The FitzOsbornes in Exile

by Michelle Cooper

  “Carlos! You sly old dog!” said Toby.

  Carlos looked up from attending to his paws and gave us a bashful grin.

  “Mrs. Jones is awfully cross about it,” said Henry. “She thought Dotty was just getting a bit fat, but then she found Dotty sitting in the laundry basket on the clean sheets, snarling if anyone went within three feet of her. She’s usually so good-natured—Dotty, I mean, not Mrs. Jones. And then Mr. Herbert came back from evensong and found all these wet, wriggling puppies in the basket. They’re so sweet, just like Carlos, except smaller, of course. I bet they’ll be excellent swimmers—the biggest one’s already tried to climb in the water bowl. We can take one, can’t we? Jocko asked his dad if he could, and his dad said yes, as long as it wasn’t a bitch, because he didn’t want a pack of mangy dogs yowling round their house every six months.”

  All this reminded me that I needed to have a chat with Henry about the Facts of Life now that she’s twelve, but it turned out she knew as much as I did, or possibly more, having spent so much time at the Home Farm watching the pigs and cows and horses. Henry is very unimpressed with the whole idea of periods (not that I blame her). If any girl manages to avoid them through sheer force of will, it’ll be Henry.

  Anyway, it is lovely to be back in the country—not just to see Henry, Carlos, and everyone else but to be out of London, away from Society. I don’t get nearly as nervous about dances and dinner parties as I used to, but they’re still a chore, each event being full of people we need to impress, people who might be able to help our campaign. I must admit that, despite our collective disapproval of Toby leaving Oxford, he’s proving to be a real asset in this regard. For one thing, titles don’t get much more impressive than “His Majesty,” so even the most pompous civil servants, the stuffiest diplomats, the busiest Members of Parliament, pay attention to him. Between Toby’s title and his boyish charm, Veronica’s beauty and her encyclopedic knowledge of European history, and Simon’s … well, Simon being Simon, we’ve made more progress in the past month than in the previous six.

  Firstly, we’ve established that the Germans are still at Montmaray—and worse, have built a proper airstrip on the Green and anchored some ships off South Head. A pair of British pilots reported this to the Defence department in May, according to Colonel Stanley-Ross’s sources. The pilots didn’t see any soldiers there, but how would a pilot be able to tell? The Germans could be camped in the village, they could have repaired the damaged parts of the castle and moved in—

  Oh, it makes me so furious to think of them there! In my bedroom, pawing through my things! Through all our things: Henry’s old toys and Veronica’s books; Toby’s sketches; my mother’s wedding veil and the FitzOsborne christening gown, lovingly packed away in layers and layers of tissue paper inside the old sandalwood chest in the Blue Room … To think of those men rifling through our personal treasures, stomping through the Great Hall in their filthy jackboots, hanging their disgusting swastika banners over our tapestries! I hadn’t fully comprehended what their invasion meant till that moment in the Colonel’s flat when he told us what he’d found out. I’d tried my best not to think about it—or, when it was unavoidable, to consider Montmaray’s invasion only in the abstract. It was dreadful enough to remember the damage the bombs had caused, to know our poor animals had been killed, or worse, wounded and none of us there to help them.

  It turns me cold to write this, even as the sun pours down over me, here on the terrace at Milford Park. My hand is actually shaking …

  No, I want to finish this. I don’t care how messy the writing is. So, yes, we have proof that the Germans have truly taken over Montmaray. But this is a good thing, it gives us ammunition for our fight. If it weren’t for the statements and photographs those pilots provided, we probably wouldn’t have been invited to meet with Winston Churchill. I expect it helped that Colonel Stanley-Ross is his first cousin, but still, Mr. Churchill seemed quite impressed with Simon and Veronica’s arguments. It’s a pity he’s not a minister in the government, or even very influential (apparently, the Prime Minister loathes him), but surely it must help to have such a clever, determined man on our side? The Colonel also reported that there are several senior officers in the defence forces who are sympathetic to our cause—or, at least, alarmed by this evidence of German military aggression so close to England, and therefore very keen to do something about it.

  With this (tacit) support in mind, we have tackled the Foreign Office with fresh vigor. Our aim is to convince Britain to apply strong diplomatic pressure on the German government. There’s the usual bickering between Simon and Veronica over how to word our letters (especially difficult now, as we can’t give away the identity of our intelligence sources), but things do seem to be progressing better than before. I am still very annoyed with Simon, though, so the two of us aren’t really speaking to each other. It’s maddening that he believes he has the right to tell me what to do! And worse, regards me as so weak-willed that I’m likely to be corrupted into shameless depravity by simply having tea with a lady of questionable virtue (which does not describe Julia, anyway). The problem with Simon is that it is not in his nature ever to apologize or admit he was wrong. However, I am behaving with dignity and restraint—in admirable contrast to his complete pigheadedness.

  Speak of the Devil, here he comes up the drive. Now he’s pulling boxes out of the car—he’s still sorting through Mr. Grenville’s files, but this must be the last of it, surely. How very irksome that Simon looks just as good with his sleeves rolled up and his hair tousled as when he strolls into a Mayfair drawing room in immaculate white tie and tails. Now Toby’s running down the steps to help him with the boxes. Well, I’m certainly not going to join them.

  Oh, bother, Simon’s coming this way …

  Later, in bed, unable to sleep. Spent an hour tossing and turning, then gave up and switched on the light again. There must be a word for this feeling. Tumult? Except that makes me think of tulips, which are very placid-looking flowers. It really isn’t fair that I should be forced to experience so many conflicting emotions in a single afternoon. Thank heavens I have the comfort of my journal, even if my vocabulary is not quite up to the task of describing my overwrought life.

  Well, it turns out that Simon is able to bend a little. He presented me with a peace offering this afternoon, a souvenir of a past conversation, something he thought I’d find intriguing. Of course, he had no idea of its true significance—nor did I, at the time.

  “I noticed it as I was packing the last box,” he said. “I took all the bundles of personal letters to Montmaray House and left them in the library, but I thought you might like to have a look at this.” He held out a slim volume, bound in cracked morocco, its edges nibbled by insects or mice. “I can’t make out much of the writing,” he went on, “but you’re better at reading French than I am. I’ve no idea who owned it, although I assume it was a girl, from the sketches. She must have been a FitzOsborne—look, you can see the family crest stamped into the leather.”

  I took the journal with a token show of reluctance, but I felt a warm glow inside—due partly to this thawing of my relations with Simon and partly to being able to touch a tiny piece of Montmaray. It was as though I’d reached out across the ages and grasped the hand of one of my ancestors, a girl who’d slept in the same castle, perhaps even the same room, as I had. Turning to the first page, I gazed at the faded indigo ink with a rising excitement—which rapidly subsided. I couldn’t understand any of it. The writing was perfectly legible, in the sense that the letters were of a familiar alphabet and were formed in beautiful copperplate script. I could even recognize a word here and there—pomme and chien and livre. It looked French—just not any sort of French that I had seen before.

  “Perhaps it’s an unusual dialect?” Simon suggested. “Or some ancient version of written French?”

  “How old do you think the book is?” I asked, examining the cover.

  “It’s hard to say, but I don’t thi
nk it could be from earlier than the 1850s,” he said. “None of the records I saw dated to before that. And it could be much more recent, despite how it looks—it hadn’t been stored very carefully. Well, there’s a mystery for you to solve.”

  “Thank you, Simon,” I said with a little smile.

  “You’re very welcome,” he said. He stood up, took a step towards the house—then turned back. “So, you’re speaking with me again?”

  “It appears so,” I said. “That is, I’ve been saying words out loud in your presence—and you may even have been listening to them.”

  “Ah, Sophia, I always listen to you,” he said. “I’ve learned from experience that it’s very dangerous to ignore you.”

  I sighed melodramatically. “What a pity,” I said. “It assists my plans for world domination, you see, if my rivals regard me as beneath their notice.”

  “Oh, you’ve been reading Machiavelli again?” he said. Then he dropped his teasing tone. “But, Sophia, I hope you understand that when I give you advice, it’s not because I see you as weak or foolish or in any way less than me. It’s simply brotherly concern.”

  “You’re not my brother—”

  “No. But I can’t see your brother giving you any useful advice.” Before I had a chance to bridle at this, he crouched down beside my chair. “Oh, Sophie!” he said. “Please don’t be cross. It’s just that sometimes I have access to information that you don’t have. I can’t help that.”

  “You were wrong about Julia,” I said. “Wrong and insulting.”

  “I may have been insulting, but I know I’m correct in … in certain aspects. Look, how about we agree to disagree on the subject of Julia Whittingham? Can’t we stop talking about her? I can’t think of anything I’d like more, believe me.”

  “All right,” I said. “And how about you agree to stop telling me what to do?”

  “All right,” he said, grinning. “Seeing as it’s impossible to get you to do anything I want, anyway.”

  We shook hands solemnly to seal our agreement, then he went off to unpack his boxes. I remained seated on the terrace for a while, gazing out at the lake and smiling to myself. Then I looked down at the book again. Each page was filled with the same careful handwriting, interrupted by occasional pen-and-ink sketches. These were all delicate, whimsical studies of flowers—full-blown roses with tumbling petals, cheerful clusters of daisies, a single violet dwarfed by a smiling bee. I scanned the lines of script, but nothing made sense. Even the punctuation was odd. Some letters had accents; some didn’t where they probably ought to have had them; capitals appeared in the middle of words; and there were no commas or full stops.

  Finally, I got up, went inside to the library, and took down the oldest French dictionary from the shelves. I managed to decipher several more words, but the syntax was so bizarre, the words so unrelated in meaning, that I was no closer to comprehension than when I’d started—and I was certainly a great deal more frustrated. Then Veronica burst into the room, beaming and waving an envelope at me.

  “From the Foreign Office, inviting us to a meeting next month!” she cried, dropping it on the table. “I really think we’re getting somewhere now! And look, another letter from Carmelita. She came top of her class this term, her father was thrilled. Look at her letter, not one spelling mistake, and English her third or fourth language! Henry ought to be ashamed of herself … Oh, what’s that you’ve got?”

  I pushed the journal towards her. “Simon found it at Mr. Grenville’s, but I can’t work out the French.”

  Veronica sat down across from me and looked at the first page. “It’s not French,” she said slowly. Her smile had vanished. She turned the page. “It’s in code.”

  “A code!” I exclaimed. “How exciting! Rather frustrating, though—I’m longing to find out what it says.”

  She gave me an odd look, far sadder and more sympathetic than I thought the situation merited, and continued to turn the pages.

  “Well, perhaps we can decipher it,” I went on. “How old do you think the journal is?”

  She gave me an even odder look. “I suppose … it depends when she wrote it. It was probably just before she got married.”

  “Married? How do you know?”

  “What?” Veronica said. “Well, I mean, she didn’t take it with her to Montmaray, obviously, and yet there’s the FitzOsborne crest on the cover. It must have been with her old things here in England. I imagine her family’s belongings were sent to Mr. Grenville, after both her parents had died—”

  “Whose parents?” I said. I was utterly bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

  Veronica blinked. “Don’t … don’t you recognize the writing? And the sketches?”

  “No,” I said, tugging the journal away from her and peering again at the first page. “No, not really. Except—well, now that I think about it, this little picture of a bee reminds me of …” I put my hand over my mouth.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Sophie!” said Veronica, jumping up and coming over to put her arm round me. “I really am, but I thought you’d realized!”

  “Are you saying … it’s my mother’s journal?” I stared at the book. “Is it really her handwriting? I don’t remember what it looked like! I don’t remember anything about her! Except this little picture of a bee, it’s just like one that she drew for me. Remember, when I got stung in the kitchen garden, and I started refusing to go outside? She said bees weren’t nearly as terrifying as I thought, and she sketched one with fuzzy legs and fat wings and an enormous grin …”

  My eyes filled with tears. I’d kept the picture tucked into the frame of our bedroom’s looking glass for ages and ages, till the paper turned yellow and tattered, and someone (probably me) threw it out. I’d thought I’d forgotten it. I’d thought I’d forgotten everything about her.

  “Typical of Simon, upsetting people like this!” Veronica was saying. “Just wait till I get hold of him!”

  “But he didn’t know,” I said, wiping my eyes. “There’s no reason he’d recognize her writing. And we both thought the book was old, really old!”

  “Store anything in a damp, rodent-infested basement for a couple of years, and it’ll look like that. But it wasn’t just the handwriting that told me.” Veronica dropped her arm from my shoulder and moved away. “It was the fact that it was in code.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was how Toby and I came up with the idea of Kernetin. Aunt Jane told us that when she was younger, she always wrote her journal in code—to stop her mother finding out things.”

  I was stunned. “I don’t remember that at all,” I said.

  “You were quite young. Toby and I were seven, I think, so you’d have been five or six. We couldn’t imagine what she might have wanted to hide from her parents! We dreamt up all sorts of dreadful crimes and kept hurling them at her, hoping to trick her into a confession. But she just laughed at us.”

  I gazed at the book, at this startling evidence of the hidden life of my quiet, mild-mannered, fading-into-the-background mother.

  “Of course, she was far too good to do anything wrong,” Veronica added hurriedly. “We knew that, really.”

  “Nobody ever talks about her,” I said. “Toby never does. Simon and Aunt Charlotte barely knew her, so I wouldn’t expect them to. But you.” I twisted round to look at Veronica. “You were always so vague whenever I asked you about her. I thought you’d forgotten her. Or that she was so … so inconspicuous that no one ever noticed what she was like.”

  Veronica was shaking her head.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “No, Sophie! She was lovely. She was so kind and patient, everyone adored her.”

  “But why didn’t you talk to me about her?”

  “Well—it seemed to bother Toby so much, anyone mentioning either of your parents.” Then she sighed. “No, it wasn’t only that. I didn’t want to think about her, either.”

  She crossed her arms and glanced away, towards the windows. There wa
s a long silence.

  “She was always much more of a mother to me than my own was,” Veronica said at last, very quietly. “When she died, I wished it’d been Isabella instead. Isabella and my father, both of them, I wished they’d been in that carriage when the bomb hit. They ought to have been—they were the ones invited to Seville. It was so unfair. Then I suppose … I suppose I was so horrified by it all, by what had happened, by the dreadful thing I’d wished …”

  She shook her head again.

  “It’s my fault that you don’t remember her, Sophie. I turned her into something dim and blurred. I tried to make her disappear.” Veronica lifted a hand to brush impatiently at her eyes, then gave me an unhappy smile. “There, what would Freud have said about that?”

  “Probably that the whole lot of us are in dire need of psychoanalysis,” I said, getting up to hug her.

  “Ah, but not you,” she said, pulling back after a moment. “You don’t need psychoanalysis, Sophie. You’ve got your journal. It must be the reason you’re the only normal one amongst us.”

  “Normal!” I scoffed. As if I even know what “normal” is!

  “The balanced one,” said Veronica, carefully disentangling her hair from where it had got caught in the clasp of my necklace. “The only calm, sensible FitzOsborne.”

  Then a footman came in to say Aunt Charlotte was on the telephone, and Veronica hurried off, although not before promising to help me decipher the journal.

  I sat back down and looked at the sketch of the bee. Poor little thing, I thought. All it had to defend itself was its sting—and if it used it, it would die. I remembered the meeting at the Foreign Office, how I’d unwittingly extinguished all of Veronica’s excitement about that. But I couldn’t help feeling she’d be disappointed yet again, that the meeting would be futile, that we were helpless little creatures about to be swatted by the vast hand of the Foreign Office …