The War that Saved My Life (12 page)

“I thought I was allowed to go outside,” I said. My foot hurt, worse than it had for days. I hadn’t walked so far without my crutches since I’d first come here. I had a scratch down my arm too, that had left a thin trail of blood.

“You can’t leave without telling me,” Miss Smith said. She looked less angry, but still unpredictable. “You’ve got to let me know where you go.”

How could I have done that? “I had to help Maggie,” I said. I told her about the horse, how the plane spooked it, how Maggie fell.

Miss Smith snorted. “Maggie? Who’s Maggie?”

I tried to explain. I told about the big horse, and the house and stables.

“The Honorable Margaret Thorton?” Miss Smith asked, her eyes widening. “Lady Thorton’s daughter?”

I shrugged. “I suppose. She’s got a brother called Jonathan.”

“The girl we met with Lady Thorton, last week in the market?”

I nodded.

Miss Smith sat down in the other chair. “The whole story,” she demanded.

I told the whole story, except for the part where Maggie said bad words. Miss Smith straightened up. Her face looked grim. “So,” she said. “You rode Jonathan Thorton’s prize hunter double with Miss Margaret, back to her home?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t believe you,” Miss Smith said.

I didn’t know what to say. I told lies, of course I did. But I wouldn’t lie about this. I’d been helpful. I’d done a good job, getting Maggie and the horse home. Grimes had said so. He’d tipped his cap to me, when I got out of the car.

“I wouldn’t know where she lived,” I said, “if it wasn’t true.”

“Oh, I believe you saw the house,” Miss Smith said bitterly. “I believe Miss Margaret rode by, and you saw them and followed them. Look at the state you’re in—foot bleeding again and everything. I believe you saw Margaret, the horse, and the house. I just don’t believe any of the rest of it.”

My mouth opened, then shut. I didn’t know what to say.

“Go to your room,” Miss Smith said. “Wash yourself off in the bathroom, then go to your room and stay there. I don’t want to see you again today. I’ll send Jamie up with some supper once he’s home.”

Hours later Jamie came up with a plate for me. “How was school?” I asked.

“I hate it,” he said, his eyes dark. “I’m never going back.”

Later still Miss Smith came up with her horrible book. She sat down on the chair on Jamie’s side of the bed, and she opened the book without looking at me. I ignored her too. Jamie snugged himself into the blankets. “What happens next?” he asked, as though the book was something he cared about.

“You’ll see,” Miss Smith said, smiling at him. She opened the book and started to read.

Next morning at breakfast Jamie said again he wasn’t going back to school. “Of course you are,” Miss Smith said. “You want to learn to read. Then you can read
Swiss Family Robinson
all by yourself.”

Jamie looked up at her through his eyelashes. “I’d rather you read it to me,” he said sweetly. Miss Smith smiled at him, and the thought ran through me that I hated them both.

Out in the field that afternoon, I couldn’t make Butter go faster than a walk. I tried and tried. I kicked and squeezed with my legs. I even snapped a branch off a tree and smacked Butter’s side with it. He lurched forward for a few stumbling steps, but dropped back almost immediately to his usual shuffle. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t elegant like Jonathan’s horse, but I was sure he could do better if he tried.

Miss Smith opened the back door. “Ada,” she called, “come here, please.”

Right. I pretended I hadn’t heard, and turned Butter so our backsides faced her.

“Ada,” she called again, “you’ve got a visitor.”

Maggie? Grimes?
Mam?
I slid off Butter, pulled the bridle off his head—I wasn’t going to get chewed out for leaving it on him again—hobbled to my crutches leaning against the wall, and went into the house as quickly as I could.

The visitor was Lady Thorton. She was smiling. Her face looked different when she smiled.

“She’s come to thank you,” Miss Smith said, in an oddly stiff voice.

I stood in the doorway, staring at them, hiding my right foot behind my left. To break the silence I said, “How is she? Maggie, I mean.”

Lady Thorton—Maggie’s mum—patted the empty spot on the sofa beside her. I sat down on it, folded my hands, and slid my right foot behind my left.

“She’s much better today, thank you,” Lady Thorton said. “She woke with a headache, but she knows where and who she is.”

“She seemed all right when she first came off,” I said. “She got worse as we went on.”

Lady Thorton nodded. “Head injuries can be like that. She tells me she doesn’t remember much of what happened. She remembers you were there, but that’s about all. Grimes in the stable told me how you brought her home.”

I glanced at Miss Smith. Her face still looked stiff, like it was made from cardboard. I said, nodding toward her, “She didn’t believe me, that I rode that horse an’ all.”

Lady Thorton opened a box near her feet. “I might not have believed it myself without a witness. That’s not an easy horse.”

“He likes me.” It slipped out before I thought, but I realized it was true. Jonathan’s horse did like me.

Now Lady Thorton’s face looked strained. “Then you’re the third person that animal has ever actually liked, after Grimes and my son.” She shook her head, once, sharply, and her face took on its official look. The iron-face look. “I brought over some clothing for you and your brother. Your brother’s is from an assortment of village families. Yours is mostly from my daughter. Things she’s outgrown. Here.”

She laid a pair of yellow pants and a pair of ankle boots across my lap. I stared at them. The pants were made of a thick, tough fabric, with legs that ballooned wide at the top, then narrowed and buttoned below the knee. I recognized them: Maggie had worn a pair just like them the day before. “For riding,” I said. I’d never worn pants before. It would be easier, on Butter.

Lady Thorton nodded. “Yes. I’m sure Miss Smith’s helping you, but I didn’t think she’d be able to find you the proper clothes.”

Miss Smith said, very softly, “I haven’t helped her. She’s done it on her own.”

Lady Thorton looked me up and down. “Margaret needs to stay in bed a few days. She won’t be able to ride again before she leaves for school. But if you have questions about horses, you can always go to our stables and ask Grimes. I know he’ll help you.”

I noticed she wasn’t offering to help me herself. I said, “Butter doesn’t want to go fast. I don’t know how to make him.”

She gave a little laugh, and tapped my knee as she stood. “Persistence,” she said. “Ponies are stubborn until they know who’s boss. Enjoy the new things.”

Miss Smith saw her out. When she came back in, she sat down in Lady Thorton’s place. “I’m sorry,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “I didn’t mean to call you a liar.”

Sure she did. I shrugged. “I am one.”

“I know.” She began to empty the rest of the box of clothes. Shorts for Jamie, sweaters, shirts. Then she straightened. “No,” she said. “That’s wrong, I don’t know that. We both know you sometimes tell lies, but I can’t say that it makes you a liar. Do you understand what I mean?”

Blouses, sweaters, skirts for me. A red dress with lace on the cuffs. Coats for winter.

I touched the girl’s coat. Maggie’s coat. “Will I still be here in winter?”

“I don’t know,” Miss Smith said. “Do you understand what I just said? The difference between lying and being a liar?”

I shrugged. Miss Smith persisted. “If you have to tell lies, or you think you have to, to keep yourself safe—I don’t think that makes you a liar. Liars tell lies when they don’t need to, to make themselves look special or important. That’s what I thought you were doing yesterday. I was wrong.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. “Why is Maggie going away for school?” I asked instead. “Why doesn’t she go to school where Jamie does?”

“Rich people educate their children at boarding schools,” Miss Smith replied. “Margaret won’t have to leave school at fourteen to work, like most children do. She’ll stay at school until she’s sixteen or seventeen. If the war’s over by then she’ll probably go to finishing school. She might even go to university.”

“What kind of school did you go to?” I asked.

“A boarding school,” she said. “Not because my family was rich—they weren’t. I was bright and my father is a clergyman, and some schools offer scholarships to the bright daughters of clergymen.”

“What’s a clergyman?”

“You know—a vicar. A man who runs a church.”

The “you know” kept me from asking more. “Churches are where the bells are.”

“Yes,” said Miss Smith. “Only they aren’t going to be allowed to ring the bells anymore. Only in case of invasion, to warn us.”

I smoothed the pants with my hand. Tomorrow I’d wear them. The left boot too.

“Ada?” Miss Smith said. “I wish I’d believed you.”

I darted a quick glance at her and shrugged again.

When Jamie came home it was obvious he’d been crying, but he wouldn’t say why. He wet the bed in the night and woke up miserable. Outside, gray clouds were spitting rain. “I can’t go to school in the rain,” Jamie said.

“Of course you can,” Miss Smith replied. She looked awful, her hair every which way and great dark circles under her eyes. She held her mug of tea in both hands and stared into it.

“I ain’t going,” Jamie said.

“Don’t start with me,” Miss Smith replied.

We sat down to breakfast and a plane blew up at the airfield.

It crashed, I guess. It didn’t blow up in the air, it blew up because it slammed into the ground. The gas tank ruptured. We learned that later. It sounded like a bomb exploding—like a bomb in Butter’s pasture. We all jumped up, knocking over dishes and chairs. I ran toward the door, toward Butter, but Miss Smith grabbed me and Jamie and pushed us beneath the table. After a moment when nothing else happened she got up and looked out the window. “Oh,” she said, “it’s an airplane.”

Under billows of black smoke across the road, we could see orange flames and twisted pieces of metal. Jamie cried out, and would have run to the airfield, but Miss Smith held him back. “No civilians,” she said. “No civilians, not now. See? They’re getting the fire out.” We could see servicemen and women, tiny in the distance, working frantically all around the burning plane.

“Who was the pilot?” Jamie asked. “Who was the crew?”

“We don’t know them,” Miss Smith said, stroking his hair.

“I knew them,” Jamie said.

I wasn’t sure how Jamie could know them—there was a big fence around the airfield now, and he knew he wasn’t allowed there, though of course that wouldn’t really stop him—but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to call him a liar, not over a dead airman.

“I wonder what kind of plane it was,” Miss Smith said.

“A Lysander,” Jamie said. “A transport plane. It could have had ten people on board.” We looked at him. He said, “That’s what it sounded like. Before the crash.”

I was so used to the sound of planes, I never paid attention to them anymore. The different kinds of planes didn’t sound different to me.