“I’m nearly two years older now.”
“About to reach the magic age. But don’t grow up too soon, will you?”
“I thought you were urging me to.”
“I want you to keep that bloom of innocence. Sweet sixteen, they say, don’t they? How right they are! Don’t learn about the wicked ways of the world too soon, will you?”
“I think I have learned quite a lot about them in the last two years.”
“But it hasn’t spoiled you. You still have that adorable innocence. You will soon be seventeen. When is your birthday?”
“In September. The first.”
“Almost three months away.”
“I wonder if you will still be here?”
“I am going to be. If necessary I shall malinger. I shall pull the wool over Dr. Egerton’s eyes and make him insist on my remaining here.”
“But surely you will have recovered by then?”
He shrugged his shoulders and touched his chest. “That bullet did something. The old leg might get back to something like normal. I believe they are not much concerned with that I don’t think it would qualify me to be here. But I have to take care of this other thing.”
“I am glad in a way that you won’t be able to go to the front.”
“You would mind very much if I did?”
“Of course. I thought a great deal about you when you were in Gallipoli.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“But you must have guessed. We were all thinking of you…you and Uncle Gerald.”
“It’s your thinking of me that interests me.”
We were silent for a few moments, then I said, “You know a great deal about me and my family. I know little about you and yours.”
“There is not a great deal to know. I have been in the army from the time I was eighteen. Destined for it, you know. It’s all tradition in my family.”
“Uncle Gerald did say something about your coming from an ancient family.”
“We all come from ancient families. Heaven knows how far our ancestors go back…to the days when they were all living in trees or caves perhaps.”
“The difference is that you know who your family was and what they were doing hundreds of years ago. You’re from one of those families who…”
“Came over with the Conqueror? That’s what you mean, is it? Oh, I daresay. There was always a lot of pride in the family…all that sort of thing.”
“Tradition,” I supplied.
“That’s it. The family has been doing certain things for centuries. We have to remember that and go on doing them. The second son always goes into the army. The first, of course, runs the estate. The third goes into politics, and if there is a fourth, the poor devil is destined for the Church. The idea in the past was to have the family represented in all the influential fields. Thus we played our part in governing the country. What was done in the sixteenth century must be done in the twentieth.”
“And do you all meekly obey?”
“There have been rebels. Last century one went into business. Unheard of! He made a fortune, bolstered up the crumbling ancestral home and set the family on its feet. But that did not stop them from thinking there was something shameful about his life.”
“Well, at least you have done your duty and haven’t become a black sheep.”
“But not an entirely white one either.”
“I should have thought they would be proud of you.”
“No. I should have become a field marshal, or at least a colonel by now. I haven’t a hope. Wars are the time for promotion. But I’m knocked out of it, as it were.”
“Won’t the family recognize that?”
“Oh, yes, but it doesn’t really count. I should at least have got a medal…preferably the Victoria Cross.”
“Poor Marcus! Perhaps it would have been better to have been born into an ordinary family like mine.”
“Yours is far from ordinary. Consider your mother. Turning her home into a hospital!”
“Do you feel restricted, having to conform to such high standards?” I asked.
“No. Because I don’t always. One gets accustomed to compromise. That is our secret motto. As long as it all looks well, that’s all that matters.”
“But you went into the army.”
“It suited me in a way. I was too reckless at eighteen to have any ambitions of my own.”
“And now…?”
“Oh, I shall be a good Merrivale to the end of my days. I shall stay in the army until I retire…then possibly settle on the estate. There’s a fine old house…not quite so imposing as the ancestral home, but it has been used by one of the younger sons through the ages. My uncle who lived there died recently and his son is living there now. I believe he has plans to move to one of the family’s smaller estates up north sometime. Then that house could be mine…when I retire from the army. I could settle down there and give my brother a hand with the estate. That life would suit me.”
“So you will do your duty to the family.”
“I shall marry and settle. I must marry before I am thirty.”
“Is that a family law?”
“It’s expected of us. Sons should have settled by the time they are thirty and begin to replenish the earth…or shall we say, the family. Time is running out for me. Do you know I am twenty-eight?”
“Is that really so?”
“Quite old, compared with you.”
“You will never be old.”
“Ah. Who is flattering now?”
“If it is the truth, it is not flattering, is it?”
“But you were saying this to please me.”
“I was merely saying what I think.”
“Oh, hello…there you are.” Annabelinda was coming toward us.
“Marcus,” she went on. “How long have you been sitting there? I’m not sure that you should. There’s quite a chill in the air.”
“Ah,” said Marcus. “The fair Annabelinda! Have you come to join us?”
“I have brought your jacket.” She put it around his shoulders. “I saw you from one of the windows and I thought you needed it.”
“How I love to be pampered!”
“I was looking for Lucinda, actually,” said Annabelinda. “Your mother was asking for you a little while ago. I thought you might be somewhere in the garden.”
“I’ll go and see what she wants,” I said. Marcus raised his eyebrows into an expression of resignation.
“Good-bye for now,” I added.
When I reached the house, I looked back. Annabelinda was sitting close to him on the seat and they were laughing together.
I found my mother.
“Did you want me?” I asked.
“Well, not especially, but now you’re here, you might take these towels along to Sister Burroughs.”
A few days later, after we had closed our books for the morning, Miss Carruthers said, “Lucinda, I have something to tell you. You will be the first to know.”
I waited expectantly.
“You are aware that your seventeenth birthday is coming up soon.”
“The first of September.”
“Exactly. You will then not really be in need of a governess.”
“Has my mother said anything about that?”
“No. But it is the case, is it not?”
“I suppose so. But I hope…well, my mother always said how useful you are in the hospital. She says she does not know what she would do without all her helpers.”
“The fact is I am going to be married.”
“Miss Carruthers!”
She glanced down, smiling. It was hard to imagine Miss Carruthers coy, but that was how she seemed at that moment.
“Dr. Egerton has asked me to marry him.”