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“Why is she crying? Can’t you keep her quiet?”
Blanche Harrigan looked down at the little girl in the red velvet Valentine dress, and the girl looked back with a tearstained face and renewed sobs.
“She’s just like her daddy,” said Blanche fondly. “Jack used to cry.”
“Not when I was around,” said Harry. He bent down and looked the child in the face. “Be quiet, Celeste.”
The girl’s sobs became a shriek of defiance. “I’m not Celeste. I’m Anita and I want to go home.”
“You are home,” said Blanche. “This is where your mommy lives.”
“No, she don’t.”
Blanche corrected her automatically. “Doesn’t.”
“She’s a little savage,” Harry Harrigan said between clenched teeth. “You’d better keep her quiet while we go through Customs and Immigration. I’m not having her tell them that her name is Anita Malloy.”
“She’s understandably confused,” Blanche said mildly.
“Well un-confuse her.”
Harry turned his broad back on grandmother and child and reached into his pocket for their documents.
Behind them the bulk of the Queen Elizabeth was nestled up against its berth, held steady by massive mooring ropes. A carpeted gangplank led to the First Class Customs and Immigration Hall. Harry left Blanche to deal with the child, proceeded down the gangway, and pushed his way into the line of disembarking passengers.
The Customs Hall was the first new and fully functional building he had seen since the Queen Elizabeth had come within sight of the devastated British Isles early in the morning. When the Isle of Wight had loomed out of the morning fog, the jagged rocks of the Needles guarding the approach to Southampton, he had been relieved that the voyage was over. He was impatient to meet the woman who claimed to be the mother of Jack’s child.
Blanche had been naively excited, with no thought of the difficulties that could be ahead as they entered Britain with a child of disputed parentage. Even the child had been momentarily overawed watching the waves break against dark rocks, but she had soon resumed her whining and crying for her mother.
Harry had stood on the deck regarding the war-damaged approaches to Southampton harbor with a jaundiced eye.
“We took quite a battering,” said a mournful-looking Englishman standing beside him.
“You sure did,” said Harry. “About time you fixed it up.”
The Englishman gave him a thin smile. “I’m afraid you American chappies have taken all our money. Lend lease, you know. Not much left for repairing the war damage. Wait until you see London. Were you there at all before the war?”
“No, never been. My son was here.”
“Oh, is he with you?”
“No, he’s dead. We took all your money and you took all our sons.”
“Oh, sorry,” said the Englishman. “I didn’t mean it quite like that.”
“Sure you did,” said Harry.
He stomped away from the rail and back to his cabin, where his wife was attempting to get the little girl dressed in a concoction of red velvet and white lace ruffles.
“We should have brought a nursemaid,” he said.
Blanche looked up, red-faced and frustrated.
“I thought she’d take to us.”
“Well, you thought wrong. Little hellion.”