The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,27

worn and rigid with mud, the smell of the charnel house and barbed wire and gas. His cap was missing. The garter badge and Roussillon plume he was so proud of were gone. But there was a waistcoat, stiff with blood, and his braces.’ I swallowed hard. ‘It was only when I overheard Florence talking to the ironmonger’s boy at the back gate that I realised George’s body had been so devastated there was nothing left to identify. Almost the entire Thirteenth Battalion, the Southdowners, was wiped out. They knew he was dead all right, mown down with his men. It’s just they couldn’t distinguish one body from the next.’

‘And so you became ill?’

I shook my head. ‘Not then, later. The breakdown, collapse, petit mal, neurasthenia, nerves, whatever you want to call it. It didn’t come out straight away. Not until I reached the age George had been when he died. My twenty-first birthday, in fact.’

‘You did not speak of your grief?’

I shrugged. ‘Who would have listened? Within a mile of our house, twenty, thirty families were in the same boat. The Battle of the Boar’s Head is known as “The Day Sussex Died”. Hundreds of local men, boys like George, went to war and never came back. There’s a plaque on the wall of the memorial hall in my home village listing some thirty men, of all ranks, who fell that day. The same thing in all the villages around us. And there was always another battle coming up behind, worse and bloodier and less inexplicable. I suppose I thought I had no right to make a fuss. That I was old enough to cope. Certainly, my parents thought so.’

‘They were not aware how much you suffered?’

‘I’m not sure it would have made any difference. You see, it was George they loved. It wasn’t that they were deliberately unkind, only that mourning George drained the life from them. That I might be missing him too did not cross their minds. And, for my part, in my muddled, old-fashioned way, I saw they had a better claim to grief than did I, so I said nothing.’

‘Your parents are gone?’

I nodded. ‘Mother passed away last winter. Father earlier this year.’

‘And do you miss them?’

I was on the point of muttering the usual platitudes, but I stopped. What was the purpose in lying? Good manners, tradition, fear of painting a poor picture of myself? The truth was I felt relief, not loss. Now they both were dead there was no longer any need to pretend. They had been unable to love me. But that was their fault, not mine.

‘Sometimes,’ I said eventually. ‘Every now and then, something will happen and I will think of them. I have a few happy recollections. But for the most part, it is easier without them.’

I looked again at Fabrissa. She did not seem disapproving or shocked. Her skin was almost transparent now in the flickering candlelight, as though the effort of listening was draining the colour from her.

‘I like to think that I would have been able to accept his death if only I had believed it was true. Grieve, yes, but move on. If only I had accepted he was dead. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Not for years. The idea he would never again come whistling through the door, or sit in the leather armchair in the music room blowing smoke rings at the ceiling while I banged away at some Beethoven sonata on the piano, was too absurd.

‘It was this, I think, the not knowing, that preyed on my mind. Not knowing what had happened to him, how he had died, when he had died. I became obsessed with piecing together those last minutes of George’s life. I read every report in the newspapers I’d missed when I’d been ill. Studied everything about the battle at Richebourg l’Avoué that I could lay my hands on - the terrain, the weather reports, the ratio of their men to ours. I sought out those few men of the Southdowners who’d survived the engagement and wrote to ask if they had seen him.’ I shrugged again. ‘Made everyone’s life a misery.’

‘The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures but our own.’

She was speaking so quietly now that I strained to hear her over the noise of