Mr. Churchill's Secretary (18 page)

A
ND THEN, FINALLY
, after months of anticipation and dread, the Luftwaffe attacked London.

Maggie was making copies of the P.M.’s letters in the Annexe office with Mrs. Tinsley and Miss Stewart when the air-raid siren began its low wail. This was no drill.

As they made their way down to the protected underground War Rooms, they could hear the roar of the aircraft engines.
Ours? Theirs?
Maggie thought. She threw open a window to look. There were hundreds—
thousands
, it seemed—of planes circling overhead, black insects against the sky, leaving silvery vapor trails against the blood-red clouds, darkening in the setting sun.

“Air raid, please. Air raid, please,” they heard Mr. Rance, the overseer of the War Rooms, call. It didn’t surprise Maggie that at a time like this he was using the word
please
. At No. 10, one said please for everything. She could just as easily imagine him saying, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, please. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, please.”

As they heard the antiaircraft guns rumble and saw the aircraft break formation to dive into dogfights, Miss Stewart placed her hand gently on Maggie’s shoulder. “There’s nothing you can do by watching, my dear.”

Maggie nodded, yet she was unable to tear her eyes
away from the spectacle in the sky, frozen with fear, fascination, admiration, and anger.

“Come along, Miss Hope,” Mrs. Tinsley said, leading the way downstairs.

Maggie took a moment to scoop Nelson up from on top of her desk to take him with them. “Coming.”

Below, an argument was brewing.

“I shall,” the P.M. stated emphatically. “I
shall
go up and watch. It’s my city, damn it. And you”—he waggled his finger at General Ismay—“shan’t stop me.”

“Sir,” General Ismay began, yet again, “as your adviser, I hardly think it prudent—”

“ ‘Prudent’?
‘Prudent’
?” Churchill spluttered. “We’re at war, man. There’s nothing prudent about it.”

General Ismay sighed. “Then please, sir. Only for a few moments.”

Mr. Churchill looked around at the gathered staff. “Who’s in?” he said with his cherubic smile, as though inviting them to cocktails.

Maggie raised her hand. John and David raised theirs. The senior staff—General Ismay, Mr. Attlee, and Mr. Eden—decided to go as well. The P.M.’s ever-present shadow, Detective Inspector Walter Thompson, followed the P.M. with a grim face.

“Don’t panic—remember, we’re British,” David joked as they went up the stairs in the shadows, but no one laughed. From their vantage point on the roof, it looked as though all of London was burning. The entire horizon of the city glowed orange-red in the dark.

Sirens wailed and Messerschmitts screamed overhead. They could hear the great thudding boom of bombs ripping buildings apart, and could feel the answering shake from British gunfire. The building rocked and swayed in response; it was all so close. The savagery and destruction happening were almost too much to bear. A terrible
tremor went through Maggie, and she involuntarily took a step backward, right into John. He put his hands on her shoulders for a moment to steady her; she was surprised and flustered by his touch. As John dropped his hands, David took her arm to give her a reassuring squeeze.

But David didn’t turn his eyes from the horizon. None of them could. The very air tasted of death—acrid, bitter, and metallic—and as Maggie looked up into the sky, she could imagine the souls of the newly dead hovering over them.

New waves of planes flew over them in two-minute intervals. Their motors ground and growled in vicious anticipation of dropping their cargo. Batches of incendiary bombs, clusters of lights called chandeliers, fell into the blackness, flashing with brilliance before burning down to pinpoints of dazzling white. They watched most of them go out, one by one, as firemen extinguished the blazes before they could rage out of control. But some burned on, and soon a yellow flame leapt up from the white center. Yet another building was engulfed in flames.

Above the fires, the sky seethed red. Overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, was a cloud of pink smoke. Up in that shrouding were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light—antiaircraft shells bursting. The barrage balloons stood in clear relief against the burning horizon, glowing crimson. Maggie was suddenly glad Aunt Edith wasn’t there to witness such an event.

They were silent in the face of such savagery, except for David, who let out a soft whistle as one particularly gorgeous chandelier exploded. It was the most beautiful and horrific sight Maggie had ever witnessed. She could feel the wetness of her sweat seeping from her armpits, pooling between her breasts, and running down her back, even in the cold.

As her thoughts went to her flatmates, out there, vulnerable, in that vast expanse of darkness, she could feel her shell of denial begin to crack. Fear had become a real person standing too close and pressing against her, hard and crude, daring her to cry out in panic.

“You all right?” John whispered.

She pulled herself up and stood straight. “Yes, I’m all right.” She was. She would get through this. They would all get through this. “And you?”

His voice was steely. “I’m getting back to work.”

Yes, work. Work was the only thing they could do.

The next morning, Maggie walked around bombed-out London. According to the BBC, the raids had been perpetrated by three hundred bombers, escorted by six hundred fighters. In just one night, more than four hundred people had been killed. Not to mention the bomb damage and resulting fires, including a huge one on the London docks. And the bombers were going to keep coming—night after night after night.

She walked past cats peering out from boarded-up windows, past houses with balconies, turrets, and Palladian windows. Past chimneys and church towers pointing accusing fingers up to heaven. Many of the once-proud houses were next to mountains of rubble or the skeletons of buildings. Maggie felt shock, disbelief, and overwhelming sadness at the violence and ruin and waste of it all.

As night after night of bombing went by, Maggie was beginning to feel, even amid the grief and loss, a sense of defiance emerging, a fierce solidarity that overrode the fear, and a wicked sense of black humor that outsiders might not understand. Bombed-out shops were open for business, regardless of damage sustained.

“More open than usual?” Maggie joked with one grocer whose front windows had shattered in the raids.

The man grinned back at her. “Right you are, miss, right you are.”

Another open store displayed the sign:
They can smash our windows but they can’t beat our furnishing values
. Even the police station posted:
Be good—we’re still cops
.

As the days turned to weeks, everyone in London learned to live with it. They learned to live with the dread and the fear, the sleepless nights and their churning, sour stomachs. They learned to get up and run to the flimsy corrugated-steel Anderson shelter in the dark without tripping and falling. They learned to live with the glow from fires burning in the East End and to live with the smell—the stench of thick, black smoke and an underlying scent of things best not discussed. Many people, more than 170,000 by some accounts, learned to live underground in at least eighty different Tube stations, sleeping on the floor, cooking over small grills, and using buckets for toilets.

They became used to seeing the endless processions of people dressed in black, coming to or from the constant funerals and memorial services.

They learned to read the morning papers without weeping.

But there were some things they couldn’t get used to. Didn’t want to. When yet another bomb dropped on their block, Maggie, Paige, and Sarah saw bodies—bodies of their friends and neighbors—pulled out from the rubble. Those weren’t the kinds of things they could forget.

But they could go on. They had to. They all went to work, ate their meals, spoke to one another in the shops, went on as though they were people in one of those classic British plays—always polite, terribly formal, occasionally stiff. It was almost comical sometimes.

There was really nothing else to do.

*  *  *

The ad ran in
The Times
as planned, an innocuous line drawing advertising the latest in women’s fashion: day dresses with skirts ending just below the knee, wrist-covering gloves, straw boater hats, and spectator pumps.

But crosshatched into the drawing where the stitching was were hundreds upon hundreds of minuscule dots and dashes. Put together, they spelled out a message for anyone who knew where to look.

Pierce was pleased to see its placement—some pages in, bottom left-hand corner, beneath the cricket scores, next to the crossword puzzle—easily glanced over and dismissed.

Except for those who were waiting for it.

At his desk, he clipped it carefully from the paper with small, sharp scissors and put it away for Claire to include in her next letter to Norway. “Bloody idiots,” he muttered to himself as he stirred his tea with satisfaction. “They’ll never see it coming.”

There was a knock at the door. He rose to his feet and opened it. There was Claire.

He smiled, and their eyes locked. “I was hoping you’d come,” he said.

She pressed herself against him and circled his neck with her hands. “I know,” she said. “I thought we should celebrate.”

His body began to respond. “What about Michael?” he managed finally, his voice thick with desire.

Her hand started at his shirtfront and found its way to his belt. “Let’s not talk about him right now.”

Despite the bombing, which barraged London night after night, Maggie decided to return her attention to finding out more information about her father.

An odd mission indeed
, she thought distractedly as
she got ready to leave, pinning on her brown straw derby hat with lilac ribbons and adjusting it in the mirror before leaving the house.

One fact she knew about her father was that he’d been a professor working with the Operational Research Group in the Department of Discrete and Applied Mathematics at the London School of Economics. It seemed like a good place to start.

Samuel Barstow, the department chair, allowed her into his office, crammed full of books, papers, and files in no discernible order. On the wall was a reproduction of Escher’s woodcut
Day and Night
. The air was thick with dust and cigarette smoke, while a spiky aspidistra kept vigil on the window ledge.

Barstow was in his mid-sixties, sported a striped bow tie, and had a pale, papery look to him, as if he rarely if ever saw the light of day. “I don’t have much time, Miss—”

“Hope. Maggie Hope,” she said, offering her hand.

He rose and clasped it, leaving ink smudges on her beige gloves. “Pleasure. What may I do for you, Miss Hope?”

“I was wondering if you might answer a few questions for me.”

“About the final?” he said, pushing back woolly gray hair. “We covered all of that in class. Just find someone and get the notes—”

“No, Professor Barstow. Actually, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about my father—Edmund Hope. He was a professor here from 1906 to 1916, working in this department.”

Samuel Barstow sat down suddenly, as though deflated. He gestured to the dark-green leather chair opposite his desk. “Oh, my dear, my dear.”

Maggie moved a stack of blue books to the floor and perched on the edge of the seat.

“Edmund Hope. I haven’t heard that name in, well—forgive me, it’s been a while.” He took out a heavy silver lighter and lit his cigarette, drawing in the smoke and then exhaling a blue cloud with a sigh.

“I realize that,” she said, leaning forward.

He stared at the tip, which smoldered red in the office’s gloomy light, then closed his eyes. As he did, she noticed the deep lines around them, the bruiselike purple shadows beneath, and the creases on his forehead.
He’s about the same age my father would have been
, she thought.
Would be. My father would have the same wrinkles by now
.

Professor Barstow took a long drag on his cigarette, then exhaled. “Miss Hope …”

“Maggie. Please.”

“Maggie,” he repeated thoughtfully. “It’s so very good to meet you, Maggie. You’re without a doubt your father’s daughter, but with aspects of your mother as well, of course. I only met her once or twice, but your father always had a photograph of her on his desk. We used to tease him no end about it—how he’d managed to persuade such a pretty girl to marry him.”

Maggie wanted to hear more—she wanted to hear everything—but she knew she had to bring the conversation back to the topic at hand.

“Did you go to his funeral?”

“Did I—” His moist eyes looked shocked.

“You see, I was wondering if you did, or if you know of anyone who did.”

“What on earth would make you ask that? Of course I went to your mother’s funeral.”

“My mother’s?” she asked. “No, this is about my father’s. I—”

“My dear child,” he said, leaning forward. “I never went to your father’s funeral.”

She folded her hands tightly together. “Why not?”

“Because—to the best of my knowledge—your father is still alive.”

Maggie gasped.

“I know he was living alone, not coming in to work, and drinking a bit more than prudent,” Barstow said. “We were all terribly worried about him. His sister was taking care of you, and he—well, one day, he just disappeared.”

“ ‘Disappeared’?” Maggie said, unclenching her hands. “No one can just disappear.”

“That’s what it seemed like. He became increasingly isolated and delusional—and the next thing we knew, he was gone.”

“Yes, but gone
where
?”

“My dear, I wish I could say. But there was the trench war, you know. Your father and I were friends, and it gives me great pain to say this. I assumed he’d gone to the country or something like that—to get his head back together. But the months went by, and then the years—and he just never came back.”