Secrets of a Charmed Life (10 page)

“I’ve emptied all but the bottom bureau drawer for you,” Charlotte said. “And more than half the wardrobe. And I’ve put some writing paper in the desk for you so you can write home to your mum or your friends as often as you wish. I wrote down my address on a little card there so that you can let people know where you are.”

“Thank you,” Emmy murmured, the most she could say at that moment.

A long pause followed as Emmy and Julia stared at the room that was to be theirs.

“Would you like to settle in and unpack first? Or would you like to do that later and come outside to the garden for a little tea?” Charlotte said.

Julia finally found her voice. “May we see the chickens?”

Charlotte laughed. “Of course! Right this way.”

She turned to leave and Julia was right on her heels, grabbing Charlotte’s hand as she stepped out of the room.

Watching Julia so easily reach for Charlotte’s hand took Emmy aback for only a moment.

Half a moment, really.

That was how long it took her to realize this situation was perfect—for Julia.

She would write a letter that very night and give Mrs. Crofton her new address. When the day came that Mrs. Crofton informed Emmy that Mr. Dabney had returned to London, she could sneak away, and leave Julia here with no reservations whatsoever. Julia would be happy here. And Emmy would be happy to be returning to London and getting on with her life. Everyone would be happy.

Emmy followed her sister.

WITH
teacups in hand, Charlotte and Emmy settled onto padded metal chairs in the shade of a towering poplar tree while Julia scampered about the garden. Rose trailed after Julia with casual but undeniable interest. Paved in Cotswold stone, the little terrace where they sat sipping tea was surrounded on three sides by more trees, flower beds, a sizable vegetable garden, orchard trees, a chicken coop, and, beyond the perimeter of Charlotte’s property, a murky pond that ended in reeds and a horizon of pearl-blue sky.

“I don’t need to worry about Julia getting too close to the pond, do I?” Emmy said as Julia skipped after a pair of wood ducks waddling toward the water.

“It’s quite shallow at the edge. Unless you think she will run headlong into it,” Charlotte replied. “I’m sure she will be fine. And Rose will get after her if she goes too close.”

“She will?”

“Well, not necessarily because she senses danger. She just knows how I feel about muddy shoes in the house.”

Emmy took a sip of her tea and sat back in her chair.

“You’ve felt responsible for your sister for a long time, haven’t you?” Charlotte said, but her gaze was on Julia a hundred yards away.

For a second Emmy wasn’t sure how to respond. She sensed admiration in Charlotte’s tone, or maybe solidarity as she had obviously taken on responsibility for her own sister, Rose, albeit to a much greater extent. “I suppose I have. It’s not like I had a choice. Our mum’s not . . . She’s not like most mothers. She’s . . .” Emmy’s voice fell away. She didn’t know what word she was looking for.

“She’s ill?”

Emmy shook her head and a tiny laugh escaped her. “No. She’s not ill. She’s . . . She was only sixteen when she had me. She’s never been married and Julia and I don’t even have the same father. Her mother—my nana—was hard on her. They didn’t get on very well. I think maybe Mum’s getting pregnant—both times—was something my nana never forgave her for.”

“And yet it takes two people to create a baby,” Charlotte said gently, pouring more tea into her cup from the teapot sitting on a little table between them. She offered the pot to Emmy, who silently extended her cup.

Charlotte’s soft but candid tone surprised Emmy. Mum had spoken to her from time to time about men, mostly how Emmy should not trust the ones who liked to say nice things about how she looked. Mum never talked about sex with Emmy. Everything Emmy knew about how babies were made she had learned from classmates at school in hushed conversations peppered with twittering laughter.

“Did neither father provide for your mother?” Charlotte continued when Emmy said nothing.

“Uh, well. Neville—that’s Julia’s father—he liked being a father when it was convenient for him and when it didn’t get in the way of things he liked better. And he didn’t know how to handle money, if that’s what you mean. Whenever he had any, he spent it as soon as he got it. He was an actor. And was unemployed a lot of the time.”

“Was?”

Emmy looked to Julia running up and down the bank of the pond. “He died in a car accident in Dublin not too long ago.”

“Oh. I’m very sorry.”

Emmy brought her attention back to Charlotte. “Julia doesn’t know he’s dead. She thinks he’s still in India. Mum has always made up stories about where Neville was when he would disappear, so that’s where she thinks he is. It’s been a year since she’s seen him.”

Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. “I see. And Julia doesn’t ask about him?”

“Sometimes. She can go for weeks without mentioning him, and then she will see something that reminds her of him and she’ll ask when he’s coming back.”

“Strange that she calls him by his first name, isn’t it?”

Emmy shrugged. “It suited him. And Julia didn’t care. She liked him because he’d bring her trinkets and toys now and then, and he never did any of the things that little children wish their parents wouldn’t do, like make them mind or insist they eat their vegetables or demand they clean their room.”

“So you don’t think she should be told he has died?”

“It’s Mum who thinks she shouldn’t be told. She found out he was dead the same day the evacuation
notice came. Mum said it was too much for Julia to handle all at once. She made me promise I wouldn’t say anything. So I haven’t.”

Off in the distance, Rose knelt down and Julia followed suit. Rose was showing Julia something in the water.

“One of the turtles, probably,” Charlotte said, as if reading Emmy’s mind. “We’ve several that prefer our edge of the pond.”

Emmy watched as Julia put her hand in the water, squealed with delight, and drew it back out.

“And what about your father, then, if I may ask?” Charlotte said.

Emmy hesitated a moment before answering. “You can ask, but I haven’t much to say about him. I don’t know who he is. Mum said he was not someone I ever needed to think about.”

Charlotte furrowed her brow. “So she was not in love with him?”

Again, Emmy shrugged. “I guess not. I don’t know. She met him at a party, apparently. And she had been drinking.”

“At such a young age?”

“It happens.”

“And no one held the young man responsible?”

Emmy had always pictured Mum having met someone a bit older than she was at the party who had changed the course of her life, not another teenager like herself. It wasn’t until Emmy was sitting there with Charlotte, discussing the very thing Mum and Nana never talked about, that she suddenly realized that if her father was a few years older than Mum, then he’d taken advantage of an underage girl, and that was against the law. He would have been arrested if Mum had named
him. That Emmy had never given this any thought irritated her.

She looked up at Charlotte, and her face must have revealed that she had realized something she hadn’t considered.

“What is it, dear?” Charlotte said.

“Nothing.” Emmy drained her cup.

It all made sense. No one had held her father responsible because Mum hadn’t identified him. That was why there was such animosity between Mum and Nana. Any parent whose barely sixteen-year-old daughter ended up pregnant would want to know who the father was. If Mum had refused to say, which surely was the case, it could only have been for one of three reasons that Emmy could think of: She had been protecting the man, she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know his name, or she had struck a deal with him.

Emmy set her cup down on the little table, angry that she had let herself be satisfied for fifteen years with such vague answers about who her father was.

“Emmeline?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

A slight pause. “Of course.”

At that moment Julia called for Emmy to come look at the baby turtles. She and Charlotte rose from their chairs, and Emmy was thankful that the conversation she had wanted to end fell away, but only partially so. She knew she would revisit it in her strange bed that night.

A few seconds later they were all at the water’s edge, and Julia was pointing to several young turtles swimming in the shallows, their little armored backs glistening. A few feet away, the wood ducks that Julia had
followed paddled toward the pond’s center. A pair of dragonflies darted past them and skimmed across the water’s surface.

Surrounded by such pastoral splendor, Emmy found it hard to believe there was a war going on.

Her presence there at a pond in the middle of nowhere was the only proof that there was.

*   *   *

WHEN
they came back inside the cottage, Emmy and Julia went upstairs to unpack and put their clothes away. Charlotte told them that for this first night they could relax in their room while she prepared supper downstairs, and that tomorrow the three of them would sit down and decide who would do what chores.

As Emmy hung up one of Julia’s dresses, her sister asked what Charlotte had meant by that.

“I imagine she expects we will do our fair share here. Setting the table, clearing it, taking out the rubbish. That sort of thing.”

“Do you think she will let me feed the chickens?”

Emmy slid the hanger onto the rung inside the wardrobe. “I am sure she will. Hand me your jumper.”

Julia handed the sweater to her and snapped her suitcase closed. “It’s not as bad here as I thought it would be. Aunt Charlotte’s nice. And her house smells pretty.”

“Pretty isn’t a smell, Jewels. Slide your suitcase under your bed like I did with mine so you won’t trip over it.”

“Why don’t you want to call her Aunt Charlotte?” Julia asked as she pushed the suitcase past the bed skirt.

“I’m too old to call someone ‘aunt’ who is not my aunt. But you’re young. It’s fine for you.”

Julia rose from her knees and sat heavily on her bed. “What are we supposed to do now?”

Emmy closed the wardrobe door. “What would you like to do?”

“Can I look at the brides?”

“Not now.”

“Why?”

Emmy didn’t have a good reason other than she was tired and it was near the end of a very trying day. “Maybe later. Why don’t you write a letter to Mum instead. You can tell her all about the ducks and turtles.”

“All right, but I’ll need help with the big words.”

Emmy told Julia she would help her with any word she didn’t know how to spell. She opened the desk drawer. Inside, Emmy found three different shades of writing paper, several sharpened pencils, and a fountain pen. It was exciting to think that she now had plenty of paper to continue sketching dresses. Emmy had planned to buy some drawing paper with her first month’s pay, but specialty paper was also being rationed and thus becoming harder to find. She decided she would make it a goal, starting the next day, to sketch a new gown every week so that she would have something to look forward to. For the moment, though, Emmy withdrew two pieces of paper—one for each of them—a pencil for Julia, and the fountain pen for herself, to write letters.

Emmy let Julia have the desk while she sat on her bed with Julia’s fairy tale book on her lap for a writing surface. While Julia wrote about the train ride, the dead bird in the street, the yellow bedroom, Charlotte’s and Rose’s long braids, and their lovely garden, Emmy penned a letter, too.

Dear Mrs. Crofton:

My sister and I are staying with an older woman named Charlotte Havelock in a tiny place not far from Stow-in-the-Wold in Gloucestershire. I would be very much in your debt if you could let me know when your cousin returns to London so that I might meet with him as we planned. I will continue to work on new sketches and I will ask Mrs. Havelock if she has a sewing machine that I can practice on while I am here. I hope to see you again very soon and I trust you will be safe.

Yours truly,

Emmeline Downtree

Thistle House
3 Maugersbury Road
Stow-on-the-Wold,
Gloucestershire

P.S. I still have the back door key you gave me.

They were called to supper just as Emmy was finishing addressing their letters. She brought the envelopes downstairs to be posted in the morning. Charlotte had set the table in the dining room for their first meal to mark the occasion. When Emmy asked about how to post the letters, Charlotte seemed pleased that the girls had been upstairs writing home.

“Your mum will be glad to hear from you girls,” she said as she placed a dish of parsleyed potatoes on the table and motioned for them to choose chairs. Rose, already seated, was unfolding and refolding her napkin.

“Emmy didn’t write Mum. Only me,” Julia announced as she plopped onto a chair.

Charlotte raised her head slightly to look at the two
envelopes in Emmy’s hand, surely wondering to whom Emmy had written. “We can post your letters tomorrow. Perhaps we can walk to town and do that. It’s only half a mile. Be good to stretch your legs.”

“I need new wellies,” Rose announced, not looking up from her folding.

“Your wellies are in fine shape, Rose. But we’d love for you to come with us. Emmeline, dear, please do have a seat.”

Emmy took the chair next to Julia while Charlotte brought in a plate of sliced ham, something the sisters hadn’t seen since Christmas.

When Charlotte was seated as well, she held her hands out to her sister, and to Emmy on her other side.

“Shall we thank God for your safe arrival?”

It had been a long time since Emmy and Julia had been in the same room with someone who spoke to God out of reverence. She took her sister’s other hand and bowed her head, peering at Julia to see whether she was doing the same.

Charlotte’s prayer was brief and to the point. She thanked God for the girls, asked that they and everyone they loved would be kept safe during this uncertain time, and that they all would be always thankful for God’s gracious provision. While they ate, Julia chattered about what their flat was like in London, the long-ago trip to Brighton Beach, and how much she hated the air raid sirens. Emmy let her carry the conversation, which Charlotte and Rose seemed to enjoy very much, leading her to believe the two elderly sisters had little exposure to the animated prattle of a child.

After the girls helped with the dishes, the four of them settled in the parlor to look at Charlotte’s family photographs. Night fell. Charlotte switched on several lamps and pulled the blackout curtains down, shutting out a sky full of stars.