The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  Brent didn’t want the woman to turn and find his mouth in midbite. So he wrapped the rest of his sandwich, though far from satiated, and slid it into his satchel behind his books to begin sketching again.

  Out of his peripheral vision he could see she was transfixed. Her gaze roamed over the contrast of an old, patched gray wall, vibrant leaves, and mossy verdigris kissing the uneven walls. Brent never tired of St. Bartholomew the Great’s spell and neither, it seemed, did she.

  “You know, you can keep eating your sandwich.”

  He wasn’t expecting her to talk to him. Not that he was nervous talking to beautiful women, though he had rarely seen a woman as perfectly proportioned as this one. Several female students had offered to accompany him on his present excursion, and there was usually a small line outside of his office with what he assumed were a few made-up questions about Paul’s friend Timothy. It was a welcome strangeness to be caught so completely off his guard by this newcomer.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you with the waxed wrapping.” She turned and looked straight at him with blue eyes so bright he blinked. “Rahere did a grand old job, didn’t he?”

  Her recognition of the church’s founding prior moved the dial from preliminary attraction to intense interest. She disappeared behind the east side of the church, and Brent focused on his notebook again. He put flourish to the edges and slants of sunlight, finger smudging the corners and leaving a familiar black mark on his fingertip. Soon he would be lecturing to a room of bored first years on Paul. Confirmed bachelor Paul. Maybe that was the elusive thorn in the apostle’s side: bachelorhood.

  Brent coughed through a growing smile. Sacrilegious. He wouldn’t tell his department head that particular theory, even though he wondered at their comparison of Paul to Brent when chiding him. He wasn’t even thirty yet, for heaven’s sake.

  “You’re still here then?” Her voice cut through his reverie.

  Brent followed her focus over the checkerboard of alternating gray and black near a rooftop patched and repatched since the eighteenth century, capturing the slightest slant of sun.

  He wasn’t quick enough to tuck his sketches into his folder, though he did leave a trail of black thumbprints over the corner of the page in his hasty attempt just as she approached.

  “That’s really quite good!” She stood behind the bench, gazing over his shoulder, smelling like roses and the sunlight his sketches never captured.

  “Thank you.” Brent kept his gaze on her face and not a figure that might inspire monks to scurry to confession.

  “May I?” The stranger indicated the empty space beside him on the bench. Brent moved his satchel and she dropped beside him, crossing one shapely leg over the other. “You’re an artist then?”

  Brent followed her sightline over the charcoal drawing, the corner smudged by the slip of his forefinger. He smiled. “Just a hobby.”

  “I love this church and you capture something about it. Something elusive.” She squinted, studying the illustration still visible under the shade of his hand before comparing the back of the structure that faced them. It wasn’t a prepossessing structure. Not broad like St. Paul’s with a distinguished outline that towered over the city and contributed to the grace of its skyline. Not elegant like St. Mary-le-Bow or ornate like St. Stephen Walbrook.

  “It’s a good subject. What would you say is elusive about this church?” To him, it was partly Prior Rahere: founder not only of Great St. Bart’s, as most Londoners called it, but the solemn St. Bartholomew the Less tucked into the grounds of the iconic St. Bart’s Hospital, another institution founded following the prior’s pilgrimage to Rome and a vision, not unlike that given to Saul of Tarsus, to care for those ill and destitute and at the mercy of London’s blind eye.

  “It has redefined itself.” She sounded like she was defending a thesis in front of a committee. “It escaped the zeppelins of the Great War, sure, but for near a millennium we have been tearing it down and rebuilding it.” She peered up at it. “Its outer shell doesn’t quite do it justice. Not to the untrained eye.”

  Was it just him, or did she look at him pointedly then?

  “It has seen the whole of England’s religious history. Civil War. Henry the Eighth’s desecration of the monasteries . . .” She tugged at her green hat. “I talk a mile a minute, don’t I? And you just want to enjoy your drawing and your lunch.”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe hearing you talk about the church will help me see something new in it.”

  Her blue eyes sparked. “They say Rahere’s ghost haunts this place.”

  Brent put on his professor voice and challenged her. He wanted to know what she would say in response. “Churches are houses of worship. Darkness dispels against the rock of Christ on earth.”

  She clucked her tongue. “That may be so, but it isn’t as fun.” She put her finger to her lips. “I swear I sense Christopher Wren at St. Paul’s. In the toll of the bells and in those grand columns. They had to hoist him up, you know. To finish the domes. He was seventy-six years old. I sometimes go there to find his ghost.”

  Brent ducked his chin and thus his wide smile. She neared so their shoulders brushed as she studied his sketchbook.

  “I’m Diana.” She waited for him to put down his sketch and shake her proffered hand. “Diana Foyle. Like the bookshop on Charing Cross Road.”

  “Brent Somerville.” He loved the softness of her palm against his hand.

  Diana inspected a bit of sketching pencil that had transferred from his hand to hers and rubbed at her index finger. “I’m a student of architectural history. And I skipped a rather dull lecture to come here because I wasn’t sure how many perfect days we would have left this autumn. It is perfect. Look at all the orange and red leaves. I love it when London has color.”

  “Where do you study?”

  “King’s. My true love is Christopher Wren.”

  “Ah, well he might prove to be a horrible lover, Diana Foyle. For one, you’d have to exhume his skeleton, and after that there’s the whole holding him lightly so he doesn’t crumble to dust. Not to mention how the kisses might taste. Rather chalky, I should say.”

  Her eyes smiled and roamed over the Tudor gatehouse and off to Cloth Fair, and he allowed himself a candid moment of inspection before he flicked his eyes away, then back again. They were sitting so closely he couldn’t tell where his shoulder ended and hers began, and he was all too aware of the proximity of her kneecap to his. “I’m a professor. Also at King’s.”

  “Oh!” She pursed her lips. “Very serious.”

  “I teach about the apostles. Paul and Peter. John too. The letters to the Corinthians. That lot.”

  “I can’t say I know much about apostles except that Paul was in Greece, wasn’t he? The Greeks had seven forms of love.”

  “I know.” Brent found it rather inconvenient that a few of those forms of love chose that exact moment to parade across his brain.

  “Do you speak Greek?”

  “Cambridge made sure of that. I burrowed as many tenses as I could in my poor, helpless brain and they stuck.”

  “I just never knew what the forms of love were.”

  “You’ll need a teacher then.” There were few instances when one could truly use the word enchanting. He was happy he had tucked it into a safe for this moment. “Yes. Part and parcel of the job, and if I dust off my brain, a workable amount of Hebrew. Why do you ask?”

  “My father spoke all of those languages. I was learning from him before he died.” She stopped for a moment as if in memory. “I don’t usually go off like this. Have you ever just seen someone and talked to them and just known they were meant to be your friend? I know I am awkward and horribly rude, and then there is the matter of your sandwiches . . .”

  “My sandwiches?” The corner of his mouth twitched.

  “I don’t mean anything by the way that I am.”

  “What way?”

  “Droning on to a perfect stranger.”

&
nbsp; “You’re not boring me and we’re not strangers. We’ve been introduced, Diana Foyle like the bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Though I will say that’s a bit of a mouthful.”

  “Move your hand.” Diana’s red fingernail moved over Brent’s sketch, capturing detailed stones and the ancient tower of St. Bart’s with his pencil. “You love churches.”

  This priory-turned-church was more striking to him than it had ever been: far more than a relaxing flit of a muse, distinguished by lines and history distinctive from the hundreds of other churches in London. Sure, the history of William Wallace lingered just behind: the Scottish revolutionary drawn and quartered beyond the stone arch separating the churchyard from the whole of Cloth Fair and out to Smithfield Market. Imagining that gruesome moment always made him shiver, but today those thoughts dispelled.

  “I love this one.” More now than he had before. “It isn’t as grand as St. Paul’s or as ornate as Garlickhythe or any of the other Wren churches.”

  “Wren’s Lantern. That’s what they call St. James Garlickhythe. On account of all of the windows letting in that beautiful natural light.” Her eyes looked over his sketch, then over at Great St. Bart’s as if seeking the same natural light.

  “Well, this one is a bit of a hodgepodge. I like seeing where all of the different parts have been sewn together.” He glanced up at the church, then to his sketch, showing her. “When it was torn and rebuilt and fixed about a bit.” He pointed with the nub of charcoal.

  She leaned over, studying it, and he blinked to keep himself from staring too intently at her, opting instead for a peek at his watch. He was going to be late for his three o’clock lecture if he didn’t walk very quickly and very immediately.

  “I must dash.” He made a semblance of order out of his sketches and tackled them into his satchel. “It was a pleasure to meet you. And I am not just saying that because it seems like the thing someone should say when they have to rush off. But I truly hope we meet again.” He swiped a swath of hair from his forehead. “And I am not just saying that either.”

  “Let’s promise then never to say anything to each other just to say something to each other.”

  She offered her hand again and he shook it, his own fingers tingling when he turned and walked through the arch in the direction of the Smithfield Market and his chosen shortcut to King’s.

  * * *

  Later that night, as the sun mellowed over the brick houses of Clerkenwell and over the bells of the neighboring St. James Church beside his flat, Brent pulled out his sketchbook again.

  He peeled off a new sheet of coarse paper and smoothed it before pressing a nub of charcoal to the middle and flourishing out smudged lines. Brent squeezed his eyes shut and let his hand conjure a memory of a woman with high cheekbones and a wonderful figure, turning her head over her shoulder so blonde curls tumbled from their carefully placed green hat with the movement. Behind her he drew the church whose study she had abandoned the moment she noticed Brent on the bench.

  He smiled thinking of her, her voice and the easy warmth they had shared. Would he find her quite as irresistible if she hadn’t been so surprisingly intelligent? He sketched and smudged and flourished, his heart racing with each new press of the pencil to paper, each shape and curve and line. Once finished, he tucked the illustration into his satchel, unsure of what he would do with it, feeling a little embarrassed to be roaming from lectern to lectern and through corridors and reams of male students with a sketch of a woman captured from a solo occasion.

  He felt differently when not a week later, he saw her crossing the Strand in the afternoon. Hatless and clutching a small satchel, oxford shoes scurrying over the pavement. He was happy it wasn’t just her physical beauty that allured him. He loved that he shared an affinity for the churchyard with another human. He steadied his drumming heart with this knowledge. This kismet.

  Should he approach her? Of course she would remember him. Their meeting wasn’t just a few pleasantries exchanged with a stranger in a shared place. She had to have felt the same stirring. She spoke as if she anticipated seeing him again.

  He quickened his pace, hoping words would come in the strides it took to reach her.

  “Professor Somerville!” Her smile widened as they made to the other side of the street in equal pace. Her cheeks flamed with a beguiling blush. “Is it ham and tomato today?”

  Brent was about to speak when Richard Mariner of the history department intercepted them. Mariner scowled at Brent. Brent merely smiled.

  Brent reached into his satchel and extracted the folded sketch tucked into a recent translation of Etienne Gilson’s work on Thomas Aquinas. “I just wanted to give you this.” He pressed it into her palm, letting his fingers linger on her wrist a moment.

  He didn’t wait for her to open it, rather smiled before he tossed a polite nod at Rick. “Mariner.”

  “Somerville.” Mariner’s voice resembled the dead.

  Brent turned knowing he had unwittingly made an enemy. And not caring in the least.

  Chapter 6

  October 1945

  Four years at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, sometimes known as Station X, under her belt should have more than qualified Diana to seven years of knowing Brent as closely as she assumed one could know another human, and yet their first night together after the war found her alone, recalling the taste of his kiss and wondering as to the depths of the scars on his collarbone.

  If she hadn’t missed Brent so much or hadn’t been reminded daily of the part of her life he would never know, she might have counted those years as some of the best times of her life. She felt confident in her work, she made new friends, and unlike her university life before she’d met Brent, she felt like she belonged. Before Brent, she was a walking encyclopedia, more comfortable with the friends she met in stones and gargoyles, turrets and parapets, than with people.

  She gulped a breath and blinked, glancing around the bedroom, momentarily forgetting where she was, then stunned that she was really here. Really home. She could hear Brent through the open bedroom door. He wasn’t saying anything intelligible in slumber, but he was speaking. Would waking him in the middle of an intense episode startle or hurt him?

  Diana swung her legs over the side of the bed and reached for her robe. She tightened it around her middle and stepped into the chilly sitting room. The vial Brent had discovered—most likely a relic—caught the moonlight through the open window from its position on the tabletop. She tiptoed to retrieve it, then stopped to watch him sleep a moment.

  A splice of moonlight through the window offered a view of his face and above the collar of his pajamas. She could just make out a ripple of scars beneath his collarbone on his left side. How deeply and how far did the scars wander over his torso and back?

  They had spent so few nights together. Just after their marriage and again on one of his leaves before the letters stopped and her secrets barricaded them.

  Brent rolled to his side, but the talking had stopped.

  She sat quietly at the kitchen table and played with possible messages that could be derived from the vial, trying to look at it as Simon Barre would. She’d mention it to him when they met the next day. She wouldn’t know until she met Rick Mariner what it was, if anything important, and if there was a specific name or description that might lead to another message or cipher. While writing descriptions of a church in her notebook, she looked for messages in stones, patterns on the rubbled ground, anything that might jump out at her.

  In her first years at Bletchley, before she and Fisher listened to the incoming and outgoing radio messages every day, she and Simon would study an intercepted message from a neighboring hut, and he played with Soviet and British coding and even sequences of buildings.

  The first time Simon mentioned the agent he called Eternity was as far back as the obliteration of Coventry: a blitzed city tortured a mere month before London barely withstood a similar barrage. Some of the cryptanalysts at Bl
etchley—even Fisher Carne—murmured a theory under their breath regarding Coventry and the possibility that British intelligence and Churchill had wind of the operation before it began and let it happen anyway.

  Diana blinked away the notion, the senseless destruction, the newspaper picture of Holy Trinity’s steeple breaking through the smoke. She had been devastated that the age-old cathedral had fallen under fire, unable to contribute to Simon’s theory.

  Even in the midst of devastation, a Special Operations Executive provided a cryptic cipher from the church bearing the infinity sign, which was brought to Simon’s attention. Eternity was born.

  Simon had admitted to her near the end of the war that he had been planted at Bletchley in pursuit of a traitor. While she was busy ensuring V-E Day and the Nazi demise, Simon was already gearing up for the Soviet war he’d spoken of. Diana couldn’t look that far ahead. She’d had enough of war as it was.

  Yet for all that the war had taken and all her time apart from Brent, her mind had sharpened like a tool surrounded by the whetstone of powerful brains, whose intellect made her a better analyst. It helped her see that perhaps the mysteries she’d unraveled at her desk were created by people who colored outside of the lines.

  Diana learned to color outside of the lines, too, beyond the segmental arches, pediments, and motifs her brain stored in constant measure.

  Brent’s sketches were still sitting on the table, exposed. She recalled the flash of worry in his eyes when she had noticed them. From the stiffness in his neck and shoulders, it must have taken everything in him not to grab them and store them away. She’d take that as a good sign. She had so little to go on and so many years between them. In that moment he didn’t hide from her.

  Diana looked to a hatbox still unpacked and sitting near the hat stand by the door. She retrieved it. Under a favorite hat she had tucked Brent’s letters, as creased and worn as the accompanying sketches. Of course, her favorite of all—the sketch of Wren’s rooftops huddled together and perfectly intact. It was smudged, but the most pristine of the letters and notes. She had treated it as carefully as the wedding ring she had worn on a chain around her neck.