Mr. Stephenson had sort of a sad face with a little scar by his mouth. He and Big Bill were quite good friends and they both adored Winnie and Danny. As we passed round Auntie’s special mashed potato casserole, Big Bill wanted to know about the portraits of Captain Bathburn and his family on all the walls of the dining room.
“Every night, that family watches us having our dinner,” I said, taking a great bite of gravy and potato. “I should imagine they must be terribly hungry after all these years.”
“Our Flissy is very outspoken,” said The Gram. “If you think she’s reserved and still very British, well, think again.”
“But she’s completely quiet when it comes to certain things,” said Uncle Gideon in a soft voice.
“That’s wonderful,” said Little Bill, smiling. “Of course she is.”
I looked down at the tablecloth. It was The Gram’s very best one. There were angels and lilies and butterflies woven into the creamy white, polished fabric. Butterflies. Yes, I was quiet about everything. Perhaps too quiet. I remembered the hot iron rolling over the invisible ink on the paper, the words, foggy and blurry, coming up out of nowhere. Derek’s father too seemed to circle round my thoughts, casting his own moving shadow. As I watched the candles burning in their silver holders, a terrible thought fluttered through my mind. Was Derek’s father the Gray Moth?
Just then Derek kicked his foot against mine, saying, “Flissy’s a trooper. She knows how to keep a secret.” I looked up at him and smiled. Then my eyes fell back to the tablecloth and I counted the butterflies repeated and repeated in the weave of the pattern all across the table.
After dinner Big and Little Bill played a special game of dominoes while Derek and I looked on. They used the old carved whalebone dominoes that had once belonged to Captain A. E. Bathburn. Big and Little Bill took the game terribly seriously and tried to beat and outfox each other every step of the way. Derek and I were sent off to bed before the game was finished and Big Bill and Little Bill were both still gnashing their teeth at each other in a jovial sort of way when I had to say good night. I was sad to go because they had been quite good fun, really, but The Gram was very firm about bedtime and school and all that rot.
“He isn’t called Wild Bill for nothing,” Mr. Stephenson was just saying as my foot hit the top step. “He’s thrown caution to the wind this time. I’ve got you now, for sure, Wild Bill.”
It was hard to sleep with the lights on downstairs, with the laughter and jokes and the sweet tobacco smoke that drifted up the hall. Soon Aunt Miami came in from her date with Bobby Henley. She had gone out after dinner and her skirts rustled in the darkness as she laid her cold, silky coat on the chair next to my bed. It brought with it the smell of the outdoors and the chill of an evening out and all that I was missing as I lay there, pretending to sleep.
Auntie moved round the room in the darkness like a ghost. Finally, I heard her bed sag as she climbed in. All the beds in the house had once belonged to the captain’s family. They were called rope beds and they didn’t have box springs as modern beds did. Instead, under the mattress there were ropes to hold the mattress up, which you tightened every night with a key that went into a keyhole in the bedpost. You turned the key and the ropes tightened. Uncle Gideon told me that was where the saying sleep tight came from. Because it was too dark and Auntie didn’t want to wake me, she didn’t tighten the ropes as she usually did and so her mattress would slump a bit that night.
Lying there, hearing Uncle Gideon roaring and laughing away, I could tell Little Bill was now beating Big Bill, whose title in Washington was Major General William Donovan. The Gram had got on the side of Big Bill and was offering him advice. But it was no use; Little Bill triumphed. When it was over, they had Nescafé coffee and talked about how the troops overseas loved this new instant coffee and how it was much easier for the army cooks to prepare. I could hear the tinkling sound of coffee cups against china saucers and it was a lovely, cozy noise, one I was used to in England. But then The Gram said, “Well, I think they are all asleep now and we can go on up and begin.”
Upon hearing those words, I am sorry to say I sat bolt upright in bed. Auntie was already asleep across the room. Her form had become a dark mountain of blanket folds and peaceful breathing. I blinked my eyes. The door to our room was open and the light from the hall fell across our rug in a comforting, homey way, but I was not to be comforted. Not tonight. I intended to listen to all that was said, every word.
In a while I heard them climb the stairs without speaking. I saw them walk silently past my room, Mr. Donovan carrying his projector and briefcase. Mr. Stephenson was carrying a box and some papers. I waited. The Gram led them into the gymnasium. And then she closed the door. Then I heard only Auntie’s breathing and the silent shifting of Captain Bathburn’s old house.
Soon, I climbed from my bed and tiptoed out of the room. In the hall I stood in my nightdress, looking at the crack of light under the door. The Gram always complained that this house didn’t have enough closets. There wasn’t any place to put our clothes. Uncle Gideon then would say, “Well, back in 1854, they didn’t have very many clothes, Mother. You had a good suit or a good dress and an everyday outfit and that was all.”
“Well, Miami would have surely perished back then without her enormous wardrobe,” The Gram would answer. “That daughter of mine has more fancy dresses than the Queen of the May!” I was thinking about closets just then because there was a closet in Derek’s room. It was long and narrow and covered in pine paneling and led to a second door, which opened onto the gymnasium. It was a shared closet but we called it a secret passageway. I needed to be in that passageway right now with the door slightly ajar. I needed to walk right into Derek’s room while he slept and wake him up.
Anyone who has ever been in love before with someone as dashing and moody and charming and changeable as Derek Blakely would know that it would be very hard indeed to enter his room while he slept. Wasn’t it improper? Winnie would surely scold me when she came back. Would Derek growl at me for waking him? Would he think me dreadful? I felt shy and awkward and nervous and yet at the same time I felt itchy and jumpy and jittery and absolutely certain I needed to go in that passageway. Now.
And so I did what all British children do when they are in a pinch. I closed my eyes and I plunged ahead. I turned Derek’s doorknob and I stepped quietly into his moonlit room. I shut the door behind me.
I stood in the center of the room. In the moonlight, Derek’s face on the pillow looked to be made of porcelain or marble, polished and fine like a statue of a beautiful sleeping boy. I wished then that all his troubles would be gone, that the father he loved would truly be his real father, forever and ever, so that Derek no longer would feel an emptiness, a loss, and a longing. “Derek,” I whispered. “Derek, wake up.”
I cannot imagine what Derek thought when he opened his eyes, with the moon’s light falling across the room in a long, dreamlike shaft and me standing in the midst of it in my white nightdress. Derek looked at me and I looked back at him in a very shy way. “I’m dreadfully sorry to disturb you, but we absolutely must go in your closet immediately,” I said. Then I threw my hand over my mouth and said, “Oops, I mean, what I mean is, um, I have to hear what is going on in the gymnasium just now. They’re all in there, Derek. They’ve got the movie projector with them. Get up, would you? I mean, I do hope you’ll excuse me but I need to look from your closet door into their room.”
Wrapped all in silence, Derek slipped out of bed, in an almost magic way, as if the statue of the sleeping boy had suddenly come to life. He was wearing the cowboy pajamas that The Gram had made for him for Christmas. It had been my idea. The Gram and I had found the flannel fabric at the dime store in Bottlebay. I had picked the tan fabric with red-and-white horses and cowboys wearing ten-gallon hats. The Gram could sew anything. I had helped her stitch the buttonholes. I had learned to do that in school in England.
Derek moved without a sound across the room.
He went right for his closet door, opened it gently, and we both crawled down the long space to the other door, which was already open a crack.
My heart sank as we sat there together on the floor, looking into the dark gymnasium and listening to the rattle and click of the film as it ran through the projector. On the screen in the long room, the film brightened, halted, and became shadowy and dark and then brightened again. There was a German soldier, an officer walking towards the camera. His face flickered by. He was getting in a car. A Nazi flag fluttered behind him.
Mr. Stephenson said, “Okay, now, this is Colonel Helmut Ludswig, a Gestapo officer, who will be taking over as head of the prison on February second. And as you can see, it’s rather remarkable. We were quite excited when we realized how much he resembles you, Gideon, with the exception of the mustache, of course. You’ll start growing your mustache soon, I hope?”
“Yes,” said Gideon.
“So you will be posing as this man. You will arrive on February first, a day early, unexpectedly, at his prison post in Limoges. The man in charge, who will be leaving, is the only man who has met Colonel Ludswig face-to-face and knows what he actually looks like. Therefore we must make sure this man is off duty the night that Gideon arrives. Perhaps a woman agent of ours could invite him out to dinner.”
“We already have someone in place for that job,” said The Gram.
“Excellent,” said Big Bill. Now there were photos of the large, dark-looking prison. Nazi soldiers stood at attention outside the gate. “We’ll work it all out in advance. The whole procedure down to the smallest detail. We are building a simulation of the prison now. The movie-set designer from California is working on it. When you come up to the facility outside of Toronto, it should be all finished.”
I sat back against the wall. I held my hand over my mouth because I was afraid I might shout out. A terrible tornado was ripping through my heart. Then Derek pulled gently on my arm. “Hush,” he whispered. “Shhh.”
I was on my knees but I fell to my face. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear any more. Then Derek tugged on my sleeve, pulling me back through the passageway. As soon as I was in his room, I dropped forward, facedown on the floor again. My tears fell on the wooden surface, my mouth pressed against the polished pine. “Why is Uncle Gideon going to a prison?” I whispered. Derek closed the closet door. I could feel more tears and sobs threatening to come up out of me in a howling sort of way.
Derek put his hand on the back of my head as I lay there. “Oh, Fliss, don’t think about it,” he said. “Don’t worry, Gideon will get them out.”
“Get who out?” I said, sitting up and shaking my head back and forth. “Who do you mean? Who?” I put my hands over my ears again.
“Flissy,” said Derek, “listen to me.”
“No, no. Leave me alone. You don’t mean Winnie and Danny. You don’t mean that Winnie and Danny have been caught? Are they in prison, Derek? Don’t say that. Don’t say one more word!”
The next morning, Big and Little Bill and Uncle Gideon were full of jokes. They were calling my father Colonel and asking him where his mustache went. “Lost it on the way to the races, did you, Colonel?” Big Bill said, slapping him on the back. We all went out on to the front porch before breakfast to see the sun rise. I hadn’t wanted to. Everyone kept making jokes but nothing seemed funny to me at all.
Even when Sir William Percy came flying in for some food, I wasn’t cheered. “You see, Gideon,” said The Gram, “I told you that seagull would become a nuisance.” When Sir William Percy took a liking to Little Bill and put his head in Little Bill’s jacket pocket and pecked at the top of his fountain pen, I still didn’t laugh. My beautiful Winnie and Danny were in prison in France. After all this waiting and hoping and wondering, now I knew. I knew and it hurt. It hurt more than any of the other hurts I had been feeling. It had come like a bomb and blown Brie and the dance away. It had swept away all the other worries that had seemed to be tumbling down on me in a constant stream. But at least they were not dead. No, not yet anyway.
During breakfast, I couldn’t eat a bite. Derek got all my toast and blueberry jam. I think he had been waiting for just such an opportunity. He gobbled up my scrambled eggs as well. Uncle Gideon was looking at me with soft brown eyes that for some reason reminded me of Wink again. Then he glanced up at The Gram quickly and shook his head. I did not know if I could bear the thought that he too would soon be in danger.
Little Bill was talking about when he was a fighter pilot during World War I. “Did you attack any enemy planes?” said Derek.
“Well, actually, I shot down the Red Baron’s brother. Didn’t kill him but he didn’t fly again for the rest of the war.”
“Hey, that’s pretty hotsy totsy,” said Derek, finishing off my portion of blueberry jam. It was very impressive the way he said that, but I didn’t feel like smiling.
I went to school then, but I couldn’t listen to anything anyone said to me. Winnie and Danny, my beautiful Winnie and Danny, were in prison. At the end of the day I couldn’t remember anything that had happened in class.
Stu Barker walked home from school with Derek and me in the afternoon. Stu was a devoted Boy Scout. He could start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. He could pitch a tent anywhere, even in the middle of a storm. He could make a water purifier out of an old coffee tin. Stu Barker was quite a small fellow, the size of a fifth grader. Derek towered over him. But Stu was very bossy.
“You got to listen to me, kiddo,” he said as we walked along the road out of town. “I’m an Eagle Scout now. I’ve got everything figured out.” He looked way up at Derek and nodded his head at him. “I’m going to be a page next year and work at the state house part-time. You go to government studies program in the spring and when you’re done with it, you are an official page. Then you’re on your way to being a senator or even the president of the United States.” Then he nudged me with his little elbow. “Isn’t it the truth, Flissy? Come on, say it’s so.”
“I daresay I know nothing at all about government studies,” I said. They went rattling along, talking away, as if everything were hunky-dory (another Derek word). But everything wasn’t hunky-dory at all. Not at all. My beloved Winnie and Danny had been caught. They had been put in prison. Were they hungry or cold? Were they together? Were they in danger of being shot?
On top of my worries for Winnie and Danny, I had become more suspicious of Derek’s father, which caused a bit of a rift between Derek and me. He refused to hear my worries about this. When I had mentioned the Gray Moth, he had exploded and stormed out of the room. Whenever I brought it up, he would simply walk away.
“Derek,” I had cried when we were alone for a moment after school. “Why wouldn’t he take off his hat?”
“What!” he had almost yelled back at me. “He told us why. He likes his hat to keep its shape. You are meddling, Flissy.”
Derek had invited his father to the house again this week and I had begged him not to. And I felt we needed to tell someone about the invisible-ink letter. And the eyeglasses and everything else. No, nothing was hunky-dory. Not at all.
“And by the way, who are you going to the dance with, kiddo?” said Stu, putting his hands in his pockets and looking up at Derek.
“I’m going with Brie. You knew that, Stu,” Derek said.
“Oh, Brie,” said Stu, punching Derek’s good arm. “Brie’s the bee’s knees. Come on, put ’em up, buddy. Winner takes all. How’d you get so lucky?”
“Dunno,” said Derek, kicking a rock up into the brush ahead of us.
Nothing was worse than having two show-off American boys fighting over a snooty, pretty American girl, even if she did wear braces. I was standing there, feeling like a foreign pip-squeak. A twerp. A twerp who knew too much. And my parents were in prison.
When we got home, Derek and Stu went into the kitchen for a cup of Ovaltine, and I went up to the room I shared with Auntie. I sat on Auntie’s canopy bed. And then I flop
ped against her pillow. As I dropped back into the softness of it, I felt a crinkly paper at the back of my head. I turned round and picked up an envelope. It was a letter addressed to Miami Bathburn from a USO Camp Show office in New York City. My heart dropped then, like a terrible submarine going down even farther to the very bottom of the ocean. Oh, Auntie, don’t leave. Stay here forever. I couldn’t bear to wander about this house without your voice calling out, “Sweetest! Oh, sweetest, where are you?”
I held the letter up to the light, hoping to see through it. I did have a little bit of luck. I could almost read the typed words Dear Miss Bathburn. Then I thought I could read, We are sneezed to inform you. No, the words were too jumbled. I couldn’t make them out and so I just sat there holding the envelope. I knew quite well in all my dreadful American snooping how to steam open a letter and then reseal it. Derek had taught me how. But for once the better part of me got hold and I resisted, though I knew already it was an acceptance. My aunt was going to be an actress traveling round to entertain the soldiers in America. It rather killed me and thrilled me at the same time.
I felt so sad and worried for my Winnie and Danny that it almost didn’t matter that the dreadful rose corsage was finally taken out of the icebox. It now sat on the table in the hallway, its petals glowing, waiting to be pinned on Cousin Brie’s shoulder. How could Derek do this? Did he not hug me in the darkness on the road last week? Did he not hold my hand in Portland? Had he not spent weeks practicing dancing with me? How could he now be going to the dance with Brie?
It was evening and The Gram was in the garden taking the dry sheets off the clothesline. I could see her through the open window. There was the smell of burning autumn leaves in the air and the sun was going down, making The Gram and her sheets into dark shadows turning in the wind. How mysterious she seemed now to me after hearing her speak in the gymnasium with the two Bills. Somehow I was in the middle of something, as if in a dark funnel, everything circling round the Bathburn house.
Romeo Blue (9780545520706) Page 8