The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  She would try to keep his memory at bay, but it was never more than a moment or two before her thoughts drifted back to him.

  Now as Brent sat beside her in the back of a taxi, her thoughts turned to the breadth of his shoulders, the curve of his chin, and the scent and nearness and feel of him. Their song too. The one she chose for them. Brent hadn’t minded not having a say in the selection of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” All of her classmates had a song with their boyfriends, to hum absently or to light up to at a dance. Diana had presented Brent with a strong case for a song that was as much about the love between two people as about love for their city.

  The city now met Diana in the whole of its complex nursery rhyme. It sank under the weight of her childhood remembrance and the visits with her professor father from nearby Cambridge. He introduced her to the nursery rhymes firsthand so she could see them before her very eyes. Bridges, posies, and rings, plagues and a devastating fire blazing a destructive path from Pudding Lane, ravaging the beautiful medieval structures before Wren commandeered the whole of the urban sprawl like his personal building block set.

  She crooned a few bars of the rhyme that was her father’s favorite and then hers too. All about the church bells. She imagined they were talking to each other.

  “Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement’s.”

  “You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s.”

  “You still sing like a lark.” Brent gave her shoulder a playful nudge with his. Diana couldn’t carry a tune. More still, his joshing her about it was a long-established jest between them.

  The cab slid to the side of the road and let them off half a block away from the construction around the churchyard. All Hallows-by-the-Tower, or what was left of it, was surrounded by blockades and shrouded in shadow.

  A worker approached as they stepped from the curb, shoving his cap back on his head. “You can’t be here, luv.”

  “My name is Diana Somerville, and I am a historian.” Diana looked up at her husband. “This is Dr. Brent Somerville.” She adjusted the brim of her hat so the worker could fully see her widening smile. “We were married at this church. We just want to take a peek around. You must be almost finished for the night.”

  “Well . . .” He scratched the back of his neck.

  “Please. It’s been so long.”

  The worker scrutinized her two-toned pumps. “It’s not very stable. Not safe. You don’t want to be roaming around here.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Diana was sure if she could just get close enough, she could see the church as it had once been. As it could be again.

  The worker shoved his cap back in place. “Make sure she doesn’t trip,” he said to Brent. “Not safe. And she’s right. I’m done here.”

  “You have my word.” Brent tipped his own hat in thanks as the man set off. “Well, at least we have an entirely full view of the Tower and the bridge.”

  “In anyone else that would be optimistic. In you, darling, it’s just—”

  “The sarcasm you fell in love with all of those years ago?” Brent offered Diana his hand to steady her over a particularly uneven plot of ground, and she took it.

  She took in the hollow that was once the pipe and wood of the grand organ, the columns overtaken by weeds, the barren arches void of their long-smashed glass panes.

  Diana continued to observe the area. The last time she had seen this church it had been in an even worse state of disrepair, and yet she was elated Brent was at her side. “There’s still part of a steeple.” She picked her way to the surviving shell of an arched window and peered at a few leafless trees. It wasn’t just the encroaching chill that caused their bleak barrenness.

  Brent inspected the moat of rock and stone rimming the shell of the church. “It’s about as cheery as being toted through Traitor’s Gate.”

  Diana followed his gaze to the banks of the Thames, just hidden by the shade of the Tower. “It looks a sight better than the last time we were here.” Diana remembered the still-burning embers and shrill police whistles as she and Brent had pressed through after a night that ravaged the city with thousands of dropped Luftwaffe bombs. Half a dozen times he had tried to convince her that getting married in the upheaval and chaos, not to mention even trying to get there, would be impossible. But she wouldn’t hear of marrying anywhere else. Then she kissed him to show her determination—and to weaken his resolve until he breathlessly agreed.

  Brent ran his good hand up the side of the church wall. She followed suit, grounded by the cold, sure feel of stone even amidst the skeleton of the church. Diana extracted a small notebook and pen from her handbag and felt the cold handle of the gun Simon had given her underneath. She had almost forgotten it was there. She steadied herself on the side of a brick column. “We can use the Roman influence. The arches! We can easily modernize the church after its reparations while still honoring its Anglo-Saxon history. The crypt, as you know, has always been one of the best in the city.”

  Diana buttoned the collar of her coat and adjusted her hat for a better view of the city’s series of shadows: the familiar Tower and its eponymous bridge, the vantage reminding her of cameos on a postcard from a tourist shop in Carnaby Street. She passed Brent one of the torches from her handbag.

  “You know”—she chased a shadow across his face in a sudden swath of light—“I went to St. Bart’s and prayed and prayed and bartered with God to take all of the Wren churches but to give me you.”

  “For anyone else that wouldn’t seem much of a sacrifice. But . . .” Brent moved toward something he must have found interesting. He pointed the light at it and, finding nothing but brick and shadow, put the torch down. Then lifted it again.

  “But?” she prompted.

  “I know how much you love these churches. And I know how rarely you pray.” Before she met him, Diana never prayed at all. Her father wasn’t particularly religious despite his passion for the architectural beauty of churches. It was only when she fell in love with Brent that his knowledge of theology stirred her to see something beyond beautiful lines, columns, and stained glass.

  “I didn’t have a lot else to bargain with, did I? And now you’re going to remind me that’s not how prayer works. That there’s no need for bargains and—”

  “I don’t think one can be expected to remember how prayer does or doesn’t work when they’re desperate and scared,” Brent said solemnly, lowering the light again. “You just rhyme off whatever words your mouth can form and hope they reach the right place.”

  “Yes. Yes. That’s right.” She waited for him to elaborate. Hoped he would segue into an example from the Front. From when he was carrying stretchers. Or wounded. The darkness hid the deformity on his left hand while his right turned the torch over and over in his palm.

  “Quite the task for the Almighty to consider giving up His house on earth. Even Walbrook?” Brent said with a smile a long moment later.

  “Yes.”

  “Not Garlickhythe?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She nodded. “And Garlickhythe.”

  He gestured toward the rubble and toppled walls. “Seems to have worked.”

  Diana produced a sketch of All Hallows as it was before the bombing and then several prints of the interior from its various incarnations throughout the years, including a recent rendition showing all of its upheaval, capturing the fire trucks and ambulances, the city workers. Her mind’s eye reconciled the church as it was with the church it was going to be. Cracked but with a sure foundation.

  * * *

  Brent wasn’t sure what he had expected to find in the nooks and crannies of the remaining wall of All Hallows, but it gave him an occupation other than studying her profile in the moonlight. Diana’s elegant lines and bearing were the same and yet . . .

  Five weeks. A favor for a friend.

  Brent blinked and returned his focus to the building. Sometimes on the battlefield he couldn’t remember his middle name. What he had e
aten for breakfast. Where he was. St. Paul’s words from the letters he taught over and over again to his theology students. But he could always clearly conjure the morning of their wedding.

  He had frantically thought of ringing her flat in Paddington after groggily finding his way back to his own flat. With the phone lines down, he had taken five minutes to splash water on his face and change before he set down the steps and out the door, determined to run the not inconsiderable length across town if cabs and buses weren’t to be found. He didn’t make it beyond Clerkenwell Green before he saw her coming toward him.

  Then she passionately kissed away his reticence about continuing with their planned ceremony. They pressed through workers with bribes of beer before his vicar uncle oversaw their vows and signed their certificate. She had been wearing red to offset the devastation of the gray dust and felled stone.

  The same red as the hat she was wearing now. He lingered on it before pursuing the shape of something he thought he had seen a moment before. Back when she was telling him she would trade churches for him. It truly was a compliment from her. They were the last link to her father. Their steeples were always the first thing her eye snagged on. When she was nervous or feeling unsafe, they were her sanctuary, and when she didn’t know what to say, she filled the silence with facts about them.

  Another might have heard this and thought she was measuring a human life against unfeeling stone. But Diana had built up their world as if they were living, breathing things. Friends. More of a home to her than her Paddington flat.

  He watched Diana, her back turned to him. What was she seeing? She had an uncanny ability to peel away the modern curtain of their city and peek into the past. He was sure while he was in the twentieth century standing amidst an eruption of stone, she was walking through the hallowed sanctuary of the oldest church in the city, still intact. Still whole.

  He took his injured hand out of his pocket and transferred his torch to it. He rippled light over the remnant of a stone wall and peered at a pop of a stem that might eventually flourish into a flower but most likely would just be trampled underfoot.

  It was only when a film of dust dispersed and the moon centered on him like a searchlight that he noticed it again. He thought he had seen something. Sure enough, a small golden orb was tucked near the base of the brick. Brent leaned down and picked it up. Not an orb, a bottle, besmirched by dust and grime.

  Squinting at the bottle, he wondered if he only imagined the outline of a shadow behind him. The portentous feeling was strong enough that he looked up and around. It wasn’t Diana. She was several feet away. The worker they met on the way in and a few other stragglers were long gone. “Hello?”

  Nothing. Brent continued to examine the small bottle until the glare of headlights washed over the leftover walls in front of him and caused him to blink with their proximity. He slowly rose and turned to see a tall man in a long trench coat whose face was shaded by a homburg.

  The man crossed the grassy path from the curb to the churchyard at a purposeful pace. Brent was about to ask the man his business when the silhouette’s swift move revealed the outline of a gun.

  Brent clicked off the torch, strode toward Diana, grabbed her arm, and took them both behind a glassless window. He shoved her behind him, feeling her oddly even heartbeat as she leaned into his back and shoulder blade. His accelerated something fierce.

  Confident they were hidden in a crevice of brick, Brent used the shadows and the sudden shift of the moon away from its cloud cover to quietly pull Diana behind another jutting wall.

  The slight shift of a shadow he perceived through his peripheral vision confirmed his suspicion that someone else had been there all along.

  Brent made to move and draw the attention of the stranger, but Diana gripped his forearm. She moved closer into his back so there wasn’t an inch between them. He thought he had left danger behind him in the trenches.

  Making only a slice of himself visible, he concealed them in a corner, waiting for the danger to pass. He’d done much the same during the war. Looking out for his younger and smaller friend Ross, ensuring his hand was always flexed and ready to grab the end of a stretcher. Always wondering if this would be the day that his spot was uncovered and he would stare an enemy gun in the face.

  Ross once had compared it to a game of Russian roulette. For try as you might to hide, there was always the off chance that a sniper was above as you watched below, that the moonlight was garish and bold on a night you had prayed for the cloak of cloud and rain. The last thing he wanted was to revisit the feeling with Diana.

  Brent reached back and held her protectively still. But she was already settled. The men soon left and Brent slowly moved out, tightly squeezing his waning fear into the small vial.

  She smoothed back his hair, and while he couldn’t make out the whole of her face in the darkness, her eyes were alert. “All right, darling?”

  For some reason he didn’t comprehend, she clearly thought the danger had passed. It had barely fazed her at all. The tone in which she used the term of endearment he hadn’t heard for months sounded almost apologetic.

  Brent straightened beside her. “Who knew churches would be more dangerous after Jerry bombed them?” he said dryly.

  Five weeks, he thought. A favor for a friend.

  Chapter 4

  January 1941

  Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire

  “They prefer unmarried women. The time of those who are married or mothers is better spent tending hearth and home,” Professor Silas Henderson had told her when he first mentioned he had a colleague who might be able to find a place where she could serve the war effort in a slightly different way.

  When Brent’s students had been rallied for King and Country and King’s College emptied its men like a tipped-over vessel, Diana was prepared to do what she could for the war effort from London. Her mentor thought about her immediate future away from the Red Cross, munitions factories, and the Mechanised Transport Corps, each employing thousands of British women ready to do their bit.

  Diana, unable to shake a foreboding sense of Brent being taken from her, was less inclined to focus on the prospect of continuing her thesis on churches vulnerable under Luftwaffe bombs.

  Silas had first mentioned that many young women were going to Wales to continue their education. Diana didn’t fancy being so far away while Brent stole into danger. When Silas approached a week later, Diana was cleaning the blackboard of a few mnemonic devices she had created for Silas’s students at King’s. She tutored those who needed a little more attention, not only in memory of her father, but because she aspired to finish her doctorate and teach someday.

  When she turned around, she recognized the light in Silas’s eyes from a particularly interesting part of a lecture or a recollection about her father from their time together teaching at Cambridge. He disappeared and returned not ten minutes later with a piece of paper. “I just popped out to make a telephone call. I think I’ve found something, Diana. Something that will keep you from having to bake or rip bandages.”

  Silas’s contact provided an opportunity for Diana to interview with the Government Code and Cipher School at a mansion in Buckinghamshire. She would give them her maiden name because she wouldn’t be married until the day before she left.

  Diana arrived at the appointed time for her interview and was asked numerous questions about her research on architectural history, her educational background, what she excelled at in school, her favorite books, and the way she approached problems. The languages she spoke. She was to be given the opportunity to bring Brent back using her brain. She would translate and intercept messages. She would never be able to tell anyone what she did or where she worked.

  It wasn’t just the nights following her wedding and the incessant bombs that led the newspapers to call the German barrage the Second Great Fire of London that kept her awake. It was that she was stepping into a part of her life that built a wall between her and Brent just a
s their life was starting.

  Diana was briefed about the train trip to Bletchley Station at Milton Keynes and the subsequent walk to the Bletchley Park estate. She was warned that familiar stations were erroneously named to confuse potential enemies, so she best not doze and miss her stop. Further, with the blackout her late evening stop would require a careful path on the short walk from the platform to the elaborate grounds of the mansion turned code-breaking center.

  She opened the gift Silas had given her the day she told him she would be leaving for Buckinghamshire: a copy of P. H. Ditchfield’s The Cathedrals of Great Britain: Their History and Architecture. Since she was a child, the binding, smell, and pages were as familiar to her as the alphabet. Before she could comprehend the separated letters underlined by her father’s finger, she studied the sketches and colored with her imagination the transepts and altars the sketches left out.

  Diana spent the last morning in London saying good-bye. She ensured Brent’s flat—her flat too—was in perfect order. She gave his—their—landlady a forwarding address. Her trunk would arrive before her, which left her with merely a suitcase and a hatbox and the sunny morning at her disposal.

  Diana could only hope she would do London justice. “I’ll save you,” she whispered. I’ll come back for you, she pledged with the same intensity of a soldier stepping farther and farther away from his sweetheart on a train platform.

  Wasn’t it exactly what Brent had said in so many words? She clutched the handle of her suitcase. He would come back. She was merely stepping into a temporary life without him. Of course he would come back. She needed him. So why wouldn’t he?

  She could map her way through a new location and boil an egg, but beyond the rudimentary metrics of day-to-day existence rested the insecurity born of years of having someone care for her—whether her father’s housekeeper or the matron in her dorm or, most recently, the woman who frequented her flat near Paddington, caring for every convenience no matter how small or large.