The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  While Diana and Brent were prowling around Wren churches, Fisher had found a perfect hideaway.

  Diana slid the paper to him across the table. “Mozart.”

  “Again?” Brent said.

  “Still.”

  * * *

  Brent remembered the hollow feeling of sitting in St. Bart’s and deciding to trust her because he loved her and because he knew her war activity was a government-held secret. But Simon was in Vienna and they were in London. Brent had a scar on his neck to add to the war wounds on his forehead and left hand. He also had a very recent memory of waiting for her to return.

  “This is different than the other times,” Brent said. “Before we weren’t guaranteed a meeting, but this is intentional—which means it is probably more dangerous.”

  “Of course it is. This is finally something concrete.”

  “Then we should leave it to the professionals.”

  “He asked me. And I gave him my word. I keep my word.”

  “I know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I know because I went to Scotland Yard and learned you signed a piece of paper keeping your secret from me.”

  Diana froze. “I beg your pardon?”

  “And if I ask what you did during the war and you tell me, then you are as good as a traitor. But what you are doing after the war is what is keeping us apart, Di.” He grabbed her hand. “We are getting so close to being who we are together. This just seems like recklessness. With the exception of your meeting Fisher, I know you never once deliberately led us into danger. But this is the file men would kill for, remember? I know. I fought a war. Your friend tried to kill me.”

  “I have no secrets from you when it comes to anything at the core of who we are. I have not lied about my vows to you. I have never once acted against what I promised to you.”

  “Diana, can’t you see? This is more than that. This is you deliberately deciding to put your life at risk.” He used his left hand emphatically, and the melded fingers were more pronounced under the light. “You told Simon this man would stop at nothing to destroy him. Even you if you got in his way. Darling, doing this puts you in the way.”

  She swiped at her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me you went to Scotland Yard?”

  “Oh, honey, if you want to play that game . . .”

  “I warred with keeping a secret from you, sure. But with that secret I was able to do more for the war, more for you than I ever would have by staying here.”

  “For me?”

  “I believed I was doing good.”

  “We all did what we had to do given the circumstances,” Brent said. “But the difference, Di, is I never wanted to experience anything like this again, and you want to keep jumping in.”

  “My experience wasn’t yours, it’s true,” Diana said softly. “I didn’t have a horrible time looking at horrible churches and spending weeks in hospital. I didn’t watch men die, Brent. I felt good at my job. And I made friends, just like you did. But I didn’t . . .” She stalled. “I didn’t lose anyone. The closest I came to losing someone was you. I didn’t hear about your injury for such a long time. So I was worried sick about you, and you didn’t need to worry about me, and I wonder if that is part of what’s making this so difficult. We’re coming so close.”

  “I deserve to worry about you. It’s part of what we agreed to. Sickness. Health. War. It is my privilege, my dear, to worry about you. I will whether you are strolling out of our flat or nursing a common cold.” He sighed. “You don’t have to feel guilty because you were safe during the war. It’s what I wanted. I don’t want to tell you about my horrific experience because I don’t want you to ever know. And I don’t want you to live wondering if every last second will be your last.”

  “But I did live like that. For heaven’s sake, we had bombs raining from the sky. At any moment we could have been invaded. I was scared. Not in the same way you were out there at the Front. But I was terrified: more for you than myself, I think. Because every time you left I had to try and imagine living without you again.” Diana lowered her voice a decibel. “Decide what you want me to be, Brent. You think I should use my talent and then stop me when I am able to put that talent into action. I have been able to help Simon.”

  “By continuing everything I fought to stop. Don’t you see? I had one job in the war, Diana. I carried wounded men with Holt, Tibbs, and . . . and R-Ross. We were one unit. We had to think together and act together. We had to share a common mind and purpose. And that focus was how we saved men. I made it through knowing I would come back to you. I arrived and you didn’t. I know you cannot tell me all that happened during the war. And I know you were helping Simon, but I still don’t know why he was more important.”

  She gripped his arm so tightly the knuckles on her hand were white. “I got sloppy, Diana. That’s what happened. Because I was tired. And sick of it. It was raining and I lost my grip and that one wretched mistake . . . My fingers wouldn’t grab and hold to my end of the stretcher and men died because of it.”

  He stretched the muscles in his wounded hand, then gestured at his left shoulder. “And I just have a few scars. And now I want to protect you because I couldn’t protect Ross. And you want to do something stupid and dangerous.”

  “Our entire lives have been dangerous, Brent.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. I can’t hear a door slam without startling. It was one thing to pursue these men in public churches at concerts. It’s another now that Simon is asking you to go into a meeting that could be potentially dangerous.”

  “But if we don’t do it, then everything I did is for nothing. Everything I did for Simon.”

  “What about for me?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You gave to your country, Di. Just like me. You did work for the Foreign Office and signed the Official Secrets Act. You are brave and wonderful. But I fought for the right to protect you. And I lost a mate I couldn’t protect. So it’s in his honor I have to say we leave this for Simon.”

  “What if having me means having a woman who has learned how to be alone?” Diana took a breath. “I don’t need to fall into you every second. I want to.” She cupped his face. “There’s a difference between my needing you and my wanting you. Can you handle that? I carried the burden of the act I signed . . . without you. But I am not the only one who is lying. Something happened to you on the Front. And as long as you keep refusing to let me in, we will circle around each other. What I did was wrong, but you swore yourself to me and it means letting me into every last corner. It means letting me share all of you. But you won’t. You’ll keep fighting your war silently.”

  Brent let out a long breath. “I already fought my war, Diana. And I would go through every last horrifying moment and trench again if it means you are standing here. But us doing this tonight . . . I won’t allow you to endanger your life.”

  “Allow me? Brent, listen to yourself.”

  “Di . . .

  “Because it’s easier to cherish and hold your pain in a deep, dark place, isn’t it?There’s something almost reverent about keeping it to yourself. If it’s your own, you don’t have to be scared and you don’t have to be vulnerable.”

  “No. I don’t. And I never will.” Diana took a long breath and straightened her shoulders before she consulted the clock in the kitchen. “I have to finish what I started.”

  “You would deliberately disobey me?”

  “The Brent Somerville I married would never ask me to obey him. He’d want us to make all of our decisions together.”

  “There it is. The solution to the mystery we’ve been circling around since you returned from wherever you were. I am not the Brent Somerville you married.”

  The warmth of their morning drained. She dressed and affixed her green hat over her brushed and curled blonde hair.

  Diana tilted her chin up. “I love you, Brent. I’ve loved you since the moment I met you and I will love you unt
il the day I die.” Her eyes locked with his as they stood silently.

  “So you’re going anyway?” His voice was strangled.

  “He asked me. I am armed. It’s a concert. There will be several people. It’s far safer than the war we both fought, isn’t it?”

  When he didn’t answer, she smiled sadly, swerved to open the door, and clicked it softly behind her.

  Chapter 25

  Brent stared at the closed front door for a long while. Looking back, he could see nothing that suggested she would deliberately go against his wishes. But looking back hadn’t served him well, had it? Peering through Diana’s lens, he should have seen the potential of her choosing to go anyway.

  On some level he knew his stubbornness wouldn’t last, that he would eventually give in, follow her to St. Bart’s, and throw himself in front of her if it meant protecting her from her promise. But that level was buried under layers of hurt and anger. Did she not know what he had seen? What he continued to see when he closed his eyes or let his brain get idle? What form of love—Greek or otherwise—allowed for her throwing what he had been through back at him?

  Because as much as he wanted to sink through the mud and listen to the moans and wails of the men whose lives were draining before his eyes for the good of King and Country, he needed a face instead of a platitude, and on the gray days when even faith was hard to hold to and the verses so impressed in his theses and so manifest in the churches she loved were too hard to recall, he just saw her.

  He did a wonderful job of pretending to begin an abstract for a seminar on Paul’s first trip to Spain. He turned on the wireless. As she was roaming the city at night, who might be following her? His chest closed in so tightly it was hard to recover breath.

  If Diana hadn’t stepped up to his bench in St. Bart’s, would he have wandered from girl to girl, tasting their lips and feeling their curves with no certainty of commitment or eternity? Would he have found it as hard to return to London and reconcile the world he saw on the battlefield with the one he was trying to settle into like an overlarge sweater?

  What she didn’t realize and what he had been too stubborn to say was that the moment she clarified her stance on needing him and wanting him, he had fallen more deeply in love with her than he thought possible. Her declaration settled beyond the misunderstandings, the lies, and the cracks in their relationship. Diana was her own person. She was the woman some part of his heart had always imagined down to the stubborn tilt of her chin.

  All of the words framed as odes when Brent made promise after promise on the field, after breathlessly setting down an empty stretcher and lifting his arms to the sky, failed. The bargains and pleas that he would never take her for granted or raise his voice at her again. And here he was deserting her? He thought long and hard, his hand hovering over the hat on the stand.

  Not even a quarter hour after she departed, he followed her, unarmed, into the night ahead.

  * * *

  Smithfield and Clerkenwell were historical neighbors with a hundred stories to tell, from Dickens to Rahere’s pilgrimage to Rome, where he had been so moved by the ancient city that he’d built an abbey that withstood zeppelins and Henry VIII’s desecration of the monasteries. In Great St. Bart’s there was Bolton’s window where the prior could peer out and watch the pious monks throughout their day. The music echoing over each stone at advent. And the neighboring St. Bartholomew the Less tucked into the narrative of this priceless square of London, serving the famous hospital where Sherlock Holmes had met Dr. Watson for the first time.

  The yard stretched out to the ancient gatehouse and beyond, stripped of the light that spread over it the afternoon Diana had met Brent. Sleek cars and sputtering streetlights mingled with the promise of the church that held a wonderful moment of her past and the next step into her future.

  She took a last few precarious steps through the yard she knew well, to a stone interface that looked like a patchwork quilt even before the war: a precursor of what all of the churches she loved might eventually look like when the rebuilding began.

  As soon as she creaked open the heavy door and stepped inside, music caught the hollow hall in a net. She recalled the Requiem from one of Fisher’s informal lectures. Diana straightened her shoulders and inhaled. She would do what Simon required. She felt in her waistband for her gun. Maybe Brent was right. Would she have the nerve to fire it? Or would she merely wander around with it as an accessory?

  She missed the sure feel of Brent beside her, but the music was enough to fill her with courage at the moment. Even though she wanted him down to the toes of her shoes.

  As she stepped through to the long aisles of the sanctuary, mournful chords blasted the tapestry of the ancient pillars and rafters. “One thing about Mozart,” Fisher would say, “he’s always surprising.” She sat at the very back in a cold, empty chair and surveyed the middling light in hopes of recognizing Fisher or one of the men who had shadowed the door of one of the churches she and Brent had attended since her return.

  Sure enough, Fisher soon entered on the opposite side of the section in which she was seated. He casually removed his homburg and trench and slid into a seat five rows from the back.

  As the chorus reached a discordant crescendo, Diana watched the man next to Fisher shifting in his seat while reaching inside of his jacket. The face was familiar. It was the Russian man who followed them before they subsequently followed him in the direction of Smithfield. Perhaps Great St. Bart’s was his destination all along.

  She felt the weight of the Russian man’s cold gaze as he watched her intently. Fisher didn’t follow the man’s gaze. The Requiem always had an effect on him. The “Lacrimosa” movement, especially. She recalled it crackling through the wireless before smoothing back to the messages they were supposed to be hearing.

  He blinked back to their world after the piece ended as if just returning from a faraway place.

  Diana resettled her handbag on her lap. What was she going to do if she didn’t find a way to intercept the inevitable pass-off? Point her gun and demand the folder be passed over to her?

  This was a perfect place to do any business. It was tucked away and sometimes forgotten largely in part because it was unscathed by the war. Its patched exterior and cold stones within weren’t the subject of propaganda or rallies to rebuild. It was almost hidden. But not too hidden from markers that would make it easy to find. For anyone unfamiliar with London, it could be a halfway house for safety. For sanctuary.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Diana swerved at the soft voice at her ear, then smiled. “Brent.”

  She started to speak, but he placed a finger to his lips. She recognized it as the apology it was.

  Together, they pretended to focus on the concert, but she could read the stiffness in his posture just as she was sure he could sense the accelerated thrum of her heartbeat. The fedora over his jostling knee nearly fell as he was having trouble keeping still.

  She set her hand over his while he kept his eyes straight ahead. Diana dismissed the discordance between them. There was little time to feel petty about Brent. Each movement of music prickled the back of her neck. She could hardly sit still through the penultimate “Agnus Dei” and then froze when the final “Communio” movement saturated the tiles and inlaid tombstones, whose etchings were worn nearly to oblivion through time.

  She stole several peripheral glances to the other side of the quire. The man with Fisher certainly had something tucked into his jacket. She might have been the least qualified person to sleuth about London, but it was clear that Simon was closing in on amateurs.

  Another figure occupied the space opposite Fisher, but Diana didn’t risk looking over completely. As such, she could only determine a third with nothing to distinguish him other than he had failed to remove his hat in church. The audience shuffled after the second encore. Diana, whose hand was now tightly on Brent’s, knuckles white, waited. “Fisher is here.” She inclined her head. “Someone is w
ith him but I can’t see his face. But he’s wearing a hat in church! The man over there is the same one we followed and you confronted,” Diana said. “I have watched that man since I got here, Brent. He’s reached into his jacket several times. I think he has something.”

  “The something?”

  She nodded. “And another man joined them.” Brent started to glance over, but Diana put a stalling hand on his kneecap. “Oh look! The one man is leaving.” She only saw his back as he slid into the chapel tucked into the north transept across from them, but it was the gait of the man who had followed them. “We’ll split up.” She felt under her blazer and blouse. “Take the gun.”

  “I will not take the gun, Diana.”

  “But, Brent . . .”

  “But nothing.” He pressed a finger to her lips. “The reason I am here at all is because you’re asking me to. Keep the gun. I’ll find Fisher and the other man.” Brent’s gaze searched the room around them. “Fisher never carries a gun, isn’t that what you said? Just that bloody piano wire. I can handle him. You can’t. I’ll find that folder. Whatever the cost.”

  Diana reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re strong, Brent Somerville. Stronger than you know. As you know.” She didn’t want to fathom the sensation of her lips on Brent’s jawline—as they were now—as a last kiss, but she accepted it. Leaned into it. “We can do this.”

  I can do this was so singular and cold to her. But we? There was a lot to wrap in two letters.

  * * *

  Brent lingered by a column near the high altar as musicians finished returning their instruments to their cases and collecting their music and stands. While the view to the Lady Chapel and its ambulatory were blocked by the pulpit, he knew that was where they were headed and gave them a few paces ahead of him.