Andy’s wedding to Penny Craven was in Epping, the next town west of North Weald. The bride looked smashing. Andy looked like a cat about to start licking cream from a pitcher his people had forgotten about.
After the ceremony, A.E. lined up outside the church with other flyers from the original Eagle Squadron. As the new bride and groom walked between their short rows, Mamedoff tipped her a wink. He turned his head to make sure his new wife didn’t see him doing it, too. A.E. grinned. She had all she could do not to laugh out loud. He was a piece of work, all right.
The reception was on the meadow behind the home—the mansion, really—of Penny’s father and mother. “So wonderful to meet you, Pilot Officer Earhart,” Penny said. “I’ve admired you since I was a child, of course. And Andy always says such wonderful things about you.”
“Does he?” A.E. kept her face straight. As far as she was concerned, that came closer to earning her a medal than anything she’d done in the air against the Germans.
Before the new Mrs. Mamedoff could answer, two Spitfires from 71 Squadron buzzed the reception. They weren’t much above rooftop height, and did a victory roll as they passed overhead. The roar from their motors stopped everything in its tracks. A.E. glanced at the big house’s windows to make sure they hadn’t shivered to sparkling shards.
“The cheek of those buggers!” someone said when mere human conversation became possible again. “I shall speak to the RAF about this.”
“You do that, sir,” someone else told him. Before long, A.E. realized the man who’d complained was Epping’s mayor. Maybe the flyers really would wind up in trouble.
She glanced back to Penny. All the Englishwoman said was, “Do you Yanks do that every time somebody in the squadron gets married?”
“I don’t know,” A.E. answered. “Andy’s the first one.”
Penny Craven—no, Penny Mamedoff now—smiled a smile of ownership. A.E. could have told her something about that, but she didn’t. She wanted Andy to be happy. God only knew he’d earned happiness the hard way. She did wonder if Penny knew Andy’s folks ran a restaurant in Massachusetts. She wondered even more if Penny’s father and mother knew. That smile said the new bride was marrying for love, or thought she was. She might not worry so much about money. Her parents would, though.
“Americans certainly have livened things up since they got here,” Penny said. “We can use some of that, I think.”
“I’m not the one to tell you whether you can use it or not,” A.E. said. “But you’re right. You’ve sure got it.”
After a severely abbreviated wartime honeymoon, Andy went off to his new squadron. A.E. caught Red Tobin sending her quizzical looks. “What’s up?” she asked, as usual not beating around the bush.
“I dunno,” he said. But even he could tell that wouldn’t do. He tried again: “Ain’t nobody left here but us chickens.”
“Don’t say it like that!” she exclaimed.
“Sorry,” he answered sheepishly. “You know what I mean, though.”
“I know how you said it—like we’ll be gone pretty soon, too. Cut that out, you hear?” If A.E. hadn’t had any superstitions like that before, flying in wartime would have given them to her. Too many strange things and too many horrible things happened for you just to shrug them off. She didn’t like thinking she heard the goose walking over her grave.
A few days later, Red said, “We’ve got another Rhubarb set for tomorrow. You coming with me again?”
“If I can,” she said. “When I was flying patrol over the Channel just now, my engine started smoking and trying to cut out. I had to nurse it back here at low power. After I landed, I checked it, but I couldn’t find anything. The mechanics are trying to figure out what’s wrong with it now.”
“Okay. You sure as heck don’t want to go over France in a kite that might let you down. I’ll talk to one of the guy guys”—he grinned at her—“in case you can’t make it.”
He flew with a different wingman the next day. The groundcrew still hadn’t made her Spitfire’s Merlin behave. A.E. felt bad about staying behind, but what could you do? No one would question her courage; she’d done more than enough to prove that to the other flyers even if she was a woman. But she wanted to cross the Channel and kick the Germans in the teeth, dammit.
Eight planes did climb away from North Weald: two finger-fours. They had enough firepower among them to hit the enemy hard if they came across anything juicy. A.E. watched them fly south and wished them luck. She’d see them all again—she hoped she’d see them all again—in two or three hours. She wondered what kind of stories they’d tell.
She realized something had gone wrong well before the Rhubarb raiders were due back. A corporal on a bicycle came from the radar station to the operations hut as fast as he could pedal. He didn’t waste time on the kickstand when he got there. The bike fell over with a clatter as he dashed inside.
When he came out, his face was still as white as if he’d seen a ghost. A.E. dogtrotted over to him as he picked up the bicycle. “What happened?” she said. “Something must have.”
“Aye, ma’am.” He nodded jerkily. He had a northern accent. A.E. had been in England long enough by now to recognize it. “There’s Jerries oop behind t’boys, swarms o’ Jerries. They laid a trap, like, an’ we walked into it.”
“Christ! Can our guys get away?”
“Soon as we saw ’em go oop, I came over here. T’boys know they’ve got trouble now. They’ll do what they can.” The corporal lit a cigarette and offered A.E. the packet. She shook her head. He rode back to the radar station.
And she … was all dressed up with no place to go. She looked toward her kite, and toward the mechanics still working on it. She could have been down in France herself, goddammit. She might have done Red some good.
More of the RAF men who stayed on the ground all the time started gathering at the edge of the runway with extinguishers and other firefighting gear. The shoulder-length asbestos gauntlets made A.E. suck in her breath. If you had to wear those to pull someone from a burning plane, would he thank you for it afterwards?
Four planes came back, all of them colandered with bullet holes, two with wounded pilots. “God bless the fucking planes,” one Yank said, sounding more than half drunk on adrenaline and terror. “They can give it out, and Jesus, they can take it. We all oughta be dead.”
“What happened … to the guys who aren’t here?” A.E. asked.
“They went down. If they’re lucky, they got out first. If they’re real lucky, they’ll run into friendly Frenchmen and get fed toward Spain and Portugal, and maybe we’ll see ’em again. Otherwise, POW camps. Or …” He didn’t go on, or need to.
Red Tobin wasn’t one of the Americans who’d returned. No one had seen him bail out. A.E. stumbled around the base in a mixture of grief and guilt. When he would have needed her most, she was stuck on the wrong side of the Channel.
What could you do now? You could get drunk, and A.E. did. Booze put a glass wall between what you were feeling and you. It didn’t go away, but you got some shelter from it. You could screw. You forgot everything else when you did, at least for a little while. If Andy’d been around, A.E. might have, and what Penny didn’t find out about wouldn’t hurt her. But none of the other Yanks in 71 Squadron interested her that way. At least nobody tried to jump on her after she fell into her cot.
The next morning, her head pounded as if she had a drop forge in there. Aspirins and coffee helped as much as they could: better than nothing, but not good enough. She went out to see how the mechanics were doing with her Spit.
“We’ve set it right, ma’am,” the flight sergeant in charge of the work crew told her. He smiled. “Good job we didn’t fix it yesterday, what? You might’ve got caught in France yourself.”
He meant well. She reminded herself of that before she could start shrieking obscenities at him. All the same, her stare made him flinch. “I wanted to be there,” she said in a low, deadly voice. “One of the two best friends I had left on this side of the ocean got killed yesterday. Maybe I could have done something to keep him alive.”
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” the mechanic said, and got away from her as fast as he could. She didn’t suppose she could blame him.