Fall of Poppies

by Heather Webb

  I flew toward him. He grabbed at me, but in the darkness he merely bumped me. I slashed, and my blade ripped down the side of his face.

  He howled, leapt back. “Give me that painting!”

  I tried to run past him to the back parlor, but he collided with me again. I fell and the painting flew from my hands, landing somewhere among the ashes. That’s when I heard the click of his pistol being cocked.

  “Light that candle, woman, and find that painting.”

  I couldn’t let him shoot me. I had to live for Hope. “I’ll do it,” I lied, grasping around for something to strike him with. “I will. You can take it.”

  I watched his form, a shadow in the darkness. He clutched the side of his face. “You stupid little—­” He raised his pistol in my direction. I dashed behind the counter. A shot rang out. He stomped after me and kicked around behind the bar until he found me. He grabbed me by the hair and pulled me up, jamming the end of his pistol under my chin.

  A terrible crash sounded. The soldier and I froze. Light filled the space. There was another crash and the front door of the tea shop splintered open, wood flying everywhere.

  I blinked in the brightness. The soldier gripped my hair harder. In walked two German officers with a battering ram. No, not German officers. Lars and Vander dressed as German officers, shiny boots and all!

  Lars strolled over to the rolled painting and picked it up. “Ah, I’ve heard rumors about this painting,” he said in polished, high German. He really was an expert linguist.

  The soldier dragged me out from behind the counter, lowering his gun to aim at the floor. “That’s mine.”

  Lars studied him. “Says who?”

  The soldier stammered.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Lars, keeping up the act. “You can’t admit who you are to your superior officer because you’re a revolutionary traitor.”

  The soldier looked upset. The gash in his cheek oozed blood. “Germany’s cause is lost.”

  Lars shook his head. “I still outrank you. Shall I arrest you and have you court-­martialed? Or,” he said, putting his hand on the butt of the pistol in his holster, “should I take justice into my own hands right now?”

  The soldier tensed, glanced at the painting first, then at Vander and the battering ram. He slowly put his gun down on the counter. “Take the painting. Call it even?”

  Lars pretended to consider it, then tipped his head. “Get out of here.”

  Just like that, the soldier ran past Vander and down the street in the glow of dawn.

  Lars turned to me, switching back to Belgian French. “Are you harmed?”

  “I—­no.”

  He handed me the painting.

  Vander walked out and climbed into the driver’s seat of an old ambulance from the clinic. Sister Wilkins must have loaned it to him. It was then I realized Vander must have been the one who told her of the men staking out the shop.

  Lars held out a packet of papers. “I threw together a few extra documents this morning for you and Hope, just in case you want to get out of town.”

  I took them. They looked stamped and official, complete with hazy identification photographs. “How did you know about the painting? That the soldier was a revolutionary?”

  “A woman Vander once loved asked him to watch over you and this place. He’s been doing it a long time. I guessed about the soldier. And I’m also guessing when I say . . . come with us.”

  I hesitated. “With you?”

  “Today is Armistice Day. There will be a cease-­fire at eleven, and the retreat will begin. You can hole up in that hidden room and pray they don’t find you and take your painting, or you can come with us.” He pointed to the ambulance. “Marie brought Hope and she packed some things for you.”

  I looked inside the ambulance. Marie held Hope on her lap in the backseat, and Hope held another lollipop.

  Lars took a deep breath. “It’s either the longing in your eyes or the name you gave your daughter, but something tells me you want to start a new life as much as I do. You can sell your painting or not, let Marie’s son sell this tea shop for you or not, just give En­gland or America a try. Vander and I have enough money to keep us afloat for a while. You can come back here if you don’t like it. There are possibilities.”

  “With you?” I asked again.

  He ducked his head, almost sheepish. “With me, or just along with me, whatever you want. We can see about that part.” He looked up, leaned in. “I just know I can’t bear to leave you here.”

  Marie hugged Hope and got out of the ambulance. She gave me an encouraging smile. Vander must have told her everything.

  I studied Lars. “Possibilities, you say. We can see about that part, you say.”

  He put a light hand on my shoulder and kissed my cheek.

  I thought about sea voyages, about museums that might wish to acquire a van Dyck, about writing honest articles, and about finding a house that Lars and Hope and I might turn into a home. I glanced at the sun’s rays peeking over the roofline. Armistice Day. A fresh start. “There are possibilities,” I said, feeling joy.

  I started walking toward the ambulance.

  Lars put his arm around me. “And there is hope for a future.”

  The Record Set Right

  Lauren Willig

  Kenya, 1980

  AT FIRST, I think that it must be a joke.

  The letter is slipped in among all the others, bills and circulars, an invitation to a friend’s child’s third marriage (on cheaper card stock, this time, than marriages one and two), the chance to claim my prize if only I call the number on the top of the page. The usual debris of the post box fans out across the pale wood of the breakfast table. And there, nestled in the middle, this, this unexpected whisper from a world away.

  I would have known the device, if not the handwriting, uncertain now with age, blurred with distance.

  I fumble for the glasses that hang on a chain around my neck. The curse of age; my eyes and my mind play tricks on me these days, conjuring ghosts in odd corners, shadows and memories. My glasses confirm what my heart already knew. The letter is from Carrington Cross. Edward’s writing has changed over the course of time—­haven’t we all?—­but it is still unmistakably his, with those crooked As, and the swoop on the d. It was, at one point, nearly as familiar to me as my own. I saw it on copybooks, on envelopes, on checks, and then, nothing, nothing at all, for the longest time. If we communicated, it was through the mutual weapon of the press, which turns the simplest statements into accusations, speculation into truth.

  Even that, even that last, feeble link, had died out long ago; who cared for a scandal of sixty years ago when there were so many new and more interesting ones in the making? The world had changed. The doings of debutantes were no longer front-­page news; the old families had ceded place to activists and visionaries—­more worthy, if less attractive.

  One knows one is truly old when the importunities of the press, clamoring for details, are succeeded by cautious letters from historians. I received those every so often, guarded inquiries into the events of sixty years ago, fumblingly prefaced, in some cases, by “would you be so kind,” in others making demands in the interest of Truth and the Historical Record. Some pretended to an interest in the larger context, the Bright Young Things, the Lost Generation, whatever it is they’re calling us these days. I was never particularly bright, nor particularly lost, but Nicholas was both, extravagantly so, and it is for Nicholas’s sake that they sidle around me, pecking and pawing, ever so cautiously working up to what they truly want to know.

  My secretary generally sends a form letter, refusing. When I die, they may have my papers. That is enough—­and should occupy at least one graduate student for some time.

  Yes, the Old World still comes calling from time to time. But never so directly. Never from Carrington
.

  I fumble with the letter opener, shaped like a dagger, made of wood. I once had a proper metal one, but my granddaughter Annabelle thinks I am less likely to hurt myself this way.

  Sensible Annabelle. They say these things skip a generation, or perhaps there is something to the argument that nurture matters more than nature. In that case, though, why did we all turn out so differently? We were, all four of us, raised in the same nursery at Carrington Cross: Daphne, Edward, and I. And, of course, Nicholas. And, yet, of the four of us, no two came out the same.

  There we all are, preserved in perpetuity on the lid of the piano that no one ever plays. Children, grandchildren, weddings, engagements, debutantes, and dotages, it’s all there, all lined up on display.

  There’s something comforting about caging memory, encasing it in silver frames and setting it out to fade, as if, with that, all the dissensions and scandals, the mistrust and misuse might fade, too, blurring away until only the happy outlines remain.

  I even have a picture of Edward on the piano, not Edward as he is now, but Edward as he was then, in 1909. We’re all there, the entire nursery, herded into place to be recorded for posterity. There’s Daphne, age eleven, bouncing with enthusiasm, one curl blown across her face, blurring her features; Edward, seventeen, sturdy in the middle, hair cut short for summer, looking sunburnt and bored. And Nicholas. Just the same age as I, but so very different in every other way. Thirteen, with a radiance even the boxy fashions of the day couldn’t hide.

  There I am, too, off to one side, part but not quite part of the group, always a little bit on the outside, even four years in.

  “An unpromising thing,” Cousin Violet liked to say, “all hair and eyes.” I believe she does me an injustice. I have seen the photographs of my younger self, the one or two that survived from those pre-­Carrington days, and I can attest the fact that I had no more or less hair than any other girl my age, pulled back at the sides and tied in the back with a ribbon. I wear high black boots and a white pinny over a dress whose color might have been anything from yellow to blue; in the photograph, it comes out as gray, as does my hair. Gray to gray, gray in sepia then, gray in reality now. I look, in black-­and-­white, like any other girl of a similar era, a little shy, perhaps, head ducked, one foot tucked behind the other, but hardly the Caliban of Cousin Violet’s imaginings.

  Although, given how it all turned out, one can’t entirely fault Cousin Violet. I can hear her now, voice low and serious as she told her eldest son, “I tell you, Edward, no good will come of it.”

  Edward was only thirteen when I came to Carrington in 1905, but he was already the man of the house.

  The envelope tears as I attempt to sever it. The Carrington writing paper is frail with age, as yellowed as my skin. I imagine Edward, alone at Carrington, sitting at the writing desk in the library, taking this page from that pile of writing paper, commissioned in his parents’ time and not replaced since. This paper in itself is history, part of my history as well as his. It looks incongruous on the light wood of my breakfast table, here, in a sunny room on a sunny day half a world away. The bright light brings out the stain on the paper, the faded green of the crest. It looks like a museum piece, something one would see on velvet in a museum. Correspondence of Sir Edward Frobisher, Bart, 1892–?

  The paper is old but the ink is fresh and new.

  “Dear Camilla,” Edward writes, and it makes my heart hurt, that, after all this time, he can’t bring himself to treat me with anything but formality.

  He built a cage for my pet mouse once, a fantastical thing, with a mouse castle and a mouse moat, which took the better part of the summer half; he danced with me at ball after ball, when we all knew how much he hated it, to keep me from the dreaded company of the wall; he even chased after me to that nightclub in Chelsea, that time when I got in above my head, but he cannot now bring himself to call me Millie.

  It had never occurred to me, back in those early days, to consider those small gestures of affection a luxury, or to think that they might someday end.

  I lift my coffee to hide the trembling in my hands. They don’t brew it strong enough for me, not anymore. I know the truth of it, that the doctor told them I must cut down, that the stronger stuff isn’t good for my heart, that it makes it race, as it is racing now. But this is my coffee, from my fields, and I’ll drink it as I like. Surely age has accorded me that much privilege. I am not the little girl I was. I am no longer the charity girl in the nursery.

  I am no longer the charity girl in the nursery, but seeing Edward’s writing brings it all back: the ragged cutouts on the fire screen, the tattered mane of Whisper, the rocking horse, the smell of barley water and milk pudding, the fall of light across the floorboards on a summer afternoon.

  “Dear Camilla,” Edward writes, and I try to picture him as he must be now, an old man, older than I am, his fingers seamed with veins, his hair thinning on his scalp, his eyes blurred.

  I can’t do it. To me, he will be forever frozen as he last was, that day at Carrington, his face flushed despite the November cold, his hair still blond then, not yet beginning to gray, rumpled around his face.

  It’s you, Millie. It’s always been you.

  I toss the letter down and turn to the television. They thought it might divert me, my children, this talking box, ­people piped into one’s home in miniature, as garishly colored and strangely exaggerated as the puppet shows we used to put on in the nursery at Carrington, although I like to think our humble productions were better scripted than the effusions one sees on the television.

  The screen flickers to life. It is a local news anchor, speaking of the capture of a gangster in Bulla Kartasi, a successful raid by the government. I have heard whispers of other things, other stories; misplaced force, rape. The anchor’s smile never wavers. Will this be the official version? Truth is written by the first to get around to it, but it never quite stays as one might want it to. Rumors do their work, leaving us in the end with a mesh of half-­truths, harder to untangle than fishing line.

  In the end, what are we left with? Supposition, conjecture, and a dose of wishful thinking.

  I silence the grinning anchor with a click of my finger. Amazing things, these remote controls. But memory isn’t as easily tamed. There is no push-­button solution.

  “Dear Camilla,” Edward writes, and I force my eyes to follow the line of his writing, less sure now than it once was. “They tell me I haven’t much time left.”

  Sixty years gone like a song, like a record on a gramophone, with the needle left to bump against the edge, around and around, the music gone. Edward would be eighty-­eight now, four years older than I. It is not so very surprising. The passage of years works as well on one side of the world as another. And, yet, I feel my eyes misting, for the boy in a sailor suit, the boy I remember. We were fond of one another once. We trusted one another. Loved one another.

  “I write to ask you to come to Carrington. I would like”—­and here, a space, as though the writer himself couldn’t quite put his thoughts into words—­“to see you before I go.”

  He can’t really expect that I’ll leave, just like that, pick up and fly around the world on a whim. I have responsibilities here, a company, even if it’s largely Henry’s these days. All right, entirely Henry’s. They trot me out for the odd meeting and for publicity purposes, in the mistaken belief that I add a touch of what the ad ­people call “class.” To them, it doesn’t matter that I was the poor cousin; they don’t care that I was the cuckoo in the nursery nest, tainted, or so it was seen, by my mother’s disastrous marriage.

  “Old World charm,” say the marketing department, and I wince, but I perform. My voice and my bearing win us sales and sales are what we seek. The world has changed and we with it.

  Yes, Henry can manage without me.

  But does Edward really believe that I’ll just pick up and go? After all thes
e years? As if I were still the one running behind, following them in their games, grateful to be included, knowing that I stood one rung down in the complicated hierarchy of the nursery, another rung down in the eyes of the world, making my curtsy in Daphne’s shadow.

  I am about to toss the letter aside—­surely, even the meanderings of politicians on the talking box is preferable to this—­when the last line catches my eye.

  “I know,” he writes, “that it is a great deal to ask. But we are the only ones left.”

  The only ones left. Cousin Violet, Daphne.

  Nicholas.

  Would Edward have sent this letter if Nicholas were still alive? I can’t be certain, but I think not.

  Whether they’re eighteen or eighty-­eight, men are all the same.

  Or perhaps not. I’m being unfair, I know. Old resentments, old hurts. Nicholas and Edward were always as different as chalk and cheese. No, not chalk and cheese. Champagne and stout, one all bubbles, the other with a hint of bitter.

  There is still something left in the envelope. It’s been folded, poorly. It makes a lump against the card stock. I draw it out and unfold it, pressing down on both sides. A crease runs down the middle, but the print on it is still legible enough. It’s an airline ticket. Nairobi to London.

  Should I be alarmed that Edward didn’t think to provide a return trip?

  No, it’s all very like Edward. Economical where Nicholas was extravagant, parsing and paring to try to keep Carrington going in an age in which it has become, increasingly, an anachronism. Rather like us. It’s no matter. I can afford my own airline ticket.

  But can I afford the rest of it?

  It’s a very long way back. Back all the way to Carrington Cross. To Carrington, in another world, another time. You can see the date in the history books. November 11, 1918. The day the world changed. Armistice. Peace, at long last.

  But it didn’t bring us peace, did it, Edward?