by Kerri Maher
“There’s my girl,” said Bertrand. They laughed together, drily.
“So,” he said, “you can tell me what’s wrong, or we can get drunk together. Both are good enough medicine.”
What did she have to lose at this point? If she didn’t speak up, she stood to lose everything. “I don’t suppose you have an attic to stow me away in when the rest of my family leaves for America?”
“Ah,” he said, and she knew he had immediately understood. “I don’t, as it happens. My matronly aunt in Liverpool might, but then you’d have to live in Liverpool.”
“Maybe only temporarily?”
“I’m afraid there is no escaping the north,” he said in an exaggerated northern accent.
She chuckled half-heartedly, then both of them were quiet before he jumped up suddenly, went to the bar, and came back with a full pint of ale. “Drink,” he told her.
“I already feel drunk,” she said, pushing the glass away. She hadn’t eaten in hours and the shandy had affected her quickly.
“I’ll feel better if you have three more sips before I tell you what I feel it my duty to tell you,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow, then followed his instructions, and immediately she felt more relaxed, even though she sensed that what he wanted to tell her was not something she wanted to hear.
“Go home,” he told her.
“Pardon?”
“Go home.”
“Can you elaborate, please?”
“Gladly,” he said, crossing his legs and sitting back in his chair. “It’s going to get messy here in England. I know you want to help, and believe me—we, by which I mean all your real friends here, know you want to stay in England for noble reasons: love of king, of country, and of a certain marquess, heir to one of the greatest dukedoms in the land. And we love you all the more for not loving him just for his lands and title. Because lord knows, you don’t need any of that.”
She opened her mouth to say something about his vulgarity, but he held up a finger and said, “Let me finish. If there was ever a time for bald honesty, this it is. Now.” He drew a breath, then went on. “What’s more, Billy knows you love him, and he knows you love him for the right reasons. But I’ve come to know Billy well, and I believe he will love you more if you remain unsullied by the filth and degradation that’s to come. Get on a boat and let him pine for you. Let him remember you in one of your fine Parisian frocks dancing with abandon, while every other Englishman wished he had you. Believe me, he will dwell at length on that image while he is stewing in his own sweat.”
“It just feels like such a risk,” she said.
“What’s your alternative? Staying here alone because he hasn’t proposed, and being the desperate American girl who waits around for the English aristocrat to make her an honest woman? No. That plot is beneath you.”
Her eyes went wide. She’d never considered the possibility that her staying might appear that way. She’d been so overwhelmed by her desire to stay, she hadn’t thought about it from every angle as a Kennedy should, as she’d been trained to do. Maybe she still needed more training. The thought was comforting, but also maddening, in the same way as looking at pictures of her hero brother in the newspapers every day.
“When would you suggest I come back?”
“When Billy gives you a reason,” he said.
“A proposal.”
“Very likely.”
Bertrand’s advice bore a striking resemblance to Billy’s own plea, but Bertrand had only her interests in mind. “Thank you,” she said, feeling a bit like a scolded child who knew she was in the wrong.
“You are most welcome,” he said. “Now if only there was room in your bag so I could stow away to America with you and avoid fighting in this god-awful mess.”
Maybe she was luckier than she’d thought.
* * *
The sense of luck was fleeting. The next week, her final week in England, was as confused as it was confusing. She had to rummage around in her packed trunks every morning to find something to wear, and in the evening when she went out to meet her friends, they had to grope their way through darkened streets, often on foot because too many taxi drivers feared drawing attention to themselves with headlights. So she and her friends arranged to meet at houses where pockets of them lived. Debo showed up to one party before Kick left, on the night before Billy left to join his regiment.
Andrew, Debo, David, Sissy, Billy, Kick, and a handful of others were gathered in the Cavendishes’ London home for dinner and dancing, courtesy of one of the 400’s most popular bands, whom the boys had hired for the occasion. Were it not for the reason they were all coming together, the party had the makings of a perfect evening. Even Sally Norton wasn’t present, and Billy and Andrew had banished their parents to Chatsworth for the weekend. “I told them that this wasn’t the way they wanted to remember their son,” Andrew had said, ever the jokester. But that night, Kick saw great tenderness in the kind and gentle way he tended to Debo, drinking very little so that he could dance with her and remain alert, constantly asking if she needed anything, and keeping his hand protectively on her back.
Debo put on a good face, and for once she was the one to drink too much. Kick could hardly blame her; she’d have wanted to use the evening to forget her tragedy, too. Before she could say anything comforting to her friend, to whom she’d already written a heartfelt letter saying she wanted to help in any way she could, Debo said to Kick, “I don’t want to talk about Unity, Hitler, or anything to do with anyone who has ever caused me pain. So don’t even try to offer your sympathies.”
To which Kick replied, “I won’t. And me, either.”
Throughout the night, Kick kept Bertrand’s advice in mind and attempted to be her most lively, likable self. She wore an emerald-green bias-cut silk dress that Billy had once said he liked, and she laughed and joked relentlessly. But dancing with Billy was physically painful. When he held her close and she felt the satisfying way her cheek rested on his chest, the crown of her head nestled in the curve of his neck, her heart hurt with sadness and longing.
At last he pulled her away from the others, into the downstairs kitchen of all places, where it appeared they were alone—all the servants must have gone to their own quarters, as it was close to one in the morning. There, they kissed. And kissed and kissed. The open mouth that had once shocked her on that dark stairwell was now a familiar, welcome force, his large hands moving deftly over curves and hollows on her body she’d never have dreamed a man would touch only a year ago. Now she welcomed Billy’s hands, and wished, wished, they were in a position to enjoy more.
Both of them sensed when it was time to pull away. He picked her up by her waist and set her down on the rectangular wooden table in the center of the room, which gave her a little more height, enough so that he could touch his forehead to hers without having to stoop too much.
“I miss you already,” he whispered.
“I miss you, too.”
“If I asked you to marry me tonight, in Westminster Abbey, by the archbishop of Canterbury . . . would you?”
“Is that even possible?” Is it? She couldn’t think clearly with so much blood coursing noisily through her ears.
“If it was?” His eyes were closed, like a boy wishing on birthday candles.
So many things came to Kick’s mind . . . Father O’Flaherty’s kindness, Wickham’s and even Lady Astor’s prejudices, her mother’s door in her face, her father’s pride in her London accomplishments, Gabrielle’s childless future with the man she loved, the majesty of the new pope riding on his crimson throne into the Vatican, her imagined photo of herself with Billy on the lawn of Chatsworth, their children in white christening clothes.
No, she realized. Not tonight.
“I’d hardly be the woman you’ve fallen in love with if I just said yes without question, would I?” she
asked, closing her own eyes and wishing herself.
She heard him inhale and hold his breath. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . Then he kissed her fiercely and quickly.
“No,” he said, pulling his head back and looking into her eyes, which she had opened at the same time. “No, you would not. And I fear I love you all the more for it,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Race you to the first letter.”
“I’ve already started mine.” He grinned.
“Then I have some catching up to do,” she said.
“Hurry,” he said quietly. “Hurry.”
BELGIUM, JUNE 1940
His hands were so afflicted with palsy, he could barely open the door of the car. But there it was, a Baby Austin, an improbably English car in a country God had forsaken. An end to his searching. When he’d seen it from the other side of the field, he thought it was a mirage. He had been seeing and smelling all sorts of things that weren’t there—the end of a rifle around the corner of a barn, yeasty bread hot from an oven, Kick’s stride in that of a faraway country girl—so he’d begun to doubt his senses. But there it was, this vehicle that could get him out of hell.
If he could get it to turn on. There were no keys. One of his men had taught him to start an engine by sparking a few wires together. Jonathan. A coarse young man from Essex who’d obviously had plenty of experience in the art of starting cars without keys. “Society man like you,” he’d said to Billy, with a sniff of arrogance, “may have a thing or two to teach me about the ladies, but you never know when you’re gon’to need a skill like this. Now listen up, mate.” A month later, he was shot in the gut when he’d run toward the Huns, screaming, “For England!” He’d been one of the few soldiers who hadn’t turned tail on those fateful, fearfully given orders when the German tanks rolled into their camp. Their supposedly unapproachable camp on the other side of the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. That false security had made cowards of them all, except the rare man who understood what war really was.
Billy’s first attempt at the wires was unsuccessful. His hands were shaking too much. Steady, steady, he told himself. He sat on his hands to warm them, not that they were especially cold on the damp, temperate morning, but he hoped the extra heat might relax the muscles enough to help his fingers do what they needed to do. He looked furtively around. It was quiet here, only cows on the horizon, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t danger. There had been danger everywhere.
Not danger like the chaos of bullets and grenades and gurgling and cursing following the terrifying sound of the tanks defiling the earth beneath their tracks, or worse, the danger he could hear in the silence when the tanks stopped. That danger he’d escaped. Without a compass or map or any other guide, he’d been on his feet for days and days since then. Two weeks was his best guess. Part of the time, he’d been with other English and French men, and together they’d intruded on the hospitality of farmers, innkeepers, barmaids, and grandmothers, all of whom were only too happy to give them a cup of wine and a hunk of bread and listen with shaking heads to the soldiers’ firsthand confirmations of the horrors they’d read about in the papers. “Are we German now?” one little boy had asked his father. “Never,” his father growled.
One by one, the other men began to disappear. Billy would wake in the morning on a bed of straw and find another one had taken his rucksack and left. They had discussed where to go and what to do, but none of them knew how to get to safety alive, and none of the locals they spoke to had any promising intelligence.
Billy knew, though, that the main reason he was alone now, so long after the event, was that he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his country and its leaders for not seeing this coming, for depending on a fortification they hadn’t built themselves, for once again not predicting that Hitler would find a way to surprise them all. But mainly, he was ashamed of himself for not being Jonathan.
When he thought his hands were ready, he tried to do what Jonathan had taught him. Maybe, he thought to himself as he fumbled with the wires, I was given this little auto lesson for a reason. Kick would certainly think so. I’m meant to live, and to apply what I’ve learned. I’m meant to be part of the solution.
At last he got the wires to spark, the engine to fire up. He put his right foot on the gas, his left on the clutch, and gripped the steering wheel and gear stick, which steadied his hands. The vibration from the engine shook the car to life and filled his body with hope for the first time in weeks. He made a vow as he drove out of the field and onto a dirt road: When I come back here, it will be to kill or be killed. Maybe both. I’ll never run again.
PART 3
SUMMER 1941
CHAPTER 18
Even two years later, she woke up some mornings and thought for a few glorious moments before she opened her eyes that she was in her bed at 14 Prince’s Gate. In that hazy, half-sentient state, the pillow would feel the same and her body would be heavy with that after-party languor she used to shake off with a few cups of tea and a slice of toast before heading out into the mercurial London elements. Then she would open her eyes to find herself in Hyannis Port or Bronxville or Palm Beach, and now Washington, DC, and the reality of her situation would flood her with the now-familiar dread. Another day in exile.
Her beloved London had been blitzed, and in his letters Billy’s sole concern had become when he would return to the continent “to crush the Huns.” She had tried once, gently, to turn his attentions back to their time before the war, when they had made those hopeful, hushed promises to each other, but that had been a huge mistake. He’d told her that he couldn’t possibly think about anything so weighty with the fate of England hanging in the balance. I cling to the hope that we can begin again, if you can find a way back here, he’d also written. So. She’d been right all along. I should have stayed. Had she been there, she could have shown Billy how much she, too, cared for England. She could have been part of his quest. Instead, she found herself defending the embattled island to American friends who saw it as weak and in need of assistance. No one understood.
The last two years had gone down a drain of lackluster parties and half-hearted attempts to study antiques at Finch while her girlfriends in England were getting married: Sissy and David. Jane and Peter. Debo and Andrew. Kick had been so paralyzed with longing after reading the columns about Debo’s wedding in Muv and Farve’s London town house right around the corner from where she had lived her happiest life that she’d barely gotten out of bed for a week. If they weren’t getting married and having babies and giving their soldier husbands a reason to fight and live, her other former debutante friends were working as nurses or in factories. Sally Norton was working in a code-breaking facility, for Pete’s sake. With Billy’s determination to defeat Germany, Kick could only imagine how admirable Sally’s new profession would seem to him. And how Sally would use that admiration to her advantage, with Kick out of the way, across the bloody Atlantic Ocean.
Kick had almost forgotten what it felt like to live a life of purpose, like Sally and the rest of them. Nothing she’d done these past two years had appealed to her, and Kick feared she was getting brittle with a too-early old age. She caught herself snapping at Jean and Pat, sounding just like Rose. How could you not know Katherine Porter was in town? Surely you could do something better with your time than read that drivel. She’d actually been relieved when Daddy had told her sternly one morning after breakfast in Palm Beach that she either had to get herself into a real college or get a paying job.
Kick picked up the phone and called Page Huidekoper, who’d been living in DC and working at the Washington Times-Herald as a reporter. With a sweaty hand clutching the slick receiver, Kick listened as Page, the architect of her last partially successful transformation, spoke of an open secretarial position on the paper.
“It’s not terribly glamorous, I’ll be honest, but people move around on the paper all the time. You could be doing someth
ing more interesting in no time. And Washington’s not a bad place to be these days. Full of characters. I think you’ll like it.”
Something about being in a totally new environment appealed to Kick and made her heart beat faster for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long. A change of scenery and pace. And best of all, she’d be living completely on her own for the first time, away from the worried gaze of her parents. She hung up the phone and started packing her bags.
Her interview with Frank Waldrop, the handsome and youthful editor in chief who spoke with a genteel Southern accent that explained everything about the conservative bent of his paper, went swimmingly. Though she didn’t agree with the isolationist politics he shared with her father, she was well practiced in setting aside her own beliefs to get what she wanted. She even hid her real identity. Kathleen Kennedy was a common enough Irish name, and Waldrop didn’t recognize her, so rooted was he in everything south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
But then, during her second week of answering his phones, Frank came back from a lunch mildly tipsy and leaned against Kick’s tidy wooden desk.
“Kathleen Kennedy, eh?” Frank drawled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Same reason I keep my mink in this bag under my desk,” Kick said, pointing to the softly rumpled brown paper bag rolled up at the top to keep the contents hidden. She barely had time to wonder how he’d found out before she came up with the answer herself: her father was in town. She was supposed to meet him for dinner, but now she could see whom Joe Kennedy had made a point of bumping into first.
Frank raised his head to survey the large room Kick shared with twenty or so reporters with small desks and big ambitions. He nodded, patted her on the shoulder with something like appreciation, and said, “Then I expect you won’t be sitting here very long, if what I know of your family has any basis in reality.”