REMINDERS OF HOME an evocative and charming Edwardian family saga (The Brannans Family Sagas Book 5) by DOMINIC LUKE

Author:DOMINIC LUKE [LUKE, DOMINIC]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books historical fiction wartime sagas
Published: 2023-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

‘I wrote to Lieutenant Cartwright some time ago and invited him to Clifton when he next had leave,’ said Aunt Eloise at breakfast, looking up from a letter she’d been reading. ‘He has sent word that his leave is due and he would be delighted to come. I must reply at once and make all the arrangements. I wonder, Dorothea, as it’s urgent, if you’d be good enough to take the letter to the post as soon as I’ve written it?’

‘Who is Lieutenant Cartwright?’ asked Owain Morgan later, as Dorothea sat with him in the churchyard; they’d happened to meet in the street when Dorothea was on her way back from the post office, Aunt Eloise’s letter safely despatched. ‘I’ve not heard you mention a Lieutenant Cartwright before.’

‘He’s a friend of Roderick’s — was a friend.’

A very good friend: that was how Aunt Eloise had described him at breakfast. This was not entirely accurate. Roderick had met Lieutenant Cartwright in May last year; they’d been crossing the Channel together, going on leave (Roderick’s last leave, as it turned out). Learning that Cartwright had nowhere much to go ‘back in Blighty’, Roderick — on the spur of the moment, characteristically off the cuff — had asked him along to Clifton. Lieutenant Cartwright had been something of a hit, as far as Dorothea remembered, though she was ashamed to say she’d not really taken much notice of him. It wasn’t that she’d deliberately ignored him; there’d simply been too much else to fit in on her flying visit. The matron at the hospital had allowed her a few days’ leave under special dispensation in view of Roderick being home. She’d not seen Roderick for more than six months, and she’d been away from Clifton for even longer, so she’d had much to catch up on. Lieutenant Cartwright had not been her priority.

Sat with Owain on a bench in the lee of the church tower, Dorothea furrowed her brow as she watched two spotted orange butterflies flickering over a bed of nettles in the fitful sunshine: she was thinking of the matron, who’d been so accommodating when Roderick was on leave, yet after Roderick’s death just a few short weeks later had been cold and disapproving as she faced Dorothea across her cluttered desk.

Really, this is most inconvenient. To leave now, when we are at our busiest. I find it incomprehensible.

Harassed and overworked — everyone was overworked at the hospital — perhaps the matron had felt she’d been taken advantage of, having granted Nurse Kaufmann special leave of absence only for that same Nurse Kaufmann to quit her post not much more than a month later. Was it this that had prompted the matron’s harsh words about divided loyalties, that had led to her threat to make sure that Dorothea never worked in a hospital again? If so, thought Dorothea, it might be that the threat had come out of a sense of resentment and frustration, and her German connections had been

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