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Even in north Kent, an imminent French invasion could not put a halt to the exigencies of daily life. True, Lord Sheringham had assembled the militia, and drilled them on the lawn daily (to his lady wife’s dismay) and his son and heir, the Hon. Anthony, had attempted to prowl the woods with his father’s fowling piece, as if they were to be invaded by large pigeons-- at least until he was caught and beaten (by his father) and wept over (by his mother)-- but the good people still went to church, began the process of slaughtering those beats which would not see another winter, and, in the case of Miss Eudora Bagshot, came down with a feverish chill.
The doctor, called upon the third day of the illness, said that it was probably not measles, but that the young lady, who had been removed to her Mama’s chamber to be nursed, should not be returned to the general throng until she was recovered enough not to communicate it to her siblings. Mrs Bagshot agreed, paid the fee, and decided that, on balance, Nurse should stay in the nursery, and she would care for Eudora, spelled by one or other of the maids long enough to sleep.
Mr Bagshot was, unusually for the time of year, absent from home, having been called upon by his widowed sister, who had decided that she must, she absolutely must have the aid and comfort of her brother in this most troubled time while she decided which of her many belongings she would take if and when the French arrived, and so, but for the invalid, Mrs Bagshot was alone in her bedchamber, occasionally checking a warm forehead with the back of her hand, and attempting to read an improving work by the light of a single candle, when something pattered against the window.
Eudora gave an unhappy moan, and shifted. Jane looked at the window, and at the sleeping child. The nearest tree was not so close, but perhaps the wind--
A second rattle decided her. That was not a tree branch. Those were stones. She rose, yawned, and made her way to the window, ready to give whoever was engaging in this most unusual method of greeting a piece of her mind.
“Well, Jenny,” called her cousin Rosalind, low and sweet, from where she was standing on the terrace, swathed in a bulky cloak, “Aren’t you going to let me in?”
If she had been close enough, Jane would have slapped her. As it was, she jerked the window shut with a rattle, decided that Eudora might be safely left alone for however long it took to be rid of Rosalind, and hurried downstairs. She jerked her paisley shawl around her shoulders as she went, then, at the top of the stairs, stopped to smooth it neat. There was no point in allowing Rosalind to see her discommoded.
The butler had, with an unfortunate dedication to duty, been extremely thorough about locking up the house. Rosalind stood on one side of the French doors to the terrace, looking increasingly quizzical, while Jane tried five different sets of keys, and was eventually able to get it open with a hideous screech that made her shoulders fly up around her ears.
“Finally,” Rosalind said. She shifted her cloak enough to reveal, beneath the folds, a yawning girl of six or seven. The girl blinked curiously at them while Rosalind stepped forward to hug Jane tightly.
“Don’t tell me you’ve landed that beast of yours on my parterre,” Jane mumbled indignantly, into the gap between Rosalind’s collar and her hat, while the little girl-- Rosalind’s daughter, no doubt-- swayed in the glimmering moonlight.
“No, Jenny,” Rosalind said, laughing again as she pulled back. “We came on a courier, and landed on Lady Sheringham’s roses.”
Jane’s fingers twitched. It was true that she had written of Lady Sheringham in her regular letters to Rosalind, but she had thought her distaste less obvious, better hidden.
Of course, she and Rosalind had grown up together.
The little girl yawned.
“And this is Hero,” Rosalind said, reaching back for her, as if Jane did not have the letter tucked away in a drawer in her escritoire, in Rosalind’s handwriting, more sprawling than normal, Hero Amelia, a fine girl and Penelope dotes upon her. “Greet your Cousin Jane, Hero.”
Hero was dressed in breeches and a shirt, and clutched a wrapped bundle to her chest, and her greeting was a scapegrace bow, the kind Jane had made, when she was that age, and a barely-breeched cadet.
“Come in, then,” Jane said ungraciously, full aware she was ungracious. She ushered them to the library-- Rosalind looking around speculatively, and little Hero yawning-- and locked the door behind them. By the time she had turned around, Rosalind had already disposed Hero in one of the chairs, and was kneeling next to the banked fire, returning it to life.
“What on earth are you doing here, Rosalind?”
Rosalind continued looking into the fire, and, finally, said, “You heard about Geoffrey, of course.”
Jane read the Times and the Gazette as carefully as any officer’s daughter. Hero’s father had died at the Battle of Dover, nearly two years ago-- Rosalind had written of it, though the letter had been smudged and the handwriting near illegible, and Jane was not entirely surprised that Rosalind did not remember sending it. She had doubtless been drinking. Her letters had picked up again three months later, and Geoffrey had never been mentioned again.
“I heard about Geoffrey,” Jane agreed, “But that was in ‘05.”
“I can’t keep Hero on Penelope, not with the French coming, I wish to God I could.”
“She’s old enough to go for a cadet,” Jane said, “We were cadets, at her age.”
“I wanted to keep her until she was ten. And if the French come--well.” Her mouth was, suddenly, very humourless. “I am a selfish woman, or so I’m told. I want her to live.”
Jane looked at her, and thought of Rosalind’s mother, dead in childbed before ever she harnessed a Longwing, and her own father, fallen during the Battle of the Nile, and her mother who had tried to be mother to them both, and had never entirely adjusted to aviator ways. The continual scrapes and clashes between the rough, scrambling manners of the aerial corps against that lady's more refined sensibilities had inculcated a fine strain of resistance, and when Jane did not wish to be a midwingman, her mother had ignored her father's laments as she shook his head, and brought her out into society.
“You want to leave her here,” she said, to be sure, “With me. Secretly.”
Part of her was already rehearsing her arguments to Humphrey. It was their Christian duty, after all. Little Hero would be a playmate for the girls. It would not be so great an expense, and Rosalind would undoubtedly reclaim her daughter as soon as the invasion was over.
They would have to call the girl by her father’s name of course-- but that would please Humphrey. Hero's father had been a Wantage. A very good family, indeed, and Jane would have been delighted to own him, if only he and Rosalind had chosen to regularise their connection. That was one of the defects of aviator society, and Jane knew the truth of those rumoured loose morals better than most. Rosalind had, with her customary indelicacy, laid out the difficulties in Lieutenant Wantage persuading his family to acknowledge his daughter for he says there might be, or should be, some money in’t, though less than if we had named her for his unwed aunt, but I will not name a child Augusta. But too many people would be able to draw correct but injurious conclusions, if they let her be Hero Beauvallet. Jane had gone from Miss Jane Beauvallet to Mrs Humphrey Bagshot at the Church of St. Domneva in Sheringham. Rosalind had even come to the wedding, though her dragon had been harnessed only three months, and she had had to wear gloves to hide the marks from young talons.
Now, Rosalind looked down at Hero, sat hunched around her bundle, and then over at Jane.
“If you can keep her,” she said, “Please, Jenny.”
It was so entirely, thoroughly, Rosalind that part of Jane wanted to laugh, and part of her wanted to scream. To turn up in the middle of the night, demand entry, pass her daughter off, and then, no doubt, vanish back into the night to cause more destruction to Lady Sheringham’s roses--she would not have expected it, but that did not mean it was not entirely in character.
“Yes,” she said, “Yes, I’ll take her. She can sleep in Eudora’s bed for tonight-- Eudora has a fever. I’ll have the maids make her up her own bed in the morning.”
“Thank you,” Rosalind said, and rose back to her feet. Her flying coat fell in folds around her legs. Jane could smell the heat singeing strands of grass that had been caught on it when they walked across the fields from Sheringham Place. Hero had begun to draw her legs up, to curl in the chair, but at Jane’s glance, she hastily let them go again, and turned towards her mother.
“You are to stay with Cousin Jane, is that not kind of her?” Rosalind said, and Hero jumped up, dropping her bundle, and hugged her, pressing her face into Rosalind’s midriff as Rosalind embraced her tightly.
“Bear up, my love,” Rosalind said, so low Jane could barely hear it. “Think what an adventure you will have, and when this is all over, I will send you for a cadet, and you will have more adventures, so many more.”
She clutched her daughter in her arms, and Jane looked discreetly away, so that she would not see their weeping. There was a mark on one of the chairs. The maids would need to be reminded to polish properly in here, though Humphrey would never mind it.
She tried to imagine handing one of her girls over, to Rosalind, to Humphrey’s sister, and could not. But then, she had never desired to become an aviator, either. She had wanted her feet firmly on the ground, not her head in the clouds.
Hero’s sobbing grew a little louder, and Jane looked back to see that Rosalind had pulled away, bracing Hero up.
“You will meet your cousins,” she said, “And you will all be such great friends, the way Jenny and I were.”
“Yes, Mama,” Hero said, and swallowed.
“I have to leave,” Rosalind said, “I’m sorry, I have to. We need to be back at the Covert for the morning.”
She and Hero had one more brief, fervent, embrace, until Rosalind wrenched herself away, and Jane led her back to the French doors in silence. Rosalind’s mouth was clenched tight, and she shuddered, occasionally, until they were at the door, and Jane had it open.
“Thank you,” Rosalind said, voice rough, “I can’t thank you enough.”
"You would do the same for me," Jane said, and laid her hand on the back of the sofa. She and Humphrey had chosen the drawing room furniture when they married, to replace his late mother’s outdated taste, and she had picked it for the clean, sweeping lines. She gripped it for a moment, the way she did when she knew Lady Sheringham or Mrs Milborne was about to be announced, and then deliberately let go, and stepped through the doorway to where Rosalind was fiddling with the cuffs of her flying leathers, tapping the heel of one boot against the paving.
“Of course I’ll keep her safe for you,” Jane swore, and kissed both of Rosalind’s chapped cheeks.
Rosalind gripped her hands hard enough to bruise, and Jane gripped them back. Rosalind would be gone, soon, and she would not see her again until the war was over. That was her way. An aviator had no constancy. They had to be like the wind that bore them, and never mind what broke in their wake.
“Thank you,” Rosalind said, one last time. The breeze caught up the tails of her flying coat as she vaulted over the terrace wall-- and then she was gone.
Jane took her time about locking the house up again, and returning to the library. ero was still by the fire, sniffling softly over the bundle clutched tight in her arms.
“This is the story we will tell,” Jane said, as calmly as she could, and knew that she would have to remind the girl again, for she was blinking with tiredness, trying to knuckle tears away. “Your mother is my cousin. Your father, who has died, was an officer on a dragon, and your mother can no longer keep you, with the invasion in prospect. You must not tell anyone that your mother is a dragon captain, do you understand me?”
Hero nodded.
“Yes, Cousin Jane.”
From the Casualty Lists printed in the Times, following the Battle of Shoeburyness
Captain Rosalind BEAUVALLET, of HMD Penelope, killed in action