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They come back different.
You don’t pluck a flower growing in its native soil and drop it in the mud of some other land and expect it to take to and start back thriving just as things was before its uprooting.
Pull up something good and hardy, something moor-bred, and hope it grows in the cold rains in the green fields of France.
Which was a lie, as Dickon came to see.
There were no green fields in his France, not with them all dug through and bomb-chewed, not with their barbed wire grown thicker than the briar patches and ancient hedgerows of home.
He’d come to have his theories later on, down the road when he could think about it again and couple it with Colin’s Science that was really more Magic.
It’s like a blight, he figured, which stood to reason, wet as that world felt. The way he remembered it, it was the kind of chill winter-wet that soaked through to the core and rattles your bones like the wind on the darkest December night when spring’s still too far gone to be anything but the echo of the memory of hope.
Spring had never been distant to Dickon, not until he learned how the bunks in the trench were so unlike sleeping in secret hollows on the moor with animals close.
A blight, yes. That’s what it was like: A blight or a fungus or the kind of pernicious sickness that yellows leaves and speckles branches with dark spots.
And then sometimes, they had to cut the blight out; they had to remove the limb, gangrenous, its bloom lost and unreclaimable. Unhealable.
A tree with a dead branch, Dickon knew, could never bring that branch back, no matter how much goodness you pour into wishing it life.
He’d seen it done, the cutting away, in that not-green not-field.
They wouldn’t have let him help with that. Simple kid, one medic had said to him one night, in equal parts pity and spite. No booklearning to help you along, no Medicine to be of use to us.
The field doctors hadn’t known his kind of medicine and hadn’t been willing to learn.
Simple, simple. Simple Simon.
Dickon had laughed at that when they said it, just enough, just enough to show it didn’t hurt.
Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does tha’ garden grow? Wi’ silver bells an’ cockle-shells an’ pretty maids all in row . . .
And then learned later: The poppies blow between the crosses row by row.
There had been poppies once in every color nature held in her wide imagination, dancing and bursting up in the garden with the hidden door, opened with a key carried always in the pocket of the sweetest girl he’d ever known, though she’d been a strange sallow creature when he’d first found her.
By the time he’d left for France, she had turned into something else, something with a round pink face and bright eyes that shone brighter with crying the day he’d said goodbye to the both of them.
He had thought she wept for fear he would never come back, and she did.
But more than that, she wept for knowing that if he returned, it wouldn’t be as it had been before.
It would be different.
They all come back changed.
At the top of one of the wide staircases, the two stopped their aimless stroll through the long cold corridors of the manor, the soles of their shoes echoing ghostlike through the stillness. Above them, the rain streaked softly down the high leadlight windows; the light streaming through was weak and gray, sickly and funereal.
“Over a hundred rooms,” Mary said again, more stubborn than ever. “Over a hundred rooms and we aren’t using hardly any. It’s so empty.”
Colin regarded her, something wry and knowing and bittersweet in his large queer eyes. “It feels empty. Because he’s gone now and when he’s home—when he’s here, I mean—I feel he fills near half the rooms on his own, just by being.”
And when he’s home, you fill the other half by his being near.
“They’re children,” she said. “Only a few of them. You won’t hardly notice they’re here if you’ve a mind to avoid them.” She smiled then and reminded her cousin, “You can hide a child well enough good long time in this house, you know.”
Colin returned her smile, though emptier and more wistful. “You could even—just for example—see very little of your own child for years and years, and then—”
“Colin, don’t. You must move on from that.”
“Must I? He hasn’t.”
“He’s a harder one to fix than you were,” Mary said.
“What was it Dickon said? Something about how it’s easier to train a sapling than a grown tree. It was—” Colin swallowed. “It was a kind of comfort. Thinking of my father as a tree. Would you say my mother’s a tree too? Is she the one in the garden, the one where . . . ?” He trailed off, ran a hand along the banister rail, feeling out the scars in the wood. “That’s not very scientifically sound, my mother as a tree, my father as another tree.”
“Metaphysics, maybe,” Mary allowed doubtfully.
Colin nodded distantly, studying the dark portraits that hung above them. The man with the uniform and hard solemn face. The woman in a wide dark gown and veil.
“These war orphans,” he said finally. “They’ve truly nowhere else to go?”
“No,” Mary said. “Save for the orphanage. Or maybe split all apart and sent like charity baskets to strangers’ homes.”
“We’re strangers,” Colin observed. “We’re very strange strangers, too.”
“Crowded parsonages,” Mary continued. “And hard little houses where a child’s made to earn their keep as a servant and shown no love in exchange.”
“We are,” Colin repeated, ignoring her, “very strange. You and he and maybe me most of all.”
“You most of all,” Mary agreed briskly to stop his insistences and bring his attention back to the matter at hand. “You aren’t listening, Colin.”
“War orphans,” Colin mused. “Would one be allowed to call them warphans I wonder?”
“No,” Mary told him, frowning and impatient.
“It just seemed more economical. Fewer letters.”
Mary glowered at him.
“We’re just eighteen, Mary.”
“Mrs. Sowerby was a mother twice over by eighteen,” Mary pointed out. “And Martha once.”
“But those babies came brand new; these are already partly grown.”
“Between the two of us, we’ll manage well enough. Plus we’ve the garden and all the secret places on the moor, and the long hedgerows and the orchards. They’ll grow strong and fat and healthy as I did—As we did.”
Colin looked back up at the oil portraits, his pale fingers griping at the banister in tense nonchalance. “Between the two of us?” he repeated softly.
She put her hand in her apron pocket and grasped at the key like a talisman. “The three of us. It will be good for him, coming back to a house filled with new small wild things to raise.”
He did not suffer too terribly and knew it was a miracle that he did not suffer. He watched the others, learned the language of mustard gas and trenchfoot and shellshock. He learned how to speak boy-inlaid-with-shrapnel as he had lamb-with-thorn-in-its-foot.
He learned the way of their wounds, the wince and hiss of pain, the way they ground their teeth as the bombs sang and whistled overheard.
Some flock o’ crows above us, he said, as he helped them each to safety, going back again and again for each last missing one. Can thee hear ‘em sing?
It was a joke that had felt brave once, but now tasted of fear like wet ash on his tongue.
Dickon’s hands were good and strong by their nature, crafted to shape the earth and give care to its living things, and as he did that now, digging through the mud, carrying the boys caught under fire, he wondered when they had begun to shake, when they had grown unsteady in their work.
Those hands, strong enough to uproot a dead rosebush, heave a young soldier from the low deep places in the trench, where the standing water was deep and brown and rapidly turning red. Gentle enough to coax the first tendril of a snowdrop to sunlight, to redress another’s wounds when there are no field doctors to be found, to read the secret braille of another’s face, in the warm shell of their ears, ridge of their collarbones, along the soft curve of the mouth of a eighteen-year-old girl from India, a eighteen-old-boy from a hidden sickbed, a soldier shivering and unwrapping the cotton around his leg to see that the wound on his thigh had begun to blacken.
You. Yorkshire. You, Simple Simon, dear God please, find the medic. Please, I don’t want to die out here. Not under the sky like this, not in the dark.
The night sky was murky; Dickon could not find him any stars to be a comfort.
Simple Simon went to look
If plums grew on a thistle;
He pricked his fingers very much,
Which made poor Simon whistle.
They were quiet at first, though Mary and Colin had filled the nursery with Colin’s old books full of fairytale pictures and had let them loose on the gardens and the moor. They huddled and whispered and did not know whether to look to the two young cousins as their guardians or as a pair of strange benevolent creatures that meant well but came from somewhere altogether too far away and distant from their memories of home and family.
The eldest was eleven-nearly-twelve and felt herself too close in age to them to want to be like a daughter to anyone but the parents she’d lost, so she herded the others to her and wrapped her broken wings around them as though they weren’t too fragile to offer protection and watched the two cousins—called Colin and Mary Craven, they were told by the charity worker—with a constant birdlike vigilance.
They were two sides of the same queer coin, she decided, one side pink-and-fat and earnestly obstinate, the other pale-and-thin and wearily authoritative.
There was a young pinker-and-fatter woman who came twice to see the children, both times trailing a wide-eyed four-year-old. During a picnic lunch in one of the gardens, when the other two had gone to fetch the bread and meat, she told them that once upon a time, Master Colin had been a sickly bedridden child, but that he had been wheeled out of doors in a chair and had slowly gotten better and stronger, until—
“He fell ill, just near two years ago,” she said. “It were the influenza. Lord, it were bad, took him so long for th’ fever to break. Since that, he’s never been quite right again, poor thing. But thee won’ tell Master Colin I told thee? He don’t like folks to know.” She smiled. “He likes to think everything is just as it were when he first began to grow strong.”
“Were you his nurse?” one of the children asked.
“Me?” She laughed heartily at that. “No, not me, but I did work in th’ house at th’ time and I knew both poor things before . . .” At that, she grew distant for a long moment, then roused herself with smile wide and brittle with melancholy. “My brother came to th’ house. Or to th’ gardens, anyhow. More th’ gardens than Misselthwaite hersel’ that drew Dickon.”
“Is he the gardener?” the eldest asked.
“Aye,” the young woman told them. “An’ also not. He weren’t a part of the staff proper, see. Those two belong more to him than him to them. Master Colin, for all his pride, knows right enough not to be Dickon’s employer. That’s not how—That’s not how the two of ‘em work together.”
“Where is he?” the eldest asked. “Why haven’t we met him yet?”
“He’s gone away to war,” came the short soft answer.
“Like my father,” came the reply, punctuated by the nodding of four other small heads.
And then: “Will he die too?”
Dickon came home, alive and in one piece.
When he first decided to go, he was certain he would. He was Dickon Sowerby, he was alive, he was wick, he would always be that; he was far too full of things good and green and growing to not come home just the same.
It was the right thing to do, he thought, it was something done by good men and brave men. He could be good and brave for the people he loved.
And he could be sure that his pay went his mother, who needed it more than he ever would.
There were so many reasons it felt like the good thing to do that he never left feeling like it could come to anything but goodness, even with Mary’s tears when she said goodbye.
When he first left for war, he was certain he would return alive and unharmed, but by its end, he had grown near-certain of the opposite.
He stepped off the train onto the platform and saw Mary standing in her winter coat. She ran to him and hugged him tight, her eyes glistening with keeping from crying.
For a moment, he felt as though maybe he was reliving their goodbye in reverse. He pictured himself following her back to the manor only to begin experiencing his whole being in reverse: younger and younger, a child with a pony, a child learning to print his letters and bandage a crow’s wing, learning to speak, learning to walk, learning to cry, then nothing, nothing, the unborn-yet darkness of pre-existence—and his hands began to tremble again with something like fear.
Mary did not notice, perhaps, or did not know the shape of the things Dickon felt now, so she took him by the hands and led him home.
To her home. Dickon startled himself with the sudden sense of bitter displacement and unbelonging. To his home. Mistress Mary and Master Colin. Us used to be cozy-close as three birds in th’ same small nest.
But now everything was different. Now the idea of Misselthwaite loomed over him monstrous and enormous, cold as mausoleum-stone.
“Did you read my letters?” she asked.
He nodded distantly. “Children. Five o’ them.”
“Yes.”
“Are they ours?”
Mary hesitated. “Yes. But I haven’t told them about you yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want to have to tell them if you’d been . . . I wouldn’t have been able to. They’d lost their own parents so recently. I didn’t want to make them lose you too.”
Mary and Colin used to believe that Dickon felt like he could fill half a hundred rooms just by being in the house, but now he was back inside and sometimes could only warm as room as much as the last glow of embers in the fireplace.
At night, he sometimes awoke with a start, sweat-drenched and shaking, forgetting for a moment where he was, while Colin or Mary held him close and repeated, You’re home, you’re home, you’re home.
Mary’s five orphans had begun to crack open and bloom. Their footsteps danced across the echoing hallways, and they pored over Dickon, reading him like one of the bright storybooks in the nursery.
“I wish he could have come back in spring,” Mary said to Colin one day. “With his whole world bursting with joy to see him.”
“He made us well once,” Colin replied. “We just need to repay him the favor.”
Looking out across the bare-branched orchard, she watched Dickon point up into one of the trees as the children gathered close and stared upward at a flash of red, a flutter of brown wings. She smiled. “I think we can do it. I think we have help. When spring gets nearer, I’m giving them the key.”