The sisters negotiate the route to the boating lake, where the juxtaposed calm water and lazily hanging tree branches is a welcome balm.
‘Constance, look here.’
The sisters are joined lakeside by a queue of blind soldiers. Led by a seeing officer, they stand one behind the other, holding the shoulder of the blind man in front of them. Efficiently they board the rowing boats that await them, one for each soldier and their guiding companions.
Verity drops her umbrella where she stands and looks back, seeking the soldiers’ place of origin. Without a word to Constance, she troops off on the path that leads to the gardens of a low handsome building adjoining the park, the hostel for newly blinded servicemen. Walking towards her is a man led by the hand of a young girl, whose head does not reach his waist. Verity later learns the girl is the gardener’s daughter whose kindness is a fixture here. The soldier wears the same dark lenses as Verity, even their frames are similar.
‘Do you need my other hand?’ The young girl asks.
An idea strikes Verity like a thunderbolt. It comes so clearly that she wonders at the dullness of her intellect.
The sisters had dabbled in philanthropy, like birds testing seed. Their unsparing giving occupied the previous years in which their failure to find Rafe slowly withered their spirits. Percy had warned them, ‘Do something. Find an additional purpose.’ They studied charities and donated anonymously with Percy’s guidance. Their hands were always in their purses, but they never really did anything.
‘No, my darling girl,’ Verity says to the child. ‘I am here to give my hand.’
Jonesy knows what risks he takes in coming to Charing Cross Station. Although Britain is beginning to open its arms to the Chinese to fill the acute labour shortage, there are malevolent opposers to all foreigners. Already twice today the Specials have requested him to produce his medical exemption certificate, and he isn’t entirely certain if it’s technically their remit to do so.
He bears the harassment so that he may search the faces of returning servicemen. There’s a word, a place, on everyone’s lips that he doesn’t understand. Jutland. Where is it? What is it? He longs to ask a stranger in the gathering throng. Since that word was first uttered the crowds have increased. He hears someone say, ‘There is no reason to wait here. They’re sewn up in hammocks and tossed over the side.’ People speak in riddles, he thinks.
The boots pass him, so many soldiers’ boots with dried, cracked mud still clinging to them. But Jonesy searches for a sailor, a young man named Stanley whose last letter was full of innuendo that only Jonesy could decipher. There were no thick, black strike-outs on the pages this time. A life together, Stanley promised between the lines.
He can only afford an hour before he must return to work in Magdalen Street. Whittling for the war effort reminds him of his prison work: hairbrushes, shaving brushes, walking sticks. One workshop cannot fill all the orders for Punch and Judy puppets, and thus send the spill to Jonesy. These, at least, he actually enjoys making.
On his way into the station he caught the outline of two women wearing identical coats, one blue, the other lavender. They left an impression that washed over him, awakening his memory of two velvet capes of the same colours that once hung on pegs in the entry of a house on Fore Street. He and Willa visited with their mistress shortly after he began his apprenticeship; the night the long dead, golden sailor gazed at him playfully on the Thames shore. The fierce Irish woman in the kitchen fed them bread and marmalade, while Mistress met with the two women who lived there.
Jonesy refrains from looking closely at the women wrapped in blue and lavender at Charing Cross Station today. He avoids faces during these days of war, except when he attunes to returning sailors and searches for Stanley. His longing encompasses him in a bittersweet ache. Jonesy carries the ache home with him, no wiser on the subject of Jutland, or Stanley.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
1917
It occurs in broad daylight, a sunny bright day in June – the thing feared by everyone in the Fowler household. Iceland had warned them in a letter that Benedikt delivered to their box.
We cannot know what effect a high-explosive bomb might have on you. We suspect you will not survive a direct hit.
Now they too are caught up in the war’s voracious maw.
Clovis had worked tirelessly these last three years to think of every scenario, every possibility to safeguard their existence. Mockett had produced medical exemptions for her men, not forged, but authentic certificates that Iceland had no way of producing.
She insisted that each of them contribute to the war effort should they ever be stopped and questioned. Willa has enough outwork to make a normal seamstress go blind. But each time she sits down with her foot on the peddle of the sewing machine she silently claims a victory. It took weeks to muster the courage to approach Finn.
‘Sir, could you, would you, possibly consider a sewing machine for the household?’
‘She won’t like it.’
‘Well, sir, of course she won’t, but there are facts, sir.’ She waits for an invitation.
‘Go on.’
‘It takes me fourteen hours to make you a dress shirt, sir. With the machine …’ she pauses for strength despite her milquetoast character, ‘I can make a shirt in an hour and fifteen minutes.’
His attention is piqued.
‘A dress, from ten hours to one hour, sir. I know a girl at the sewing factory. I’ve seen it.’
‘Well, girl.
