The Wild Dark Flowers Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself even to speak, let alone take pleasure in the world. She remembered her mother sitting on her bed last autumn, stroking her face, chafing her hands, saying, “Darling, please talk to me. It’s quite all right to talk to me, I shan’t criticize you.” But her mother’s kindness had made it all the worse. Louisa simply lay there with tears streaming down her face. “Don’t blame yourself,” her father said, the first time that she managed to come down to dinner. “It wasn’t your fault.” But of course, it was her fault. She knew that. She had failed quite spectacularly to have a grain of sense in her head.
    Now, however, pleasure was coming back. And to her complete surprise, she felt it most in the library, carefully looking through the books, running her hand over histories and maps and the records of other lives. Here, and in the archives, where Father kept all his own father’s diaries, she felt that her family were wrapped around her, gently protecting her, gently encouraging her to look outwards, past herself.
    Her father would come in sometimes and stand next to her. He would say very little. But he would occasionally put his hand on her shoulder, and lean to kiss her cheek. “Read the translation of Homer,” he would suggest, or, “Look at the botanical drawings, they are rather fine,” or some such thing. She knew he was offering her what he himself most enjoyed. He wanted to share it with her. She would look up at him, and he would blush, and pat her shoulder rather embarrassedly. “There’s a good girl,” he would say, as if she were five years old. “There’s a good girl.”
    She got up now at last, and stretched. She looked out onto the terrace; then opened the large doors through to the hall, crossed over it, and went into her father’s study. There on the desk was the morning newspaper, still folded at the page about Rupert Kent. She laid her hand on it reflectively.
    She hadn’t much memory of Rupert—he was nine years older than she. He
had been
nine years older, she corrected herself, frowning deeply. Her mind immediately conjured up Harry as he had been last October, putting an arm around her shoulders and whispering, “Buck up, dear girl, won’t you? For my sake, if nothing else. I don’t want to think of you here moping about.” She had smiled at him; one couldn’t help smiling at Harry’s irrepressibility. “I shall try,” she promised him. “There’s a love,” he responded, pretending to give her chin a glancing blow.
    She shook her head at the memory. Slowly, she walked out of the room and through to the orangerie.
    It was a building that ran down the length of the south side of the house. Palms reached up to the roof, and there was a warm, heavy scent. She stood for a few moments, gazing out at the grounds, and then seemed to make a decision. Taking up her hat, which was lying discarded on a cane chair, she went out through the double doors and down the long herringbone path, skirting the kitchen garden within its high walls, until she finally emerged in the bright afternoon sunshine at the stable block.
    Jack Armitage was just crossing the yard. As soon as he saw her, he stopped dead.
    “Good afternoon, Jack.”
    “Afternoon, miss.”
    She smiled at him. “Are you busy?” He paused, after a brief glance over his shoulder. “Of course you are,” she said for him. “Two of the boys have gone, haven’t they?” She knew that the stable hands had enlisted long ago.
    “That they have.”
    “Where are they training?”
    “They’ve gone already, gone to France.”
    “So soon?”
    “Some do,” he said. “And the Blessington Pals are going this week, too.”
    “Are they?” It was the group that had signed up together from the mills that her mother had owned, twelve miles away on the other side of the moorland hills.
    “And Harrison, and Nash.”
    “Yes, of course,” she replied.
    He stood watching her. She liked it that he had little to say; she