Her Sister's Gift Read online

“It’ll be all right, Faither.” Isa whispered. “ I’m here now. Yer home. Yer safe.”

  “Isa. My Isa,” her father managed, the tears still gently falling.

  For John, seeing his eldest daughter brought the beginnings of a return of speech and the recovery of his identity. This was a huge turning point on his long recuperative journey, for now he knew who he was and began to remember his life. It took weeks of physiotherapy and occupational therapy before his speech became clear, but the fog in his head lifted, unlocking his memory. The will to live demanded that he drew on every ounce of his strength to make himself learn to walk again, and to make the shapes with tongue and lips that would allow him to communicate once more.

  Isa visited on her days off and every evening she was freed of duties in the kitchen. She brought her photographs of the family and talked to her father about Margaret and Chrissie. She wrote to them and told them what had happened and they wrote letters for her to read to their father about their exploits and lessons. He loved hearing their news and gradually was able to respond with questions as well as smiles and laughter. They had no idea how essential all of this was to his recovery, since it gave him a reason to improve, a reason to live, to fight to regain his faculties.

  As a result he made speedier progress than many other patients who had begun in similar circumstances. By April he had been in hospital for four months. Isa arrived one afternoon on her day off to find him alert, lucid and ready to tell her what he knew of the events leading up to his arrival in the Royal Victoria.

  “Some o’ it has come back tae me noo an’ the nurses hae filled me in wi’ whit they ken. Seems I somehow got separatit frae ma unit and wis caught in heavy shellfire frae the Turks. Ma dog tags wis blawn off in the blast an’ I’d bin thrown tae the groond wi’ sic a force I wis oot cold.”

  Isa shivered as she heard this because it was just as she had seen it in her strange experience.

  “Apparently I was foond later, efter the shellin’ subsidit, by lads frae Australia and New Zealand – the ANZAC unit – wha were headit doon tae the beach. They were due tae evacuate on the ships waitin’ in the bay fur the retreat at the end o’ December. They takit me wi’ them an’ got me tae a British hospital ship on accoont o’ reco’nisin’ the uniform, whit was left o’ it. They savit me or I could hae bin left for dead for I didnae come roond fur days. I slepit maist o’ the journey hame an’ I dinnae mind much until ma ee’n clappit on yer face, ma bonnie lassie. Then I kent I wis yer faither an I hid tae get weel.” He reached out for her hand and held it tight.

  There was something very special between them. It was as if all the traumas they had shared had knitted them together: grief and hardship and having to look after the others had imbued them both with strengths they would otherwise never have found and somehow they fed on each other’s will to survive. Isa knew her father was flawed – the drunken bouts had been hard on her – but she also knew his warmth, his love, his pride in her had helped make her who she was. They might at times disappoint each other but they would never let go, never turn their back on the other, it was like an unspoken promise, a trust that had already been tested and held firm. Perhaps that was why she had known, even though separated by thousands of miles, that he had been in danger and yet had survived. It was a special secret that she did not yet share with him, but she held it close to her.

  *

  In June her father was about to be discharged and Lord and Lady Tolquhoun expressed a wish to meet him, and so John was given an invitation to take tea with them at Cadogan Square. He was very nervous at the thought of meeting a lord, but Isa reassured him that the Tolquhouns were very fine people and from all her stories he knew they had been wonderful to his daughter and therefore he wanted to thank them for their care of her.

  The day arrived and he left the hospital wearing his new suit carefully brushed, shoes highly polished to a shine and his cap. They had sent the car for him and Harry greeted him with a handshake. On the journey Harry told John what great employers the Tolquhouns were, how impressed he was with Isa and how glad he was personally to meet her father. John relaxed in the car talking to this chatty Londoner, though part of his mind was jumping ahead to what he would say to Lord Tolquhoun.

  In the event he need not have worried. Lord Tolquhoun was a Scot and could speak in the vernacular, which was exactly what he did, to put John at his ease. He was shown into Lord Tolquhoun’s study and plied with whisky and soon he was telling this member of the nobility about his life in Falkirk, his work in the foundry and what he could remember of the Dardanelles campaign. Man to man, he could talk of the terrible heat and flies in the summer months when he arrived, the overcrowding in the tents, the poor sanitation; the thirst, dysentery and exhaustion which killed more men than the bullets from the Turks; the heartbreakingly small gains of ground which were quickly lost again; the bitter, stormy winter prior to the heavy bombardment in which he had been injured; the wounded men he’d known as comrades; the dead and maimed bodies he’d seen strewn on the battlefield and left to go putrid and which now peopled his nightmares. Such details he’d never share with his daughters.

  When he met Isa briefly on his way out he was full of admiration for Lord Tolquhoun, who had spoken to him “like a Scot in ma ain tongue”.

  *

  By the end of the month of June, John Dick was installed once again in 22 Sunnyside Road, Camelon, Falkirk, and Margaret and Chrissie could come home. Margaret was now a very fine-looking, confident girl of nine with a mop of glossy dark curls and a delightful smile. Chrissie was seven and a little shy, always holding Margaret’s hand, but when she laughed it was impossible not to laugh with her, her giggle was so infectious.

  That summer Isa was able to see much more of them all because the Tolquhouns had decamped to their Scottish home at Pitskellie Castle near Dunfermline in Fife. Parliament was in summer recess and the family came to relax and shoot grouse on the estate. Isa was given a room at the top of the house. It was really more of a stately home than a castle, built originally in the seventeenth century and extensively remodelled in 1885, but very grand and huge in comparison to the house in Cadogan Square. The castle was surrounded by extensive lawns and woodland. When she had a few hours off, Isa loved to walk by herself, enjoying the fresh air and the quiet, which she had much missed in London. From the foot of the sloping lawn, Isa could turn back and admire the symmetry of the house, the grand bay windows of the dining room and drawing room on the first floor and above them the bedrooms with the balustraded balconies overlooking the sweeping lawns. Her own room had a window up in the roof and she could see how tiny it looked compared to the grander family accommodation in the castle, but if she stood on a stool at the high window she got an amazing view past the lawns and woodland over the surrounding countryside, and to her it was perfect.

  Within a few days of the household re-establishing itself in Pitskellie, there was further upheaval. Rose Nelson, the assistant nanny, had taken ill and needed leave of absence. There was great consternation as to who would take her place. Mrs Roberts, ever mindful of her protégée, had a word with Isa.

  “How long was it that you looked after your two sisters, Isa?”

  “I was eleven when ma mother passed and I looked after Maggie and Chrissie till ma father went tae the war so that would be nigh on four and a half years, Mrs Roberts.”

  “You’d fairly be experienced then.”

  “Aye, I suppose. I saw them through a few illnesses and I always cooked for them and heard their lessons. Truth be told, Mrs Roberts, it wis hard at times, but I liked it. I fair miss them. It’s grand bein’ nearby now. I think Chrissie doesnae really mind ma mother. It’s as if I had that role in her life.”

  Mrs Roberts had a word with Mrs Williams.

  “I know Her Ladyship is worried about the departure of Rose, but you know, Isa looked after her own sisters for four and a half years when they were just little ones. I think she will be very capable. Perhaps she could cover in
the nursery till Rose recovers?”

  “But what about her help in the kitchen? I know you have come to rely on her.”

  “Oh yes, very much so, and I’m not suggesting a permanent move. I need her back. But for now, to help Miss Rutherford out? It would be good experience for Isa and the children know her.”

  “Very well. I shall mention this to Her Ladyship. We’ll see what she thinks of the idea. Thank you, Mrs Roberts.”

  And so it was that for a period of three months Isa transferred to work in the nursery with the Tolquhouns’ youngest children: Agatha, who was four, and James, who was six and who would next year be off to boarding school. She soon discovered looking after wealthy children was different in lots of ways. She was taken aback at the books and toys the children had at their disposal. This was a far cry from what she and her sisters had had. Most of their games had taken place outdoors in the fields, playing with twigs and stones, imagining themselves as shopkeepers or farmers, taking it in turns to invent stories and characters. Then there were the games where they played at being mother, with rag dolls made from stockings with embroidered faces and clothes made literally from rags of cut-down or worn-out clothing. Here in the nursery there were beautiful dolls with porcelain faces and rosebud mouths, long hair, frilly petticoats, silk dresses, fur-trimmed bonnets and little leather shoes. There were rattles and tambourines, building blocks, miniature cars, a wooden rocking horse, jigsaw puzzles. There were mechanical toys: tin soldiers that marched when wound up with a key, monkeys that climbed a ladder rung by rung then flipped over the top and climbed down the other side. There was a huge doll’s house, one whole side of which was hinged and opened out to reveal three floors of rooms with tiny exquisite furniture, little plates and knives and forks, even candlesticks and vases of flowers, everything replicated as in a stately home.

  What Isa loved most were the books. Fond as she had been of writing stories and reading them out loud in class she had not had books at home. Now here she was surrounded with all the children’s classics. There were collections of fairy tales, illustrated books of nursery rhymes plus novels such as Treasure Island and The Water Babies. Miss Rutherford, the senior nanny, a somewhat frosty spinster in her forties, was quite put out at first to discover that this girl from the kitchen could actually read, and do so reasonably well.

  Isa would look back on this time as one when she learned much about child-rearing that her own mother had not known. It was here she learned about table manners and what was not done in polite society, for as Miss Rutherford instructed the young Tolquhouns she was also unwittingly instructing Isa. Knowledge was power and Isa knew she was being shown into a very different level of society from the one she had previously known. She stored every tiny detail in her thirsty mind: new approaches to hygiene that could keep germs at bay, different ways of treating a fever, polite ways to ask questions or to say no to something, how to hold one’s cutlery, what to do with the table napkins, the correct way to hold a teacup and saucer. It was a revelation that one could give away one’s breeding so easily by the way one held one’s knife. But now she too had those secrets of noble breeding.

  On one of her evening walks, Isa was returning towards the house in the summer dim. The light was just beginning to fade but darkness was a long way off and it was already past ten o’clock. She loved these Scottish summer evenings that seemed to last forever. As she strolled up the lawn, swallows and house martins were skimming close to the ground, filling their mouths with insects, then swooping up to their mud-cup nests in the eaves above the windows. She sat on the grass for a moment to watch, breathing in the stillness and the cooling air, resting her legs, weary after her day’s work with the children. As she gazed up at the house, her eyes caught a movement at one of the bedroom windows. The window opened and a figure stepped out on to the balcony above the dining room. Isa was by now about a hundred yards from the house, but even so, the figure looked small, slight, childlike. But that was not the nursery bedroom, and both the children had gone to sleep ages ago. This was the guest bedroom, which was empty this evening as Earl Roseberry and his family were not expected until the weekend. As she stood puzzling all this out she saw the child come closer to the stone balustrade. This wouldn’t do. What was Miss Rutherford thinking? Why wasn’t James in his bed?

  She ran towards the house. As she got nearer, the child began to climb on to the balustrade. What was he doing?

  “James!” she yelled. “Get down!” By now she was panicking. “James! James!”

  She wanted him to look at her, to see she was there. She wanted to calm him and get him off the balustrade. She did not want to frighten him in case he stumbled.

  And then suddenly he stepped off the balustrade, his arms wide, and fell to the ground.

  “Oh my God!” Isa ran even faster to the house, screaming for help at the top of her voice, dreading what she would find as she came round the row of rhododendron that masked her view of the path. Expecting to see the body of the boy on the gravel, she was shocked to find there was nothing. Nothing at all. No child, no marks on the gravel. She looked up at the balcony. Nothing.

  Mr Westfield had been in the dining room tidying the servery and had heard Isa’s screams. He had gone to the window, seen her stupefied on the path and headed out to find out what was the matter. He came walking smartly towards her.

  “Isa? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  “I . . . I don’t know Mr Westfield. I thought I saw something. Someone who needed help. But . . . I must have been mistaken.”

  “What did you see?”

  Isa stammered through what she’d thought she’d seen.

  “Ah, my dear,” Mr Westfield sighed in relief. “Don’t worry. There’s no one needing our help tonight. Just you. You’ve seen our ghost, I think. Come inside, we’ll get you sorted.”

  Isa was trembling and tearful. It had been so real. She had been overcome by such a sense of desperation at her helplessness to avert another terrible disaster happening right in front of her. She was overwhelmed. Mr Westfield supported her at her elbow and got her into the kitchen and into Mrs Roberts’ arms, where Isa finally broke down into sobs.

  Later when Mrs Roberts’ shushing and soothing had calmed her, Isa was told the ghost’s story. The little boy had been Edward, the youngest son of Mary and George Wardlaw, who had lived in the castle a century ago. Edward had been an unusual child, very much living in a world of his own making. From the age of three he had not really communicated with people. He made noises and pointed at what he wanted, but seemed oblivious to other people. Things were more important. He had been fascinated with insects and birds, poring over illustrations in books and copying the diagrams meticulously. One night, after being put to bed, he had got up and crept through to the guest bedroom, where he had opened the window and stepped out on to the balcony, from where he had fallen to his death. No one had seen it happen and it was not until the morning that the staff had found the body outside on the path.

  Isa was still in a state of shock, for although no one had been on the balcony while she watched, she had seen replayed something that had really happened and that made ice run in her veins. She was shivering.

  “Mr Westfield, I think Isa could do with some brandy,” suggested Mrs Roberts.

  “I’ll just get the keys.” Mr Westfield headed through to his parlour. He returned with the bottle of brandy and poured a finger’s worth in a glass.

  “Here, Isa. Take this. It will help. You’ve had a terrible shock.” He handed her the glass.

  Isa sipped slowly and felt the heat in the alcohol quickly course through her body, warming her and stilling her. She felt strength return to her legs. The fear and shock were beginning to dissipate. Mrs Roberts got her upstairs and settled into bed with an extra cover to keep away the chill. She sat down on the chair beside Isa and waited till the girl’s breathing settled. Running through her mind was the vivid description the girl had given of the child: his face, his clothi
ng, his oblivious demeanour and the manner in which he had jumped to his death, not fallen. These were details she had never had passed to her in any of the accounts of the ghost she had come across. Isa truly was a particularly sensitive girl. And tonight it seemed a curse to be so inclined.

  12

  Understandably Isa remained shaken for several weeks after what she had seen. It was difficult to put it out of her mind. Usually, when she was busy with the children, she had other things to focus on, but at night, alone in her room, fear and terror generated by seeing the ghost child, and memories of Eliza’s death, filled her dreams.Tired from her lack of sleep, she occasionally broke down in tears. Mrs Roberts worried for her and brought it to the attention of Lady Tolquhoun, who decided to speak with Isa and had her sent for.

  “Good afternoon, Your Ladyship. You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, Isa. Do come in. How are you?”

  “Very well, Your Ladyship,” Isa said, surprised at the question. She had not been ill. Why was Her Ladyship concerned about her health?

  “My dear, you are still looking very pale. Are you sleeping well?” There was genuine concern in Lady Tolquhoun’s voice and in her face as she regarded Isa closely. “I fear that terrible experience a few weeks ago has taken a dreadful toll on your good spirits and on your health.”

  “But Your Ladyship, do not worry. I am fine through the day when I am working and I do love being in the nursery.”

  “Isa, I know you are good at your work. Everything we ask of you is done to the very highest standard. It is you I am concerned for. You have been through so much recently. I wondered if you might like a few days at home with your family? It would seem to be a good time to do that, while we are here in Scotland not so far away from them. Your father, after all, has just been through a horrific time too. I think you should take a week at home, my dear. Restore your strength. We can manage here. I have already spoken with Miss Rutherford and with Mrs Roberts. Harry will see you to the station in Dunfermline. Tuesday, I think?”