The Romeo and Juliet Code (18 page)

Yes, we were ever so wet when we got there. So wet that we made a rather gloomy puddle under us as we stood in the town hall. Mrs. Boxman, who was the director of the program, came flying towards us with a thermos of tea swinging from her hand and she poured us three cups and we stood there warming up while she congratulated Aunt Miami on winning the raffle.

There were all sorts of people sitting on the stage waiting with fiddles and flutes and drums, and there was a yodeler wearing a Swiss costume, just like you’d see on tins of powdered cocoa. Mrs. Boxman said, “Florence,
you
are to start the program. You will be first as the winner of the raffle. What are you going to perform?”

Miami looked rather sweet and wet standing in a puddle of water. “I’d like to do several scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
.” Auntie smiled.

“What a marvelous idea,” Mrs. Boxman said. “We’ll have costumes, props, the works. It will be a smash hit. Who will be your Romeo?”

And suddenly, Miami went silent and blank like a photo that had just come shooting out of a photo booth completely empty with no image on it at all. “I hadn’t thought about it,” said Aunt Miami, and it looked to me like she might start to cry. She turned away and stared down at her hands.

That’s when I panicked. My eyes rolled round the room from one person to another. Then they stopped and there was Derek in his handsome macintosh and wellies, looking so tall and so sweet. To me, at that moment, he was the most perfect Romeo in all the world, even wet as he was. And I called out, “Derek. Derek will be Romeo.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Boxman, “of course. Well, he’s young, but he’s tall and bonnie, as they say in England. I knew you’d have everything worked out, Florence dear. After all, you are Danny’s sister. And Danny was once my student and wasn’t he a wonder! Oh, I just thought the world of him. How is he doing and where is he, by the way?”

“He’s away on holiday,” I said, and then for a moment, I felt like a ship, like the SS
Athenia
drifting along at sea, hearing the sound of a submarine churning nearby.

Then I noticed Derek was looking rather muddled and confused and gruff; his hair was messed up and he looked rather like a bull pawing the ground, thinking about charging. “Romeo? Me?” he said.

I went round and stood by him and I whispered, “Please, Derek. Just for now. Please. Just to get her started. Just for practice until we can find a real Romeo.”

I always thought I was properly cared for. My hair was always brushed, and Winnie always made sure my skirts were hemmed. I had all my manners. I was sure of that. But it’s true there were nights when I was alone. I never liked waiting by the window after dark, watching for Winnie’s white wool jacket under the streetlight, watching for Danny’s overcoat and scarf and his felt hat. They often came up the walk late. Ever so late. I never knew what they were doing or where they went or why.

Once right before Christmas, there was a phone call, and Winnie and Danny had to go away. Winnie cried about it. It’s strange to have someone else’s tears on your cheeks. She hugged me and cried and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, darling. So terribly sorry. Will you forgive me ever? Danny and I have to go. It’s terribly important. Alice will be in to get you. You’ll have Christmas with her and her father. We’ll celebrate afterwards. Later. It will be lovely.” Her tears dried on my cheeks by the time Alice Wentley, our housekeeper, arrived. Winnie and Danny had already left. I was glad to hear Alice’s footsteps on the stairs. I thought she’d never get there. We left our flat and our Christmas tree all decorated with unopened presents sitting under it. I hoped that no bomb would fall on our flat while we were gone. I did so want to open my presents.

I went to the country with Alice in a car. We didn’t say much the whole way there, except that I sang Christmas carols without stopping, one after another, without catching my breath in between. Across the city, I could see all kinds of bombed-up buildings and fires burning. “You really shouldn’t be in London anymore at all,” said Alice.

“I know,” I said, “but Danny works there.”

“Well, we’re lucky we had some petrol in the tank. Just about enough to get home. And that will be it. They’ll have to come out for you when they get back.”

“We are going to have our Christmas when Winnie and Danny come home in two weeks,” I said, and then I started right in with “Once in Royal David’s City” and I didn’t stop singing till we were past a huge pile of bricks partly covering the road. Those bricks had once been a building, and bunches of bobbies (policemen) in capes were waving us by and blowing whistles.

When we got to our housekeeper Alice Wentley’s cottage, she said, “Well, now, here we are at Hollyhock Hill. It’s got a registered name, our house does. And it’s where I live with my father, who’s feeling poorly these days.”

I carried Wink, who seemed quite miserable, into the little brick house, and Alice called out, “Daddy, we’re here. We barely made it. Would you like a cup of tea?” They had a tiny Christmas tree on the kitchen table, but it wasn’t real. It was fake. I could tell when I touched it. “Lucky we had that in the attic or we wouldn’t have had a tree at all, would we. I don’t know where your mother found your Christmas tree in London with these times being as they are.”

“She found it in Piccadilly Circus. A man was selling some. It was ever so dear,” I said.

“Well, Daddy, here’s Felicity Bathburn Budwig come for Christmas with us. What do you say, Daddy?” Her father was lying on the sofa in the small parlor, under a blanket. I didn’t know if he could turn his head or not since he always stared at the ceiling. “Daddy, say hello, won’t you.” It was strange to hear a very old woman, Alice Wentley, calling an even older man Daddy. Because I’d never called Winnie and Danny that sort of thing. Everybody thought it very funny at first. Winnie said I was terribly grown up in some ways and terribly childish in others.

Alice Wentley’s father said, “How old is she?”

And I said, “I’m ten years old, though I’ll be eleven in January.” But he had already started coughing and didn’t even hear the part about my being eleven soon. He didn’t say much after that except, now and again, he would call out, “That chap Churchill is a bloody fool.”

Christmas Eve was a few days later. Alice Wentley cooked Christmas pudding, and her father spit it up. That night I lay awake in my bed in the tiny room near the kitchen. I was thinking about Winnie and what she had said that night before they left. She said, “Felicity, it’s so hard. I have a kind of calling. It’s my work. My work is important to me, but
you
are also important to me. I’m torn between those two things. Don’t you see? I’m torn in two.”

All Christmas Eve, I lay in bed looking up at the ceiling like Alice Wentley’s father. I was listening for bombers in the sky. They said there would be a cease-fire that night in London for Christmas, and I was hoping it would be true.

Even though Uncle Gideon had said to forget about him, the man from Washington bothered me. Why had he come here to Bottlebay, Maine, and how did he know my Winnie? Even if Derek and I didn’t talk about the code all the time, it seemed to be always with us or near us like the sound of the ocean. We thought of it especially at rehearsals when Aunt Miami and Derek were repeating those lines that we hoped held the answer. Derek often looked at me as he said his lines, but then I was never sure what he was thinking. Did he know I liked him? It nagged at me. Was it possible for an older boy to like a younger girl?

“You know, Flissy,” said Derek one day after school, “I can’t keep playing that Romeo part. I hate doing it, you know. I only did it this far just for Miami because it is nice she’s getting to be Juliet finally. But honestly, Fliss, I hate it.”

“You do such a lovely job of it, though,” I said. “But of course we’ll find someone else.” We were sitting on the porch swing pushing it in circles in a lazy sort of way. It was almost October and there was a smell of smoke in the air. The leaves fell from the tree next to our house all at once that afternoon, filling the sky with fluttering yellow light. The summer people had all gone home, and most of the beach houses down the way were shuttered and boarded up.

“Anyway, those lines are stuck in my head now,” said Derek.

“I know them by heart,” I said.

“Tell me something, Flissy. When you saw the book of
Romeo and Juliet
in the locked study that day you went in there, was it open to those very lines?”

“I think so,” I said. “But I can’t be sure because I was in such a hurry.
Something
was circled with a pencil.”

“And how many letters do you think we’ve gotten, all together?”

“I think there are six, though we haven’t received any for over a month.” And just as I said that, I began to have a sort of anxious feeling that started to hover over me like a dark overcoat hanging above me in a closet.

“You know, Fliss, we need to go back into the study and copy over the other letters and look at the book of
Romeo and Juliet
that you saw in there.”

“I see,” I said. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Flissy,” he said, “let’s go down to the side yard and look up at the house from below.”

And so we did. From down in the south yard, the house seemed enormous and tall, with great, crisp-looking autumn clouds sailing slowly beyond the roof. “Have a look at the windows on the second floor. Count them. The one that is the third from the end is the study. The other two are part of the gymnasium,” said Derek.

“Yes, I think you’re right,” I said.

“And there’s a screen in the window today. The window’s open.” A few yellow leaves floated in the air. “I’ll need a ladder,” Derek said. He pushed his hair off his forehead. I closed my eyes. He wasn’t afraid at all.

“It’s a great thing that no one is home right now. When is Mr. Bathtub due back?” I said.

“He usually stays at least an hour after school,” said Derek. I was following him down the slope that led under the porch, where the basement door was. We pulled the long ladder out of the darkness and carried it up to the side of the house and set it against the wall.

It was an oddly quiet afternoon. Even the ocean seemed hushed. Shadows were velvety and muffled, lying across the house. “Derek,” I said as he climbed the ladder and I held it steady at the bottom, “be careful. Do. And by the way, can I have the little broken tin soldier. Please?”

“You mean if I don’t make it back alive?” Derek said, looking down at me quite sweetly. The ladder swayed and I held on tight.

To keep from being nervous, which is my way, really, I closed my eyes and wrote another letter to Winnie and Danny in my head.

Dear Winnie and Danny,

After having discovered Derek Bathburn Blakely here in the house at Bottlebay, I am afraid to say that I have rather fallen for him, though I don’t want to use that word “fallen” just now, as he is up on a very high ladder and it’s a bit rickety.

More later, I hope, if we don’t die doing this.

Love,
Your Felicity, who is most definitely a nutter

Derek had climbed all the way up the ladder by then. He was just at the window and he was leaning against it, reaching for the screen, which meant he wasn’t holding on to anything because his other arm could do nothing but hang at his side. I watched him pull the screen out of the window with one hand. Derek always amazed me. Then he lost his balance, with the screen swinging around in the air. Finally, he dropped it, and it went spinning and sailing down, bumping against the ladder. It landed with a flat thump in the sandy grass near where I was standing. Everything else was silent.

“Oh, Derek,” I whispered, “be careful.”

Luckily, the old peeling window stuck open and Derek inched up on the ledge and was able to duck his head inside and then slip the rest of him off the window ledge, down into the room. Then he shut the window.

And so I was left below gripping the ladder, shadows from clouds above drifting in a soundless way across the house. “Derek,” I whispered again. “Derek? Derek?”