Chapter Twenty-two
Twenty-two
EMMY had never been to a morgue before, makeshift or otherwise.
The sheet-covered bodies lay on the school cafeteria floor, where only six months earlier children had eaten sausages and peas at sturdy wooden tables.
The fallen were arranged in even rows, each one with a cardboard label affixed to the chest, identifying them by name—if it was known—and where they had been killed.
Several officials moved about the rows, escorting next of kin to the draped body of the family member they’d been looking for, lifting a corner of the covering, and revealing just half the face; all that a mother or brother or son or grandparent needed to see to identify and claim their beloved.
Emmy would not be able to recall every step to the school-turned-morgue or how she managed to remember the directions after she was told how far she needed to walk to claim her mother’s body.
She did remember being asked how old she was when at last her voice returned and she whispered to the volunteer at the IIP that Mum’s name was among those on the list of the dead.
The first lie came off her lips as easy as air out of a burst balloon.
To have said she was fifteen and orphaned was to have sentenced herself to a children’s home or worse.
A social services worker would have been summoned.
Emmy would have been escorted away. She wouldn’t have been able to return to the flat.
She wouldn’t have been able to keep looking for Julia, whose name was not on the list.
Not on the list!
Emmy was all Julia had. She had to stay on her own. She had to.
“Eighteen,” Emmy had said.
And where was her father?
The second lie came just as effortlessly.
“Recovering in hospital. We got separated Sunday night.”
Kind condolences were offered to Emmy but she did not want the woman’s sympathy. She wanted nothing from her that would give weight and substance to yet another grief.
Emmy was tired of weight and substance. Tired of fear, of anguish, of hunger, of thirst, of despair.
She wanted to feel nothing.
It had taken supreme effort not to press her hand to the woman’s mouth and tell her to shut up about the terrible loss of her mother.
“Where is she?” Emmy had said, and the woman told her how to find the temporary morgue that had been set up near Holborn station for unclaimed dead.
Every step had seemed like the ticking off of the days and weeks and months the war was taking from her.
With one word, she allowed her sixteenth and seventeenth years to be swallowed whole by the enemy—taken as swiftly and surely as the war had stolen everything else that was hers.
This was all she had been aware of as she strode forward.
She could be a child no longer. Emmy had to be done with immature worries and juvenile hopes.
Orphan was a word to describe a child without parents. Emmy was not a child.
She was Julia’s only living hope, and as such, her little sister’s guardian.
Julia was Emmy’s sole concern.
She would tell whatever lies she must to find her sister. Mum would want only one thing from Emmy now. To find Julia.
When Emmy arrived at the temporary morgue, she was eighteen. She felt eighteen. There would be no looking back.
She approached a haggard-looking city official with a clipboard who seemed to be in charge of receiving callers to the morgue. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.
“I’ve come about my mother,” Emmy said, surprising herself with how grown-up she sounded. “Her name is Annie Downtree. Anne Louise Downtree. I was told I would find her body here.”
The man looked at his clipboard. “Are you the next of kin?” His voice sounded as tired as his body looked.
“I’m her only kin.”
He looked up to study Emmy’s face, wondering perhaps how old she was. But Emmy knew she no longer looked like a child.
“My father passed away when I was young.” Again, the lie flew off Emmy’s tongue with hardly a moment’s thought.
“I’m so sorry for ye, lass. Truly I am.”
Emmy did not want his sympathy. “Where is she?”
Again he consulted his clipboard, and then he checked a ledger on a nearby desk. When he looked up, he shook his head. “We aren’t able to keep the unclaimed bodies more than a few days. We always make what inquiries we can. I am so sorry.”
An odd sensation rippled through Emmy. Fear? Emptiness? Dread? “What did you do with her?” she said, restrained emotion thickening her words.
He consulted his clipboard yet again. When he looked up, he rubbed his chin with his hand, the gesture of one about to say something he was afraid to say. “She was buried proper; I can tell you that. In Tower Hamlets. Just this morning.”
Emmy needed a moment to understand what the man was telling her. Mum had been buried already. She was buried. Buried. “What is Tower Hamlets?”
“It’s the public cemetery, miss. Not far from Charing Cross. They were all given proper burials.”
She swallowed a lingering sensation of loss and fear. “‘They’?”
“There were others what no one came for and who had no kin near as we could tell. They were buried proper. A vicar and everything.”
“A vicar,” Emmy echoed.
“Yes.”
Emmy started to teeter and she steadied herself against the wall.
“Miss?” he said.
“Where—where was she found?”
The man checked the ledger; a different page this time. “In the basement of the Sharington Crescent Hotel. The place took a direct hit, I’m afraid. The upper floors collapsed into the basement, I hear. No one sheltering in the basement survived. I’m sorry.”
A hotel. She was at a hotel.
“Where is this place?” Emmy said evenly.
“I’m sure it was quick, miss. I’m sure she didn’t suffer.”
He could be sure of nothing and he and Emmy both knew it. “Where is it?”
“Near Covent Garden, I think.”
“And there were others?”
“Others?” He blinked, wide-eyed.
“Others in the basement? Was she with someone?”
He blinked again. “Oh, aye, there were other victims, I hear. A dozen or so.”
“And they all came here?”
The man was trying to piece together why Emmy was asking so many questions. He stared at her. “No. Not all.”
“Just the ones no one came for,” Emmy finished for him.
He half nodded, embarrassed for her, possibly.
“We have what she was found with,” he said. “Her handbag and such. Those haven’t been stored away yet. Hold on.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and Emmy heard him speaking to a woman.
The man told her whose effects Emmy was after and the woman asked who wanted them.
“It’s the deceased’s daughter.”
“Daughter?” The woman sounded surprised. Emmy’s pulse quickened as the woman appeared in the doorway, her brow furrowed.
“Are you Anne Downtree’s daughter?” the woman asked as she approached Emmy.
Emmy felt a pulsing instinct to run.
“I am.” She swallowed the rising alarm.
“Your foster mother already got the telegram and brought you here?”
A second ripple of fear coursed through her. “Y-yes.”
The woman looked past Emmy to the door she’d come through. “We weren’t told you’d be coming today. I’m sorry to tell you that I could not have released your mother’s body to your foster mother even if I had wanted to. Is that what she was thinking? Is she outside waiting for you?”
Emmy had to get away.
But she had to pretend as if she didn’t.
“She is,” Emmy said slowly.
The woman frowned as if she’d been insulted. “And she sent you in here alone? Of all the—” She slammed the ledger shut and began to stride toward the door.
Emmy moved toward the woman, blocking her path.
“Please. I—I asked to come in alone. I wanted to see her on my own. My foster mother wanted to come in with me but I begged her not to.”
The woman’s disdain melted into something more like compassion.
“She’s waiting for me at the chemist,” Emmy continued. “My little sister has . . . She has asthma. We needed medicine. I’ll go get her.”
Emmy turned before either one could offer to accompany her. She strode toward the door as unhurriedly as she dared, without Mum’s handbag or whatever else she had on her when her body was found.
As soon as she was outside and around the corner, Emmy ran as fast as her legs could carry her.
Tears crept to the corners of her eyes as she sprinted down the street but Emmy savagely rubbed them away. After several blocks, and when her lungs were burning, she slowed to a walk, looking behind to make sure no one was coming after her.
So Charlotte had been sent a telegram that Mum had died. Would they come looking for her? Emmy wasn’t sure. Would the woman at the morgue assume that once Emmy told her foster mother that Mum had already been buried, they would opt for the first train out of hellish London? She would, wouldn’t she?
Even so, Emmy could not continue to stay at the flat, not now that she had been seen. Besides, there was no running water, electricity, gas, or food. She had to make other arrangements, but what?
Emmy had passed homeless shelters on the way back to Whitechapel, but whenever she had neared one of them, she smelled the fetid odor of unwashed bodies and makeshift latrines.
She had no desire to stay in one. She could not go back to Mrs. Billingsley’s.
The widow and her staff all knew how old Emmy was. They would contact social services.
Perhaps, though, Mrs. Billingsley could be persuaded to help her find Julia. If Emmy begged her? The woman had money. Apparently Mum had believed money was needed to do what the police could not or would not.
But would Mrs. Billingsley do that?
Emmy could not chance it.
She could go to no one that she knew; no classmate from school, or even a classmate’s family. She had to be eighteen-year-old Emmeline: a woman who did not yet exist in the eyes of anyone who knew her.
But where else could she go?
And then Emmy thought of Mrs. Crofton. Could Emmy convince her to let her stay with her?
Emmy had missed the opportunity to become Graham’s apprentice but perhaps Mrs. Crofton would allow Emmy to stay with her while Emmy looked for Julia.
Emmy would promise her that when she found her sister, she would return to Charlotte’s and she and Julia would stay in Stow for the remainder of the war, as they were supposed to have done.
Yes, Emmy would do that. She would again have her brides box.
She would find some way to regain the opportunity she had lost. Emmy would bring Julia with her back to London when the war ended.
Perhaps Mrs. Crofton would allow her and Julia to board with her.
Mrs. Crofton had had a daughter once, and she was fond of Emmy because of that.
Emmy could tell that she was. She could pay for their room and board by working at the shop.
And at night she would work on her gowns.
Perhaps after the war, Mr. Dabney would give Emmy another chance.
Emmy could still find a way to make Mum proud of her.
Surely God allowed a dead mother glances from heaven at the children she had been torn from. . . .
Yes.
But Emmy didn’t know where Mrs. Crofton lived.
Hoping the shop had not been bombed, she decided to make her way to Primrose Bridal. She still had the back door key. She would wait for Mrs. Crofton there or poke about her desk, looking for the woman’s home address. Surely Mrs. Crofton would understand the need to do such a bold thing.
Emmy quickened her steps, impatient to take what she needed out of the flat and get to the bridal shop.
She arrived back home as the sun dipped low in the sky.
Emmy pulled a travel bag from Mum’s wardrobe and added to it the contents of her mother’s top bureau drawer, which included her stockings, a nightgown, a felt-lined jewelry box, and a few trinkets.
She also stuffed inside three of her mother’s dresses, a pair of her slacks, gloves, and a pair of heeled shoes.
Next, Emmy went into her old bedroom and took the remaining undergarments she had left behind, a few of Julia’s clothes so that when she found her sister, she’d have clean clothes to wear.
Back downstairs, Emmy grabbed her satchel and tossed what was left of Thea’s food stores inside—and the hammer—and ran out of the flat and down the deserted street.
The sun was nearly gone from the horizon.
Emmy doubled her speed, running haphazardly with her awkward load.
Let it be standing, Emmy whispered to the heavens. Let Primrose still be there.
She covered the four blocks to the shop in less than ten minutes, dodging debris and collecting stares all along the way. She reached the street and her heart plummeted to her knees. The building on the corner of the street was a smoking hulk.
But Primrose, four buildings down on the opposite side, still stood among the ruins.