The Gates of Rutherford by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

tended rows, theforcing beds for pineapples, for melons; down past the fruit cages that would yield strawberries and raspberries in just a few weeks, inhaling the tart aroma of their leaves in the twilight. A few more steps took her to another door, leading out into the stable yard.
    Here, she paused again, looking across the yard to the Armitages’ cottage. She really ought not to intrude, she thought. She really ought not to be here at all.
    And, as if summoned by her thoughts, the door to the cottage opened. For a moment, Josiah Armitage was framed in the light of the door. Then he closed it and progressed down the path and out into the yard. He shuffled a little as he walked. He was in his mid-seventies, and the posting of his only son, Jack, to the veterinary corps in France seemed to have broken something in him. He looked his age.
    He noticed her only as he got very close to her.
    â€œWhy, Miss Louisa. Welcome ’ome.” He tipped his forehead, where the peak of a cap would normally be.
    â€œHello, Armitage. How are you?”
    â€œOh, as well as can be expected.”
    They looked at one another in silence. Louisa felt the blood thumping in her chest. Her face was flushed, but she hoped that he would not see it.
    â€œI wondered . . .” she began. And stopped again. She cleared her throat. “And . . . how is Mrs. Armitage?”
    The old man smiled slowly. “Waiting. Like we all do.” Armitage, like most Yorkshiremen of his generation, was a man of very few words.
    Louisa bit her lip. She didn’t know how to go on.
    At last, Armitage put her out of her embarrassed misery. He fished in his pocket and brought out a very slim envelope, and held it out to her. “If you don’t mind my saying,” he muttered softly, “tis a strange thing to be a messenger. I’m not right comfortable with it, miss.”
    She took the letter, seeing Jack’s writing upon it.
    â€œThank you,” she replied. They paused another moment. She wanted to tell Jack’s father that it wasn’t at all what it seemed. That there was nothing improper in the correspondence, and that her own father would not dislike letters being kept away from the house, or her scurrying through to the staff quarters to retrieve them. She wanted to say that it was all of no consequence, that it was just some kind of harmless entertainment.
    But it would not be true, of course.
    They both knew that.
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    I t was deathly still at Catterick.
    That night there had been a thunderstorm after the warmer temperatures of the day. It was odd, because although a little more bearable, it had hardly been a summer day; the clouds had rolled in like fast grey breakers on a stormy sea, obliterating the light. It was not the kind of weather that a man would associate with thunder.
    But all the same it came, and the lightning lit up the bleak barracks yards beyond the windows. Frederick did not know what went through the other men’s minds but he could have guessed. The thunder was like artillery. When the storm came overhead, you could feel it reverberating in your bones just the same as when they had been at the front.
    It passed within an hour. The hut was like a morgue, a hundred men stretched out and motionless and sleepless, full of memories. Ghosts walked between the beds. Ghosts they didn’t want to see, or think about.
    He must have fallen asleep in the early hours, and he found himself on a field at home, looking back towards the farm. He laid down in the grass and covered his face with his fingers just as he had usedto do when a child, spacing his fingertips so that he saw the farm buildings in a haze of grass.
    He supposed that he had been a typical child. He liked the rough and tumble of the schoolyard, and he grudged his way through lessons, not understanding much but eager to please, stumbling his way through Charlemagne and Teutonic