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Toby leaned down and scratched his right leg. The deep cut had been stitched in haste and left a jagged scar, his one and only visible war wound.
“You should get a medal for what you done,” Mrs. Larimor had said.
“We should all get a medal,” Toby had replied, “just for living through this.”
He brought his mind back to the present and looked around the room. Each face held its own memory of the V-1 raids. Time had passed, but time had not healed.
“Horrible,” said Nurse Tierney. “Evil, horrible.”
“Hmm,” said the Earl with a challenging note in his voice, “I thought you Irish were in favor of Hitler.”
“I’m from Ulster,” Nurse Tierney replied, “and even if I wasn’t, even if I was from Dublin itself and never spoke a word of English, I would still call it evil. What it did to those babies ...”
Toby hated to probe the wound, but he knew Edwin Champion would demand a full reckoning of the nurse’s story. “Did it land on the ward?”
“God, no. I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if it had landed on the ward. It landed on the chapel, but it brought down the nursery wall, and them that wasn’t crushed in the fall was burned up in the fire.”
“Good God,” said the Earl, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “Do we have to go over this? Can’t we just leave it that some of the babies died?”
“And some of the nuns,” Sylvia added.
“Perhaps you could tell me in your own words,” Toby said.
The nurse gave him a hard look. Toby was puzzled by her. He could hear compassion in her voice when she spoke of the babies killed by the bomb, but when her eyes darted to the housekeeper, she seemed to be issuing a challenge.
“Shall I be after telling it all?” she asked, looking to Mrs. Pearson.
The housekeeper retained her rigid stance behind Lady Sylvia’s chair. “Of course. That’s why we brought you here.”
“In your own words,” Toby repeated.
“It wasn’t a real hospital,” said Nurse Tierney, “just a converted convent, papist, of course. The walls was that thick we didn’t hear it coming over. We heard the alert, but what difference did that make? If we were going to run and hide every time we heard the alert, those babies would be staying inside their mothers’ wombs forever, poor little mites. Besides, you know how it was; they usually went right over us on their way to somewhere more important. I suppose it didn’t have enough fuel, and that’s why it fell on us.”
“Maybe it came from farther away,” the Earl said. He was staring fixedly at the nurse, his forgotten cigarette accumulating a long column of ash.
“What does it matter where it came from?” said Nurse Tierney, who seemed to be unimpressed by the Earl’s exalted position.
“Doesn’t matter at all,” the Earl agreed.
“The babies was mostly in the nursery,” Nurse Tierney said. “It was a fancy kind of place where the mothers wanted their peace and quiet. Didn’t want the babies lying in with them, so we had to take them away and just bring them for the feeding.”
Toby made a note in his notebook. Babies were brought in for feeding; maybe it was important, maybe not. Better to write it down.
“We had gathered up the babies from the twelve o’clock feeding,” said Nurse Tierney. “Most of them were in the nursery, and just the last few left with the mothers. Some mothers take longer than others to get the hang of the feeding, you know. I went back to get the last three. We was in a hurry. Our shift was ending and we wanted to be finished with the babies. None of us was nuns with nothing to do but pray. We had places to go, and I wasn’t afraid to tell those mothers that I didn’t have all day to wait while they fussed around. Everyone else was ready to leave, so I went back and got the last three. I could carry them three at a time. The mothers didn’t like it, but I wasn’t there to please the mothers, I was there because that’s where the recruiter said I had to be. I was Irish, so all I was good for was skivvying.”
Nurse Tierney might well be from Northern Ireland and officially British, Toby thought, but she was still Irish, and her soul carried a thousand years of resentment. He could only imagine how unpleasant it would be for a new mother to give her baby into Nurse Tierney’s uncaring hands. He wondered why she was being so carefully referred to as “Nurse” Tierney when quite obviously she had not been a nurse.
“I had three babies in my arms,” Nurse Tierney continued. “The explosion blew me off my feet. I was lying on the floor, still holding the babies.”
A puzzled expression crossed her face. “It’s funny, you know, you’d think I’d want to be saving myself, but I had those babies, and I don’t know why, but I didn’t give a thought for myself. I had to look after those babies.”
“Very commendable,” said the Earl.
Nurse Tierney didn’t seem to notice the Earl’s caustic tone. “It was a terrible thing, Your Lordship. Fire, flames, smoke, and the screaming.”
For a moment the library was wrapped in silence. Toby held his pen poised above the paper, but he had nothing to write. They had all lived through the war years. They had all seen terrible things. Their quiet, orderly peacetime lives had been turned upside down. Of the people in the room, only the Earl had seen service in World War I. Perhaps he had been prepared for the violence and the way the brain protects itself by not visualizing, not filling in the details, but Toby could not stop himself from filling in the details.
Choking smoke, rafters crashing down in a shower of sparks, walls collapsing on helpless babies imprisoned in their little wood cribs. Nuns with hands reaching out to protect their charges, and the infants breathing in acrid smoke until all breathing ceased. His mind tried to soften the blow. He wanted to believe that several gasping but painless breaths were all that was needed to return the infants to their home in heaven.
And in the ward, where the walls had withstood the blast, the surviving mothers screaming for their children. Beds overturned, women pinned down under collapsing ceilings, and one Irishwoman with three babies in her arms.
The Earl looked at his daughter. She was pale but composed.
“I didn’t know what was happening. I had given Celeste to the nurse to be taken back to the nursery, and I was just lying there in the bed. I heard the explosion, and then I suppose something fell on my head and knocked me out. I don’t remember anything.”
“Sounds like a blessing to me,” said her father.
“No, Daddy. If I had been conscious, I would never have let anyone take my baby. I would have recognized her, I know I would. But when I came round, the Red Cross worker told me all the babies were dead. She never said anything about three of the babies still being alive. I thought Celeste was in the nursery with the other babies. I saw where they’d been, and it was just a pile of burning ruins. How could I find her in there? I had to believe what I was told.”
Toby dutifully wrote down his client’s words. The words were easy to write, but the emotion was hard to convey. Something in the way Lady Sylvia spoke seemed forced and unreal. When she had first spoken to him of finding her daughter, she had been almost without emotion, and even now the emotion she was displaying seemed shallow. On the other hand, the Earl was white-faced, and his hands shook as he reached for another cigarette, and Nurse Tierney was trembling on the edge of tears. Toby was certain that the air in the room was full of false words and false emotions, but Nurse Tierney’s memory was not false. She had been there.
“I was just lying there on the floor,” said Nurse Tierney, “with the babies in my arms, still wrapped up tight in their blankets.”
“Because of rationing, we each had to bring our own blankets,” said Lady Sylvia, as if the information was very important. “We had our own blankets and our own baby clothes. Every blanket was different.”
“A woman came at me out of the smoke,” Nurse Tierney continued. “I thought maybe she was a rescue worker. There were all kinds of people by then, moving around everywhere, trying to get the women out. She took the baby.”
“All the babies?” Toby asked.
“No.” Nurse Tierney’s tone indicated sorely tried patience. “Not all the babies, just the one. She said it was her baby. Said she recognized the blanket. She was crying, and I think she was wearing a dressing gown, but it could have been a coat. I don’t know. I didn’t recognize her, but she seemed really sure it was her baby, and I just wanted to get up off the floor and give the babies to someone who would look after them.”
“Did you see her again?” Toby asked. “Was she outside when the smoke cleared?”
The nurse shook her head. “They was taking the women away as fast as they could. Didn’t want them to stay there looking at the ruins, I suppose, and the other walls were going to be collapsing at any minute. Sure, it wasn’t safe for anyone to be there.”
“But what about the other babies?” Toby persisted.
“I gave them to the Red Cross worker. Boys, both of them.”
“And the third one was a girl?”
“I didn’t look.”
“It was Celeste,” Lady Sylvia insisted.
Toby hesitated, testing the tension in the air. The Irishwoman’s description of the burning nursery had been brief but terrible, and he was sure that mere words could not convey the horror of the event she had witnessed.
The Earl, puffing on his second cigarette, was still trembling. Mrs. Pearson stood ramrod straight, eyes downcast, her face unreadable. Lady Sylvia had not lost her composure and was looking at him inquiringly. After a moment of silence, the Irishwoman crossed her arms across her ample bosom and settled back on the sofa with an air of completion. She had a story to tell and she had told it.
“Nurse Tierney,” Toby said eventually, “can you tell me why it has taken you so long to tell your story?”
She leaned forward aggressively. “What do you mean? “
“It’s been six years.”
“Sure and I didn’t know anyone was looking for that baby. Do you think I’ve spent the last six years wondering if I’d given her to the right woman? She said it was her baby and I gave it to her, and no one to tell me any different. You might as well ask Her Ladyship there why it has taken six years to ask about it?”
Indeed I might, Toby thought, but, preferring not to upset Mr. Champion’s illustrious client, he rephrased his question. “If you could just tell me why you have come forward now ...”
“Come forward? Come forward? You make it sound like I’ve committed a crime.”
“No, no, of course not. I wasn’t suggesting any such thing.”
Lady Sylvia rose gracefully to her feet. “Mr. Whitby, I can assure you that there has been no suggestion of wrongdoing by Nurse Tierney. You have to understand that I was firmly convinced that my daughter had died in the explosion. I had no reason to think that she might still be alive until Nurse Tierney contacted me.”
“Ah,” said Toby, “so it was Nurse Tierney who initiated the contact.”
“And what if I did?” asked the nurse.
“I was just wondering how that happened.”
The Earl rose slowly to his feet. “I think I’ll go back upstairs,” he said. “Not feeling too good.”
Mrs. Pearson was beside him in a moment. “Shall I help you, sir?”
“No, I don’t need any of your damned help.”
The Earl shuffled past Toby and then paused. “Don’t ask any more questions, young man. It’s insulting. We don’t like to be insulted. If my daughter says the baby was hers, it was hers.”
Toby stood up, opened his mouth to protest, and then thought better of it.
“Daddy,” Lady Sylvia protested, “we don’t need to talk like that. We’re perfectly happy to provide Mr. Whitby with all the evidence he needs.”
“Poppycock,” said the Earl. “No need to provide him with anything. Just get on with it, young Whitby. Just get the child here and make everything legal. That’s what you’re being paid to do.”
“Really, Daddy—”
The Earl glared imperiously at Toby. “No more poking around. Just get on with it and no more questions. If you keep this up, I will have to talk to your employer. Work is hard to come by these days, and I’m sure you would like to keep your position.”
Toby remained standing as the Earl tottered away into the darkness of the hallway.
“So sorry,” said Lady Sylvia as soon as her father was out of sight. “My father is somewhat feudal in his outlook.”
“You’re making a mystery where there is none,” Mrs. Pearson said firmly. “It’s a simple thing. It was the blanket. The Southwold crest was on the blanket, and Nurse Tierney happened to remember.”
“So I told them,” said Nurse Tierney. “Better late than never.”
Toby looked at the three women and they looked back at him, their faces blank and innocent. He was quite certain that no matter how many questions he asked, he would get no more information from them today. He felt a deep-seated resentment at their assumption that he could be fooled by such flimsy evidence or bullied by the Earl with such obvious threats. He had no doubt that there was a kernel of truth in the Irishwoman’s story. Her emotions had been real. Somewhere, at some time, she had witnessed the destruction of a nursery full of babies. As for the rest of the story ...
He closed his notebook and slipped his pen into his pocket. He was unsure what he should do next. He was surrounded by liars, but one lie was more important than all the others. Only one question could and should be answered. Who was the mother of the child? Was it Lady Sylvia or Vera Chapman? It was a problem worthy of King Solomon, but unlike Solomon he could hardly suggest that the baby should be split in half.
Mrs. Pearson resumed her seat by the fire with an air of triumph, and it was Lady Sylvia who rose to show him out.
Nurse Tierney remained firmly in her seat. Toby reached into his pocket and produced one of his business cards.
“If you think of anything else,” he said, holding it out to the Irishwoman.
“I won’t.”
“Just in case.”
“I won’t,” she repeated, but she took the card and dropped it into her pocket.
“This way, Mr. Whitby,” said Lady Sylvia.