Secrets of a Charmed Life (14 page)

Up in their bedroom Emmy laid out on her bed what she could fit in the satchel. The coin purse that held the only money she had—all of her paycheck from her two months’ work at Primrose and the little bit Mum had sent with them—a package of biscuits she had taken from the pantry, changes of underwear, toothbrush and paste, and the brides box, which she wrapped in a shawl so that the corners wouldn’t bite into her side as she walked the five miles to Moreton with the satchel over her shoulder.

The envelope inscribed with Charlotte’s name she had already removed from the brides box and it now lay on the bed.

“What did you write in Aunt Charlotte’s letter?” Julia asked.

“The same thing I wrote in yours.” Emmy picked up the letter and set it on the nightstand so that Charlotte would see it in the morning.

“But you have to tell her I went with you. She won’t know I went with you unless you tell her.”

Emmy had hoped Julia would not think of this. But as she stood there staring at Emmy, she knew she would have to do exactly what her sister said. Julia and she had been together every minute since she’d opened the brides box and found the envelopes. She knew Emmy hadn’t written anything additional in the note to Charlotte. Emmy decided it didn’t matter. In the morning when Julia awoke, Emmy would be long gone. Charlotte would put two and two together. She would understand why in
the first part of the letter Emmy asked her to watch over Julia and in the postscript she told her Julia was coming along, especially since Julia would be there to fill in all the blanks.

“Get me the pen off the desk.”

Julia did as she was told. Emmy retrieved the letter, lifted the single sheet of paper out, and smoothed it onto the nightstand.

Underneath where Emmy had signed her name she added:

P.S. Julia has asked to come with me
.

She put the note back inside its envelope and repositioned it on the nightstand. Then she told Julia to put on her pajamas.

“Why aren’t we sleeping in our clothes?” Julia said, frowning.

“Because they will wrinkle. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, do we?”

Julia shook her head gravely. Then she changed out of her clothes, draped them on the bedpost, and hopped under the covers.

Emmy had gotten into her own pajamas and was about to crawl into bed also when Julia sat up. “I need a drink, Emmy. I’m too excited. I’m thirsty.”

“You’ll have to use the loo if you drink too much.”

“Just a tiny sip, please? I won’t be able to sleep if I don’t have one. I’m too excited.”

Sighing, Emmy got up out of bed, opened the door, and headed downstairs. Rose had already gone to bed and Charlotte was locking the back door and turning out the lights.

A wave of guilt rushed over Emmy as Charlotte smiled at her and asked if there was anything she needed.

“Just a sip of water for Julia,” Emmy said.

Charlotte laughed lightly, grabbed a juice glass from the cabinet, and filled it half-full from the tap. “That enough?”

“Perfect,” Emmy said, taking it from her.

“Good night, Emmeline.”

“Yes. Good night. And thank you.”

Emmy could feel Charlotte’s gaze on her as she left the kitchen. Emmy wanted badly to run from those compassionate eyes. But she walked calmly with Julia’s water in her hand, took the stairs slowly, and opened the bedroom door.

Julia was sitting up in bed, eager for her drink. She gulped it down in one swallow.

“Won’t Mum be surprised to see us?” Julia said as Emmy took the glass from her.

Emmy stroked her sister’s head. It was difficult to stay angry with her. “Yes,” Emmy said, unable to say anything to the contrary.

She tucked Julia in.

“Wake me up when it’s time to go,” Julia said, yawning.

“Sweet dreams,” was Emmy’s answer.

She turned out the light and got into bed, turning her back to Julia so that her sister would not see that Emmy kept her eyes open.

When Julia’s breathing was slow and even, Emmy turned over, parted the blackout curtains, and watched her sister sleep in a spill of moonlight. She gazed up at the sky outside the window, thankful for the cloudless blanket of stars and generous moon.

She did not mean to doze at all, but the next thing Emmy knew, the clock downstairs was chiming two.

She sat up in bed, grateful it was only two and not
later. Emmy could not risk falling asleep again. She got out of bed quietly and listened for any sounds in the house that would indicate that Rose or Charlotte was awake. Hearing nothing, Emmy slipped off her nightgown and stuffed it into the satchel. She dressed in the same clothes she had worn the day before, grabbed her jacket from the back of the desk chair, and bent to retrieve the satchel. When her knees straightened, an owl hooted outside their window and Julia’s eyes snapped open.

“Is it time to go?” she whispered.

Emmy’s mind raced for a way out of this predicament. She had time. She could wait a little longer.

“Not yet. Go back to sleep.”

Julia sat up. She saw Emmy’s made bed, and that her big sister was in her street clothes. “Why aren’t you still sleeping?”

“I—I just can’t sleep anymore.”

Julia tossed her legs over the side of her bed. “Me, neither.”

“Jewels, it’s not time to go yet.”

“But I’m not sleepy anymore.”

As Emmy pondered her response, the voice of reason seemed to murmur just at the edge of sound that this was a moment that demanded she weigh the consequences, consider the possible outcomes. She stood at a crossroads, half-aware that her choice would send her down a path from which there could be no turning back.

But instead of two choices, she saw only one—because it was all she really wanted to see.

Emmy mentally shooed the whispering voice away.

She would look back on that moonlit night and wonder and wonder and wonder what she would have done had she considered that the owl that awakened Julia was divinely sent so that she wouldn’t leave Thistle House that
night. Had it been summoned to the tree outside the window and called her little sister out of sleep so that Emmy might stop and consider that there is always, always the other road to choose, even if it seems to be nothing more than an unpaved path in the middle of nowhere?

On that night, the night Julia could not fall back asleep, Emmy saw only what she wanted to.

“All right,” Emmy said, sighing as loud as she dared. “Let’s go, then. Don’t make a sound, Julia. Not a peep.”

As Julia dressed by moonlight and Emmy made her bed, Emmy decided she would take Julia straight to the flat. If Thea wasn’t home, she’d tell her sister to wait for Mum to get home from work. Emmy would still have plenty of time to make it to Knightsbridge by four. She would deal with Mum’s anger later, if she had to. And as for Julia . . . Well, Mum could easily get her sister back to Thistle House on Sunday. Easily.

Mum had the address.

She had the day off.

She owed Charlotte a visit anyway.

There was nothing to worry about.

Emmy grabbed her satchel, and together she and Julia tiptoed soundlessly down the stairs, out the front door, and into the sparkling night.

KENDRA

A
rap at the door startles me, but Isabel merely turns her head toward the sound.

The door opens slightly and Beryl pokes her head inside the parlor. “Can I freshen the pot for you ladies?” Her words are polite, but the tone and her facial expression are fraught with worry. I can see that she’s concerned the interview is taking too long, that I am exhausting Isabel and potentially sabotaging the party.

“I am quite happy with the two cups I’ve had,” Isabel replies without a moment’s hesitation or a hint of fatigue. She turns to me. “Kendra? Would you care for more tea?”

“No, I’m good. But thank you very much.”

Isabel directs her attention back to Beryl. “You can take the tea tray, dear.”

Beryl enters the room, her anxiety only slightly lessened
as she hoists the tray. “Is there anything else I can get for you? Are you needing to rest, Auntie? Do you want your medicine now?”

“No, but thank you. We’re fine.”

Beryl turns toward us before she leaves the room. “If I can bring you anything else—”

“We’ll be sure to let you know. Don’t worry about us. You attend to the party details, Beryl.”

“Right, then,” Beryl says, obviously unconvinced as she closes the door behind her.

I turn my attention back to Isabel. She doesn’t exhibit signs of fatigue and yet surely she must be tired after having talked without stopping for the last hour or so. I am thankful for the full charge on my recorder’s battery. I have written nothing on my notepad, so spellbound have I been. From behind where Isabel sits, I see one of her Umbrella Girl paintings and I know now where the polka-dot umbrellas came from, though I don’t know how. I only know that Isabel is somehow connected to the story she is telling me about the two sisters, one named Emmeline and the other, Julia.

Furthermore, we are sitting in Thistle House. Part of the story she is telling me happened right here in this room.

Isabel inhales deeply, as if needing a fresh charge of oxygen to continue. I am about to ask her if she would like to take a break after all, when she speaks.

“You, being a history major, probably know what these two sisters were headed into, don’t you, it being the seventh of September.”

I nod. “The Blitz began that day.”

Isabel takes a handkerchief out of her skirt pocket and blots her nose, gently and with practiced gentility. “Indeed it did.”

“But Emmy couldn’t have known that.”

“No. No, she could not.” She folds the handkerchief and places it on the table next to her.

Then she laughs gently. “It is strangely amusing how proud Emmy was for getting herself and her little sister to Moreton, in the dark, after carrying Julia when her feet and legs got tired. And then they had to hide in the ladies’ room like mice until the ticket office opened. Emmy had thought of a good excuse for needing train tickets to London while they walked, not that it should have been anyone’s business. But she knew the station master would be curious. Children didn’t travel to London those days; they left it, by the thousands. So she told the ticket man their mother was deathly ill and that their aunt had called them back to the city to say a quick good-bye before she passed from this life to the next. Oh, Kendra. Such looks of sympathy they got then. The porter—whom they didn’t need because of course they had no luggage—and the conductor, and everyone went out of their way to be kind to the poor girls whose mother lay dying. So convincing was Emmy that she had to whisper several times to Julia while the train rumbled down its tracks that she’d made it all up. Julia was nearly convinced Mum was on her deathbed, too.

“And when they stepped out of the Tube at the station near their flat, you’d have thought Emmy had pulled off the greatest feat in modern history. That’s how proud of herself she was.” Isabel laughs with more energy. “And all the while the greatest feat was actually happening already as hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots climbed into their cockpits.”

Her smile dies away slowly. Then she turns to me.

“Did you know, Kendra, that the RAF pilots who
saw the German bombers headed for the coast of England had never seen so many aircraft in the air all at the same time? Never had they seen the likes of it. Their coming was like a sheet of black across the sky.”

“I—I can’t even imagine.” I am at a complete loss for words and already anxious about what she is preparing to tell me. It can’t be anything good.

“No. Of course you can’t. The radar station at Foreness was the first to pick them up, even as Emmy was making her way to Knightsbridge. Isn’t that astonishing? Those planes were already in the air, already streaming toward London, as Emmy walked to her appointment, and no one had any idea.”

Isabel seems to withdraw into a protected place where the details of that seventh day of September are kept. She learned of these details after the fact, perhaps months later, maybe years later, and it appears that she filed them away, to bring them out now, with me.

“There was all of London, going about its Saturday afternoon business. A WAAF corporal at the radar station was confused by the size of the formation on the radar screen and she called for one of her superior officers. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. ‘What is that?’ she probably said, pointing to the monstrous cloud on the screen. Can’t you just see her, Kendra?”

I nodded. I could see her.

“Then the Dover radar picked up the giant shadow, and then Rye,” Isabel continues. “And oh, the chatter as they took to their radios to warn their brothers at arms that an armada from hell was streaking across the Channel toward them.”

She pauses for a moment. I can almost hear the throaty hum of all those engines.

Isabel turns to the window as a breeze catches the lace and lifts it in our direction, almost in greeting. The laughter of a child outside wafts into the room.

“It started on the south side of the Thames at about half past four.” Her voice seems almost detached from her body. “Emmy was already finished with her meeting with Mr. Dabney when the sirens began to scream. And then everyone was running for shelter, and they heard the planes, and they felt the impact of what was happening at the docks. It was . . .” She stops and shakes her head as she struggles to find the right words. “It was as if the end of the world had begun. The end of everything.”

Then Isabel slowly raises her head to look at me. “For a long time, Emmy wished it had been the end of the world. A very long time.”