Fallen Skies Read online

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Reading Group Guide

  ‘The King's Curse’ Excerpt

  About Philippa Gregory

  This book is dedicated to

  PRIVATE FREDERICK JOHN CARTER

  of the 11th Scottish Rifles, who died at Salonika, 12th September 1917, aged twenty-four

  Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

  D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

  1

  STEPHEN’S MOUTH WAS FILLING WITH MUD, wet slurry pressed on his eyelids, slid into his nostrils like earthworms. He flailed helplessly against the weight of it on his face, on his body, in his hair. He felt the silty terrible power of it pinning him down. When he opened his mouth to scream it poured into his throat, he could taste its wetness: the terrible non-taste of earth.

  He choked on it, retching and heaving for breath, spitting and hawking. He was drowning in it, he was being crushed by its weight, he was being buried alive. His hands like paddles, he scrabbled against it, trying to claw a space for his face, and then he grabbed linen sheet, woolen blankets, counterpane, and he opened his eyes, clogged only by sleep, and saw the white ceiling of his home.

  He whooped like a sick child, gasping in terror, rubbing his face roughly, dragging his palm across his lips, across his tongue where the dead taste still lingered. He whispered “Oh God, oh God,” pitifully, over and over again. “Oh God, oh God.”

  Then he turned his head and saw her. In the doorway was his mother, her dressing-gown pulled on over her thick cotton nightdress, her tired face set in lines of fear and . . . something else. He stared at her, trying to read the expression on her face: disapproval.

  His bedside table was overturned, the ugly pottery electric lamp broken, his jug of water spilling into a puddle on the carpet. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was humble, ashamed. “I was dreaming.”

  She came into the room and lifted up the table. She set the empty jug and the pieces of the bedside light on it in mute accusation. “I wish you’d let me call Dr. Mobey,” she said. “You were having a fit.”

  He shook his head quickly, his anger rising. “It was nothing. A bad dream.”

  “You should take one of my sleeping tablets.”

  Stephen dreaded deep sleep more than anything else. In deep sleep the dream would go on, the dream of the collapsed dug-out, the dream of scrabbling and suffocating, and only after a lifetime of screaming horror, the bliss of feeling the earth shift and tumble and Coventry’s gentle hands scraping the soil from his face and hearing his voice saying, “You’re all right, Sir. I’m here now. We’ll have you out in a jiffy.” Stephen had wept then, wept like a baby. There had been no-one but Coventry to see his coward’s tears, and he had wiped them away with dirty bleeding hands. Coventry had dug bare-handed, refusing to put a spade in the earth. He had scrabbled in the mud like a dog for its master and then they had both wept together; like new-found lovers, like reunited twins.

  “I’ll go downstairs and make myself a brew,” he said. “You get to bed. I don’t want any tablets.”

  “Oh, go to sleep,” Stephen’s mother said irritably. “It’s four in the morning. Far too late for tea.”

  He got out of bed and threw his dressing-gown around his shoulders. When he stood, his height and maleness could dominate her. Now he was the master of the house, not a sick man screaming with nightmares. “I think I’ll have a brew and a cigarette,” he said with the upper-class drawl he had learned from the senior officers in the trenches. “Then I’ll sleep. You toddle off, old lady.”

  She turned, obedient but resentful. “Well, don’t make a mess for Cook.”

  He shepherded her out of the room and she shied away from him as if fear were contagious, as if terror were catching.

  “I wish you’d let me call Dr. Mobey,” she said again, pausing on the landing before she turned into her bedroom. “He says it’s very common. They have all sorts of things to cure nervous troubles. It’s just hysteria.”

  Stephen smoothed his moustache, his broad handsome face regaining its confident good looks. He laughed. “I’m not a hysteric,” he said. His voice was rich with his male pride. “Not me,” he said, smiling. “I just get the odd bad dream.”

  He turned away from her and loped down the stairs. The hall was dark but the fanlight above the front door showed him the green baize door that separated the domestic quarters in the basement from the rest of the house. He opened the door and went quietly down the back stairs.

  The kitchen was light; it was warm from the kitchen range. Coventry was at the stove, warming a teapot. He looked up when Stephen entered and took him in, took him all in, with one comprehensive glance. Stephen sighed with relief at the sight of him. “Had a bit of a dream,” he said. “Fancied a cup of tea, and here you are. Ministering bloody angel.”

  Coventry smiled his slow crooked smile. As Stephen watched, he spooned five heaped spoonfuls of tea from the caddy into the teapot, adding them to the old dregs left in the pot. He poured boiling water on the stale brew and stood the pot on the range for a few moments, then took up the two mugs. He put four spoonfuls of sugar into each mug and poured a dark stream of tea from the pot. It tasted stewed, and sour from the old tea, as strong as poison and teeth-grittingly sweet. It was how it had tasted in the trenches. It was that taste which told you that you were alive, that you had come back, against all odds, from a night patrol, from a dawn attack, from a lonely dangerous sniper’s mission. The strong sweet taste of tea was the taste of survival. The taste of mud was death. Stephen sank into one of the chairs before the range and put his slippered feet against the warm oven door.

  “Good Christ, Coventry! I wish you would speak again,” he said. “I wish I could stop dreaming.” He sipped a taste of tea, the strong sour brew rinsing his mouth clean of the taste of dream-mud. “I wish it had never happened,” Stephen said with rare bleak honesty. “I wish to Christ it had never happened at all.”

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