Delusion (4 page)

“‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’”

“Bugger standing and waiting. What do you think a German with a bayonet would do to you if you stood and waited? What we need to do is find a way to help the local Home Guard.” She had an inspiration. “We can do the same thing Mum and Dad and Geoff are doing—right here in England!”

“How?”

“I don’t quite know yet, but I’ll talk with the Guard. Sussex is between the coast and London, so there’s bound to be a huge auxiliary force. Old men and invalids, to be sure, but still, they’ll know how to organize. Forget about being a Land Girl. Who wants to hoe mangelwurzels when they can be fighting!”

“You can’t exactly box the Germans,” Fee pointed out.

Geoff, a conscientious big brother, had tried to make sure his sisters’ virtues would remain intact for exactly as long as they wanted them to, and had done his best to teach both to box. Fee had only sighed at her gloves, but Phil had taken to it like a bantamweight Beau Jack and repaid Geoff for his pains by regularly trouncing him (but only, he always said, because he was too much of a gentleman to fight back).

“If I can hang upside-down in a straitjacket with a hundred blokes trying to see up my skirt, I can do anything.”

Then, as she often did when agitated, she took a pair of handcuffs from her purse, clamped her hands together behind her back, and practiced her escapes, much to the consternation of a trio of nuns who shared their compartment.

Fee sighed. Her dreams and daydreams had always been full of wildflowers, butterflies, and long rambles over moors. All, of course, with an as-yet-unknown Someone at her side. She’d brought along her entire collection of Jane Austen, and if she could only manage to hurt herself rather badly and then be saved by a dashing romantic young lord, like her heroine Marianne Dashwood, life would be perfect. She was just enough of a realist to know this probably wouldn’t happen, but rereading
Sense and Sensibility
in a pastoral setting would be nearly as good. As long as she never, ever had to hear another bomb falling . . .

A genial conductor told them theirs was the next stop, and the girls pressed their noses to the window for a look at their new home.

“Oh!” Fee said with delight. “It’s out of Shakespeare, or Hardy!” She was literary, but not architectural, and knew only that the little village was picturesquely lovely. “And the yellow roses! How are they still blooming this late?” She wandered away from the station, abandoning her luggage. “Do you see the little dragons in the ironwork of the streetlights? Oh, I can almost forget . . .”

Phil looked the village over with a critical eye. “Those roses should be dug up and potatoes planted in their place,” she said. “And do you see a single shelter? These lights are pretty,” she owned, “but they ought to be out by now.”

“It’s still an hour until dusk, at least,” Fee said.

“All the same, the air raid warden will want to know about it. Better safe than . . .” But
sorry
seemed too inadequate a word after the carnage she’d witnessed the night before, and she let her platitude drift away.

It was such a small town that they were surprised to see more than fifty people debouch from the train, cheerful groups of women, whole families shepherding children. “Did the entire town go on vacation?” Phil asked. “There can’t be that many people in all of Bittersweet.”

“This way, please,” someone called out, though Phil and Fee couldn’t see who spoke. The crowd made its unhurried and disorganized way to a motor lorry and two open farm carts. When the masses scrambled in, the girls could see they were being directed by a small, sharp sparrow of a woman in a floral chintz dress and Wellingtons. The breeze blew her dress up a bit, and Fee nudged her sister. “Did you see? Bloomers!”

“Don’t dilly-dally,” the woman chirped at the group. “Got to get the lot of you settled so you can be up with the sun. ‘A bushel before sunrise’ has always been my motto, and it’s served me well so far. Step lively now, the hops won’t wait.”

“I’m ever so sorry,” Fee said, “but we’re looking for Weasel Rue Farm. We’re to stay with...oh, I can’t remember what her married name is, but she used to be a Miss Merriall.”

The little woman cocked her head and peered at them with her very bright eyes. “You’ll be the theater girls. I must say you look it.” They weren’t sure what she meant by that but decided to take it for a compliment. “Weren’t there supposed to be four of you? I only agreed to take you because I thought there’d be a pair of boys to help with the hops and the apples.”

“Hector joined the army,” Phil said, “and Stan...he...just last night . . .” She leaned into Fee and gathered enough strength to say stoically, “Stan died in the bombing.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the woman said, though her eyes wandered over the people loaded into the wagons, and it was evident she wanted to get back to her own business as soon as possible. “I’m Mrs. Pippin, that’s Miss Merriall as was. No one troubled to tell me your names.”

“I’m Phil,” she said. “Philomel, really, but who could stomach that.”

“Quite,” Mrs. Pippin said.

“And I’m Phoebe, but everyone calls me Fee. That’s with an F-e-e, not a P-h-o-e, because if you just wrote Phoe, who on earth would know how to say your name? They’d call me phooey.”

“Have you got surnames?”

“Of course. Albion.”

“Good. I had a notion you might really be my sister’s children. I always feared the worst when our Rose ran off to London.” She gave them a very canny look. “The dear knows what goes on backstage.”

(“She speaks as if
backstage
were a code name for a brothel,” Fee whispered to her sister later that night.)

“Well, there’s bound to be one bad apple in the barrel, I always say,” Mrs. Pippin went on.

“Oh, no, Miss Merriall isn’t a bad apple!” Fee insisted. “She’s our wardrobe mistress, and she can sew anything in about half an hour, and you can’t imagine how useful that is when your father decides at the last minute it would look better for a ballerina to be cut in half than a flamenco dancer.”

All Mrs. Pippin said was “Mistress, humph! No truck with mistresses at Weasel Rue.”

(“Can you imagine dear, plump, dowdy Miss Merriall being anyone’s mistress?” Phil asked when they were alone.

Fee sighed and said doubtfully, “Perhaps there are some men who’d find her...comfortable.”)

“Come along, girls,” Mrs. Pippin said. “The stationmaster will see your things are sent on. For now bundle into the cart, and I’ll drop you off at the farm before I unload this lot.” She gestured with absolute disdain to the chattering band in the back.

They climbed up next to Mrs. Pippin and were off with a flick of the reins.

“What a charming village,” Fee said, preparing to gush.

“Half the drains are bad. The houses haven’t been updated since the Old Earl’s time.”

An Old Earl implied a Young Earl, and Fee immediately had romantic designs on him. “Does he live very close by?” With petrol rationing, any possible love must be within a five-mile radius. Unless the Pippins had a spare bicycle, in which case Fee could stalk her prey as much as ten miles in clement weather.

“The Old Earl’s been dead and gone these forty years and more. Died at Mafeking.”

“His descendants then?”

“Not a one. Don’t know as he had any children.”

Fee frowned, then brightened, one sort of romance replacing another. “It must be a lovely estate, though. Who lives in it now?”

“There is no estate. There was a castle, once, but it’s gone.”

“Ruined, you mean?” Ruins were, if anything, more romantic than stately homes, particularly, she imagined, by foggy moonlight. Even if your only company was Jane Austen and dreams.

“I mean gone, every brick. Weasel Rue is the largest house you’ll find for twenty miles.”

While Fee wondered how a castle could simply vanish, and then, following her expertise, pondered how she’d go about
making
it vanish, Phil quizzed Mrs. Pippin about the local Home Guard.

“Home Guard? What on earth do we have to guard? Here in Bittersweet there’s just hops and apples and sheep. We’re at the back end of everything. Mr. Hitler wouldn’t dream of coming here, and if a bomb fell accidentally, it would take one look at the place and turn around again.” She nickered to the horses to speed them along, her hands tight on the reins, her jaw set.

(“She called him Mister,” Fee said to Phil when they curled up in bed to discuss the day. “Do you think she’s—”

“Never. If Hitler came near her hops, she’d eat him alive. Don’t you remember what she said about German beer? ‘It tastes like piss from an asparagus-eating pig.’ Now that’s patriotism if I ever heard it.”)

“There’s no war here,” Mrs. Pippin said at length. “The war is for them out there. Folks who stay in Bittersweet never have to worry about such blights as wars. Bittersweet’s safe.”

Before long they turned down into a navel of land between gently rolling hills and got their first look at Weasel Rue.

Look at it, sprawled like a sleeping dragon,” Fee said.

It was an old golden stone building without a single pretense to any architectural style. Someone had built part of the house when they had money, and added another wing when they had more. Bits jutted out here and there when some feature of geography or habit made it easier to put a kitchen at odd angles rather than move the pigsty. It was a large house, or rather a long house, winding, as Fee said, in a serpentine fashion, and it was very much a farmhouse, with chickens and geese promenading on the grass and an omnipresent yet strangely pleasant scent of manure in the air.

Phil shook her head. “Impossible to defend,” she said when Mrs. Pippin hopped down. “Why on earth didn’t they build it on a rise like anyone sensible?”

“It’s nestled,” Fee said. “I like it. It feels safe and cozy.”

“Lots of things feel safe that aren’t,” Phil said sharply. “The Hall of Delusion felt safe.”

There were several flocks of sheep barricaded within the thorny hedgerows that divided the gentle hills. “From inside the house it must look like you’re in a boat being tossed on waves of sheep.”

“Really, Fee, aren’t you taking it a bit far? It’s just a nice farmhouse.”

Fee sighed. She never quite gave up trying to sway her prosaic sister.

“You get yourselves settled. My son Algernon will show you to your room. I’ll be back in a jiff after I get this lot squared away.”

“What are they all here for?” Phil finally managed to ask. “Are they evacuees?”

“Heavens, no! Do you think I’d saddle myself with all these beastly Londoners for good? No, these are just hop pickers here for a few weeks. They come from the East End of London every year.”

“And they all stay here?” Phil asked. The farmhouse was large, but not large enough for fifty or more people.

“They stay in the hopper huts, and thank the lord my grandfather had sense enough to build them far away from Weasel Rue. Londoners are worse than tinkers, and though I forbid it, they seem to have a bottomless stash of gin. If they drank cider or beer like any civilized person, I wouldn’t mind, good wholesome beverages that they are, but I don’t trust them that drink hard liquor. Now, scurry inside, and I’ll be back in an hour. There’s always one that balks at the earth closet and has to be told it’s that or a bucket and you better not dump it in the open. I’ve known sows cleaner than Londoners.”

“My,” said Phil as she watched Mrs. Pippin lead the caravan away, “I never knew I was worse than a sow, and a sot to boot.”

“She can’t stand London,” said a low-pitched voice from the farmhouse door, making them start. They turned and saw a young man, not much more than twenty, with tight-curling chestnut hair cut short and a tall, lithe body. “Can’t stand any place other than here, really. Are you the magician girls?”

“We are,” Fee said, intensely interested by what little she could make out in the doorway’s shadow. “And we haven’t brought an ounce of gin, so we hope to win her over.”

“You don’t stand a chance unless you’ve lived here all you life. She never really loves anyone unless they can claim five generations in Bittersweet. Lucky for her social life, not many people move away.”

“Her sister did.”

“Yes, and as far as I know they’ve never spoken or written since, until she asked if you two could stay for a while. It was like that with me, when I left. Not a letter, like I stopped existing.”

“Oh, were you in London? Maybe you saw our show?” Fee always felt she had a better chance of captivating a man if he’d seen her in her body-hugging sequins. Appearances shouldn’t matter to true love, but she was quite sure they did anyway.

“I was only there briefly, on my way to army training. But don’t stand out there with the dew about to fall. Get your things and come in. I’m Algernon.”

There was a brief awkward pause as they waited for him to come and help them, but he just stood in the threshold, smiling, waiting, and at last they hefted their bags. He slipped into the house just before them, holding the door at least, and they trudged in, weary from the trip, and the terror and work of the night before. Inside, it was impossibly peaceful, dark, and warm, with a succession of fading prints and more recent photographs of monarchs lined up as if they were Mrs. Pippin’s own ancestors.

“I’m Phil,” she said, holding out her hand. “And I can’t help but notice there are no blackout curtains. Miss Merriall sent along two trunks of material from the theater for safekeeping. If you don’t have any coupons left, I’m sure we can find something heavy enough, though she’ll want it back one day for costuming.”

Algernon made no attempt to shake her hand. He stared at her fixedly, still faintly smiling.

“I don’t mean to offend you, I’m sure, but there’s a war on. No one around here seems to know that.” She let her hand drop.

“
I
know it,” he whispered.

“I’ve been here all of half an hour, and I can already see it’s a disgrace. Look at that window, with nothing but lace curtains over it.”

He turned his head so he faced a spot a few feet away from the window.

“Why, if a German bomber—” She broke off. When Algernon turned toward the light, she could see the striations of scars cross his face, as if a giant clawed paw had raked him right across the eyes and down to his chin.