bath that makes me smile just to think of it – soapsuds threatening to engulf me, and Celine’s hair showering me with hairgrips as she sponged my back and let me do my own nooks and crannies, or ‘coins et recoins’ as she called them. It’s funny what one remembers. And how safe I felt in front of that fire each Friday night.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Rosamund of her governess one Saturday in May, shortly after her eighth birthday.

  ‘To Dartmouth.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not too far.’

  ‘How will we get there?’

  ‘By train.’

  Rosamund had never been on a train before. She had seen pictures of them in magazines and books, and had stood at the local station when they had pulled in or thundered through, but her travelling of any great distance – which was rare – had been undertaken either in her father’s car or the estate pony and trap which was still in use, despite its venerable age.

  At first she was frightened by the noise and the size of the great iron beast that clanked and wheezed its way into the station. The compartment into which they climbed had a peculiar smell and she examined the pictures of such exotic-sounding resorts as Skegness and Ullapool, which were framed in glass below the criss-cross stringing of the luggage rack into which Celine deposited the wicker hamper containing their picnic.

  This trip would be the first of many to Dartmouth and Salcombe – a feeling of escape
and delight at exploring new places that would never leave her. To Celine’s chagrin, Rosamund learned how to lower the window on its leather strap so that she could lean out and inhale the smoke-filled air. If she did this quietly when Celine had dozed off, she could feel the wind in her hair for at least thirty seconds before the noise of the wind would wake her governess, who would then admonish her for her folly and heave on the leather strap to close the window with a resounding thud.

  ‘If another train goes by, you will lose your head!’ – almost always delivered at breakneck speed in French – which would reduce Rosamund to giggles and eventually cause Celine to sigh and murmur ‘Sacré bleu’ in melodramatic tones.

  The day would be spent looking in shops – pointing out hats that Celine especially took a shine to – and examining the boats in the harbour, with Celine conjuring up stories of where they had been and where they were bound for. The picnic – jam sandwiches (Celine’s favourite made with plums from the orchard at Daneway) and lemonade, with a slice of ginger cake to finish off – were almost always taken on the harbour wall. Then, late in the afternoon, the two would board the train for the return journey, frequently falling asleep with Rosamund’s head in Celine’s lap. They would be met at the station by the pony and trap, and on returning to Daneway as a copper sun set over the sea, Celine would then have the job of scrubbing her charge to remove the smuts and smell of smoke, which were invariably detected by her father as she was presented to her parents each evening before their supper.

  ‘What have we done today?’ her father would ask absently from behind his local newspaper as his daughter stood in front of him, shepherded into the room by Celine.

  ‘We saw a pirate ship and a very scary-looking captain in Dartmouth harbour,’ said Rosamund.