Pack up your troubles, p.1
Pack Up Your Troubles, page 1
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Because Charlie Cochrane couldn’t be trusted to do any of her jobs of choice—like managing a rugby team—she writes. Her mystery novels include the Edwardian era Cambridge Fellows series, and the contemporary Lindenshaw Mysteries. Multi-published, she has titles with Carina, Riptide, Endeavour and Bold Strokes, among others.
A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Mystery People and International Thriller Writers Inc, Charlie regularly appears at literary festivals and at reader and author conferences with The Deadly Dames.
Copyright © Charlie Cochrane
This edition published in 2018 by Williams & Whiting
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 9781912582174
Williams & Whiting (Publishers)
15 Chestnut Grove, Hurstpierpoint,
West Sussex, BN6 9SS
Pack Up Your
TROUBLES
Charlie Cochrane
Williams and Whiting
THIS GROUND WHICH WAS SECURED AT GREAT EXPENSE
August 1914, London
War and rumours of war.
They’d spoken of it for long enough in the smoking room at Warne’s, of the great powder keg of Europe waiting for a single spark to ignite it. Now the explosion would rock the whole world.
Nicholas Southwell stared at people scurrying through the foyer like garden ants thrown into panic by the autumnal arrival of the flying variety, spreading the news of an impending attack. So it had come to war at last. All the club was buzzing with the news, the usual calm, archaic atmosphere shattered. Even men who were already old when the Boer War, that last great disturbance for the members, had erupted were speaking in vigorous tones of offering their strength, brains and energy to King George.
Nicholas had plenty of all three commodities—and business acumen, although he wasn’t sure how that could be employed to serve his country. When his father had died, leaving him to inherit, the estate had been sound though small; he’d maintained the success of the business ventures, preserved and enlarged all that was good. They brought in a steady income and gave him a solid roof over his head, which was more than could be said for some of his neighbours for whom the twentieth century had brought little but debts and leaking tiles.
“Dam’s burst at last, eh, Southwell?” Lord Spreadbury eased himself into the leather chair in Nicholas’s preferred corner of the reading room, a place most favoured by those who kept themselves to themselves.
“So it appears.” Nicholas laid down his newspaper, recognising he’d get no more peace or quiet today. “And whether all Europe will be flooded remains to be seen.”
“It’ll be over in a twelvemonth.” Spreadbury waved his arm in a dismissive gesture. “Our boys will teach the Germans a thing or two, then march home victorious. Johnny Foreigner will never be a match for the British bulldog.”
“Will you sign up, my lord?” Nicholas caught the quickly hidden look of some dark emotion—discomfort or fear—on the other man’s face and knew his barb had struck home.
“I don’t think they’d want old men like me getting in the way. I’ll leave it to you youngsters to have your hour of glory this time around.” Spreadbury rose. “I’ll get myself an Evening Standard and see if the appeasers are spouting any nonsense.”
Nicholas watched his retreating figure; Lord Spreadbury, at a guess, was barely forty—five and still in his prime. Coward. One of the few things he could recall his mother telling him as a child were stories about cowards, how they always came to a bad end unless they saw the errors of their ways, Nicholas. If she’d been alive now, Lady Southwell would have been the first to lead the local recruitment drive, using her charms to persuade young men to sign up.
I should go and get the Evening Standard as well. It was doubtful the newspaper would be any more accurate than the buzz of rumour was, but Nicholas wanted to know what people were being told.
He caught his reflection in the long mirror by the porters’ desk, then stood transfixed, as if seeing himself clearly for the first time. He saw his mother’s grey eyes and elegant nose, yet the Southwell stamp was on him in the dark hair and determined chin. An only child, his visage bore the sole living likeness of his parents and the possibility of having his own child to inherit the distinctive Southwell jaw seemed extremely remote. Who’ll miss you if you march away with the rest of them? Will there be a Nicholas Southwell—shaped fissure in anyone’s life? In anyone’s heart?
Poor Mama; a teary goodbye on a platform in London or the dock at Southampton would have finished her, even if the tumour hadn’t. She’d never been the same since Sir Robert, Nicholas’s father, had died, victim to a catastrophic fall from his hunter just a year after the old queen passed on. Lady Southwell hadn’t let Nicholas ride after that, not even exercising one of the mares along the wide, safe paddock by the river. She would never have coped with him volunteering to serve his country, no matter how keen she would have been for other people’s sons to go.
Lady Southwell looked out from his reflection’s eyes, pleading with him. Wait and see, Nicholas. Bide your time.
His father spoke from the clean cut jawline. Do your duty, old man. No one to grieve for you now my lovely girl’s gone.
Nicholas sighed; maybe he was lucky to have the debate going on only in his head rather than over his dinner table. Perhaps it was as well not to leave anyone behind to grieve. There was Nanny, of course—she’d sniffle into her handkerchief but she’d keep calling him brave and noble, making him feel less like some officer in khaki than a knight in shining armour from one of the stories she used to read when he was no more than a boy.
He would have to write to her; she’d expect that. Maybe she’d even share his letters with the rest of the staff—they’d be keen to have news of how their master was getting on. He’d write to Haskell as well; Nicholas wouldn’t need to keep half an eye out of the battlefield and onto estate business if Haskell was there to manage it in his absence. All would be safe on the home front.
Paul Haskell. His father had run the estate and related business for Sir Robert, and Paul had inherited the job two years after Nicholas had inherited the property. He was all that an employer could ask for: meticulous, honest, hard—working. And as handsome as Adonis. Nicholas closed his eyes, remembering Paul Haskell playing tennis on the lawn at the back of the house at one of Lady Southwell’s many house parties—she’d loved entertaining, especially when she could fill the house with pretty girls she hoped would catch her son’s eye.
She hadn’t succeeded. Nicholas had refused to be regarded as breeding stock, some stallion that could be put to the mare, and it had almost brought him to blows with Sir Robert. From the day he turned eighteen, his father had insisted that he settle down, preserve the family name, and secure the inheritance. No one could force him into the livestock ring now.
The image in the mirror seemed to dissolve into green and white. Paul Haskell stooping to lob the ball, immaculate white flannels clinging to his wiry frame. Nicholas could imagine the scene vividly, could hear the sound of ball on racket, could smell buddleia and girls’ scent. While there were plenty of eligible young men to be had in the county, few played tennis as well as Haskell, nor were they as handsome. Green eyes framed by a clear—skinned face which saw plenty of fresh air, and topped by a mass of black locks—Haskell’s colouration was unusual and his fine frame lacked nothing a girl could require to sigh over. There used to be an awful lot of sighing at Lady Southwell’s parties.
Nicholas was certain that none of the fillies who’d been paraded for his perusal and who’d all received the same polite indifference had been served by the stallion who strode the tennis lawn. Nice girls didn’t generally do such things outside the lawful marriage bed, or so he’d been led to believe. He couldn’t say the same for the nursery maids or governesses he sometimes spied clinging to Paul’s arm after church; their reputation wasn’t quite so immaculate. He’d never asked, and Paul had never ventured to tell him, whether there was some girl he had his eye on, someone whom Nicholas would find with a toddler at her heels, a baby in a pram and Paul’s ring on her finger when he came back from France.
Assuming Paul stayed at home for the war. What if he signed up?
A wave of panic crept up Nicholas’ spine. Paul was plenty young enough, just past his thirtieth birthday—Nicholas had given him a hunter watch to mark the occasion, to replace one he’d broken taking a tumble down the stairs from the bell tower at St. Mary’s. Paul had said he’d repay the compliment when Nicholas turned the same age in 1916, but would either of them see that date?
Nicholas’ alarm subsided as he remembered why the fall had been so bad. Congenital weakness in the right leg. Doesn’t bother me usually but sometimes it just seems to cave in and I go arse over tip like a drunken sailor. They’d never let him serve if he was half—crippled; he’d be safe at home. Nicholas wouldn’t feel he had returned home until he saw Paul’s smile.
Dear God, he would miss him.
“Are you feeling quite all right, sir?” The porter’s voice bore the proper level of objective concern.
Nicholas realised he’
d been standing too long in front of the mirror, deep in thought and memory. He glanced around, dreading the sight of some old buffer watching him, but only the porter seemed to have noticed his reverie. “I’m fine, thank you. Just thinking—these times give us all pause for thought.”
“Indeed, sir.” The porter bowed then returned to his desk, suitably chastened, as Nicholas strode purposefully towards the door.
He took a deep breath as he reached the pavement, savouring the sweetness and ridding his nostrils of Warne’s dust and pretence. His generation would sign up willingly. It’s the old ones who’ll sit and fight from the safety of their armchairs.
AUGUST 1914, HAMPSHIRE
The leaves on the copper beeches danced in the breeze; the late summer sun lighting on them produced a warm glow. Nicholas had always loved them more than any other trees on his estate, even in their bare winter form. Now, leaving the cab at the gate and savouring the walk along his own drive, he saw them afresh. He used to meet Paul under these branches when they were hardly more than boys, taking a chess set or pack of cards to play seemingly endless games bathed by the warm August Hampshire sun. There’d be no time for such frivolity now.
He told Nanny that he was signing up almost as soon as he reached the house, before anyone else. She’d been so proud at the thought of him putting his name down. “You’ll look a picture in your uniform. Have all those mesdemoiselles waving their handkerchiefs at you. Be careful you don’t come back with one of them on your arm.”
“I promise.” Only recently had Nicholas been able to address his former governess and not feel seven—and—a—half again. Even though he towered over her, she would always seem the grown—up one of the pair. “I hope to be off training in just a few weeks, which will give me time enough to set my affairs here straight. There are plenty of safe pairs of hands to entrust things into.”
“Young Mr. Haskell will keep a steady eye on things,” Nanny said, fiddling with her knitting. No doubt those fingers would be employed producing socks or scarves or who knew what else over the next few months. “You’ll be back come the spring, in time to see the lambs over at Longlea.” She made the pronouncement as if it were a certainty, as sure as Christmas Day falling on December the twenty—fifth.
“I hope so.” As Nicholas spoke the words, he felt a prophetic jolt, and knew it was all a lie. Somewhere inside—heart or brain, he couldn’t be sure—he was certain they were in for a long campaign. Leaving the old lady with her wool and her thoughts, he went out into the gentle light to find Paul.
As he walked down the path back to the beech avenue an instantly recognisable, elegant figure came to meet him, a gun hanging off its shoulder and an uncharacteristically serious look on its handsome face.
“You’ll sign up?” Paul didn’t attempt any small talk; it wasn’t their way. They usually met three times a week, if Nicholas was down in Hampshire, and those meetings always began with a litany of business, action taken or to be considered on the estate, successes and failures. Only when all the business was dealt with would Paul take a beer, relax for half an hour and indulge in chit—chat. A discussion of parish scandal, something which might have been called gossip if they’d been female, a brief harking back to the days when they’d traded all their secrets over that chess board. True to form, Paul hit straight at the crux of things now.
Nicholas wasn’t sure if the question was an order—you do this for the honour of the estate, I can’t—or some sort of expression of jealousy, that he could go where the other man could only dream of. He couldn’t dare hope it was the beginnings of a plea for him not to go.
“It’s my duty.” The words seemed inadequate, barely expressing anything Nicholas felt. Yes, he was bound by duty, but there were other considerations. He was, he knew, running away from conflict as much as running towards it.
“I’ll look after things.” Paul’s eyes registered something which might have been offence.
Nicholas replied hastily. “Of course you will. I’ve never doubted it.” He’d doubted his own intentions, of course.
He cast a sidelong glance at Paul, wondering what expectations he’d have. The estate manager wore his business face, a cool, clear eye surveying the fields, maybe weighing up the chances of the next pheasant brood surviving the depredation of fox or buzzard. Sometimes Paul spoke of his family, an occasional glimpse into a world not bounded by rents or yields; would one of his brothers or cousins be taking the King’s shilling? “Will Tom volunteer?”
“He’s not told me one way or the other. They’ll want medical men, of course, especially ones who know about bones.” Paul smiled, as he always did on the rare occasions he mentioned his older brother. Nicholas had often wished he’d been blessed with a younger sibling to hold him in such high regard. “They’ll want ones who know how to deal with heads. And what goes on inside them as well.” Paul scuffed with his boots at a weed which had dared to poke its nose up in the immaculate gravel.
“Do you wish that you’d been able to get over there?” Nicholas immediately bit his tongue. Why on earth had he felt the need to ask such a stupid question? But the words were out and beyond recall, maybe as lethal to friendship as a vixen among the nestlings.
“Good God, no. If it wasn’t for this,” Paul tapped his gammy leg, “I’d have to find some other way to avoid it. I’d drive ambulances, or crack codes, run messages night and day if I had to. I couldn’t go and fight.” The sea—green eyes looked straight into Nicholas’s deep grey ones, hiding nothing, baring Paul’s very soul.
“Why?” Relieved that their friendship hadn’t fallen at the first hurdle of his clumsy questioning, shocked at his friend’s uncharacteristic candour, Nicholas rushed in again.
“I couldn’t shoot another man, or bayonet him.” Paul’s face, normally ruddy from fresh air and exercise, had turned as pale as the hawthorn blossom they’d collected as boys. He ran his fingers through his fine, dark hair.
Nicholas tried to keep his eyes from admiring those long slender hands. Hands he’d seen wring the neck of a critically injured bird caught in the raspberry netting. Hands which could knock out, behead and gut a trout in thirty seconds. Hands which had tipped blossom into his, the gentle brush of fingers on palm remaining in Nicholas’s mind long after the flowers had faded and lost their odour. “I see. I think I understand.” He didn’t, but he wouldn’t judge out of ignorance or misapprehension. If Paul had his reasons, that was good enough.
“Do you? Then you see more than I do.” A sad smile crossed Paul’s face, like a cloud over the sun. They stood a while in silence, watching a kestrel quartering the field the other side of the beeches, both wary of words which could build a wall between them.
“I don’t believe you’re a coward, Paul. I’ve seen too much of your valour to make such a mistake.” The village bully thrashed because of what he’d done to a harmless tramp who’d been holed up in the woods behind the church. The dog which had gone wild and worried the livestock—confronted and despatched, almost clinically.
Paul shrugged. “Maybe it takes a braver man to stay at home at times like this. Don’t ask me to speculate on the nature of courage.”
“How long have you felt this way?” Nicholas looked at the gun and the man who carried it. He’d thought they were close, that they knew each other as well as any pair of friends might, but now it seemed like he was talking to a stranger.
“All my life, or at least as far back as I can remember. Don’t you recall when we were boys?”
“You never played at soldiers.” It was true and the remembrance was blinding, a light on the Damascus road. Paul had always been the one to pretend that he tended the horses or the wounded. Maybe, at a pinch, he had driven the horse artillery and placed the guns. Never a foot soldier or an officer.
“I never did and I never will. I’m sorry if you despise me for it.” Paul studied his boots. “You can find someone else to manage your estate when you return. I’ll be here—I daresay no one will want to steal me away, not if they know the real reason I’m not marching to the front.”
