Secrets of a Charmed Life (22 page)

Charlotte studied Emmy’s face, looking for the girl she knew from before. “But that’s not who you are.”

“It’s who I am now,” Emmy said. “That other name means only misery to me.”

“But . . . you can’t just decide to become someone else, Emmeline. Inside, you are still you. I know you’ve been through hell, but you will—”

“I don’t want to be called that anymore.”

Again, Charlotte held Emmy’s gaze, and Emmy could
see fear, like an old neighbor, in the woman’s eyes. “What happened to Julia is not your fault.”

“Of course it is,” Emmy said. “I took her to London with me when I ran away and I left her alone in the flat.”

“But you didn’t know that—”

“I
took
her with me when I ran away. And I left her.
Alone
,” Emmy said again, louder and with a prickly vehemence that made Charlotte wince. Emmy could feel her pulse pounding in her head. Her hands were starting to shake.

“All right,” Charlotte said soothingly. “I will call you whatever you want. If you want to be called Isabel, I will call you Isabel.”

“Isabel is eighteen,” Emmy said in a challenging tone that a ten-year-old would employ. But she wanted Charlotte to know she was not like the other fifteen-year-olds in Stow. She would never be like them.

Charlotte rested her hand on top of Emmy’s. She flinched at first. “You, as Isabel, are more than welcome in my home,” Charlotte said gently. “Thistle House is for people who love and care for one another. We respect one another in this house, Emmeline. We carry one another’s burdens. We weep for one another and we laugh with one another. We hold one another by the hand when the lights go out and when the way seems hopeless. We work together and we share the table together and we pray together. No matter how old we are or what we are called.”

She waited for Emmy to respond that she not only understood but was also willing to abide by this contract. Emmy hesitated only because she had never known a house like that. It wasn’t that Mum was a terrible parent. She just never said words like that to Emmy. She didn’t think Mum believed she was capable of creating such a home.

“Emmeline?” Charlotte said, for what would be the last time.

“Yes.” Tears formed at Emmy’s eyes and she wiped them away. “I understand.”

“Then Isabel you shall be. But there will be conditions. I will need to inform Mrs. Howell in Moreton that you, Emmy Downtree, have come back and that you wish to continue to live with me. They must likewise be informed that Julia is missing so that they will be looking for her and will return her to us when they find her. Plenty of children here in the village finish their schooling at fourteen, so it will not raise an eyebrow if you do not attend classes here. But I insist you finish your education at Thistle House with me. And you
will
finish it. I will not allow you to stop learning just because you wish to be treated like an adult. Lastly, I must insist that you never run out of this house again without talking to me first. And I shall make that same promise to you. I won’t budge on any of these things. Are we agreed?”

Emmy nodded.

Charlotte reached for Emmy’s hands and clasped them in her own. “And I will pray every day that Julia comes home to us. I promise I will.”

Emmy’s voice felt thick in her throat but she wanted to express her gratitude to Charlotte, if nothing else than for a warm place to sleep that night. Emmy had grown used to expecting only as much good fortune as one day could hold. “Thank you,” she said, the two words coming out thin and splintered.

Charlotte patted Emmy’s hand under hers as if she had uttered her thanks with the boldness of a field general. “You’re welcome, Isabel.”

IT
was nearing the middle of November before Emmy felt well enough to rise from her sick bed on the parlor sofa and take her meals in the dining room with Charlotte and Rose. The attending physician at the hospital in London had said she was suffering from an advanced case of pneumonia, although Emmy knew it was more than that. She hadn’t the energy to climb the stairs, nor the courage to spend much time in the bedroom that she had shared with Julia.

Charlotte had driven out to Moreton-in-Marsh to inform Mrs. Howell that Emmy had returned, and as Emmy was too weak to accompany Charlotte, she did not have to go. There had been no word on Julia. It was recommended to Charlotte that she apply to be appointed as Emmeline’s legal guardian so that she could make decisions on her behalf until she came of age. She
asked Emmy if she was in favor of this and Emmy found it did not matter to her what Charlotte did or didn’t do for Emmeline Downtree. If she thought it made sense, she should do it.

Charlotte didn’t want to rush Emmy back into studies, so she allowed her to read what she wanted as she convalesced, and said that they would pick up on the sciences and mathematics after the Christmas holidays. Charlotte brought home a basket of books to her every Monday, even after she was well enough to go to the library in Stow on her own. Emmy preferred to stay with Rose and leave it to Charlotte to provide her with books to read. She had no desire to be seen in the village. Those who knew Charlotte surely also knew Emmy was that rebellious runaway who had lost her sister in the bombings. Emmy didn’t want anyone looking at her, staring at her, whispering about her. She was Isabel, not that other girl they thought she was. So she stayed at Thistle House unless it was absolutely necessary to go out. If Emmy had to go into town, Charlotte agreed to take her to Moreton, where hardly anybody knew who she was. Visits to the doctor, the dentist, the clothing store, the shoe store, all took place in Moreton where, except to Mrs. Howell, whom Emmy avoided as much as she could, Emmy was viewed as a London refugee named Isabel who was helping an older woman named Charlotte Havelock take care of her handicapped sister, Rose.

On the day that Emmy was to move back into the bedroom upstairs, Charlotte sat Emmy down after breakfast and asked her how she felt about taking in two evacuees, now that she was finally well again. The need for homes in the country was still great and there was room at Thistle House. Emmy was flattered that
Charlotte asked, because in truth, she didn’t have to. Emmy’s first reaction was to balk at any kind of intrusion into the carefully scripted world she was rebuilding for herself, but when Charlotte said there was plenty of room for a second bed in her bedroom and that Emmy could join her, which would make the yellow bedroom available, Emmy saw the beauty of Charlotte’s plan. She was handing Emmy a way of staying at Thistle House without having to sleep in the spare bedroom that she had shared with Julia. They both knew her plan was as much to insulate Emmy from the damning weight of her regret as it was to provide a home for evacuees.

When Emmy agreed, Charlotte asked if Emmy wanted to move her things from one room to the other, or if she preferred Charlotte did it. The wardrobe, desk, and bedside tables were still full of Emmy’s and Julia’s things. And the brides box was surely hidden in the crawl space in the yellow room; Emmy was sure of that, though she hadn’t been upstairs yet. Charlotte, who believed the sketches had been lost in the bombings, obviously hadn’t found the box shoved under a bed or stuck in a wardrobe after the girls had left, which meant the crawl space was the only place the box could be. Julia had had no time to hide it anywhere else.

As Charlotte waited for an answer, Emmy realized she wished the box
had
been lost in the bombings. She wanted it to have been blown to tattered bits. It would’ve been a fitting end to them. Emmy didn’t know whether she had the courage to do what the bombs should have done, for surely that was what she would have to do with those sketches when she had them in her hands again. She knew she couldn’t bear the sight of them, but would she be able destroy them? The burn pile out in the garden would be a willing partner if she was able to just toss them in.

“I’ll take care of it,” Emmy said to Charlotte.

Charlotte nodded and rose to begin making her inquiries.

Emmy headed up the stairs.

The room was cold and cheerless from having no warm souls sleeping in its beds at night. Emmy changed the linens first, stopping a time or two to stare at the little table along the wall as she assessed her readiness to be reunited with that which had parted her from her sister. The box was there; she needed only to crawl inside the narrow space and retrieve it.

She’d save that chore for last.

Emmy took a wicker basket and loaded up Julia’s few clothes, the dolls Charlotte had given her to play with, and the tea set. She put this basket on the floor of a smaller wardrobe in Charlotte’s room that had been emptied for Emmy to use. Then she moved her own things. Her satchel was gone, but she had Mum’s travel bag with the few things she had grabbed from the flat: Julia’s book of fairy tales, the felt-lined box of trinkets, and Geraldine’s hammer.

She hung up Mum’s clothes, which were hers now, put her box of trinkets on the extra bureau Charlotte and she lugged in from Rose’s room, and placed Julia’s book on the bookcase by the window. The hammer she held in her hands for a long time before sliding it between the mattresses of her new bed. She could not see placing it among Charlotte’s tools in the utility cupboard downstairs next to the loo. It wasn’t just a hammer to her. It was something else entirely: a steeled and weighted reminder of what she had been parted from.

Emmy went back into the yellow room and swept and dusted.

The room was clean now, and ready for its new
occupants. There was only one thing left to do. She propped the broom up against the wall and then moved the little table away from the wall, revealing the crawl space door. Emmy knelt before it and saw that it was slightly ajar, further proof that Julia had shoved the box inside in a desperate hurry. Emmy pulled the door open and its hinges squeaked a faint protest. She leaned forward on her knees and stuck her head inside, expecting to see the box lying there at an angle after being hastily shoved in.

It wasn’t there.

She dropped to her elbows and crawled halfway inside, letting her eyes adjust to the shadowed light as she felt around. She touched dust-covered piles of books, the frayed top of an embroidered step stool, a hobbyhorse, old shoes, and their button hook.

But no box.

No box.

Emmy withdrew from the darkness and sat back on her bent knees, unable to fathom where else Julia could have hidden it.

A queer ache pulsed inside her at the cruelty of not being able to find the box, but the ache was quickly and surprisingly replaced with relief. She would not have to be the one to destroy the sketches after all. They were gone and it did not matter how. Somehow, the brides had been taken as atonement for her offenses.

She only had to offer the rest of what Emmy had once been.

Emmy had been given what every penitent thief wants more than anything: a merciful way to compensate for what she stole.

She turned her hands over in her lap, empty.

And outside, a light snow began to fall.

HUGH
and Philip Goodsell, brothers ages six and eight, arrived on December 6. Emmy had not asked Charlotte to bring home boys, but as soon as she came into the house with them, Emmy was overwhelmed with gratitude that Charlotte had not brought home two sisters.

They were shy at first, having suffered a distressing period of homelessness after their flat near Horse Guards was bombed. Their parents had managed to find a place to live near Edgeware with a distant relative, but there wasn’t room for the boys, nor, after so close a call, was their father willing to give in any longer to their mother’s pleas that they stay together.

The boys took to Emmy like glue once she told them she had also lost her home in the bombings. After they managed to extract from Emmy that she had lost her mother as well, they took it upon themselves to find
ways to cheer her. They made pictures for her to hang on her wall, and fought over who got to play cards with her and who got to hang the washing with her. Charlotte told Emmy this was evidence of how much they missed their own mother.

The boys’ devotion at first surprised Emmy, but it soon became a soothing balm. She felt scraped and raw after her cleansing experience in the yellow room, as though she were knit together solely of the pink, fragile skin that was revealed when a sunburn sloughed off. Hugh’s and Philip’s affections lessened the sting of that newness.

Rose was jealous of the boys’ attentions toward Emmy; another reason for her to scowl incessantly at Emmy. Rose knew enough to understand that Emmy was somehow an extension of the girl who had been at Thistle House before, and occasionally she would ask Emmy, “Where’s the other one?” meaning Julia.

On several occasions Rose flat-out said to Emmy, as if it had suddenly dawned on her, that Emmy’s name wasn’t Isabel.

Once when she did this—in front of the boys, no less—Emmy leaned in toward Rose and told her she had a secret. Emmy had discovered that Rose loved secrets. She loved the word “secrets.” Emmy told her she wanted to be called Isabel because it was her favorite name. And that she would call Rose by her favorite name if she would tell Emmy what it was. Rose’s eyes glittered with the heady notion of being called by a name she loved far more than her own.

She leaned toward Emmy in return. “Ophelia,” she murmured.

Emmy told her that was a beautiful name and that she would call her that.

Rose’s reticence toward Emmy began to wane after
that. This was a good thing because since Emmy never wanted to go to the village, Charlotte went—most often with the boys in tow—and that meant Emmy stayed at Thistle House with Rose. Rose slowly began to prefer Emmy’s company to Charlotte’s, an oddity that Charlotte seemed to wish to find endearing and not a bit hurtful. She had cared for Rose for two decades, yet here was Emmy stealing away Rose’s affections after only a few weeks. When Emmy caught Charlotte looking injured at Rose’s continued deference to Emmy, she apologized for it, and Charlotte just said, “Don’t mind me.”

Rose seemed to think she and Emmy had a treasure trove of secrets between them now, when in reality they had just the one. And even that wasn’t a secret, since everyone heard Emmy call her Ophelia. But that one secret seemed like a thousand to Rose. And it made her happy.

Between caring for Rose when Charlotte was away from the house, minding the boys, and getting the house ready for the holidays, Emmy’s life seemed full of purpose. They prepared for Christmas—the five of them—by agreeing that they would only give one another presents they had made themselves. Emmy had long since put away the pieces of Charlotte’s wedding dress and had no desire to trifle with her bargain with God by sewing anything for anyone, so she used the money that Mac had given her and bought watercolor paints and canvases at an art store in Moreton. Emmy had never painted before, but she had found creative release and joy in sketching, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that she could find the same in painting?

At night, after the boys were in bed, Emmy would set up a makeshift easel in the laundry room by the privy, the only place where she had any privacy, and experiment with brushes, shades, and strokes. She painted
what she saw in the laundry room, which, that first night, was Charlotte’s umbrella, the very same one Julia had dreamed of owning one day. Over the course of the next few nights, a second painting took shape: a flaxen-haired nymph of a girl holding a red-and-white polka-dot umbrella with a curly licorice black handle, and walking in the rain down a flower-flecked path. It would be the first of many Umbrella Girls, though Emmy did not paint another for six years. That first one Emmy gave to Charlotte for their Christmas together at Thistle House. For Rose, she painted a trellis of roses, and for the boys, a horse for Hugh, and a sailboat for Philip.

She also helped the boys make gifts for their parents, and for Charlotte and Rose. They made calendars constructed from old greeting cards that the woman across the lane—the only one of the neighbors who didn’t crinkle an eyebrow when she called Emmy “Isabel”—was going to throw out and instead gave to Emmy for the boys.

During these weeks, Mac rang up from London several times, to say hello and give Emmy an update on his continued search for Julia. Emmy knew he would be spending Christmas in the hotel, so with Charlotte’s permission, Emmy invited him for supper. He rode the train with Hugh and Philip’s parents, who had also been invited.

As they all sat around the dining table Christmas Day with one of Charlotte’s fatter and recently retired laying hens serving as their Christmas goose, Emmy was astonished at how normal and wonderful the scene was. Even Philip and Hugh bickering over a chicken leg seemed perfectly sublime.

After dinner and before their train ride back to London, Mac asked to take a walk with Emmy. They bundled up against the chill and headed outside.

Emmy knew how the war was progressing; she and Charlotte listened to the wireless most nights after the boys and Rose were in bed, and they had a two-day-old newspaper once or twice a week to keep them abreast of what was going on. Emmy knew that more than twenty thousand ordinary people like her mum and Eloise Crofton had been killed in the Blitz since September, and that hundreds of thousands had been made homeless. Coventry had been decimated not long after Emmy returned to Thistle House, and terrible raids had been inflicted on Manchester and Liverpool in the days leading up to Christmas. More than forty thousand British soldiers had been made prisoners of war on the Continent.

Emmy did not particularly want to talk about those things as she and Mac stepped outside, but how could they not? The war was what had brought Mac and her together and the war was the only reason he was in England instead of at home in the States.

Mac told Emmy he was afraid the year to come—1941—was going to be a long one. Things would get worse before they got better.

But then he took her mittened hand in his as they walked up Maugersbury Road. “I’m glad you’re here in Stow, even though I hardly ever see you. London’s no place for a young woman like you.”

Emmy didn’t know what to say to this. Mac didn’t know her at all.

“I wish I had news of your half sister,” he continued when she said nothing. “I hate to tell you that I don’t. And on Christmas, too. The one thing you can hold on to is that there’s no record of her death.”

“I almost wish there was, because then I’d know.” Emmy exhaled heavily, her breath puffing away from her in vapor.

They walked in silence for several seconds.

“You must be very close to her,” Mac finally said.

“I am,” Emmy replied. “She was—is—very fond of me. She looked to me for protection. I was more like a mother to her than an older sister.”

“Her mother wasn’t around much?” he asked.

“She . . . was around. She just struggled to make ends meet. It was hard. I think she did her best.”

“And the father you shared passed away a while ago, right?”

The mingling of her lives in conversation made Emmy feel a little dizzy, as though she were spinning in a circle and if she stopped, she would topple.

“Right,” she said simply.

“What was he like, your father?”

They were just short of entering town, a good place to stop. Emmy needed to be careful of what she said. And remember every word. She stopped at a picket fence that bordered a cottage of Cotswold stone and stared at the gray skies beyond.

If Julia and she had shared the same father—which was what Mac believed—then Emmy would have memories of him; she was the older by eight years. Emmy reasoned that if she could blend Emmeline and Isabel into one, she could certainly combine her nameless father with Neville.

“My father wasn’t a very responsible person. He had charm and liked to be happy, but he didn’t know how to think beyond the moment.” As Emmy said this, she wondered how much was true of her own father, whoever he was. He had certainly charmed Mum with no thought to tomorrow.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mac stood close to her.

Emmy shrugged. “I’ve not spent any time mulling over it.”

He seemed surprised. “Really?”

“What good would it do? It won’t change anything. He was who he was. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life wondering why.”

Mac smiled. “Good for you.” He paused a moment. “So what
are
you going to spend the rest of your life doing? Assuming the Luftwaffe doesn’t kill us all.” He laughed lightly.

Emmy stared at the pointed slats of the fence. She didn’t have a plan for the rest of her life. Not anymore. “I really don’t know.”

A couple seconds of silence passed between them before Emmy realized she should ask him what his plans were. “What about you?”

Mac looked past the cottage, just as she had, to the colorless sky. “Well, if the Nazis don’t blow me to bits, I want to move back to Minneapolis or maybe Saint Paul, buy my own radio station, make a lot of money, marry, have a couple kids, retire at fifty.”

“That’s all?” Emmy said, and Mac laughed.

“I like knowing what I want out of life,” he said.

“Knowing isn’t having.” Emmy did not mean for it to sound bitter, but she tasted resentment on her tongue.

“But if you don’t know what you want, you can’t reach for it.”

She wanted to tell him that reaching hard for something you thought you must have, having it nearly in your grasp, and risking all to get it, could lead you straight to the heart of utter ruin.

But what would Isabel Crofton know of that?

“Want to meet in Oxford for the New Year?” he asked.

Emmy coughed to hide the breath he had stolen from her.

“I don’t mean at a hotel, Isabel. I mean at a party. A friend of mine in London has family there. It would be fun.”

Her eyes were watering at the curious exchange of air and breath and voice taking place in her throat.

“Maybe,” was all she could say.

But Mac did not make it to the party in Oxford on New Year’s. London was bombed two days before New Year’s Eve with such intensity that a firestorm swept across the city and nearly swallowed the East End whole. Five days passed before Mac rang Emmy and told her he was all right.

And so began 1941, the second year of the war.