Free Softly Grow the Poppies by Audrey Howard Page A

towards him restored him as nothing else could.
    As they waited at the altar for the bride to walk towards them Charlie glanced over his shoulder. Present were what Charlie called the same hordes of ‘vultures’ who had attended his father’s interment the day before and to Harry’s dismay he had been about to harangue them but he was saved by the arrival at the porch door of the bride.
    ‘Behave, Charlie,’ Harry had warned him yesterday, knowing his brother was ready to do battle with anyone or anything that offended him. ‘He was their squire after all, and they have come to pay their respects. Not to gawp as you think.’
    They were gathered in the church and even among the gravestones to see Sir George laid to rest and now they had come to see Sir George’s handsome son marry the Weatherly girl who, it was whispered, was already with child. And herself only a child at eighteen. But then there was a war on and there were hasty weddings taking place up and down the country in these terrible times. Already two young men, sons of farmers and known to them all, had been killed in the trenches. Those hasty marriages were not called ‘shotgun weddings’ any more, for the soldiers were more than willing to marry their sweethearts before they returned to the trenches. But they were not the proper events that would have meant six months’ engagement at least. The birth rate had gone up considerably in the days following the declaration of war! Those of a more charitable nature sympathised as who could blame young men, many of them virgins come straight from school, wanting to know the delights of love before they left for the Western Front. Up and down the country it was beginning to be realised that this war that was supposed to be over by Christmas – which had come and gone – would be a long time in reaching a conclusion as the casualties poured back across the Channel.
    As she came down the aisle Alice held the arm of the person who was to give her away and Harry smiled, for who else would have the audacity to take what should have been Alice’s father’s place but Rose Beechworth! A gasp of consternation rippled round the congregation and the vicar almost dropped his prayer book but there was nothing written that said it was illegal.
    They both looked splendid but in different ways. Alice was almost ethereal in her young beauty. She wore the wedding gown that Rose’s mother had worn, and let out skilfully. White lace backed with satin with a high neck and long sleeves and between them, she, Rose and Dolly had cleverly draped a length of chiffon across the front of the skirt so that the bump of her child was barely noticeable. Tucked into her silvery hair, which was piled on the top of her head in a froth of curls, was one white rosebud – which still flowered in Tom’s greenhouse – and she carried another. In contrast, Rose was dressed in oyster satin and carried a small bouquet of oyster-coloured roses. Her hat was a boater on which Fanny and Carrie from Beechworth had arranged a circlet of apricot–coloured roses around the crown, thrilled to the core to have been given the run of Tom’s hothouse. They had even taken the liberty of adorning their own bonnets with pink roses, smiling at their mam as they walked up the aisle behind Miss Beechworth and Miss Weatherly who would soon be Mrs Summers. Their mams and the rest of their families were as proud of the maids as if one of them were the bride!
    Rose was at least six inches taller than Alice but both of them smiled serenely as though there was nothing unusual in one woman giving away another. Most of the women were in tears as the lovely girl became the wife of the brave Captain Charlie Summers who would be going back to the fighting the very next day.
    She herself, the bride, had become tearful as she contemplated her wedding day. ‘What am I to wear, Rose? I can hardly stand at the altar in the morning gown in which I came to you.’
    She looked