The Passing Bells Read online

  Dedication

  For Bettye Cooper Rock

  from Kingston-upon-Thames—

  with all my love.

  Epigraph

  Let there be rung the passing bells

  to call the living, to mourn the dead.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Book Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Book Three

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Book Four

  Chapter 20

  Author’s Note

  P.S.

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Also by Phillip Rock

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  BOOK ONE

  Summer, 1914

  Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

  Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

  Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

  And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

  And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

  And we have come into our heritage.

  —RUPERT BROOKE (1887–1915)

  1

  The dawn came early, tinting a cloudless sky the palest shade of green. Cocks had been crowing before first light, heralding the June day the length and breadth of the shire. On Burgate Hill, woodcutters paused to rest after the steep climb to the top, lit their pipes, and watched the sun rise. It was another clear, dry day and the men could see Sussex and the South Downs far off across the Weald. The Vale of Abingdon lay below them, still dark with shadows, but by the time they had finished their smokes—tapping the ashes carefully onto bare ground—the sun had reached the spire of Abingdon church and the brick chimneys of the great house, Abingdon Pryory, three miles to the west, the house itself shrouded from view by the dense foliage of oak and birch woods. Beyond the vale, the men could see a thin plume of smoke rise from the gentle hollows of the heath—the 5:10 from Tipley’s Green bearing the rich harvests of Surrey to the London markets.

  Anthony Greville, 9th earl of Stanmore, heard the distant hoot of the train as it approached the crossing at Leith Common. He lay drowsily in bed, following in his mind’s eye the passage of the goods train as it meandered across the county before joining the main line at Godalming. It was the same train—larger and more sophisticated, of course—that he had known as a boy, although in those days it had not crossed the heath but had come from Tipley’s Green by way of Bigham through five miles of his father’s land. When would that have been exactly? he wondered. Eighteen seventy? Seventy-two? About then, he imagined. The early seventies because the land had been sold off later in the decade and parceled into farms. A new railroad line had been built to skirt Abingdon proper, a much more efficient line, he remembered the farmers saying, but he had missed the ancient train with its tall, bulbous smokestack and gleaming brass.

  He turned his head on the pillow and glanced at the bedside clock, a ship’s chronometer set in a rosewood case. Five twenty-three. The great house was coming alive, and he stretched his long, leanly muscled body under the comforter and listened to the muted sounds—the murmur of pipes as the scullery maids drew water for the cooks, the faraway ring of shovels as coal buckets were filled, the faint whistling of a stableboy washing up at the courtyard pump. Soon there would be scurrying footsteps in the halls as the upstairs maids brought hot water for shaving and pots of tea for the early risers. There were forty servants in the house, counting stableboys and grooms, and they could make a fair amount of noise as they began the day. They were sounds that Lord Stanmore found as comforting as memory.

  He shaved himself, standing before the mirror in his stocking feet while his valet stood near him holding towels and a bottle of bay rum. His valet’s name was Fisher, and he had been the earl’s man for over ten years.

  “And what does your lordship have in mind for today?”

  He studied his face in the glass. “What do you think, Fisher? Is the mustache getting a bit too military?”

  “It is rather fierce, if you’ll permit me to say so.”

  “And aging?”

  “I’d hardly go that far, m’lord. Martial, yes.”

  “We shall trim it later, Fisher. Blunt the ends.”

  “Very good, sir. And as for your needs?”

  The earl made one final stroke along the chin line and then dropped his razor in the shaving bowl.

  “Morning clothes after my ride . . . and there will be guests for dinner. Black tie.”

  “Very good, m’lord.”

  The morning ride was the earl’s unfailing ritual, in the heat of summer or the dark frosty mornings of winter. He dressed for it in old whipcord breeches and a Norfolk jacket, with a sweater beneath it if the air was chill. There were thirty pair of riding boots in the dressing room closet, but his choice was habit-set for the morning ride, a pair of Irish hunting boots, the tan leather cracked into fine lines like the face of an ancient weatherbeaten man. The boots were as supple as gloves and fitted his long legs like a second skin. He was getting into them with Fisher’s help when there came a discreet tap at the door and Coatsworth entered the room, followed by one of the maids, bearing a large, silver tray, on which stood a teapot, a jug of hot water, milk, sugar, a basket of scones, a pot of marmalade, and a dish of butter. The elderly butler walked slowly, his dark trousers almost obscuring his slippered feet.

  “Good morning, m’lord.”

  “Morning to you, Coatsworth. How’s the gout this morning?”

  “Better, sir, I do believe. Soaked my feet in hot vinegar last night at Mr. Banks’ suggestion.”

  “Hot vinegar indeed.”

  “Works wonders, Mr. Banks says.”

  “Been damn effective on the hunters, I’ll say that.”

  Mr. Coatsworth cleared a table next to the chair in which his master was seated and motioned for the maid to set the tray down. She was a young girl, slender and dark haired, with high cheekbones and a thin uptilted nose. A very pretty girl, the earl thought as he smiled at her.

  “Thank you, Mary.”

  “Ivy, sir,” the girl whispered.

  “Of course, Ivy.” One of the new ones. Mary was the plump ginger-haired girl with buck teeth.

  “Shall I pour, sir?” the butler asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  “You may go, lass,” Coatsworth murmured. She was lingering, looking about the room. It took a while to train them properly. This one seemed more intelligent than most. She gave a proper curtsy before leaving. He poured tea into a cup and added a teaspoonful of sugar and a dash of milk. He then split a hot scone and buttered it. “I think you will find the scones to be quite delicious this morning, sir. Cook changed the recipe. A higher proportion of rye flour than usual.”

  “You don’t say so.”

  “Ross says they remind him of the scones his mother used to bake when he was a lad in Aberdeen.”

  “Gets about a bit, doesn’t he? Told me he came from Perth.”

  The butler chuckled as he spread marmalade on the scone. “I’d say Glasgow or the East End was nearer the truth.”

  “Perhaps. Still, a good man with a motorcar.”

  “As you say, m’lord,” Coatsworth said through pursed lips befor
e turning to leave.

  A bit of resentment there and the earl knew it. Jaimie Ross was a brash young man of indeterminate geographic origin, but a first-rate chauffeur and mechanic. He was badly needed now that the number of motorcars in the family had increased from one to four. The previous chauffeur had been a man of Coatsworth’s age, an ex-coachman who had known little about cars other than how to put one in gear and steer it in a reasonably straight line. He and the butler had been close friends and had spent their off hours together at the Crown and Anchor in Abingdon, where dart playing was an almost holy rite. Young Ross, on the other hand, preferred female company to darts and spent his half days off dashing about the countryside on his motorbike, impressing maids and shopgirls from Guildford to Crawley.

  Lord Stanmore did not linger over his first breakfast of the day, but drank his tea and munched his scones, a man in a hurry to be someplace else. He could feel the tug of field and wood, hedgerow and thicket. There wasn’t a part of the vale that wasn’t a challenge to a horseman, not a yard of the land that didn’t provide a sense of exhilaration and triumph. There was no better way on earth to start the day than by riding full tilt across that blessed landscape. His only regret at the moment was that he would be riding alone on this bright and glorious morning. William wouldn’t be down from Eton for another day or two and Charles had lost his zest for riding. The thought of his eldest son cast a momentary pall over his mood. He couldn’t fathom the lad. All Charles had done since coming down from Cambridge had been to moon about, listless and apathetic. His scholastic record at King’s had been most gratifying, but when the earl had tried to discuss his son’s future with him, he had drawn a total blank. The lad’s direction seemed clear enough to Greville. He was, after all, the eldest, which would mean the eventual inheritance of the title. He should apply himself diligently to understanding the complex structure of the family holdings—not merely Abingdon Pryory with its score of tenant farms, but the land in Wiltshire, Kent, Northumberland, and the West Riding, as well as the various parcels of London commercial properties. A job enough for any man. Of course, if Charles had expressed a desire to remain a scholar and wished to return to Cambridge, he wouldn’t stand in his way, but any discussion of the future had been met with what was fast becoming unendurable, aggravating, exasperating, bloody ennui! He drained his cup as though it contained a dram of whiskey.

  “I’m off,” he said, getting abruptly to his feet. The valet hurried from the dressing room carrying a jacket, tweed cap, and a riding crop with a polished bamboo handle. Properly attired, the earl strode across the room to the door which connected his suite with his wife’s. It was a source of inner satisfaction to him that never in the course of twenty-five years of married life had that door ever been locked, a symbol of love that effectively quelled the dark predictions of his friends, who had said that the marriage could not possibly last, “American women being what they are.” He had not understood the meaning of that remark then, nor did he now.

  The contrast between the two suites symbolized the difference between men and women, as the earl saw it. His rooms were paneled with dark oak, Spartanly furnished, and devoid of frivolous ornamentation. A large, untidy bookcase contained books on country life and hunting, a novel or two by Hardy, Shakespeare’s plays in five volumes, and a Bible given to him by the local vicar on the day he had left home for the first time to go to school at Winchester. Between the slim stacks of books stood hunting cups and other trophies of horsemanship. The sword that his grandfather had carried, but never used, at Waterloo rested in its scabbard above the brick fireplace, and a large telescope, the gift of an admiral uncle, was fixed to a tripod in front of one of the mullioned windows. Study, bedroom, and dressing room had survived intact his transition from young manhood to middle age.

  The rooms of Hanna Rilke Greville, Countess Stanmore, had been decorated by a man who had been under the spell of the Belle Epoque: rooms of deep-pile carpets, embossed wallpapers in shades of lemon and milky green, gilt-framed paintings, mirrors, and rococo furniture. Silk drapes diffused the light, bathing the rooms with a softly feminine glow. The rooms of a warm and sensuous woman. In all the years of their lovemaking, she had never come to his rooms, only he to hers.

  She was still asleep, her long blonde hair tied in two thick coils that lay across the pillow like strands of spun gold. The earl did not intrude on his wife’s slumber. It was his ritual to simply stand for a moment at one end of the large bedroom and look at her. He then closed the door quietly and retreated into his own room, slapped his boot top with the crop, and strode briskly toward the hall.

  “Good morning, your lordship.” Four of the upstairs maids stood on the landing and whispered their greeting in unison. They curtsied as they did so, their heavily starched uniforms making a pleasant rustling sound.

  “Good morning . . . good morning,” Lord Stanmore said, barely glancing at them as he descended the broad staircase.

  He left the house through the glass-domed conservatory, with its riot of potted palms and hanging baskets of ferns, and then went out across the shadowed west terrace, where two gardener’s helpers were sweeping the flagstones with brooms made of twigs. The men paused in their work long enough to touch their caps in respect, and he acknowledged their gesture by a slight nod of his head. Steps of weathered granite curved down to the Italian garden, where four men were busily trimming the topiary work. An ornamental iron gate purchased long ago from the estate of the duke of Fiori in Urbino led into the rose garden, with its central fountain of Carrara marble tumbling green water over carvings of Neptune and Europa. Beyond the brick wall that enclosed the rose garden, several long, low greenhouses marked the edge of the vast kitchen gardens and their neat rows of vegetables and well-spaded earth. A tree-shaded gravel path wound past the gardeners’ cottages, the compost pits, and the storage sheds to the stable area, separated from the domain of the gardeners by a high stone wall. There was a scattering of musket and pistol balls embedded in the chinks between the stone blocks, mementos of a brisk fight between Prince Rupert’s horse and a company of Roundhead infantry in 1642. As a child, the earl had dug for them with a pocketknife, but had recovered nothing but rusty flakes of iron and thin curlings of lead. A solid wood gate painted a dark green pierced the wall and gave access to the paddock and stables beyond.

  This was his world, and the earl was intensely proud of it. The new wood buildings with their slate roofs were painted in his colors—buff with accents of dull orange. They were the finest stables in England, and the twenty-five hunters and jumpers housed in them were the best horses that could be bought, bartered, or begged. His favorite of them all, a seven-year-old chestnut gelding, was being walked in the paddock by a groom while a stocky, bandy-legged man wearing tweeds and brown leather gaiters eyed the horse with a critical and practiced eye.

  “Good morning, Banks,” Lord Stanmore called out cheerily. “Have a saddle on him, I see.”

  George Banks, trainer and vet, jocularly referred to as Master of the Earl’s Horse, removed a knobby briar pipe from between his teeth and tapped out the ash against his palm.

  “Fit as a fiddle, sir, and strainin’ at the bit as you can see. I’d venture to say that old Jupiter’s as good as new.”

  The earl peered intently at the horse’s left front leg as the groom walked it toward him.

  “Not favoring the leg at all.”

  “No, sir,” said Banks. “It’s the hot packs what done the job good and proper.”

  “Let’s just hope he won’t be jump-shy after this.”

  “Well, sir, we’ll never know that till the old boy takes a fence, but he’s had his knocks before this.”

  “Quite so, Banks, though not as severely.” The earl patted the horse fondly on the neck and then ran his hand along its smoothly curried withers. “Good Jupiter. Good old boy.”

  “Full of mustard.”

  “Quite so.”

  “He watched Tinker go and they’re proper stablema
tes. I reckon he’s eager to be catching up with him.”

  “Tinker? Who on earth . . . ?”

  “Why, the captain, sir,” Banks said, refilling his pipe from a yellow oilskin pouch. “Captain Wood-Lacy. Came down from London last night, sir. Got in a bit late and didn’t want to disturb the household, so he bunked in with me. He was up with the lark and eager for a ride.”

  The earl swung up into Jupiter’s saddle.

  “Damn. Wish I’d known. Which direction did he take?”

  “Toward Burgate and Swan Copse,” the groom said. “But he weren’t spurrin’, m’lord. Just ridin’ easy.”

  “Thank you, Smithy. Perhaps I can catch up with him.”

  He tapped the big gelding with his heels, and the horse responded eagerly, breaking into a canter down the hard-packed sandy path. He had to hold him from bursting into a flat-out gallop as they swept past the stables and the feed barns. The path curved to the right toward the Abingdon road and was bordered on the left by a five-foot fence.

  “Take it, Jupiter.” He tugged the left rein, and the horse veered sharply off the path and soared over the fence with feet to spare. He could hear Banks and the groom give a cheer, but he did not glance back.

  Captain Fenton Wood-Lacy, Coldstream Guards, rode slowly and morosely through the dappled shadows of a beech wood. He was a tall square-shouldered man of twenty-five with dark deep-set eyes, a prominent high-bridged nose, and thin lips. It was a face with a look of studied arrogance about it and a hint of cruelty, like the face of a falcon. It was a face that, when angered, could reduce incompetent subalterns to twitching terror. But that was his parade-ground face, acquired with his commission. With friends, women, small children, and the meek and humble of the earth, the face underwent an almost magical transformation. The hard line of the mouth softened, and the eyes lost their beady coldness and became warm with humor and compassion. At the moment, the eyes were leaden and the face troubled. A passing stranger seeing this man seated on a magnificent bay, dressed in fine London-cut riding clothes, and wearing a bowler of impeccable fit and style would have taken him for a rich squire. In actuality, he carried in his pocket a letter from Cox’s Bank informing him in a respectful but terse manner that his account was seriously overdrawn. The matter of his unpaid bills at the Marlborough Club had been brought to his attention the day before by the club secretary.