Fee sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid.”
She didn’t look afraid. But Phil was, for Thomas and for Fee. It would end in heartbreak, sure as the sun sets. And Thomas, well, he was like a newborn lamb, gazing at the world in fresh-eyed innocence. Fee surely must know what it would do to this young man to let him love her.
For Phil could see at a glance that if such a thing as love existed, this foolish pair were gripped firmly in its teeth. And she very much feared it was a death grip, unbreakable.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Phil said, forcing her voice to be harsh. “Go back to Stour where you belong.”
“I had to come,” Thomas said, sitting up and managing a half-bow from his perch on the hay. “I was lured to her as to a siren on the rocks.”
“Yes, and you know what happened to those stupid sailors. You’ll be in hot water with the Headmaster if you’re found here. Go!”
“He came to ask about the war,” Fee said. “And since you were the one who said that every one of those magicians should be fighting at the front lines, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I told him a bit more about it.”
“Fee, kitchen. Now!” Phil stomped off, wondering why it was just her luck to have a family crisis when she desperately needed to be on her game. In her mind’s eye, she could clearly see all of England falling simply because she did not get her recruits organized quite in time. Why, one fortification, one alert signalman spotting a paratrooper, could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
“What in the world are you up to, Fee?” she asked. “Wait, get the tea things together while you’re telling me. Twelve or thirteen are coming, and most of them men, so don’t bother cutting the bread thin. Oh, butter! Thank goodness we’re in the country. I’d never sway them with marge. Sardines, do you think? Get rid of your magician first, though.”
Fee made a pretty pout. “But we have so much to talk about. I feel like I’ve known him all my life.”
“Ha! You got that out of a book.”
“Maybe, but it’s true. I look at him, and all I want to do is be with him.”
“And kiss him, and—”
“Well, yes, of course, but it’s so much more than that. This is it.”
“It?” Phil asked, knowing, dreading.
“I’m in love. Real love.”
“Codswallop! You met the boy under interesting circumstances, he’s clueless enough to make you feel like a woman of the world, and because he hasn’t seen a female since he left his dam’s teat, he thinks you’re the bee’s knees. You’re flattered, it’s fun, but you know that being involved with one of those magicians is downright foolish. It’s not love, Fee. It can’t be, not so soon. You’ve spent, what, two hours in each other’s company? I’ve known Hector for years, and I still don’t know if I love him.”
“You know,” Fee said. “You might marry Hector and be happy, but you don’t love him. I might marry Thomas and be miserable, but I’d love him. That matters more than anything.”
“Then love’s a damned stupid thing!” Phil said, slamming down a stack of sturdy saucers. “Be sensible, Fee. You might as well say you love a priest, or a monk. He lives for that Essence nonsense, and he will his whole life. Members of the College of Drycraeft can’t have sweethearts.”
“He says he wants to leave the order.”
Phil grabbed her sister by the shoulders and pulled her into their forehead-to-forehead embrace. Usually it was a position of solace and affection. This time, though, Phil stared at Fee until her eyes merged into a single Cyclops orbit, and she tried with all her silent influence to force her sister not to be an idiot.
Fee stroked her sister’s hair, slowly, rhythmically, as she might to calm a riled cat. At last, Phil pulled away and said angrily, “Fine! You win!” At this, Fee’s smile grew infuriatingly smug. “You’re the only person in the world who actually falls in love at first sight. You’re a perfect romantic novel. But don’t you see? You’re going to get hurt.”
“The magicians can’t hurt either of us.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Isn’t it? Thomas doesn’t just want to sneak out to visit me. He wants to leave the order, for good.”
“They’ll never let him. They’ll find him, like they found Stan. Like the German magicians tracked down Stan’s mother. Do you know that they’ve arranged for the entire country to ignore Bittersweet, and manipulated everyone in the village so they don’t care about England or the war? Just to keep attention away from Stour. They’ll do anything to keep their order secret. Why, they’ll probably kill Thomas if he runs away, drain his Essence and—”
“No!” Fee gasped, blanching deathly pale. “They wouldn’t!”
“They’re fools and cowards and sticklers for their own arcane laws. But most likely they’ll discover he’s sneaked out today and lock him in the dungeon until we go.”
“I’ll never leave him.”
“One bit of triteness after another.”
“It’s only trite when it isn’t real,” Fee said stubbornly. “Just wait until you’re in love. You’ll see.”
“I’d like to see the day love makes me such a confounded fool. Damn! They’ll be here any minute. Biscuits, you think, or just the bread? I hope Mrs. Pippin doesn’t flay me for pillaging her food. She will when she finds out there’s no more tea.”
“She won’t care. She only takes rose hips and hyssop. May I go back to Thomas now?” Fee folded her hands in schoolgirl primness.
“Why not? Just make sure your handkerchiefs are clean. You’ll need them for all the tears that will come tomorrow.”
“I’m ready for tears,” Fee reassured her. “After all, tears are a natural part of love.”
Phil gathered her volunteers in a little fallow field within sight of the house. In canvas overalls and leather aprons, in grease-stained trousers and, in one case, a polka-dotted pinafore, they clustered around her. They were skeptical, naturally enough, that a seventeen-year-old girl could teach them anything about warcraft, and assumed they’d receive little more than a lecture about not talking to strangers with German accents, or be told to buy war bonds. They still largely felt that the war was none of their business, but life did get boring sometimes, and hiking out to Weasel Rue to see what the Londoner had to say was as good a distraction as any.
Plus, there was food.
Phil faced them as she would a hostile audience on those nights when the first five rows of the Hall of Delusion were filled with tipsy university students. When met with hecklers, she stared them down and amazed them into silence and, later, applause. She fully intended to do the same with her Home Guard volunteers.
Only, she had no idea what to do.
Oh, she could rant about their ostrichlike, head-in-the-sand ways, or tell them horrific tales about the first night of bombing. But the former would only make them resentful right now, though in time she knew she could rouse their guilt. And the latter, while sensational enough to be stirring, was, after all, only words. She had to do something spectacular, something to make them feel, intimately and personally, that they were in real danger.
Boxing, maybe? No, not dramatic enough.
“Wait right here,” she suddenly said, and whirled and ran back to the farmhouse. When she returned, she carried a clanking satchel.
“Volunteer, please,” she said. “Thank you so much, Mr. Dooley. Now if you’ll clamp these on me.” She handed him a set of handcuffs and put her hands behind her back. “Tighter. Now, when the Germans come—”
“Who’s to say they’ll come?” asked Mrs. Enery.
“Hitler says they’ll come,” Phil said. “He’s got practically all of Europe, and we’re next. Now say the Germans get as far as Bittersweet—”
“No German will ever set foot on English soil,” the baker said with absolute certainty.
“You bloody fool! They already have! The Channel Islands have been invaded and occupied! D’you think that’s not English soil?”
Thirteen pairs of eyes showed their whites, to cries of “No!” “Never!” and “Blimy!”
“You mean, you hadn’t heard? It happened last June.”
Heads shook and had the decency to look a bit embarrassed. “We don’t have much truck with the rest of the world out here.”
“The Germans have been bombing London every night, and what can it be if not preparations for a land invasion? They will strike the beaches and fight through from shore to shore. No place will be safe—and every place, even the tiniest village, might prove the decisive battleground that keeps invasion from turning into occupation.”
“We could never fight an army,” the baker said.
“But we can slow it down. We can sabotage tanks and keep the enemy from getting food and supplies. We can mislead him. Who knows what the course of war might bring? If our troops were massing for a counterattack, but couldn’t muster for another day, don’t you think blocking a panzer line for a few hours in Bittersweet might make all the difference? There are a thousand things any one of us can do, that might mean nothing but might mean everything. Together you and I are going to learn everything we can to prepare for the worst day. First, today, I’ll teach you something that will come in handy if you’re ever captured—the art of escape.
“Now, supposing you were German soldiers come to interrogate me. Why, as soon as you were distracted, quick as anything, I’d . . .” She undulated her shoulders, gave her body a little twist, and within two seconds the nickel-plated handcuffs clanked to the turf.
“Impossible,” they cried, and “How’d you do that?” “Oughtn’t to be allowed,” said a man she later learned was a part-time constable.
“Show me how to do that,” said Mrs. Enery keenly. “Show me right now, missie!”
So she did. Breaking them into groups and dividing her three sets of handcuffs among them, she showed them how to pick the locks with a bent piece of wire, how to shim them open by sliding a bobby pin along the ratchet teeth. She taught them how to bend their wrists to keep the handcuffs from tightening all the way, and convinced them that, if the situation were dire enough, they could curl their hands into a narrow tube shape and pull until enough joints dislocated that they could slip free.
“My own dad had to do that once, when he was learning the trade.”
“What’s his trade, then, and yours, come to mention it?” asked the sometime constable. “Burglary?”
Phil laughed. “Don’t you people gossip? My family are magicians.”
She had them now, and they hung on her every word as she told them about life on the stage, about crowned heads she’d entertained (and on one memorable occasion, threatened to cut off, an act that was surely becoming her forte). Then, smoothly, she segued into the first night of the Blitz.
“I never knew,” the baker said in wonder as he practiced shimming his cuffs. “What was this, only a week ago?”
“Not even. You didn’t hear it on the wireless?”
“Only the postmistress and your Mrs. Pippin have a set. Neither of them ever said anything.”
“And no one takes the paper?”
They looked at each other, shaking their heads.
“We all knew there was a war, Miss Albion,” Dooley said. “It’s just...we thought it was far away.”
There was no use in blaming them, Phil decided. The only thing to do was start from scratch.
“Next time we meet, I’ll teach you how to get out of ropes, and we’ll start civil defense lessons proper. Thank you so much for coming.” On cue, Fee burst from the farmhouse with the first tea tray. Thomas drifted in her wake with a cutting board of toast and big lumps of farm butter.
Phil felt a sharp nudge in her ribs. “Who’s he?” Mrs. Enery asked admiringly. Phil thought perhaps she’d been forgiven for attracting Enery’s attention—the nudge didn’t break any ribs. “Another magician?”
“You might say that,” Phil admitted, and followed her troops to the benches nestled under ash tree shade.
Fee, playing hostess, and Thomas, in the role of her devoted slave, handed around tea and toast and slivers of a ginger cake that had once been undercooked in the middle but had staled to biscotti-like perfection. Fee charmed them all, miraculously without flirting, Phil noticed.
(“I think I promised we’d put on a magic show for them,” Fee confessed later that night.
“You what! We don’t have time for that.”
“You told me to be charming, and I was smiling and saying yes so much, I didn’t even notice what I was agreeing to. Don’t worry, they’ll forget.”
Of course, they didn’t.)
When the volunteers had all gone home to supper—the English being capable of near-perpetual eating, with a meal for practically every hour—Phil and Fee sent Thomas home and began to clean up. While the dishes were still piled in the sink, they were accosted by Mrs. Pippin, fresh from the hop gardens and full of righteous ire at all outlanders.
“I’m sorry I used so much of your food. I had some...people over.”
“Never mind about the food. You took it from the slops cupboard, from what I can see.”
To the sisters’ chagrin, Mrs. Pippin pointed out which cabinets held food for human consumption, and which contained stale bread, slightly moldy cheese, and sour milk, provender for the vastly pregnant sow.
“If they can take that, they can take the Germans,” Phil said, after Fee admitted she’d scraped a bit of mold from the loaves.
“I met your lot of ragtags on the way back,” Mrs. Pippin said as she rewashed the dishes the sisters thought they’d already scrubbed spotless. “Dooley says there’s Germans on Guernsey. That true?”
Phil nodded. “Starving, too, from what I hear, both sides.”
Mrs. Pippin looked over her suds to some long-ago time, her busy little hands falling still. “I went to Guernsey when I was a girl. My mother took ill one summer, and my father had the farm to tend, so I was sent to a relative there. They were goat herders and lived up on the crags, but when I climbed high enough, I could see the sea all around. Blue above, blue below, and me, five years old, on a rock in the middle. The goats there are golden, you know.”
She broke off and a said brusquely, “A shame Guernsey’s been invaded, but it’s hardly proper England. Practically France.” She dried her hands as if she were wiping the years away, and turned her attention to supper.
“You see,” Phil said when they’d migrated to the parlor, “even Mrs. Pippin can feel the war now. Just give me a few weeks, and I’ll have the town whipped into shape. Only, I wish I knew the best way to go about it. What if the Germans really do come? I know how to fight a man.” She held up her deceptively delicate fists. “But I don’t know how to fight an army.”