The king confided the plans to his queen, and she carried them to the basement of Windsor Castle, where the four witches of Elizabeth’s coven planned their own, quite specific kinds of sorties.
It took a long time and stretched over several nights. Olive asked for a storm over the Channel, with a lull in the pounding rain and rough seas that lasted just long enough to allow the landing craft to reach shore. Rose added a request for deception of Herr Hitler. Elizabeth concocted a spell of confusion for the German meteorologists, as well as one for accuracy for the Allied scientists. It fell to Veronica to try to cast the light of protection over the soldiers and fliers of the Allies, but even as she did it, she felt how enormous the task was, too large for a small coven to accomplish.
In many ways the coven succeeded. They confused the German weather forecasters into believing the storms in the Channel would continue well into the month. Herr Hitler was persuaded the invasion would come through Calais rather than Normandy. The Allies believed the weather would change enough to allow their landing craft to reach the beaches.
The witches burned baskets of herbs and boxes of candles. They stood by the hour, chanting in the smoky room, all through the first days of June. They took breaks only for food and sleep, and only when they could no longer work without them. On the final day, they emerged rumpled and exhausted from their labors, almost too weary to climb the stairs.
Elizabeth broke her habit of caution that one time. She took the three women to her private parlor and ordered the best breakfast the kitchens could produce. They sat together, too tired to talk, too tense to listen to the wireless. The crystal was wrapped and stowed away in its hamper behind Veronica’s feet. They gazed at each other with tired resignation as they waited for their meal. There was nothing further they could do.
They had to wait with the other citizens for details of the invasion. They learned, in time, that though the weather was hardly clement, it had eased enough to allow the Allies to land at Utah Beach and Omaha Beach, and to take Pointe du Hoc. They heard the stories of how Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches fell that first day, and other targets on succeeding days. They read accounts of the German commanders dining and dancing, drinking stolen French wine, secure in the certainty that the invasion had been postoned. It took longer to discover that Hitler himself, the great evil, slept late on what would become D-Day, in happy ignorance that his vicious reign was near its end.
Veronica was crushed by the casualty figures. She felt she had let the others down, that her efforts had been less successful, her power less effective than theirs. The loss of life appalled her. Elizabeth reminded her that though it had been a cruel day, it marked the turn toward final victory. Veronica did her best to accept her sovereign’s reassurance, but her heart broke under the weight of the nation’s grief, and soon, just as she had feared, under the weight of her own sorrow.
Halfway through the battle, Squadron Leader Phillip Paxton’s Bristol Beaufort, flying inland from Omaha Beach, took a direct hit from the guns of a Heinkel He 51. Phillip was dead before his airplane struck the ground. His bride of three weeks, now his widow, was drinking coffee with the queen.
9
Veronica’s war ended with D-Day. When word arrived of Phillip’s death, Elizabeth ordered her home to Sweetbriar. “You’ve served gallantly, my dear. The king and I are grateful.” The queen’s small body was as erect as ever, though her cheeks were shadowed by fatigue, and new lines, delicate as the seams on an oak leaf, fanned from her eyes.
Veronica protested, but weakly. “Ma’am, won’t you need me?”
“We can manage the work that’s left. I’m told surrender will come soon. You’ve suffered a terrible loss, and you should be with your family.”
Veronica was too weary to argue. While the battle for France raged on, she packed her things and said her good-byes to the coven. Rose shook her hand. Olive regarded her with a hard gaze and said, “Don’t turn your back on the craft, Veronica.”
“I thought I would leave it be, now that our work is done.”
“That never succeeds.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll find out, in time, and I hope you’ll have someone to teach in your turn. A daughter to carry on your line. There aren’t enough of us left.”
Veronica nodded without committing herself. Olive startled her with a stiff embrace that marked the end of their service together.
Carrying the Fortnum & Mason hamper and a small valise, with Oona at her heels, she boarded the train at Charing Cross. She sat in her compartment with the dog at her feet and the hamper in her lap, and watched the ruins of London pass as the train wound out of the city and clattered into the countryside.
Jago met her at the Stamford railway station. He insisted on taking the hamper from her as they walked to the Daimler, though she protested it was too heavy. “Think I’m too old, you,” he said cheerfully.
“Of course not,” she said.
She did find him aged, though. His hair had gone white and thin. She could see his pink, vulnerable scalp through the silvery strands. He had developed a slight stoop, and he walked awkwardly, as if his legs hurt. She felt an urge to hold his arm as they moved through the station and out to the car park, but she restrained the impulse.
She settled her things in the boot and opened the back door of the Daimler for Oona to jump in before she settled herself in the front next to Jago. “How are things at Sweetbriar?” she asked, as he maneuvered the car out into the street.
“Proper to sit in back, you,” was his first response.
“Who knows what’s proper anymore, Jago? The war has changed everything, even at Buckingham Palace.”
He admitted this with a shrug. “Certainly Sweetbriar is changed.”
“It will be over soon, they say.”
“Never thought it would last this long.”
She glanced at his profile and saw with sadness how his cheeks and chin sagged, how ropy the muscles of his throat looked. She had no idea how old he was, and she didn’t dare ask. She blurted instead, “Jago—do we know how old Ynyr is?”
His mouth curled at one side, and she squirmed in her seat. He probably understood how she had arrived at her question. “Well,” he said good-humoredly, “Ynyr is uncommonly old for a horse. He was two when he came to Morgan Hall, with your grandmother. That would make him over fifty.”
Veronica turned in her seat to stare at him in shock. “Jago, that’s impossible!”
“Think I’ve lost my memory, you?”
“Well, no, but …” She turned back to watch the hedgerows flow by.
“A long life,” Jago said calmly. “Perhaps you can understand that.”
“Because he was my mother’s familiar,” she said.
“As Oona is yours.”
Veronica blew out a long breath and dropped her head back against the upholstery. “You’re the second person to say that to me.”
“Obvious.”
From the back seat Oona emitted a single yip. Veronica and Jago both chuckled. She said, “I didn’t know there were such things. There were so many things I didn’t know.”
“You do now.”
“Yes. Knowledge, though, Jago—it’s not always a blessing.”
“A hard truth. Some things we’d rather not have learned.”
Veronica had been relieved to find her father, although now confining himself to a wheelchair, otherwise unchanged. Using the chair had relieved some of his pain, and he was clearly delighted to have her home again, though he said little about it. He had made a shrine to Thomas in the morning room, arranging his army portrait, his ribbons and medals, and a framed copy of his commission. Veronica, before she went up to her room, stopped before it.
Lord Dafydd rolled his chair to her side. “Thomas was a sweet boy. A good son. He should have been a vicar, or a professor.”
“It breaks my heart, Papa.”
“And mine.” He took her hand. He held it for a moment before, in an un
characteristic demonstration, he raised it to his lips. She glanced down in surprise and saw unshed tears glistening in his eyes.
She wanted to kneel beside him, put her arms around his shoulders, kiss his forehead. She did none of these things. He would never forgive her if she broke his reserve, and those tears escaped.
Instead she said, “I’ll take my things up now, Papa. Shall we have a sherry together afterward? We can toast Thomas, and then you can show me how things are with the hospital.”
He nodded without speaking, and without looking up. She knew he didn’t trust his voice. They hadn’t even spoken of Phillip yet. She trudged up the staircase, feeling as if she had aged twenty years in the four she had been away.
She wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of memory that met her when she opened the door to her old bedroom. She stepped inside and set her valise and the hamper on the floor. Oona watched with her head cocked to one side as Veronica walked to the bed and sat on the edge. She smoothed the coverlet with her hand, recalling how she had felt that long-ago night.
So much had happened since she and Valéry lay here, while the bombs fell on London and the world they knew crumbled into ruins. So many had suffered. Too many had died. And she herself—she had done many great things, and one that was terrible.
Yet she could remember how it felt to be young and innocent, in the throes of her first love. She remembered how strong Valéry’s hands had been, how sweet the touch of his skin. Her body had melted in his warmth, and rebelled when she tore herself away.
Poor Phillip had known none of that passion, and now he never would.
She was certainly not the only young Englishwoman to face the prospect of lifelong widowhood. She supposed she could take some comfort in that. They would be a sisterhood, the war widows. They would recognize each other when they met. They would know how many of them lived in the villages and in the towns, childless and solitary. They would find occupations to pass the lonely years, good works perhaps, or teaching other people’s children.
Veronica sighed, smoothed the coverlet again, and got up. She had promised to have a drink with her father, and to inspect the hospital. There was still work to be done. The war wasn’t over yet. She had enough, for the moment, to think about.
As if he had only been awaiting her return to Sweetbriar, Jago died that night. Ynyr, the great horse who had lived long past his normal life span, lay down in his stall at the very same time, and breathed out his last. It fell to Veronica to find them both.
It was Oona who alerted her that something was wrong. Veronica was having coffee in the morning room, and Lord Dafydd was immersed in his paper, when Oona began a long, skin-tingling howl. Veronica put down her cup and hurried outside. At first she didn’t know where the dog was, but then she saw her, a blur of black and brown running back and forth between the stables and the garage.
“Oona! Oona, quiet!” Veronica called. Jago had declined to move into the big house, and still lived in the small apartment above the garage. With anxiety fluttering in her chest, Veronica dashed up the stairs.
Despite her nursing experience in the Sweetbriar hospital, it was a terrible shock to find Jago still and cold in his bed, his lifeless eyes fixed on something she couldn’t see. It was no less a shock to find that Ynyr had followed him.
When Veronica had closed Jago’s eyes and drawn the curtains over his window, Oona led her to the stables. There she found the big horse, still beautiful with his dappled coat and shining mane and tail, lying on his side in his stall, peaceful and unmoving. His eyes, too, were open, and resisted all her efforts to close them.
With the discipline instilled in her by five years of war, Veronica straightened, smoothed her skirt, and started toward the house to inform her father of the two passings, and to begin the arrangements that would need to be made. For Jago, of course, an undertaker and a service. And for Ynyr …
Suddenly she found herself spinning about, running back into the stable to fall to her knees in the horse’s loose box. She circled his neck with her arm. Oona, beside her, tried to lick the tears from her face. Veronica lifted her other arm to snuggle the dog close, and she held both as she cried. For a long time she stayed there, weeping out her sorrow, her shame, and her exhaustion over the cold, intractable fact of death.
It seemed impossible that life at Sweetbriar would go on more or less as usual, yet it did. Veronica persuaded her father to allow her to step into Jago’s shoes, and to take on the greater share of the duties of running the house and administering the hospital. Both needed supplies, provisions, and staff. The house itself had begun to fall into disrepair, but there was no one available to paint or plaster or replace fallen bricks. The Victory gardens needed tending. There was the post to answer, and telephone calls to direct. The work never ended. Veronica, thinking of Queen Elizabeth’s brave and steady smile, put one on her own face each morning as she left her bedroom, and tried to maintain it until she closed her door at night.
A tentative air of hope brightened the atmosphere at Sweetbriar. The wounded officers were cheered by the news from Europe. Fewer and fewer soldiers arrived, and the number of patients began to dwindle. The nurses brought a wireless into the main ward so those still bedridden could listen to encouraging pronouncements from the king and the prime minister. A fragile sense of relief was growing by the time autumn leaves swirled over the drive, but Veronica couldn’t feel it.
When she had the time or energy to feel anything, she felt sadness and confusion. She wrestled with a feeling that all her losses—Valéry, the little life that might have been her daughter, her brief marriage, poor Phillip, sweet Thomas—that all of them had served no purpose.
When she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling with disconsolate tears running down her temples, Oona would jump up to lie beside her. If she made the dog get down, Oona just leaped up again until Veronica finally conceded. She fell into the habit of letting Oona curl over her ankles as she slept, surprised by the comfort it gave her. Oona’s breathing soothed her restlessness, and the little node of life and warmth reminded Veronica that although she was lonely, she was not alone. Oona’s loyalty brightened the long succession of dark days in which Veronica fought the conviction that her life, at the age of twenty-four, was over.
10
Lord Dafydd Selwyn, maimed by the First World War, died on the day the Second ended in Europe. While the prime minister spoke, everyone in the hospital gathered around the wireless, their cheers echoing through the halls of Sweetbriar.
Lord Dafydd remained in his room, too ill to go downstairs, and refusing to let Honeychurch summon his doctor. Veronica sat with him in his darkened room, the curtains drawn, but the door ajar so they could hear the news.
When the cheering began, she patted her father’s hand. “It’s over, Papa. The Germans have surrendered.”
His eyes didn’t open. He muttered, “Again.”
“Yes.”
He took a long, rattling breath, while Veronica held hers. She jumped when he spoke again. He croaked, “Japan.”
“Yes, I know, Papa. But for us, for Europe at least, we have peace. Japan will fall.”
His fingers moved weakly in hers, and she squeezed them. He took another noisy, shallow breath before he said, “Morwen?”
“No, Papa, it’s me. It’s Veroni—”
“Morwen!” he cried, his voice louder than it had been in days. His eyes opened, just for a moment, and fixed on the door to the bedroom. Involuntarily Veronica turned to see what he was looking at. She saw nothing. She was still holding his hand, and she felt a sudden slipping sensation, as of water running through her fingers. With a gasp she turned back. Her father’s eyes were still on the doorway, but the light in them, the light of consciousness, of awareness, of life, had died. He was gone.
For an hour or more Veronica sat, dry eyed, beside her father’s body. She held his hand, though she knew he could no longer feel the contact. She imagined her mother had come to fetch him. Theirs had been a r
eal love, a lasting one. It had been far more powerful than the affection she’d felt for Phillip.
She looked around at Lord Dafydd’s spartan bedroom. His abandoned prosthesis was gathering dust in a corner. The wheelchair with its folded woolen blanket rested beside the bed. His dressing table was almost bare except for the miniature of her mother he had allowed no one to move. It all felt abandoned. Empty.
Who would sleep in this room now? Her father’s death made her the mistress of Sweetbriar, but she couldn’t imagine moving into this room with its four-poster bed and its tall windows overlooking the park. It was not a room for a solitary woman. She would be lost in it.
At length she released her father’s hand and laid it on his chest. She closed his eyes for him and pulled his blanket up to his chin, though that could hardly matter now. His face was smooth in death, with the trace of a smile on his lips. Before she went out to alert the staff to his passing, Veronica bent and placed a kiss on his cold forehead. “You were a good man, Papa,” she said. “I think you must have been a fine husband. I know you were a good father, and a brave and faithful soldier. I’m proud of you.”
Dafydd Selwyn had been spared learning what his wife was, and his daughter. That, Veronica thought, as she closed his bedroom door, was a mercy.
The next night the inhabitants of Sweetbriar gathered on the south terrace to watch London alight, not with bombs this time, but with fireworks and bonfires and a rainbow of red and green flares dropped by three Lancasters soaring above the city. The king had addressed the nation. The wireless announcer described the royal family emerging onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and the cheering crowds waving Union Jacks and dancing in the streets.
Veronica had spent a dreary day making funeral arrangements and receiving condolences. She didn’t go down to the terrace, but remained in her bedroom to watch the fireworks from her window. She pictured Elizabeth smiling down at the cheering throngs. Olive and Rose might be in the happy crowd, looking up at the queen, celebrating her triumph in the secrecy of their shared knowledge.
A Secret History of Witches Page 39