“While everyone else was busy in the house, Peter ducked into the gardens at the back. Somehow the kitchen garden had escaped notice—he found carrots and leeks and then, miraculously, a coop. When they camped that night, they were able to cook up enough soup to feed a dozen of the wounded.” She smiled at Lydia again, her grey eyes glittering like chips of ice. “So you see, your brother did steal chickens—but only for the greater good.”
Lydia managed a light chuckle, as Mrs. Boyne clearly intended her to be amused. But the thought of Peter, or anyone, having to scrounge for food after a battle was a knife to the heart.
And here she sat with a feast spread out on every side. They had barely made a dent in the picnic basket’s contents—the jellies and cheeses hadn’t even been touched. Guilt speared through Lydia. “We should take the rest of this to Mrs. Kaur. She’s organizing a charity bazaar for the local Patriotic Fund—I’m sure she could find some use for it.”
“I believe Mrs. Crangle has already sent several baskets over,” Mrs. Boyne replied, but began packing up the remains of their meal all the same. Her smile had vanished, “Until nightfall, Miss Wraxhall.” With a nod of her chestnut head, she returned to her horse, leapt into the saddle, and was off again down the hill.
Lydia watched until the snowy landscape swallowed her graceful figure. Shadows shifted, and the sunlight turned thick as the day waned.
Lydia felt something in her fading with it. She’d known Peter had suffered hardship; he’d written her about it often enough. They were not in the habit of hiding things from one another. She’d known, too, about him and Captain Marwood. She’d approved, for whatever such approval was worth. The captain sounded like he made Peter happy more often than not.
The stolen chickens, though… It was one thing to read war stories in print, at a distance. Quite another to hear them from someone who’d lived through them. There was the frightening chance to ask all manner of probing, too-intimate questions: Were you afraid? Do you feel changed by what you’ve seen? Are you still grieving?
Did he suffer terribly at the end?
Worse still: the possibility that you might get an answer.
It forced Lydia face to face with the humbling fact that, deep down, part of her did not want to know.
She didn’t want to know such horrible things had happened, especially to people she loved when she could do nothing to save them or soothe their passing. She didn’t want to know about strangers in pain, or young soldiers falling, or diseases that brooked no cure.
It was the unworthiest impulse of a common and cowardly soul.
Was this all goodness was? To live in polite ignorance while others fought and died? Walking the same roads every day, on the same errands, never changing, until her proper little steps wore grooves in the cobbles and the hall of her father’s house. Until she took her last breath beneath the same roof where she’d breathed her first, and went to sleep in the earth mere steps away. Unloved, unremarked, and unremembered.
Peter had not even been gone a year, and already Lydia feared she had become someone he would not recognize.
A nudge on her elbow. She raised it, and there was Walter, making soft sounds of worry and climbing into her lap. She sighed. A snuggling chicken indeed. She stroked the plumage on his neck, soothing him, and also herself.
The Greys were watching. But this watching had a different quality. There was a kind of anticipation in it now, as if they had reached a détente and now were wondering: What next?
Suddenly Lydia was sick to death of goodness.
She was sick of the polite thing, the proper thing, the dutiful thing. She knew now why Peter had joined the army in the first place all those years ago—it got him out, and away from this feeling of suffocation. He’d been older, and braver, and a little wiser than his sister.
She didn’t have that option: nobody wanted women in the army. So failing that, what would her soldier brother do, right here, right now?
One of the Bickerton Greys took a step toward her—then another. Testing her. Curious, rather than afraid.
Mrs. Boyne’s words rang in her mind like bells: Luring implies that you gave the chickens a choice.
Recklessly, Lydia decided that sounded like fine advice.
She braced Walter in her arms and stood. The hens rose as a flock and drifted over, wary but willing, as the rooster in her arms clucked encouragement. Slowly, with Lydia in the lead, they moved down the ruined nave of the church, then down the hill, then into the wood.
The Greys chose every step of the way home.
Harriet had barely glanced around Bickerton proper when they moved into the Hall. Now she observed it was a close little place, the church and the green and the tavern all packed tight as if huddled suspiciously against outsiders. The almost-but-not-quite-rude sign of the Cock and Apple was hung with icicles on this frosty morning, as Harriet Boyne marched past on the way to Dr. Wraxhall’s house to shout at his thieving daughter.
Oh, she ought to have known that story about catching chickens at night was a joke. She’d let herself get taken in by mourning colors and a pair of soft brown eyes. Never again. God, the way Lizzie Crangle had laughed when she and Arun and Harriet had showed up at the Abbey after sunset, with covered lanterns and a wheelbarrow with a makeshift coop of wood and wire. They’d crept so carefully up the hill—trying not to spook the sleeping birds.
Birds who were, by then, at least a mile away and safely tucked in with Miss Wraxhall’s rooster.
Harriet’s friends were never going to let her forget it.
Dr. Wraxhall’s home had a new gate, but the stone was old, and a century’s worth of ivy held the snow close to the walls. Harriet’s knock was answered by a youngish maid with gold curls beneath her cap. “Mrs. Harriet Boyne. I’m here to see Miss Wraxhall, if you please.”
“Sarah!” called a rough baritone voice, “If it’s Mrs. Outerbridge remind her that she sees Dr. Penrose now.”
