Chapter 23
23
There was no body and so Olivia refused to accept that Howard was dead.
She got through the next few weeks doing the thing she did best: retreating to her imagination. There were a dozen different scenarios that could have played out: the men could have become disorientated and be hiding out somewhere, or perhaps Howard was recovering in a foreign hospital but had lost his memory, or the party had been captured by the Germans and were in a prisoner of war camp. It would, however, take time to establish if this was the case, especially as the enemy was now in a state of utter chaos, but Sir Hugo was calling in all the favours he could think of to discover the truth as quickly as possible.
She reconciled herself to the fact that being captured might be the best thing to happen to him. He would be safe until the conflict was over – away from the shells and bullets, and out of the rat-infested trenches. She was under no illusion that prisoners had it easy but, every day, she played out scenes in her head where her beloved Howard was returned to her. Surely, she would have known, felt something – a hole, an empty ache – if he were dead. It hadn’t taken her long to feel an eviscerating void after the sinking of the Titanic , and her parents’ bodies had never been recovered either.
She wondered if her photograph was being caressed and cherished by him in some distant land, a reminder that he was loved beyond measure and must survive the war so that they could be reunited? Or was it buried under several feet of earth, with his broken, lifeless body, waiting to be found and give them all the full stop they longed for? Or perhaps destined never to be found at all?
It was nearly a month of not knowing. A month of torture. And then the news came through that they’d all been waiting for, with Sir Hugo finding her in the library, listless and exhausted from lack of sleep. She looked up as he strode into the room, waving a sheet of paper at her.
‘He’s safe, Olivia. He’s been in a German prisoner of war camp all this time.’
* * *
On the eleventh of November 1918, the armistice was signed in France, with all hostilities ceasing at eleven o’clock that morning. Church bells rang across the country; even Big Ben spoke for the first time in two years. The days passed in a blur of celebrations. The war was finally over.
Wedding preparations began in earnest, even though they had no idea when Howard would be able to get home. A three-tier cake had been baked, but not yet iced, and Olivia was fitted for a dress.
It was mid-December, Benji was back from school, and the household finally had a festive season to look forward to, when the housekeeper sought Olivia out in the library. One look at the woman’s face and she knew something was terribly wrong.
‘The Fairchilds have had a telegram. I thought you should know.’
An icy terror started somewhere deep inside and slowly spread outwards from her very centre, creeping like a deadly poison through her veins, and killing every part of her as it went. The war was at an end. The fighting had ceased. Surely, it could not be bringing bad news.
She rushed to the drawing room and flung open the door. Sir Hugo stood with a piece of paper in his hand and Her Ladyship was staring at her husband, pale as the moon, but they both turned to face Olivia as she entered. The look of bewilderment and unfathomable sadness in Sir Hugo’s eyes, the exaggerated silence that hung in the air like a heavy, immovable fog, and the way Cynthia held herself – slumped, defeated and broken – told her all she needed to know.
Finally, he spoke. ‘Oh, my darling girl. It’s Howard.’
Olivia’s knees went from under her as the world shattered into a million tiny, irreparable shards. First her parents, then Clarence and Louis, and now she’d been dealt the most wicked blow of all, just when she thought all the unbearable suffering and crippling pain was over.
Sir Hugo had not yet said the words but she didn’t need to hear them. Howard was dead and the details didn’t matter. He spoke of them regardless.
‘Influenza. They think he was already quite weak from his ordeal and he caught it when he was being transported across France.’
Nothing in this world would ever matter again.