The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  Diana dwelled on the certainty of Brent and his inevitable return until the train chugged away from their new life together.

  She endured the crowded train ride: passengers accommodated their fellow travelers within the cramped quarters by sitting atop their luggage. She gazed out the window, fingering the wedding ring that dangled from a chain beneath her collar and admiring the patchwork quilt of fields, sheep, and trees until the sun sank behind the horizon.

  She was careful not to doze lest the carefully misnamed stations pass her by. Finally at Milton Keynes, she rose and stretched. She collected her suitcase and hatbox, then maneuvered off the train. She stepped down from the platform, jostled through the crowd, and heaved her luggage at an odd angle before she found herself on sure enough ground to take a breath.

  She tried to see herself as Brent did: a smart woman who saw the world in a new way, accustomed to sleeping in Tube shelters, reading papers, and blinking her way through the moats of rubble surrounding her beloved churches. Diana had never been certain of the moment she used the barometer of Brent’s opinion to measure herself. She had aged more than her twenty-three years even within the past few days of saying good-bye to her new husband.

  Exhausted and frozen, Diana meandered in the pitch black. During London blackouts the familiar street curves and sounds as well as Brent’s protective arm and the fact that he knew the city blindfolded served as a makeshift compass.

  Here, she stumbled over pathways and roads. A brick gate proclaimed the entrance to the manor grounds and estate, but she tripped just beyond it, landing harshly on her ankle before her eyes adjusted to light and shadows. She drew in a deep breath, a moment’s reprieve, as she set her cases on the grass. She took in a yard peppered with trees and sloping toward a glistening pond catching ribbons of moonlight.

  Diana retrieved and clutched her cases as a fox or a badger scurried not a yard from her. It was silly to be frightened. Her father always told her the most certain way to find her way back to herself in a moment of uncertainty was to ground herself in who she was. “Think, think, Diana,” he would say, “of what is at the very core of you.”

  She could hardly see where she was going. She was tired and overwhelmed. Though only an hour separated her from London, she felt its absence keenly. So she began to sing a nursery rhyme in her painfully off-key voice.

  “Oranges and lemons sing the bells of St. Clement’s.”

  She sang as her father had taught her to, when she was scared or confused or merely wanted the sanctuary of a safe, peaceful night.

  “You owe me five farthings, sing the bells of St. Martin’s.”

  She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake. She didn’t need fairy-tale rhymes. And though the German bombs had obliterated the bells of her nursery rhyme, she would never stop hearing them. Even as she navigated this unfamiliar place, nearly tripping over a patch of uneven ground. Diana stopped, raised her heel, and flicked at the scuffs on her shoes.

  She straightened her shoulders, pressing onward, her stride confident, her chin slightly raised. And she sang through the rest of the nursery rhyme. She could sing what she wanted, couldn’t she?

  A grown woman who clearly wasn’t watching where she was going when she bumped into a figure.

  “What a voice!” A woman’s alto voice cut through the darkness.

  Diana exhaled. “I . . . Sometimes when I . . .” She didn’t get far in her explanation before the woman looped her arm through hers to steady her. Diana clutched at her cases.

  “Let me help you, Little Canary. I know my way around. Even in the dark.”

  “Thank you.” Diana set her cases down, then picked them back up in a surer grip.

  “I was trying to make myself feel better and scare away any nighttime bogeymen.”

  “What’s your name, Canary?”

  “Diana So—Foyle.” She set her shoulders. “Diana Foyle. Like the bookshop on Charing Cross Road.”

  “Enchanted. I am Sophie Villiers, but Lord help you if you call me Sophie. It’s Villiers and Villiers only. Something right uncanny about minding p’s and q’s in the middle of the night where this bloody bridge has seen girls near to death.”

  Villiers grabbed Diana’s elbow and pulled her across the dark terrain. “So let’s cut to the chase. I like you and I don’t find it easy to like many people. On account of my father being rich as Midas and my not being able to trust people to like me for me. You’d think in a place like this”—Villiers wobbled before she gripped Diana tighter and steadied her feet—“it wouldn’t be like that anymore. But it’s a bloody coming-out season the way some of the girls go on. Not most of the wrens. They’re just happy not to be in a corner knitting. But I digress. You. You seem just the right sort, and you have no idea who I am.”

  “Villiers. You don’t like to be called Sophie.”

  “Right-o! You’re eons ahead. Come! Come!”

  Diana and her acquaintance sought out a door and a hallway, warm and preferable to the chill of the outdoors.

  “This is where I drop you. But I’ll see you around, Little Canary.”

  “Canary?” Diana stalled in her tracks.

  “On account of your unforgettable singing voice,” Villers said with a smile and a wink.

  Diana pushed on a door that screeched open and led into an unsettling silence. Her heels echoed loudly on the hardwood floor, and she headed into a large, empty drawing room. As she turned to leave, she caught her pale reflection, like a ghost, in the mantel mirror.

  She backtracked and found her way down the hall where a uniformed gentleman, his chest full of medals, did little but cock his head at her and present a long pen. “Sign here, please.”

  Diana was familiar with the next step after her initial training and interview. But hearing about something and actually following through with it were two different things. “What am I signing?”

  “You know.” The man’s voice rushed with impatience.

  “I merely want to do what I can. My job.” She read the Official Secrets Act again.

  The verbiage was quite eloquent speaking of King and Country. Diana only saw what kept her from Brent. One word. Another. A barrier. Then another. She couldn’t divulge any nature or manner of the work she undertook to anyone. Careless talk would cost lives. Careless talk would be seen as an act of treason.

  While her hand shook a little from the cold, a little from exhaustion, and, of course, a little from the weight of what she was promising, her heart and mind were steady. With sure intent she pressed pen to paper and signed: Diana Foyle.

  When she finally turned the key and stepped through the door of her billeted house, she watched as the last embers glowed in the hearth in the corner of the room. The branches tapped at the windowpane like fingernails in the wind. Diana opened her suitcase and retrieved a framed picture of Brent. It didn’t capture the warmth of his smile or the way his voice could wrap around her like a tight embrace. Couldn’t conjure the feel of his deft fingers stroking her cheek and down the slope of her neck to her shoulder while his eyes never left hers.

  She had pledged her secrets to Britain as Diana Foyle. But she wrote Diana Somerville over and over and over again on a fresh sheet of paper until dawn peeked through the curtains and her temporary new life began.

  * * *

  September 1945

  London

  “We’ll find a cab more easily at Fenchurch Station,” Diana said as Brent matched her pace from Byward to Seething Lane. They traversed a street Samuel Pepys often wandered, passing another felled church buried under rubble.

  In the yard uneven tombstones like gapped teeth in a slack jaw yawned at trees, shadows blending with skeletons of brick.

  “It was Dickens’s favorite churchyard in the city.” Diana grabbed tightly to Brent’s arm.

  “What’s the style?” Brent’s breath was damp at Diana’s ear. He was probably just trying to make her feel at ease, much as Gabriel Langer had in Vienna. “Well, what was the style?”


  Diana looked up and over the remains of St. Olave Hart Street. “Perpendicular Gothic.” She could almost find that same happy Diana now through the shadows, over the thrum of her heartbeat, in the whisper of leaves over the stubble of grass even as the church lay in ruins.

  “I thought it might be hard for you to see the churches like this. Before we left it was always a source of physical pain for you.” His voice, low and certain, rumbled through her. Brent shifted so she could better fit into the slope of his shoulder.

  Diana shook her head against his chest. “But St. Paul’s dome is the highest in the city. And Great St. Bart’s has never been blemished by war. Not in a thousand years.”

  “Di . . .” He searched her flushed face. “What is going on? I know you don’t want to hurt me. I need to know that I can trust you. You’re lying to me and have been for quite a while.”

  “Brent,” she whispered.

  “Where were you?”

  “I needed to do something. For a friend. If I possibly could have been with you, I would have.” She gazed up at him imploringly.

  Regardless of the secrets imprinted on her heart, the years of separation peeled back. No longer holding on to his elbow, Diana removed her hat, wilted by the length of the unending day, and swung it by her side. “You know, there’s some talk of not repairing the churches at all. Just leaving them roofless and gutted as a memorial.” She studied his profile. “I’d be sad if that happened.” She looked over to the open-walled church where she could see an arch beyond several tumbled planks.

  Diana shivered and Brent wrestled out of his long coat and tucked it around her shoulders.

  “You’ll freeze,” she protested. When Brent didn’t answer, Diana relished a moment inhaling his spicy scent over the collar. She smoothed out the sides when she felt a bulge in the right pocket.

  She slowly extracted it. “What’s this?” She stopped walking and held the dusty vial up to him.

  Brent leaned over her shoulder to look at it. “Found it by the eastern corner of All Hallows. Seemed old. Maybe that’s why those men were skulking around, eh? I read an article in The Times about people looting any last treasure from the bomb sites: a bit of a morbid gold rush.”

  Diana smoothed a bit of the grime away with her finger pad. She reached into the opposite pocket, extracted the torch, and examined the bubbled base of the bottle. A calling card. A Roman artifact. Her heartbeat escalating, Diana cloaked her expression of excitement from her husband.

  “I ask you to consult on the spiritual significance of the churches and you, Professor Somerville, may have just stumbled on to something far more valuable.”

  “A Roman antiquity?”

  Diana raised a shoulder, happy for the occupation that momentarily smoothed any animosity between them. “Perhaps a priceless one.”

  “Priceless enough that someone was searching for it? Would kill for it?”

  She reached for the second torch in her handbag. Brent’s eyes widened as he spotted the small shine of her handgun. His gaze slid from her handbag to lock with hers.

  Here she was closing him out again, yet his eyes weren’t filmed with bitterness. Wounded, sure, and clearly as heartbroken as she was by the wall she had built between them. But no resentment.

  Part of his look belonged to someone searching for a solution when everything before him was an assortment of lines that didn’t add up—like Corinthian columns. She felt something stirring then, as clearly as she did the first time she watched him take a nub of charcoal to paper and smudge a brick and a curve and a line of a church tower.

  Diana took the ensuing seconds to frame his face with her hands and draw his mouth to hers under the streetlight. She closed her eyes and fell completely. Deepening the kiss, he matched her growing fervor while tenderly holding the back of her neck with his injured hand.

  When he finally, gently, disengaged, his eyes glistened.

  * * *

  The bells of St. James still tolled even as those at St. John’s Priory and around the gate were silenced by bomb destruction. Brent had spent so long adjusting to the absence of sound when he was in hospital in Italy. The constant artillery fire, the whistle of grenades, the whir of the battles in the air above him replaced the quiet of an everyday life he had taken for granted. Heavy silence meant now and then a bird’s call would startle him with the same intensity as an air-raid siren once had.

  The night was calm as they ascended the steps to their flat. Brent turned the key in the door and stepped back to let Diana in.

  “Some things never change,” Diana said as Brent brushed past her in pursuit of the kettle. He set it on the cooktop to boil. “You immediately rush to put on the tea.”

  “Habit,” he said over his shoulder as he reached for the tea tin. “Even when it got quite terrible, I tried to substitute: treacle, hickory. I never stopped drinking it. I suppose I just like the methodology of it.”

  Moments later, he watched her clasp the cup he handed her and followed her eyes as they took in the room: the bookshelves containing her tomes on architecture and his on Greek, the worn furniture he had done his best to spruce up and dust before her return, even ironing the sofa cover. Then they settled on the sketchbook he had carelessly left open on the table. The scenes were not Brent’s usual depictions of stained glass and turrets, steeples against the London sky. Instead, fragments of the images seared behind his eyes, the ones that were ever present as he drifted off to sleep, had been captured with the same attention to detail but for ragged, tortured faces and fallen buildings.

  She sat back without saying anything, though the hand reaching for her saucer shook slightly.

  She couldn’t know what he had seen unless she entered his mind. And he knew so little from her letters of the part of the war he had left behind: ration books and air-raid sirens, Diana at the Foreign Office. He could imagine her making friends and wrinkling her nose in thought. But he could only imagine.

  He looked up and their eyes met. He didn’t want her to imagine any of what plagued him at night.

  “We got a bit of adventure out of it, wouldn’t you say?” Diana said too quickly. She set down her tea and snatched the vial Brent had found to study it in the low lamplight. “And perhaps a nest egg! We should call round Rick Mariner’s office when you go to King’s tomorrow. Are your offices still in the same corridor?”

  Brent sipped his watery tea. Frowned. Wasn’t ready to let her into his thoughts yet. “I suppose the grocer will double our tea rations now that you’re back.”

  With the exception of their wedding night and some of the subsequent day, she had yet to live with him. All he had dreamed by way of learning her small habits and quirks and inevitable annoyances could come true. She was right there beside him. And he felt further from her than he had during their separation.

  Brent passed buildings every day that had been patched up: a makeshift solution with a quick paint job that hid the cracks. He wondered how long the foundation would last.

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa, Di. It’s been a long time since I shared a bed. Took me long enough to get used to sleeping in one again at all.”

  “You’re not sleeping on the sofa, Brent . . .” Expectation beamed from her face.

  He could take advantage of the moment and close the space between them. Her eyes were so wide staring at his face, and her body was leaning forward. “I wake up sometimes, Diana. I have nightmares.”

  She furtively glanced toward the sketches, then returned her gaze to him. “Then I’ll get you water and prop your pillows.”

  He never thought he would have to guard his heart against her, but he would if it meant he would come out with some self-preservation. “There’s a lot between us right now.”

  Diana blurted a laugh. “This from the man whose first words to me on our wedding night were if I wanted a cup of tea?” She patted his knee. “Your virtue is safe with me.” Diana hopped from the sofa and stole his scarred hand.

  Brent slowl
y backed away. “I’m serious, Diana. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  A few moments later, pajama clad, Brent stretched out on the sofa and propped his pillow. There was the fear that pricked him whenever night’s shade fell. Drifting into unconsciousness often resulted in his waking up thrashing. He had once woken in a fury to find a pillow twisted in his good hand. He wouldn’t risk unintentionally hurting Diana.

  She had left the door to the bedroom just off of the sitting room open, and he imagined her staring up at the ceiling.

  He pressed his arms to his sides. He had never been more comfortably intimate with another human soul. She was a part of him. He certainly didn’t anticipate spending the first night of her return on the sofa.

  “You’re still the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” he said through the open door.

  When her voice came a moment later, he could hear the smile in it. “What form of Greek love is this, Professor Somerville? The kind where you chastely sleep on the sofa after reuniting with your estranged spouse and running from danger with a vial that may or may not be a priceless Roman artifact?”

  Brent was so unused to smiling that the muscles at the creases of his mouth almost hurt with the wide stretch. “It’s beyond definition.”

  Chapter 5

  October 1938

  St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield

  Ham and tomato on rye was more appetizing than it might have been had he not taught three lectures on an empty stomach. Midway through unwrapping the waxed paper, Brent realized he wasn’t alone in the churchyard. A curvy woman stood there, her blonde hair under a little green hat set at a jaunty angle on her head. There was a tiny button on the hat as well as a feather to flourish it, offsetting a sun blaring through a lattice of leaves in a cloistered yard off Cloth Fair.