Secrets of a Charmed Life (20 page)

Emmy could tell Mac thought she was pretty, also a new and intriguing concept. With Mum’s clothes on and her comb nestled in her hair, it occurred to Emmy that she might actually look like her mother. Mum had always drawn the stares of men, even in her maid’s
uniform. Emmy liked that Mac thought she was pretty. She considered for only a moment that he was actually eleven years older than she, not the eight that he believed she was when she told him her age. But why should that matter? She was Isabel. She was eighteen.

When she left the Savoy a few minutes later, she could feel Mac’s gaze on her.

By the end of October, Mac was hanging about the Savoy dining room on Monday mornings, making sure he didn’t miss Emmy’s visit. He would save a Danish or sweet roll from his breakfast and would invariably ask her to sit and enjoy it.

Emmy in turn started looking forward to those borrowed moments of pleasure. That anticipation caught her by surprise, and she suspected it was dangerous to feel that way about their visits, which was something Mac picked up on from the get-go and apparently found alluring.

On the morning of October 28, Emmy arrived at the Savoy feeling particularly defeated. Julia had been missing for nearly two months and Emmy was no closer to finding her than she had been the day she disappeared. Mac poured her a cup of coffee and asked her to sit and tell him what was wrong.

His compassion was attractive. In fact, everything about him was striking that morning. The stubble on his chin, the timbre of his voice, the muscles in his arms as he handed Emmy a Danish. She didn’t want to admit she was drawn to him. She wanted to believe that only Julia mattered. But that morning Emmy could sense how weak she was. Resolve, her constant companion for the last two months, had apparently been left behind with the wedding dresses she had slept on. She was alone with
a handsome man who reached out and squeezed her hand.

“Is everything all right?” he said.

The pretense that she had been carefully constructing threatened to crumble. She felt her old self clawing its way to the surface. Emmy made her hand a fist under Mac’s as if to smash back down the girl she had been before.

“Isabel?”

Emmy shook her head to keep the ghostly remains of her former life from settling back into the folds of her mind. “No!” she said. To herself. Not to Mac.

But he thought Emmy was answering his question.

“What has happened?” he said, stroking Emmy’s balled fist, forcing her to relax her fingers.

No! She could not go back. There was no going back. There was only the task at hand. She was Isabel.

“I—I’m just missing my mum, I guess,” Emmy whispered. It was as good an answer as any.

Mac lifted her palm off the table and enclosed it in his. “I’m so sorry about that.”

Emmy was mesmerized by the warmth and strength in his tender grip. She hadn’t been touched—by anyone—in weeks; not since Mum put her hand on her cheek on the night she died. Emmy wanted to be in Mac’s arms. She wanted Mac to pull her to his chest and kiss her forehead and tell her everything was going to be all right. She wanted to be enfolded in his embrace. And to disappear in it. For good.

A tiny exhale escaped her as she vented the tremendous pull of that desire to be held and loved.

“What can I do for you?” Mac said as he squeezed her hand.

Emmy summoned Isabel from the foggy place to which she had wafted away. She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“There must be something I can do.”

As Emmy felt Mac’s hand strong and protective over hers, and as she saw in his eyes a longing to be close that she didn’t need to be eighteen to recognize, she decided to trust him. To let him in, only halfway, so that she could have what she wanted—his help—and he could have what he wanted—a closer relationship with her.

“Maybe there is something,” Emmy said.

“Yes?”

Emmy leaned forward, imploring him. “I’m looking for a young girl. Her name is Julia Downtree and she’s seven. She disappeared on the first night of the Blitz. She was left home alone by accident and her street was bombed. None of the neighbors have seen her. She’s not on any of the casualty lists. The police have not seen her. She’s not in any hospital. She’s just . . . gone.”

“Is she someone you know personally?” Mac said, obviously puzzled by Emmy’s interest in one particular child.

Emmy had a split second to decide how she would answer. She knew he would double his efforts to help her if she told him the truth. Emmy didn’t have to tell him everything. But she could tell him this.

“She’s my half sister. And I’m the one who left her alone. I didn’t think she’d be alone for very long. It just . . . It just happened that way. I was on my way to her when the first bombs fell.”

With his other hand, Mac reached into his shirt pocket, withdrew a slim notepad, and placed it on the table.

“Julia, you said?” He pulled his other hand off hers
and withdrew a pencil from the same pocket. He began to write.

“Downtree,” Emmy replied.

Mac glanced up at Emmy, wondering, she supposed, whether she was going to explain how she came to have a half sister.

“We’ve the same father and that’s all I am going to say about that.” The less Emmy entwined her two lives with explanations, the better. Besides, a gentleman didn’t need to know any of the supposed sordid details.

She said nothing else and Mac quickly lowered his gaze back to his notepad.

“She’s only seven,” Emmy continued. “Blond hair. The flat where she lived with her mother was off Queen Victoria in Whitechapel.”

“And where is her mother, if I may ask?”

“She unfortunately died on the second night of the bombings,” Emmy said, her voice breaking a bit.

Mac again looked up at Emmy, surprised at her reaction to the death of her half sister’s mother. Emmy was fine with Mac thinking whatever he wanted. She did not try to mask the emotions etched across her face.

“I’m so very sorry, Isabel. Damn this war. Damn the Nazis to hell.” He shook his head like people did when they were disgusted, and he slipped the notebook and pencil back inside his pocket.

“I just want to find her, Mac. I’m all she has. I’ve checked with the police and the hospitals and the IIPs. They have no record of her being found. None of the remaining neighbors have seen her.”

“And you’ve thoroughly checked the flat?”

“Yes. I’ve been back several times. There is no gas or water or electricity.”

“No other relatives or friends of the family could have come for her?”

For the first time it occurred to Emmy that Charlotte might have come back for Julia. Maybe that was why every search she had made on her own came up empty. Maybe Julia had been discovered by an ARP warden who managed to get her back to the foster home where she should have been all along.

But she had scoured as many evacuation and billeting records as she could since the night she and Julia returned to London. There was no record of a Julia Downtree being reevacuated to her foster home in Gloucestershire.

What she hadn’t checked was whether a certain Charlotte Havelock had reported her evacuees as having run away. Surely Charlotte had notified someone when she awoke the morning of September 7 and saw that Emmy and Julia were gone. There would be a paper trail for that. There—

“Isabel?”

Emmy snapped back to the present moment. “What?”

“No one else?”

“No . . .” But her mind was far away. She had to find out whether Julia was safe and sound with Charlotte. Surely that was where she was. That was why she couldn’t find any trace of her in London! Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Just because she had found no record of Julia being reunited with Charlotte at the beginning of her search didn’t mean that record didn’t exist now.

Emmy rose from her chair and nearly knocked it over. “I need to get back.”

Mac’s eyes widened in surprise. “Just like that? You—you haven’t even eaten your Danish.”

“I—I forgot to take care of something important. I—I need to go.”

Mac rose, too, unconvinced. “Did you remember something about your sister?”

“Yes . . . I mean, no. I mean, I need to go.”

Emmy made for the lobby doors and she could sense Mac was right behind her. He sprang ahead of her so that he could open the door before the bellman did.

“Can I see you later today? A drink after work perhaps?” he said.

“I—I don’t know.” Emmy couldn’t think about anything but her new task at hand.

“You don’t know?” Mac smiled and held the door open wide.

They emerged onto the street. A light drizzle was falling but the air still stank of fire, ash, and ruin. Emmy turned to Mac to say good-bye.

“Thank you,” she blurted, and stepped away from him.

“For what?” Mac called after her.

“For . . . the Danish!” she said.

“You didn’t even eat it!”

But Emmy just smiled stupidly and dashed away into the rain.

AFTER
so many weeks of frustration, the prospect of knowing that Julia had been rescued from the nightmare in which Emmy had left her was almost too much to take in. She nearly sprinted back to the local WVS office to revisit her inquiry into the evacuees who had been billeted with Charlotte Havelock.

Emmy did not have direct access to all the billeting records for the children of the East End but she knew where to go and whom to ask. Isabel Crofton’s reputation for fervently making sure every orphan with whom she came into contact was properly cared for had been made obvious to all, so it surely came as no surprise when Emmy appeared, breathless and rain soaked, at the offices where the East End billeting records were kept and announced she had a lead on an orphaned evacuee who might have been reported missing by her foster mother.

The WVS volunteer who was assisting the billeting officials offered to help Emmy, and together they pored over a pile of ledgers and files to see whether a Charlotte Havelock had reported weeks ago on September 7 that the two evacuees in her care had run away. After half an hour of careful searching, Emmy finally found a notation that Charlotte had called Mrs. Howell, the billeting official in Moreton-in-Marsh, who had notified the billeting headquarters in London that Emmeline and Julia Downtree had run away, supposedly back to their mother’s flat in London.

Emmy and her companion continued to peruse the paperwork from September 8 onward.

There was no new record of the Downtree evacuees having been returned to Mrs. Havelock.

“Are you sure that documentation wouldn’t be someplace else?” Emmy asked, a knot of dread rising in her throat.

“I don’t see why,” the WVS volunteer replied.

“Maybe you should ring up Mrs. Howell in Moreton and make sure.”

“Make sure of what?”

“Make sure the sisters didn’t return on their own and that no one recorded it!” Emmy replied, a little too forcefully. “I mean, perhaps the children returned on their own. I would just like to know for sure. I’ve—I’ve a report that the younger Downtree sister has been seen on the streets in Whitechapel. I . . . just want to know if that is possible. She’s quite young.”

The woman shrugged. “I suppose.” She picked up the telephone and asked for the Moreton exchange while Emmy waited, trying very hard not to pace.

“Yes, this is Vera Brindle at HQ,” the woman said a
few moments later. “I’m just checking to see if the two Downtree sisters reported as runaways in September have turned up. They had been billeted at the home of a Charlotte Havelock in Stow-on-the-Wold.”

There was an interminable moment of silence as the woman listened to an answer that Emmy couldn’t hear. She wanted badly to yank the receiver from the woman’s hand and shove it next to her own ear instead.

“Oh. I see. Yes. Quite right,” the woman said.

Emmy closed her eyes for a second to keep from pouncing on the woman.

“Yes. No doubt.”

For the love of God . . .

“All right, then. Thank you very much.” The woman hung up and looked at Emmy. “No sign of them, I’m afraid.”

Emmy couldn’t breathe. “Truly?” she finally eked out.

The woman closed the ledger they’d been looking at, as if that little matter was done for the day. Maybe forever. “Mrs. Havelock has been instructed to inform Mrs. Howell if the girls turn up. But they haven’t. And their mother was killed, you know, so it’s a very sad business. No one knows what became of those girls.”

Hope that had filled Emmy’s heart only moments ago was suddenly sucked away. A cold and ironlike dread filled the emptiness.

The woman patted Emmy’s hand. “You did all you could.”

Emmy felt as though she might vomit, and she raised a hand to her mouth.

“Really, now. You shouldn’t take it so to heart, Isabel. You’ll go mad if you do.”

“Yes,” Emmy whispered. “I just . . . I haven’t eaten
anything yet today and I . . .” But Emmy’s voice faded. The effort of pretending her nausea was just the result of having missed breakfast was too much for her. “Thank you for your help,” Emmy mumbled, and moved away.

“You should go to a canteen right now and have something to eat!” the woman called after her. “It’s not smart to work so hard on an empty stomach.”

Emmy nodded and continued out of the billeting office and back outside into the rain.

She tipped her face up to the sodden clouds and waited for the icy downpour to cleanse her of her mistakes. But as people walked past her and stared, she knew she was just a girl standing in the pouring rain.

*   *   *

EMMY
did not return to her afternoon duties for the WVS. She made her way slowly back to Primrose, on foot, hardly caring if anyone saw her. She let herself in by the back door, and, soaked to the bone, curled up on top of the wedding dresses that lay like mattress stuffing on the floor.

Tears did not come; she was beyond the uselessness of tears. But sleep finally did.

Emmy awoke a few hours later, freezing, her skin chafed from her wet clothes. She changed into dry clothes, made a cup of tea, and hung the damp wedding dresses she’d been lying on back on their tossed hangers to dry.

Hours later, when the sirens began to scream, Emmy did not crawl under the sewing table. She sat in the middle of the floor, shivering from the cold, and implored the heavens to give her what she was due.

But as incendiaries and bombs fell all over London, Emmy’s frozen corner of the war remained stalwart and upright.

When she fell asleep again, she did not awaken until she heard a tapping at the back door. Her first thought was that the bridal shop had been hit after all and was on fire. Everything was hot. Burning hot. Maybe she was in hell, and the tapping was the sound of the damned banging on the walls of their prison. She found she didn’t care.

And then someone said, “Isabel!” and she wanted to say,
There is no Isabel,
but her throat was coated in broken glass and she could utter nothing. The flames were covering her head, bursting out of her chest.

There was a loud noise and then she felt snakes on her arms. They coiled themselves about her and lifted her off the floor.

“I have her,” one of the snakes said.

A snake had appeared to Eve in the garden, hadn’t it? The snake was the devil. And now he had her. She had gotten her wish after all.

Emmy had been given what she deserved.

She felt a blast of piercing needles against her skin and then all was dark.

*   *   *

EMMY
didn’t know when she realized she was not in hell after all. Her body still burned but she was lying on a bed, not a lake of fire.

A cool hand soothed her brow.

She tried to open her eyes but it was as if they had melted shut.

Not from the fires of hell, but from fever.

Emmy slept.

*   *   *

WHEN
at last Emmy opened her eyes, a dark figure stood beside her. The figure moved closer and took her hand.

Was she lying on the wedding dresses? All seemed white around her. But no, she was on a bed. White sheets covered her. There were white sheets everywhere. She was in a room full of beds with other people lying on top of them. A nurse moved into her peripheral vision and bent over a man wrapped in white bandages.

“Welcome back,” the dark figure said. “Guess I came for a visit at just the right time.”

Mac.

Emmy lifted her gaze to look at him.

“Where am I?” she murmured.

“At Royal London Hospital, cozy and warm.”

Emmy knew this place. She’d been inside its doors many times over the last two months, looking for Julia.

“I’m afraid I’ve blown your cover, Isabel,” Mac said.

“What?” A ripple of fear wriggled up from within her. Her cover? Did he know who she really was? Is that what he was saying?

“I came to your bridal shop on Tuesday to convince you to come have dinner with me. The ARP on your street said no one was there and I assured him someone was.”

“Dinner?” Emmy couldn’t think properly. “What day is it?”

“It’s Friday, actually.”

Emmy couldn’t remember what day she had last seen him. When had she run off into the rain? What had happened that day?

Monday.

Emmy had seen him on Monday.

And then she had run to the local billeting offices where she had learned Julia was not at Charlotte’s. Julia was nowhere.

“Your nurses tell me you’ll live. They also say I am your hero.” He laughed and squeezed her hand. “So maybe you’ll forgive me, then?”

“Forgive you?” Emmy’s head was spinning.

“You can’t go back to your mother’s shop, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

“Actually, even if I hadn’t blown your cover for you, you still couldn’t go back.”

It was too much to take in. Her place with the wedding dresses was her sanctuary, her secret haven. What did he mean, she could not go back? Had someone figured out that that she was posing as Eloise Crofton’s daughter? Would she be arrested?

Emmy started to rise from the bed, but fell back against the pillows.

Mac was hovering over her in an instant. “Isabel, you’re still very sick. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything yet. That was stupid of me.”

Emmy felt instantly woozy from having tried to sit up. “Water?” she murmured.

Mac reached for a glass at her bedside table. He slid next to her and raised her head off the pillow so that she could drink.

He lowered Emmy gently to the pillow and then reset the glass down on the table.

“What happened?” Emmy whispered.

“You mean after the warden and I found you? There were bombs, Isabel. Just a few hours later. I’m afraid the bridal shop was hit. All the shops on that street were.”

Julia’s book of fairy tales, Isabel’s birth certificate.

Her death certificate . . .

They were all inside Mum’s travel bag.

“I have to go back . . . ,” Emmy whispered.

“Hold on, Isabel. It was hit by incendiaries. There’s nothing left.”

Mac didn’t need to say more. She knew what had become of Julia’s book. Mum’s travel bag, her clothes, her trinkets. And she knew that Isabel’s death certificate had also been reduced to ashes. At least no one combing through the rubble would find it and realize she was an imposter.

“Your bag is here,” he said. “Although I’m afraid that’s all I was able to grab the day I found you.”

“My bag? Here?”

He nodded toward a chair in the corner. Mum’s travel bag sat there like an old, wise friend. It was still clasped shut.

“Bring it to me!”

Startled, Mac was slow to respond, but then he let go of her hand, walked over to the chair, and grasped Mum’s bag by its worn handles. He brought it to Emmy and she clutched it to her chest, embracing it as a child would cuddle a beloved toy. Tears of relief spilled out of her.

Mac stared wide-eyed.

“It was my mum’s,” Emmy said, hoping that was explanation enough. “Thank you for thinking to take it.”

He returned to the chair by the bed. “You’re welcome.”

For a few minutes there was silence between them as Emmy held on to the last thing on earth that she owned.

“Isabel, the hospital is a little short on beds as you can imagine. The nurses want to know who will be coming for you,” he said gently. “Is there a friend or relative here in London who can take you in?”

Emmy shook her head, closing her eyes against the thought that she had nowhere to go.

“What about any relatives elsewhere in England? Is there anyone I can ring for you? Anyone I can take you to?”

Emmy started to shake her head again. And then an image of Thistle House with its climbing roses and clucking chickens, its shining pond and gabled windows, and Charlotte with her long silver braid, filled her head. Charlotte. Would she take Emmy back? Or would she despise Emmy for what she had done? Emmy realized with a sickening thud in her heart that she no longer felt the urgency to stay in London and look for Julia. Her sister was lost to her. Emmy didn’t deserve to be rewarded with finding her and she knew now that she wouldn’t be.

The brides box was at Thistle House, though.

And although Emmy felt no tingling sensation of hope or aspiration at the thought of being reunited with her sketches, at least she would have them again.

“There is someone,” Emmy said. “She’s . . . an aunt. She lives in Gloucestershire.”

“I’d be happy to telephone her for you,” Mac said, then added, “or take you to her.”

He said this last bit as if he wanted to take Emmy to Charlotte’s himself, but did not want to appear too forward. The last thing Emmy wanted was for Charlotte to learn over the phone what she had done and then have to come to London to pull her out of the pit she had dug for herself.

“Would you? Take me there?” Emmy asked.

Mac smiled. “I’d be happy to.”

Emmy nodded. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes at the kindness of this man who thought he knew her.

Mac leaned in, thumbing away the tear that had escaped and was now sliding down her cheek. He kissed her forehead.

It was not the first kiss of lovers, yet it felt just like that to Emmy. A gnawing desire to be wanted—in every possible way—surged up within her. Despite all the mistakes she had made, she still wanted to be loved.