The Way to London

by Alix Rickloff

  “That’s rubbish. You left when I specifically told you to stay put.”

  “I was hungry as a kicked dog and you were taking ages. So I decided to poke about to see what was what.”

  “And?”

  “I found a bang-up shop selling fish and chips just on the corner. Here, I saved you some.” He held out a greasy cardboard box covered with a paper napkin.

  “How did you pay for it? You only had a few pennies.”

  His grin was triumphantly wicked.

  “Please tell me you didn’t steal that man’s half crown.”

  “The ugly old sod deserved it for talking to you like that. Mam says a true gentleman treats ladies with respect. Course she likewise says true gentlemen are rare as hen’s teeth, but she has hope.”

  “Your mother is a wise woman and Mr. Emory had the manners of a baboon, but that doesn’t make it right. And what’s worse? You lied to me. You looked right at me with that wobbly chin and those great cow eyes and lied to me and, fool that I am, I fell for it.”

  “I had to lie. You’d have made me give the money back otherwise.”

  “Of course I would have.”

  “Then we wouldn’t have fish and chips.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I had to take the money, Lucy. I knew it was wrong and I shouldn’t have done it, but it was only a half crown, and I might need it just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  He scuffed the toe of his shoe in a crack in the paving, his narrow shoulders hunched in a defensive shrug.

  “Bill? In case of what?”

  He glanced up, his eyes like two great hollows in the pale disk of his face. “In case Mam isn’t there when I get home.”

  Lucy led the way down the street assisted by Bill’s torch, which she’d shielded with the napkin off the fish and chips. The last thing she needed was to draw the attention of a nosy air raid warden. The small pool of greasy yellow lit a road pocked with craters and scattered with trash and bits of rubble. A breeze moaned through a broken window and set a metal door to banging. A piece of torn sheeting flapped white like a ghostly arm beckoning to them.

  Bill pressed closer to her side. “Aren’t we going back to the station, miss?”

  “A bomb’s hit the line and the train’s stuck here until tomorrow morning at the earliest. We’ll find a detour around the damaged track and pick up the train again closer to London.”

  “Was there dead people? Did a train blow up? I’d’a liked to seen that. Ned Hollis saw a dead person once. He was with his mam in Padstow when a bomb fell on a house. Killed a man and a baby. Ned boasted that he saw them taking the bodies away. I don’t know if I believe him. Ned Hollis is a awful liar.”

  “What bloodthirsty creatures you and Ned Hollis are.”

  They rounded a corner. Soot and dust choked the air. Bill pulled the collar of his sweater up over his mouth. They passed a building buckled on its smashed foundation, its windows blown out. Another had toppled into the empty lot beside it, plaster and bricks and lathing all jumbled up with an old steel sink, a pair of upholstered chairs, a splintered bed frame.

  She’d heard about the raid on the wireless. Snug in her room at Nanreath Hall, she’d barely paid the boring BBC newsman any mind as he reported on scores dead and hundreds injured and displaced. Instead, she’d snapped over to hear Harry Roy and his orchestra play their hearts out from London’s Embassy Club while she polished her nails. Now, surrounded by the broken, ugly ruins of bombed-out buildings with the specters of those who’d died hovering at the edge of her imagination, the war seemed closer than it had at any moment since the Strathleven had been struck.

  To fight the bleak turn of her thoughts, she hummed the bouncy refrain from “She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor.”

  “Look ’ere, Lucy.” Bill held up a doll in a frilly pink organza dress. Her porcelain face had been smashed, leaving only one sightless blue eye and a few strands of blond hair that streamed from the crushed head in a sodden tangle.

  “Put it down, Bill.”

  “But—”

  “I said put it back. Now!”

  “All right, miss.” Bill set it down at the curb. Lucy grabbed his hand and they hurried on. At the corner, he glanced back over his shoulder. “You suppose they’ll come back for it?”

  Lucy took a breath, feeling the scratch of cinders and ash in her throat. “No, Bill. I don’t suppose they will.”

  The raids had left the city skittish and on edge. The streets were nearly empty. An ambulance headed to a call. Two fire wardens made their rounds. A soldier pedaled by on his bicycle.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Bill suggested, a slight wobble to his voice. “It might be better to wait for the repairs. It’s terrible black out here, and who knows how long the batteries will last in the torch? If it dies, we’ll be blind as beggars.”

  “You wanted an adventure, didn’t you?”

  Bill nodded doubtfully.

  “Well, you got one.”

  High above them came the growl of bombers. Lucy tensed, but the sound soon faded back into the night and they were left once again with only the crunch of their shoes on the road and the labored hiss of their breathing.

  “You suppose they’re headed to London?” Bill asked quietly.

  “I doubt it.”

  “The Sayres said the cities are what’s getting hit worst, and London’s the biggest city of them all. They said they’d not be surprised if it was bombed flat before the end.”

  “The Sayres are a bunch of cranky old codgers who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “That’s true,” he replied, adding sadly under his breath, “but that don’t mean they’re wrong.”

  By now, her shins ached, the court shoes that had looked so darling when she saw them in the store blistered her heels, and she felt as if she’d stashed anvils in her damned traveling case. As the thick air became a misting drizzle that clung with wet fingers to her skin, her zeal for hoofing it waned. Another of her bad ideas? She was racking up quite a list so far.

  “Do you have a mam, Lucy?”

  “I didn’t emerge fully grown from a clamshell,” she said, more sharply than she intended. “Of course I have a mother.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Lucy swapped the case to her other hand. It gave her pause to consider. “Glamorous and witty and everyone who knows her falls in love with her.”

  “She sounds lovely. My mam’s got a dimple in her chin and hair the color of caramel, all soft and shiny. Mostly she wears it up under a kerchief on account of work, but on Saturday nights, she does it up right. Sometimes she lets me comb it out for her after she’s had her bath. She says I have the gentlest hands, better than one of them West End hairdressers what charge a whole shilling just for a trimming.” His voice grew soft with memory. “I used to love Saturday nights.”

  “In a few days, you’ll be back home with your mother. Maybe in time for Saturday night.”

  “What about you? Where’s your mother?”

  Perhaps because so much of their lives had been spent apart, the truth of Amelia’s death was easy to push aside. It was an absence she recognized. A void long callused over. She was able to answer Bill without any hint of darker emotion. “I don’t know.”

  Bill put his hand in hers, glancing up at her through wet hair. “Don’t you worry, miss. We’ll find my mam and yours. You wait and see. It’ll be all right once we get to London.”

  That was supposed to be her line, but she offered him a quick smile of thanks and when Bill sought to let go, she found herself holding on just a moment longer.

  “If the trains ain’t running, does this mean we have to walk there after all?” Bill asked.

  A van passed them before pulling into a gated loading yard. Lucy picked up her pace. Maybe her luck was turning after all. “Not if we can hitch a ride.”

  Chapter 10

  It was a small brown-and-white scrap of a dog with ea
rs that pricked and a curious nose constantly on the prowl for new scents. Currently, it was engaged in searching out the jam roll Lucy had wrapped in a handkerchief and stuffed in her handbag for later, its tail wagging like a metronome beating out bebop time. Bill giggled—he actually giggled—as the dog turned its attention to him, its little tongue licking him in a frenzy of excitement. For a moment, the streetwise toughness slipped, and he was a little boy.

  His face was almost pleasant when it wasn’t screwed up in that jaw-jutting wary scowl of his.

  “Let me have a look at that map of yours.”

  Bill fished it from his knapsack. Lucy propped it against the delivery van’s steering wheel to study. The paper smelled like pilchard and the pencil marks were faint, but the important bits were all marked. The train headed north toward Bristol before turning east. A more direct route would be to head for Salisbury and from there east again to London. She traced a path through villages and towns: Honiton, Charbury, Yeovil. She paused, following her finger back the way it had come—Charbury . . . Charbury . . .

  Where had she heard that name before?

  “Here, you!” The driver’s-side door was wrenched open with a meaty fist, and a blunt round face, pockmarked and flat nosed, squinted in at her. “What do you think you’re doing mucking about in my van . . . and with my dog?”

  At the first syllable, the dog left off biscuit hunting, his bright button eyes sparkling with excitement. “We’re not mucking about,” Lucy replied tersely, snapping off Bill’s torch and folding the map. “We’re waiting—for you. We began to despair you’d ever come back. Your pup here was growing quite antsy, the little beggar.”

  The driver jerked a thumb. “Out.”

  His wrestler’s body spoke of a lifetime of hard labor. He’d no neck to speak of and his forearms under the grease-stained coat he wore were like tree trunks. He looked to be anywhere between thirty and fifty. His light brown hair was thin but held no touch of gray, and his face, while jowly and weathered, was as yet unlined. She’d need to tread carefully with this one or they’d be in front of a magistrate by dawn.

  She tried to look irresistible. Hard to completely nail with Bill giggling beside her and the dog’s tail wagging in her face, but she did her best. “We were hoping you’d give us a lift. It’s an awfully nasty night and we’ve got a long way to go. It would be jolly nice of you, Mr. . . .”

  “Teague, though it’s no business of yours.”

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Teague.”

  Just then, finished with its cleaning of Bill’s face, the dog swung round to Lucy, its paws on her shoulders, its slobbery tongue scraping across her cheeks like a soggy flannel.

  “Uh . . . dog breath,” she groaned, trying to push the interloper away. “Yuck.”

  Bill laughed. “He’s taken a shine to you, Lucy. Dogs know who’s a right one and who’s not. Don’t they, guv?”

  The dog crawled into her lap, curled into a brown-and-white ball, and stared up at the driver with big sad eyes. She sighed. It was impossible to exude an aura of glamour covered in dog hair.

  Mr. Teague’s belligerence relaxed. He even managed a tight smile. “Aye, dogs know the truth about a person, all right.” He slid into the cab beside her and slammed the door. “Off the young lady, Dex. You’ll ruin her nice frock.”

  The dog whined but didn’t budge. Its soft heavy weight on Lucy’s thighs was almost reassuring. She ran a hand through its wiry fur. “He can stay. My frock is a lost cause at this point anyway.”

  “Right, then. My run is to Honiton and on up through Cullompton way if that’s where you’re headed.”

  “That will do splendidly for a start. Thank you.”

  “Thank Dex. If he vouches for you, that’s good enough for me.”

  He started the van’s engine and pulled out with a great grinding of gears, managing to jolt his way through every rut until Lucy had to brace a steadying hand on the dashboard to keep herself from falling onto the floor. The dog merely yawned as if used to this sort of rough travel.

  They hit the edge of town and the empty A30, but the van’s shuttered headlamps barely illuminated more than a few feet of macadam, making anything over ten miles per hour impossible. Lucy gritted her teeth to keep herself from stomping on the accelerator.

  “Where you two headed?” Mr. Teague asked, breaking the silence.

  “London,” Bill piped up before Lucy could come up with a suitable lie.

  “What you want to go to that dirty place for? As likely to rob you blind as give you the time of day.”

  Bill bristled, and Lucy clamped a hand over his mouth before he took it into his head to defend Bethnal Green’s dubious honor.

  “I have a job offer,” she supplied, “but if I don’t get there fast it’ll be gone.”

  “You never said nothing about a job.” Bill looked as if he wanted to question her further. She quickly changed the subject.

  “Your dog is an interesting breed, Mr. Teague,” she said, scratching the mutt under the chin. “Terrier of some sort?”

  Mr. Teague smiled broadly, taking his hand off the wheel long enough to pat the dog on the head. “I found old Dex half-starved in a ditch two years ago. Suppose somebody decided what with the war, it was too much trouble keeping a pet. Just dropped him off on the side of the road to fend for himself.”

  “That’s horrid.”

  “Yeah, well, better than what most of ’em got, isn’t it? Millions of the poor blighters done in on account of the invasion panic. Makes you sick thinking of John Bull doing such a black thing to a poor innocent animal, but there you are . . . the world goes mad in wartime.”

  The cab was warm, the windscreen foggy with their steaming breath. The springs in the seat poked Lucy’s legs and there was a decided odor of wet dog and sour milk. Bill dozed, his head on her shoulder, his mouth, at last, blessedly closed. Fields and farms flashed past, their shapes picked out in black on black against the midnight ink of the sky. The moon hung low behind them, a pale disk in the rearview mirror.

  “You have a dog growing up, miss?” Mr. Teague asked, breaking the companionable silence.

  “My mother thought they were too much trouble. She didn’t want the responsibility.” Lucy dug her fingers into Dex’s thick fur. “Didn’t want to be tied down.”

  The van rattled over a cattle grid and into a village, houses closer together. Strings of shops. Teague turned into a side street and parked outside a dairy. Men were already hard at work loading and unloading trucks. Lucy roused Bill, who yawned and stretched. They climbed out of the cab; the rain had stopped but the chilly air brought her back to the present like a slap to the face.

  “Thank you for the ride. We can walk the rest of the way from here.”

  “Are you sure? Those clouds are thick. Rain’s not through yet, I’m thinkin’.”

  “We don’t melt, and we’ve a long way to go yet.”

  Teague was being summoned by a man with a clipboard. The loading dock was crowded with milk cans ready for transport. “Right, well, careful as you go, miss. Not everyone who’ll offer a lift is as nice or as respectable as I am.”

  She gave Dex a final pat on the head and in a moment of weakness kissed him on his cold wet nose. “I’m neither nice nor respectable so I’m sure whoever it is, we shall get along swimmingly.”

  They made their way east as best they could. Away from town, thick hedges rimmed the winding road. A wooden gate stood open to a gravel lane. A path led away through a leafy fern-scented wood. “Why’s the countryside so bleedin’ quiet? And dark,” Bill complained.

  “Everywhere is dark these days, but go ahead and turn on your torch if it makes you feel better.”

  The narrow beam of light wobbled ahead of them as they walked. No road signs to offer them guidance. She couldn’t even use the moon to mark her way. Clouds covered the sky, a wet wind pushing at their backs, rain threatening to return. The jam rolls were devoured. She smoked her last cigarette.
r />   “What did you mean about finding a job in London, miss?”

  She’d had a feeling Bill would bring that back up. For some reason she couldn’t explain—even to herself—she found herself prevaricating instead of answering the question directly. “I couldn’t tell him I was helping you run away, could I? It was the first thing that popped in my head.”

  Bill fell silent as if mulling this over. Then he gave a quick little laugh. “I’d not have thought it about someone what has the gingerbread you do, but you’re a right swindle, Lucy. The boys at the Lion would think tops of you.”

  “I’m flattered—I think. But we should probably come up with a better story in case anyone else asks.”

  The lane they followed was thick with wet grass and rabbit holes that dragged at their legs and turned their ankles. Twice they made wrong turns that left them stranded. The rain resumed, soaking their clothes and making every footstep a squelchy dreary mess.

  “Damn and blast,” Lucy finally said when they’d come to their third dead end. “We’ll be drowned if we stay out here much longer.”

  Bill swept his torch in front of them. Off to their right was a gravel track lined by a double row of elms. “Look. A farm. I always wanted to sleep in a barn.” He took off running, and Lucy could only follow as fast as she was able, muttering under her breath the entire way about inconsiderate children with no respect for their elders.

  The track widened as it neared a wooden gate opening onto a farmyard. “What d’ya think, Lucy?”

  “I think we need to find somewhere out of the way. All of these buildings are too close to the house.”

  They continued along a grassy swale that led into a wood. A church stood on a far rise, but down below the copse was thick and the way looked little traversed. “There.”

  A small stone-and-timber shed set into the side of a hill. As she predicted, it smelled, but the odor was faint and not unpleasant, and, best of all, it was dry. An old vine-covered tractor sat alongside rusty broken bits of mechanical equipment and ancient farm machinery. Rungs nailed to a pair of wooden beams led to a small loft above.

  Bill poked his head over the side. “Look at this, Lucy.”