The Legend of Nimway Hall Read online

  “’The gingham dog and the calico cat

  Wallowed this way and tumbled that—”

  “Father, please don’t—”

  “Employing every tooth and claw

  In the awfullest way you ever saw—

  And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!’”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Am I the dog, or the cat?”

  “You needn’t tell me how the meeting goes, Josie Bear— I’ll get my news from the Chinese plate!” He laughed broadly at his own cleverness. “But just now, that shelf of Mr. Tennyson awaits!”

  He pointed up the ladder then ascended in a charge so agile it surprised her and, by Winnie’s barking, delighted the dog.

  “Imagine, Miss Josie, their Royal Highnesses havin’ to plan those fancy state dinners ‘round these very same rations th’t we do our own suppers: just so much meat and butter and sugar.”

  “But how very like the Windsors, Mrs. Lamb, to lead us by example.” Ration books guaranteed everyone, of every class, including the Royal Family, the same access to the critical nutrition that would keep the country healthy during the war. Nimway Farms and Orchards provided a wealth of food, not only to the people who depended on the Hall, but to the local shop and the air station at nearby Yeovilton.

  “Bet that nasty Mr. Hitler eats high on the hog.”

  “Actually, I understand he’s a vegetarian.” Mrs. Lamb blinked, waited for an explanation. “Vegetables only. Doesn’t eat meat.”

  “Who tol’ya that?”

  Who, indeed. “Someone in London during one of the air raids. Probably just gossip. Nothing else to do down in the tunnels while the bombs are falling above. That and play cards.”

  “What a mad world is this one, I don’t mind sayin’.”

  Josie left Winnie in the kitchen, awaiting her dinner, and started up the backstairs to check that all was right in her father’s chamber, reached the first landing and found the bean-thin Mrs. Patten waiting at the top.

  “There you are, dear— just in time to sort out our mattress troubles.” Without waiting for Josie to catch up, Mrs. Patten strode off down the corridor leading to the guest chambers, chattering all the way. “I’ve put three men to a room as we had planned. Those three rooms along the front range, and the colonel billeted on his own in the Buttercup Suite in the west wing. Gives him a sitting room for an office and a bed chamber. Said he needed privacy for his work.”

  Don’t we all. “Thank you for adapting to the change of schedule, Mrs. Patten. I’m sorry I wasn’t here at the time. But there’s nothing for us to do about it—the War Office requisitioned this wing and the Buttercup Suite for whatever use they felt necessary at the moment. Commandeered the conservatory without a warning. Who knows, next week we’ll be billeting POWs in our attic.”

  “Heavens, you say!”

  Seeing Mrs. Patten’s distress, Josie tried to wave away the woman’s concern. “Only joking, Mrs. Patten, a bit of dark humor.” That only seemed to deepen her worry lines. “Come then, show me the mattress trouble.”

  “See, Miss Josie. There aren’t none. No mattresses at all.”

  Josie entered the first guest chamber and realized what the housekeeper meant. None but the thick felt mattress on the elegant hundred year-old tester in the middle of the room.

  Incongruously, three rope-sprung wooden camp beds that had been constructed here at the Hall by the talented Mr. Broadfoot with the help of the Land Girls, were arranged along each of the remaining walls, with blankets folded neatly at the foot of each bed, and sheeted pillows at the head.

  “These fellows slept on the floor the last two nights. So did the fellows in the other two rooms. Said they didn’t mind. Were used to sleeping rough and glad to have a roof over their heads.”

  “Well, I mind. I’ve a letter on my desk from the War Office confirming the mattresses will arrive here early next week, along with extra linens. Not a word about the men arriving early. But I’ll ring the supplier and see if I can speed up the delivery. If not, the colonel’s men will just have to keep roughing it.”

  She suffered a fleeting twinge of conscience. After all, these were His Majesty’s soldiers—even the arrogant colonel who was stuck like a badger in her conservatory. They deserved the best she could give them.

  “What about Colonel Fletcher? Is he also sleeping rough?”

  “On the floor as well, just like his men. Though he’s got a perfectly good mattress on his bed.”

  Not wanting to credit Fletcher with a jot of devotion to his men, Josie stepped out into the corridor and realized what was missing from the usual chaos at the end of a long day. “Where are the children? It’s nearly bedtime.”

  “Ran off to the lake after their dinner in the kitchen.” Mrs. Patten flicked her feather duster along the gallery railing and through the spindles as they walked toward the grand staircase. “Said they were going to help Mr. Godby catch tomorrow’s breakfast.”

  “They went alone? To the lake, at this time of the evening?” Three rascally boys and a girl. That didn’t go well last time. “Where is Mrs. Tramble?”

  “Attending the Women’s Institute meeting in town. It’s Knit for a Knight night. Ain’t that a funny thing to say? Anyway, Mrs. Tramble said she’d be home by dark and that she’d bring wool back for Mrs. Lamb and m’self so we can do our part, too.”

  “Leaving dear old Godby to supervise the children!” She’d best go rescue him before he ended up in the drink.

  “Send ‘em my way when you find ‘em and I’ll see they’re cleaned up before bed.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Patten.” What would she do without the woman taking on extra duties, caring for the children’s quarters, supervising the two daily village girls?

  Josie hurried down the stairs, out the back of the house and set off for the lake, Winnie suddenly loping past her. They didn’t get more than a hundred yards down the cooling woodland path when a flurry of footfalls sounded ahead, heralding all four children, the lanky Geordie in the lead with a string of perch hanging from his outstretched arm, Winnie joining the parade.

  “Looka w’at we fished outta th’lake, Miss Josie!”

  “I missed you, Miss Josie!” “Me too!” “And me!”

  “I missed you, too.” The children swarmed around her, so pleased with themselves, rosy cheeks smeared with mud, sturdy legs green-mired in scum from the withie patches on the shoreline.

  They had all arrived from Stepney with Mrs. Tramble a month before, rail-thin, pale, and terrified of everything at Nimway Hall, from the cock’s morning crow to the nearly deafening silence at night, to the tall grass and burbling creeks. Geordie and Kenny suffering from head lice and ten-year-old Molly and her eight-year-old brother Robbie with clothes so threadbare that Josie had put them both to bed after their baths that evening in Mr. Broadfoot’s spare night shirts, and replaced their everyday wardrobes, top to bottom, shoes included, from Nimway’s attic storage the next morning.

  Nimway Hall made and mended everything in their own workshops, from shoes to plowshares to parts for the tractors. And sustained everyone on the estate from its fields and farmyards and the lake. Mr. Godby kept the lake dredged and well stocked with perch and trout, which were proving to be vastly entertaining for the children, as well as a source of muck from stem to stern.

  “Those are prize-winning perch you’ve caught there, Mr. Geordie.”

  “Molly stuck the worms on the hooks fer us!” Robbie made an ‘eewie’ face and shook the fishing rod, rattling the sinker against the reel. “They was wriggling too much for us to do it!”

  “And too icky!” Lucas added with a swipe of his forearm across his forehead, bunching his wavy hair into a brown nest and spreading another swath of mud.

  “You are very brave, Molly, and helpful. Thank you.” The girl was blushing fiercely when she met Josie’s gaze.

  “Ever s’kind f’r ya to say, Miss Josie,” Molly whispered, hunching her thin shoulders and dropping her chin to her ch
est, all the while grinning from ear to ear. So much more confident than the girl who’d arrived four weeks ago with her gaze permanently stuck to the tops of her ill-fitting, worn-through shoes.

  Such a miraculous change in each of the children. “Now where’d you leave Mr. Godby? Not in the lake, I hope!”

  “I’m ri’ cheer, Miss Josie—” Godby came hobbling into view around the stand of birch, his ubiquitous brass ghillie stick slapping in rhythm against his hip. “I tell yer, those kids gonna run me right outta my job if they keep dragging all those fish outta the lake.”

  “Next they’ll be trapping rabbits for you, Mr. Godby.” He looked none the worse for wear, if not a tad more jolly than he’d been before the children arrived.

  “Rabbits! Yayyy!” The three boys jumped up and down. “Can we catch ‘em? Can we, Miss Josie?”

  Godby nodded at her; with rabbits pillaging her vegetable garden and decimating crops all over the county, she knew he could use a few more hands trapping the pests and adding them to the larder.

  “School starts day after tomorrow,” she said, “if Mrs. Tramble reports that you all behave in class, play well together, study hard—”

  “And feed the chickens! And collect the eggs.” Molly said, her eyes alight.

  “Yes, Molly, and if each of you do your part in the war effort without being asked, then I suspect that Mr. Godby will be glad to teach you to catch rabbits. What say you?”

  “We will!”

  “Now, run on up to the kitchen with your catch so Mrs. Lamb can clean them for breakfast tomorrow. Mrs. Tramble will be home from her meeting shortly. Why don’t you surprise her and be washed and in your beds when she comes looking for you!”

  “Surpriiiiiiise!” The children ran up the path toward the Hall until they and Winnie’s wagging tail were out of sight in the twilight.

  “Thanks for supervising the tribe, Godby.”

  “Good kids, for the most part. Keeps me young, running after them like I do. ‘Specially that Lucas lad.”

  “Let me know if they become too much and I’ll make sure Mrs. Tramble keeps a closer eye on them.”

  “Has Isaac talked with yer yet about his trouble, miss?”

  “I haven’t seen him.” Nimway’s lone mechanic and stable hand, the man was a treasure, sought after by every estate in the county. Too old too enlist in the military, but that didn’t stop him from being the most eager man in the Home Guard.

  “’Parently had an argy-bargy with that old Fordson every morning you were away, barely got the tractor running. The girls limped it back into the carriage house every evening. But if anyone can keep that tractor going, it’s sure to be our Isaac.”

  “I’ll catch him in his shop before he leaves for the Home Guard meeting tonight. What time?”

  “‘Leven a’clock, in the village hall. A special demonstration which I will enjoy to the fullest: How to Beat Up a Nazi Bastard with Your Bare Knuckles. If you pardon my French, Miss Josie.”

  She remembered the bombs raining down on the neighborhoods of London. “As long as you beat up one for me, Godby. Thanks again!”

  Josie hurried back down to the range of support buildings west of the Hall, set between the lake and the escarpment. What had begun as a simple stone livery a few centuries ago had expanded into a four sided stableyard with an arch-fronted gatehouse, housing all manner of wagons and motorized vehicles on the west range, the stables and paddocks on the east, with Isaac’s workshops on the ground floor of the two-story center building, his office and living quarters on the left, and a dormitory for farm hands on the right.

  If it moved on four legs, rolled on wheels, was powered by a combustion engine or electricity, or had anything to do with producing food at Nimway Hall, then Isaac kept it running by virtue of his expertise and his verbal threats to dismantle the blasted thing if it didn’t cooperate.

  It was near dark and the windows in the stable were blacked out by shutters and curtains. Even with all that coverage, Josie could hear Isaac’s string of colorful profanity intermixed with the clang of his hammer against some piece of immovable metal. She slid open the door just far enough to let herself inside, slipped through the door curtain and watched Isaac at the vise, hammering on an iron plate, the Fordson tractor standing like a stubborn green ox in the middle of the shop, his task lit only by the shimmering gold light of an oil lantern that must have been a hundred years old.

  He shifted the flat piece of metal between the jaws of the vice and gave the lever a hard yank. “Stay put, you scurvy git!” Clang!

  “Please say you’re winning this round, Isaac.”

  “Poxy lump of shite!” Whack!

  “I guess not. Have the parts come in?”

  Isaac looked up from his labors. “Same old story, Miss Josie: The factory’s now making Spitfire parts. Said they won’t be making clutch plates again until after the war. After the trouncing that bloody Hitler gave us at Dunkirk, I’m thinking that’s going to be a long time. Leaving me to either scavenge one, or make it myself.”

  “We’ve plenty of old equipment for you to salvage.” Two of the carriage house stalls were stacked full of unused implements from the old days.

  “Couldn’t Mr. Cabot forge the plate in his blacksmith shop?”

  “Sure, once I’m in the queue. But he said it would be at least a week before he could get to it. Maybe I’m in the wrong business, Miss Josie.” He shot her a wink. “With all that new custom I ought to take up smithing and make me some money for after the war.”

  “Isaac Higgins, your father and grandfather would spin beneath their tombstones if you deserted Nimway Hall when we need you the most. You are family, as they were. You were raised on these grounds, alongside my mother and my aunt; and your sons with me and my cousins. This is your home. What would I do without you and dear Mrs. Higgins who bakes our bread and tends the kitchen garden and the chickens and, frankly, keeps me sane?”

  “Not to worry, Miss Josie,” he said, his dark eyes glittering gold in the lamplight, “I was only jesting! Me and the missus plan to stay on at Nimway Hall as long as ye’ll have us.”

  “Then it’s forever, Isaac, and a great relief to me! Especially now.”

  “Leastwise our horse-flesh power hasn’t let us down. I put the two Shires under harness today and they plowed a full hectare down by the north swale. Should finish the rest of the field by the end of the week and be ready to plant peas and broad beans on Monday.”

  “You’re brilliant, Isaac! At least I’ve got that bit of good news to log into my accounts for the day.” And that the children were thriving, her father was safe from the Blitz, the Land Girls had made real progress on plowing up the front lawn.

  And she’d managed to get past the colonel’s guard at her own front gate.

  “I’ll leave you to your delicate work, Isaac.” Josie lit a shielded candle lantern from Isaac’s lamp then left him to his hammering and made her way up the lane, past the rear of the Hall to the dairy barn. She inspected the milking machines in the spotless milking parlor and the milking log for the four days she’d been away and wondered at the slight decrease not only in the quantity, but the butterfat content of the milk from all ten cows.

  “Coo, ladies, coo!” she called softly as she entered the cool, very dark shelter of the barn, pleased to hear Dot and Dixie’s cantankerous moos echoing off the high cruck of the barrel vaulted ceiling, the gentle lowing of the others. “Did you miss me? Is that why you’re keeping your butter to yourselves?”

  When three formless shapes of white began moving toward her in the blackness, Josie raised her candle lantern and the blade of light it threw revealed the trio of Friesians, roaming free of their individual box stalls.

  “How did you three escape? Did one of the Land Girls forget to latch your gates?” Or one of the children? Too late to ferret out the culprit tonight; the quartet of young women would be fast asleep in their rooms after a long day of plowing, or had slipped down the lane to let off steam at
the Hungry Dragon in the village.

  “Come, come, ladies, back into your stalls.” They followed along behind her in the shambling bovine amble that both irritated and charmed Josie equally. She settled them in, checking that their water was clean and plentiful and their bedding was fresh. Jill and Jenny were in the loafing barn, just days from calving, sleeping on their sides.

  She checked the other gates, then headed out of the milking barn into the near pitch-dark. The blackout regulations had darkened every window in the Hall and made the moonless night as impenetrable as a pea-soup fog. Even with the candle lantern, only the white stripes painted strategically down the outside corners of the buildings, and the blotches of stark white that marked the direction across the cobbles toward the Hall kept her from walking into gateposts, and directed her finally through the kitchen garden and up the wide steps to the covered service porch at the back of the Hall. Once inside, she hung her jacket on a hook in the utility room then continued into the old farm office that now served as the control center from which she managed the entire wartime estate. She’d set up her bed chamber in the old conservatory next door, where she was awakened most mornings by a knock before dawn to take care of something that needed her immediate attention.

  Guided by the wan light of her candle lantern, Josie made sure the blackout frames were in place in the window casings, drew the blackout curtains closed, then collapsed into her desk chair and turned on the goose-necked lamp, all the while hoping the problem that had been haunting her while she was away in London had vanished.

  It hadn’t. The letter from the Ministry of Agriculture remained like a curse in the middle of the desk blotter. A threat to all she loved about her home. Dated two weeks ago.

  Dear Miss Stirling,

  It has come to the attention of the Ministry that Balesboro Wood, the ancient stand of trees on your farm at Nimway Hall, Balesborough Parish, Somerset, has been deemed by the Timber Supply Department a candidate for felling, clearing and putting the land under the plow.