Maggie Bright (3 page)

SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE

“What in me is dark, illumine. What is low, raise and support.”

No chance for good-bye, no chance to explain. With those guys a whole year, sharing care packages from home and trade secrets on girls, and suddenly this, hustling a broken half-wit to a place on fire.

Private Jamie Elliott bent to yank the tongue of his boot back in place. It kept sliding down the side of his foot.

“Trial will come unsought. God towards thee hath done his part
 
—do thine.”

“Shut
up
!”

Little rest or food for two solid days, always on their feet, always moving, sometimes ditch-diving to avoid bullets from a low-strafing airplane, sometimes hiding in terror from German patrols which usually turned out to be civilians running scared; and always, always with a constant backdrop of this eerie howling and quoting.

The thought summoned direct response from the offender, Captain Milton, who now stopped in his tracks, put his arms wide, and with loud lament aimed right at God, shouted: “Hast thou made me here thy substitute?”

“Shut it!” Jamie pushed the man. He stumbled forward and regained his shambling gait.

Did his men find out what happened to him? Kearnsey will worry. Drake will say it’s war, and act like he doesn’t care. Lieutenant Dunn likely sent someone out, and hopefully that someone had discovered Jamie’s fate. But he did not know theirs.

“Too well I see and rue the dire event, that with sad overthrow and foul defeat hath lost us heaven.”

Jamie shoved the captain harder than necessary, and he stumbled and fell. Discovering himself upon the ground, he wrapped his arms about his head and rested in the dirt, his backside hiked in the air. Looked like Lawrence of Arabia doing some worshippy Arab thing. Jamie waited. He shifted his weight. He wondered how to secure the boot tongue.

“All right, all right. Get up. You’re not that bad off. I’ve seen a man carry his hand in a helmet.”

Not a lick of action until two weeks ago, and nothing but action since. Whole German Army crashed on them like a thousand thunderstorms, and now chased them like monsters from a thousand nightmares.

“Come on. Get up. Let’s find some water.”

Why was it burning? Dunkirk wasn’t an ammo dump, it was a seaside tourist town. No way could the Germans have made that much ground that fast. Was it being bombed? If so, why Dunkirk? Calais was closest to Dover, wasn’t it?

But here was the real question: When will the army stand and fight?

“What’s the matter with him?” A steel-helmeted soldier stood beside him. No stripes, no need to salute.

“Got hit in the head. Knocked a bunch of sense out of it.” Jamie looked at the soldier. Dusty, unshaven, wary, haunted, and hunted
 
—looked like Jamie felt. “Who are you with? Any news?”

“Queen’s Fusiliers, the 2nd
 
—what’s left of ’em. We’re scattered to the four winds. I only know two direct orders: it’s every man for himself, and head for Dunkirk.”

“Every man for himself?” Jamie repeated, hardly believing such words came out of his mouth.

“Aye.” Watching the captain, the soldier unscrewed his canteen and handed it to Elliott. “What’d he say?”

“Oh, he goes off like that. If it’s not poetry, he howls like a shot dog.” Jamie took a swallow and handed back the canteen. “Thanks.”

“Something yet of doubt remains,” the captain groaned, “which only thy solution can resolve!”

“When do you think we’ll stand and fight?” said Jamie.

“Dunno. But you better get him off the road. There’s a whole village coming. Half of Belgium, looks like.”

Jamie had seen hundreds of people on the road over the past two days, mostly terrified civilians carrying or pushing whatever they could. All hurrying, hurrying. A few hurried past now, staring at the man with his face in the dust. They looked like the soldier
 
—haunted, hunted.

“Where are they going?” Jamie said. “Dunkirk, like us?”

“I don’t think
they
know.”

“We’ll make our stand at Dunkirk, then?”

“Not a clue. Well, good luck, mate.” The soldier walked off a few steps, then turned. “You know the new directive about the injured, don’t you?”

“What directive?”

“Leave any wounded behind.”

Jamie stared.

“Heard it from a major. He got it straight from the top.”

Jamie felt a strange, hot flush. “Never heard of such a thing.” He looked at the captain.

The soldier shrugged. “Makes sense. Why chance losing two fighting men for one who may die anyway? Leave ’em for the Germans to sort out. Maybe they’ll swap for ’em later.” He gave a little salute. “See you in Dunkirk.” Off he went.

Jamie kicked the ground. “Curse my sodding, rotten luck!”

If someone else had got to that hut before him,
that
man would’ve got stuck with this job. But no
 
—Jamie had pushed past other would-be chumps to end up king chump of them all.

“Come on, move! We don’t have time for this!” Jamie booted the captain’s hip, and he fell sideways.

Where were Kearnsey and Drake, his two best mates? Blown to bits in some trench?

“Did you hear what he said?” Jamie shouted at his ear. “I could leave you for the Germans! Perfectly in my rights!”

He could not shake the belief that if he was with his unit, they would be all right. They would make it if they were together. A year with those men. He cared more about them than he did his own brother.

He opened his mouth for another go at the captain, but squinted at a bright new spot on the captain’s bandage, and went to a knee for a better look.

“Oh, what have you gone and done?”

“Dazzled and spent,” the captain whispered hoarsely. His lips looked like corrugated tin, creased with dust. Jamie hadn’t thought of the captain when the soldier had given him a drink. “Sunk down, and sought repair of sleep . . .”

“Yes, well, we’re all tired.” A bleary mind played tricks. A few miles back, what Jamie thought was a corpse in the road was only an artillery-blown tree limb; half a mile later, what he thought was a limb was a corpse. “Look, you can sleep later
 
—do you understand?
We’ve got to get someone to stitch this or you’ll bleed to death, won’t you? No bloody Victoria Cross for you, then.”

He looked back to where they’d come from. If refugees would soon flood the road, surely one of them had to be a doctor. He looked around for a place to stash the captain. No houses about. A long fenced meadow on one side of the road, and on the other, a dead horse in the ditch, killed a day or so ago by strafing aircraft. It was still harnessed to a crashed cart.

“Come on, mate. Upsadaisy.” He hooked his hands under the captain’s armpits and pulled him up. “We’ll get you sorted, and I’ll go find someone to fix your head. Here you are. A nice horsie to keep you company. Doesn’t even smell much. See? He’s looking right at you, you can tell him all your Milton. Now don’t move. Stay. Understand?” He held his hands up. “Stay
right there
.”

He walked away from the captain with the terrible knowledge that he could keep on walking, and all would be in his rights.

CLARE CHILDS SCANNED
the stops listed on the side of the double-decker bus. She leaned in to ask the driver, “Excuse me, does this change for
 
—” she glanced at the paper
 
—“someplace close to 12 Brookby Road, Westminster?”

The driver nodded and rattled off the changes. She listened carefully, boarded the bus, dropped in some coins, and took a seat.

What secret did
Maggie Bright
keep? Clare had gone over every inch of the boat after she’d signed the papers with Mr. Hillary, her family’s solicitor. She’d had Captain John go over every inch, too; he had assured her that not only was
Maggie Bright
seaworthy, and that the stout old girl had seen many sea journeys
 
—not a river cruiser, was she
 
—but that ownership of Maggie for the price of the back taxes was certainly fair;
too
fair, he worried. Mr. Hillary, however, a large man with an improbably shrill voice, had assured them the boat would have been Clare’s scot-free, were the bequest not used as collateral against a
loan. The former owner of the boat, an Arthur Vance, was a boyhood chum of her father’s with apparently no heir of his own.

For days after the encounter with the Burglar Vicar (as Captain John called the man), Clare prowled about Maggie, pulling out sticky drawers and peering into tight damp places. She took a torch and examined every inch of the deck lockers above, the cupboards below. She emptied out the larder, and found only a packet of ancient mildewed crackers that had fallen into a chink.

All she had was a boxful of old newspapers that the previous owner had collected
 
—American newspapers, curiously enough
 
—with a few oddments in it: a brittle old sea sponge, a cheap figurine of a dancing native girl, and a few mildewed sailing books and navigation charts. But the Burglar Vicar hadn’t taken this box. He had gone through it, plainly enough, as it certainly appeared ransacked, but nothing was missing from it.

He had, in fact, taken nothing at all
 
—and easily could have. Clare’s purse was right on the chart table. A new portable wireless, a valuable first edition from her uncle’s bookstore
 
—things of some value, and quite in the open, untouched. Mrs. Shrew’s money was also untouched, though she likely slept with it strapped to her stomach; there could be no safer place.

“What were you after, Burglar Vicar?” Clare mused. She looked at the paper. He went by the name of Father David Fitzpatrick, so Captain John’s friend discovered.

She hated this unfair dread that the
Maggie Bright
was somehow under siege. It was her home. She had one again, and nothing would take it from her. So she faced this fear much like she once faced a bully of a dog, who growled and barked at her every time she came home from school; she was so tired of being afraid of the thing, and angry at being afraid, that one day
she
attacked
it
, and punched it right on the muzzle.

Poor thing.

She would not punch a priest. But she would not leave that police station until she had answers.

She noticed the headline of the abandoned newspaper in the seat next, and took the paper to her lap.
BEF in Holland; German Offensive Checked.

Where was Captain John’s son, “over there”? Perhaps when he came home, he might find himself a new stepmother
 
—what a ghastly thought. The woman had answered the advertisement for Bed and Breakfast on the Thames, and really meant to have breakfast
every morning
 
—and Clare had to fix it!

Clare smiled ruefully. The bed and breakfast scheme turned out to be far more work than she had planned. Still, her jar labeled
Operation: Circumnavigate the Globe
now had enough money in it to rattle when she shook it.

She laughed out loud. She’d need more than rattling coins to make a go of it.

Vision! Courage! Singularity of
 
—

She yelped when she saw the name of the current stop and jumped from her seat.

In the little jail cell he shared with no one, Father David Fitzpatrick selected another memory with which to entertain himself. The entertaining ones usually involved Murray.

“What’s glory, Father Fitz?” he had asked one day, while they fixed slatted bushel baskets for the basketball courts at the YMCA.

“Drat you, Murray,” David had said, and laid down his hammer.

Murray would expect nothing less than a real answer, not the off-the-cuff ecclesiastical reply that would satisfy, if not truly inform, the average parishioner who often cared less about an answer than asking an impressive question
 
—though David enjoyed impressive questions.

“How are your classes coming?” he asked. Murray would know it for his way to work out the answer.

“Swell. There’s a broad who
 
—there’s a
young lady
 
—who sits beside me, and if she don’t have the most gorgeous set of legs God put on the planet . . . I drew them instead of the bowl of monochrome fruit. It wasn’t doing anything. The legs did somethin’. They hollered to be drawn.”

“That’s glory. It hollers to be drawn.”

“I knew it! Them legs were glorious.”

“
Those
legs were glorious. Did you get in trouble?”

“Not ’til after the professor saw my drawing and asked if he could keep it. I said nothin’ doin’,
then
I got in trouble. Speaking of legs, how is Helen? I mean
 
—Mrs. Father Fitz?”

“Aw, she’s wonderful. Loves to go for walks. There’s a trail in the woods at Shea Park. My favorite place is that dark and close area down by the creek, where I look up and see a great canopy of layered leaves. So many different shades of green, and if the sun is out, I see golden pinpoints of light come through. It feels secure and close, everything around me and everything above me; it’s beautiful, and still, and fragrant, and I get such a sense of well-being there’s often an ache in my heart. Not sure what that ache is. But I think it’s glory.” He picked up his hammer.

A week later, he and Helen found a wrapped present on their doorstep. It was a framed watercolor of a vaulted canopy layered in green, golden pinpoints of light, the closeness discerned, the fragrance caught, the stillness felt. It was so stirring that David could never say what he thought of it, anything at all would never come close; he could only murmur agreement with whatever everyone else said.

At first they hung it in their dining room, but knew it must be shared. It now hung in the foyer of St. Dominic’s in Bartlett. He lost track of how many times art collectors came to ask if it was for sale.
David stood before it when he needed to, and never failed to come away with an ache of well-being.

Murray easily understood glory. It came to him in a rectangle gleam on a fixture of chrome, in the smell of a box of new crayons, in the feel of a teapot’s curve. Murray seemed to encounter it daily, ever since he sought to know what it was, and seemed to encounter it far more than David did. The cares of the world, and of his parishioners, often stopped glory from getting through.

How endearing seemed those cares, now that he could not get to them. How he ached to see his people and hear their troubles, to see what he could do to bring guidance and hope.

He could think about them, and he could think about Murray. Helen and the baby, he kept far from mind and heart.

He mined another memory, and found the day he picked up Murray from his trip abroad. He came hooting and trampling down the white-railed, zigzagged gangway, announced that he had disowned his father, and said he was dying for New York food. All hope for the long-plotted father-son reconciliation had vanished before David could even say welcome home.

“You got a visitor, mate.”

David looked up. He could scarcely make sense of the words, they were so very unexpected.

“Well, let’s not dillydally. Haven’t got all day.” The policeman held the cell door wide and swept his arm to where David should go.

David walked the corridor in a daze. He’d seen no one but guards and inmates for three long weeks. As he knew no one in England, who would visit now? Two men from Scotland Yard came once, but never came back. Not that he said much to gain their attention
 
—he’d said nothing. He couldn’t. There was too much at stake.

“Have it your way, then,” the older of the two had told him and could not have been more affably indifferent
 
—but not his partner.

“If you fancy a chat, ring me up,” said the younger man with a
smile not meant to be warm, and bestowed his card between two fingers like a hot tip to the races. The clear implication was that this younger man, William Percy, could make things go well for David if he did.

Something about William Percy stayed with David. As a parish priest at St. Dominic’s for twelve years, he knew personalities. Percy had a chilly manner ill-fitting for one so young
 
—he couldn’t be past his early thirties, yet seemed to have the hardness of a man who had seen the worst human nature had to offer and had given up hope or desire for human nature’s redemption. His eyes were so pale they were nearly the color of wheat, and this stark color he put to good use with his cold manner
 
—while his partner did the talking he did the watching, with a probing, unsettling force David could call leashed menace. Percy seemed to know what David was looking for on the
Maggie Bright
. It made David his enemy.

David couldn’t even tell Percy they were on the same side. Couldn’t tell him that he’d had an important mission, and that mission had failed.

He had not yet been assigned counsel of any kind, and when he’d asked a guard about it, the man said there was a
war
on, and who gives a (colorful phrase) about a foreigner priest who was likely a Fifth Columnist anyway? Perhaps it was irrational of David, but he had a hard time thinking of himself as foreign since they both spoke English.

He did wonder how he could trust even a lawyer; Arthur Vance had told him to trust no one, and Arthur had had his reasons. So he dared not speak a word even to Scotland Yard, and when they allowed him to send a telegram to Helen, he was quite careful: he said nothing past the fact that he had been arrested, that she should contact Congressman Wilson’s office to contact the American embassy, and that he had found the
Maggie Bright
.

For three long weeks, nothing had happened. Who could be
waiting for him? Someone from the embassy? Had Arthur Vance’s lawyer heard of his arrest? Hope rose, and he followed the policeman into a large room.

There were chairs at long tables, and down the center of each table was a partition. At intervals along the partitions were posted notices:
Do Not Reach Over Partition
. Many people sat across from each other at these tables. The room was filled with layered cigarette smoke, softly squabbling visitors and inmates, a crying baby and a few busy children, and armed policemen at intervals all along the wall.

“Right. Thirty-minute visit. No reaching over the partition. No reaching under the table. You will be watched at all times. Your time starts now. Your visitor is there. Well? Go on, then. Off you go.”

But David couldn’t move. The policeman gave him a little shove. In a dream, he went to the table. His visitor had been too interested in the coping along the ceiling edge to notice.

“Murray,” David breathed.

Murray Vance rose from the other side of the table, stuck out his hand, yanked it back at the sharp command from the nearest policeman, shook it theatrically as if burned, and settled for the biggest, most beautiful, most welcoming grin David had ever seen.

“Whaddya say, Padre? What’s cookin’, eh? You look terrible.” He took off his hat with a flourish, set it on the table and smoothed his hair. “Don’t they feed you jailbirds, Father Fitz?” He said it in the comical Brooklyn accent David loved, the one Murray put on just for him: ‘fadda,’ and ‘jailboids.’ It was heaven on his ears. “Maybe I can get you a sandwich.” Murray looked around the room. “Hey! Anyone got a sandwich for this man? I can pay.” He looked at a cop. “Say, are sandwiches allowed? I can toss one over the wooden thingy. Says don’t reach; doesn’t say don’t toss. Well. He ain’t havin’ any. No one’s got a sense of humor around here.”