That night
The children were sticky from the treat Mrs. Scaldwell had made and wouldn’t go to sleep. Only a few hours later, they had ’planes overhead, as low as they might be flying past their ears.
The sirens in Dittisham had begun to wail, the rising and falling of warning. Mrs. Arbuthnot appeared in the corridor. “I suppose we should bring them down?” They had become accustomed, exhausted, but Bridey insisted. Yes, they should bring them down.
Beryl, Tina, Pamela, Doreen, and the boys carried pillows under their arms, and some trailed the blankets from their cots. Mrs. Arbuthnot grabbed the baby a little too harshly and woke the poor thing. The child howled as they marched down the family stairs to the entry, past the portrait of the mistress, age four, past the portrait of the stern nanny of Mrs. M.’s own childhood, into the morning room and through.
Bridey settled the children in piles of bedding in front of the fireplace and, after taking each to the toilet, dropped into the couch behind them. Mrs. Arbuthnot eagerly handed over the crying infant. Bridey jostled him back to sleep while Mr. Scaldwell checked at the shutters.
“Brixham, I think,” he said. “Again.”
Mr. Arbuthnot had a cigar out, Sunday picnic for him. “Brixham’s hardly up the road.”
Scaldwell looked over. “If you light that cigar, so help me . . .”
“Ah, you think you have authority, do you?”
“I like my chances, sir, if you would like to test it.”
“Dear me, I wouldn’t want to tangle with a member of the Brixham Home Guard—”
“Malcolm, put the cigar away,” Mrs. Arbuthnot snapped. In the light of the candle Mrs. Scaldwell had lit, her face was pinched. “Think of . . . the children’s developing lungs. Bridey?”
“Yes, missus,” Bridey said. “The smoke’s not good for them.”
“Bombs aren’t good for them,” Mr. Arbuthnot groused. “Or for any of us, but Churchill has his cigar.”
“When you lift a finger to save humanity, you can have yours, too,” Scaldwell said.
Arbuthnot dug himself out of the chair, bluster and indignation.
“Malcolm, please,” his wife said, without conviction. Her daughters exchanged glances.
Mrs. Mallowan hadn’t even come down. She preferred, Scaldwell said, to be up in the high stories of the house if it were to collapse.
After the all-clear, after putting the children back to bed, Bridey went to her room and pulled out her kit, her bandages and packets of aspirin, and drew out the bottle of blue pills. She had not slept much since her visit from Dr. Hart, had spent all her time within Greenway House, studying the mistress’s books for ideas. How was a villain revealed?
She opened the bottle and shook one of the pills into the palm of her hand. She couldn’t take one. What if the sirens started up again, or if one of the children became ill? What if the pill worked too well and she couldn’t rise in the morning?
What if it stunned her into thinking she should take more than one?
What if she took more than one?
Bridey put the pill back in the bottle, the bottle back into the kit, and herself to bed. What she wanted was a clear head, though she felt she may never have one again.
Bridey woke to shouting. She sat up but all was silent.
She had dreamed of the old family flat on fire, charred remains of all she loved, and the smoke in her nose and throat. Was it her thrashing and shouting in her sleep?
But she did smell smoke. She kicked back the covers and went to the door. Bare feet in the corridor, then the stairs, yes it was smoke, the stairwell filled with haze.
She tucked her face into the crook of her elbow and trailed the smoke down to the ground floor, past the kitchen and pantry, past the gong, and into the front hall. It came from the left, from the library—no, from the inner hall, a sort of sitting room reserved for the family. In that room, a comfortable-looking chair smoldered.
Bridey ran to the kitchen, flung open the door to the scullery, and finally found a stew pot to fill with water and carry back. Mr. Scaldwell stood at the bottom of the family stairs, slippered and groggy, his demeanor all but poised to demand of her what the blast she was doing when he caught the scent.
“Did we have a strike?”
He followed her to the chair and watched as she poured the whole of the pot into it.
“An enemy within.” He reached into the seat of the chair and pulled out the short end of a soggy cigar. “I would like to be enraged but I’m not nearly surprised enough. I don’t have the blood for it.”
“He nearly set the house on fire.”
“I dare say it is not the first fire this house has seen,” Scaldwell said. “But he might have killed us all.”
She’d not had enough time to consider it, to follow the smoke to its ultimate conclusion. Her teeth chattered.
Scaldwell reached for the pot. “I can take over if you would like to return to bed.”
“I’m quite awake now.”
“Perhaps some tea, then.”
In the kitchen, he made the tea and set two cups on the table. “An old man falling asleep and dropping his lit cigar like a baby dropping its dummy. If that doesn’t say something about the state of this country, old codgers in nappies at the gears . . .”
She concentrated on keeping her hands steady to pour milk into her cup.
“Ah,” he said, “you think I’m an old man, is that it? I’m not so old as that.” He stirred his tea. “Aye, maybe I am. Old enough to have been in the tangle last time.”
“Oh?”
“But still hearty,” he said. “Rhymes with foolhardy, though, doesn’t it? Best not call my own bluff, as many funerals as we’ve had, these parts.”
Bridey worked at keeping her face blank.
“Something inside them gave out,” he said. “That’s what they’ve been saying.”
Heart lungs stomach kidneys liver bowels.
“If you’re worried after your friend,” he said, “you can rest easy that whatever took these men didn’t take her.”
He couldn’t know that.
Gigi had been gone a year with no word, and she thought of her less each day. Now, she was thinking of the doctor’s bag, filled with tools to save and used to carry home treasures. And in between—
“Why does a person kill another?” She remembered the soldier at St. Prisca’s. “Other than an accident, say?”
“Other than war?” Scaldwell could be thinking of deaths he had meted out, too. Some, encouraged to kill. “Greed. Lust. Wrath. There are more but I can’t—pride. Envy?”
She didn’t know what to do about the doctor, if anyone would believe her. If, in taking her account, certain questions might be asked in London. She was not a trustworthy person. She had to stop it, though, didn’t she? If she could stop suffering—
A stab in her gut, thinking of Gigi. But Gigi would have put herself first, too. Every woman for herself.
“I think I will try to lie down a while,” she whispered. She left her cup for someone else to tidy. It wasn’t like her. It wasn’t at all who she was.