Until We Find Home

by Cathy Gohlke

  At least, that’s what she’d tell her aunt. If all she’d heard of her aunt Miranda was true—if she really was a “rebel with a cause round every bend, like that Mrs. Roosevelt”—she’d surely understand. Claire would simply explain that Aunt Miranda and Uncle Gilbert’s part in helping with the war effort was to take in these poor, dear children—children at terrible risk whose parents had not been able to get their whole families out of France.

  Claire sank into her seat, exhausted. There had been a few close calls throughout the long day when passengers had lifted their heads, listening carefully to Elise’s occasional slip into French or to Gaston’s retorts to his older brother. But with so many children and troops crowding the aisles, the refugees were largely ignored, blending into the landscape of evacuees—a small splotch on a great and messy painting.

  Claire’s eyelids felt weighted, as if someone had dropped large English pennies over them. Her head nodded once or twice before she gave up and it reached her chest. The aisle of the train vanished.

  Arnaud, crossing a wide and unfamiliar landscape—something like a desolate moor—marched toward her. Planes emerged over the horizon, like bees from dark clouds. Claire couldn’t tell whose planes they were for the longest time, until they tipped their wings, and swastikas glistened in the last light of the sun. Arnaud ran, his legs fiercely pumping. He glanced back, over his shoulder. His face turned forward again, drained of blood. Faster and faster he ran toward Claire’s open arms.

  She willed her legs to move, but they did not obey. Planes swooped, dove with a vengeance, somersaulting in midair—like an air show—then dove again, strafing the road before and behind Arnaud. He leaped, headlong, into a ditch by the road.

  Claire’s leaden feet moved at last, pounding the road toward him now. Her heavy eyes struggled to open wider, to see him better. She’d not seen him hit . . . but as she reached the body in the ditch, a bright-red stream spread across his back and into the black dirt. “Arnaud! Arnaud!” she cried.

  “Mademoiselle! Miss Stewart!” Jeanine shook her roughly awake. “You are dreaming,” she hissed, pinching Claire’s arm, “and shouting.”

  The woman across the aisle raised her head, glared at Claire, and narrowed her eyes at Jeanine. Claire smiled feebly and turned away, holding her head. The dream had seemed so real. Thank You, God, it was only a dream. And then she remembered that she wasn’t altogether certain she believed in God. She only hoped, if He was real, that He believed in Arnaud and the work he was doing. . . .

  Claire’s temples throbbed. She touched the healing scar beneath her hair, the still ever-so-slightly swollen goose egg she’d received compliments of the lorry’s tailgate weeks before.

  Aimee shifted in her sleep, nestling her head beneath Claire’s arm. Claire pulled the little girl’s jacket tight around her and snuggled her close. The compartment had grown cold, but Aimee’s head felt warm to Claire’s cheek. Claire spread her palm across the little girl’s forehead. Like fire. Aimee whimpered.

  Claire’s headache mushroomed. What now? Aimee should be home, with her mother. A mother would know how to treat a fever.

  The lightbulbs of the compartment, painted blue for minimum light, gave Claire no clue of the time. She lifted the blackout blind hanging down the window. Not even a streak of dawn yet. The face in the dark glass staring back looked older than Claire’s new identity papers claimed—more like forty-three years than twenty-three.

  Hmm-hmm. The conductor cleared his throat disapprovingly. Sheepishly, Claire dropped the blind into place and shifted Aimee in her arms.

  In that shifting, Claire felt a slight weight poking against her leg and moved again. There was something heavy—something narrow and solid—in the hem of Aimee’s dress. Claire remembered Mrs. Beardsley’s observation of Aimee’s hem, the night they’d come to her home. Surely that good lady had investigated, but she hadn’t mentioned a thing. “Aimee? What’s this?” But the child was fast asleep.

  Minutes later the conductor returned, droning, “Windermere. Five minutes to Windermere Station,” as he made his way back through the cars.

  “Nous sommes où?” Aimee’s sleepy voice whimpered again. She stretched her thin arms high to reach Claire’s neck, then nestled back into her embrace.

  “Windermere. The Lake District. On est en Angleterre, ma petite,” Claire whispered into the little girl’s matted hair, hoping, nearly praying, that her aunt would let the children stay.

  Two hours and wearier bones later, Claire and her entourage jostled up and down in the back of a white-bearded farmer’s straw-laden wagon. Hard of hearing and with one poorly sighted eye, the grim-mouthed farmer, returning from an early morning delivery, seemed more curious than glad to help.

  At first skeptical of the notion that children were being delivered to Lady Miranda Langford’s Bluebell Wood, he clearly disapproved of Claire. “Another American. Still,” he granted, “it’s high time her ladyship took some in.” He acknowledged the children as England’s evacuees, “poor young tykes.” Claire simply gave a stiff-lipped smile, offering no response, desperately hoping the children would not speak loud enough for him to hear their French accents. She also desperately hoped she’d not have to beg him for a ride back to the station, five waifs in tow.

  Now that the children felt free to laugh and whisper among themselves in the back of the wagon, they alternately stood and tumbled backward into the straw—even the older ones—stretching their cramped limbs. Claire frowned and commanded the children to be seated and quiet. Her head pounded. The last thing they needed was to be ordered from the wagon in the middle of the unknown countryside. She had no idea how to find her aunt’s home without the farmer’s help.

  Gaston seemed a little subdued, glassy-eyed and pink-cheeked, which made Claire wonder if he, too, might prove feverish. She bit her lip. They’d arrive with musty straw and dust in their hair and the stench of urine on the younger children’s clothes, but Claire’s arms ached and her head had grown so heavy she no longer cared as she knew she ought. She pulled straw from her coat, sure that the itching she felt meant that she, too, had sown straw down her blouse and up her skirt.

  Claire urged the fretful Aimee to stretch out beside her and covered her as best she could. It was a relief for Claire to give her brain and heartbeat over to the rhythm of the horse’s clomping hoofbeats, to lean her head against the wagon’s side, free to drink in the vista as the dark gave way.

  Misty dawn crept over the gorse-strewn fells, sweeping a brilliant green and golden landscape—so bright it almost hurt her eyes. The landscape that had, she’d heard and read, inspired poets and painters for centuries. Home of Wordsworth and inspiration of Coleridge.

  Claire breathed deeply, wishing it were a different time, a different sort of visit, so she might soak in some of that literary air. She knew the Lake District was renowned for its dramatic skies and pristine lakes, for its high and artful peaks, but she’d not come mentally prepared for one glimpse to steal her breath or mark her soul in this way. She swallowed, her throat painful. Such beauty . . . unparalleled beauty. No wonder writers and painters spend all they earn to come here and stay as long as they can.

  It wasn’t her live-on-the-edge-and-in-the-moment world of Paris or the crowded, musty, provocative, avant-garde draw of Shakespeare and Company. She couldn’t imagine James Joyce penning Ulysses in such an open environment or that she, here, could write the same as she might in Paris.

  But does that mean I wouldn’t write in the same voice, or the same stories? Do location and environment bear on the release of imagination or the form it takes . . . the summoning of the muse? Or is that like saying the muse can only visit us in certain times, in certain places, in certain ways?

  Claire shifted until she leaned her head against the wagon’s seat back and wondered. She loved pondering the philosophical side of writerly questions. Writing, she believed, was her real life, her ultimate destiny. That writing—and all of her life—was destined for Paris, o
f that she was certain.

  She saw Arnaud and herself engaged in saving children in daring, romantic adventures, a noble cause. There would come a time in the very near future when all this would prove grist for her writing mill as well, as the adventures of the Great War had done for a young Hemingway. Just now, however, she’d trade her dreams for the reality of Arnaud beside her.

  A long while later, when the farmer pulled back the reins and brought his sturdy draft horse to a halt by the side of the road, Claire felt anything but steady. It was a moment before she realized the farmer was speaking to her.

  “The government’s taken all those fine cast-iron gates and posts—even the signs for most of the great estates. Shame, really.” And then he seemed to think better of what he’d said. “Mind you, it’s the patriotic thing to do—necessary, don’t you know.”

  Claire couldn’t imagine why the government would want gates and fences.

  “Melting them down for the war effort—munitions and the like, so they say,” the man continued. “Make no mistake, miss. Sign or no sign, gate or no gate, this is the place: Bluebell Wood, just down that lane and round the bend.”

  Claire couldn’t make herself move.

  “You want I should drive you up to the house?”

  “No, no, thank you. We’ll walk. It can’t be far. It will do us good to stretch our legs.” She forced a smile she didn’t feel.

  The farmer nodded in agreement. “Keep to the path, then, and mind you hurry along. Rain’s hoverin’.”

  Claire stood at the edge of the winding, narrow road and looked down at her five disheveled and dirty charges, at least one of them sick. She felt as uncertain and insecure as they looked. The reassurance they craved, Claire felt totally inadequate to give.

  But this was the lane, the drive to her aunt’s home, and there was no going back now.

  Claire swallowed, pasted on a smile, and nodded to Bertram to lift the pillowslips and cases from the wagon. She hefted Aimee—who’d cried she was too tired to walk, and who grew heavier with each step—into her arms and marched forward. Gaston walked close as a noonday shadow by her side, content for once to be quiet. Jeanine and Elise silently pulled up the rear.

  The graveled drive wound through stately oaks on either side, each looking more than a hundred years old. Evergreen carpets spread the up-hill, down-dale forest floor on either side of the drive, ornamented by towering gray-green canopies beyond. Low stone walls cemented with moss and the occasional creeping fern kept wanderers to the drive. Yet who, Claire wondered, would wander off this lovely path? It’s L. Frank Baum’s yellow brick road from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—I’d never leave this lane before seeing where it leads!

  Worn though she was, Claire began to hope she might like her aunt very much. Anyone who keeps such wild beauty barely, cleverly tamed—just enough to delight the eye and lift the soul—must be an interesting person. Even the name, Bluebell Wood, rings mysterious and beautiful. And Mother said her sister fancied herself a poet in her youth. Oh, Aunt Miranda—please, please prove a kindred spirit.

  They’d nearly come to the end of the wood when the drive turned sharply into a wide arc encircling more of the estate. Claire and the children gasped, halting midstep. Paths, covered in graceful, flowering arches of early-summer pink and cream roses and thick, fragrant, weeping wisteria vines, broke the wide, overgrown lawn. Thick crops of yellow and blue iris provided bright contrast. Scattered, irregular ponds unfolded, strategically placed and dotted in cream and mauve water lilies, bordered by grasses creeping well beyond their bounds. A gangly yew maze edged one side of the gardens. Gigantic animal-shaped boxwood topiaries grown nearly beyond their definitions created something between a circus and a safari on the other. A stallion rearing on hind legs took center stage. Trees and grounds and shrubbery, all somewhat overgrown, perfectly framed a towering gray-stone mansion, complete with turrets and spires.

  “It’s like a fairy-tale castle,” Jeanine whispered.

  “It is a castle,” Gaston corrected.

  Bertram turned, his eyes brimming with questions and trepidation. “Mademoiselle?”

  But Claire’s throat had swollen and gone dry in the moment. She’d expected a big house—an estate, after all—but not this. Nothing she’d seen on their drive through the Lake District—not even the extravagant distant house their driver had pointed out as Wray Castle—had prepared her imagination for such a place.

  She turned, as if to summon the farmer. No wonder he’d not seemed eager to drive them to the house itself. No wonder his curious fascination with the notion of six ragamuffin souls deposited on this regal doorstep. What have I done?

  Claire could not imagine the owner of such magnificence understanding her plight, let alone that of five homeless French children. But there is whimsy here, too. What does that mean? Where will I take them when she refuses? Where can we go?

  As if nothing in life could be less certain, the sun, which had dappled feeble rays through heavy leaves along the winding drive, withdrew altogether. Clouds gathered in typical English fashion, darkened, took a deep breath, and spat their wind and rain upon the refugees.

  Claire knew nothing about childhood illnesses but was certain that allowing Aimee and possibly Gaston, already feverish, to get wet and chilled would do them no good. “Run!” she cried, stumbling forward with her load, trusting the others to follow.

  The main house lay still another quarter of a mile away. Wind whipped their skirts and trousers, whistling between arches and round trees into the open space, blustering and shoving them forward. Claire heard Elise cry out as she tripped and fell but knew that Jeanine would help her younger sister. Bertram struggled with the cases, dropping one and picking it up, then dropping another before gathering speed. Poor Gaston stumbled, keeping as close to Claire’s side as before. She felt the heat rise off his body. Two sick children! Forgive me, Aunt, but take us in!

  By the time they reached the porte cochere, all six shivered, soaked to the skin, in the dropping temperature. Thunder boomed in the distance and rumbled down the fells, the rain a torrent.

  “Jeanine,” Claire ordered, squaring her shoulders as best she could with Aimee weighing down her arms, “please knock.”

  Jeanine lifted the heavy brass ring from the lion’s head and let it fall once, twice. But the knock came rather timid. The wind picked up, so Claire urged, “Again, please.”

  Gaston huddled closer and Elise nestled into her sister’s skirt, her thumb slipping into her mouth.

  Jeanine knocked again. No one came. Minutes passed. Rain poured.

  Claire set Aimee on her feet and stepped forward. The sniffling child clung to Claire’s sodden skirt. Just as Claire raised the heavy brass ring and brought it down in a mighty blow, the door fell open and she shot forward, sprawling through the doorway onto the parquet floor. Aimee, clinging to Claire’s skirt, flew behind, sliding in the slick track they created.

  “What on earth!” A tall, auburn-haired woman in a long, peacock-blue silk dressing gown stepped back from the door.

  The gray-haired woman running in her wake squealed, “Sakes alive! You’re bringing a monsoon with you! Close the door! Beg pardon, my lady, I was downstairs and didn’t hear the door.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire gasped. “I’m so sorry!” She groped to push herself up, but Aimee cried and clung all the harder, pulling her again to the floor.

  Bertram dropped the bags inside the door and dragged Aimee off of Claire, shoving her back toward Gaston, who, wide-eyed and miserable, opened his arms to the smaller child. Jeanine leaned her weight into the door until it closed, Elise whimpering and hiccupping all the while. Painfully, Claire pushed herself up from the floor.

  The woman in the blue dressing gown and the gray-haired woman both reached down to help Claire to her feet. Up Claire came, until she stood looking into the face she’d seen in the blackened train window less than three hours before—an older version of herself, but this one regal and lovely.
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  The women gasped in unison as Claire’s mirror image dropped her arm, unsteadying them both.

  Claire knew the woman caught the resemblance too—had recognized some echo of herself in another decade. She swallowed. It’s now or never. Be brave. “Aunt Miranda . . . Lady Langford, I’m Claire Stewart, your niece from America . . . from New Jersey.”

  The woman gasped again, drawing her hand to her throat. Claire saw immediate confusion and disbelief flash through her blue-green eyes. Then a gradual recognition and a cautious joy. “Claire? Mildred’s daughter?”

  “Yes,” Claire breathed, relieved that her mother’s name hadn’t brought a scowl.

  But Aunt Miranda’s sudden warmth stopped cold, replaced by a widening in her eyes. “What’s happened? Is Mildred all right? Is she—?”

  “Mother’s fine—as far as I know.” But Claire didn’t know. She hadn’t seen or heard from her mother in the ten months since she’d moved to Paris. But then, she hadn’t written her mother either. “I should have telephoned or written before coming here, but I didn’t know how to reach you—if you were even still living here.”

  Aimee reached up, whimpering, for Claire’s arms. Claire stooped down and hoisted the child to her hip.

  Aunt Miranda seemed about to ask Claire something more but looked around, taking in the motley group dripping puddles on her parquet floor. “These are your children? All these?”

  Jeanine giggled, out of nervousness or perhaps because the idea seemed so impossible.

  Flustered, Claire couldn’t catch her composure. “I’m not married.”

  The gray-haired woman, already pulling a rug toward the dripping entourage, grunted in disapproval.

  “Mrs. Newsome, please,” Aunt Miranda admonished.

  “I mean, they’re not mine.” Claire flushed. “But they need help, and a home. Their parents—” She stopped, realizing she couldn’t adequately explain in front of the children, couldn’t say that their parents had sent them away for fear of the coming wrath of Hitler’s army simply because they were Jewish.