Maggie Bright

by Tracy Groot

  “That was unnecessary, young man.” Mr. Hillary gave him a very stern look. “Perhaps it’s how you talk in America. It isn’t done here, and not to my client.” He turned to Clare. “I gave it long thought, and decided you should know. I would have wanted to.”

  “Well. It’s good to know this now, isn’t it?” said the Shrew, hands on her hips. “I had you two married off, but this is even better—his blood runs in your veins. Right, then; would anyone like some tea? I’ll just go make some. That and a few digestives seem just the thing.” On the way to the companion hatch, she gave Clare’s shoulder a quick squeeze, said quietly, “We’ll sort it out later, my dear,” and went below.

  “You need not pay back the shilling,” Mr. Hillary said magnanimously.

  “How do you like being the daughter of a two-timin’ snake?” Murray said.

  “Now see here,” Mr. Hillary began severely.

  William Percy rose. “She’s the daughter of a national hero.”

  Murray rose. “Must be you’re talkin’ about her adopted daddy. On behalf of my ma, ain’t no one callin’ my old man a hero in front of me.” He looked him up and down with clear disdain. “Who are you again? Some kinda bobby?”

  “Detective Inspector William Percy. Scotland Yard.”

  “Yeah? Why don’t you go solve a crime?”

  “Murray,” Clare began. “He’s here because—”

  “What did you say I already knew?” asked Captain John, the anxious expression from this morning on his face. “Do you know anything about my Jamie?”

  Clare hesitated, then said carefully, “It appears that the army is in desperate straits.”

  “Who is in desperate straits?” asked Mr. Hillary, twisting to have a look at everyone.

  “The BEF,” said Percy. “They are cut off and surrounded. The entire army.”

  “What?” cried Mr. Hillary, jumping to his feet. “Impossible! I haven’t read this in the newspapers! I haven’t heard it on the wireless!”

  “Belgium is all but finished. They are expected to surrender anytime. For France, it could be a matter of days.”

  “But we are allies!” said Mr. Hillary. “France would never surrender!”

  “No,” said Percy grimly. “But they will fall.”

  “Great scott! What’s to become of England? There’s no one left! Mussolini is an onerous piece of tripe, and if Roosevelt is anything like his sorry ambassador, then—”

  “Please,” said Captain John, looking from Clare to Percy. “Do you know anything of the Queen’s 9th Lancers? Only, I haven’t heard from Jamie in weeks.”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid,” said Percy. “I do know they’re converging on Dunkirk, and that a rescue operation is under way. My brother-in-law serves under Admiral Ramsay. Best stay close to the wireless. The king is sure to make an announcement soon.” To Clare, he said, “I’m going to canvass the area and ask if anyone has seen Klein.”

  “Mr. Percy, I’ve thought of something—I do have an extra cabin. It’s filled with junk, but I could clear it for you.”

  “Thanks, but I noticed the Anderson shelter at the boathouse. I’ll stay there. Better vantage. He’d have to pass by me to get to—the Maggie Bright.”

  “Wait. Who’s Klein?” asked Murray.

  “Oh, dear me,” said Mr. Hillary, shoving his handkerchief in his pocket. “I must get home. I must see to my dog. I must cycle out my Anderson perishables. Must get the mail, and I have an order at the butcher’s.” He quickly made his way off the boat, and hurried down the dock.

  “Mr. Hillary!” Clare called. “Thank you for coming!” He didn’t answer.

  “My good fellow,” Percy said to Captain John, “would you mind terribly if, for a few days, I posed about your boatyard as a hired hand? Perhaps as a fisherman?”

  “Wait, Mr. Percy.” Clare looked at his clothing. “I think a yacht owner would be far more plausible. You fit that bill much more believably. There is that lovely little Argo in dry dock, Captain John, the Chris Craft with the beautiful mahogany hull; perhaps Mr. Percy could pretend to work on it. Act as though he’s readying it for the water.”

  “I haven’t the faintest what you’re talking about,” said Captain John, bemused.

  “Yeah—what’s goin’ on?” Murray asked.

  “I’ll leave you to Miss Childs for that,” Percy said to Murray. He looked at Clare, and his eyes briefly held hers. Then he turned to Captain John. “Come, my good fellow, I will tell you what little I know. You’ll likely read about the BEF before the day is out, but there is another matter, about a man named Klein.”

  When they stepped from the boarding plank to the dock, Clare heard Percy say cheerily, “You’re an old navy sod, correct? Well, as far as the BEF is concerned, they’ve got the entire Royal Navy on the job, pulling in destroyers from everywhere. The navy to the rescue of the army—now that must be a very entertaining thought. . . .”

  With one of Maggie’s crew in the keeping of William Percy, whom she felt to be another, Clare called down the hatch, “Mrs. Shrew, can we take tea up here?” She couldn’t go below. She had to be in the bow, near the foremast where she loved Maggie most. She had to be in the open air, facing south, where the hope of England lay on a foreign, embattled shore.

  “Certainly,” the Shrew called up. “How many? I heard some go off.”

  “Three. Counting you.”

  “Righty, then.”

  For the first time, brother and sister were alone.

  “No wonder you’re good-lookin’,” Murray quipped.

  “No wonder you talk so much.” They regarded one another for a moment, and Clare blurted, “Maggie is just as much yours as she is mine.”

  “Nah—for once, my old man did the right thing.”

  “Oh, Murray—he’s done so much more than that. I don’t know where to start.” She hesitated. “Please, I would like to . . . If it’s not . . . Do you mind?” And she stepped closer. How very strange to see some of the same traits she saw in the mirror.

  Hesitating, she touched his cheek, for the set of the face was hers. The bridge of his nose, the shape of the nostrils. His eye color was a deeper brown, but the way his eyes turned downward slightly at the edges . . .

  “The worst day of my life is turning out to be one of the best,” she said.

  A charming grin came, as if he’d held it back. “Ain’t it a kick? Can’t wait to tell the Fitz. Say—what did the bobby mean? Who’s Klein?”

  “Murray, I have to know—what was the photograph that changed your friend?”

  “What?” he said, confused. “Oh—the senator. Boy, we must be related. You don’t stay on track.”

  “I hope it changed him for the good.” Her breath caught. “I saw a picture today. I have to know I’ll come out all right.”

  Eyeing her, he put his hands in his pockets and jingled change. Then he looked up at the top of the mainmast. “Come on. Let’s go forward. I like it best, there.”

  “Me too,” she said, surprised.

  They sat next to each other on the locker near the foremast, watching the east-flowing waters of the Thames.

  This young man was her brother.

  She couldn’t absorb it. It was too enormous.

  “About that picture,” Murray said. “They said I should read the papers to get ideas for my work, and I did, and maybe political satire is where the dough is but I figured out it ain’t me. So I do my own thing, but one guy got my attention when I was lookin’ into politics—Senator George Norris, Nebraska. Old Georgie pie was all isolationism and noninterventionism up ’til Shanghai. Changed when he saw a picture of a baby.”

  Erich von Wechsler’s face came laughing before her.

  “The picture’s called Bloody Saturday. You prob’ly seen it. A baby’s sittin’ all alone in bombed-out Shanghai, when the Japanese took the Chinese by surprise. It was all over in the papers and newsreels. He’s just sitting there, cryin’. All by himself.”

  “I remember.” No one c
ould forget it.

  “Norris changed after that.”

  “For the good, do you think?”

  “Some said no, some said yes. But you know what I liked? He followed his conscience. Didn’t care what any party said. I got two questions: A, what picture did you see today, and B, what about that Klein fella?” He jerked his thumb to where William Percy had gone. “Why’s he got that bobby all Eliot Ness?”

  “Who?”

  “Ness? Guy who got Capone?”

  “Oh. Capone the crime lord.” Clare’s stomach fluttered. “Capone’s a fairy godmother compared to Waldemar Klein. Murray—did you know that your father had been working with Scotland Yard? That Maggie had been used to save lives? Did you know that they’re killing defenseless children, the ones they say have no use in society? The picture is one of those children.”

  He watched a seagull alight on a dock piling. “I knew. The Fitz told me. Rocket Kid saved ’em.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gave a short chuckle. “People thought I stopped drawing. I got a whole stack of unpublished strips where Rocket Kid and Salamander save them kids, and Hitler and the Nazis get theirs, and I think it’s some of my best work. But guess what? It’s all fiction.”

  She shrugged. “You try to make things right, with your work. What’s so bad about that?” She muttered darkly, “‘It’s all fiction.’ Nonsense! I see shades of my uncle in that.”

  Murray went still. “Say that again.”

  “I see shades of—”

  “The other.”

  And she said it clearly and with all her heart to make the words sail home: “You try to make things right with your work.”

  Murray shot up as if propelled by what Clare now saw in his face, excitement made golden by the sun’s waning rays. He paced a few steps and put his hands in his pockets, withdrew them and rubbed his fingers together, looked at them as if expecting to see something.

  “I gotta draw.”

  “But—I have so much to tell you!”

  “Tell me while I draw. I hear best that way.” He ran for the hatch and swung below.

  Murray sat in the curve of the bowsprit with a drawing pad propped on the rail. He’d shimmied easily into the spot as if long accustomed to doing so, and Clare could easily see him younger, and sunburned, and could imagine a presence in the stern watching the boy draw, a man who was her own father.

  The only presence behind her was that of Mrs. Shrew, who sat on the locker near the skylight of Murray’s cabin, holding a cup of tea. She was the one who watched Murray now.

  “Murray,” Clare began.

  “Hang on, hang on.” He finished some strokes, put in some shading, and pulled away from the drawing, tilting his head. A grin came. He stuck the pencil behind his ear, slid from the bowsprit to the deck and brought the drawing pad to Mrs. Shrew.

  She studied it—and gasped. “That’s how you intend to bring back Salamander?”

  Murray stuck his hands in his waistband, grinning, while she carried on, flapping her hand and saying, “Oh, bravo!” Then he eased the pad from her grasp and climbed back into the bowsprit. He touched the pencil to his tongue, hesitated, then began to draw.

  “Where did you come up with that?” said Mrs. Shrew, wiping tears.

  “I think my editor’s gonna love it.”

  “Perhaps Salamander is the one paddling the banana boat, and the ray gun is actually his paddle,” the Shrew suggested. “What do you think? And then—no. No, don’t listen to me. I will not interfere. Worldwide implications, right here on this deck. I shall get my knitting, and remain calm. Everyone—give him space.”

  “Murray, have you heard of a place called Grafeneck Castle?” Clare asked.

  The pencil hesitated.

  It resumed.

  “You hear of Hadamar?” Murray asked, not looking up from his drawing pad. “Brandenburg?”

  “What’s this?” The Shrew looked from Murray to Clare. “What are they?”

  “Killing places,” said Clare faintly.

  “Oh, not just any old killing places,” Murray said, now making broader strokes. “They’re killing kids. Deaf kids. Retarded kids. Blind kids. Kids born with bad spines. Sometimes before they kill them, they do research on ’em, see. Can’t miss a chance for science.” He pulled back from his drawing, and tilted his head. He turned the pad about to face Mrs. Shrew. “Whaddya think?”

  Mrs. Shrew stared at him, frozen. She glanced at the drawing. “Brilliant. What do you mean, they’re killing children? Who is?”

  Murray resumed drawing. “Nazis.”

  “It’s what the BV told me,” said Clare quietly. “And later, Mr. Percy and Mr. Butterfield, from Scotland Yard.”

  Mrs. Shrew was speechless.

  “Murray’s father sailed Maggie Bright four times from Holland, saving five of those children. Five lives, saved. One day I will carve that number on Maggie’s foremast as a record of her exploits.” She took hold of the locket. “Murray—I have something awful to tell you. Your father was murdered by a man named Waldemar Klein.”

  The pencil stilled.

  “My old man died of a heart attack.”

  “No.” She let go the locket. “He refused to give him that packet of documents. He was . . . tortured for it.”

  “See, that’s what I’m sayin’, Clare. Rocket Kid can’t make that right.” He suddenly winged the drawing pad into the water, the pencil after it.

  He slid to the deck and said brightly, “I’m starvin’. How ’bout I get cleaned up and take you girls out for dinner? You ain’t got Prohibition here, do ya? We’re still smartin’ over that.”

  He made his way past, and went below.

  The two women watched the drawing pad in the water. A gentle eddy caught it, turned it lazily about, and slowly bore it east.

  “Tell me everything, my dear,” said Mrs. Shrew quietly.

  AFTER A FEW DAYS IN the company of these men, Jamie had a fair idea of who ran the group, and it wasn’t the ranking man by three weeks, Lance Corporal Grayling.

  Their squad consisted of Grayling at the top, then Balantine as his right-hand man, then Baylor, Curtis, and Griggs, and now Jamie and Milton. If Grayling gave a direct order, he expected it to be obeyed, but he didn’t give those often enough. Balantine, in Jamie’s mind, had the sort of leadership qualities that made him the best soldier of the lot; but exactly because of this, he supported Grayling. Jamie discovered that Baylor, despite his lack of soldiering qualities, was the one he most liked to be around—in part, because of the way he looked out for the captain. Curtis was the sort of guy with the unfortunate personality of admiring whoever dominated, and the person who dominated this group wasn’t Grayling; it was Griggs.

  Because Griggs talked the most, because his annoying opinions were always assertive, because he was handsome and sometimes funny and carried himself with supreme confidence, because he was often right in his assessment of situations (maddeningly so), all seemed to defer to him whether they liked it or not. But Griggs was finally challenged when Jamie and the captain came along.

  Baylor had brought out this observation to Jamie when, the previous night, they’d found shelter in a barn, and Griggs went on first watch.

  “He doesn’t like the captain because he’s afraid he’ll give us away,” Baylor had said. “Of course, the captain says things he can’t understand, and that provokes outrage because nobody can be smarter than Griggs. But he likes you even less, partly because you take care of the captain, partly because you don’t give way to him. I must say, Elliott—it’s good to have someone knock him off his perch a bit. Arrogant twit.”

  Today they moved through fields and meadows, taking as direct a route north as they could without taking the roads—yesterday they’d had a narrow miss when a Stuka appeared out of the bright blue, diving with a hellish onrush of shrieking whistles, to pull up and strafe the road at car height. Bullets sprayed the area, and one shot through Curtis’s kit bag; it was as close an enco
unter with death as any of them had faced, and all agreed with Griggs that they should abandon the roads and strike cross-country for the sea. Slower, but safer.

  “What in me is dark, illumine. What is low, raise and support.”

  “I think that’s his favorite,” Baylor now observed, walking behind the captain. “He says it a lot.”

  “That one, the most,” Jamie agreed. But today he didn’t like the way he’d said it. The captain’s voice had lost a lot of its pep.

  “And I will place within them as a guide my umpire conscience,” the captain said thinly, “whom if they will hear, light after light well used they shall attain, and to the end persisting, safe arrive.”

  “He really says something, you know?” said Baylor. “I read the book because I had to, but now, I want to.”

  To the end persisting, safe arrive. Jamie saw in his mind an insistent Captain Jacobs in a moonlit patch. A captain who was stronger than this.

  The squad of seven men marched sometimes through fields of knee-high corn or waist-high wheat, sometimes through woods and meadows, often through the backyards of abandoned homes, and once through a potato field, where they dug up new potatoes and ate them raw. Bray Dunes, and the sea where they were supposed to find it, was much farther away than they had originally thought; they were two days out from the town where Jamie and the captain hooked up with the five.

  “From imposition of strict laws to free acceptance of large grace, from servile fear to filial, works of law to works of faith.”

  “Oh, just shut it, will you?” Griggs called from the back. “Annoying sod.”

  “Here it comes,” Baylor muttered. Over his shoulder he said, “I don’t know what your problem is. You can barely hear him from there.”

  “I think he’s making it all up,” Griggs announced. “He’s probably an actor. This is his big chance to show off.”

  “Just let him talk,” Baylor warned, for Jamie’s ears only.

  “It’s brilliant, really. Make everyone think you’ve gone daft by quoting a bunch of fancy lines, and there’s your ticket home.” Curtis laughed.

  “Why is he such an idiot?” Jamie said, not for Baylor’s ears only.