Act of Will

Great-Aunt Frances gave her a surprised look and then she smiled slightly. ‘Well, Audra, you are a practical child, it seems. I think that’s an excellent idea, especially since poor dear Edith did not think to make a will. This way the three of you can discuss the division of your mother’s property at leisure, and make your decisions. Why don’t you take an inventory next week, my dear.’

Audra nodded solemnly, camouflaging her triumph behind a bland expression. ‘Yes, I think I will, Great-Aunt. ’

In the days which followed this conversation, Frederick, quaking in his boots, had warned Audra that there were bound to be repercussions. He had noticed the calculating look in Aunt Alicia Drummond’s mean little black eyes when they had all been in the library, even if his brother and sister had not.

But nothing untoward had happened in the end, and the long, hot summer had slithered into a cool autumn; then winter had come finally, and life at The Grange had continued uneventfully. And as miserable as the Kentons were in the cold and unloving environment of their aunt’s home, even Audra felt bound to agree with William, her favourite, that they were fortunate in one respect: the three of them were together, they had each other to love, and for companionship and consolation.

It was the week before Christmas when Audra chanced to hear a strange remark, one that worried her briefly; its true meaning was to baffle her for some time thereafter.

Late one afternoon, knowing that Great-Aunt Frances had come to visit, Audra went looking for her.

She was about to push open the drawing-room door, which was already ajar, when she heard Aunt Alicia mention her mother’s name in the most scathing manner. She did not catch what her aunt said next because Alicia lowered her voice. But Audra stiffened as Great-Aunt Frances suddenly exclaimed in a horrified tone, ‘You cannot punish the children for the sins of the mother, Alicia!’

Instantly, Audra’s hand dropped from the knob and she quickly backed away, not wishing to hear any more, and knowing that it was wrong to eavesdrop anyway.

She crept down the dark passage to the back parlour, where she sat for a while, pondering her great-aunt’s odd remark. Audra knew that it had to do with them – that much was patently obvious. But she could not fathom its meaning. How had her mother sinned? At once she told herself that her mother had not committed a single sin in her entire life. As young as she was, Audra was perceptive and she had long known that Alicia Drummond had always been jealous of her mother’s classical beauty, her charm and her refinement. So much so, she had never lost a chance to demean Edith Kenton during her lifetime. Seemingly she could not resist doing the same thing after her death.

For the next few days Audra continued to wonder why Alicia wanted to punish them, but eventually she managed to curb her worry. She consoled herself with the knowledge that whatever punishment she had had in mind for them, their great-aunt had obviously found a way to put a stop to it.

But as it turned out, Frances Reynolds’s words had apparently meant little or nothing. Certainly they had not been a deterrent to her daughter.

For in the end they had been punished.

Two months later, in February of 1922, Frederick and William were dispatched to Australia as emigrants, and Audra was sent to work at the Fever Hospital for Children in Ripon.

Their fierce protestations and anguished pleadings to stay together had made no impression. They were helpless in the face of their aunt’s determination. And so, against their wishes, and those of their Great-Aunt Frances, they had been forced to do as Alicia Drummond said.

It was a wrenching moment for the three young Kentons when Frederick and William took leave of their sister on that bitter winter morning. Before setting out for London and the boat to Sydney, they had huddled together in the front hall, saying their goodbyes, fighting back their tears.

Audra clung to William. Emotion welled up in her, and her throat was so tight she could barely speak. Finally she managed, ‘You won’t forget about me, will you, William?’ And then she started to sob brokenly and her eyes streamed.

Swallowing his own tears, trying to be brave, William tightened his arms around his adored little sister. She looked so young and vulnerable at this moment. ‘No, I won’t. We won’t,’ he said reassuringly. ‘And we’ll send for you as soon as we can. I promise, Audra.’

Frederick, equally emotional, stroked the top of Audra’s head lovingly, and reiterated this promise. Then her brothers stepped away from her, picked up their suitcases and left the house without uttering another word.

Audra snatched her coat from the hall cupboard and ran out. She flew down the drive, calling their names, needing to prolong these last few minutes with them. They stopped, turned, waited for her, and the three of them linked arms and walked on in silence, too heartbroken to speak. When they arrived at the gates the two boys silently kissed Audra for the last time, and tore themselves from her clinging arms before they lost control completely.

Holding one hand to her trembling mouth, stifling her sobs, Audra watched them stride courageously along the main road to Ripon until they were just small specks in the distance. She wanted to run after them, to shout, ‘Wait for me! Don’t leave me behind! Take me with you!’ But Audra knew this would be useless. They could not take her with them. It was not her brothers’ fault they were being separated from each other. Alicia Drummond was to blame. She wanted to rid herself of Edith Kenton’s children and she did not care how she did it.

Only when her brothers had finally disappeared from sight did Audra drag her gaze away from the empty road at last. She turned back into the driveway and wondered, with a sinking heart and a sickening feeling of despair, if she would ever see her brothers again. Australia was at the other end of the world, as far away as any place could possibly be. They had promised faithfully to send for her, but how long would it take them to save up the money for her passage? A whole year, perhaps.

As this dismaying thought wedged itself into Audra’s mind she looked up at that bleak, grim house and shivered involuntarily. And at that precise moment her dislike for her mother’s cousin hardened into a terrible and bitter hatred that would remain with her for the rest of her life. Audra Kenton would not ever find it in her heart to forgive Alicia Drummond for her cold and deliberate cruelty to them. And the memory of the day her brothers had been sent away would stay with Audra always.

The following afternoon, white-faced and trembling, and fretting for her brothers, Audra had gone to live and work at the Fever Hospital. Since there were no vacancies that year for student nurses she had been taken on as a ward maid.

Audra Kenton’s life of drudgery had begun. She was still only fourteen years old.

She had been awakened at dawn the next morning. After a breakfast of porridge, dripping and bread, and tea, eaten with the other little ward maids, the daily routine had commenced. Audra was appalled at the hardship of it, and she, who had never done a domestic chore in her entire life, had found that first day unspeakable. Balking at the tasks assigned to her, she had asked herself despairingly how she would manage. Yet she had not dared complain to her superiors. Being intelligent, and alert, she had understood within the space of a few hours that they were not interested in the likes of her. She was inconsequential in the hierarchy of the hospital, where everyone – doctors and nurses alike – worked extremely hard, and with conscientiousness.

On her second morning she had gritted her teeth and attacked her chores with renewed vigour, and she had learned the best way she could, mainly by observing the other maids at work. At the end of the first month she was as efficient as any of them, and had become expert at scrubbing floors, scouring bathtubs, washing and ironing sheets, making beds, emptying bed pans, cleaning lavatories, disinfecting the surgical ward and sterilizing instruments.

Every night she had fallen into her hard little cot in the maids’ dormitory, so bone tired that she had not noticed her surroundings or the uncomfortable bed. She was usually so exhausted in these first weeks she did not even have the strength to weep. And when she did cry into her pillow it was not for her state of being or for her mean and cheerless life. Audra wept out of longing for her brothers, who were as lost to her now as her mother and Uncle Peter lying in their graves.

There were times, as she scrubbed and polished and toiled in the wards, that Audra worriedly asked herself if she had brought this disastrous state upon her brothers and herself. Guilt trickled through her when she remembered how insistent she had been about taking those inventories of her mother’s possessions. But generally her common sense quickly surfaced and Audra recognized that they would have been punished no matter what. In fact, she had come to believe that Alicia Drummond had callously determined their fate on the very day their-mother had died.

When Audra had been pushed out of The Grange and sent to the hospital, Aunt Alicia had told her that she could visit them every month, on one of her two weekends off, and spend special holidays with them. But Audra had only ever ventured there twice, and then merely to collect the remainder of her clothes and a few other belongings. For as far back as she could remember, she had never felt anything but uncomfortable in that appalling house; she understood she was not welcome.

The second time she went to fetch the last of her things she had had to steel herself to enter The Grange, and she had made a solemn vow to herself. She had sworn she would never set foot in that mausoleum of a place again, not until the day she went back to claim her mother’s property. And so, over those early months of 1922, as she had learned to stand on her own two feet, she had kept herself to herself. She had continued to do her work diligently, and she had stayed out of trouble at the hospital.

If her daily life was dreary, and lacked the normal small pleasures enjoyed by most girls of her age, she nevertheless managed to buoy herself up with dreams of a pleasanter future. Hope was her constant companion. No one could take that away from her. Nor could anyone diminish her faith in her brothers. She was absolutely convinced that they would send for her, that she would be with them in Australia soon. Three months after Frederick and William had left England their letters had started to arrive, and these had continued to come fairly regularly. They were always full of news, good cheer, and promises, and the pages had soon grown tattered from her constant reading of them. Audra treasured her letters; they were her greatest comfort and joy in those days.

The hospital routine had scarcely varied during Audra’s first year. The work was hard, even for the strongest of the girls. Some of them had left because their daily chores had worn them down and inevitably demolished their interest in nursing. Only the truly dedicated remained. Audra, with nowhere else to go, stayed out of sheer necessity.

However, there was also something very special in Audra Kenton, call it stubbornness, that made her stick it out until she could graduate to nurse’s training. Small though she was, she had unusual physical stamina, as well as a mental energy and toughness of mind that were remarkable in one so young. Despite her youth, she possessed inner resources which she was able to draw on for courage and strength. And so she had valiantly continued to scrub and clean and polish endlessly…run up and down endless stairs and along endless wards…forever on her feet or on her knees.

The toil and monotonous grind of her days quite apart, Audra could not complain that she was ill treated in any way, for she was not. Everyone at the hospital was kind to her and the other little ward maids, and if the food was plain, even stodgy at times, at least there was plenty of it. No one ever went hungry. Audra, plodding along and braced by her stoicism, would tell herself that hard work and plain food never killed anybody.

But by the end of the year she was looking to better herself. Her eyes were focused on the day she would take a step forward and start climbing the ladder. She had been sent to work at the hospital against her will, but slowly, as she had mastered her chores, she had had a chance to look up, to observe and absorb. Gradually she had begun to realize that nursing appealed to her.

Audra knew she would have to earn a living, even if she went out to join her brothers in Sydney; she wanted to do so as a nurse. According to William, she would have no trouble finding a position in a hospital. He had written to tell her that there was a shortage of nurses Down Under, and this knowledge had fired her ambition even more.

It was in the spring of 1923, not long after Audra had started her second year at the hospital, that her chance came. Matron retired and a successor was appointed. Her name was Margaret Lennox and she was of a new breed of woman, very modern in her way of thinking, some said even radical. She was well known in the North of England for her passionate espousal of reforms in woman and child welfare, and for her dedication to the advancement of women’s rights in general.

With the announcement of her appointment there was a flurry of excitement and everyone wondered if the daily routine would be affected. It was. For, as was usually the way, a new broom swept clean and a new regime, in this instance the Lennox Regime, was swiftly instituted.

Audra, observing everything with her usual perspicacity, decided that she must waste no time in applying for nurse’s training at once. From what she had heard, Margaret Lennox favoured young and ambitious girls who wanted to get on; apparently she went out of her way to give them her unstinting support and encouragement.

Two weeks after Matron Lennox had taken up her duties, Audra sat down and wrote a letter to her. She thought this was the wisest tactic to use, rather than to approach her personally. Matron Lennox had been in a whirlwind of activity and surrounded by a phalanx of hospital staff since her arrival.

Less than a week after Audra had left the letter in Matron’s office she was summoned for an interview. This was brisk, brief and very much to the point. Ten minutes after she had walked in, Audra Kenton walked out, smiling broadly, her application approved.

With her superior intelligence, her ability to learn quickly, Audra swiftly became one of the best student nurses on the hospital staff, and earned a reputation for being dedicated. She found the new work and her studies challenging; also, she discovered she had a desire to heal, and therefore, a real aptitude for nursing. And the young patients, with whom she had a genuine affinity, became the focus of the love she had bottled up inside her since her brothers had gone away…

Now, remembering all of this, as she lay in the grass on the crest of the slope above the River Ure, Audra thought not of her diplomas and nursing achievements over the past four years, but of Frederick and William.

Her brothers had not sent for her in the end.

They had not been able to save up the money for her passage to Australia. Things had not gone well for the Kenton boys. Frederick had had two serious bouts with pneumonia and seemed to be in a state of physical debilitation a great deal of the time. Apart from the problems with his health, he and William were unskilled and untrained. They had had a hard time scraping a living together.

She sighed and bestirred herself, then sat up, blinking as she opened her eyes and adjusted them to the brightness. Poor Frederick and William had had nothing but bad luck really. Their letters, which arrived less frequently these days, were permeated with defeat. Audra had all but given up hope of going out to join them in Sydney. She continued to fret and to miss them, and she supposed she always would. They were her only family, after all, and she loved them very much.

Her work at the hospital gave her satisfaction, and for this she was grateful, but it was not enough. Her sense of isolation, of not belonging to anyone, or more precisely of not being part of a family, and her dreadful loneliness, all contributed to the aridness of her life. Sometimes she found it unbearable, despite her treasured friendship with the devoted Gwen.

Audra stood up, then cast her gaze to the other side of the river.

The light had changed in the last few hours and High Cleugh now looked as if it had been built from polished bronze stones. It was bathed in a golden glow, appeared to shimmer like a mirage in the distance, and even the gardens had a burnished sheen in the rosy sunset. All of her life thus far, at least the best, the happiest parts of it, and her dearest memories, were bound up with that old house. A rush of feeling swept over Audra and she suddenly knew that she would never cease to yearn for High Cleugh and all the things it represented.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_f2aafaf1-dadf-528c-b1d9-298c713c27f0)