The Way to London

by Alix Rickloff

  An hour later, they had made their way back to Irene Turnbull’s flat. Lucy wore a cold compress on her forehead as she watched two antacid tablets dissolving in a glass of barley water. Bill thumbed through a first aid manual left lying open on the coffee table.

  “I don’t understand,” Irene said, pulling on her shoes. She was dressed for work in her ARP tunic and skirt and had the anxious tension of someone running late. “You want me to find Bill’s mother?”

  “Not at all,” Lucy explained. “We want you to help us find Bill’s mother. A completely different kettle of fish.”

  “Smells either way” was Irene’s muttered comment.

  Bill leaned over, his finger pointing at a word in the manual. “What’s that say, Lucy?”

  “‘Permanganate of potash.’”

  Disappearing into the kitchen, Irene hollered from the other room, “If the authorities realize Bill’s run away, they’ll be on the two of you like a shot.”

  “What about that?” Bill gestured to another sentence.

  “‘Perforating wound.’” Downing her tonic in one stomach-soothing gulp, Lucy groaned to her feet and followed after her hostess. The flat’s kitchen was enormous and efficient, and looked as if it ought to have a cook bustling about making a royal dinner for twenty. Instead, Irene hunched over a loaf of bread and a cutting board.

  “They won’t find out because we aren’t going to tell them and once he’s back with his mother, it will all sort itself out,” Lucy explained.

  Irene slapped cheese and mustard on her sandwich before packing a bag with her lunch and a thermos. “You have obviously never dealt with the authorities.” Racing back into the drawing room, she snatched her hat off a chair and pulled on her coat.

  Lucy shadowed her. “Look, according to Bill, his mother works as a maid for a gentleman in the West End.”

  “That should narrow it down,” Irene replied caustically.

  “Would it help if I told you he thinks the man’s last name begins with a B?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “It’s asking a lot, but I don’t know who else to turn to, and you did say you were a dab hand at all sorts of odd jobs.”

  “Not tracking down missing persons. Besides, I don’t work anywhere close to Mansford Terrace.”

  “But you know people who do. Or you know people who know people . . . well, you get the idea.”

  “I suppose . . .” Irene hedged.

  Bill pointed at a very detailed and very grisly drawing of a head.

  “I understand—‘carotid artery’—if you can’t help. It’s asking a lot, and I’m sure you’re busy with much more important things.” Taking a page from the Bill Smedley book of acting, Lucy affected a rather distinct limp and the always-formidable lip wobble as she trailed Irene into the foyer. “We’ll muddle through on our own somehow, it’s just my knees are a bit sore this morning after that smash-up with your bicycle . . .”

  “You would bring that up, wouldn’t you? All right.” Irene sighed in defeat. “I’ll ask around. Maybe make some calls. Come along with me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Splendid,” Lucy chirped, miraculously healed. “I was certain I could count on you.”

  They emerged onto the street and proceeded to follow Irene, who, even pushing her bicycle rather than riding it, kept up a spanking pace.

  “This may sound rude, but why don’t you just hand him over to the WVS?” Irene asked as they waited to cross Piccadilly into Green Park. “They’d find him somewhere safe to stay until his mother could be found.”

  Bill shoved his way between them, his face screwed up in a belligerent jut. “Lucy wouldn’t do that. She promised she’d find me mam and she will. You wait and see.”

  Irene blushed. “I’m sure she will,” she said, though she looked anything but as they hurried along the tree-lined footpath toward Buckingham Palace.

  Twenty minutes later and out of breath, they turned off Denbigh Street to arrive at a creeper-covered redbrick building bolstered by sandbags. Irene bypassed the ornate pillared portico for a flight of area steps leading to the basement. The room they entered smelled of burned coffee, bad drains, and a nauseating blend of every type of tobacco known to man. An older uniformed gentleman with a walrus mustache stared at an enormous map while two young women spoke quickly into phones. A runner stood hopping from foot to foot in agitation. One of the women slammed down her receiver and barked over her shoulder to the warden, “Explosion, Tufmore Street. Calling for police, fire, and ambulance services.”

  “There’s been no word on an attack from report and control,” the man barked.

  “Station BR 7 thinks the bomb might have lain there since last week’s raid. Workers digging nearby set it off.”

  “Damn. What a bloody mess. Call in whomever you can reach. Tell them to get all available men and equipment over there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He spotted Irene, his mustache quivering with agitation. “Turnbull, it’s about time. You were due ten minutes ago.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I needed to speak with you about—”

  “Not now. Grab your helmet and respirator. We’ll have personnel from at least half a dozen stations converging. I need you to coordinate. You’ve got the right accent and the right credentials. People listen to you.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Yesterday, Turnbull.”

  “Right, sir.” She equipped herself before hustling out of the basement wardens’ post.

  Lucy caught her at the top of the steps as she was taking her bicycle from the rack. “What about Mrs. Smedley?”

  “No time now. Where are you staying? I’ll phone or send a note round if I find anything out.”

  “The Connaught under Mr. Fortescue’s name.”

  Irene chewed her lip as she played with the strap of her respirator bag. “Grand-mère told me who you really are. Who your family is.”

  “I didn’t think she’d be able to keep such juicy gossip to herself for long.”

  “It wasn’t gossip. She only said that she knew your mother as a girl and you were very much like her.”

  Once that comparison might have lifted Lucy’s spirits. Now her stomach churned and a cold sweat broke out across her back. So much for the cure-all of barley water and antacid tablets.

  “Is that all she said?”

  Irene looked unsettled.

  “Go on. You can tell me. I have the hide of a rhinoceros.”

  Irene seemed to consider, then her features smoothed as if she’d made her decision. “She said you were very much like Lady Amelia, but she had high hopes it wasn’t in any way that mattered.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I thought you might know.”

  She rode off, leaving Bill and Lucy to keep up as best they could.

  “You all right?” Bill asked. “Not gonna shoot the cat, are you?”

  “Where do you come up with these sayings?” When he continued to eye her with concern, Lucy smiled. “I’m fine. Just a bit winded.”

  Like Lady Amelia? She had only to glance at her Bethnal Green bodyguard to know that was a laugh. Her mother possessed an entourage of wealthy, powerful men. Lucy had one ragtag boy of twelve.

  They continued to follow the clang of bells and the whine of sirens toward a plume of smoke that curled black bellied and shot red with cinders above nearby rooftops. Gawking onlookers gathered behind a line of constables to watch flames devour the remains of a building. Firemen with blistered, soot-smudged faces sprayed the flames while others assisted the wounded from the rubble. A man staggered past, blood soaking his clothes. Another wept against the shoulder of a young woman in a nurse’s uniform. A blanket lay draped ominously over a humped shape at the curb just beyond the policemen’s rope.

  Leaving Bill and Lucy safely behind, Irene conferred with a fireman, two policemen, and a man in military khaki before moving on to a ragtag crowd of survivors being seen to by a pair of ambulance beare
rs. She hugged a woman whose shoulders shook with weeping and spoke to a man in an ARP uniform. Directed an arriving ambulance and organized the setting up of a field telephone.

  There was a firmness to her expression and a determination to her soft features. She neither flinched nor faltered as she worked. Instead, she took command as if she’d been born to bark orders. Her father was an admiral. Perhaps leadership ran in the blood.

  You were very much like Lady Amelia.

  So what ran in Lucy’s blood?

  Lucy and Bill returned to the hotel just in time for afternoon tea. She had her heart set on a cream bun and a hot cup of Darjeeling. Not her usual five o’clock refreshment, to be sure, but after the day she’d had, it sounded positively divine.

  “Miss Stanhope? A letter came for you this afternoon.” The man at the Connaught’s front desk handed her an envelope.

  “Is it from Miss Irene?” Bill asked, anxiety and excitement in his voice. “Has she found my mam?”

  Lucy hurried him toward the lift and the privacy of their suite, feeling the curious stare of the clerk drilling its way between her shoulder blades. Safe from prying eyes, she sawed the letter open with a finger. A single page fell out onto the carpet. Bill dove for it as if it were a ten-pound note wrapped round a candy bar.

  Almost immediately, his face fell. “It’s for you.”

  She snatched the letter away from him, scanning the swift slanted writing, her own face showing definite signs of gravity. “It’s not from Michael.”

  “I never said it was,” Bill grumbled.

  Come to think on it, he’d been a bit grumpy most of the afternoon. She chalked it up to two packs of gum, a bag of licorice allsorts, and a chocolate bar gathered during their travels around town. The boy seemed to acquire sweets like an art collector acquired oils.

  “It’s from Mr. Oliver,” Lucy said.

  “What’s he want?”

  “He’s invited me to dine with him tonight. A car will pick me up at nine.”

  “Again? How many times you got to see this bloke? I thought we were going to look for my mam today and all we did was muck about.”

  “I wouldn’t call knocking on every door from Regent’s Park to Battersea Bridge mucking about.”

  “I thought you said men was all rotters. I thought you said me and Michael was the only blokes what wasn’t. Now you’re dolling yourself up to go see this Oliver gent again instead of helping me. That’s not fair.”

  “Give Miss Turnbull time.”

  “She’ll never find Mam. She don’t know where to look. She’s a toff from the country. What does she know of the city? I say we go see Ace again. Tell him we’ve changed our minds.”

  “If you think I’m going to hand over my last few shillings to some penny-ante gangster for information I could get for free, you’ve another think coming. The man’s a black marketeer and probably worse. I wouldn’t trust him or any of those boys from the Lion any farther than I could toss them.”

  “You take that back.”

  “I won’t.” She breathed deeply. “If you don’t want to wait for Miss Turnbull, we can always go to the police.”

  “What about your aunt? Or the Sayres? They’ll find us out and we’ll have come all this way for nothin’.”

  “I don’t like it any more than you do, but maybe it’s a risk we have to take.”

  “No,” Bill said, his brown eyes hard with not just anger but fear. “No coppers.”

  “Then Miss Turnbull is our only option.”

  “But Ace said he knew where my mam was living.”

  “Of course he did. He wants you to come begging, but we’ll not pay his price.”

  “Then I’ll go on my own. You don’t have to come.”

  “You can’t go running about the city by yourself.”

  “I’m not some mama’s boy what don’t know his way about. Ace could tell you that if you’d talk to him. He said I was bang up to all the rigs.”

  “I don’t want you hanging about with Ace or his friends. They’re all up to their armpits in nasty doings. And they’d drag you in if they could.”

  “Now you’re telling me who I can see and what I can do? You’re not my mam. I don’t have to listen to anything you say.”

  “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be on the road—or worse, already caught and dragged back to the Sayres.”

  “I wouldn’t. I’d have been fine all by myself.”

  This time, she hardened herself against his wobbling lip. He was not going to connive her out of her last opportunity for . . .

  She shook her head, unsure at this precise moment what opportunity might actually exist, but this was neither the time nor the place to ponder her future. Surely, Mr. Oliver wouldn’t lead her on only to knock her down just when she could taste success. “Please, Bill. If you’d just be a little more patient. I’m sure word will come soon.”

  “I don’t want soon. I want my mam now. She needs me. You heard Mr. Leonard. She’s walkin’ out with a docker. It’s only ’cause she don’t have me around to take care of her.”

  “I understand . . .”

  “No, you don’t. You’re just like all the rest. You say it but you don’t mean it. It’s just words.”

  “Bill, please . . .”

  “You said you’d help. You promised!” He stormed out the door. Rufus let out a sad little warble.

  “Don’t you scold too.”

  Rufus fluttered and was still.

  Lucy bathed. “He’ll fume and kick about and then he’ll come back when he’s good and ready.”

  She dressed. “He’s probably out there cadging more sweets off some poor unsuspecting soldier.”

  She brushed and pinned her hair. “I didn’t lie. I really will find his mother.”

  Perfectly perfumed, attired, and arranged, she closed and locked the door to the hotel suite. Her evening was about to begin, her final chance to persuade Oliver to take her with him when he returned to the United States.

  Uneasy, she paused, her hand on the latch, and checked her watch one last time. Nine o’clock and no sign of Bill. Should she? Shouldn’t she?

  The lift opened.

  Taking a deep breath, she stepped inside.

  Chapter 23

  This time, all her plans fell into place as if they’d been scripted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The influential man, the sleek car, the grand entrance. Even the night seemed as if it had been created on a Hollywood back lot. The air was soft and brought with it the perfumed warmth of honeysuckle and lilac rather than smoke and mildew. An enormous moon hung high against a sweep of thin clouds and a million stars pricked a velvet sky. Lucy took it as an omen of good things to come and a little bubble of happiness filled her chest.

  Finally, after all she’d been through, her moment had come. It was thrilling and, to be perfectly honest, suddenly a bit daunting. Her bubble burst, but she replaced it with a lift of her chin and a stiffening of her back. Butterflies, that was all. They’d pass.

  Mason Oliver guided her through to the hotel’s promenade, where a table and a bucket of chilled champagne were waiting. Once again, she was offered a feast harkening back to better times and unrationed ingredients. She ignored a repeat of that strange pebble-in-the-shoe sensation. Who was she to quibble over a few steaks and a couple of bottles of bubbly? There would always be haves and have-nots in the world. War didn’t change that. It merely made it bad form.

  “I apologize for running off last night,” Oliver said as he held a seat for her. He wore a sober charcoal suit and a gray silk tie, but Lucy smiled to see a lime-green handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. “A group of us decided to check out a musical revue at the Vaudeville.” He filled two flutes to near overflowing. “We needn’t have bothered. Just coming past Piccadilly Circus, the sirens went off.” He shuddered. “The noise alone was enough to freeze my blood but then those guns started barking and it was like my brains were about to leak out my ears. Frankly, I don’t know how these Brits bear i
t night after night. I’d have gone bonkers long ago.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What any right-thinking person would do. Fled to the nearest tube station. It was horrible. I had to sit on the platform in the filth. Ruined the seat of my trousers, an old man with bad teeth and horrible taste in waistcoats fell asleep on me, and three fights broke out.” He shuddered. “After all that, the Germans didn’t even bother to show up. We were all finally let loose like cattle from a pen. It took an hour in the bath and three martinis before I could even think about the evening without growing ill. I can’t wait to get back home. My nerves are shot.”

  And what of those people who called England home? Who couldn’t jump on a plane and escape the war? Who endured hardship and tragedy but continued to do what was needed without complaint? Michael and Irene. Patsy and Mrs. McKeegan. Lady Boxley and—much as it pained her to admit it—Sister Murphy.

  Lucy’s discomfort grew from a pebble in the shoe to a boulder on her chest.

  Oliver looked up from his menu. “Are you feeling okay, Miss Stanhope? You look a little . . . off.”

  “I’m sorry. I suppose I feel almost criminal eating in one meal enough ration points to serve a family of four for a month.”

  Oliver laughed gently. If he could have chucked her chin in a kindly-uncle manner he would have. “Your conscience does you credit, but see that man in the corner? A member of Churchill’s Baker Street Irregulars. The couple coming in? Duncan Sandys and Mrs. Margaret Sweeny. Lord Halifax stays here. So does your minister of war. If it’s good enough for the locals, it’s good enough for us.”

  “Of course. If politicians are doing it, it must be all right,” she said in her best deadpan.

  He didn’t seem to get the joke. “Here, forget your troubles in one of these.” He popped a canapé in her mouth. It was warm and savory and absolutely mouthwatering. She’d not tasted anything like it since her last dinner at Singapore’s Adelphi Hotel, when war had been a few columns in the newspaper or a nightly report on the radio. Something to be tutted over and then dismissed for more amusing entertainments. “Now, tell me they aren’t sinfully delicious,” he said.