Finding Flora

* Read/Listen to Introducing before reading!

So far, Lucy Brookes had found retirement to be fairly unremarkable. When Dave had suggested she reply to the ad for volunteers on the back of the toilet door at their local National Trust house, she hadn’t been able to think of any good reasons why not. She’d picked up the phone and agreed to pop by the following Wednesday for a chat about what was involved. The house was pretty and there were some really good stories she only half remembered about the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the last Lord and Lady to live there.

It was several weeks later, surrounded by biting brambles and stinging nettles, she began to wonder if she shouldn’t’ve thought a bit harder. The house, the head of volunteers had explained, was in good condition, well-maintained for many years now by the Trust. But they’d somewhat neglected the garden due to a distinct lack of qualified candidates for the post of Head Gardener. The last chap had been found napping in the orchard and for a number of reasons Lucy couldn’t now recall, but had been recounted to her at length that fateful Wednesday, they hadn’t found a suitable replacement. Therefore, every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, a team of volunteers, now including Lucy, took to the gardens armed with rakes, spades and secateurs to tame the overgrown hedges and tidy the over-crowded borders. She’d been hoping for something a bit more indoors but hadn’t found the words to say no, they’d seemed so desperate to recruit her.

Today her job was to start work on the clearance of a corner of the garden that had been left entirely untended for a long time. Someone had suggested that this corner might have formed part of the original Arts and Crafts garden, primarily designed and planted by the last Lady of the house, but no one had yet found the original garden plans so they couldn’t be sure. Lucy had regarded the tangled mess as she approached and felt sincerely unconvinced there’d be anything there other than weeds. Still, here she was, and with nothing better to do today she might as well get on with it.

It was frustrating work and as the day wore on, Lucy hacked with increasing vigour at the brambly tangle between her and what might be quite a nice view if she ever got there.

Meanwhile, inside the house, an interesting discovery was being made.

Lucy continued, unaware that her view of this battle with nature might be about to change. She was really swinging hard with the long rake when she struck something solid. Ow! She exclaimed. Her dodgy shoulder reverberating with the blow. There’d be need of a warm bath and some arnica salts later, that was for sure. What on earth had she hit? Working more carefully, Lucy pulled at the brambles with gloved hands, expecting to find a wall, although the garden, as far as she knew, didn’t finish here. The boundary should be a good few feet away yet. Gradually, Lucy began to reveal not a wall, but something more elaborate. Something solid yes, and made of stone, but seemingly carved rather than built. Something big. A statue she guessed. Other volunteers began to show interest and together they worked through the early afternoon to reveal two life-size figures, a man, seated, with a woman sitting across his lap appeared before them cast in granite. They were held in an embrace, she leaning against his chest, he holding her arms clasped around his neck, his cheek resting on her head. Their eyes were shut and they seemed peacefully asleep. The detail was incredible and, protected by the overgrowth perhaps, the statue looked clean and new. Noticing that it was in fact time for a tea break, the volunteers made their way to the staff room, remarking on how unusual the statue was and wondering out loud whether it might not actually be something quite worth the pain to have discovered.

Around the little staff kitchenette that had been built into the stable block, quite a buzz awaited them. While Lucy was pranging her shoulder on a hidden statue in a forgotten corner of the garden, another volunteer inside the house had been ferreting about inside a bureau drawer and accidentally released a hidden panel revealing the long lost diaries of the last Lady of the house. They looked to have been written around the time of the couple’s mysterious disappearance. It had been quite a day for incredible discoveries and everyone went home feeling really rather pleased with themselves.

Over the following days, a mystery begins to unfold and Lucy is enthralled.

This much, they already knew…

Lord Edward and Lady Flora had inherited the Manor from her father. They were inquisitive, intelligent young people with a busy social life and a lust for new knowledge. On honeymoon, they had taken a world tour, of which Edward kept detailed journals. Flora used the trip to collect and catalogue unusual plant samples for the garden she would plant at the Manor on their return. The intention was that this would be their country residence. There they would entertain neighbours and invite friends from the city to join them at weekends for picnics and croquet and dancing. It was a modest house by comparison to many but big enough for the family they hoped to have and in the meantime for their guests to visit.

By the outbreak of war in 1914, Flora and Edward had spent many a happy weekend and summer season at their country manor home. It was the perfect place to which to retire for peace and quiet nestled as it was deep in the heart of the Somerset countryside. Surrounded by open parklands rising into gentle hills, it was at the centre of a natural bowl. Glastonbury Tor graced the skyline atop the highest hill in sight and in the far distance they were sheltered by the towering cliffs of Cheddar Gorge and the Mendip Hills. If you hadn’t received directions, you would be most unlikely to stumble upon the Manor accidentally, even now. The house and formal garden were well hidden from any road or passer-by and it really was a peaceful place to be. The village was a mile or so away and the house felt most completely private.

For Flora and Edward, children had not come as they hoped and it was with a heavy heart that he set out to join the 9th Queens Royal Lancers on the Western Front where they became one of the unlucky battalions to spend the entirety of the First World War. This at just the time he wanted nothing more than to be at home with his wife, united in their love for each other, and the shared bittersweet sorrow of childlessness. Bittersweet for, while they had not children, they had each other, and all their time had been their own. They were a couple truly in love. Accounts of the household at the time make this fact unfalteringly clear.

Flora was a busy woman during the war. Active in her local community, she donated and packed vegetables from the kitchen garden for the soldiers, contributed to the cost of ambulances on the front, was a feature of many local committees and organiser of the village WI effort. Most of all however, she hoped and waited for the safe return of her beloved Edward.

Although he did indeed return, he, like so many, was never to be the same again. All that he had seen and experienced at war would return with him, hanging heavily about his person. Weighing him down so that he would never walk again, although his legs sustained no physical damage. Pressing on his chest so that he would never speak again although his vocal chords remained intact. Preying on his mind so that he would never sleep soundly again although he showed no clinical sign of madness. Crushing him daily so that he would cower and shrink under the sheer weight of it all. Utterly lost to his Flora.

Dutifully, she cared for him and they retired permanently to their country home as the world outside those walls threw itself into the new decade with energy and optimism. Their modest staff cleaned, cooked and tended the garden around them. She communicated with them as usual, although admittedly she seemed somewhat ‘less’ than before. He became a hidden being, a cloud of sadness moved silently around the Manor by his wife as she continued tirelessly to plan and plant the garden they had dreamed of together in their earlier, happier years. No visitors came to call any more.

And then one day, seemingly in no way unlike any other, Lady Flora issued the whole staff with their final pay, thanked them profusely for their loyal service, praised their tender care and attention of her and her husband and sent them on their way. The village records show that each one found a new position in the homes of other local gentry but the records fail to account for what happened next to the Lord Edward and the Lady Flora. In the autumn of 1926, both aged just 43, they simply disappeared.

Lucy had brought the kids to the house every Halloween when they were young for spooky ghost tours featuring costumed volunteers. The disappearance was indeed a great mystery, and long enough unsolved as to seem impossible to ever answer. If she thought about it now, she realised she’d never really tried. Muddy wellies, sticky fingers and endless “whys” were her main concern at the time.

With the discovery of the long lost diaries, and the excuse of her recently aggravated shoulder, Lucy spotted an opportunity to get out of the garden on her volunteer days. Eagerly she put herself forward for the task of reading the Lady Flora’s last known words.

Cup of tea in hand, Lucy chose the volume labelled 1926, which fell naturally open towards the end.

In her flowery script, the Lady Flora told her own sad tale.

9th October

All around us the world moves on. Flapper girls dance a frenzy, ballrooms hop and bounce to the sounds of this new jazz. The war becomes a world apart and politics races on ahead. Everything advances at a giddy pace.

Yet here our world stands still.

How sad, thought Lucy, reading on.

10th October

I remember when we were young, and first in love. We would walk for miles, talking, dreaming, planning our great adventures. Oh how they were great!

We felt so enriched by our experience, enlivened and yet at the same time, I think we had begun a quieter, more stately stage of our lives together. Our love had taken us from the heady romance of those first years and settled us into happily married life with relative ease.

We knew ourselves to be so lucky.

But war was looming over our return.

We’d had a sense of it getting closer for the last month or so, and felt it safer to be home, and among friends.

I remember the call to war. Scared and suddenly so fragile, all life laid before us.

The children we had never had. The family and friends we would not see again.

And then, too soon, the roles we had never known we could play until we had no choice. The endless days, weeks and months that bled into years of separation. Scrambled letters read first by another and our words crossed through by their censorious hand.

I remember the nights when sleep would never come. Exhausted by my worry and my work, alone at home and him so far from me, so far from home. In the mire and the mud. A world no longer solid beneath his feet. Fighting for his life, for mine, for all our lives.

I remember when he first came home. Those eyes that used to see my very soul could no longer meet my gaze. His stare that reaches further now than ever I could fathom. Seemingly he searches for a reason, a magic cure that lies somewhere far beyond the landscape I can see with mere civilian sight. The walls within his mind have flexed and bent. He has nothing to hold onto. Now I must be his rock.

15th October

Amidst our sadness, the garden progresses well. The orchard fruits abundantly and the kitchen garden feeds our staff and their families also. I am pleased with the terrace and its borders. The gardener tends the lawn with such care. The trees that line the avenue between the house and the view toward the Tor are grown so well this year. I marvel at their changing colours. Where just weeks ago was green, now fiery crowns of gold reach skyward.

Best of all, my clever little secret gardens tucked in amongst the other features like the prizes in a hunt for garden treasure.

Excellent, a garden entry! thought Lucy. She knew that this is what the Trust were really after.

16th October

Edward had a restless night. His cries excruciate me. The pain within him overtakes his fitful sleep. I’m powerless to stop his screams. In the darkness, I feel his nightmares come alive. Taking ghastly form they torment us both throughout the night. They haunt our rooms and there is no escape.

As day began to break, he found at last some hard won peace and I slipped in and out of dreams myself.

I dreamt of flying, across our own stone walls, up and over the magical Tor, onwards through the Gorge and hills, then higher still. I flew high over sea and over land, and time became a fluid thing. Arriving somehow in Ancient Greece, huge monolithic statues rose above me like great stony Gods and I felt safe under their watch. When I woke I stretched my heavy limbs which creaked and cracked. I felt almost as if I myself had once been one of them.

17th October

Today I am quite out of sorts. The blood flows slower in my veins I fancy. I’m moving strangely. Stiff and a little cold. I imagine I am seeing things I haven’t seen before, as if I can look beneath the earth and know how it is made. I find there is a new and unexpected warmth in the layered limestone hills that embrace our little country nook.

Lucy thought back to the endlessness of sleepless nights with young children and empathised with Lady Flora who was clearly some days on the edge of reason.

18th October

I paid particular attention to a little robin hopping on the wall earlier today. I stared so long and in such a daze that I jumped most out of my skin when Edward yelled out, as he does so often now. In that moment of awakening from my daydream, I was certain that somehow it seemed as though that little robin had simply ceased to move. I thought how weary I must be to lose perspective so. I quite forgot about him when I went to answer Edward’s cries but now I swear I see him still, that little bird, exactly where he was when I last looked. But that can’t be, hours have gone by.

It’s getting dark and I am letting my imagination run away with me.

19th October

I can’t recall how I got here. What length of time has passed while I gaze idly from the study window? This is becoming quite a habit of mine.

The little robin has a friend today. A second bird alighted briefly next to him upon the wall and as I fixed it in my sight, I wished the first could have a friend. As I wished it, I swear, he froze in flight. I’m collecting robins on my wall. Little robin statues I have made. But that cannot be! I am most undone.

Well, maybe she hadn’t been quite this bad, Lucy reflected, with a growing sense of things going really rather wrong in Flora’s world.

20th October

Autumn passes fast before my eyes and yet we stall. Time has little meaning here in our hideaway among these hills. It becomes slow and liquid as it was in my dream. I feel it run through my fingers like water from a tap and simultaneously swallow me whole as if I’d slipped below the surface of the deepest blackest lake. I gasp for air and yet I choke on it.

The queerest thing, I turned a deer to stone today. As it stood stock still in the middle of the lawn, I willed it never change. I simply wished it never move again but freeze all life as in that very moment. So bright, so free. I wished and willed so hard it came to pass. I am sure this time that it was me. I will have the gardener plant a tree to give it shelter.

Oh dear, poor Flora’s lost it, Lucy frowned.  

21st October

No sleep again last night. Edward is worse now every day. I have had an idea. I will send the servants home. We won’t be needing maid or cook or garden boy. I’ll see they’re paid and I’ll be sure to have made my recommendations for their new positions. It wouldn’t do to see them suffer. 

22nd October

A single leaf drifts downward on a soundless breeze. All is still. Here. This is the place. This is where we’ll be.

In this secret garden, there is a granite bench. It is solid and it is safe. It can hold any weight. It’s the only thing that I have had a hand in here. Otherwise this corner of our little world is left to nature. The plants are wilder, and all are native. It is not formal in any way. It’s wildness, it’s closeness to the earth is comforting.    

After breakfast, I shall wheel Edward here. The mornings are a quiet time. Nightmares banished by the morning light, the boiled eggs and morning papers, which neither of us really reads. I’ll wash him, gently, as he sits and stares straight past me and choose him comfortable clothes.

We’ll take a tour of the garden first and look once more upon the hills beyond our gardens end. We’ll walk the avenue and bathe in autumn’s glow. The time is near for the trees to draw their life within as they prepare to grow again next spring.

When we arrive here in this place that I’ll prepare for us, I’ll help Edward from his chair onto the bench.

Maybe he will briefly meet my gaze and I will wince at the pain I see there. The love, yes, always love but so much pain it simply should no longer be borne.

I will take his face in my hands. I will feel his breath upon my own as I kiss his brow, each cheek, his neck. He smells the same and I will breathe him in, remembering.

He feels almost the same as before. Close enough that I can imagine him unchanged. The damage is all inside. To soothe him, I will whisper of happier times. I’ll talk of love and laughter and spin him tales of our lives as they could have been. I will weave a spell eternal as I tell him how I wish our love were set in stone.

Sitting upon his lap, I’ll take both his hands in mine then lift my arms to rest around his neck. They feel heavier now. My face will rest against his hardened chest, just in the crook of his neck and he will lay his stony cheek on mine. We will close our heavy eyes and we will be here for all time.

Lucy turned the page but there was nothing more.

Was the mystery solved at last?

Had the Lady Flora turned them both to stone, imbued with the power of some ancient Grecian rock Gods?

Or had she succeeded in a tragic double suicide having lost her mind?

Everything Lucy had read posed more questions than it gave answers. She mused a while on how they would share the diaries through display boards and costumed Halloweens. What a storyteller Flora had been.

On her way home, Lucy couldn’t help but take a detour to the statue she herself had found.

She stood for a long time, wondering.