her voice. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Walter.”
Maud smiled. “The most amazing thing happened. You read in the newspapers about the Christmas truce?”
“Yes, of course-British and Germans exchanging presents and playing football in no-man’s-land. It’s a shame they didn’t continue the truce, and refuse to fight on.”
“Absolutely. But Fitz met Walter!”
“Well, now, there’s marvelous.”
“Of course, Fitz doesn’t know we’re married, so Walter had to be careful what he said. But he sent a message to say he was thinking of me on Christmas Day.”
Ethel squeezed Maud’s hand. “So he’s all right!”
“He’s been in the fighting in East Prussia, and now he’s on the front line in France, but he hasn’t been wounded.”
“Thank heaven. But I don’t suppose you’ll hear from him again. Such luck doesn’t repeat itself.”
“No. My only hope is that for some reason he’ll be sent to a neutral country, such as Sweden or the United States, where he can post a letter to me. Otherwise I’ll have to wait until the war is over.”
“And what about the earl?”
“Fitz is fine. He spent the first few weeks of the war living it up in Paris.”
While I was looking for a job in a sweatshop, Ethel thought resentfully.
Maud went on: “Princess Bea had a baby boy.”
“Fitz must be happy to have an heir.”
“We’re all pleased,” Maud said, and Ethel remembered that she was an aristocrat as well as a rebel.
The meeting broke up. A cab was waiting for Maud, and they said good-bye. Bernie Leckwith got on the bus with Ethel. “She was better than I expected,” he said. “Upper-class, of course, but quite sound. And friendly, especially to you. I suppose you get to know the family quite well when you’re in service.”
You don’t know the half of it, Ethel thought.
Ethel lived on a quiet street of small terraced houses, old but well-built, mostly occupied by better-off workers, craftsmen and supervisors, and their families. Bernie walked her to her front door. He probably wanted to kiss her good night. She toyed with the idea of letting him, just because she was grateful there was one man in the world who still found her attractive. But common sense prevailed: she did not want to give him false hope. “Good night, comrade!” she said cheerfully, and she went inside.
There was no sound or light upstairs: Mildred and her children were already asleep. Ethel undressed and got into bed. She was weary, but her mind was active, and she could not fall asleep. After a while she got up and made tea.
She decided to write to her brother. She opened her writing pad and began.
My very dear young sister Libby,
In their childhood code, every third word counted, and familiar names were scrambled, so this meant simply Dear Billy.
She recalled that her method had been to write out the message she wanted to send, then fill in the spaces. She now wrote:
Sitting alone feeling proper miserable.
Then she turned it into code.
Where I’m sitting, if you’re alone you’re not feeling yourself either proper happy or miserable.
As a child she had loved this game, inventing an imaginary message to hide the real one. She and Billy had devised helpful tricks: crossed-out words counted, whereas underlined words did not.
She decided to write out the whole of her message, then go back and turn it into code.
The streets of London are not paved with gold, at least not in Aldgate.
She thought about writing a cheerful letter, making light of her troubles. Then she thought: to hell with that, I can tell my brother the truth.
I used to believe I was special, don’t ask why. She thinks she’s too good for Aberowen, they used to say, and they were right.
She had to blink back tears when she thought of those days: the crisp uniform, the hearty meals in the spotless servants’ hall, and most of all the slim, beautiful body that had once been hers.
Now look at me. I work twelve hours a day in Mannie Litov’s sweatshop. I have a headache every evening and a permanent pain in my back. I’m having a baby no one wants. No one wants me, either, except a boring librarian with glasses.
She sucked the end of her pencil for a long, thoughtful moment, then she wrote:
I might as well be dead.
On the second Sunday of each month an Orthodox priest came from Cardiff on the train up the valley to Aberowen, carrying a suitcase full of carefully wrapped icons and candlesticks, to celebrate Divine Liturgy for the Russians.
Lev Peshkov hated priests, but he always attended the service-you had to, to get the free dinner afterward. The service took place in the reading room of the public library. It was a Carnegie library, built with a donation from the American philanthropist, according to a plaque in the lobby. Lev could read, but he did not really understand people who thought of it as a pleasure. The newspapers here were fixed to hefty wooden holders, so that they could not be stolen, and there were signs that read “Silence.” How much fun could you have in such a place?
Lev disliked most things about Aberowen.
Horses were the same everywhere, but he hated working underground: it was always half-dark, and the thick coal dust made him cough. Aboveground it rained all the time. He had never seen so much rain. It did not come in thunderstorms, or sudden cloudbursts, to be followed by the relief of clear skies and dry weather. Rather, it was a soft drizzle that drifted down all day, sometimes all week, creeping up the legs of his trousers and down the back of his shirt.
The strike had petered out in August, after the outbreak of war, and the miners had drifted back to work. Most had been rehired and given back their old houses. The exceptions were those the management branded troublemakers, most of whom had gone off to join the Welsh Rifles. The evicted widows had found places to live. The strikebreakers were no longer ostracized: the locals had come around to the view that the foreigners, too, had been manipulated by the capitalist system.
But it was not for this that Lev had escaped from St. Petersburg. Britain was better than Russia, of course: trade unions were allowed, the police were not completely out of control, even Jews were free. All the same, he was not going to settle for a life of backbreaking work in a mining town on the edge of nowhere. This was not what he and Grigori had dreamed of. This was not America.
Even if he had been tempted to stay there, he owed it to Grigori to go on. He knew he had treated his brother badly, but he had sworn to send him the money for his own ticket. Lev had broken a lot of promises in his short life, but he intended to keep this one.
He had most of the price of a ticket from Cardiff to New York. The money was hidden under a flagstone in the kitchen of his house in Wellington Row, along with his gun and his brother’s passport. He had not saved this out of his weekly wage, of course: that was barely enough to keep him in beer and tobacco. His savings came from the weekly card game.
Spirya was no longer his collaborator. The young man had left Aberowen after a few days and returned to Cardiff to seek easier work. But it was never difficult to find a greedy man, and Lev had befriended a colliery deputy called Rhys Price. Lev made sure Rhys won steadily, and afterward they shared the proceeds. It was important not to overdo things: other people had to win sometimes. If the miners worked out what was going on, not only would it be the end of the card school, but they would probably kill Lev. So the money accumulated slowly, and Lev could not afford to turn down a free meal.
The priest was always met at the station by the earl’s car. He was driven to Ty Gwyn, where he was given sherry and cake. If Princess Bea was in residence, she accompanied him to the library and entered the room a few seconds before him, which saved her having to wait too long with the common people.
