Earl Selden’s home had been heavily damaged by artillery fire. My guess is that a shell entered the leaded glass rose window above the great hall and detonated inside against one of the masonry arches, bringing down the center of the building. Another shell streaked into the servants’ wing. Defenders must have made the manor a redoubt, because bullet pocks etched the exterior brick and stone in long strings and swirls. Inside the main entrance, a fragmentation grenade had scoured the slate floor and the hall woodwork with metal shards. The door had been ripped from its ancient iron hinges and was lying across a flattened yew near the walkway.
Although I visited the manor house a month after the battle, it had remained untouched since the combatants had departed, except for the quick visit by the burial service. Nothing had been looted or further overturned, nothing picked through by collectors or the curious. Much of the county was in ruin. Earl Selden’s ancestral mansion shared the same end as hundreds of others and as thousands upon thousands of more modest homes and shops. At the time of my visit, there were too many buildings destroyed and too many lives dashed for the recovery to have begun. The remains of the manor house stood unsteadily, empty and silent, in sorrowful contrast to the scintillating conversation and wild flirtation I had witnessed here.
I pushed aside splintered panels to make my way through the hall. Glass crackled under each footfall. A Chippendale giltwood mirror lay on the floor, the wood in a dozen pieces scattered around the floor, and the glass shattered. An oyster walnut-veneered longcase clock was on its side, the pendulum hanging out of the open case. A painting lay face down, its gilded gesso frame cracked. I lifted it and saw a portrait of an earlier earl, whiskered and frowning, but with an amused cant to his eyes. I could see Lady Anne in the portrait. I placed it on an exposed nail and carefully leveled it.
A beam had crushed a buffet in the dining room, but the china closet was intact. Not a plate or serving dish or sauceboat had been broken. A fire had begun in the main kitchen and spread into the servants’ kitchen. The stoves and coolers had been blackened. Wallpaper had curled and peeled with the heat. The fire may have been extinguished using the two buckets near the door. It appeared a grenade had been lobbed through the window and landed in a sink. Porcelain fragments covered the kitchen tile, and exposed water pipes rose from the floor like bent fingers.
I wandered next into the library, where General Clay and the earl had spent so many hours. I righted the globe. A bookshelf that had been against an outside wall had been overturned by a blast that had punched a hole into the room. Books were spilled across the carpets. The earl’s display cases were on their sides, the glass in long shards. His treasured Wellington letters were scattered about. I took a moment to gather them, finding sixty-two, and put them in his desk drawer. One leg of the Bosendorfer piano had collapsed. The instrument was at a sharp angle to the floor, looking undignified. A soldier had fired up through the window, raggedly serrating the hammered copper ceiling.
I searched the building until I found Lady Anne’s chambers, which were comprised of a bedroom, dressing room, study, and bathroom. Her rooms were more girlish than I would have imagined. The wallpaper was patterned in pink and green flowers, and a settee was covered in pink velvet. One wall of the study had been entirely covered with framed photographs from her youth. Most had fallen to the floor. They showed her in riding habits posing on numerous horses. There were bays and chestnuts and a palomino. She must have gone through horses like she went through men.
Her bedroom was dominated by a mahogany four-poster bed dressed in silk damask. She was not known to use this bed often. I peered into her closet, pushing hanging clothes along the bars one at a time, regaining a sense of her. I looked through an armoir and a William and Mary chest of drawers and a plumwood highboy, fingering her intimate items, feeling like a voyeur. I poked through several jewelry boxes. Necklaces and earrings, many with diamonds and other stones, were still in the small drawers. I realized I was delaying my search, putting off what I feared to discover. I snapped the drawers closed, and walked into her study.
Lyle Foote of the burial service had told me he had found her body in front of her rococo-styled desk, which I found out later was from the time of Louis XV, complete with the stamp “ASSNAT,” standing for “Assemblée Nationale,” indicating it had been confiscated from an aristocratic house during the French Revolution. Foote believed the concussion of a bomb or artillery round had blown her back, toppling her chair and spilling her onto the Chinese rug. Or, he said, the window frame hit her, or the cross beam that had cut her desk into halves had also crashed into her.
Foote said, no, he had not inventoried her effects. “Too many corpses to get under ground before they bloated to have time for the niceties.”
Her inlaid mahogany chair was on its side near the desk. A crystal inkwell was turned upside down on the rug, and a blue stain had spread under the well. I lifted one end of the beam and pivoted it away from the desk. The blotter was curved like a ladle from the weight of the beam. I opened several drawers until I found a small packet of letters from Wilson Clay. The cancellations showed them to be from dates earlier than I was looking for, but I put them in my jacket pocket. I continued to search through the side drawers, examining letters and mementos, bits and pieces of a life. I felt that at any moment, Anne Percival would appear in the doorway, scold me for being a nosy child, and slap my fingers.
The last place I looked was the center drawer, buckled by the beam. I tugged it several times before parts broke free. I pulled out pencils, stamps, paper clips, and, finally, the letter I had presumed existed.
An envelope was stamped with the AEFHQ logo. On it also, in General Clay’s handwriting, were her address and the words, “HQ Signal Co., hand deliver immediately. Clay.”
I pulled the letter from the envelope and unfolded it. It read in fulclass="underline" “Anne, I beg of you, leave Haldon House for London this hour. For the sake of your country and mine, my plans cannot be altered. Wilson.”
Then, after ten more minutes of searching, I found her response, which she either did not have the inclination or the time to complete. The sheet of paper had been blown into her bathroom, perhaps by the blast or by a later wind through the broken windows, and was near a basin stand. Her stationery was a bond so heavy that a pen might have caught in the coarse fibers. I could not tell from the condition of the paper if she had wadded it up to throw it away.
Her letter read, “Wilson, You will destroy England to save it. I will never leave Haldon House. I am the price you will pay if—” The letter was unfinished.
So my questions were still unanswered by their last correspondence, and that is why I had her body exhumed and examined by a Scotland Yard forensic pathologist. I admit I did not go through channels. I did not even attempt to find surviving members of her family to ask permission. I believed then, and still believe, that the demands of a precise record of the war demanded that I plunge ahead with the ghastly task. I convinced Henry Bartholemew, the pathologist, and Lyle Foote, the gravedigger, to assist me.
Foote walked us to the cite at the corner of the earl’s winter garden. England had far more bodies than coffins. Despite her wealth and standing, Lady Anne had been wrapped in a blanket and lowered into a pit. Foote said she must have released her servants, because hers was the only body found in the manor. Foote, Bartholemew, and I dug with gardeners’ tools. The others dealt with corpses as their professions, and worked quickly, but I gingerly hacked at the ground.