The aurora paints the night more often than not, greens and magentas curtaining down from the heavens. Alec spends most of his time on the forecastle, watching the sun sink into the great basin of the sea before the ship, the pink foam of cloud hovering overhead. He’s midway through the crossing from Leith by way of Liverpool, and the world is all ocean. Pods of porpoise cleave the ship’s wake, throwing sunlight like pennies against the hull. The RMS Highlander is Livingstone & Gray’s first ocean liner, and Alec loves every inch of her—the clean white lines and perfect crimson of the stacks, the fin of the bow slicing through the water, they all work on him like a spell. For years now he has watched her come together in the shipyard, always thinking that if he were to board her, take her out into the world, it would be like sailing again on the RMS Jaipur.
It’s not, though. Not at all. Even when the whole sky is broken open with stars, the constellations anchored in the darkness, this crossing is not that crossing. And now, halfway through, he no longer wants it to be. It’s a relief to have it be neither the bewildering voyage from Bombay to London nor the very different return from Odessa. Both sailings had been fraught with not knowing what would come next, ships and crossings as clear as hinges linking one part of his life to the next. His life had changed so much between the first crossing and the second, and since his return from the war there have been other enormous shifts—chief among them his reunion with June and the eventual arrival of Penny.
He misses them more than he can say, his brilliant girls, and being away from them pulls at him in ways he doesn’t like. But it helps that the ship is his domain. His floating kingdom. He knows every paisley in the carpet, every whorl in the oak of the banisters. He knows that the pulleys on the fourth starboard lifeboat are inclined to squeak when the wind comes straight from the north.
Livingstone & Gray have not been in the habit of ocean liners—tugs and dredgers have been their bread and butter for a generation, and the Highlander is a departure from their history. And she is his. This grand ship has been his since Roland Livingstone himself called Alec into his cluttered office and asked him to try his hand at a design after all those years of his informal apprenticeship to the design team. And Alec had thought of every ship he’d ever laid his hands on, every boat whose hull he’d patted. And somewhere at the intersection of those memories, midwifed by the design group, the Highlander had been born. She’s small for a liner, a kestrel skimming the sea where the newest Cunard ships are more like eagles. When she hits the waves broadside, she balances like a frigate on the water.
He’s standing on the deck one night, still dressed for dinner and watching the moon lay a track on the waves, when one of the junior navigation officers comes up alongside him.
“Good evening, Mr. Tremayne,” Alec says. He gestures out at the water. “Lot of ice.”
“Yes, sir,” Tremayne says. “Thought we’d miss them with the southern route, even this time of year, but . . .”
Alec nods. They had wanted the ship to skim across the Atlantic like a skipped stone, three days from Liverpool to Halifax. But icebergs have slowed their progress, calving off the coast of Greenland like monstrous sharks, and if Alec is honest with himself, this way is better. He’s never seen anything like the looming crowns of blue and green and white or the underwater reefs the helmsman works to avoid.
Tremayne says, “You were in the war, sir?”
“I was,” Alec says. “Flew planes for a bit.” An incomplete truth, but what else is there to say? He looks at his hands, left resting atop the right on the railing. He still sometimes yearns for that feeling of being aloft in his crate.
Tremayne nods. “Navy.” He points off to the north. “Sunk a U-boat off the Faroes on a night like this.”
“Good man,” Alec says, impressed. “That was a bloody hard show.”
“Chow is a lot better this time across,” Tremayne says, and laughs. “But you know how it is, you’re out with your mates, you and them against the enemy . . .”
“I do,” Alec says. But there is only so much thinking of those days before he comes up short against the memory of Charlie’s plane shattering against the rocks, or Smasher dead in the German mud. He tries to concentrate instead on what Tremayne said about food—best to think on the vol-au-vent and Charlotte royale he’d eaten earlier that evening, on the dot of jam Penny had by her nose when he’d hugged her goodbye last week.
“Well,” Tremayne says, “best get back to rounds. Have a good night, sir.” He touches the brim of his cap and sets off around the curve of the forecastle. Alec watches him go, glad both for the moment of connection and the quiet that follows it, and then turns his gaze back to the sea.
There is nothing he would have liked more than to bring his girls with him for the Highlander’s maiden voyage, and when Livingstone & Gray had first proposed that he make the crossing, Alec had started to daydream of ways to make it happen. But then the trip had changed, a two-day pause in Halifax blossoming into almost three months taking the measure of the Livingstone & Gray offices there with the aim of finding a new project. Alec had hesitated—it was a long time to be away from his home, away from Penny and June and Ursa, away from everything . . . But the RMS Highlander was his ship, and he had worked for the company for more than a decade now, building himself a place there. And really, ten weeks is not such a long stretch in the great scheme of things. Penny is in school, and Mrs. Nesbit will run the household as competently as ever, whether Alec’s there or not.
Alec is waiting to disembark in Halifax, looking out over the barely ordered chaos of passengers unloading and the swirl of dark water, gulls swooping and screaming overhead, when Tremayne finds him and hands him a slim oilskin packet of letters.
“Came by air mail,” Tremayne says. “Anyone meeting you, once you’re through customs?”
“No,” Alec says, thinking of the way it had felt to see June waiting for him on the dock when he’d come back from Odessa, her face open and hopeful. He had not dared expect her, and yet, there she’d been. He looks down at the gangplank, wishing she and Penny were at the other end of it.
“Well,” Tremayne says, tapping the brim of his hat, “I wish you a good stay in Halifax.”
“Thank you,” Alec says. He pats the railing fondly, tucks the packet of letters into his inside breast pocket, and moves toward the gangplank with a last wave at Tremayne.
It feels like no time at all before a taxi deposits Alec at his lodgings, a yellow-brick house across the street from Point Pleasant Park in Halifax’s South End. He raises the brass bull’s head that acts as a knocker and lets it fall against the door.
An older woman answers the door almost immediately, her eyes a cloudy green behind glasses. “You must be Mr. Oswin. I’m Mrs. Carter.”
“Yes, Alec Oswin. Very nice to meet you.”
“The harbormaster’s boy let us know your ship had docked. I’m pleased you found your way here. Do come in.” Her voice is round with just the hint of an Irish lilt. “May I take your coat?”
“Grand, thanks,” Alec says. He glances around the foyer, a tidy, welcoming space with pictures of the Pope and Queen Elizabeth on the wall. Ahead of him the foyer opens up into a sitting room, where he can just see the ornate mantelpiece of the fireplace and the gleaming brass candlesticks centered there, and more of the rich blue-and-gold carpet that sinks beneath his feet. “You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Carter.”
“Oh, thank you.” She clasps her hands. “Well, I’m glad enough to be taking another man from Livingstone and Gray as a boarder. We were sorry to lose Mr. Lurie back to Scotland.”
Alec says, “He couldn’t say enough good things about boarding here.”
“I’m so very glad to hear that,” she says. “Now then, you can leave your suitcase here for the moment, all right?”
Alec sets down his valise and follows Mrs. Carter. In the sitting room, French doors opposite the fireplace lead to a wide patio that stretches out into the garden beyond.
“Oh, that’s awfully nice,” Alec says, “having the park out one door and your garden out the other.”
Mrs. Carter’s face lights up. “Just wait until we start having more blooms, Mr. Oswin. We’ve had our daffodils, you can just see them, there,” she says, gesturing outside, “and the snowdrops, of course, but we’re right on the edge with so many others.”
“I’ll look forward to that.” And he will, although it won’t be his own garden, which will be gangbusters in the Edinburgh spring any day now.
Mrs. Carter nods and leads him to the dining room, pointing out the kitchen as they make their way back to the foyer. “My daughter-in-law, Maeve, prepares most of our meals. She’s an excellent cook.”
“Wonderful,” Alec says. After a week of the fancy food aboard the Highlander, something homey sounds like just the ticket. He follows her up the stairs, where she pauses in front of a wall hung with pictures. She points to a photo of a young family standing in front of the fireplace downstairs: the young man with curly dark hair, his arm around a fair-haired girl holding an infant. “That’s Maeve and my grandson Cullen,” she says. “He’s ten now. And that was my son Desmond, God rest him.”
God, she’s lost a son. “I am so awfully sorry.” Alec regards the photo again, a pang in his chest—they look so happy.
“Thank you.” Her hand comes up to touch the cross she wears on a long chain as she gathers herself. “In any event, your room is just here. The bath is down the hall.”
“This will do very nicely,” Alec says. He takes in the tidy room with its pale, rosy wallpaper, and smiles at Mrs. Carter.
“Very good,” she says. “Dinner is at seven thirty, in the dining room. Breakfast is somewhat less formal. I ask that if you’re going to miss a meal you let me know so that we may plan accordingly. Also, we lock the front door at eleven, so do please be back by then if you go out in the evening. And I ask that you do not bring guests back with you. I like to keep a quiet home, especially with my grandson here.”
“I quite understand. I have a little girl myself, back in Edinburgh. Penny.”
“What a sweet name,” Mrs. Carter says. “You must miss her.”
“I do, yes,” Alec says. “Awfully. She’s only just six.”
“Such a lovely age,” she says. “Well, I’ll leave you to settle in. Please let either Maeve or myself know if you need anything at all.”
Alec says, “I shall. Thank you.”
She closes the door behind her, and Alec looks at his watch—just past five now, plenty of time to settle in and wash up before the evening meal. He puts away his few belongings and sits down with the oilskin packet in the wooden chair at the writing desk under the window. Across the street, the low stone wall that borders the park has a gap in it, and he can just see the trail leading down into the trees. A stand of pines towers over the wall, a small red squirrel chittering in a high branch. It’s so bucolic, but somewhere not too far away, he can hear the particular curl of a freight train’s bellowing horn. For an unsettling moment his pulse races, his memory filling with the train that took him from Italy to Germany and the stench of too many frightened men wedged into a single car. He closes his eyes and counts to ten, then counts roses on the wallpaper until present prevails over past.
He unwinds the waxed laces holding the packet together and puts aside the thick envelope with his name on it in June’s precise writing, saving the best for last. There’s a letter from Roger, now retired to a horse farm in Kenya and hoping to come to Edinburgh next year. Alec’s pleased—he hasn’t seen his uncle in years, and it’s good to get caught up. On Roger’s infrequent visits, it’s a delight to watch him with Penny, whom he adores. Then at last he turns to the letter from June.
Dear Alec,
I hope this finds you well, and that you have arrived safely in Nova Scotia. I imagine it must have been an incredible voyage! We miss you—the house is quiet without you, and Ursa doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with herself. Penny, in a rather sweet effort to help, has been telling her your bear stories—or, rather, Penny’s versions of your bear stories. It’s quite charming, as you can imagine, and I believe it’s helping both of them.
The garden has started blooming. That crocus border you put in is going to be a glory soon, and Penny has been gathering marsh violets when we take Ursa to the pond. It’s a shame you’re missing these, but there will be roses when you come home, and likely sweet pea blossom as well. I’ll look after the garden as well as I can while you’re gone, but I expect your flowers will be pleased to see you home. Still, God knows I’ve needed the distraction—I’ve put in for that new Reader position the department has opened for next year, the one we talked about last spring. It would be quite a feather in my cap, but what a tiresome, nerve-wracking process!
We had tea last week with Parvati and the children (Sanjay has not come home from London yet). Did you know that when Penny is with her friends she sounds much more the wee Scot than when she is with us? I suppose you must. It always catches my attention, though, watching her move so easily into their world. She is such a clever child, and so adaptable.
In any event, we hope you had a lovely trip, and that your work in Halifax goes brilliantly.
Stay safe, Alec.
Love,
June
Alec smiles to himself and runs his fingers over the careful printing, marveling as always at June’s ability to write in perfectly straight lines on unruled paper. He brings the letter to his nose, wishing he could breathe in the scent of her. There’s so much he’s missed already, and for just a moment he wishes so fiercely to be home that the sprawl of weeks ahead of him seems impossibly daunting.
After a moment, he opens the second note enclosed in June’s letter, and his heart pangs against his ribs at the sight of the smudged, childish scrawl with its careful uppercase letters and the false starts of misspelled words.
Dear Daddy,
Mummy says right now you are on your ship in the North Atlantic. She showed me on a map the way your ship would go, and each day we are going to look at the map and try to mark where you are. Also we are crossing off days on the calendar but there are so many days left! At school we are learning about Robert the Bruce. Mrs. Nesbit told me a spider helped him save Scotland. Are there spiders where you’re going?
Love Penny
He sits for a long time looking at his letters, missing June and Penny like air.
In the dining room that evening he finds Mrs. Carter looking through a French textbook with Cullen. A loaf of soda bread waits with butter and a jar of jam on a cutting board at the foot of the table. A covered bowl sits near the table’s center. Metal crutches lean into the corner beyond the table.
Mrs. Carter says, “Ah, good evening, Mr. Oswin. This is my grandson Cullen. Cullen, this is Mr. Oswin.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Cullen.” Alec puts out his hand.
“Likewise,” Cullen says. He hesitates briefly before flattening his palm against the uneven landscape of Alec’s, and Alec realizes too late that he may be putting Cullen in an awkward position.
Alec smiles and leans close with a conspiratorial smile. “Don’t mind the hand—ran into some trouble in the war.”
Before Cullen can respond, a young woman steps into the room carrying a ceramic serving dish—Maeve, Cullen’s mother. The young widow.
“Oh, Mr. Oswin,” Mrs. Carter says, standing and moving the textbook to the sideboard, “this is my daughter-in-law, Maeve.”
“It’s lovely to meet you,” Maeve says, her blue eyes crinkling at the corners when she smiles.
“It’s a pleasure,” Alec says. “This all looks wonderful.” He gestures at the salmon she’s brought out, the smells of butter and lemon rising along with the rich scent of the fish, and the fish itself surrounded by new potatoes flecked with parsley.
“It’s Friday,” Cullen says dourly. “That’s why there’s fish.”
Maeve laughs as she begins plating the food. “Don’t fuss. Tomorrow I’ll be making you something you like better.”
Cullen says, “Well, you could hardly make something I like less,” and grins at his mother.
“In that case perhaps I’ll be giving it a try,” Maeve says wryly.
Alec thanks her as she passes him his plate, and she smiles at him before serving the rest of the table. Then she turns to Cullen. “Will you lead us in a blessing, love?” She folds her hands and bows her head. Mrs. Carter and Cullen follow suit. Alec hesitates, then bundles his hands in his lap, touched by the easy humor and familiarity woven through their exchanges.
Cullen clears his throat. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ our Lord, amen.” He pauses. “And bless Dad and Uncle Sean and Granddad too, Lord.” He crosses himself.
“My sweet lad.” Maeve brushes the dark curls back from her boy’s forehead, then turns to Alec. “So, Mr. Oswin, is this your first time in Halifax?”
“Yes,” he replies. “So far it seems like a lovely place.”
“Oh, ’tis,” she agrees, slicing into the soda bread. The crust gives way with a hearty tearing sound. She chooses the thickest slice and slathers it carefully with butter and jam, then slides it onto Cullen’s plate. In a soft voice she says to him, “Extra jam for my best boy.”
Alec glances down at the table—Cullen is only a bit older than he was when the cholera struck, and the unabashed affection with which Maeve and her son comport themselves tugs at him.
“The fish is delicious,” Alec says. “The peas as well. That’s mint?”
Maeve dips her head in acknowledgment. “Yes,” she says. “It’s my mam’s way, with mint fresh from the garden. I’m pleased you like it.”
“It’s awfully good,” Alec says. “I don’t have much in the way of herbs in my garden at home. Rather feel like I ought to, now.”
“Just a set of pots will do you,” Maeve says. Alec gives this some thought, asking questions and taking in her answers as they eat, Mrs. Carter chiming in here and there with her own ideas on gardening.
After a while, Cullen speaks up. “Gram says you came by ship, Mr. Oswin. What was it like?”
“It was splendid, crossing the whole of the Atlantic like that.” Alec goes on, happy to be telling them the story of his crossing—icebergs and the rough cast of the waves against the ship, the steady soar of an albatross in the Georges Bank.
“It’s quite a journey,” Maeve says, during a pause. “All that ice. It was like nothing I’d ever dreamed of.”
“I wonder if you came by the southern route as well,” Alec says.
“I believe so.” Maeve’s forehead creases. “Beautiful, most of it, except a bit of a storm near the end.”
“Just a wee young thing when Des brought you home,” Mrs. Carter says affectionately.
“And fat with that one,” Maeve says, her eyes gleaming as she looks at Cullen. He blushes, just a bit, and she puts an arm across his shoulders in a quick hug. “Eat your fish, then.”
Cullen shakes his head. “I can’t. It’s looking at me.”
Alec chuckles, then reaches over and turns the dish. “There. Now it’s watching me instead.”
Cullen laughs. Maeve’s mouth quirks up at the corner.
“Speaking of watching things, I didn’t see very much of the city on the way over,” Alec says. “We’re fairly close to the harbor here, aren’t we?”
Mrs. Carter nods. “When the wind is right we can sometimes hear the tugboat captains talking back and forth with their ships’ horns.”
“I’m going to have a ship and see the whole world when I grow up,” Cullen says. “London and everywhere. Like John Cabot.”
Maeve’s face lights up as she looks at Cullen. “That’s a grand notion.”
For dessert Maeve brings out a small cheesecake decorated with strawberries, Mrs. Carter following her with coffee, cream, and sugar on a round silver tray. When Alec tastes the cheesecake, the sweetness melts against his tongue. Mrs. Nesbit leaves a traybake or some other dessert fairly often, but nothing quite so lush as this.
“This is excellent,” he says to Maeve. She smiles.
Cullen takes a bite of cheesecake and chews thoughtfully, quiet for a moment. “So, do you work with the boats at Livingstone and Gray?”
“I do indeed. In fact, I worked with the design chaps on the Highlander. More physical than it sounds, mind.” Alec pauses, remembering the early days of the ship coming together. “To make sure the design is coming together you have to monkey about in its bones, you know? A ship like that, it doesn’t have riggings and so on like a pirate ship, something to climb in, exactly, but in the beginning especially you spend a good bit of time dangling from a rope with the shipwright, checking the lines. Make sure it feels right and all that.”
“That’s amazing,” Cullen says, his eyes wide. He pauses. “Did you work with ships in the war, too? Were you in the navy?”
“No,” Alec says, “I was a pilot. RAF.”
“Well, you’re in it now,” Maeve says to Alec with a laugh.
“Oh, gosh!” Cullen exclaims. “Did you fly Spitfires?”
Alec warms to Cullen’s enthusiasm. “Bristol Beaufighters. Quite a lot bigger than a Spitfire, and two engines rather than the one. And not nearly so nimble.”
Cullen’s eyes gleam. “Were they single-seaters, too?”
“No, there were three of us to a plane—pilot, gunner, navigator,” Alec says. He hesitates. All the glad memories of the camaraderie will never not be confused with the loss. “Got rather crowded.”
Maeve says, “Cullen’s been mad for planes since we saw a demonstration from the base at Shearwater.”
“I was like that about cars when I was his age. And motorbikes. Planes came later.” Alec beams at Cullen, thinking of those long-ago afternoons with his uncle, the sounds and smells of the race-warmed cars. The echoes never really go away, do they? And now here they are awakened by this bright-eyed boy in Canada, of all places.
Mrs. Carter says, “I don’t know how he keeps them all straight, honestly.” She shakes her head fondly at her grandson.
“The show at the base was super,” Cullen says. “There were so many kinds of planes—Spitfires and Hurricanes and all, and a lot of bombers, and some planes from the Great War. We saw an aerobatics demonstration, too!”
“Oh, yes, I expect that was quite a show.” The echoes keep coming, but there’s a lightness in his chest, too. “You have a favorite?”
Cullen tilts his head thoughtfully. “It’s all of them,” he says at last, “but I liked the fighters better than the bombers. How fast they were.”
Alec nods. “The fighter planes make quite a racket, don’t they? Especially a whole flight of them at once?”
“It was brilliant,” Cullen says happily.
“It was a right shebeen,” Maeve says, her voice dry and affectionate. “Now, lad, it’s coming up on time to say good night.”
“Can I show Mr. Oswin my planes?”
Maeve says, “In the morning, perhaps. I expect he’ll be needing some quiet tonight, after his travels.”
The boy frowns a bit. “But, Mum . . . I’ll be quick.”
Maeve stands, her eyes warm as she regards her son. “Cullen, if there is one thing I know for certain, it’s that there’s no quick with you and your models. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“First thing,” Alec says. He’d be happy to look at the planes now, but he doesn’t want to overstep. “I’d love to see them.”
Maeve mouths a thank-you at Alec over Cullen’s head, her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s time we were off, lad,” she says to Cullen. He makes a face but doesn’t protest as she hands him his crutches.
Mrs. Carter steps around the table to kiss Cullen’s forehead. “Sleep well, lovey.”
Cullen kisses his grandmother’s cheek, then turns, pausing with his elbows angled out from his crutches, his left foot limp beneath the stiff braces. “See you in the morning, Mr. Oswin.”
“Good night, Cullen.” Alec gets to his feet, moved by Cullen’s seeming nonchalance. “I’ll see you and your planes tomorrow.”
The next morning, it’s a moment before he knows where he is, why the room isn’t moving with the sea, but then he soon remembers. Sunlight slices through the curtains and sets the pines and maples outside aglow. He stays still, listening to the swell of unfamiliar noises ringing through the morning—the house shifting as it warms, the distant thunk of the boiler in the cellar.
The air is layered with the wafting scent of baking spices, and his belly rumbles with a confusing wash of memory and hunger, of missing Cook and the vicarage and the days when he and June were still so young—before the war and his hands and the rest of it. He lets the feelings settle, and he gets up to begin his day.
Alec performs his morning ablutions, washing and shaving carefully, and wincing when the hot water pipe clangs with use. He dresses quickly and heads for the stairs. In the corridor he stops again at the family photos—in the light of day, the picture of Maeve and Cullen with Desmond plucks at him.
In the outsized kitchen, Maeve is setting down a rasher of bacon and a carton of eggs, two round cakes cooling on a rack on the counter beyond her. Cullen sits at the kitchen table, a newspaper spread out in front of him dotted with paint and glue. He’s squinting down at a tin airplane, dabbing paint carefully into the markings on its wings.
“Good morning,” Alec says. He smiles at Cullen, taking the seat across from him, eager to resume their conversation about planes. “Fine-looking Spitfire you’ve got there.”
Cullen grins at him, holding up the plane. “It’s my newest.”
Maeve says, “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Oswin?”
“I would love some,” he says. “Thank you. And please call me Alec.”
She reaches across to the rack of mugs warming above the Aga and pours him a cup. Alec takes a long swallow, grateful for its warmth. It may be spring, and Halifax may benefit from the mild coastal climate, but that doesn’t stop the distinct nip in the air this morning.
Alec lifts his face, basking in the scent of ginger and a bit of citrus. “The cake smells marvelous.”
Maeve sips at her own coffee and smiles. “I made one for the bazaar at St. Columba’s this afternoon. The other we’ll be having for the household.”
Alec’s mouth waters hopefully, and he eyes the cakes again. All of this reminds him so much of his childhood in Fenbourne. There had been bazaars and jumbles at St. Anne’s too, part of the flurry of spring festivals dotted through the Fenlands. One year there had been a troupe of Molly dancers in from Suffolk, and twice he had won a silly trinket for June at the fair. “The bazaar sounds a jolly time. Will there be a coconut shy, things like that?”
“There will be. All manner of craic through the afternoon. All in good fun, though, right, lad?” Maeve tousles Cullen’s dark hair, then sets to work with the bacon, humming quietly to herself. It’s a tune Alec doesn’t recognize, perhaps something from her Irish childhood. He sips his coffee, his mind whirling with quiet questions.
Cullen rolls the Spitfire across the newspaper, adjusting the wheels until they move more smoothly, then holds it up so the light through the kitchen window catches it. “I think this is nearly finished.”
Alec says, “You’ve done well with the markings.”
Maeve calls over her shoulder, “What will you be building next, Cullen?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He flies the Spitfire through the airspace above the table, thinking, then glances at Alec. “I don’t have a Beaufighter. Mostly just Spitfires and Hurricanes. And a Lancaster.”
Alec considers this. “I suppose Beaus are a bit harder to find.”
“I suppose so,” Cullen says. “American planes are easy to find. I have a Mustang upstairs.”
Alec asks, “You only work with Allied planes?”
Cullen shrugs. “So far. I have a friend at school who has a Messerschmitt and a Stuka and a Zero, and sometimes we have dogfights.”
“Very good, as long as you win.”
Cullen smiles. “Were you in the Battle of Britain?”
“Yes. Night sorties mostly.” He shrugs, trying to cover the shiver that rises in him, thinking about those nights.
Cullen tilts his head, thinking. “But . . . how did you know where you were? Or where the other planes were? If it was dark? Did you have to black out your lights?”
“Well,” Alec says, “at first it was quite difficult, of course. But you can steer by the stars, and after a while we had planes with radar, and that changed everything.”
“Like a bat,” Cullen says.
“Yes, I expect so.” Those early nights, flying blind in the dark . . . He’s still not sure how to measure the astonishment of flight against the fear.
“Did you ever shoot anyone down?”
“Heavens, Cullen,” Maeve says briskly, turning to give him a stern look. “I’m sorry, Mr. Oswin.”
Alec shakes his head. “No, quite all right.” He looks down at his hands, then meets Cullen’s gaze. “Yes. A few German planes.” Cullen stares, and Alec continues quietly. “Terrible responsibility, really. I’m glad to be shut of it. But I miss the flying. The sound of a Beaufighter’s engines is quite unlike anything else I know.”
Cullen ponders this. “I heard Spitfires at Shearwater. They’re awfully loud. Wouldn’t a Beaufighter be even louder, if there are two engines?”
“Considerably, yes, but the way a Spitfire echoes when it climbs is something else entirely.” He looks at the airplane again. How many Spitfires had he seen over the years? There had been a squadron of them at RAF Manston, and he remembers them shredded on the runways by the Luftwaffe’s relentless raids just as well as he remembers them airborne over the North Sea, glittering fiercely against the enemy. It’s disorienting to think of them—he had known, sailing across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, that he would miss Penny and June and the overgrown back garden and Ursa and the rest of it. But he had not for a moment expected to find himself missing the airfields of England and Algeria, the gleaming snouts of planes waiting in a row.
Maeve puts a pot of jam on the table. Her voice gentle, almost as if she can feel how unsettled he is, says, “Mr. Oswin, will you take your breakfast now?”
Alec smiles at her gratefully. “That would be grand, please.”
She nods and turns her attention to the cooker. A moment later she sets down a plate of bacon and eggs with a thick slice of toast in front of each of them.
“Thank you,” Alec says. The bacon is thick and crisp, the scent of it intoxicating, and he tucks in enthusiastically, happy a moment later to emulate Cullen’s eager spreading of butter and jam on his toast.
After a few minutes Cullen looks up from his breakfast. “Mr. Oswin? Were you ever . . .” He glances briefly at his mother and lowers his voice a bit. “Did they ever shoot you down?”
Maeve turns, her lips pursed. “Cullen, lad . . .”
“It’s fine, really,” Alec says, folding his hands together and trying to corral the memories. “Had a couple of bad moments, yes. Inevitable, really, during wartime.”
Cullen hesitates, his brows furrowing. “Well. I was wondering about your hands, what you said last night about the war.”
Maeve raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Cullen, you’re a brilliant boy and my whole heart, but your questions . . .” She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Oswin.”
“No, it’s quite all right. They’re fine questions.” He smiles at Cullen. “They got me over the Mediterranean, and I had a bit of a job getting free of the wreck. Never healed quite right, but I’m lucky it wasn’t worse.”
Cullen says, “Oh, yes, I see.” He takes a breath, shifting in his chair. “I had polio. That’s why . . .” He gestures at the crutches. “My dad, too.”
Ah, Christ. A vague memory snakes in—Bombay, the night clotted with smoke and rot, his own mother’s face taut with grief and glassy with fever as she tells him that the cholera has taken his father. He rubs his hand across his face, banishing the memory, and gazes at Cullen and Maeve. His chest aches when he sees the grief’s shadow on her face, and the clear light of her love for Cullen. He can’t begin to conceive what that must have been like for her, how afraid she must have been. God. “That must have been unspeakably awful for you. For both of you,” he adds, meeting Maeve’s eyes. “I’m terribly sorry.”
Cullen, his voice small, says, “I don’t really remember. I was only three.”
Maeve offers a sad smile to Alec. She lays her hand across Cullen’s. “Your grandmother will be in soon, love. She’ll not be wanting to hear about this.”
“No, I know.” Cullen pushes the Spitfire along the edge of the table toward Alec. “After breakfast do you want to see my other planes?”
“I’d like that very much.”
Cullen darts a look at Alec and turns back to his mother. “Can Mr. Oswin come to the bazaar with us?”
Maeve says, “I’m sure he’s got any number of other things to do, Cullen.”
“No, I’d love to, really,” Alec says, smiling. “I haven’t been to a bazaar since I was a boy.”
Cullen grins happily, and Maeve rumples his hair. “Go on, then, and show Mr. Oswin your airfield.”
She hands him the crutches, and he gets to his feet, watching Alec over his shoulder to make sure he’s getting up from the table, too.
Maeve watches Cullen go, then turns to Alec, her expression warm. “Perhaps there’ll be a bit of extra cake for you later, Mr. Oswin.” Her eyes twinkle as she adds, “Alec.”
A week into his visit, Alec is more at home in Halifax than he had expected. Most of his time is taken up at Livingstone & Gray, whose offices occupy the upstairs of a cedar-sided block of a building just past the ferry landing, but the routines of the Carter household have enveloped him as well. Ever since that first afternoon and the bazaar at St. Columba’s, out in the pale spring light with Cullen and Maeve, Alec has felt completely comfortable with them. Watching Cullen be absorbed into a pack of boys, one of them with a stunted arm that makes Alec wonder whether he too had been stricken with polio, had warmed him; it had seemed like a privilege to be part of the everyday with them. He had not minded keeping pace with Maeve as she moved through the crowd, and although she hadn’t talked much, the quiet had been companionable and easy.
That camaraderie grows stronger as the weeks pass, as does his sense of the city. By the end of Alec’s fifth week in Halifax, the round front window like a giant eye regarding the shipyard’s domain and the staid blue-and-silver L&G sign mark the top of what he thinks of as his Halifax, just as the Carter house and Point Pleasant Park mark the bottom. He has his patch, as it were, the part of the city where he knows the babies by sight and the dogs by name. He knows which greengrocer Maeve is talking about if she asks him to pick something up on his way back from the office, and what the old woman down the road most wants to hear about her rose garden when he passes by every morning.
It’s reassuring to have his routines, to know which evenings he will write letters home to his girls and which days he is most likely to get the packet from Edinburgh. Those letters are his tether, despite all those moments he’s missing, quotidian though they may be, and each one a thorn in his heart. June’s messages bring him news of Penny’s spring concert at school and the related May Day revels, a loose tile on the roof, a branch come off the pear tree, the boy down the road sick with measles. When he hears that Mrs. Nesbit has slipped on a loose flagstone in the garden and sprained her ankle, Alec has a wave of guilt, as if his absence from Edinburgh is to blame for everything. And Penny’s sporadic notes build in layers in his chest as well—a few lines here and there about Ursa or school, or Penny’s fun with her friends. There are also mentions now and then of “Uncle Floss,” who confusingly seems never to appear in June’s letters. He’s told his daughter a bit about Cullen, and twice she mentions him in her responses. And it warms Alec each time as he thinks about a vague fantasy of a friendship for Cullen and Penny, never mind how illogical the idea is, or how implausible.
He misses home. Stopping to have a natter with the stately old Labrador at the chemist’s down the road is not really a substitute for Ursa, but every bit helps. Too, he feels his place at the Carter house. There had been that first rush of activity—not even twenty-four hours in and he’d had two meals and that glory of a church bazaar with Cullen and Maeve—and since then he has felt increasingly like this is home too, in a way. He has his breakfast with Cullen every day, the two of them talking about airplanes or dogs or a host of other things, and dines with the family in the evenings. Thrice now he has cut the grass for Mrs. Carter on a weekend morning, because it’s one less thing she has to pay a neighborhood boy to do, even for a few weeks. His days are square and secure, the march of time forward sometimes confusing as it moves him deeper into his Halifax visit, deeper into this family and his growing attachment to Cullen and Maeve, and always closer to the day he boards the ship that will take him home.
During the week, he takes the trolleybus to the waterfront and the alcove he shares with a gruff pipe-smoking Quebecois whose blueprints and sketches litter the room like palm leaves. Most days, Alec takes his lunch at the Everard, a shabby little diner not far from the wharf. It’s the kind of place that must once have catered to stevedores and shipwrights, now more likely to feed men like him stepping away from the office for an hour in the middle of the day. He finds a certain comfort in the worn banquettes in the booths, and the nicks in the long countertop that runs the length of the building. They remind him of the pubs near the shipyard at Leith, the scores of lunches and pints with Sanjay and the other men from the office, and there is a quiet joy in being somewhere familiar.
Today, though, he and Armand, the draftsman, are meant to be settling the question of Livingstone & Gray’s next build, which has been a slow process at best. But now, after weeks of forms carved into paper with a T square and a thick black wax pencil, Armand’s fragrant pipe smoke thick in the air, they’ve found the gem they’re looking for: a sloop that will race along the cresting waves like a Thoroughbred.
At lunchtime, Alec makes his way to one of the creaky wooden benches that sit along the docks, waving off the pigeons and gulls hoping for a prize. He regards the birds warily—Maeve has packed him a lunch of leftover meat pasties, their crimped edges a rich brown, all of it flaking away in his hands. If he were a bird he would want this too, but he’s made the mistake before of throwing something to the gulls. They’ll grant no quarter and make a dreadful racket besides.
As with so much else Maeve has done in the past weeks, the pasties make Alec a bit homesick, if that’s the word. It’s less missing Edinburgh, or even his family, and more a nostalgic longing for his mother, or for those quiet afternoons with Cook and June at the vicarage. Of wondering what would have been without the war, or without his particular war, without the loss of the vicarage and his and June’s families, all of it contained in the way a layer of crust peels away when he bites it. It’s a form of magic, really, the conjuring, the spells woven through Maeve’s baking, as if she were a wisewoman of old, or a benevolent sorceress.
He finishes his lunch, the gulls swooping and screaming overhead, barking back at the breeze. Alec pauses and looks out over the water, where a seal is bobbing in the light current between two fishing trawlers in their berths. He watches until the seal dives again, and then Alec packs up to go back to the office.