The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (22 page)

Will stood. “The war has put me much in mind of father lately. Thought perhaps that grandfather’s journals might shed some light on him. I don’t remember father at all, though I suppose you do.”

“I didn’t know grandfather kept a journal.”

Grandfather had always taken great care to shield Aubrey from the strange disciplines he practiced with Will. Will’s older brother was blissfully ignorant of Eidolons, Enochian, and all the rest.
Lucky, lucky.

Will shrugged. “Perhaps I’m wasting my time.”

“I should say—What did you do to your hand, William?”

“Gardening accident.”

Aubrey cocked an eyebrow. “That’s odd. From what I’ve heard, you abandoned the foundation and left the victory gardens to others.”

“Be assured,” said Will, “that planting the seeds of victory is my one and only concern.”

“I’ll send someone to help you sort through the things Mr. Malcolm packed away after grandfather’s death. You’ll need it. There’s an entire room on the third floor.”

“Smashing. Oh—I’ll need one of the cars, too.”

Aubrey rolled his eyes.

Will brought the Humber Snipe to a halt and killed the engine. He checked the name in the journal again before placing the book in the glove box along with the map. He’d had to stop for directions at two pubs and a filling station before he found this place.

He climbed out and donned his bowler. Silence lay thick upon this clearing and its modest little cottage. It swallowed the
clunk
of the car door and the
tink-tink-tink
of the Humber’s cooling engine. Wind didn’t whisper through these oaks; instead it tiptoed through the boughs.

And no birdsong,
Will noted.

The cottage’s roof sagged in the center. It put the wooden shingles out of true. Green and yellow moss grew in the gaps, alongside sprigs of purple foxglove and belladonna. The door rattled when Will knocked.

The man who answered the door was older than Will, old enough to be his father, but still too young to be a contemporary of his grandfather.

Bloodlines.

“Mr. Shapley?”

The man looked past Will at the car. He frowned. “Who are you?”

“My name is William Beauclerk,” said Will, extending his good hand, “and I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.” Surreptitiously, he inspected the man’s hand as they shook. It was ribbed, front and back, with a network of white ridges and pink wheals.

“For if I’m not mistaken, your father and my grandfather were colleagues.”

29 May 1940

Walworth, London, England

A
s hopes of a decisive victory in France deteriorated, so, too, did hopes n of quiet and efficient damage control after the fiasco of Gretel’s escape. Just as the Jerries’ lightning advance through the Ardennes had caught the French and British defenders unaware, her rescue caught Milkweed off guard and unprepared to extinguish the firestorm of rumor and speculation left in her wake.

In the fortnight following the debacle, Marsh and Lorimer found the spectacle indelibly seared into the witnesses’ memories. Explaining away what they’d seen was impossible. Simultaneously, the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force found itself in an untenable position, squeezed between two German army groups. One advanced south into France via the Low Countries; the other raced west from its penetration point in the Ardennes.

The defenders adopted a new strategy. They retreated to the Atlantic coast for evacuation across the Channel. The ranks of those awaiting rescue at Dunkirk swelled daily.

As did the ranks of Milkweed. Within a week of the escape, Marsh and company had together conscripted thirty-one people into their ranks. They showed the Tarragona film twice. The witnesses they recruited included numerous officers and enlisted from His Majesty’s Navy, a handful of fighting men from other services, and one accountant who’d had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Stephenson
also took the opportunity to enlist a handful of scientists and engineers to assist Lorimer in his analysis of the battery.

But it wasn’t enough. Milkweed needed a strategy for quashing the rumors. One that would kill the issue.

The King declared Sunday, May 26—which also happened to be the first day of the Dunkirk evacuation—a national day of prayer. Most Sundays, Liv sang in the choir. But on that day, Liv and Marsh had joined the congregants overflowing from the chapel into the surrounding churchyard. They’d been unable to hear a word of the vicar’s sermon, by virtue of distance and the cacophony of church bells shaking off the nation’s pent-up anxiety.

After the service, Marsh kissed Liv and baby Agnes good-bye, returned to work, and together with Stephenson he selected a fellow countryman for execution.

Lieutenant F. P. Cattermole was a middling and undistinguished officer who offered Milkweed no skills that hadn’t already been acquired through other personnel. He hadn’t witnessed the escape. But he had heard about it secondhand, and he was a prolific rumormonger.

And, it turned out, he was also a madman, a drunkard, and a fifth columnist seeking to lower morale by spreading Jerry propaganda.

The veracity of the charges was immaterial. Far more important was the grim seriousness with which they were dealt. On the morning of May 29, Cattermole, Milkweed’s sacrificial lamb, became the first man hanged under the week-old Treachery Act of 1940, mere days after his “discovery” as a Nazi collaborator within the Admiralty.

Marsh knew it was a necessary evil. But it didn’t alter the fact he’d condemned an innocent man.

Others who had heard of the events second-and thirdhand were now strongly disinclined to share what they had heard, and equally disinclined to pay the rumors any heed at all. They were, after all, nothing but the outlandish fabrications of a Jerry spy. As evidenced by the fact that what Cattermole had described—a man walking through walls?—was impossible.

Marsh stopped at a florist on the way home that evening. “I’m home,
Liv,” he called as he kicked off his shoes. He paused to straighten the framed watercolor hanging in the vestibule; it had been a wedding gift from Corrie Stephenson.

He bumped the end table, knocking to the floor a leaflet from the Ministry of Information and the War Office:
If the Invader Comes.
Liv had set it next to the bowl of water and the blankets.
Hide your food. Hide your maps. Lock up your bicycles. Leave nothing for the Germans.

Her voice, all chimes and flutes, called from the kitchen. “In here.”

He went through the den. Liv had put the bassinet there, so as to keep an eye on Agnes while preparing dinner.

Their daughter was a pudgy scrunch-faced bundle in pink swaddling. He brushed her forehead with his lips, as lightly as he could so as not to wake her. She smelled of talcum and baby. He swelled his lungs with the scent of his daughter. If there existed a more potent anodyne for an unsettled mind, Marsh couldn’t imagine what it might be. He stood there, wishing he didn’t have to breathe, didn’t have to release her essence.

The thought of breathing reminded him of the man who rescued Gretel, and speculations about his vulnerabilities. He shook his head, banished the memory.

“Papa’s home,” he whispered.

Agnes mewled and shifted, crumpling her face into a new pattern of wrinkles. Her blanket undulated in little fits and starts, powered by the spasmodic motions of her arms and legs before she settled again.

“Papa missed you.”

He watched her for another minute before going to the kitchen. Liv stood at the sink with her back to him, chopping vegetables for a Woolton pie—something new recommended by the Ministry of Food—as she sang along to the music on the wireless.

He wrapped one arm about her waist, pulled her close, and kissed the nape of her neck as he thrust the bouquet before her with his other arm. “Ta-da,” he said through the fringes of chestnut hair stuck to his lips.

“Oh! They’re lovely.” She took the bouquet of daffodils, snapdragons, and delphinia.

She twisted in his embrace. “Thank you,” she said, kissing him. He pulled her closer. She was soft and warm.

“You’re shaking,” she said. “Are you getting ill?”

“Just cold. Hold me a bit.”

She did. Liv read his face when she came up for air. One of her slender eyebrows arched up, as though rearing back for a better look at him. Her face wasn’t so round as it had been just before Agnes was born, but still not yet so thin as it had been when they’d first met. She still carried some of Agnes on her.

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Are the flowers for me or for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re feeling guilty about something.”

When had she burrowed inside him like that? This was part of Liv’s magic, the way she saw into him, saw the man inside him. She’d done it since the moment they met, as though she’d made a study of him all his life.

“Of course they’re for you, dove.” Marsh sighed. He shook his head. “Bad day at work.”

She didn’t ask. She didn’t need to.

“So they are for you, then.” She poked a finger in his stomach. “Cheeky.”

He jumped. “Never.” Somewhere inside him, storm clouds thinned, turned from coal to lead.

“Hmm,” she said. With the vegetable knife she trimmed the flower stems. Then she plucked a glass preserves jar from the narrow shelf above the sink. Water sprayed in every direction, jetting from the spout, when she filled the jar. It darkened her blouse, shone like diamond droplets on her eyelashes.

She frowned, blinked at him. “I wish you’d mend that.”

“I’ll do it now.” He opened the cabinet beneath the sink. She arranged the bouquet on the windowsill overlooking the back garden where the Anderson bomb shelter and Marsh’s shed crowded together.
She bumped his head with her hip, ever so carefully, as she did. A breeze swirled through the open window to tug at the petals.

He touched the back of her knee, rested his hand on the curve of her calf. “Someday, Liv, you’ll have a real vase. You won’t be using jam jars forever.”

“I think it’s cozy.”

Marsh’s toolbox jangled as he pulled it out from under the sink. The sink needed mending on a regular basis.

Agnes cried. Her wails, surprising in their intensity from a package so small, drowned out the wireless.

Liv lifted Agnes from the bassinet. She hugged the blanketed bundle to her chest, swaying on her feet in time with the music. “Shhh, shhh.”

She sang along with Vera Lynn on the wireless, lulling Agnes to rest. “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when . . .” Marsh hummed while pulling the faucet apart.

“Tsk, tsk.” Liv cooed to their daughter. “Your father couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. What should we do with him? Should we keep him?”

“What’s that, pretty girl?” She leaned her head toward little Agnes resting against her shoulder, as though listening to a whisper. She fixed Marsh with a long sly look. “Yes, I suppose he is. In a rugged sort of way.” One of her tresses bounced across the pale curve of her neck as she shrugged. “If one goes for that sort of thing.”

Despite himself, Marsh smiled.

“What else should you know about your father? Hmmm. What a curious girl you are. Now let me think.” She put a finger of her free hand to the corner of her mouth and frowned, eyebrows hanging low over her eyes.

“Well, he is rather sharp. Or so his friends tell me.”

Marsh replaced the washer, chuckling to himself. Somewhere, the sun burned through storm clouds and gloom. He felt inside the valve seat with the tip of his finger. It was worn and rough.

“There’s the problem,” he muttered to himself. “Have to replace that.” Until he did, it would keep chewing up washers, forcing him to replace them regularly.

“And occasionally,” said Liv, “he shows a glimmer of usefulness about the home. Not often, however.”

He tightened everything, reopened the valve beneath the sink, and tested the faucet. Water gushed from the spout and nowhere else.

“On second thought,” Liv said to their unconscious daughter, “let’s keep him round a bit longer.”

Marsh embraced her. They swayed to the music. Quietly, he asked, “How long until we eat?”

“A little while.”

“In that case, I’ll go out to the shed. Try to get something done before it’s too dark.” He kissed Liv on the cheek. “It’s past warm enough to get the tomatoes in the ground, and I should do it soon. Otherwise, it’ll be a long wait for a proper salad this summer.”

“Go, you. I’ll call when it’s time to eat.”

Music floated through the open window all the way to Marsh’s shed, though it was too faint to make out. He hummed the Vera Lynn song to himself as he worked.
We’ll meet again . . . don’t know where . . . don’t know when . . .

He inspected the tomato vines, checking for hornworms and fungus. Just as he’d been taught when he was very young. He’d been putting the plants out every morning to harden them in preparation for transplanting to the garden. In another day or two, they’d be ready to stay out overnight.

Crash.
From inside came the noise of a shattered dish.