The Storms of War Read Online Free PDF Page B

too. Are you not, Verena? You direct our current gardeners with great skill.’
    Verena gave a frosty smile. ‘Very fond.’
    Lady Lenley stared at Rudolf and then returned her glance to her hands. ‘I would not wish my roses to die.’
    Rudolf looked at the window, smiled.
    Within a few days of Lady Lenley’s visit, the house was a riot of packing. The housekeeper, Mrs Dew, and the butler, Mr Gregory, hurried between the rooms. Verena shut herself in the parlour and emerged only for meals. Mr Gregory and Mrs Mount, the cook, had refused to leave their families in London, and all the lower maids and footmen would never wish to go so far. Verena burst into tears at tea with the strain. ‘A whole new staff to be appointed!’ she wept on to Emmeline’s shoulder. Celia walked downstairs one morning and saw a line of men waiting to be interviewed as their new butler. Letters piled up on the hall table with recommendations of cooks. ‘Tom’s mother could work for us,’ Celia suggested one day. Mrs Cotton had been a parlourmaid for the family but had left before Celia was born, because she was ill, Rudolf had said. Verena turned, her pen poised and directed towards Celia. ‘I don’t think so, dear.’ She shook her head and that was that.
    Celia stood at her bedroom window, pretending to dress for Sir Hugh. Just under the ledge, she knew, ivy was creeping thickly over the walls. Every spring, after the house clean, Rudolf would send for twelve men from the village to put up ladders and scramble over the front, trying to cut it back and pull it down. Otherwise, he said, the leaves would work their way into the gaps between the stone, pinching their way into the hollows and forcing the stones loose. For two weeks men tugged and cut and shouted out to each other, throwing great strips of stems on to piles at their feet. The leaves lay confused and browning, ants and spiders clambering through the maze, before the men took the piles to the back of the garden at the end of the day, set them alight and let the flames blaze. After they had finished, for a month or so the pale front of the upper part of the house shone out to the road. The stone looked so painfully naked, with only a few wisps of stemsleft unbattered by rain, that Celia almost felt she had to avert her eyes coming home. Its clean bareness felt like a challenge: who are you, to live here?
    ‘Stoneythorpe is ours now,’ Rudolf had said, when they had drawn up in the car for the first time. ‘And when I am dead, it will come to Arthur.’ Teams of men had arrived from Winchester to knock out the walls to widen the rooms, install a new kitchen in the basement with a working oven, put in new bathrooms on every floor, and paint and paper over the damp and mould of the walls. Celia stood at her window and watched the carters take away Lady Lenley’s Victorian furniture to be burned. The drawing room was covered in silk hangings from London, the dining room decorated with antiques bought from a shop in St James’s. Verena instructed workmen to pull down the back wall and replace it with glass doors, so that they could throw them open after parties, she said. Rudolf had even tried to paint the front of the house, but the stone would not take the colour. Now, after five years, he declared himself nearly satisfied.
    Celia drew a circle in the mist on the window. She opened the lacquer box on the windowsill, her box of leaves. Every year she had saved a piece of ivy from the cutting-down. She let the leaves dry on her windowsill and then stored them in the box, which Michael had bought her in a market in London. She touched the top one, thinking of how they were like pieces of skin a snake might cast off, dry with months of accumulated life. The oldest was turning into a skeleton, the dried leaf flaking off the intricate frame each time she picked it up.
    Verena had to scale back her plans for a Versailles garden in the end for Rudolf couldn’t spare the money from his