Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [73]
He read Matthew’s letter three times. There was nothing particular in it, just gossip about London, a short description of the countryside when he had been home, the weather, a few jokes. It was like listening to the voice of someone you loved. What they were saying was unimportant, the message through it was I am here, and that was what you needed to know.
There was a second letter for him, in a hand he did not know. He opened it with curiosity and read:
Dear Captain Reavley,
Thank you for your letter telling me of my husband’s death. I know from the casualty figures that you must have this dreadful duty to perform very often. It was generous of you to write so personally to me.
I shall share your words with my brother-in-law who lives up in the family manor house a few miles away. Garaint was a quiet man who loved the land and the hills here. He would walk miles, even in the rain, and he sang beautifully, as so many Welshmen do. He seemed to be able to play any musical instrument if he turned his hand to it.
I find it hard to believe he is not coming back, but then there are many other women all over the country who must feel the same. Perhaps it is worse if it is a son, someone you have known and loved all their lives. That is a grief that won’t come to me, and I am grateful for it.
I believe that you get newspapers quite often in the trenches, so perhaps you know as much news as I do. Some of it is very grim. I think the thing that saddens me the most is the death of Rupert Brooke. He died on April 23rd, off Gallipoli somewhere. It wasn’t in action, it was blood poisoning. I feel horribly empty, because he was so wonderfully, vibrantly alive. Of course I never knew him in person, but I loved his poetry. He said all the things I wished I could. His dreams soared to the places I longed to be, passion and imagination and a fierce hunger for the intensity of life, as if you could touch it, taste it, for a moment hold it in your hands, as if you could stand in the sunset and in silence take its fire inside you.
The lights are going out, aren’t they? What can we hold on to so that one day we can kindle them again?
Thank you for the strength of your faith that somewhere there will be meaning to all of this, if we have the courage to hang on. It does help.
Yours sincerely,
Isobel Hughes
He did not read it again. Perhaps he would later, at another time, when the words would matter. Now he was stunned and filled with loss, not for Garaint Hughes whom he had held as he died, but for a poet whose thoughts and words had woven themselves into the fabric of his own life. Rupert Brooke had been eight years younger than Joseph. He had studied at Cambridge and loved it with a passion he had made wild and beautiful in verse, to live beyond generations, let alone his own lifetime. But here in this mortal little space, they had seen the same stones and trees, the same burning sunset across the west from Harleyfield to Madingley, breathed the same air and watched the same birds in flight.
It was almost as if Sebastian had died again, only a better, brighter version of him, a man whose heart achieved the gold that Sebastian had tarnished.
The words of Brooke’s poetry flooded his mind, painting with bone-deep nostalgia the beauty of the land they had both loved, familiar now in the pain of memory.
How could such hunger for life be gone, without warning? How many young men would have their promise shattered before it bloomed, their talents never more than a hope? Was it worth this price? He had told Isobel Hughes that it was, because it was what she needed to believe, but did he believe it himself?
Maybe the whole thing was just as tragic