Bill glanced up at her over his cards. “Your aunt won’t find us, will she, Lucy? She won’t make me go back. I won’t do it. I’ll run away again.”
“They won’t take you back. I promise.”
This seemed to relieve his worry, and his face cleared before he tossed down his cards. “I’m tired of playing brag. Can I go feed the rest of my sandwich to the sheep?”
“Just don’t wander too far off. We have to be at the depot soon.”
“Ta!” He scrambled to his feet and headed toward a herd of black-faced woolly sheep huddled against a nearby stile.
Only the sound of a dog barking down in the valley and the drone of an airplane’s buzz as it landed at a nearby airfield overlapped the birdsong and Bill’s laughter as he leaned precariously over the stile to twist his fingers into the thick wool. Lucy rucked her skirt up to her thighs, enjoying the warm sun on her bare legs.
Michael lit a cigarette and stretched with his back against a tree. The sun through the branches gilded strands of his blond hair, throwing shadows along the strong line of his cheekbones and in the angled hollows beneath his eyes. “Not to be the voice of doom, but what happens if the authorities catch up to you? Surely they must be searching for Bill by now. Or if you can’t find Bill’s mother? Worse—what if she’s not alive to be found?” He stubbed out his cigarette in the grass, his features unnaturally grim. “Be careful what you promise, lass. It could come back to haunt you.”
She promised to see me off.
She promised us it would be all right. She promised.
Lucy shuddered, pain scissoring its way along her nerves, but she shoved the memories away before they took hold. Pasted on a brilliant smile. “Don’t be such a worrywart.”
“I don’t want to see Bill disappointed.”
“Neither do I.”
Michael’s words rankled like a sore tooth—what else was new? The man was a positive irritant. Had she thought a moment of soppy weakness would change that? Before she could think of a suitable scathing response, Bill scurried toward them, his hands cupped ahead of him.
“Oi, Lucy. Look.” A little gray-and-yellow bird with a black cap nested in the bowl of his palms. “I think its wing is broken.”
“That’s a siskin,” Michael instructed.
Lucy sat up, pulling her skirt back down and dusting grass from her hair. “Best put it back where you found it. We have to get a move on if we’re to make the bus.”
“But he’ll die if he can’t fly. Can’t I take him with us to London?”
“Him?”
“I named him Rufus.”
“Wonderful. He has a name.”
“I can’t just leave him here all by himself. What’ll happen to him?”
“I think I’ve an old basket in the wagon,” Michael suggested. “You can put him in that.”
“Can we?” Lucy asked. “That’s a great help.” What she’d like to do was beat him over the head with it. She let her thoughts be known with a cold dead stare.
He grinned, his earlier solemnity banished back to wherever he kept it hidden away in his incessant need to remain always optimistic. Perversely, now that she knew he didn’t spend every waking moment in a dazzle of good humor, he was far more likable.
“Please, Lucy,” Bill persisted. “I want to show Mam. He’s just about the prettiest bird I ever saw and he’s so soft. Ain’t got nothing like him on Mansford Terrace.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Michael explained. “Siskins like trees and meadows. Not smoke and traffic.”
Bill held the bird gently. His eyes were big and wide, and there it was—right on cue—the lip wobble. “But Rufus needs me.”
Lucy was a sucker for the lip wobble. She caved like a house of cards. “Bring Rufus. Bring a whole flock of Rufuses if you like. The more the merrier.”
Ignoring her sarcasm, Bill retrieved the basket. “It don’t look very comfortable. You think he’d like a bed to lie in? Maybe some grass and leaves and such? What do siskins eat, Michael? I should get him some food for the trip.”
Bill wandered off again in search of furnishings and dinner for Rufus.
Michael reclined back on one elbow, watching Lucy with bemused curiosity. “You moan and complain, but you really do care for him, don’t you?”
“Rufus?”
He laughed and tossed a conker at her. “Bill, you idiot.”
“Do you think I’d have put up with him this long if I didn’t? I’m not completely cold and unfeeling.”
“No, but on first inspection you don’t strike one as particularly maternal.”
“Okay, I have to ask—how did I strike you on first inspection?”
A corner of his mouth turned up in malicious delight. “The honest truth?”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
“Very well. I thought you were rude, immature, conceited, selfish, and a spoiled little girl who should be taken over someone’s knee.”
Her eyes danced with wickedness. “Are you volunteering for the job?”
He shook his head. “You never miss an opportunity, do you?”
“To make you squirm? Where would the fun be in that?” She smoothed her hands down her skirt, all too aware of the picture she must make in her wrinkled hand-me-downs. No wonder he looked on her with amusement. She’d become no more than a figure of fun. “So, if you held such a low opinion of me, why agree to help me reach London? You could have just as easily told me to bugger off.”
“Maybe I held out hope my first impression might be wrong.”
“You must be sorely disappointed.”
Their eyes locked and held for the space of a heartbeat. “Not completely.”
To hide the excitement blooming in her cheeks, Lucy leaned back to stare up at the sky, a pale blue bowl streaked by dingy white clouds. It would rain before nightfall, probably one of those English misting drizzles that made everything smell like an old shoe. But now, this very moment, the air was fragrant with the musty scents of earth and new budding leaves. Birds rattled the hedges, calling in a spring matchmaking frenzy, and there was a sense of rebirth, of hope, and for the first time in a long time the chance that tomorrow might not arrive wearing jackboots and singing Wagner. It made her feel as if anything were possible. As if all her dreams were an arm’s length away, and all she needed was the courage to reach for them.
“Look here, miss!” Bill held up a juicy wriggling worm. “It’s a beaut!”
Her body lighter than it had been in weeks, Lucy still couldn’t help her pained smile. “An avian gastronomic delight, I’m sure.”
Bill’s brow wrinkled in momentary confusion.
She clarified. “Rufus will love it.”
He dropped the worm in the basket and returned to digging.
Lucy stood and shook out the rug before folding it away. “We should be leaving for the bus station. Bill has a date with his mam and I have a date with Mr. Oliver. Neither of us wants to be late.”
Michael’s gaze traveled between Bill and Lucy and back again. “You can’t tell me you won’t be a little sorry to see him go.”
She glanced at Bill, who was placing meadow grass carefully in the basket. Despite his age, there was no soft roundness of boyhood in his cheeks, no childish plumpness to be outgrown. Beneath a thatch of ragged brown hair, his face was lean and narrow. And there was too much knowledge in those quick, darting brown eyes.
“Are you kidding?” she scoffed, the lightness in her chest sinking into her stomach, where it mixed uneasily with a Spam sandwich. “I can hardly turn up at the Dorchester with a twelve-year-old in tow, now, can I?”
“No, I suppose not. I just thought when it came right down to it, you might find it hard to say good-bye.”
Did he speak of Bill now? Or himself? She hardened her resolve as she hardened her heart. Sentimentality didn’t figure into her future plans. She tossed her head, chin set, throat tight, stomach knotted. “Don’t worry about me, Corporal. I’m an expert at saying goo
d-bye.”
Chapter 16
The bus depot was crowded with soldiers heading out on leave and sailors returning to their ships after a few precious days at home. A trio of Red Cross nurses with their blue gabardine uniforms and air of efficiency thumbed through a rack of magazines; an older couple weary after a day trip, faces tired and shoulders hunched, sat on a wooden bench beneath a poster advertising the latest war bond campaign.
Bill poked a stick into a drain while Lucy scanned a paper someone had left on the bench. Devastation in Malta, screamed the headline.
Normally, she skipped past the war news with barely a second glance, but this afternoon not even an announcement of what movie was playing at the Metropole, an advertisement for a dance contest to raise victory funds for the Red Cross, or a story about a two-headed dog in Shropshire was enough to drag her attention away from every page and column.
The nightly destruction meted out on Britain’s rocky Mediterranean island outpost.
Tit-for-tat air raids by Germans on the ancient spa city of Bath.
British air raids on the cultural center of Rostock.
Japan’s seemingly unstoppable advance through Burma.
For a moment, Michael’s warnings had her doubting her ability to find Bill’s mother as easily as she’d boldly proclaimed. Years of overnight raids on the city had displaced thousands. It was just barely conceivable Mrs. Smedley might be among them. What then?
She tossed the paper aside. This was why she avoided the news. There was only so much one could take in one go, and borrowing trouble wasn’t her way. There was nothing she could do until they arrived. Either Bill’s mother was fine and Lucy worried for no reason or Bill’s mother was not fine and all the worrying in the world wouldn’t change the fact. They’d find out soon enough.
“Did you mean what you said back there?” Lucy was jolted from her thoughts to find Bill watching her, head cocked to the side in suspicious observation. “About going to London for a job?”
“You heard that, did you?”
“Hard not to when you and Michael was hollering.” He jammed his stick in and out, in and out. “When I asked you before, you told me you made it up, that it was all a hum. Why did you lie, Lucy? Didn’t you trust me? I wouldn’t rat you out. We’re mates, you and me.”
“I know we are, Bill. Best mates. It wasn’t that, but you were so excited at first and then as we went along, it felt nice to be . . . looked up to for a change.”
“But you’re rich and you live in a great big house and your aunt’s a real lady, the kind what knows the king and queen. Don’t people look up to you now?”
“Some might for those reasons, but I liked that you looked up to me for . . . being me. Does that make sense?”
“I suppose.” He seemed to ponder this riddle. “So, I guess Michael was right.”
“I’m sure he’d be gratified to hear it. Right about what?”
“That you’re running away.”
Her hands tightened on her bag. “Maybe he’s got it backward. Maybe I’m running toward instead.”
“Toward what?”
She tried conjuring a picture of palm trees and Pacific breezes but found the images as blurry and ill defined as the rain-streaked landscape beyond her Nanreath windows. “I suppose I’ll find out when I get there.”
Michael approached with their tickets. “Here you go. Two seats on the next coach.”
“I wish you’d let me pay my own way,” Lucy replied.
“It’s money well spent if it gets you out of my hair once and for all.” His smile took the sting from his words. It wasn’t one of his cocksure grins either, but sweet, almost wistful.
It made her want to kiss him—or pinch him. Either response would prove whether he was real or just a strange hallucination. She was leaning toward the latter because nobody in her jaded experience was this Andy Hardy wholesome.
Michael could be depended upon to do the right thing in any situation.
Michael could be depended upon—period.
She found that a novel and disconcerting experience and envied Arabella, though any girl who held this man’s heart and let it go couldn’t be the sharpest knife in the drawer.
The coach approached with a crank and grind of gears. The waiting passengers fidgeted, heads up, bags and parcels clutched more closely in expectation. Bill dropped his stick. She gripped her suitcase. A few more minutes and she’d be stepping aboard. There would be no better time to speak her mind than these final moments.
“Michael, I—”
“Lucy, I—”
They spoke one over the other. He motioned for her to continue.
“Pardon, miss. Are you taking this bus?” A policeman had approached while they were locked in stilted conversation. He wore a friendly smile but his posture and the shrewd gleam in his eye told a different story.
“That depends,” she hedged with a swift sideways glance for Michael. He gave the barest hint of a nod in answer, but it was enough to reassure her. He’d not give her away.
The policeman sized her up from top to bottom as if committing her to memory. “We’ve been told to be on the lookout for a young woman fitting your description. We have reason to believe she might be headed this way.”
Golly. Aunt Cynthia worked fast.
Lucy scrambled for an explanation, but her mind had gone frighteningly blank.
“A pretty dark-haired young woman of slender build, that’s what we were told.”
The passengers headed for the coach, all of them pointedly ignoring the scene playing out before them while straining to catch a whiff of possible scandal.
“I appreciate the compliment, Constable, but you see—”
“Oi, Lucy.” Bill rushed over, his eyes bright with triumph. “I found a whole tuppence dropped down that drainpipe there.”
The policeman’s friendly gaze narrowed. He rolled up on the balls of his feet as if preparing to strike. “Your name is Lucy?”
“That’s right,” she answered, forcing her voice to remain calm and her smile to remain ambivalent. Not an easy task when her insides were churning and her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth. “Lucy Stanley.”
Spotting the policeman, Bill’s face drained of color and his mouth sagged open. He took an involuntary step back. As if sensing his panic, Michael put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Or perhaps it was a restraining hand. Either way, it worked. Bill looked like he was going to neither faint nor scarper.
“My sister and I are taking this child back to London,” Michael offered. She almost expected him to clamp a hand on her shoulder. “He’s an evacuee who’s been staying with our family in Charbury, but his mother’s taken sick and wants him home with her.”
Lucy could almost see the first crack in the policeman’s confidence. Faced with a trio rather than the lone woman on the lam he was expecting, he lost his single-minded bluster. “And you are, sir?”
“Corporal Michael McKeegan.” He dug in his wallet for his identity papers. “Formerly of the Royal Engineers. It’s good to make your acquaintance, Constable . . .”
“Grantley.”
“Pleasure to meet you.” Michael’s handshake was accompanied by one of those disarming smiles of his that never failed to ease any situation. They should paratrooper the man into Germany. He’d have Hitler eating out of the palm of his grease-stained hand.
“McKeegan?” the man pried, his nose buried in Michael’s particulars. “She said her name was Stanley.”
“Half sister. Call McKeegan’s Garage at 25430 if you need to verify it. My mother is there. She can explain the situation.”
The policeman continued to eye them suspiciously, his gaze lingering longest on Bill, who seemed to have shrunk in on himself, his eyes unfocused, his face the color of chalk as he gripped his prize tuppence.
“Hey! You ridin’ or not?” the driver shouted, anxious to keep to his timetable.
The policeman handed Michael his papers back. “Go on, then.
Get the lad home to his mother.”
“Will do.” Michael quickly shepherded Lucy and Bill ahead of him onto the coach.
“What are you doing?” she hissed under her breath.
“Saving your bacon,” he muttered as he followed her up the steps.
With a gasp of brakes, the coach moved out, still under the policeman’s eagle eye.
“Well that didn’t go quite to plan, did it, brother dear?” Lucy commented as town gave way to hilly countryside.
Michael gave a bark of dry laughter. “At this point, I’d have been surprised if it had.”
The coach lurched and rattled, the young ticket-taking chippie balancing easily as she passed from front to back like a seasoned sailor on a heaving deck, her leather bag slung over her shoulder, whistle round her neck swinging back and forth.
“‘With superb skill, Flight Lieutenant Wood rolls the Lysander . . . ,’” Bill read aloud over the shoulder of the man in the seat ahead.
The man turned round to glare, and Bill sank back into his seat.
“Will your mother back up your story?” Lucy asked as Michael handed over his tuppence and was issued a ticket for as far as Pitcombe.
“I have no idea, but by the time they ring her, you’ll be long gone, so it won’t matter.”
“You could get in trouble.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
By now, Bill had sidled up once more, peering over the seat in hopes of learning Buck Ryan’s fate. “‘Battling with the ice-cold waves, Ryan struggles ashore. “I’d better stick to the rocks . . .”’”
The man cleared his throat as he shot Bill a “do you mind” look through thick horn-rimmed spectacles. Bill pretended to be studying the flowers on a spring hat three rows to their left.
“Why are you doing this, Michael? Why are you going out of your way to help me when you don’t even like me?”
“I never said I didn’t like you.”
“You never said you did.”
He glanced out the window. “I suppose you looked like someone in desperate need of a friend.”
“I thought I didn’t make friends . . . only collected followers,” she answered tightly.
The Way to London Page 19
