Edward Denholm was the first to telegraph his imminent arrival in Kent, having got his leave in record time after his father’s fatal heart attack. Eleanor supposed the Royal Air Force was used to coping with the sudden disappearance of its pilots, the mortality rate for air crews being what it was. And he only had to find his way down from Yorkshire, which Eleanor knew he could do fairly easily, more traffic heading up the trunk line (replacement crews) than came back down.
Eleanor’s job in the Ministry involved transportation, and she was used to deflecting questions by claiming it was too boring to talk about, and it was. But the reason she’d signed the Official Secrets Act was that anyone looking into the manifests she filed could figure out the size and location of armed forces bases that the Ministry—not to mention the entire bombed-half-to-pieces country—would rather the Nazis not find out. Edward’s base didn’t seem to be large, but she had an idea it was important. Robin’s most recent letters from a remote corner of Scotland left her pretty sure he was training as a commando, having proved himself so admirably at Dunkirk in the early days of the war. Quite primitive equipment was sent up to Scotland. They seemed to need a lot of rope.
“Education?” the man from the Ministry had asked. Charles Mortlake had been the one to give into her entreaties and set up a job interview. Eleanor had no idea how senior the man was. His name sounded made up. Norfolk. Of course, there were the dukes of Norfolk, but the family name was Howard.
“I was privately educated,” Eleanor replied. “My father was a vicar.”
Norfolk perked up. Perhaps this was the last place, the last job, where this sort of thing was not only acceptable but preferred. The decayed gentry. Her ancestral home of Goodwood had been half ruined during the last war by being used as an infectious diseases hospital. Its ruin would be completed by this one, the army having requisitioned the poor old girl again, the air healthy and the location remote enough not to distress the citizenry with the sight of the burns cases they planned to send there.
“Can you type?” Norfolk asked.
“No, but I imagine it’s not too difficult to learn. And I do learn quickly.”
“Quite right. But I presume you can spell.”
“And add. Maths skills, I suppose. I like words and numbers.”
“Crossword puzzles?” he asked, which Eleanor later understood to be a feint toward her suitability for intelligence work, code breaking, which she would probably have enjoyed and been reasonably good at. But that was as far as it went, something she half regretted. Her ideal would be an interesting job and a settled personal life. But given the over-interesting lives they were leading during the Blitz, she was happy to have a routine job busy enough to leave her with little time to think. She was a cog, but (she hoped) a useful cog.
She could also get an idea what was going on, and of course one of the hardest parts of life these days was the constant uncertainty. Picking up information might not have been the best way to get to sleep, but with the nightly bombing raids, the Blitz, no one slept anyway. And she liked it. There was this unpredictable thing: when one did something, when a woman got a job, she was no longer the subject of decisions but played a part in making them. Most women had known that forever, of course. Maids, market women, farm women, factory workers—even though they had only a small part to play in deciding how their lives would go. A miniscule part. But at least Eleanor had that now, too.
On the day Edward was due in, she and her aunt set off on foot to Ackley Castle, petrol being too precious to use when they could walk.
“I was born in a different time,” her aunt said, not sounding as if she regretted it. Glancing over, Eleanor saw lines dug more deeply around her aunt’s mouth, the stress and time she spent outdoors telling on her. She called herself a farmer now, a steward, with poor Lieutenant Stickley in hospital, although she remained obstinately chic. Their family hadn’t quite gone with the wind, no evening dresses made out of curtains, not yet. But she’d had trunks shipped down from Goodwood and rummaged through the attics of Preston Hall, harvesting the clothing of centuries to be remade at night behind their blackout blinds. She and Mrs. McBee sewed determinedly as German planes droned overhead, schools of airborne sharks ready to dive down and sink their teeth into London.
Men’s jackets from the last century were particularly useful. Good thick wool. Her aunt was wearing a cut-down jacket with a tweed skirt and a silk scarf that Eleanor suspected had once danced its way around the ballrooms of Yorkshire, having spent its previous life as a panel in the gown of a Crosby miss. Eleanor’s own prized overcoat was a handsome chocolate brown lined with grey-green silk and padded with a quilting of old cotton. It had raised envy throughout the Ministry, the other girls twittering. Even Murdo Crawley had stopped her in the street one day to rub the wool between his fingers. “Your aunt?”
Murdo Crawley, MP, who had recently positioned himself on the far right of the Conservative Party, perhaps seeking to distinguish himself in a way he couldn’t overseas, if “distinguish” was the right word. He made speeches that were shockingly non-anti-Hitler.
“How is poor Alicia?” Eleanor had asked.
“She’s not poorly,” Murdo had replied, looking confused.
“Holding up. Good soldier,” Eleanor said.
“There’s Edward.”
Aunt Clara nodded across the dishevelled back garden of the castle to the terrace where Edward Denholm stood smoking a cigarette. His mother lived in one corner of the ground floor, a bedroom made beside her sitting room against those times a flare-up in her multiple sclerosis left her unable to walk. These were frequent lately, stress being a trigger. Eleanor expected her to be back in her wheelchair, but she was standing behind the closed French doors, pulling herself up straighter when she saw them.
“I’ll speak to him briefly then go to his mother,” her aunt said. “You might as well get it over with.” Pausing, a hand going to Eleanor’s arm. “Oh, my. He does pout beautifully, doesn’t he?”
Her aunt sailed toward Edward, leaving Eleanor to follow reluctantly. She hadn’t seen him since the Mortlakes’ last dance before the war, when Robin was already with his regiment. Everything had gone so badly she didn’t really remember it, or at least she didn’t want to. Now she was his brother’s girl. As her aunt gave Edward her sympathies in a low murmuring burr, Eleanor scuffed the stone with the toe of her boot like a schoolgirl. The ancestral shoes wouldn’t do as replacements. She’d bought a pair of sturdy brogues just before the war, a brand favoured by the jolly daughters of admirals, which had never been fashionable but would outlast Armageddon.
Once her aunt was gone, and Eleanor blurted, “My sympathies as well. Of course.”
“No one’s really sorry though, are they?” He didn’t quite look at her. “Including me.”
“I’m sure you are, though.”
“Life’s too short to be stupid about it.”
Edward glanced over. She’d forgotten that his eyes were so dark, nearly black. Of course he was handsome; she’d always thought he was handsome, academically, from a distance, while finding Robin far more physically stirring. Edward threw down his cigarette and stubbed it with a well-polished shoe. He was much leaner now. They were all thin these days from the stress and rationing and shortages. Her aunt spoke of Londoners as being unexpectedly elegant amid the smouldering ruins of the Blitz, so many podgy Britons slimmed to actors, cheekbones prominent, their movements gone feral as war returned after centuries to England’s green and pleasant land. Beautiful hard-edged young women, their nails sharpened to talons. Dangerous-looking men. The children were minks sliding through the fallen bricks, the ancient stones, the gargoyles tumbled from old churches to grimace at the cobbles.
“In fact, I’m devastated,” Edward said.
“I lost my father when I was fifteen. You know that, of course. I really am sorry.”
She wanted to go inside but knew she had to stay until he signalled willing. Which he wouldn’t, pulling out his packet of American cigarettes and offering one. When she shook her head, Edward began knocking out another cigarette before pausing and flicking it back in. His nerves were excruciating.
“Every happiness to you and Robin, of course,” he said, still looking at the packet. “Best man at your wedding, I suppose, if any of us make it.” Darting another glance at her. “I presume there’s going to be a wedding.”
“Nothing official,” she replied, and figured she ought to add, “I’ve told him he’d better get through it, though. I only plan do this once.”
“You know what he’s training for.”
Not officially, either. She shrugged. If you avoided gossip, conversations were half silences these days. “I might be the one not to make it,” she said. “My aunt’s townhouse hasn’t been touched, nor the Ministry, and that can’t last.”
“So why in God’s name don’t you stay down here?” He looked around at the dilapidated grounds as if they were perfectly groomed. His inheritance, of course.
Eleanor chaffed him: “A pilot asking me that.”
Their eyes met and they smiled, both mordantly amused, shaking their heads. It always came to this. She liked Edward. He was quick off the mark. Intelligent. Undependable, although that might have changed. Vain, which probably hadn’t. He looked good in his uniform, which hadn’t come off the rack.
“You’ll have to take me up flying after the war.”
“Steal you away?”
She’d thought he was past that. Some American girl. But she was probably long gone.
“You can’t be like that anymore, Edward. Can we agree?”
“In that case, you’re going to have to find me someone.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She was aware of never having said that before, not in quite that way. Everyone was engaged. The Moreland twins. The Browne girl, because why not? All of them could lose everything at any moment, including Kate. David Arden had finally got himself accredited as a war photographer, and if there was an offensive—either side—he could be killed taking pictures. So could Kate, of course, obstinately painting in London, the east-end children central to her sketches, foxes, minks, the babies curled like hedgehogs, wildlife taking over the ruins as the Germans bombed, destroying the city so Hitler could claim his Lebensraum, his new territory. Already taken, thank you very much.
“Any objection to widows?” she asked Edward.
“I thought you only planned one go.”
“Edward, I’m serious,” she said. “Don’t.”
Robin arrived two days later, bringing his father home for burial in the family vault. Only a senior officer would have been awarded the privilege of transport, even though he hadn’t been far away, stationed at Aldershot. Eleanor went to meet Robin at the train station, his mother having ceded the claim. She stood half-hidden by the ticket counter as the train pulled in and watched him jump down even before it stopped.
Robin strode quickly back to the baggage compartment in the rear, talking to the conductor and afterwards turning impatiently to look for someone from the castle. Eleanor signalled behind her and the two old men his mother had sent creaked themselves up from their cart and laboriously wheeled it up the incline toward the station. She’d always hated that sound.
“They’re coming,” she called, and Robin paused as if electrified before seeing the ancient cart turn the corner and labour onto the platform. When the conductor registered the retainers’ age, he helped Edward heft a plain wooden coffin to the edge of the carriage, not that he was a sprig himself. The four of them slid it onto the cart, Eleanor praying for no mishap, and when it was settled and tied into place, the conductor hopped back aboard and signalled the engineer. Without sounding its whistle, the train trundled off.
Eleanor passed the old men on her way into the station. When she reached Robin, he folded her into a long exhausted embrace she never wanted to end.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured into his tunic.
“How’s my mother?”
“With your brother,” she said, pulling away, “I think in a way she’s relieved. She said he couldn’t have stood a long illness like hers. Just as well to go quickly, one way or another.”
She nestled back against him and they kissed. This time Robin was the one to pull away, still as restless as he was on his last leave.
“I’ve only got a few days,” he said. “We should go.”
They found the others in Mrs. Denholm’s sitting room, with its tottering piles of books and sheet music and the inadequate fire. Edward sat close to his mother but rose to greet Robin with that brotherly cordiality that Jane Austen called the true English style, burying his real attachment under a calm façade that looked like indifference when they would have done anything for each other.
Burying their attachment and what looked like Edward Denholm’s equally cordial wish to murder Robin for snapping her up. Eleanor imagined that had also been part of brotherhood since Cain and Abel, although Jane didn’t get into that, or at least not so far. She was reading Austen’s novel Emma in the cellar at night, enjoying the mismatch between Emma’s Highbury and the loud bone-rattling Blitz above. Kate, a firm atheist, was reading the Bible.
“Wherefore, thus sayeth the LORD God: O woe be unto that bloodthirsty city, for whom I will prepare a heap of wood.”
“It was a delightful visit, perfect is being much too short.”
They couldn’t agree on who was more savage, Jane Austen or God.
Mrs. Denholm clung to Robin, and his answering embrace was gentle and patient, even though she held him for a long time, leaning on his tunic, her head barely reaching his chin. Eleanor was surprised: she’d thought Edward was the favourite.
“It’s a terrible reason for us all to be together,” Mrs. Denholm said, finally pulling away. “Nor would your father have liked it much, taking such a passive role in the proceedings.”
Another surprise, her irony as clear as her fondness.
“I’ll be leaving the castle for a house in the village,” she said, and they all sat down. “We might as well get it out all at once. This is yours now, Teddy.” Another ironic look around. “Or it shall be, yours and the creditors’, after years of paperwork. I doubt inheritance is at the top of the government list. I have no idea what you’ll do with it.”
“Speak to my gunner about shooting down a Messerschmitt, I suppose, once you’re safely in the village.” Edward sat with his hands jammed in his pockets and his legs out toward the fire. “Bit of a challenge to get the angle right, but I imagine we could bring it down directly on the tower. I doubt my latest man’s ever played billiards, but his night vision’s off the charts. A Canadian.” Chewing on this. “You’ll take the billiards table with you, I hope.”
“One is desolated, really,” Mrs. Denholm said. They sat silently for a moment, before she gave herself a shake. “And you, Eleanor, the great heiress, slowly losing Goodwood.”
Sting and sympathy. Mrs. Denholm scarcely used to say a memorable word.
“I’ve never thought of myself that way,” Eleanor replied. “It’s a pity, though, isn’t it? All these lovely old houses that no one can afford to keep up anymore. The past disintegrating behind us. But I suppose that means we can be modern, if this ever ends.”
“Not such a fan of that,” Robin said. He seemed to be the only one.
“It’s barely started,” Edward said.
The funeral was the next morning, a hasty wartime affair, although Mrs. Denholm had made sure to have the dean down from the Cathedral, an old school friend of her husband. The surrounding farmers and villagers all came to the service at the small flint-walled local church, making a surprisingly good show of filling the cramped pews.
Taking her seat at the front, Eleanor figured that in olden times the ornate censer-swinging ceremony would have been half an entertainment for the local people, solemnity breaking the usual drudgery of their days. But they all faced enough drama lately and it must have been duty that brought them, or habit, maybe respect for a senior army officer whose experience, they might have hoped, would have kept them from having to fight on the beaches, fight on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, as the prime minister had recently promised; fight in the hills of Kent, which were only a mild impediment between London and the southern coast, where the Nazis might land any day.
The dean spoke and she didn’t listen. A good and faithful knight, he said, and then they were singing a hymn, “Oh God our help in ages past.” Not so much in this one. Eleanor was mainly conscious of Robin’s thigh against hers. The casket lay on a trestle in front, the lid closed despite the colonel’s natural passing. Mrs. Denholm had kept the utilitarian coffin but had draped an ancient flat-weave tapestry of St. George defeating the dragon on top. There must have been embalming but it wasn’t quite adequate, and the church smelled faintly as London did these days, the overworked wardens unable to shovel up every remnant of flesh, not when houses were tottering, façades poised to tumble into the street, floors to pancake, the wardens under orders (often ignored) not to put themselves at risk of becoming casualties themselves.
It wasn’t entirely like London. There was incense in the church, not the smell of cordite. No waft of burnt paper, no stink of sewerage from the not-infrequent times bombs plummeted into the old Victorian sanitary tunnels and blasted up unclean geysers. The smell here was a reminder of ordinary death, not of chaos and battle. Mrs. Denholm gently wept and Robin sat with his head bowed and eyebrows raised, sucking on his handsome mouth as if thinking, He can’t really be dead, can he? My father?
After they laid the colonel in the family vault, Eleanor and Robin walked back to the house together. He looked distracted, distant, finally slowing his pace deliberately to let the others get ahead of them. They were soon alone in the overgrown yew walk and he stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“I was thinking we might beg a lift with the dean to Rochester, then pick up a local to London,” he said, not quite looking at her. “If you’d like. That would give us a couple of days on our own before your leave ends and I have to get back.”
Her heart lurched. Here it was. She felt an impossible mixture of desire and panic, her voice becoming a scratch.
“We’re more likely to survive a couple of days in Kent. I can’t describe the Blitz when you haven’t seen it and, and . . . my aunt can be tactful.” Risking a glance at him. “I know that’s hard to believe.”
“All the damn parental considerations,” he said. Half a pout: “It’s bloody intrusive.”
Something seemed off about his plan, and it occurred to her to ask, “Would the dean really give a lift to an unmarried couple planning a few days in London?”
“I suppose that’s my cue.”
Robin looked around humorously to make sure they had the privacy for him to kneel.
“No!” she cried, and Robin’s surprise looked ready to turn into hurt. “Not like this. Not a vulgar speeded-up wartime . . . I told you I’m only going to do this once, and I don’t have a dress. Or flowers.”
He seemed to be trying to work out whether this was an excuse.
“It’s not an excuse. The dean won’t drive us without a dreadful little ceremony. And in fact, once I think about it, I can tell you we likely can’t just hop a local to London, even with your uniform. Or I can’t. I’ve already booked a ticket for a couple of days down the line, knowing something about it from the Ministry. My job being . . .” She stopped. “We can walk.”
“Nora, that’s quite mad.”
“You walked to London on your last leave.”
“Yes, but I dossed down for a sleep . . .”
“It’s getting warmer.” Her voice sounded tinny, faintly panicked. She tried to control it. “The wind’s turned; have you noticed? Blowing in from the south. Just before the war—I’m quite proud of myself, actually—I bought some tremendously practical footwear at Robert Lewis, including a pair of boots that I’ve been meaning to take up to London. You need good footwear to make it through the streets these days. Especially when they’re not visibly streets.” Blocking her throat was an absurd virginal sob. She’d had no idea that sobs could be virginal.
“It’s what I’d like,” she said, trying again to control herself. “We’re both great walkers, I think. It could well be the last normal thing we’ll ever be able to do. The Blitz is real, Robin.”
A moment’s consideration. “All right.”
They decided he would say his farewells to his family, telling them only that he was going up to London for a couple of days. No need to mention Eleanor. She would speak with her aunt, who would likely give her a knapsack of farm provisions, but she wouldn’t have much else to carry.
Of course, no one was fooled when Robin explained his plan at luncheon, including the rather lugubrious dean, who seemed to spend a moment considering whether to interfere before deciding the matter was beneath him (hierarchically rather than spiritually) and taking more fish. Nor did her aunt try to stop Eleanor when they returned to the Hall. On the old deal table in the kitchen, she packed some Durex into Eleanor’s knapsack along with the eggs and cabbages and bacon, giving an embarrassingly explicit demonstration of how to use them. (She was also packing a cucumber.)
“You can have the box. I don’t need any at the moment, do I?” An allusion to poor Mr. Stickley that made Eleanor pick up her knapsack and flee for their meeting place in the orchard, finding Robin already pacing and waiting, eating a windfall apple. Then they were off.