Secrets of a Charmed Life (18 page)

EMMY
had never been to a morgue before, makeshift or otherwise.

The sheet-covered bodies lay on the school cafeteria floor, where only six months earlier children had eaten sausages and peas at sturdy wooden tables. The fallen were arranged in even rows, each one with a cardboard label affixed to the chest, identifying them by name—if it was known—and where they had been killed. Several officials moved about the rows, escorting next of kin to the draped body of the family member they’d been looking for, lifting a corner of the covering, and revealing just half the face; all that a mother or brother or son or grandparent needed to see to identify and claim their beloved.

Emmy would not be able to recall every step to the school-turned-morgue or how she managed to remember
the directions after she was told how far she needed to walk to claim her mother’s body.

She did remember being asked how old she was when at last her voice returned and she whispered to the volunteer at the IIP that Mum’s name was among those on the list of the dead.

The first lie came off her lips as easy as air out of a burst balloon.

To have said she was fifteen and orphaned was to have sentenced herself to a children’s home or worse. A social services worker would have been summoned. Emmy would have been escorted away. She wouldn’t have been able to return to the flat. She wouldn’t have been able to keep looking for Julia, whose name was not on the list.

Not on the list!

Emmy was all Julia had. She had to stay on her own. She had to.

“Eighteen,” Emmy had said.

And where was her father?

The second lie came just as effortlessly.

“Recovering in hospital. We got separated Sunday night.”

Kind condolences were offered to Emmy but she did not want the woman’s sympathy. She wanted nothing from her that would give weight and substance to yet another grief.

Emmy was tired of weight and substance. Tired of fear, of anguish, of hunger, of thirst, of despair.

She wanted to feel nothing.

It had taken supreme effort not to press her hand to the woman’s mouth and tell her to shut up about the terrible loss of her mother.

“Where is she?” Emmy had said, and the woman told her how to find the temporary morgue that had been set up near Holborn station for unclaimed dead.

Every step had seemed like the ticking off of the days and weeks and months the war was taking from her. With one word, she allowed her sixteenth and seventeenth years to be swallowed whole by the enemy—taken as swiftly and surely as the war had stolen everything else that was hers. This was all she had been aware of as she strode forward.

She could be a child no longer. Emmy had to be done with immature worries and juvenile hopes.

Orphan was a word to describe a child without parents. Emmy was not a child.

She was Julia’s only living hope, and as such, her little sister’s guardian.

Julia was Emmy’s sole concern.

She would tell whatever lies she must to find her sister. Mum would want only one thing from Emmy now. To find Julia.

When Emmy arrived at the temporary morgue, she was eighteen. She felt eighteen. There would be no looking back.

She approached a haggard-looking city official with a clipboard who seemed to be in charge of receiving callers to the morgue. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.

“I’ve come about my mother,” Emmy said, surprising herself with how grown-up she sounded. “Her name is Annie Downtree. Anne Louise Downtree. I was told I would find her body here.”

The man looked at his clipboard. “Are you the next of kin?” His voice sounded as tired as his body looked.

“I’m her only kin.”

He looked up to study Emmy’s face, wondering perhaps how old she was. But Emmy knew she no longer looked like a child.

“My father passed away when I was young.” Again, the lie flew off Emmy’s tongue with hardly a moment’s thought.

“I’m so sorry for ye, lass. Truly I am.”

Emmy did not want his sympathy. “Where is she?”

Again he consulted his clipboard, and then he checked a ledger on a nearby desk. When he looked up, he shook his head. “We aren’t able to keep the unclaimed bodies more than a few days. We always make what inquiries we can. I am so sorry.”

An odd sensation rippled through Emmy. Fear? Emptiness? Dread? “What did you do with her?” she said, restrained emotion thickening her words.

He consulted his clipboard yet again. When he looked up, he rubbed his chin with his hand, the gesture of one about to say something he was afraid to say. “She was buried proper; I can tell you that. In Tower Hamlets. Just this morning.”

Emmy needed a moment to understand what the man was telling her. Mum had been buried already. She was buried. Buried. “What is Tower Hamlets?”

“It’s the public cemetery, miss. Not far from Charing Cross. They were all given proper burials.”

She swallowed a lingering sensation of loss and fear. “‘They’?”

“There were others what no one came for and who had no kin near as we could tell. They were buried proper. A vicar and everything.”

“A vicar,” Emmy echoed.

“Yes.”

Emmy started to teeter and she steadied herself against the wall.

“Miss?” he said.

“Where—where was she found?”

The man checked the ledger; a different page this time. “In the basement of the Sharington Crescent Hotel. The place took a direct hit, I’m afraid. The upper floors collapsed into the basement, I hear. No one sheltering in the basement survived. I’m sorry.”

A hotel. She was at a hotel.

“Where is this place?” Emmy said evenly.

“I’m sure it was quick, miss. I’m sure she didn’t suffer.”

He could be sure of nothing and he and Emmy both knew it. “Where is it?”

“Near Covent Garden, I think.”

“And there were others?”

“Others?” He blinked, wide-eyed.

“Others in the basement? Was she with someone?”

He blinked again. “Oh, aye, there were other victims, I hear. A dozen or so.”

“And they all came here?”

The man was trying to piece together why Emmy was asking so many questions. He stared at her. “No. Not all.”

“Just the ones no one came for,” Emmy finished for him.

He half nodded, embarrassed for her, possibly.

“We have what she was found with,” he said. “Her handbag and such. Those haven’t been stored away yet. Hold on.”

He disappeared into the kitchen and Emmy heard him speaking to a woman.

The man told her whose effects Emmy was after and the woman asked who wanted them.

“It’s the deceased’s daughter.”

“Daughter?” The woman sounded surprised. Emmy’s pulse quickened as the woman appeared in the doorway, her brow furrowed.

“Are you Anne Downtree’s daughter?” the woman asked as she approached Emmy.

Emmy felt a pulsing instinct to run.

“I am.” She swallowed the rising alarm.

“Your foster mother already got the telegram and brought you here?”

A second ripple of fear coursed through her. “Y-yes.”

The woman looked past Emmy to the door she’d come through. “We weren’t told you’d be coming today. I’m sorry to tell you that I could not have released your mother’s body to your foster mother even if I had wanted to. Is that what she was thinking? Is she outside waiting for you?”

Emmy had to get away.

But she had to pretend as if she didn’t.

“She is,” Emmy said slowly.

The woman frowned as if she’d been insulted. “And she sent you in here alone? Of all the—” She slammed the ledger shut and began to stride toward the door.

Emmy moved toward the woman, blocking her path.

“Please. I—I asked to come in alone. I wanted to see her on my own. My foster mother wanted to come in with me but I begged her not to.”

The woman’s disdain melted into something more like compassion.

“She’s waiting for me at the chemist,” Emmy continued. “My little sister has . . . She has asthma. We needed medicine. I’ll go get her.”

Emmy turned before either one could offer to accompany her. She strode toward the door as unhurriedly as she dared, without Mum’s handbag or whatever else she had on her when her body was found.

As soon as she was outside and around the corner, Emmy ran as fast as her legs could carry her.

Tears crept to the corners of her eyes as she sprinted down the street but Emmy savagely rubbed them away. After several blocks, and when her lungs were burning, she slowed to a walk, looking behind to make sure no one was coming after her.

So Charlotte had been sent a telegram that Mum had died. Would they come looking for her? Emmy wasn’t sure. Would the woman at the morgue assume that once Emmy told her foster mother that Mum had already been buried, they would opt for the first train out of hellish London? She would, wouldn’t she?

Even so, Emmy could not continue to stay at the flat, not now that she had been seen. Besides, there was no running water, electricity, gas, or food. She had to make other arrangements, but what?

Emmy had passed homeless shelters on the way back to Whitechapel, but whenever she had neared one of them, she smelled the fetid odor of unwashed bodies and makeshift latrines. She had no desire to stay in one. She could not go back to Mrs. Billingsley’s. The widow and her staff all knew how old Emmy was. They would contact social services.

Perhaps, though, Mrs. Billingsley could be persuaded to help her find Julia. If Emmy begged her? The woman had money. Apparently Mum had believed money was needed to do what the police could not or would not.

But would Mrs. Billingsley do that?

Emmy could not chance it.

She could go to no one that she knew; no classmate from school, or even a classmate’s family. She had to be eighteen-year-old Emmeline: a woman who did not yet exist in the eyes of anyone who knew her.

But where else could she go?

And then Emmy thought of Mrs. Crofton. Could Emmy convince her to let her stay with her? Emmy had missed the opportunity to become Graham’s apprentice but perhaps Mrs. Crofton would allow Emmy to stay with her while Emmy looked for Julia. Emmy would promise her that when she found her sister, she would return to Charlotte’s and she and Julia would stay in Stow for the remainder of the war, as they were supposed to have done. Yes, Emmy would do that. She would again have her brides box. She would find some way to regain the opportunity she had lost. Emmy would bring Julia with her back to London when the war ended. Perhaps Mrs. Crofton would allow her and Julia to board with her. Mrs. Crofton had had a daughter once, and she was fond of Emmy because of that. Emmy could tell that she was. She could pay for their room and board by working at the shop. And at night she would work on her gowns. Perhaps after the war, Mr. Dabney would give Emmy another chance. Emmy could still find a way to make Mum proud of her. Surely God allowed a dead mother glances from heaven at the children she had been torn from. . . .

Yes.

But Emmy didn’t know where Mrs. Crofton lived.

Hoping the shop had not been bombed, she decided to make her way to Primrose Bridal. She still had the back door key. She would wait for Mrs. Crofton there or poke about her desk, looking for the woman’s home
address. Surely Mrs. Crofton would understand the need to do such a bold thing.

Emmy quickened her steps, impatient to take what she needed out of the flat and get to the bridal shop.

She arrived back home as the sun dipped low in the sky. Emmy pulled a travel bag from Mum’s wardrobe and added to it the contents of her mother’s top bureau drawer, which included her stockings, a nightgown, a felt-lined jewelry box, and a few trinkets. She also stuffed inside three of her mother’s dresses, a pair of her slacks, gloves, and a pair of heeled shoes. Next, Emmy went into her old bedroom and took the remaining undergarments she had left behind, a few of Julia’s clothes so that when she found her sister, she’d have clean clothes to wear. Back downstairs, Emmy grabbed her satchel and tossed what was left of Thea’s food stores inside—and the hammer—and ran out of the flat and down the deserted street.

The sun was nearly gone from the horizon.

Emmy doubled her speed, running haphazardly with her awkward load.

Let it be standing,
Emmy whispered to the heavens.
Let Primrose still be there
.

She covered the four blocks to the shop in less than ten minutes, dodging debris and collecting stares all along the way. She reached the street and her heart plummeted to her knees. The building on the corner of the street was a smoking hulk.

But Primrose, four buildings down on the opposite side, still stood among the ruins.

EMMY
let herself into the bridal shop by its back door, certain that Mrs. Crofton wasn’t there, and yet she called for her as she stepped into the shadows.

She locked the door behind her and crept from the back entrance to the alterations room where she had first sewn a hem for Mrs. Crofton. Here, Mrs. Crofton had installed a blackout curtain for nights when she stayed late after business hours. Emmy lowered her belongings to the floor and reached up to the little window that overlooked the alley. She pulled the curtain down, securing it to the hooks Mrs. Crofton had nailed into the plaster. Emmy switched on the small table lamp by the sewing machine, grateful that the electricity on this side of the street had not been affected. A halo of sallow light fell about the tiny room. It was just enough brightness to see her way around but not enough to be detected by patrolling wardens and fire-watchers outside.

Emmy plugged in Mrs. Crofton’s hot plate, filled the teakettle, and for the first time since she had sat in Mr. Dabney’s elegant sitting room—a lifetime ago—she drank hot tea from a dainty, beautiful cup. Along with the tea, Emmy ate two slices of stale bread that she had taken from Thea’s kitchen, spread with marmalade.

In her rush to be away from the flat, she had not considered that she might need a blanket and a pillow this night. It was too dark now to rummage around Mrs. Crofton’s desk for her home address. Emmy would have to sleep at Primrose.

She stripped down to her underwear and, with water from the sink in the loo, she used a scrap of fabric from the alterations dustbin to wash the grit, dirt, and ash from her body. Then she stuck her head under the tap and washed her hair, repulsed by the swirls of dirty suds that accumulated at the drain as she massaged her scalp.

Emmy used a hand towel to dry off and then slipped on a pair of Mum’s slacks and a blouse to serve as pajamas. As she started to comb out the tangles with the brush she’d grabbed from Mum’s bedroom, she noticed it still held strands of her mother’s hair in the bristles.

She pulled the brush away from her head. As she gazed at the mingled strands, hers and Mum’s, a wave of grief swept over her. For hours, Emmy had kept the loss of her mother at a distance, refusing to acknowledge that Mum was dead. In her drastic measures to be able to keep searching for Julia, Emmy had not allowed herself to shed a tear for Mum. Not one. But now as she stood in the back room of the bridal shop, wearing Mum’s clothes and holding her mother’s hairbrush, the full weight of her loss came crashing in. Emmy sank to her knees, clutching the brush to her chest. The bristles pricked her skin like nettles through the thin fabric of her mother’s blouse.

The tears began to fall, rivers of them, as Emmy sat back on her bent knees.

“Mum,” Emmy murmured, as she thought of her mother’s hand on her cheek and the last words she had said to her—the last words she would ever hear her say—floated into Emmy’s mind.

Stay here and watch for your sister.

Don’t go outside after dark.

It’s not safe.

With those parting words, Emmy had suddenly been flung into an unfamiliar world falling apart all around her. She was alone in the very place where, only a few months ago, hope had been breathed into her dreams. Those dreams seemed thin as vapor now, spun by a different girl, someone Emmy barely recognized.

“Mum, Mum . . .” Emmy’s voice was hoarse as she pushed it past the anguish in her throat. She raised her hand to wipe away tears and caught the faintest whiff of Mum’s perfume on the sleeve of the blouse. Emmy folded herself to the floor and laid her head on the travel bag, clutching the hairbrush to her body just as the night before she had clutched the hammer. As she lay on the tiles, she began to shiver, and she screwed her eyes shut to take herself back to Brighton Beach, to that long-ago sultry weekend when Neville was still in Mum’s life. The sand had been warm between Emmy’s toes and a brilliant sun had been shining down on the water, making the surface of the sea look wired with tiny little flames. The white surf hitting the shore bubbled like bridal lace and Mum had been standing by Emmy as she dug her toes into the sand. They had been watching Neville and Julia play in the waves and Mum had reached down and laid a hand on her shoulder. Emmy had been reminded then of how it had been before Julia was born. When it
was just she and Mum. Emmy had been flooded with the memory of her and Mum splashing in a London fountain and Mum stroking Emmy’s hair and telling her someday she’d have everything she ever wanted.

And then Julia had squealed for Emmy to help her as Neville grabbed her around the middle and the two fell splashing and laughing to the water. Mum had laughed, too.

I guess you’d better go rescue her,
Mum had said, nodding toward the water.
It’s you she wants.

For a moment, a solitary pinch of time, she and Mum stood in the sand, looking out past the happy swimmers to the vast and endless Atlantic.

You’d better go rescue her
.

“I will, Mum,” Emmy whispered now as the sensation of the warm sand and hot sun began to fade away, replaced by the cold tiles.

Emmy had no sooner murmured this promise than the sirens began their dreadful wailing and she was forced to contemplate her options. If she ran outside to join those sprinting for the nearest public shelter, she would be noticed by the local ARP warden whose job it was to account for the civilians in his or her sector. She could run for the nearest Tube station, but those inside would wonder where she had come from that she could suddenly materialize out of nowhere and be in need of shelter in a space they’d been hunkering down in for weeks.

As the first whistling bombs began to fall, followed by the thundering claps of their detonations, Emmy instinctively crawled under the sewing machine. Then an explosion rocked the world outside and she knew she needed something to cushion her against shattering walls, if it came to that. And Emmy knew where she could find that protection. She came out from underneath the sewing machine and stumbled into the dark store, yanking
ebullient wedding gowns off their hangers as outside the air rocked with violence. She ran back into the alterations room, her arms overflowing with yards and yards of downy fabric. She scooted under the sewing table, then shoved the gauzy, generous gowns all around her until she felt she might suffocate. For the next seven hours, until four o’clock in the morning, Emmy crouched under the Singer as the Luftwaffe pummeled London, every word off her lips a promise to her mother.

When at last an eerie quiet signaled that daylight was not far away, she nodded off, enveloped by bridal gowns.

Emmy awoke midmorning and emerged from her white cocoon. Her head ached from mourning the loss of Mum, and a heavy numbness clung to her, but she still sensed relief that the street and the shop had not taken a direct hit. The toilet still flushed. The hot plate still worked. She could make tea. She found a bottle of aspirin inside a cabinet in the privy and took two.

With her teacup in hand, Emmy ventured out into the main room to steal a glance outside. As she was about to walk past the dressing room and Mrs. Crofton’s consultation desk, Emmy saw a suitcase, standing as if at attention along the wall. A pair of gloves rested neatly on top and a neck scarf was draped over one side. Mrs. Crofton was prepared to go away. Perhaps she would be coming by the shop today to get her suitcase and flee London. Perhaps Emmy could convince her to delay her departure for just a few days so that she could help Emmy find Julia.

Emmy saw a neat pile of documents at the edge of the desk closest to the suitcase, and the unmistakable shape and color of a British passport. The other documents were folded. She picked up the little pile of documents and unfolded the first two. Mrs. Crofton’s marriage license and her late husband’s death certificate. The other three pieces
of paper were her business license and her late daughter Isabel’s birth and death certificates. Emmy noticed that Isabel would have been eighteen on the coming Sunday had she lived. Such history bound up in such flimsy pieces of paper. Private pieces of paper.

Emmy put them back where she had found them as her burning cheeks reminded her they were not her documents. A stamped but unmailed envelope lay next to Mrs. Crofton’s private papers, addressed to Mrs. Talmadge, the woman who cleaned the shop on Friday mornings. Emmy reasoned that she needed to read what was written inside because she had to know what Mrs. Crofton’s plans were. She needed to ascertain whether Mrs. Crofton would be able to be of any help.

The letter had not been sealed. Emmy lifted the flap, drew out the single piece of stationery, and read what Mrs. Crofton had written: It was dated Sunday, September 8.

Dear Mrs. Talmadge:

I am closing the shop for a while, perhaps a long while, and leaving London to wait out the war with my cousin and his wife in Edinburgh.

We are leaving Tuesday morning, so I shall not need . . .

Emmy stopped reading.

Today was Thursday.

If Mrs. Crofton had left on Tuesday with Mr. Dabney, why had she not taken her suitcase? And her important documents?

Had Mr. Dabney not left yet?

In her heart Emmy rushed to believe this was the case, that Mr. Dabney had been detained because of
complications from the bombings, and that if Emmy just waited there at the shop, Mrs. Crofton would be by shortly to fetch her suitcase and papers.

Emmy could tell her what had happened. She could offer to wash by hand the gowns she had used for protection the previous night. Perhaps Mr. Dabney would allow her and Julia both to join them all in Edinburgh, once Emmy found her.

Mr. Dabney could write to Charlotte and have her send the brides box to him in Edinburgh.

It could all still work out. Maybe it was possible that Mum would one day, indeed, look down on Emmy from heaven and see that she had rescued Julia and made something of herself. Perhaps in heaven, a mother was allowed to feel pride in a child’s accomplishments after her death.

Perhaps in heaven, you could see that your existence on earth hadn’t been wasted.

Emmy just needed to find Julia and to have Mr. Dabney say he’d be fine with Emmy’s coming later and bringing her sister.

But even as she entertained these idyllic thoughts, doubt began to creep into her mind. Today was Thursday.

Mrs. Crofton had written the note Sunday.

She wasn’t going to be returning to the shop for her suitcase.

She had either fled with her cousin to Edinburgh without it, or she’d gone back home Sunday to get some forgotten thing, and the Luftwaffe had found her.

Emmy sank into a chair and dropped her pounding head into her hands.

There was a way to find out whether Mrs. Crofton had made it safely out of London. All she had to do was step
inside the nearest Incident Inquiry Point and peruse its appalling list.

But not today.

Emmy could not look at that list today.

She kneaded her forehead with her fingers, wondering how much more she could be expected to take. She had enough food for only a few more days, no ration book, no money, a place to call home for only as long as she could stay undetected.

She had to find a way to search for Julia. But how could she without money? Without Mum?

Mum . . .

Emmy dug her fingertips into her temples. She couldn’t think anymore about having lost Mum. She couldn’t start thinking about having lost Mrs. Crofton. Grief sapped her of mental clarity and made her feel weak. She could not be a companion to it now. All that mattered was finding Julia. Somehow she had to insert herself into the workings of the war effort so that she could be privy to what became of lost or abandoned children. She needed to volunteer somewhere so that she was in the know. With the Women’s Volunteer Service, perhaps. The women of the WVS were everywhere with their official badges, helping to ease suffering, administrating the evacuation of children to safety, serving food to the firemen, assisting the homeless and hurting. But how in the world was she going to pass herself off as an adult who had every right to be on the streets of London on her own in wartime?

Then out of the corner of her eye, she saw the little stack of papers.

And Isabel Crofton’s birth certificate.