The FitzOsbornes in Exile (18 page)

“That’s very interesting,” I said. “About, um, your Leader.” Veronica slid one foot forward and I caught hold of her sleeve. “Could you explain more about him being against war?” I went on, trying to keep my voice even. “I think that’s an awfully good philosophy, don’t you, being
against
violence?”

The Crazed Assassin glared at me. “The Leader isn’t a coward, he’s a
hero
! He was in the last war, and he understands
everything
about—”

Veronica suddenly made a tiny sound, almost a squeak, and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Yes!” she agreed loudly, dropping her hand. “Fascinating!
Do
go on about his ideas.”

Over the woman’s shoulder, I saw what Veronica had seen, and my heart, hammering at twice the normal speed, seemed to stop altogether. Because in the paneled wall ten feet behind the woman, the dumbwaiter doors had just slid open to reveal Henry in full Girl Guide uniform, bow in hand, a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder.

“Get help!” I mouthed at her, trying not to move my lips too much. I was terrified the Crazed Assassin would turn and see what we were trying not to stare at. But Henry just dropped silently to the floor and began fitting an arrow to her bow. Behind her, the dumbwaiter platform descended without sound (and I blessed the footman who’d kept it so well oiled) while I frantically tried to think of a way to remove my little sister from this horrible situation.

“—and get rid of filthy Jews and foreigners—” ranted on the Crazed Assassin.

“Quite right, Britain’s
much
better off without those sorts of people,” said Veronica (fortunately, the Crazed Assassin was in no state to recognize sarcasm). “But don’t you think that sometimes, it’s better to
take no action at all?
” Veronica raised her voice, hoping Henry would take the hint. “Or to
call
on the
authorities
?”

The dumbwaiter platform reappeared, supporting the curled-up figure of Carmelita Labauria, Javier’s ten-year-old sister, who climbed out and raised her own bow and arrow. I nearly groaned aloud. If anything happened to her, Javier would
kill
us. If there was anything left of us, that is, after we’d been shot to pieces by this crazy Fascist …

“—keeping Britain racially pure, and eliminating all the bloody Reds—”

There was an outraged exclamation from behind me, the voice of an angry child.

The Crazed Assassin’s mouth hung open, but the flow of words ceased as she stared past me. Then the hand holding the gun jolted upwards, her fingers twitching.

“Down!” cried Veronica, shoving my shoulder. We both dived to the floor, Veronica sliding far enough to grab the woman’s ankle and yank it sideways. There was a tremendous explosion somewhere above my head, and then assorted crashing noises. The Crazed Assassin fell to her hands and knees, and Veronica hurled herself across the woman, wrenching her wrist backwards. The gun clattered across the floor, trailing wisps of sulfur-scented smoke.

“Don’t touch it!” I screamed at Henry and Carmelita, who’d dashed forward, bows raised. “And put those arrows
down
!” I twisted round to assess the damage and saw wave upon wave of Girl Guides pouring into the hall—through the front doors, around the staircase, even out of the White Drawing Room. Actually, there were only about half a dozen of them, but the uniforms made it seem like far more. I gaped at them, dumbstruck.

“Don’t worry. No one got shot,” said Henry cheerfully. “Well, except for poor old Edward de Quincy.”

The bust of our only ancestor of note, I saw, now lay in jagged shards across the floor. Veronica and Carmelita had forced the Crazed Assassin onto her front by then and were twisting her arms behind her back. I started crawling over to secure her thrashing legs, but then Phoebe appeared with a pile of towels, stared at the writhing black-booted figure on the floor, and began screaming. Luckily, Carlos had turned up and was quite willing to sit on the woman’s legs in my place while I attempted to calm Phoebe down.

“Don’t worry. It’s not your brother!” I shouted over Phoebe’s wails and the Crazed Assassin’s strident and rather creative cursing.

“Ana Luisa, the rope!” called Henry, and a tiny Basque girl hurried over. “We were in the folly, practicing knot-tying,” Henry explained as little Ana Luisa expertly looped a piece of rope round the woman’s wrists. “And then this man walked past, on his way to the house—but he went
off
the path, through the woods.
Very
suspicious, anyone could see that. So we tracked him—well, her—as far as the driveway. Then I told everyone to split up and use the side doors, and Carmelita and me went through the laundry room.”

“And you didn’t think to tell any of the
servants
?” exclaimed Veronica, rubbing her face where the woman had just hit her.

“We didn’t see any,” said Henry. “I think they were having their tea, and anyway, they’d just say we weren’t allowed to play in the house. And there was no point calling the
police
, they’d have to come all the way from Salisbury. You’d all have been
dead
by then.”

“We could all have been dead, anyway, thanks to you waving those arrows around!” snapped Veronica. “As if it isn’t bad enough that
you
could have been hurt—I can’t believe you put these children in danger as well!”

“We
wanted
to come!” protested Carmelita. “Anyway, that woman’s a Fascist. I
heard
her.” And all the Guides nodded ferociously, even the girls from the village. One or two looked as though they wanted to spit on the floor, but fortunately, they restrained themselves. A footman, alerted by Phoebe’s screams, then rushed in to help with the still-wriggling assassin, and he sent Henry to summon the other servants.

“But, Sophie, you’re bleeding,” Carmelita said, pointing at my hand. It turned out I’d been injured by a sharp piece of Edward de Quincy, although I hadn’t even noticed till then. I picked up a towel from the pile Phoebe had dropped and wiped away the blood. The cut looked fairly shallow, but the Girl Guides made me sit down on the stairs, in case I fainted.

“We haven’t done our first aid badge yet,” said one of them, frowning at my palm. “So I’m not sure what else to do.” Veronica, on her way back from telephoning the police, suggested that doing that badge
before
the archery one might have been more prudent.

“But not as interesting,” said Henry.

The police sergeant and two constables eventually arrived, and Phoebe started crying again, because she was worried they’d discover her Blackshirt brother had a criminal record and think that
she’d
let the Crazed Assassin in the house. But of course, the police didn’t care about that—it was perfectly obvious that
anyone
could have walked in, anytime he (or she) wanted. Who locks their doors in the country? So I patted Phoebe on the back a bit more and gave her my handkerchief. The police took the Crazed Assassin away, the maids swept up the remains of Edward de Quincy, and the Girl Guides were taken down to the kitchen for milk and biscuits. I made Veronica put some ice on her face, and Barnes bandaged my hand, although it had already stopped bleeding. Then I ran up to my room for my journal, because I thought I should jot down as much as I could remember, in case the police needed a detailed statement later on. I had just sat down at the secretaire in the White Drawing Room when I heard the shouting—not Aunt Charlotte and Toby, as it turned out, but Simon and Veronica. A moment later, Simon flung open the door.

“My God!” he cried. “Are you all right? I saw the police at the gates as I was driving in, and then Veronica told me … She said it was someone from
Poole
!”

I closed my journal and went over to join him.

“Yes, your mother’s former roommate,” I said. “It’s all right, no one was hurt.”

“But someone
could
have been!” he exclaimed. “Veronica’s right, someone could have been killed! How
could
they have let her leave Poole like that? Why didn’t any of the staff realize she was dangerous? My God—why didn’t
I
realize?”

He sank onto the sofa and stared at me, raking his hands through his hair.

“I chose that place,” he said. “And I
knew
Mother was still obsessed with Veronica’s mother and … and still
confused
about everything. Why didn’t I think of that when we were trying to work out who might want to attack Veronica?”

His hair was in total disarray by now.

“I knew Mother was in Poole, and of course, it wasn’t
her
at the wedding—but how could I not have recognized that woman?”

“I didn’t, either,” I said. “I looked and looked at those photographs, and I didn’t figure it out.”

“But you only saw her once! I saw her three or four times, I had
tea
with her, and—Sophia, you’re injured!”

He took my hand by the fingertips and drew me closer.

“It’s just a cut,” I said as he gently turned my hand over. “I must have put my hand down on something sharp when I was on the floor. I didn’t even notice at the time, it was all such a blur—”

“Well, of
course
it was,” he said, gazing at me with sympathy. My hand, which had started shaking when I’d sat down to write, felt very odd. Actually, I felt odd all over. The trembling had spread, up my arm, into my chest, and down my legs, a horrible, cold, shivery feeling. “Good Lord, the whole thing must have been terrifying,” Simon continued, still holding my hand.

“It
was
, a bit,” I whispered, because I was worried my voice would start shaking, too. “Especially when Henry … when I thought she might …”

He leapt up and put his arms around me as I started to cry.

“I thought Henry was going to get
shot
,” I sobbed into his chest. “And … and Veronica, when she—”

“Of course you did,” he murmured into the top of my head. “It must have been awful. You’ve been very brave.”

“No, I wasn’t!”

“Yes, you
were
. Veronica said if you hadn’t turned up when you did and acted so calmly, she’d probably have been shot dead in the first minute.”

“She said that?” I sniffed.

“Oh, yes,” he said, his hands rubbing slow circles on my back. “But that didn’t surprise me. I know how sensible you are in a crisis.”

The shaking feeling was beginning to subside, but I was grateful nonetheless for his warm, solid presence. I thought that if he took his arms away, I might just crumple to the floor. Perhaps he’d been taking mind-reading lessons from Veronica, because the next thing I knew, he’d sat me down on the sofa. He gave me his handkerchief but kept his arm around me. As soon as I’d blown my nose, I smelled his cologne or the soap he used or perhaps just
him
. It was a wonderfully complex scent, like dried lavender stored in a sandalwood box, or cinnamon and vanilla and pepper spilled on a pantry shelf. I couldn’t help leaning into him a bit as he brought his hand up to smooth my hair out of my eyes.

Then Barnes walked in.

“Her Highness is suffering from shock,” Simon announced, sitting up straighter. He could just as well have been referring to Barnes, who’d nearly dropped the cup of tea she’d been carrying and was now giving him the look of extreme disapproval she usually reserved for Phoebe. “She ought to have been taken
straight
up to bed after that terrible experience,” Simon added, frowning right back at Barnes. “Where’s her maid?”

“I’ll see to it, sir,” said Barnes indignantly, setting down the teacup and bustling over to help me up. “I’ll take Her Highness upstairs at once.”

And now here I am, writing this in bed and waiting for dinner to be brought up on a tray. Veronica has just come in and said she’ll have it with me. She has a darkening bruise on one cheekbone but claims she can hardly feel it. Henry is sprawled across the end of my bed, working away at a labeled sketch of the Crazed Assassin (“in case she escapes and the police need to put up
WANTED
posters”), and Carlos is looking very smug because no one has made him go downstairs yet. It turns out Aunt Charlotte and Toby went off to visit the Stanley-Rosses after luncheon, which is why they still aren’t back (one of the footmen telephoned the Bosworths to see where they’d got to, just in case
they’d
been attacked by the Crazed Assassin). As long as
I’m
not the one who has to recount the whole thing to Aunt Charlotte—I couldn’t bear to go through it again. I expect that task will fall to Simon …

Speaking of whom, at least there’ll be no difficulty returning
his
handkerchief, which is still balled up in my pocket. Oh, wait a moment—it’s
Toby’s
, I can see the monogram!

Well. It’s a good thing I’m not the slightest bit infatuated with Simon anymore. Considering how
close
he and Toby still are. To the extent that their
personal belongings
are mixed up with each other’s!

I think I
am
feeling a bit emotional after today’s crisis. Oh good, dinner’s arrived.

12th January 1938

More
tears today—sometimes it seems I consist of nothing but salt water. Actually, I didn’t cry
very
much, not compared to the children. Even Javier’s eyes were suspiciously shiny when he said goodbye to Veronica, although I’m certain he’d deny it. He didn’t even hug her, just shook hands in a very gruff and masculine manner. I
did
see the two of them having what looked like a rather intense conversation beforehand—though, knowing them, it was probably a political argument.

The Labauria siblings and their Moreno cousins are now on a ship bound for Mexico, having received word that Javier’s father and uncle arrived there safely two months ago. The letter announcing this, written in mid-November, had unfortunately been sent to Southampton, then Birmingham, before someone finally located the correct Labaurias. It was such a relief for the children, to discover their fathers were alive—I’d never before seen Javier’s face lit up in quite that way, with joy rather than anger. But he immediately sank back into gloom. How
could
the men have given up on their homeland like that? Surely it would be better to be hiding in the mountains, even to be in
prison
, than to have crawled off to the other side of the world! What about when the Republicans triumphed over Franco? They would all need to
be
there, to help clear the Basque homeland of Fascists! The Basque government might have surrendered, but he, Javier Moreno Labauria, had not! And so on.

Until Carmelita uncrossed her arms and shouted across the kitchen that
she
was not going to spend another second listening to him, because she needed to pack her things so she could join their papa. And perhaps when Franco was dead, they would go back to Bilbao, but right then, home was where the whole family was, or what was left of it, and did Javier think that their mama, God rest her soul, would have wanted them to argue with what Papa said? Then she stomped upstairs. She used to be such a shy, mild-mannered child. I think she’s spent a bit too much time with Henry.

Anyway, that was that. The other six children at the Old Mill House decided they would move to one of the large Basque colonies in Manchester, as they had friends there from their old neighborhood. They might even return to Bilbao with their friends, although that depends on how things go (the news from Spain is as bad as ever). Veronica went to the bank and found there was almost seven hundred pounds left over from the donations we’d received, so we divided the money equally amongst the seventeen children, down to the last penny. There was a flurry of shopping for suitcases and new shoes, a hurried final visit to the dentist, and then one last party at the Old Mill House, with most of the village turning up with little farewell presents (and how I wished Lord Elchester could have been there to see
that
).

And now they are gone. There is a new tenant moving into the Old Mill House next week, thanks to us having made it habitable again (so Aunt Charlotte really ought to be
grateful
to the children), and I need to go down to check that all the borrowed furnishings have been returned to their original owners. It will be so sad walking round the empty, echoing rooms, though. Perhaps Veronica will come with me …

Evening now, and I never
did
get down to the Old Mill House, after all. I walked into Veronica’s room and found her kneeling on the floor beside her wardrobe, the carpet scattered with papers.

“What are you—” I started to ask.

And then I saw what it was.

“Oh,
Veronica
,” I breathed. Because it was her
Brief History of Montmaray
, or at least the few bits that Anthony had managed to save. I knelt down beside her and stared at the pages. They were all different sizes, whatever she’d been able to scrounge at the time, and the handwriting was so tiny, in order to conserve paper, that it was almost indecipherable. “Do you think … Is it possible to go on with it?” I asked quietly. “I mean, can you continue your research here?”

Veronica picked up a scrap of paper and considered it. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “There’s certainly nothing about Montmaray in the library here at Milford. Well—apart from a dozen copies of Edward de Quincy FitzOsborne’s
Collected Works.
”

I smiled at her, and she at me, each of us trying to be cheerful and brave for the other’s sake. For today is the anniversary of the day we left Montmaray—a year ago, exactly, that we watched our home being destroyed.

But why
should
anniversaries be so significant? Why should a year hurt more than eleven months or thirteen months or thirty-seven? Surely I could choose how I felt and when I felt it. I took a deep breath.

“Poor old Edward!” I said, a little too brightly. “Gosh, do you think anyone alive’s actually
read
his book, apart from us?”

“I hope not,” Veronica said. “Imagine people associating us with all that terrible poetry.”

“Oh, be fair. Not
all
his verse is terrible,” I said. (I’d just about got my tone right now: rueful but gently amused.) “There’s that sonnet about the sun setting over South Head.”

“The sun does not set in the south.”

“Well, no. But that lovely simile, where he compares—”

“Do you think the library at Montmaray was
completely
destroyed?” said Veronica abruptly.

I stopped smiling. The last time I’d seen the library, it had been a pile of broken granite. “I think … I think it was very badly damaged,” I said.

“Still,” she said slowly, “I doubt it caught fire. There was hardly any wood in that structure. Even some of the bookcases were stone. I expect there are whole shelves of books on the lower floors that escaped damage. They’d be buried under a lot of rubble, of course, but at least they’re protected from the weather that way.”

“Veronica—”

“I keep wondering about that man, Otto Rahn,” she said. “He was a scholar.
He
would have a proper respect for books. I’m sure he went back and tried to retrieve some of them, even if he was only looking for information about the Holy Grail. But oh, Sophie …” Her voice faltered. “The
thought
of those Germans trampling through our home!”

She turned to me, and her eyes were blazing.

“We need to get Montmaray back,” she said. “We need to … to work together, all of us, to get rid of those Germans. I’ve been stalling, I know I have, because … well, because I knew we’d need Simon, and I simply couldn’t face asking him for help.” She hesitated, worrying at her bottom lip. “Sophie
—do
you think he’ll help?”

“Of course he will,” I said. “He cares just as much about Montmaray as we do.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “After all, he
is
one of the family.”

I stared at her. “What on earth did Javier
say
to you?”

“How did you know that he—”

“I didn’t,” I said. “But I do now.”

She looked at the floor and began to gather her papers together. “Well, it wasn’t just him. I’d been considering … and then when he said …” She sat back on her heels and sighed.

“He said that if
he
were in my position, he wouldn’t be sitting around feeling helpless. He said if
he
had money, and was an adult, and didn’t have a lot of younger brothers and sisters to look after, he’d be fighting in every way he could to get his home back. He wouldn’t let
anything
stop him.”

“Although we
don’t
actually have any money of our own,” I pointed out. “And you
do
have younger brothers and sisters—well, cousins—and we’re not really adults till we turn twenty-one. And we’re
girls
.”

“But you know what he means,” she said. “And you know he’s right.”

I gazed back at her. “Yes,” I said, and it felt as solemn as a vow. “Yes, I know.”

She stood up and tapped the papers against the glass top of the dressing table. It made a crisp, business-like sound. “I need,” she announced, “to write a list.”

She wore an expression of such grim resolve that, for a moment, I almost felt
sorry
for the Germans. But that soon passed.