The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  It was stupid that through the hollow sounds of his last moments of life he would hear the refrain of Diana’s stupid song. That nightingale worlds away in blasted Berkeley Square. But why shouldn’t he think of the best thing in his life knowing that soon his light would be snuffed out and everything he feared for the past four years had finally found him?

  He knew he was hurting Ross, tightening his iron clamp on Ross’s wrists. But as long as he held him down, he could reverse his mistake. He could protect him. A soldier looked after his own. Brent would look after Ross at the cost of his own life.

  And yet as he was thinking of Diana and aching for her, it hardly registered as Ross rolled over, hardly registered that he was no longer directly next to the shell, rather protected by another and the barrier of canvas and steel with enough sinking mud to keep him from bearing the full weight of the bomb blast. Hardly registered that Brent had underestimated Ross’s wiry strength.

  The wet-behind-the-ears kid who called him Padre and followed his every move had taken his last breath so Brent could exhale another.

  Brent’s head buzzed. He pried his eyes open and the moment came back. “You’re the strong one,” Ross had said. The calluses on Brent’s hands from years of rowing kept his grip. His broad shoulders allowed him to keep a steady pace.

  Brent didn’t recall a lot after. Had he dreamt Holt and Tibbs yelling that they would be back presently after seeing to the barely breathing man in their care? The same man he had nearly dropped, beginning the spiral of events that left him in pain with Ross unmoving and battered beside him?

  “Wh-what would St. Paul say, Padre?” Holt lifted Brent onto the canvas stretcher and waited for Tibbs to close Ross’s eyes.

  Brent gaped at him. Gaped at Ross unmoving and shattered beside him. Felt the stinging start to replace the phantom thud in his shoulder and the unbearable pain above his left eye. He stared down at his bloody fingers, then up at the raining sky.

  He knew Paul’s words like a lifeline. His heartbeat quickened and there was something. Just there. Beareth. Believeth. Endureth. Hopeth. All the words his mind and body and heart ascribed to Diana. But where were they?

  “Padre?” Holt’s concern was frantic.

  Brent blinked and groaned, his eyes falling shut even though he wanted to stay awake and say one thing that might start to repair what he had done. No Paul. No Paul even. Brent could command a whole world from behind that lectern when it came to Paul. He could . . .

  He had.

  The words weren’t just mouthed against the din of rapid fire and shouting men. They weren’t lost in the barrage of rain and orders and calls and cannon fire.

  Help me! A plea to the God he couldn’t see beyond his lecture notes and Paul’s insistence, the undercurrent of every Greek form of love and every last thesis and every letter to the Corinthians. Patient. Kind . . .

  Help me.

  Later, Brent awoke in a hospital in Italy amidst clean sheets, with four fingers instead of five, and morphine dripping in an IV to counter the pain of the burns on his side. All of Paul’s words came back to him with a vengeance to mark the part of his heart irrevocably changed.

  Brent’s eyes adjusted to the light and he thought of her. For once he had stopped yelling Ross’s name, in the blurry moments between waking and sleeping, he saw her. Only her.

  But it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that when this is all over we will start. Truly start. London owes us that much. After all, we were generous enough to loan it our love story.

  * * *

  December 1945

  Brent’s shoulder throbbed, pressing into the stone floor of the Lady Chapel. Stunned, he registered footsteps echoing over the bricks before he could think or breathe or get his bearings. But Brent only cared about the weight on his back. His head buzzed.

  Brent blinked. Fisher. The gunshot. Diana. Brent’s eyes widened in panic and he gently shifted, heart shattering when he felt the sticky warm substance on his hand. The metallic smell. The feeling that life was slowly leaving through sinews and muscle. He knew the signs. It played every evening in his nightmares. But never her . . . Not her.

  Brent grunted as he strained to disentangle himself without moving Diana.

  “No. No.” Brent carefully repositioned her. She was pale, eyes closed, head falling limply back on his arm, blood trailing the left side of her face. “No!” Brent pleaded, then unraveled. He stopped, checked his breath, and inhaled deeply. “Diana.”

  With the hand not holding her upward, he placed two shaking fingers to her neck, dizzy with relief that her pulse was there. But she was losing too much blood. Brent laid her head down gently on the brick, wriggled out of his vest, and pressed it tightly to the gash at the edge of her temple, swabbing away enough blood so he could ascertain the damage while blinking tears away.

  The world seemed to be closing in on him. He searched out the trail of the bullet on the side of her temple, through her red-soaked blonde hair. He made out a bit of bone beneath and his stomach rolled.

  Her eyes fluttered open and she glanced around.

  “You’re alright, Di. You’re going to be just fine. The bullet just grazed you.” If she hadn’t thrown herself in the bullet’s path, he’d more than likely be dead on the floor. How could he live with her choice? Ross’s choice. Though if their roles had been reversed, he would have done the same thing. He added more pressure to the makeshift bandage at her temple.

  “Brent . . . ,” she said weakly.

  “Shhh.” He cradled her head.

  “I’m so sorry. I owed Simon because of you. Because of the hospital. He said he could arrange . . . He could find out where you were taken, and if . . . I did it for you. I promised him for you.”

  “I was a cad. I was angry. Don’t talk. You’re going to be fine.”

  Diana made a sound. Swallowed slowly. “B-but I’m so afraid you don’t know . . .”

  “Di, I can’t hear you.” Brent grazed her forehead with his lips, tasting the metallic tang of blood flowing too freely despite the pressure of his vest. He touched her cheek. “I can’t hear you.”

  She didn’t speak again. Her breath was light and she shivered now and then. He placed his coat over her. “I love you. If I’ve done this all wrong, I need you to know that,” he whispered.

  Love was complicated enough on its own without throwing war in its path.

  Brent looked around frantically, blinking away what his mind saw as his eyes took in a church long drained of music but not of people.

  He held her. Wasn’t he trained for this? No. No amount of training could prepare him for cradling his wife’s head as her breathing slowed from a bullet wound she took for him. Brent gently laid her head on the stone and disengaged.

  Rising, his nerves sparked and his blood flowed just as they had any moment a wounded man was placed in their care. He blacked out the world, focused as if wearing blinders. His shoes didn’t press through the weight of layers of mud, just grazed the stones he took in pursuit of help, soles clacking on sure ground at a pace he mightn’t have thought possible while his memory took him through a tunnel.

  When his voice fought through, it was quiet and uneven. “Can someone find help, please?”

  The small crowd watching dispersed. Someone had had the foresight to ring for the medics and police before Brent’s request.

  He barely registered hearing Fisher had been arrested. He answered questions distractedly. A kind medic assured him several times that Diana would be just fine. Brent nodded, a weight sinking his shoulders.

  He slowly walked from the Lady Chapel through the quire, casting a look at the chair he occupied when he promised to trust her through to the yard and into the night.

  Chapter 28

  Diana picked at the coarse, starched sheet of her hospital bed. Brent was glued to her side, but his eyes were bleary, hair matted to his forehead, shirt stained but hidden under his jacket. If she looked back at the fabric of the last seven years o
f her life, she would always be surprised by the way Brent’s threads intersected hers: in a churchyard or lecture, at a train station, in pursuit of a Soviet agent named Eternity. Even if she could rewind her life to work through the insecurity and pain, she would hope it would cast her in his path. Again and again and again.

  She had enough to occupy her time too. While Fisher had been apprehended at the church by the police and taken away, the file he was killing to protect had also been seized and somehow, even from another country, Simon Barre’s influence stretched wide. The file was delivered to her in hospital and she would exercise her brain by spending the long days to recovery decoding it.

  She looked up at Brent’s bloodshot eyes and tentative smile and knew without a shred of doubt that she could hope and bear and endure all things because he was near. That where she ended he began. That the stop of a sentence, a premonition, or a word on the tip of her tongue would be fully realized by him.

  “I’m sorry I left you without a gun.” Diana studied Brent carefully.

  “I’m sorry you got shot.”

  “Not actually shot.” Diana smiled. “Grazed.” She felt at her bandage. “I hope you didn’t marry me for my looks.”

  “Not in the least.” He ducked his chin to his chest a moment. Then he met her gaze. “Agape.”

  “We did that one,” she recalled. “All well. Everything seems like something new somehow, doesn’t it?”

  “It means the devotion of one for the help of humanity. Of others.” Brent touched her cheek. “I don’t know what you did during the war, Diana. Not truly and I won’t ask. But I don’t need to know to know that you have gumption in spades.”

  “You—”

  “I feel like I’ve met you all over again.”

  Diana shifted, bunched the sheet in her hands. “You know, I was thinking . . .”

  “Somervilles!” Simon appeared in the doorway, decked out in a fine suit with polished black shoes. He handed Diana a bouquet and set his fedora at the end of her regulation blanket. “Having a private moment?”

  “As a matter of fact . . . ,” Brent began.

  Diana smelled the flowers. “You’re in a good mood. Everything go well in Vienna?”

  “I think I’ve won the respect of MI6. I have carte blanche to continue to build my little team for this task. Here and in Vienna.” He turned to Brent. “When I met you. That night . . . well . . . something had . . . Anyway, with Langer and—”

  “I’m glad it worked out,” Brent interrupted. “But as you can see, Diana and I were having a conversation and . . . oh, so you’re staying. Please, don’t stand on ceremony.”

  Simon dragged a metal chair from the bed adjacent Diana’s. Parking it next to Brent, he sank into it and crossed his legs casually.

  Diana glanced at Brent, then handed the file to Simon. “Everything was encrypted. As you know.”

  Simon cursed under his breath and scrubbed his hand over his face. “Well . . .”

  “She started to decode it,” Brent said just as Simon flipped back the cover.

  “How . . . how did . . . ?” Simon’s fingers worked over the papers bearing Diana’s cursive handwriting.

  “Nothing a knowledge of Fisher’s fondness for Playfair ciphers and Mozart wouldn’t fix.” Diana felt a little sad thinking of Fisher despite how he had killed Mariner and almost killed Brent. He so wanted something to believe in.

  She had tinkered with a sequence of rough cubes she had produced, each bearing the distinctive grid pattern Fisher had taught her. “The Mass in C Minor. It was the one composition I found a pattern in. I heard it with Langer and then again here at St. Paul’s. It’s #427 in the catalogue and it’s Fisher’s favorite piece.” She pointed. “There were three pages with vital information. I merely assigned each with four and two and seven. So the alphabet on page one began at the fourth letter—D—then the next at B, and the next—”

  “G,” Simon finished. He was watching her intently, glancing from the paper to her, then back again. “But what was the key? How did you find what words to use?”

  Diana reached for the Bible on her bedside table. “Our atheist friend Fisher used a verse.”

  “Of course he did.”

  She leafed through and pointed. “Start there.”

  “Matthew 16:18,” he read.

  “‘And I tell you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church,’” Diana recited. “I know that one. Married to a theology professor and all.” She smiled at Brent. “Here’s names, locations, and . . .” She felt a slight rush to her head and settled back against the pillow. “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Thank you for this. Truly.” Simon took the folder and smoothed out the pages before tucking it into his case. “Turns out Eternity is far bigger than we thought. More than just eight London agents. It’s all across Europe. Soviet sympathy is rampant in Vienna. What’s in this file is of interest to all four of the reigning Allied victors. Which is why I was thinking . . .” He looked to Brent before returning to Diana. “You could come to Vienna.”

  “I am a professor of theology at King’s. I am not a spy. I have no reason to go to Vienna. Diana got you your precious file. More still, she translated it for you.”

  “My superiors believe I can stop this ring quickly from the inside without drawing a lot of attention. Someone else will keep an eye on London. I will focus on Vienna.” He cast a pleading look at her. “Diana, I consider you part of that team now.”

  She rearranged her flowers, moving the daisies behind the carnations.

  “Brent Somerville. I need you.”

  “I am not infiltrating a spy ring. Are you mad?”

  “You can’t have Brent, Simon. You can’t take my husband to Vienna.”

  “You’ll go with him. You can study there. You can wander around churches with Gabriel Langer.”

  “Absolutely not.” Brent pounded his knee with his fist. “Whatever she promised you back at that Foreign Office, she has more than fulfilled. And while I will appreciate the neck scar from Fisher’s piano wire, I won’t miss the adventure. I’ve had four years at the Front and I really just want a nap.”

  Simon met Diana’s eyes. “Did you tell him about our bargain, Diana?”

  “Not in great detail.” Diana swallowed at the memory. “Enough detail.”

  Brent ran his hands over his kneecaps. “Enough detail to know you bribed her with information about me.” Brent’s gaze swerved to Simon. “Why didn’t you just tell her? She’s your friend.”

  “Oh, believe me.” Diana raised a brow at Simon. “We’ve discussed that.”

  “I think you owe me.”

  “Owe you?” Brent growled. The protectiveness she saw in Brent’s eyes was worth every last thing she had done for Simon and more. “I owe her everything, including my life, and you . . . I owe you nothing. Were you attempting to ruin our marriage?”

  “I can’t ruin your marriage. It can’t be ruined. She loves you too much. Wren churches and Brent Somerville. All I heard about for four years. Bring her with you to Vienna.”

  “I don’t even speak German.”

  “Your wife does.”

  “I just got back. I can’t take a sabbatical. They won’t guarantee to hold my position.”

  Simon reached into his pocket. “A letter from the dean.” He popped it into the front pocket of Brent’s jacket. “And you have a position at the Universität Wien. You will be teaching Greek and Latin to undergrads. Attending faculty parties. Making friends. Going to meetings. Looking for men like Rick Mariner who are caught up in something over their heads.”

  “I am a Pauline scholar.”

  “He spoke those languages too,” Simon said.

  Brent frowned. “Diana, are you hearing this man?”

  “You want this, Diana.” Simon grabbed her hand. “Brent wants this too.”

  “No, Brent does not want this.”

  “Yes, he does,” Simon continued, addressing Diana. “He says he doesn’t, but
I can see it in his face. He’s trying to fathom how he can possibly spend another day supervising someone’s dry thesis on Corinthians.”

  Diana pulled a loose thread on her blanket. “I wanted to start keeping house.”

  “You can! Hoover the flat. Cook. Eat rationed strudel and watery coffee.”

  “I don’t know, Simon.”

  “I hear that Anton Pilgram is a favorite architect of yours.”

  Diana’s eyes widened. “He did the altar at Stephansdom.”

  “See, Somerville? Your wife already knows the city. My former SOE contact is an agent there now and will take care of everything. Housing behind Stephansdom. Papers. The works. A few lecture opportunities in Prague and Brussels.”

  “You need to leave now, Simon. Your visiting hours are over.”

  Simon nodded, rose. “Do it for the war effort.”

  “The war’s over, Simon.”

  “No, Somerville, it’s not. Not mine. Not yours.” He looked at Diana. “You know I care deeply about you and I am sorry you were hurt. You also know that you want to come to Vienna. I can tell.”

  Simon collected his hat and, just before he retreated, said, “Perhaps I’ll see you there.”

  * * *

  “It was so hard.” Diana reached for Brent’s hand once Simon was gone and held it fast. “Seeing everyone going home and knowing that I couldn’t.”

  Brent smiled and lifted their joined hands so he could kiss her knuckles. “Do you want to go to Vienna, Di?”

  “I want romance. I want everything I didn’t get in our four years apart.”

  “The most romantic man I know how to be right now is the one who recognizes your abilities, Diana.” He stroked her uninjured temple.

  “You’d have to leave King’s. Vienna is a dangerous place right now, Brent.”

  “We’ve found enough danger in London.” He fingered the scar at his neckline. “Do you want to see those Pilgram churches?”

  Her smile was automatic. “I love the churches there. But aren’t you happy at King’s?”

  Brent studied her closely a moment. “It’s hard to know what happy is right now.”