Secrets of a Charmed Life (12 page)

Julia didn’t need to be asked twice. Charlotte moved out of the way and Julia dropped to her knees. Charlotte handed her the flashlight, and then Julia scooted inside the crawl space and disappeared inside it. Emmy heard scraping on wood and then the first box appeared, and then the second one.

“There’s a box of books in here,” Julia called out.

“They’re just old schoolbooks. They can stay,” Charlotte said, brushing her hand across the dusty surface of the first box. Motes took to the beams of afternoon sunlight slanting in the room.

Julia reappeared, her long blond hair mussed about her face.

“Well done, Julia,” Charlotte said as Julia crawled completely out and Charlotte swung the door closed. She took the flashlight from Julia and switched it off.

“What’s in them?” Julia asked, fully intrigued.

Charlotte smiled and opened the first box. Inside were little lumps of thin muslin. Charlotte withdrew one of the lumps. Inside the fabric was a child-size china teacup patterned in autumn leaves.

“Oh!” Julia exclaimed.

“It’s my tea set from when I was a little girl. I want you to think of it as yours for as long as you’re here, all right?”

Julia was speechless with wonder as Charlotte continued to unwrap the pieces. There were four cups with their saucers, four plates, a creamer and sugar bowl, and a squat little teapot with a swanlike spout.

Then Charlotte opened the next box, which held two dolls, one golden-haired and one brunette, and a smaller box of tissue-wrapped doll clothes.

She placed the dolls in Julia’s arms.

“This one with the brown hair I called Guinevere and the other one Henrietta, but you can call them whatever you want. They are also yours to play with while you’re here. But I want you to take good care of them. No leaving them outside or tearing the clothes or bringing them to the table. Can you do that?”

Julia nodded solemnly, astonishment in her eyes. “I promise,” she whispered. She pulled the dolls close to her chest and kissed each head. “I love their names, Aunt Charlotte.”

Charlotte got to her feet and picked up the smaller box with the unwrapped tea service resting at odd
angles inside it. “I’ll just wash the tea set and then it will be ready for you to use. That sound all right?”

Julia nodded, enraptured beyond words. It was the happiest Emmy had ever seen her.

She sought Charlotte’s gaze. “Thank you for doing that,” Emmy said softly.

“I’ve something to show you, too.”

Emmy followed Charlotte to her room across the hall. The woman set the box with the tea set on her bed and walked to a wardrobe. After opening the door, she reached for a long, deep box on a shelf above the rod of hanging dresses and blouses.

This box Charlotte also set on her bed. She lifted its lid, pushed away the tissue paper, and pulled out an ivory gown, its skirt glistening with tiny seed pearls that had aged to twilight gray. Lacy sleeves that buttoned tight to the elbow ballooned to the shoulder in Victorian elegance. A close-fitting bodice completed the top half, and the crushed full skirt hinted at the gown’s former glory.

“My wedding dress,” Charlotte murmured, gazing at the gown, not at Emmy.

“It’s beautiful.”

She turned to Emmy. “I thought it might inspire you. Sometimes an old design will spark a new idea. You—you can take it apart if you want. If it helps you.”

Emmy touched the fabric, a low-luster satin that nearly murmured hello back to her. “I couldn’t do such a thing,” she whispered.

“It is of no use to anyone sitting in a box,” Charlotte continued. “It’s no longer in style and I have no daughter to give it to. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to take it apart and study the construction? You could use the
parts to reinvent it, or come up with your own design. Not just a drawing but an actual dress.”

“You would let me do that?” Emmy was incredulous.

“It would make me very happy if you did. Now, I don’t have a sewing machine. But I’ve sharp scissors, several spools of white thread, and lots of sewing needles. You’ll have to do it all by hand, but I’m thinking you’re probably going to have the time during these long summer months.”

Emmy, like Julia, found she could not express the right words of gratitude. To say a simple thank-you to such generosity seemed too shallow.

So she thought of something else to say.

“Would you like to see my sketches?”

For the next few minutes, while Julia played with Guinevere and Henrietta in the other room, Charlotte and Emmy sat on the bed and looked at the sketches in the brides box.

Charlotte said they were the loveliest dresses she had ever seen.

A day that could not have been more surprisingly pleasant for Emmy and Julia became even more so. Late in the afternoon when it was time to take care of the chickens, a gentle rain started to fall. Charlotte let Julia use her umbrella: a red polka-dot umbrella with a curly black handle that looked like licorice.

THE
days at Thistle House fell into a routine as days always do. After the beds were made and breakfast things put away, mornings were spent tending the vegetable garden, weeding the berry patch, pinching off the heads of spent blooms, and watering the flower beds and the apple, plum, and pear trees, of which there were several each. Even though being outside made the girls hot and sweaty, it was Julia’s favorite part of the day and the work made the morning fly by. After lunch on Mondays and Fridays, Emmy would walk to town to buy Charlotte a newspaper. The afternoons were spent inside reading, working on puzzles, or writing to Mum. Late-afternoon tea was often enjoyed at one of the neighbors’ homes. All of the neighbors seemed to be Charlotte’s age or older. Julia and Emmy were the only children among Charlotte’s friends, and that they were London evacuees made them especially
interesting. In the evenings, after listening to the BBC for a bit, Charlotte and Rose would knit, Julia would play with the dolls or the tea set or both, and Emmy would work on dissecting Charlotte’s wedding dress—her favorite part of the day.

Some days Charlotte loaded everyone into her blue jalopy and they headed to Moreton or Cheltenham, to see Rose’s doctor or to shop in stores that had more in the way of staples to offer, though the queues were longer. On Sundays they attended services at the church with the blue door that Charlotte had pointed out the day they arrived. Emmy liked the vicar well enough, and she enjoyed the way their voices echoed when they sang hymns or recited the creed and prayers. The stone floors and walls made the sound bigger than it really was. And more eloquent. Church was also one of the few places where they saw the other London children all at the same time. They, like the girls, seemed to have settled in to their new surroundings. Emmy felt no need to converse with these other children, but she was a bit surprised that they didn’t, either, even though most were younger. It was as if they had all struck a careful balance between where they lived now and where their true homes were. To speak to one another was to trifle with that balance.

Emmy had summoned the courage and snipped away every seam of Charlotte’s wedding dress, a process that took her nearly a week. She then laid out the pieces so that she could study their structure and also compare them with the brides box sketches. Some nights Charlotte would sit with her while she worked, and sometimes Rose would, which was always a bit unnerving as Rose was convinced the dress in pieces was for her wedding and she worried Emmy wouldn’t get it sewn in time.

Mum’s first letter came at the end of June, nearly two weeks after they had arrived at Stow. She wrote that she missed her daughters, that the entire city seemed out of sorts without its children, and that there had been annoying air raid warnings nearly every night since the girls had left. Emmy didn’t think this was quite true. She read the newspaper that Charlotte had her buy. The rest of June had been relatively quiet in London. Julia and Emmy had left one week after Mr. Churchill announced on the radio that Britain would fight the Germans on every beach, street, hill, and field, and never, ever surrender to them. That had been as near an invitation to Hitler to come see if Britain would do just that as anyone could have given. And yet the attack on London did not come. The few bombs that had fallen in the open country, like those at Addington and Colney, had been so insignificant and so far from the city center, some wondered if London wasn’t the safest place after all. There were no landing fields to strafe, no troops to engage, no planes to shoot down. London was a city of civilians—shopkeepers, firemen, watchers, and mothers without their children. But the girls wrote Mum back and told her they missed her, too, to keep the blackout curtains pulled tight, and to mind the sirens.

Only one letter came from Mrs. Crofton, in late June, which Emmy read as she walked to town and then hid inside her pocket. Mrs. Crofton had heard again from her cousin. He was much intrigued by the two sketches she had sent him, and he had an idea he wanted to run past Mrs. Crofton when he returned to London, which probably wouldn’t be until sometime in August. She didn’t know what the idea was or even if it had to do with Emmy, but she thought it might. She also wrote
that she missed having Emmy at the shop and that business was dreadfully slow. Emmy wrote her straightaway, posting the letter at the post office before she walked back to Thistle House. She wrote that she missed her job at Primrose Bridal and that she was keeping up with her sewing skills by hand.

In mid-July, Charlotte planted a winter squash garden, something she had wanted to do for several years but hadn’t because she hadn’t known what she would do with so great a harvest. Now there would be plenty of people in the cities to whom she could give the squash if they had more than they would need. They also moved tomato plants that Charlotte had started in May into the main vegetable patch and harvested the early potatoes, beets, and carrots.

One day in late July, Charlotte brought home from the fabric store in Moreton a bolt of checked muslin that had been stained and that the owner of the store could not sell. It wasn’t the entire bolt; the flaw hadn’t shown up until the owner had already sold half of the yardage. But it was more than enough for Emmy to try her hand at making her own pattern pieces. It didn’t matter if she made a mistake and cut pieces she could not use. Charlotte had acquired it for next to nothing because the owner was a close friend.

It was slow going, sewing everything by hand, but Emmy found she made fewer mistakes than when she was using Mrs. Crofton’s impressive Singer. And she sketched two new dresses in July, one based on the basic design of Charlotte’s dress and another on one of the dolls’ ball gowns.

As the days leaned into August, Emmy found herself feeling sad that she would have to sneak away from
Thistle House to meet with Mrs. Crofton’s cousin and that perhaps she would not be returning. If Mr. Dabney planned to offer her an apprenticeship, Emmy was prepared to accept and to ask him if she might be able to sleep on the floor of his studio at night. She would not be going back to Mum’s flat. Emmy didn’t even want Mum to know where she was if it came to that. Emmy was not bothered that Mum would likely be furious or even that Julia would miss her, because Julia would be safe and cared for at Thistle House for as long as the war lasted.

But Emmy was bothered that she would be disappointing Charlotte. She didn’t think Charlotte would be angry like Mum would be, nor even sad like Julia. Emmy was afraid Charlotte would be hurt. Emmy didn’t want Charlotte to think that, after all her kindnesses, Emmy wasn’t grateful. At night in her bed, Emmy would imagine what she would write in the notes that she would leave behind for both Julia and Charlotte. She would have to be vague as to where she was going so that neither one would alert Mum to the location. And she had to communicate that it was simply wise and practical to think ahead to the life that she would live when the war was over. The time for Emmy to prepare for that life was now. The opportunity was now. There was no way for her to know whether a chance like this would come again.

If it came.

Mr. Dabney might not have any interest in mentoring Emmy at all. Perhaps his idea was to buy her designs. She would not sell them.

What would happen then? Would that be the end of it?

Emmy refused to consider that that was all he wanted.

A few more letters came from Mum. She hadn’t
much to tell them, and she didn’t speculate on when she might come to visit, even though the Moreton billeting official, a Mrs. Howell, had told them she was free to do so as often as she wished. Emmy wanted to believe it was because seeing them in the environment Julia had described in detail—with a lot of help with spelling—would be hard for Mum. Charlotte had provided for their every need, given them chores to do, a schedule to keep, goals to meet, and encouraged their budding talents. And she hadn’t had to resort to anything disreputable to do it.

The more time chipped away at August, the more restless Emmy was to hear from Mrs. Crofton.

Two things happened at the end of that month. On the night of August 24, a Saturday, the Luftwaffe dropped a collection of bombs on London, destroying several homes and killing a number of civilians. Until that Saturday night, Londoners had heard distant gunfire, and seen the far-off vapor trails of dogfights in the sky over the English Channel. They had heard about the ongoing war in newspapers and on the radio. But this was the first time that London was bombed at night. Bombs fell at Aldgate, Bloomsbury, Bethnal Green, Finsbury, Hackney, Stepney, Shoreditch, and West Ham. Emmy heard on the radio the next day that fires had broken out all over London’s East End, with blazes belching out of factory windows and walls crashing down as if they were made of paper. Ramsgate was also hit. Thirty-one people were killed in the seaside city and more than one thousand houses were destroyed and damaged. Emmy assured Julia, who managed to hear people discussing these terrible details despite her and Charlotte’s attempts to shield her from them, that the bombs had fallen nowhere near Whitechapel and that Mum was quite safe.

For a few tense days after that, everyone waited to see what would happen next. The BBC announced that the RAF retaliated with attacks on Berlin. And then London was quiet again.

Which was exactly what Emmy wanted to hear, because on September 2, a Monday, she received her second letter from Mrs. Crofton.

Dear Emmeline:

My cousin, Graham Dabney, has at last returned to London. His father-in-law, God rest his soul, passed away two weeks ago. His wife is settling the last details and then taking over ownership of the house he left behind. I have some exciting news for you. At least I hope you will find it exciting. You wrote in your last letter that it would be no trouble for you to return to London to meet with my cousin about an apprenticeship. If possible, I would like you to meet me at his flat in Knightsbridge at four o’clock on Saturday, September 7, so that we might discuss our idea. Bring all your sketches, dear. And do bring your mother along, too, as she will need to give her permission for what we would like to do.

Running out of room on this notepaper. Will explain all when you get here. For now, just know that my cousin and his wife and I wish to do our part in the war effort and the protection of its youngest citizens. If you are to be evacuated somewhere, why not be with someone who can mentor you for the duration of your time away from home? Graham’s address for now is 14 Cadogen Square.

Safe journey,

Eloise Crofton

Emmy read the letter three times, needing to convince herself every few seconds that she was not dreaming and
that at last her patience had been rewarded. Mr. Dabney not only wanted to mentor her; he and his wife wanted to be her foster family. They wanted to be her Charlotte. Mr. Dabney wanted Emmy to bring her sketches to a meeting in London.

But they also wanted her to bring Mum, the very thought of which set Emmy’s heart to skipping beats. She could not think of that now.

She would not think of that now.

Her only focus was getting herself to London on Saturday without anyone noticing.