The FitzOsbornes in Exile

by Michelle Cooper

  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.

  21st February 1938

  Veronica, Simon, and I have arrived at Montmaray House brimming with fresh purpose, charged with determination. And so it is fitting that I set aside my tattered old exercise book, filled cover to cover with my blotchy scrawl, and turn to the first page of my beautiful, new sky-blue journal. I even have a nonleaky pen, a Christmas present from Toby. I do believe that, as a result, everything I write this afternoon will be significant and hopeful—and unsmudged.

  The weather, it must be admitted, is not very encouraging. Yesterday, we were shrouded in a thick gray fog. This morning, an icy gale arrived, direct from the Arctic. Now sleet is splattering itself against the sooty windows, making the library even dimmer and colder than usual. Perhaps in an attempt to counteract this, Veronica and Simon are embroiled in yet another blazing row. (Just because they’ve agreed to work together on the Montmaray campaign doesn’t mean they agree on anything else.) This argument seems to be about … the Prime Minister? No, apparently they’re debating which government department is most likely to be helpful to our cause. Simon thinks the Ministry for Coordination of Defence will have the greatest interest in us, given the Germans seem to be using Montmaray as a military base.

  “Where’s our proof of that?” says Veronica. “Besides, everyone knows the Minister of Defence is completely useless. ‘The most cynical appointment since Caligula made his horse a consul,’ that’s what they said when the PM announced Thomas Inskip had the job. He was chosen to do nothing.”

  “Inskip!” says Simon scornfully. “Who said anything about approaching him? It’s the senior civil servants who make all the decisions in that department. If we talk with them, they’ll get in contact with the navy and the air force—”

  “And then they’ll do what, exactly?” says Veronica. “Send a battleship to Montmaray? So it can sit there, doing absolutely nothing, just like that ship they sent to Spain?”

  Simon scowls at her. “The mere presence of a battleship might make Germany have second thoughts. There’ll only be a few Germans actually on the island; they won’t be capable of offering any real resistance.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! They’ll know it’s a bluff!” snaps Veronica. “This is a crisis requiring international diplomacy. It’s the Foreign Office we need to target! First of all, we need the British Ambassador to deliver an official letter of protest to Berlin. Now, who’s the new Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs?”

  “Sir Alexander Cadogan—and give me back that pen! I’m not letting you draft that letter! What you know about diplomacy and tact could be chiseled on the head of a pin—”

  And so on. Oh good, the footman’s just come in to announce that luncheon is served. Now they’ll have to call a temporary truce …

  Much later. We had apple dumplings with butterscotch sauce and clotted cream for pudding, and even that didn’t improve Simon’s mood. He’s stomped off down the corridor to the little room Aunt Charlotte uses as her office, after announcing that Veronica was driving him mad. Poor Simon. In addition to working on our Montmaray campaign, he’s still sorting through the records at Mr. Grenville’s, and I don’t think it’s going very well. I get the distinct impression Mr. Grenville’s employees resent the fact that a former clerk has been elevated to the status of valued client. They can’t openly express this, of course, but they keep “misplacing” keys to cabinets and “accidentally” dropping files, then stuffing all the papers back in, upside down and in the wrong order.

  “But what exactly are you looking for?” I asked Simon this afternoon.

  He sighed heavily. “Oh, Sophia, you wouldn’t believe what a mess things are in, once one goes back more than a few years. I’ve already found a bank account set up in 1897 to pay for subscriptions to some club that doesn’t even exist anymore. There was a grand total of seven shillings and sixpence in that account, by the way. And then I keep coming across documents that ought to be here at Montmaray House, nothing to do with legal or financial matters—bundles of personal letters, for instance, and a diary belonging to some long-departed princess.”

  “Really?” I said, intrigued
. “Who was she?”

  “Heaven knows. It was half eaten by mice, and I think it’s in French. But what I’m really hoping to discover is a fat pouch of diamonds, or some secret trust fund that’s been accumulating interest for decades.”

  “That would be exciting,” I said. “Would you like me to come down and help?”

  “That’s kind of you, Sophia. But really, it needs someone who’s familiar with the filing system, and it’s a task more grubby than glamorous. I can’t imagine your aunt would approve of—Good Lord!”

  “What?” I said, peering over at the newspaper the footman had just delivered.

  “Anthony Eden’s resigned!”

  “Isn’t he the Foreign Secretary?” I asked. “The one with the nice suits? Why did he resign?”

  “He probably heard Veronica was planning to target the Foreign Office and wanted to get out of the way first.”

  “Simon!”

  He glanced up and smiled. “No, I expect he disapproves of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini.”

  “But how would resigning help? Now he won’t be able to influence Conservative policy, and they’re the ones in charge.”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes,” said Simon, thoroughly absorbed in his newspaper, so I left him to it and went back down the corridor to tell Veronica.

  “Oh, blast!” she exclaimed, looking up from a messy draft of a letter. “I was counting on Eden supporting us.” She shoved her hair back, leaving another smudge of ink on her forehead, and sighed. “Well! I wonder what Churchill will have to say about this.”

  “Churchill’s against appeasement, too, isn’t he? Do you think they’ll both leave the Conservatives and start up a new party together?”

  “Hmm. No, I wouldn’t think so,” Veronica said. “They might both be worried about the threat posed by the Fascist dictators, but that’s about all they have in common. Churchill wants a war, any war—ideally against the Soviet Union—but Eden’s strongly in favor of the League of Nations and collective security.” And Veronica gave an approving little nod.