Chapter Thirty-two
Thirty-two
OUTSIDE the Thorne mansion, the driver stood next to the vehicle as if he’d been told Emmy would only be a short while.
He snapped to action when Emmy emerged from the house and opened the car door for her. Emmy would have walked away from that place on her own two legs, but she had no idea where she was. She got inside.
“Paddington, miss?” the driver said when he was also back inside the vehicle.
Emmy did not want to go back to Thistle House right then. Not as Emmeline, and that was who she firmly was as she stepped out of the Thorne home slathered in recriminations. She wanted more than anything to go to Primrose and fall asleep on the heap of bridal gowns, and never open her eyes again.
She wanted to wake up in the arms of the angels and have them tell her she was worthy of love—to give it and to have it given to her.
But there was no place like that in London. Not for her.
Except perhaps . . .
“The Savoy,” she said.
Thirty minutes later, Emmy was inside the lobby of the hotel where she used to go every Monday on her campaign to find London’s orphans.
Mac wasn’t there; it was only midafternoon.
He was no doubt in the underground studio at Broadcasting House, working dials and switches as someone leaned over a microphone and described the advance of the Allies across Germany.
She settled into a chair to wait for him.
Emmy was not aware she had fallen asleep until Mac was bending over her, gently shaking her awake and murmuring her name.
When Emmy opened her eyes, she saw a woman standing behind Mac, her hand on his arm, and the utter despair of that singular moment was nearly the end of her. But then the woman walked away, clearly having spied the party she was looking for. Mac was now alone.
“Is it really you?” Emmy said.
He laughed. “I was about to ask you the same thing. What are you doing here?”
Emmy stood and threw her arms around his neck and held him tight. It took him a moment to respond in kind, but then his arms were around her as well. She did not want to start crying into his shirt collar but she did, and once the seal was broken, the tears would not stop coming.
Mac cupped the back of her head in his hand and drew her closer. “Isabel. Is it about Julia?”
She shook her head.
Emmy wanted to tell him why she was suddenly at the Savoy, in tears, and wrapped in his embrace. But to repeat every ugly thing Agnes Thorne had said to her and about her, and relive it, held no appeal. Besides, that was Emmeline’s story, not Isabel’s.
“I just had a really terrible day. Awful.” Emmy pulled away and he immediately handed her a handkerchief. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re in London,” he said, and it was a question that wasn’t a question.
“There was someone I needed to see. It couldn’t be helped.”
He studied her. “And it didn’t go well?”
“No. It didn’t.”
“Sure you don’t want to talk about it?” he asked.
“Quite sure.”
“Can I take you to dinner, then?”
“Will your girlfriend mind?” Emmy said, handing him his handkerchief and making no attempt to hide her disdain.
He laughed. “She’s just a friend who’s a girl, Isabel.”
“Will there be a stiff drink?” Emmy wanted to drown the word whore, whore, whore, which kept echoing like a clanging bell in her head. Drown it in drink.
“Uh. Sure.” Mac gave her his arm and they started to walk toward the lobby doors.
“You look beautiful when you cry, by the way,” he said.
Emmy leaned into him as they stepped into the early evening. Surely there would be no air raids tonight. Germany had nothing left to send up into the air.
“I don’t like it when I cry,” she said. “Makes me feel weak.”
He slid his arm around her waist and kissed her temple. “Oh, but it’s our tears that make us human, Isabel.”
Being on Mac’s arm as they walked, and in his arms as they danced after dinner, and then as they walked past the ruins along the river, Emmy felt something being returned to her after a long absence.
The fires had stopped burning, the bombs had stopped falling, the debris was being cleared away, the slabs where buildings once stood were being scraped clean to begin their second life, a life after the war.
It was not far off, this new life. A few months, maybe by the end of the year, but she could feel that the turning of the tide was just beyond the horizon.
She was ready to feel again. To feel something good.
Chocolate on her tongue. New shoes on her feet.
Holidays at the seaside. Blank canvases on which to paint. Kisses on her neck and lips.
They went back to the Savoy to see whether Emmy could get a room as she had missed the last train to Oxford. But the hotel was full.
“Come up to my room, Isabel,” Mac offered. “I can sleep on the floor. Scout’s honor.”
And that was the plan.
Mac would have honored it; Emmy was sure of that.
But sometime in the night she dreamed that she was the one trapped in the basement of the Sharington Crescent Hotel, buried in rubble, and no one would help her. She was suffocating and darkness was closing in on her. She would be buried alive.
Worse, Julia was in the rubble with her, and her eyes were open, glassy, and unblinking, like the dead man on the street during the Blitz whose nose and mouth were spattered with blood.
Her screams woke Mac, who was at her side in an instant, shushing her, calming her. And then kissing her. Everywhere. When he realized what was happening, he pulled away, an apology on his lips.
But she drew him back to his bed.
Emmy wanted to be with him. She wanted to feel as if she mattered.
As Mac entwined his body with hers, as close as two people could possibly be, Emmy suddenly understood why Mum had kept going back to Henry Thorne, even though he was married to someone else.
It wasn’t just about the money he gave her to survive as a single mother.
He made her feel wanted. Desired. Precious.
Mum had made an exchange, just like everyone does when quaking under a load that seems far too heavy.
She exchanged a transparent life of abject poverty for one of secrets and illusion that kept her and her daughters fed and clothed.
Julia had likewise exchanged the brides box for the fairy tale book when she didn’t want Emmy to leave.
Emmy had exchanged Julia for her own aspirations when she didn’t want anyone else telling her what she could and couldn’t do.
And that very day Emmy had exchanged the absolution her father had willed to her for her own dignity.
This was how people balanced the scales their world was tipping, Emmy reasoned. It was only after time had passed that a person was able to see whether she might have been able to bear the load she was sure had been too heavy.
But life is lived at the moment you are living it, she thought. No one but God in heaven has the benefit of seeing beyond today.
In the morning when she awoke, Mac smiled at her in sleepy wakefulness and fingered a lock of hair away from her eyes.
“Good morning,” he said.
Emmy was afraid to rise from where she lay. Time seemed to have stilled and she didn’t want it to go about its relentless forward march. She didn’t know which girl she would be as she rose from the bed. She whispered her reluctance to leave.
“Stay, then.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Then marry me.”
He said it so swiftly. Emmy waited for him to laugh and assure her he was joking. Surely he was joking. But the seconds flitted by and he did not laugh.
“I’m crazy about you. Marry me, Isabel.”
Emmy stared at him openmouthed, not daring to imagine herself the happy wife of a good man. She was no friend of happiness. Mac had no idea whom he was proposing to.
“I’m not who you think I am,” Emmy whispered. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.
He kissed them away. “You’re the woman I love.”
“But you will leave when the war is over.”
“Everyone has to leave sometime, Isabel. Life is about coming and going. Come to America with me. I promise I will live every day to see that you don’t regret it.”
She closed her eyes to stop picturing herself pushing away from England, the only home she had ever known.
Pushing away from Julia, finally and fully.
“Isabel?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you love me?”
The moment the question was posed, she knew that she did. She did love him. But just because she loved him did not mean she was entitled to happiness with him, nor did it mean she had the courage to leave England and walk out on a promise she’d made to Mum years before on a sunny beach.
“What does it matter if I do?” Emmy said, rising from the bed and reaching for her clothes. Loving Mac changed nothing about who she was and what she had done.
“Isabel.”
She turned to him.
“Please don’t let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now,” he said. “Please don’t.”
The pulling and twisting of her two identities—Emmeline’s past, Isabel’s future—was making her head spin. “I have to get back. Charlotte will be worried.”
“Isabel?”
“I—I can’t think about the future right now, Mac. Please don’t ask me to.”
He said no more about it. He said hardly anything as he walked her to the train station.
Emmy returned to Thistle House and made her apologies for having stayed overnight without letting Charlotte know. Then she told Charlotte what had happened at the lawyers’ office, and at the Thorne mansion.
She didn’t tell Charlotte she’d slept with Mac.
But Emmy thought Charlotte knew anyway.
Mac rang her twice in the weeks that followed, and Emmy kept the calls short, something she had not done before, not when it came to Mac.
But his unanswered proposal hung between them like a gift she was too afraid to reach out and take.
Her heart ached for Mac, but sleeping with him had been reckless and selfish.
And not without consequence. Seven weeks after returning from London, it was clear to Emmy that she was pregnant.
As Emmy vomited again and again into the toilet, and as Charlotte placed a cool cloth across the back of her neck, a terrible longing filled the emptiness that gripped her stomach. She missed her mother.
“I want my mum,” Emmy rasped to Charlotte, between heaves.
Charlotte leaned over her and kissed the back of Emmy’s head. “I know you do.”
Through all the years of the war, Emmy had awakened each day as Isabel Crofton.
But she was still Annie Downtree’s daughter.
Mum had stood where she was now: alone, pregnant, and reeling from choices made in weakness.
Mum alone knew where to find the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the stares, the empty days, and the lonely nights.
Mum knew how to survive in a world without dreams.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Emmy finally whispered.
Charlotte sought Emmy’s gaze, maneuvering her face close to Emmy’s. “Tell Mac. He loves you. I’ve known it all along. And I think you love him, too. This child is as much his as it is yours.”
Emmy blinked back threatening tears. “But . . . Mac is American. When the war is over, he will go back to America.”
Charlotte looked down and nodded. “I know.”
“You . . . would want me to go? Leave here?” Emmy could hardly form the words. Thistle House had been her refuge, a sanctuary after the war had taken everything from her.
“We’re not talking about what I want.” Charlotte reached for Emmy’s hand.
“This is about your life, not mine. You need to make your way back into the world, Isabel. You’ve a place in it.
You need to find what it is. I know you’ve said you won’t ever sketch another bridal gown, and maybe you won’t, but you were meant to do something with your life.
I can’t believe it’s to sit in Thistle House and watch time pass you by. ”
“But I feel . . . safe here,” Emmy said, scarcely breathing.
“Safe is not the same thing as happy. Trust me on this, Isabel.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“I won’t know what to do with myself in America,” Emmy finally said.
Charlotte smiled. “You will build a life with the man you love and the child you created. You’ll figure out the rest. That’s what we all have to do.”
Another stretch of silence passed as Emmy contemplated a future with the only man she could ever see herself loving. It seemed too grand a thing to imagine; it had been too grand for Mum.
Mum.
If she did this, this was where Annie Downtree’s daughter and Eloise Crofton’s would part. For good.
This was where Emmeline Downtree would fade at last into nothing, just like Julia had. Like Mum had.
Charlotte got to her knees and told Emmy she was going to make some chamomile tea to settle Emmy’s stomach.
“You might consider telling Mac who you really are. I don’t think it will matter to him,” Charlotte said as she stood at the doorway.
Emmy murmured that if it didn’t matter to him, then there was no reason to tell him. Because it mattered to her. Life was about coming and going.
For Emmy, it was time to go.
* * *
ISABEL Crofton married Jonah MacFarland in a London courthouse on May 8, the day the Allies declared victory in Europe.
The end of hostilities.
The newlyweds left for America with Isabel’s brand-new passport on a foggy morning in July after a tearful, long weekend at Thistle House where she said her farewells.
The morning of their departure, Isabel found herself as she had been the day she left London after Mac had saved her life, desperate to be far from it.
She felt the stitching of any last ties to her old life break away as London fell behind her.
In her suitcase in the belly of the ship, she carried a small stack of maternity clothes, her watercolor brushes, her birth certificate, a felt box of trinkets, a book of fairy tales.
And a hammer.
She would not see England again.
The hammer would remind her, lest she forget, that she had made a transaction when she became Isabel.
Leaving England forever meant she could leave Emmeline Downtree and her terrible sorrows there with it.
It seemed a reasonable exchange.