Delusion (12 page)

Algernon cocked his head at Phil. “She heard you wouldn’t join her Home Guard because you were afraid you couldn’t thrust a bayonet as well as a girl. She said if you care to, you can sew blackout curtains and roll bandages instead.”

“I didn’t—” Phil began, but Algernon nudged her.

“Why, I...Now, missie, don’t you go listening to rumors. It ain’t true. Look at me—you think I can’t dig a trench? Strong as an ox, I am.” He twitched his pectorals and then curled his arm to reveal a bicep as big as a shire horse’s hoof. “Feel it, missie, just feel it, and tell me you’ll not have me in the Guard.”

She felt it. It was like the turnip that won first prize at the agricultural fair.

“Oxen are strong, but we won’t take them in the Guard,” Algernon said. “What else can you do?”

“I can fix any car on the road.”

“The last thing we need in an invasion is Germans commandeering our cars and tractors. The important question is, can you disable a car?”

“Why, missie, you stand right there and watch.”

He stepped brusquely past them to where a muddy Morris coupe rumbled down the cobbled street. With his bulk placed squarely in front of the grille, the driver had no choice but to stop.

“What’s this all about, Eamon?” asked Mr. Henshawe, the little grocer.

“For the war effort,” the burly mechanic said as he opened the bonnet, fiddled a moment, then tossed a small bit of metal into the languishing yellow rosebushes across the street. “There,” he said, rubbing engine grease on his already-stained overalls. “Let’s see a Nazi drive that to Buckingham Palace!”

And so Phil added the first name to her roster of informal Home Guards.

As she helped the grocer search for his missing bit of motor, she tried to solicit him, too.

“Pah, Germans!” he said, scrabbling through the loam. “Might as well say the fairies will be coming through Bittersweet. Now help me find that engine gizmo. I’ve a missing shipment of tea to account for. Not a drop of leaf on the shelves, and the delivery was supposed to be yesterday.”

“You don’t have to march and fight, you know,” Phil said. She found the missing part but kept it hidden in her palm. “In a place like this, you should be able to get most of your food locally and save your coupons. I’m sure as a grocer it isn’t good for business, but as an Englishman you ought to encourage your customers not to buy anything that’s rationed. Leave those things to the people in London and Birmingham and Leeds, where they can’t grow their own food. If all your customers left their ration books at home—”

“Their what?” Henshawe asked.

Thus it came out, after a great deal of incredulity on Phil’s part and indignation on the grocer’s (“What! Tell a body how much he can eat and how much he can buy with his own honest money!”) that the townspeople of Bittersweet had never been issued ration books.

“How is that possible?” Phil asked as she tossed the engine part back under the bush and took Algernon’s arm to lead him to the next likely prospect for civil defense. “
Everyone
is issued food coupons and a gas mask and—”

“No gas masks either,” Algernon said. “Except Uncle Walter, of course.”

Phil stopped dead in the road. “I don’t believe it. Does the government even know about Bittersweet? Is it invisible? Oh!”

She remembered the moment when her parents had first told her she’d be going to the country. Dad had tried to find the village on the map—it hadn’t been there, though it was a very detailed map that listed the tiniest hamlets.

If the magicians could hide all of Stour, could they do something similar with an entire town? For a group so concerned with staying hidden, it was a natural step, and they were probably capable of it. Could they make every bureaucratic eye in London skim over the village’s name when doling out supplies and conscripting recruits?

Those wretches!
thought Phil.
Bad enough that all those able-bodied men huddle in their manor and don’t do their bit fighting Nazis. But to steal away an entire village from its duty of national defense—it’s unpardonable!

She fumbled in the side pocket of her gas mask pouch and counted out her shillings. “Come on, we’re going to the post office.”

She bought a pack of nearly transparent paper and drafted three quick letters. She had no addresses, but she chose recipients who were so well known that her letter would either be automatically delivered or else tossed away by a postman assuming it was a joke, rather like letters addressed to Father Christmas. One went to Lord Woolton at the Ministry of Food, informing him that no one in Bitersweet had ration cards. Another went to Winston Churchill, stating how eager the village was to help the war effort, if only someone would tell them how. The last she simply addressed to the Ministry of Defense, asking that a recruiter pay the town a visit.

Not wanting to be sent to Bedlam, she didn’t offer any theories about magicians. She signed herself “A Concerned Englishwoman,” affixed the stamps, and sent them into the void.

As soon as they were in the box, she had misgivings. What could one small town really do, with its old men and pugilist vicars? Would it be best to leave things as they were? Perhaps, with her interference, she was condemning men to death, men who otherwise would have lived long, happy lives, solved scientific problems, contributed to the birth of geniuses and saviors.

No, she told herself firmly. All over England and in distant battlefields, men who had at least as much right to such possibilities were fighting and dying. Everyone had to do his part.

She and Algernon spent the rest of their day recruiting, with dismal results.

“Isn’t that thing over by now?” one housewife asked when Phil encouraged her to take in evacuee children.

“Give up my saucepans!” gulped another, barring the door with her considerable bulk as if Phil meant to launch an immediate assault on her cupboards. “Not on your nelly!”

One fellow in his forties seemed on the verge of volunteering for Phil’s Home Guard, albeit not quite for the right reasons. “Redheads,” he said, looking her up and down, lingering longest in the middle. “Plenty of spunk, you redheads.” Phil, dragging and disappointed with her day’s work, was ready even to accept recruits with dubious motives, when a ginger-haired slip of a woman gripped him by the ear and hauled him inside. She glowered at Phil.

“My Enery’s got room for one red-headed woman in his life, and I ain’t about to step aside for a London piece like you. Off with you now!”

One old man did agree to dig up his zinnias and plant cabbage and silverbeet, but only because his flowers had gotten the blight.

When she tried to tell the deaf, grandmotherly Mrs. Abernathy about rationing and food shortages, she accidentally gave the ancient woman the impression that she herself was hungry, and Phil and Algernon weren’t allowed to escape until they’d choked down two cups of tea and some excruciatingly dry seed cake.

“It’s no use,” Phil said as they backtracked down High Street.

Algernon, starting to answer, stumbled, and Phil caught him with an arm around his waist.

“What do you think you’re doing?” came an indignant feminine voice from behind. Phil turned and found Diana bearing down on them. Hastily, Phil disengaged herself from Algernon and explained.

Diana’s eyes lit up. It had been so long since Algernon had taken any real interest in anything. If this project, however foolish, could give him a new passion for life, she was all for it. But she’d be damned if she’d let that curvy, wiggling slut of a London girl do it at his side.

Thrilling with enthusiasm, she said, “Oh yes, just what the village needs, a war hero to shake it out of its lethargy.”

Algernon tried for the second time that day to protest the word
hero,
but Diana easily talked over him. “I know
exactly
what to do,” she said brightly, flicking a glance at Phil that clearly said
and you do not.
“The ladies of the knitting circle will make nothing but socks for the poor soldiers, and every farmer will double his egg production so we can send more to the starving Londoners.”

“They aren’t exactly starving,” Phil began.
Honestly, she makes us sound like beggars and guttersnipes.
“What we really need is people for the Home Guard. And rifles, or any other kind of weapon.”

“Yes, yes,” Diana said dismissively. “I’ll arrange all that.”

“We’ve spoken with practically everyone in the village,” Phil said. “No one is interested.”

Diana looked at Algernon with burning devotion, seeing him coming back to life. “I’ll
make
them be interested!” she swore.

She did it, too. Phil wasn’t sure exactly how—whether it was simply that they were more willing to listen to a local than an outsider, or perhaps that Diana knew their secrets and hidden fears, the better to bribe and bully them. But by afternoon she’d recruited some dozen men and the red-haired woman for paramilitary training and had almost everyone else reluctantly agreeing to save scrap. It was easy to find volunteer fire wardens once she hit on the idea of letting them work in pairs. Several teenage couples relished the idea of being allowed out all night, ostensibly to watch for incendiaries.

Even steely-eyed Diana might not have had such luck, if the war hadn’t happened to hit close to home for the first time since its declaration.

Bittersweet had run out of tea.

Phil had never seen anything like it. An Englishwoman deprived of her cuppa is a fearsome creature. After the poor little grocer had to deny the first housewife her weekly supply, word got around, and soon every able-bodied woman was crowding inside the store, demanding her soothing and stimulating leaf at once.

Now there,
thought Phil, as she watched them rant and storm in their house dresses and aprons,
is my army of volunteers.
She’d rarely seen such passion, even in the London Women’s Voluntary Service.

After scurrying to safety to place a few frantic calls, the grocer stood trembling before the seething, bekerchiefed masses and explained that he could not get a shipment for at least another week.

This was terrible news, but they were a cooperative community and, after some mumbling and grumbling, agreed to divvy up their stores until things returned to normal.

Then, quaking, the grocer admitted the worst: when at last supplies did arrive, the quantity would be so severely limited that there would scarcely be enough for each person to have a scant spoonful of tea each day.

“But I need tea for breakfast, and elevenses, and lunch,” Mrs. Enery said. “And an afternoon pick-me-up, not to mention teatime proper, and like as not a cup around the fireplace before bed. One spoonful of tea won’t even tinge the water!”

“It’s Hitler’s fault!” Phil shouted, absorbed in the mob.

Since the crowd was evidently primed to tear
someone
limb from limb, the grocer was only too happy to turn their aggressions elsewhere and echoed this resoundingly. “Oh yes, it’s because of the war, and submarines torpedoing tea ships from Ceylon, and...and...Hitler hates tea!”

Angry people are always willing to seize upon an object for their spite, and as soon as Diana stepped in and redirected their energies, nearly everyone agreed to do whatever she could to defeat the horrible tea-hating Hun.

Luckily, Phil knew that Weasel Rue had plenty of tea (and Mrs. Pippin didn’t know about the shortage yet), so she told the Home Guard volunteers that the first meeting would be that very afternoon over an outdoor tea. She rushed ahead to make the preparations, with the dozen recruits to follow in an hour.

“Fee! Tea!” she ordered as she ran into the farmhouse. She had hoped to have Algie’s help, but Diana had snatched him away. Then, with what Phil could have sworn was a malicious gleam in her eye, she’d told all the volunteers in her resounding sergeant’s voice to bring their broomsticks to stand in for rifles and spades for knives, for they’d be starting military practice straight away.

Phil had no idea what to do, but she wasn’t about to disappoint them. Men could be lured with food and the promise of looking at a pretty girl, but they could be held only by either duty or excitement. Their sense of duty was so tenuous that she had no faith in it.

“Fee!” she cried again, checking outside. She needed her sister for her opinion but mostly to play hostess. Phil had to be the man of the family, so Fee had better be prepared to pour tea and be the woman. “Where the devil are you? Fooling about in the hay with the bantams?”

Fee was in the hay, all right, but her companion was hardly a bantam. Phil stifled a giggle with her fist.

Thomas—what Phil could see of him—lay stretched out on his back while Fee kneeled over him, her abundant red-blond hair making a misty tent over them both. She kissed the side of his neck, the hollow at the base of his throat, and then, tossing her tresses back out of the way, fell upon his lips in her fervent, practiced manner.

“Ahem,” Phil said.

“Mmm,” Fee replied, looking up, and in that instant of sisterly telepathy, Phil’s eyes widened in alarm. She was used to her sister’s many amours, which came and went faster than a Thames tide. Fee played at love, enthusiastically and heartlessly, practicing, she always told her sister, for the real thing. She gave her affections—which, physically speaking, never went beyond kisses and admittedly rather daring caresses—lightly and took them merrily back when the game was done. She left broken hearts in her wake, but spared less pity for them than she did for a desiccated worm on the sidewalk (which always made her weep and try her hand at worm nursing), for she never made any promises, never let them think they had a chance at owning her heart.

There was no laughter in Fee’s face now, though, only a determined, serious sort of bliss. It was the same look of concentration she had when she was mastering a new vanishing trick, her against the world and all the laws of nature, determined to make her illusion work. Invariably, she succeeded. Fee might be soft and yielding in many ways, but she had steel at her core.

“No,” Phil said.