Flossie was heartened to see that at least the solid, unadorned gates of Bow Cemetery (as the locals called it) remained in one piece. The East End and the Docklands had been bombed almost beyond recognition in some places. Families here didn’t have the same sort of options as her mother did. There were no ancestral homes in the country for them to retreat to. While they might send their children away to the country, or even as far as Australia or Canada, the adults of the East End had no alternative but to stay in London and see the war out.
The staccato sound of an ack-ack gun started a few streets away. The doll tucked under her arm, Flossie watched the searchlights roam the sky, checking for enemy planes. She was just about to tap upon the gates with her iron ring to alert Ada, the Turnkey of Tower Hamlets, to her presence, when the piercing, screaming whistle of a bomb sounded from far above. Then came the mighty bang and the shaking as the bomb hit, maybe five or six streets away. There was a long silence and, just as she thought it was all over, she heard the drone of a plane before the ack-ack guns went off again, faster this time and more insistent. The aircraft itself flew so low she felt she could have almost reached up and touched it as it rained bullets down upon the street.
Flossie stood, unafraid, and watched the plane pass over her. Sometimes she wondered if this war would ever end.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re here,” a voice gushed from behind the gates.
Ada was busy with the lock. Ada had died of cholera, along with her entire family, almost one hundred years ago and was the first and only Turnkey of Tower Hamlets Cemetery. When Flossie had first met Ada, she had seen a small, wiry girl who distrusted everyone, and wore a hard cross sort of expression and a dress that was slightly too large for her slender frame. Now she only saw her best friend.
As Flossie passed through the iron gates, Ada’s words tripped over each other. “It’s so good that you’ve come. I’ll need the extra hands.”
“Have any of the other Turnkeys come to help?” Apart from Ada and Flossie, there were the elderly sisters Alice and Matilda at West Norwood Cemetery, the strange printer at Nunhead Cemetery, the sensible optician at Brompton Cemetery, the nervy Methodist Minister at Abney Park Cemetery and the imposing Victorian architect Hugo Howsham at Kensal Green Cemetery.
“Of course not,” Ada replied.
“You’ve been hit badly?”
“Yes, unfortunately. The north-west corner. Not too badly – mostly shrapnel damage – but it will mean some of the nearby interred waking from rest. And you know how long it can take to settle some of them again.”
As Ada locked the gates behind them, Flossie steeled herself for what she was about to see – Ada’s Advisor. Each cemetery had both a Turnkey and an Advisor. The Turnkey’s job was solely to care for the interred – to keep them happily at rest. The Advisor was the soul of the cemetery itself and could advise the Turnkey on anything involving the cemetery that he or she might need to know. Every new Turnkey was given the opportunity to choose the form their Advisor would appear in. Flossie’s choice had been to bring forth her Advisor in the form of a fox she had known in life.
Knowing she couldn’t put it off any longer, Flossie’s eyes moved upwards. And there she was – Ada’s fearsome, imposing stone angel.
She wore a Grecian dress and long cape and she towered behind Ada, wings outstretched to finely carved tips. Her hands were calmly folded, a solemn expression on her face as she peered down at Flossie with her cold grey stone eyes.
“I hope that’s not a present for me,” Ada said drily. “Because I gave up dolls a century or so ago.”
Flossie laughed, imagining serious, often-grumpy Ada dressing up a doll.
“It’s for one of my interred,” Flossie said.
“Well, that’s a relief. I was worried you’d be wanting to play tea parties next.” Ada’s eyes darted about restlessly, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
Flossie placed her iron-ringed hand on Ada’s arm. “Let’s head on over to the north-west corner to see what’s going on. And, I promise, no tea parties.”
* * *
Thankfully, the bomb damage wasn’t as bad as Flossie had expected. A brick wall had collapsed and several of the taller obelisks in the vicinity had toppled, but that was all. The shrapnel damage from the plane, however, was much more severe. Many headstones had been badly peppered, arousing a few confused interred from rest. Several of them were easily convinced to return to eternal slumber straightaway, but a mother and daughter from one of the cemetery’s many mass graves were awakened. They clutched at each other and it took some time for both Ada and Flossie to coerce them back to rest.
“Part of me still thinks it’s wrong – to convince them to return to their dreams. It’s as if I’m tearing them apart once more,” Flossie said with a sigh, when she and Ada were finished. She placed the doll on the ground and sat upon the edge of a monument, smoothing out the flared skirt of her dress and adjusting her navy and white dotted necktie. In life, Mama had hated this outfit, saying it made Flossie look like a flapper. But she had dressed Flossie in it after her death, knowing how much she had adored it. That was love. The real sort. Flossie had learned a lot about love in death. About how it could cross all sorts of boundaries – time and distance, the twilight and living worlds.
Ada sat beside her in the dim light, her ever-present angel blending into the background of the cemetery behind them. “You know very well that’s not true. There’s nothing for them here. To be at rest …”
“Yes, I know.” Flossie was taken back once again to that picnic on the grassy hill. She had been so happy. And then the cemetery had called upon her and she had been given her key from the Turnkey before her – a curious little Victorian man who had said he was tired and wanted to return to rest. “Say the words!” he’d told her, anxious to leave and, somehow, she had known exactly the words that needed to be said.
I am the Turnkey of Highgate Cemetery; the dead remain at rest within.
She’d uttered the words almost without thinking. Within the blink of an eye, he was gone and she was Turnkey. For who knew how long? Until she was tired too, she supposed.
Flossie was dragged back to the present as she remembered the other reason she had come this evening.
“I have to tell you something. I saw something strange tonight – a man of the twilight, atop St Paul’s.”
“A Turnkey from somewhere else?” Ada swivelled around to face Flossie.
“No, that’s the thing. He wasn’t a Turnkey. And he wasn’t with one either. At least, I didn’t see a Turnkey anywhere near him.”
Ada thought about this for a moment. “And he wasn’t distressed at being away from his body?”
“He didn’t seem to be. It gets even stranger. He wasn’t a Turnkey, but he could travel. I saw him do it right in front of me. One second he was there, the next he was gone.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Wait. Here’s the truly strange bit. He’s not even from here. He was German. An officer of some sort. An important one in the SS. I could tell by his uniform.”
Ada didn’t understand as much about the ins and outs of this war as Flossie did. She found the new world outside her cemetery gates a confusing place and didn’t like to leave her cemetery very often. Because of this, she relied on Flossie for a lot of information. But even Ada knew who the SS were. “A Nazi! In London? Why? What’s he doing here? Surely he’s buried in Germany somewhere.”
“I know! It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“And he could really travel? Just like us? Without being a Turnkey?”
“He didn’t have a key of any sort and he was carrying something in his hands – a sort of glass object. I couldn’t quite make out what it was. It didn’t seem like it belonged in the twilight. It was too bright.”
“That is odd. What do you think he’s doing here?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like it. I confronted him and he ran. He didn’t want to be seen, that’s for sure.” Flossie couldn’t get the picture out of her head of the man fleeing.
Ada’s key rattled on its iron ring. They both looked down at it.
“Someone’s at the gate,” Ada said.
“Come on, then.” Flossie picked up the doll, rose and offered Ada her keyed hand to get up. “We’d best go see who it is.”
As it turned out, however, it wasn’t someone, but quite a number of someones at the gates of Tower Hamlets.