“Wellingford is your home, too,” Audrey had said. She’d heard Mother’s bitter laughter and imagined her shaking her head. Mother didn’t love Wellingford the way Audrey and Alfie and Father did. To them, it would always be home. But not to Mother.
The sun was beginning to rise when Audrey and Robbins reached the outskirts of London. It had been the longest drive of her life. The longest night. A pall of smoke hung above the city, and she could taste the scorched air—the same as in Coventry.
The destruction filled her with dread as they neared the town house. Rubble. Police and fire barricades. A woman in uniform telling Audrey she couldn’t go any farther. Audrey wanted to rage at her but managed to reply calmly. “My town house was bombed last night.”
“You’ll have to walk. You can’t drive any closer. Emergency vehicles only.”
Audrey parked, and she and Robbins got out. Her distress grew with each trembling step, dodging bricks and shiny chunks of shrapnel, twisting fire hoses. Audrey halted in silent horror when she saw the crumpled, smoking ruin. Robbins groaned and gripped his forehead.
All but one of the town houses had collapsed. The front of that unit was sheared off, and Audrey saw inside her neighbors’ rooms as if peering into a dollhouse. Pictures hung crookedly on the walls. Furniture and rugs lay jumbled in heaps. The floors tilted, ready to collapse. Her family’s town house had stood in the middle of the row. Audrey couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.
“Audrey! . . . Audrey!” She heard her name as if from a great distance, the way one hears it when being awakened from a nightmare. “Audrey!” She turned and fell into Eve’s arms. The strength of her grip pushed all the air from Audrey’s chest, but she clung to her, longing to draw from Eve’s strength.
“Oh, Eve . . . dear God . . .”
“They haven’t found anybody, yet.”
Audrey couldn’t grasp what she was saying. “They have an Anderson, don’t they? In back?”
“They’re still trying to dig it out. The garages—” Eve halted. She released her and ran toward a fireman leading a group of dazed survivors from the alleyway. Robbins took Audrey’s arm as they followed. The cook and the housekeeper were hugging Eve. Weeping. Mother wasn’t with them. Neither was Eve’s mum.
“Where’s my mum?” Eve shrieked. “Isn’t she with you?”
“No—”
“What do you mean, no? She has to be!” Eve gave the housekeeper a shake as if forcing her to change her reply. The cook’s words came out between sobs.
“We were all in the shelter except Lady Rosamunde. Your mum went back inside to persuade her to come down where it was safe. Then . . . then the bomb hit.”
Eve collapsed to the ground and wept.
Audrey didn’t know what to do. She hesitated, then crouched beside her, feeling Eve’s loss as much as her own. “They’re still searching, aren’t they, Eve? Let’s not lose hope.”
Hours passed as they waited, holding tightly to each other’s hands, watching the rescue workers dig. A canteen truck arrived with tea and sandwiches but neither of them could eat. Audrey heard her servants talking, weeping, and Robbins comforting them like a father.
Every now and then Audrey would recognize a broken bit of furniture or a fragment of a rug or a vase as workers shoveled debris into the street, and she had the crazy notion that if she could just gather up all the shattered pieces and put them back together again, everything would be all right. Mother would be all right. She imagined her mother emerging from the rubble, strong and proud and beautiful, dusting dirt from her sequined dress and sniffing at all the fuss—then frowning in displeasure at Audrey’s tears of relief. Audrey wished she could cry but she felt strangely numb as she fought to hold herself together. It was what Mother would have wished.
Shortly before noon, the workers found two bodies. ARP wardens laid the lifeless forms on stretchers. As Robbins went forward to identify them, one of Mother’s cigarette holders rolled out of the ruins at his feet. Audrey saw his expression and knew the answer before he spoke a word.
“NO!” The scream rose up from deep in Audrey’s soul before she could stop it. It couldn’t be true. Mother couldn’t be dead. She was larger than life, a proud, beautiful woman who held Audrey’s world together. She’d never been the mother Audrey longed for, but she was the mother she needed—now more than ever. How would she navigate the rituals of the aristocracy without her? There were rules and customs she still needed to learn, standards one must live up to, the right people to meet. For as long as Audrey could remember, she had clung to the hope that if she managed to do everything right, married a suitable husband, socialized in the proper circles, perhaps Mother would finally love her. Because in spite of Mother’s aloofness, in spite of the dark truth of her infidelity, Lady Rosamunde was her mother. And Audrey loved her.
Eve’s cries were as soul-deep as her own as she wept alongside her. Audrey turned to her. They shared an unimaginable loss. But Eve stepped back. “This is your mother’s fault!” Her face twisted with anger and grief. “She was too selfish to go into the shelter where it was safe. She wouldn’t leave London, so my mum had to stay here, too. She didn’t think of anyone but herself!”
Eve’s anger stunned her. But the accusation was true. “I know. I know what Mother is like . . .” What she was like. Mother was dead. A chasm of grief opened before Audrey, and she covered her face and wept as hours of pent-up fear and sorrow overflowed. Eve turned away from her into the cook’s arms. None of the servants moved to comfort Audrey.
14
WELLINGFORD VILLAGE
Eve gripped Alfie’s hand as she watched George and Robbins and Williams—men who had been like fathers to her—lower Mum’s coffin into the ground behind the village church. The villagers she’d known all her life surrounded her, sharing her grief, murmuring about Mum’s tragic death. Throughout the long hours of the wake, the funeral, and now the burial, Alfie and Audrey had remained by Eve’s side, holding her up, helping her through these terrible days, even though they were also grieving. Lady Rosamunde’s funeral would be tomorrow at Wellingford, once Mr. Clarkson returned home.
“If there’s anything I can do,” Rev. Hamlin said. “Anything at all . . .” Everyone had loved Ellen Dawson. Her fierce loyalty to Lady Rosamunde baffled the villagers as much as it did Eve. She still blamed Lady Rosamunde for Mum’s death. If not for her stubbornness, Mum would be alive. The Anderson shelter had kept the others safe. Yet Eve tried not to direct her anger at Alfie or Audrey. It wasn’t their fault. They’d suffered from Lady Rosamunde’s selfishness, too.
Tears blurred Eve’s eyes as Mum’s coffin came to rest at the bottom of the hole alongside Granny Maud’s grave. The two people she loved most in this world were gone. When Granny died, Eve thought the ache in her heart would never heal. Her life had changed that day, yet the world spun on, the sun rising and setting. “Rain or shine, just take the day the Lord gives you,” Granny Maud taught her. With Mum to console her, the painful wound of grief had slowly healed. This time, Eve’s grief seemed bottomless, swallowing her alive, blocking off the sunlight.