Chapter 2
With heavy shoulders, Charley ran through the bustling streets of Whitechapel, making her way to Wintter’s Bakery in record time. The jog down familiar streets brought a bit of comfort now that everything was about to change.
After sitting huddled with her mother in the Underground half the night, waiting to see if German zeppelins would make good on their threats to level the East End, they’d finally returned home in the daylight to discover her twin brother Charles had fled to God knew where.
“He doesn’t mean it,” their mother had insisted. “He’ll come back in his own time.”
But Charley knew her brother better than anyone.
While he had many fine qualities—a head for numbers, a knack for quoting Shakespeare, compassion beyond measure—he was also a coward, not equal to the task of foreign war.
His compassion extended first and foremost to himself.
He’d probably been planning how to disappear since they passed the Conscription Act in January.
His notice arrived a week ago, and the air raid warnings had provided the perfect cover for him to up and disappear. Besides all that, he’d taken most of his clothes.
“He’s supposed to report for duty by tomorrow,” she reminded her mother. “I’m not sure his own time will suit.”
“He’ll be back, you’ll see.”
“He’s taken the sketch he drew of you and me,” Charley said, observing the empty place upon the mantel. “He isn’t coming home.”
“He has to,” her mother said, wringing her hands. “What will be the penalty if he’s found?”
“They won’t find him,” she answered evenly, straightening her mother’s collar to hide the trembling in her own hands. “They won’t even look, because I’m going in his place.”
She, too, had thought it through since January, because Charles was always their mother’s favorite, whether she admitted it or not—the man of the house, whom she couldn’t live without—the one it would break her heart to lose.
And because Charley knew without a doubt that if he made it to the Western Front, they would lose him.
The war in France would break him just as surely as the Boers had broken the father she never met.
“What can you mean?” her mum asked, crossing her arms and rubbing them against a sudden chill. “Go in his place? Don’t be absurd.”
Charley pulled her long hair up, tucking it beneath her brother’s old cap. “What do you see?”
Her mother blinked, and Charley knew she had her, no matter how much she might protest.
“I see my darling girl.”
“Admit it, Mum. You see Charles.”
“This isn’t Twelfth Night, Charley. You can’t just dress up as your twin and be taken for a man.”
“Viola dresses up as Cesario, not Sebastian,” she countered. “And I know it’ll be hard, but I can do it. Only first, you must cut my hair.”
She pulled off the cap, letting it fall to her waist in wavy brown locks.
“Your beautiful hair,” her mother moaned, stepping back.
Charley moved closer, holding out the scissors.
“You can’t do this. I can’t lose you both.”
When her mother sniffled, eyes filled with tears, Charley’s own tears threatened to fall, so she focused on the scissors.
“You won’t lose either of us. Charles is out there, somewhere.
Safe enough for now. If I go in his place, he’ll stay safe, don’t you see?
You know I can bear it better than he can.
And I promise to take very good care while I’m away.
” She tried to press the scissors into her mother’s hand.
“What’s the alternative?” she asked gently.
“We do nothing. We wait.”
“If he’s discovered it will be too late.”
In the back of her brother’s wardrobe, Charley found a pair of old overalls. She clenched her fists and took a deep breath. Stiff upper lip now, she told herself, before pulling on the overalls and tucking her hair once more inside the threadbare cap. Then she set out at a run for Little Germany.
Although it was reported the zeppelins had all been turned away, the cracked door frame and hanging shutters of Wintter’s Bakery told a different tale.
She arrived to find Herr Wintter nailing boards over shattered remnants of the lovely stained glass windows they’d brought all the way from Wittenberg.
“Good morning,” Charley called, cautiously.
Herr Wintter turned stiffly to squint at her, his right eye swollen shut, unrecognizable as cheek or bone. “Is it?”
Hurrying inside, she found his wife sweeping up the broken glass.
“What happened?”
“Englishmen with stones and knives.”
Her stomach plunged. Anti-German turmoil had been growing steadily since the outbreak of war, and fear of zeppelin attacks always fanned the flames. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you need bread? They took it all.”
“No, I—” Charley stopped herself. The request seemed selfish and petty now.
“Come. We still have tea.”
Frau Wintter led the way behind the counter and into the clean, homey kitchen, where she placed a kettle on the hob. “Tell me.”
“My hair. I was hoping you would cut it off—all of it.”
“Nits?”
“Not nits.” She made a face. “Nothing like that.”
“Then why so short, Spatzi?” Frau Wintter asked as she ran her fingers through the thick chestnut locks.
A surrogate grandmother to Charles and Charley, the baker’s wife had dubbed her Spatzi—Little Sparrow—as a child because she flew at the bigger boys, all talons and teeth, when they taunted Charles to crying in the street.
“Not just short, Oma,” Charley explained. “Like a boy. I want to look like Charles.”
Frau Wintter’s brow furrowed, but she nodded once and set out her supplies. There were no prying questions. It wasn’t her way.
She parted the hair down the side at the right temple, and Charley closed her eyes tight against the icy scissors until the first lock fell to the floor. “It’s only hair,” she reminded them both. It would grow back some day if she allowed it.
“What do you read these days? Best way to see the world and find adventure, books.”
“I’ve got Little Dorrit from the lending library.”
“Always melancholy Dickens,” she chided.
“I love him.”
“So bleak. A nice girl like you should read poetry.”
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Charley teased, and Frau Wintter chortled.
“Perhaps an autumn one,” she said, handing over a small mirror.
A gasp escaped Charley’s lips before she could tamp it down—or out of Charles’s, for it was he who stared back at her in the glass, his brown hair falling to the side in short waves.
“Still beautiful,” Frau Wintter said, cupping her cheek. “How can you expect to fool a soul?”
A shiver ran down Charley’s freshly bared neck. The decision was made, had been writ in her heart from the moment her brother’s notice had arrived, but she couldn’t help asking anyway. “Do you think I’m making a terrible mistake?”
Ignoring the quaver in her voice, Frau Wintter gazed back, her face a mixture of tenderness and despair and the deepest understanding. “This war is a terrible mistake, Spatzi. But no decision born of love could ever be. You are brave. You are strong. You are wonderful. And you will be fine.”
They were the same words she’d repeated over and over as she cleaned Charley up and mended her dress after Billy Boyle and his gang had caught her in the alleyway a few years back.
She kissed Charley’s cheek, and Charley kissed her back, pressing a shilling into her palm for the haircut.
Frau Wintter squeezed her hand, leaving the shilling and something else: a bronze medallion emblazoned with her maiden initials: AR.
“Your necklace?” Charley asked in wonder. “I couldn’t.”
“So you’ll always find your way home.”
“Danke,” Charley whispered, refusing to acknowledge the swell of homesickness already rising in her chest as she tugged on her cap and waved goodbye.
The recruitment office wasn’t far, but when Charley peered through the window she realized she hadn’t accounted for a mandatory physical.
Dropping her trousers to turn her head and cough, not to mention removing her shirt, would see her instantly unmasked.
Blast Charles for not sticking around long enough to get himself through this bit before he’d taken flight.
She’d already cut her hair. Now what was she supposed to do? Talk her way out of it?
Patriotic posters lined the walls, and she looked to them for guidance as she waited, but they were mostly empty platitudes and threats.
it is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb! one poster shouted, as an illustrated zeppelin soared above St. Paul’s. Very helpful. women of britain say, ‘go!’ implored another—exactly what she was trying to do, if only her anatomy didn’t get in the way.
“Papers?” the recruitment officer demanded, just as Charley noticed a man on the street nick an old lady’s handbag.
She couldn’t have said why exactly, but when the lady cried out, only to be ignored by everyone around her, Charley was compelled to take off running down the overcrowded street, as though all hundred-odd pounds of her would be able to fight the thief.
But in trousers and a cap, Charley wasn’t little Charlotte anymore.
She could truly become as brave and strong as Frau Wintter professed her to be.
Rounding the corner, the thief ducked down an alleyway, but Charley kept pace with him—until a lorry full of sheep blocked her exit from the alley, grinding the motor as though stuck, while pedestrians flooded around it on both sides.
With a running leap, she hefted herself into the bed and pressed her way through the skittish, smelly sheep, then swung down onto the road once more, catching sight of the thief as he turned left at the next crossroads.
Darting down another alley, Charley popped out just in time to trip the thief and snatch the handbag from his flailing arms before turning heel and hoofing it back to the recruitment office, where a constable was speaking to the old woman.
Charley handed back the purse before bending over to catch her breath, waving off the old lady’s gratitude, though when she stood up straight again, she couldn’t stop her chest from puffing up with pride.