He slammed a fist down on the desk, scattering papers. He was racked, teeth bared like a fighting animal, and he could not force out the words he wanted. She was filled with wonder and with pity, seeing him like this. How had she driven him to it?
‘Please reconsider . . .’ he said. ‘I . . .’ But he could not say it. Tell the truth all he might, there were yet words that would choke him.
The tremendous wave of anger that had engulfed her had ebbed away by now, but her resolution was left stranded behind. ‘Mr Northway . . .’ Gentle, now that all was decided. He looked up with hope, though, and she finished, ‘I must go to war.’
‘I did not kill your brother.’ His face twisted with something that looked like self-loathing. ‘I did not kill your father. I did not kill your brother. I did not.’
‘It changes nothing.’
‘I am asking you, Miss Marshwic, to change your mind. There is still time. I do not want you to go to the front.’
‘And why not, Mr Northway?’ she said at last. ‘Tell me more of your truth. Tell me why you would commit treason for me and not for Rodric.’
He stared at her with hollow, hungry eyes. His perennial mask was gone, and the smile with it. So little was left of the urbane, wicked man she had thought she knew. Slowly he righted his chair, slumped back into it. His lips moved, but no words came. He could only stare at her, with all entreaties exhausted. Of the two of them, he looked more like the one facing a death sentence.
9
The first task at Gravenfield was to put us in uniform. You may imagine exactly what a travesty that was. Picture a mass of women of all ages, from girls younger than Alice to women older than Cook, cramming themselves into those ill-tailored britches and shirts. There was a great deal of amusement from all concerned, and I may safely describe it as a shambles. I believe women must be of a greater variety of shapes than men. Certainly we are quite different sizes. Nobody received clothes that fit. We looked more like tatty mummers than soldiers, and there was a sense that we were all playing some child’s game of dressing up.
Then the master sergeant asked for all those who had been dressers of hair or barbers wives, and he had some old men on hand, too, who had shorn a head or two in their time. He had us line up, and then he told these people to cut our hair short – everyone’s hair to be as short as his own in a man’s style. There was no more laughing from that point on. Many complained and we protested, but we were soldiers now and we would dress like soldiers, and wear our hair like soldiers. It was cold in early spring, with our hair cut back to the napes of our necks.
Those of the women who had trades and skills that Lascanne could make use of were siphoned off to factories and workshops across the country, there to put their experience to work for the King’s shilling. They were the lucky ones.
Unsurprisingly, being a landed gentlewoman of good family was not a skill the war effort could find any great use for, and so Emily, along with around half the other recruits from Chalcaster, found herself dispatched to Gravenfield to learn how to become a soldier.
Gravenfield: it had been twenty years since anyone had thought of using that place as anything more than a store. A windswept, walled compound surrounded by bleak moorland, the erstwhile barracks had last seen active service in the Hellic wars. A day’s ride from the nearest railway station, it had been too remote during peacetime to amount to anything more than a punishment. Now, with the advent of the Women’s Draft, some resourceful mind within the army had unearthed Gravenfield once again. This was where the women of Chalcaster, and a half-dozen other towns, were to be turned into soldiers.
Their transformation would not come easily.
After providing the uniforms, with all that entailed, they tried to teach the women to march. The duty fell to a portly master sergeant, a few years short of three score, who introduced himself as: ‘I am MASTER Sergeant BOWLER, and YOU will call me SIR. Is that CLEAR?’ His moustache and his belly quivered in unison whenever he shouted,