Dedication
For my opa Thomas Bruce Cann,
who served with the 24th Field Ambulance,
5th Armored Division, Royal Canadian Army
Epigraph
The streets of town were paved with stars
It was such a romantic affair
—“A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Historical Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Acclaim for Rachel McMillan
Also by Rachel McMillan
Copyright
Historical Note
When you wander Cloth Fair in pursuit of St. Bartholomew the Great in London, you pass through a gatehouse, which is one of the oldest buildings in the city—dating to the time of the Great Fire. As a voracious reader of historical fiction, I often approach books in a similar manner to this gatehouse. As a gateway to the past. Hopefully capturing the essence and sensibility of a time long gone, while promoting further exploration. My most memorable fictional experiences inspire me to read more about the periods, places, and events I have encountered. I am not a scholar, rather a nerdy bookworm and enthusiast who has long wanted to make the London churches—both blitzed and non—a muse.
As a Canadian author writing the history of a foreign city I love, I recognize that my creation of this novel was conceived with historical liberties, often to the advantage of the world I wanted to create while appropriating a history I cannot personally speak to. My limitations, however, should not be a reflection of my deep inspiration or passion for this remarkable city, its people, and its resiliency. I wrote this book with reverence and awe but mostly to inspire you to pursue the history of London (not a hardship, I assure you) on your own terms.
So, let me start with a verifiable fact. My opa, Private Thomas Bruce Cann of Exeter, Ontario, served with the Royal Canadian Army, 24th Field Ambulance, 5th Armoured Division. He volunteered for the role of stretcher bearer because he never wanted to fire a gun. To our knowledge, he never did. I imparted this proud family history onto Brent Somerville. While Brent’s division and European tour during the war are entirely of my own creation, the intensity and horror of his experiences, his postwar PTSD, and his camaraderie are entirely authentic.
The Churches
Photos of couples marrying amidst rubble and parsons officiating services during the war years are plentiful and captured brilliantly. The parish churches, whole or maimed, were still a mainstay of a community in the midst of the upheaval of war. To add, the determination to rebuild was rampant. If one church had a piece that another did not in the midst of the chaos and destruction, they swapped. The rebuilt churches in London are a complicated and beautiful puzzle piece.
The grading system determining the heritage and preservation of London’s history was imparted in 1947; however, long before its implementation, committees were established to consider the atrocities of the Blitz as well as the subsequent plans of action. There was a motion to leave the wrecked churches as monuments to their horrible devastation, but I assure you I am happy that this motion was largely unpassed. While beautiful gardens overrun the ruins of Christ Church Greyfriars and the Priory Church of the Order of St. John, Clerkenwell, in memory of loss, I truly treasure the rebuilt London churches. To the contemporary eye, they may wield the look of a patchwork quilt, bearing the scars of war, but the dedication to the architect’s vision centuries later is commendable.
If you spend enough time in London, you wonder how Christopher Wren existed without a Starbucks—for such was his indefatigable drive! He is a true Renaissance man. His influence stretches far beyond London (look to Washington, DC, if you want to see Wren’s distinctive architectural influence stateside . . . ). After the Great Fire, he was given royal permission to rebuild fifty-one of the churches destroyed. Twenty-three of these churches (as well as St. Paul’s Cathedral) remain in the heart of the city’s financial center; while many were destroyed during the Blitz, several were demolished in the nineteenth century to make way for modern urban development.
The reconstruction of the churches lasted for decades with many reopening for services as late as the 1960s, but the indomitable work of historians and architects as well as religious leaders and committees to recreate and honor Wren’s vision provides a lasting memorial that you will immediately see when you visit the beautiful city.
Though London is a city I have sought several times, I spent ten days last fall specifically exploring the Wren churches (and their friends) and learned closely of the spirit of these remarkable buildings in honoring the intent of their architect while still advancing into the modern era and thus to eternity. I am not, alas, an architecture historian, so all errors in my portrayal of these beautiful structures are mine.
The St. Paul’s Watch included volunteers who pledged their lives to a structure under Churchill’s orders, and on the Longest Night (often called the Second Great Fire of London in December 1940) Churchill ordered that the cathedral be protected at all costs as integral to the battered city’s morale. As such, St. Paul’s became an icon of indomitable spirit. Until the 1960s, its un-Blitzed dome was the highest point in the city.
King’s College
I confess wholeheartedly to creating courses, departments, and structures of the Strand campus of this institution to geographically suit the world I was rebuilding. Theology was not a course taught there, but having Brent teach there made a lot of sense for my story. Ah! The malleable wonder of fiction.
The Soviet Threat and Eternity
I love that in the earliest instances of the Cold War (a term coined by George Orwell who, ironically, wrote the tome so central to dystopian fiction), it was a war of “nerds” (as I joked with my editor). Academics and scientists and philosophers. A quiet war, at first, rooted in ideology. While everything (including Simon’s very liberal MI6 involvement) is fictional, the Cold War, the discovery of a weapon as brutal and devastating as the atomic bomb, and the rise of Communist sympathy was rampant and often hidden just beneath the surface. The Secret Intelligence Service at 54 Broadway used numerous locations throughout London for the passing of encrypted and top-secret messages. Hotels, the Old Vic Theatre, private clubs as well as churches—such as the Holy Trinity Church, Knightsbridge—became essential for clandestine meetings and drop-offs.
One of the aspects of the Second World War that has always fascinated me is how ordinary people were forced into extraordinary roles: often unprepared. Diana’s “recruitment” by Simon Barre as well as his method of procuring her for his Eternity hunch are, of course, fictional, but civilians were certainly used to gather intelligence.
In a similar way to Diana and Brent navigating a world of amateur espionage, I thought it likely that men swayed by the threatening Co
mmunist ideology may also try to play an integral role, albeit without knowing a sure way of the ropes.
Bletchley Park
When I wandered Bletchley Park for research, I attempted to recreate the everyday life of the men and women for whom it became home. While the Government Code and Cipher School was mostly populated by women (a three-to-one ratio), there were men there—often of academic renown—who were assigned on account of their proficiency in mathematics and chess. The women, too, were often selected based on their educational background and proficiency in languages. It is quite likely that a woman of Diana’s talent in languages would have been assigned to Hut 3 in the capacity she was.
Both Gordon Welchman (in The Hut Six Story) and the BMP reports developed by the German Air Section at Bletchley speak to signal interceptions and the Y Sections or “ears” of Bletchley Park. While the three-man RAF Y Stations for the listening, decoding, and interception of German radio signals were based at Cheadle, Chicksands, and Kingsdown, I very much needed to keep Diana where she was, though it could be possible for Diana and Fisher to be stationed at the park listening for possible signals, intercepts, and communications over the airwaves. Once I decided that some of these could be interrupted by classical music, I was over the moon.
While I made up the Bletchley traitor that Simon Barre was assigned to find, there was actual traitorous activity within Bletchley Manor. The most famous being John Cairncross: a double agent, late of Cambridge, whose cryptonym was Liszt (after the classical composer). As of 1944, he worked for MI6.
Oleum Medicina
The wonderful thing about fiction is you can create a relic out of thin air. Prior Rahere is very much a real person whose fateful pilgrimage to Rome inspired him to consider the plight of impoverished Londoners and to found a priory and hospital near the Smithfield Market. Yet, I created that artifact and the rumor of his bringing it back to St. Bart’s. What is not fictional is the artifacts unintentionally exhumed when Luftwaffe bombs fell. So many priceless treasures from the churches surrounding the oldest gates and areas of Roman-discovered Londinium survive. A visit to London affords this glimpse into the past. I heartily recommend visiting the rebuilt church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower and St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, which host some fascinating Roman relics from ancient London.
The London Restoration hopefully reflects my sheer passion for some of the world’s most beautiful churches and my awe at the resilience of a nation to ensure that the powers of hell never prevailed against them. Yet, it is not an authoritative text. I encourage readers to visit my Goodreads page (my bibliography was far too extensive to include here) and pursue some of the themes, places, events . . . and churches.
Chapter 1
September 1945
Allied-Occupied Vienna
While some adjusted to air-raid sirens and others to the lost light of blackouts, Diana Somerville never recovered from the absence of church bells. The war had taken the bells in London, the home she was impatient to return to, and certainly in Vienna, where she had been for the past five weeks. She’d never hear the resonant peal of the Pummerin, the booming bell cast in the eighteenth century and ruined several months previously at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
En route to a meeting with a man named Gabriel Langer, she looked up at the interrupted cathedral. While the structure was still recognizable, its famed crisscrossed roof had been incinerated. Diana imagined it as it might have been before the war.
As she passed one of the cream Baroque buildings unfelled by Luftwaffe bombs, Wieder Frei!—“Free Again!”—was plastered in colorful attribution to the new and mostly Soviet regime in a city quartered by Allied dominance between the British, French, Americans, and Russians. The city was still beautiful despite the propaganda, scars, and craters from the bombs.
How had the Soviets gone from a needed ally into MI6’s most imminent threat?
Simon Barre had told her that the loudest voice in a time of devastation could blast through a war-torn city like cannon fire. Or the mournful toll of a church bell. She had been so preoccupied during her time at Bletchley Park and thereafter in this temporary city home that she hadn’t paid as much attention to politics. Certainly not with the depth Simon did in his clandestine world. He felt that allowing Communists to assume any power was as large a threat as the war they had just survived. If in a different way.
Diana strode down the sunny streets, occasionally squinting to blur the faces of the buildings so at least for a second her vantage was spared the damage caused by bombs dropped by the Allies, who now promised the city’s free and bright future and reconstruction.
Vienna was not quite the city she once had imagined exploring, with cranes modernizing the otherwise historic skyline and the pedestrian thoroughfares of the Graben and Kärtnerstrasse marred by blockades that kept the rubble from tumbling onto the pedestrians. She’d imagined looping arms with her husband, Brent, and peering up at steeples, not waiting for the next directive from her friend and wartime colleague MI6 agent Simon Barre.
Simon said a new war was building: one that would require intelligence and the decryption skills she had honed during her work at Bletchley Park and the Government Code and Cipher School. But mostly he required her intuition and ability to read hidden messages: from the position of a column in a Christopher Wren church to the subtle interruption of a Mozart piece when her ears were attuned to unusual activity in a Luftwaffe flight plan intercepted by radio waves.
His pursuit of a Soviet agent named Eternity led Simon to believe an association existed between churches in Vienna and in London and the spread of the man’s Communist influence. Simon needed to find Eternity. The man was rumored to possess a file containing information that could prolong the war. Or catapult the new war he spoke of into a certainty.
A file that men would kill for.
When Diana had protested that the war was over, Simon merely gave her a look she recognized from dozens of times when she asked a question about chess he was surprised she didn’t know.
No one, of course, was better suited to search for the concealed clues a church might hold than Diana Somerville, née Foyle. She loved churches. Especially those designed by Sir Christopher Wren. And as to recognizing the pattern of Eternity, the man used a signature: the mathematic symbol for infinity. Simon chose the code name when the foreign agent’s activity seemed to involve churches. The eternal house of God on earth.
She had seen armed British soldiers overtake their portion of the divided city, had seen a non-Communist foreign minister appointed even as the collars of the Soviet officers bristled.
She had wandered age-old cobblestones in a dark waltz of silenced bells and deserted palaces, wondering what was shadow and what was her imagination. She’d witnessed the drawn faces of men in battered homburgs lined up for a cup of watered coffee at Julius Meinl while women sat with white-knuckled hands crossed in their laps at the Hauptbahnhof, waiting for their emaciated prisoners of war to exit the trains screeching into the station. As the city precariously balanced Hitler’s oppressive Anschluss and the Allied indecision regarding next moves, it was a prime breeding ground for the Communist influence Simon was so intent on destroying.
Gabriel Langer, like Diana, was an ally. Simon introduced him as a proud Austrian university professor who had watched his city first captured by Hitler’s regime and then divided when liberated by the occupying Allied forces. The last thing Langer wanted was to see his city torn apart again. She wasn’t sure how Simon knew him, just that he was as influential as Simon believed she was.
Diana adjusted the brim of her red cartwheel hat, straightened her shoulders, and pursed her lips stained the same shade of crimson as her hat as she neared the heavy wooden door of Peterskirche, tucked between narrow buildings in its eponymous Platz. She would find Langer and together they would try to suss out Eternity.
Simon had intercepted a message the night before that linked Eternity—or one of his men—with a concert at Peterskirche. The
concert gave her an opportunity to meet the man Simon so relied on in Vienna just before she caught her three-hour flight back to London the following day.
The textbooks, dry lectures, and slides from her studying at King’s College couldn’t adequately encapsulate the opulent interior, nor could they breathe life into Mozart’s Great Mass filling the hochaltar amidst gilded marble walls hosting numerous sculptures and inspiring the eye upward to its famed painted dome.
She wouldn’t have known as much about music if she hadn’t sat across from Fisher Carne for four years in a slatted hut in Bletchley, listening to German signals through the wireless and overhearing daily programs of religious and classical music. None of those experiences could compare to the live musicians who filled the sanctuary now with an explosion of sound. She savored the first bars of the Grosse Messe in C Minor as she scanned pews for her contact.
The Kyrie section swelled to the frescoes and tripped over the tile as voices filled every inch of the sanctuary. It was important for her to pay attention to the music. It might be a language beyond each note or phrase.
She spotted white-blond hair and a green collar three pews from the back as per her directive. She slid in beside Langer.
“Are you familiar with Mozart?” he asked.
“I know this piece.” Diana cast a surreptitious look at the handbag she had placed beside her at an angle, ensuring the white-handled revolver was tucked away from view.
“A shame we have to hear it scaled back like this. Doubles in each of the vocal sections. Seems everything is rationed these days, even timpani and tenors,” Gabriel remarked. She liked his soft Viennese accent and intelligent brown eyes.
“Mercy.” He translated the lyrics accompanying the next bar. Diana kept her ears peeled to recognize a code or a message, to seek out a possible key in the architecture of the unbombed sanctuary. Simon had warned her of traitors who looked like friends. Those who balanced two worlds: depressed or destitute by war or unknowing of what good or evil was. Langer, he assured her, was none of those things.
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