The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

He and Diana were just beginning to find their footing again. Just beginning to sew up the rift that separated them. But at the moment, the entirety of their foundation was losing its stability. She was holding back.

  But she wouldn’t without a reason. His brain knew that even as his heart was in knots. She would never be unfaithful to him and he couldn’t fathom her doing anything dishonest for any but a good reason. He loved her. He owed her his own stories, too, the ones he held cloistered inside.

  Deflated, he could barely find the energy to sit upright in the quire. Footsteps sounded from the north transept, then retreated. The door latched with an echo. Brent was alone. But not truly alone. The Voice that kept intercepting his thoughts in the stillness negated that. Brent knew that voice. It had met Paul on the road to Damascus and had comforted Brent numerous times on the field. Even when he didn’t want to acknowledge it.

  It reminded him she needed his protection. But Brent needed her honesty. What if . . . ? What might she have seen behind a signature that swore her to secrecy? He carried his own rucksack of secrets, the weight of Ross’s memory sinking him again and again.

  He could make it up to Diana by trusting her. Either that or let her slip away from him. The latter was impossible.

  Brent kneaded his injured hand across his knee, the wool of his trousers scratching uncomfortably with his movement. And if she had signed an official act serious enough to hold the threat of imprisonment or treason, what secrets might she be bearing?

  So his hurt at her betrayal, his mistrust, his own insecurities needed to stay behind, tucked into the ancient abbey walls, safely hidden by the carved stone, Prior Rahere’s everlasting tomb. A church that had withstood the fire and the firebombs and the zeppelins of the previous war.

  “Well, poor Old Barking here won’t toll its bells for a while. It’s all rubble,” she had said on their wedding day at All Hallows. “But it still has a foundation, Brent.” She fell into him, strong and sweet. “Architecture aims at eternity.” She quoted Wren before leaning up with a butterfly touch over his lips. “And that’s what we’ll aim for too.”

  He looked at the walls around him and the tile underfoot interrupted by gravestones centuries old whose names and dates were nearly unreadable with wear. It wasn’t a Wren church but had fared far better. He had always loved this church. Never more so than when he saw a woman with a green hat turning to take it fully in.

  Brent swept his hat up from the empty chair and tugged it over his hair as he stepped into the sunlight.

  Chapter 10

  The only other time Diana had been at Brent’s flat—her flat—in Clerkenwell alone was when she was packing her suitcase to leave for Buckinghamshire. After returning from her meeting with Simon, every tick of the clock or hum of the radiator startled her. Footsteps on the ceiling overhead almost made her spill her tea. Diana took a long breath and turned on the wireless. Classical music funneled out. The kind she heard when she and Fisher had been assigned long nights of listening to radio signals.

  She quickly turned the knob until Glen Miller and his orchestra sped the tempo of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” so that its wistful chords and mournful words seemed almost happy.

  She and Brent had danced to this once. Well, tried to dance to it. No matter how hard he tried to teach her and pull her in step, she could never help but trip over her two left feet. Unless it was their song, of course. She could always find the rhythm to match his when “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” began to play.

  She hummed off-key, sat at the kitchen table, and perused the list of church events Simon had given her at tea. There were so many churches. Many just shells now, but others continued their parish events and some merged with other churches.

  Eighty-eight parish churches were destroyed in the Great Fire of London, of which Christopher Wren rebuilt fifty-two. It was not even ten days before he brought his plans to the king. The barely standing steeples could be a place to start. Simon had mentioned the patterns Langer found in Vienna and Prague.

  “If I were a Soviet agent with a file people would kill for and I needed to meet with men clandestinely . . .” Diana set her pen to paper. She thought of the churches within the London gates as a possibility. Then of the possibility of Roman churches as she had mentioned to Simon. Anything with a pattern or a theme. Simon said Eternity was suspected to be a man of intelligence and academic background. It could have been a coincidence that they found the relic the night before, of course, or it could have been a sign. She had read articles throughout the war about how bombs had exhumed archaeologists’ treasure troves. So much of the oldest Roman influences intersected the churches.

  She just needed to know where to start. She settled on asking Brent to accompany her to St. Stephen Walbrook this evening.

  This evening. She had to feed him! He’d have been working all day. Diana hopped up from the table, tucked the sheets inside an oversized book of Wren sketches, and set it on the bookshelf.

  * * *

  Brent just hoped Diana didn’t look out the second-floor window. Or she would see him. Hand on the door to the entrance of their building, then off of it. Key turned in the lock and then retracted again. What would he say? “Hi, Di. Good day? So, I went to Scotland Yard and apparently your file is classified. What’s for tea?”

  He straightened his shoulders and finally pushed the door open, then ascended the short flight of stairs to their flat. “Di?”

  She stepped out of the kitchen, running her hands over an apron. “How was your day?”

  Brent slid off his shoes and set his hat on the hat stand. He wriggled out of his coat and hung it on the hook beside it. Then he turned and noticed her coat draped over the arm of a wing-back chair.

  “You’re not leaving this here?” Brent looked at her coat.

  “I must have forgotten when I got home.”

  “The coat stand is right there!”

  “I’m sorry. I must have forgotten.”

  “Is this going to be a habit?”

  She didn’t answer. He didn’t blame her. He was being a cad. But he couldn’t think of one safe sentence, no matter how he had practiced on his way home, without calling her out on what he’d learned. It was one thing for his heart to promise he would believe her and trust her. It was quite another when she was standing in front of him as a smoky scent wafted from the kitchen.

  “Drats!” she muttered, dashing to the oven.

  Brent pretended to read the paper while she saw to the table. He watched her through the open partition separating the kitchen from the living room. Her blonde hair had escaped from its careful updo and her tongue crept out the side of her mouth in concentration.

  This was the Diana he knew. He had to try harder. It was cowardly to resent her. To be jealous of the time they were apart. The war turned everyone into secret keepers.

  Diana’s attempt at tea was a half-burnt can of soup and scrambled eggs with a few tomatoes grilled to a burn. He fancied himself the type of man who would never demand that his prospective wife know her way around a kitchen, but Diana was almost impressive in her sheer lack of culinary skill.

  He shouldn’t have found it endearing, but he did. Especially since she was clearly walking on eggshells.

  “I’m sorry about my coat.” She cleared the dishes from a meal shared in near silence.

  “Long day. I am sorry I snapped at you.”

  Diana smiled. “I’m headed to Walbrook. Fancy coming?”

  “Right now?” Brent folded his napkin on the table.

  “Do you have a lot of preparation for your classes?”

  “No. But . . .”

  “Well, you don’t want me going alone in the dark, do you?”

  “No. I certainly don’t want that.”

  “Then let’s make sure it’s still standing.”

  “You know it’s still standing, Diana.”

  “I want to see it with my own eyes.”

  * * *

  Not ten minute
s later, Diana tugged him out of the flat and waited while Brent turned the key in the lock.

  London was still beautiful in its upheaval. Its scars and its wear, its streets with patched holes and scarred buildings still standing. For every tower of brick there was a crane and a construction worker exiting a lorry, and the staccato sound of a hammer rang over the silence where church bells had once chimed. She brightened as they roamed ruined roads and leaned into him.

  Over a million homes had been destroyed, and the prefab houses established in answer to the housing crisis occupied their space, slapped together like matchbox-sized building blocks—enough to make an architect quake. A slow, certain spark like the burning detonation cord to a bomb in a cartoon snaked through a populous who still shuddered and jumped at the things that went bump in the dim-lit half-blacked-out nights. As if it could happen again and again in their heavily rationed and bruised city.

  Brent and Diana found their way through a stream of students protesting Francisco Franco and holding anti-Communism signs and strolled past a shop window adorned not with the latest dress patterns but with artificial limbs, perfectly suited for the men with amputations settling back in after life at the Front.

  Diana clutched Brent’s arm tightly. Her eyes flicked to his injured hand. It was nothing. A pittance, really, when compared to the mangled men he had lifted onto stretchers crying for their mothers or their sweethearts and demanding they be left whole. For the most part, Brent never turned another chapter of their story.

  He turned from the window display with a surge of gratitude. His wife was keeping several things from him, not the least of which her whereabouts the past four years, but she was still beside him just as he had prayed every night or morning and before every skirmish or battle. And he, with the exception of a few scars and a maimed hand—providentially not his sketching hand—was alive. And here. The knowledge bowled him over a moment and he looked down at her in the moonlight.

  St. Stephen Walbrook stood not a few blocks from Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire. When they passed the high Palladian-style Mansion House, its portico rich with columns Diana had pointed out as Corinthian, her smile lit up her face, compensating for streetlights still on half blackout.

  “Happy, Di?”

  Her smile was broad and just for him. He knew in his core that she loved him. No one could act at looking at another as if he hung the moon in the sky. It was part of why their severed years pricked so deeply at him.

  He placed a steadying hand on her back and they entered St. Stephen Walbrook through a deceptively small doorway in a deceptively unassuming stone tower with a steeple Diana told him was trademark Wren. She motioned to features similar to St. James Garlickhythe and St. Michael Paternoster Royal. The casual passerby wouldn’t know the door opened to a grand sanctuary. Columns stood sentry and flourished into lath and plaster, ornate figures and sculptures. During the daylight, sunlight spilled through the arched windows and prismed the mosaic floor.

  “Wren would hate the floor.” Diana followed Brent’s gaze around the space. It was a church you could stretch and sigh in, and his wife was in her element. “There used to be boxed pews here. In the Victorian era. Wren wouldn’t like the arrangement.” She scribbled in her notebook. “They might have better luck returning it to his open vision. No boxed pews.” She underlined with a vehement stroke. “He put a lot of theological weight into the balance of the pulpit and the high altar. Maybe you’ll find another relic here.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s said that St. Stephen’s was built over a Mithraic temple from the Roman times. Just on the river. There’s still a river beneath here.”

  Brent found it hard to imagine rippling water underneath the bombed rubble surrounding him, but he looked to his shoes just the same before his gaze roamed over the columns, and soon they peeled away. His mind was transported. He recalled leaning against the side of a church with Ross while the sonorous sounds of Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” trickled through glassless windows. Before everything fell apart. When his left hand spread its whole fingers on his sketch pad and his mate Ross was beside him.

  “Brent?” Diana’s voice was at his ear.

  “Sorry, I . . .” Brent took two frantic paces away from her, turning so he would miss the inevitable questions at the sudden eruption of tears in his eyes. He could feel her behind him even with the space between them. She flipped through her little notebook. The stream of torchlight on its pages cast the same shadows of similar light hitting his Boys’ Own Adventure Stories as a kid. She was picking up, he supposed, where she had left off the night before.

  “This church’s frame has held up well,” she remarked softly, facing where the wall-length organ formerly sat on the west side, wooden pipes piercing the ceiling. Brent could almost imagine the church as it was. Gone now, like the smile in her voice. The only light was from their torches, hers smothering the ceiling to where the oeil-de-boeuf window had been. “The dome was his original sketch for St. Paul’s.” She looked up through the ruined roof.

  “It was here, wasn’t it?” Brent said hoarsely after a moment. “That I told you I had my orders.”

  “Yes.” Diana pressed a smile. “You said that Wren was a barrier. That I could handle bad news a little better in a beautiful place.”

  The damage was minimal given the glorious surroundings. At least in comparison to poor All Hallows and some of the Wren churches along Fleet Street. He stopped before the font and narrowed his gaze. Perhaps another shiny artifact would catch his eye as the vial had. “And what is the spiritual significance?” Brent muttered, kicking at a loose stone on the tile, wondering if she would listen. “‘And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church . . .’” Brent kicked at another wayward stone, the starlight spilling through the grand, ruined Wren dome. “‘And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ Well, seems the gates of hell did quite a—”

  Brent stopped in his tracks. He flicked a look up at Diana leaning over something in the opposite corner. She picked it up as Brent noticed a shadow draw near her.

  He watched and waited a moment.

  “Good evening.” The man’s accented voice matched his sharply cut suit. Czech? Russian? Polish? Brent wished he had brushed up on more dialects.

  Diana’s smile outdid the dim streetlights swimming over the walls. “Good evening.” Her shoulders straightened as her hand reached into her bag, most likely for her permit, maybe for her gun. Or maybe to deposit something inside.

  “What’s a beautiful woman doing skulking around a church at night?”

  “I’m not skulking,” Diana said easily. There wasn’t a trace of the woman who stumbled into his lecture those many years ago. “I’m consulting.”

  The man leered. Brent thought of stepping forward, but he wanted to see how it played out. How she handled it. What she said. If she would hide behind the same front she put on for him. The last time she consulted in a church, a man with a gun turned up.

  “Consulting?” One step and another, the shadow slid forward, seemingly positioned to look straight past Diana until he stopped.

  “Yes.” She held up her notebook. Began the spiel about grading and reconstruction, her voice even as she pandered to the altar of Christopher Wren.

  Diana’s shoulders were straight as the man stepped in. A jolt of nerves sparked through Brent’s arm and settled in his fingers.

  The man stepped closer to Diana and grabbed her notebook from her, wringing her arm before Brent reflexively pounced. He grabbed the man from behind, wrenched his hand from Diana’s arm, and hooked his arm around the man’s neck in a tight grip. “Touch her again . . . ,” he hissed.

  “Brent!” Diana pleaded when it was clear to her, if not to Brent, that the man was seconds away from strangulation.

  The man choked, wheezed air. Brent slowly let go. Too slowly. He’d always been strong, but hoisting men over battlefields for four years clearly contributed to his f
orce. The man coughed as he tripped backward. “I . . . I . . .”

  But the man didn’t speak. Not that Brent was anticipating an answer. He was in challenge mode. Brent’s nerves and heartbeat were so highly elevated that when the man left the way he came, Brent was still on edge. Leftover tension spiraled through him, the stones closing in and the night sky clear through the space where a dome had once sheltered the wrecked mosaics, altar, and organ.

  Diana slowly retrieved her notebook from the dusty ground.

  “Your gun is in your handbag, isn’t it?”

  Diana nodded.

  “Because what you’re doing is dangerous.” He waited through several ticks of silence.

  “Brent . . . please trust me.”

  He nodded. “I will protect you. You will not come to any church without me. Do you understand?”

  “That’s what I suggested. You could give me a spiritual perspective and—”

  “My spiritual perspective is that I am following my wife around at night with no clue as to why.”

  “I don’t want to be alone.” She shuddered and fear flashed in her eyes. Diana was rubbing her arms as if to scrub them clean of a stranger’s touch.

  He inched closer. “I won’t let you.” He wouldn’t let her be associated with anything that could lead to danger. He would return the vial to Rick Mariner the next day.

  Her eyes glistened. She nodded, then fell into him completely and pressed her lips to his.

  Brent Somerville, despite his best intentions to demand that she tell him what they were into, was only human. So amidst the dust and cracks of yet another devastated church, he kissed her back.

  Chapter 11

  December 1940

  London

  “Part of me wants it to start,” Tibbs said to Brent as they sat through another long and uneventful day of what The Times described as the Phoney War at their barracks near Oxfordshire.

  After their daily drills and training, terrible canteen food and endless rounds of cards, Brent had found a few neighboring churches to sketch for Diana with golden bricks and toppled little adjacent cemeteries that loaned themselves well to the curve and shade of his pencil.