Secrets of Nanreath Hall (2 page)

September 1940

T
his is London.” American newscaster Edward R. Murrow's nightly send-off repeated itself in Anna Trenowyth's head as she emerged from the Aldersgate Tube station into the dusty yellow glare of a late summer afternoon.

This certainly was not the London she knew. In the weeks since German bombers had begun concentrating their nightly raids on the capital, the city had taken on a surreal feeling, as if the entire population clenched its fists and held its breath. Even the air seemed charged and heavy, coating the back of her throat with a taste of grit and cinders.

Damaged roads had been roped off, so that just navigating the short distance between the station and Graham and Prue's house became a game of snakes and ladders, with every move forward requiring three moves back. Homeless queued in front of a burned-out department store where volunteers handed out blankets and coffee. A group of boys rooted near a rubble-filled crater, hooting
and whistling over bits of shrapnel and twisted metal. A family hustled, heads down, toward a bus, carrying a few bits of scarred luggage.

She'd been warned what to expect. She'd listened to the news reports from her hospital bed in Surrey, fingers clenched white in her lap, stomach tight and tense. Whitechapel, Clerkenwell, Holborn, the names familiar and dear. Places she could picture when she closed her eyes. Her city. Her home. But not even Mr. Murrow's impressions of devastation had been enough to prepare her for the harsh reality.

“Pardon, miss. Street's closed off. Unexploded bomb.” A policeman barred her way, twirling his whistle round his finger, rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Bomb disposal's on its way, but you'll have to go round.” He eyed her dark blue gabardine Red Cross VAD uniform and the valise she carried, the weight of it dragging against her bad shoulder. “Home for a bit?”

“A week's leave. My family lives just north of here. I thought I'd surprise them.”

His frown deepened. He caught his whistle in a closed hand. “A good daughter, you are, miss. I hope you find them well.”

Anna nodded her thanks and began the roundabout track that would take her east then back north. At this rate, it would be dinnertime before she dragged herself into the small front parlor in Queen's Crescent. It was Friday, so Graham would be at the pub for his weekly pint of bitter and a jaw with the lads. Prue would be in her chair by the radio, listening to Vera Lynn or the comedy of
Band Waggon
, chewing nervously at the end of her spectacles.

Anna hadn't seen either of them since July, when they'd visited her in hospital. She'd tried talking them out of the difficult trip from London to Surrey, but Prue had insisted, and Anna hadn't the stamina to argue. It took all her energy just to scribble a few hack
neyed lines on a postcard each week. There was no way she could make them understand her desire to be left alone without sounding cold and unfeeling. And she'd not hurt Graham or Prue even if it meant gritting her teeth through their hovering attentiveness.

Just as she'd expected, it had been an awkward reunion. They'd not known what to say as she lay plastered like a mummy, her face gaunt and marked by the constant nightmares that left her sick. She'd had too much to say and no words to speak of the horrible images seared upon her heart. By the time they left, she'd felt nothing but guilty relief and an overwhelming urge to be sick.

Then she'd received her new orders, and she'd had to speak to them. They were the only ones who might understand her emotional tug-of-war. She'd foregone a letter, choosing instead to ring them up with the news, spilling her confusion and doubts over the wires. Graham had listened to her calmly before handing the phone to Prue, who urged her to come home for a long-delayed visit. They needed to talk with her—about her mother.

Anna had hung up the receiver with shaking hands and arranged for leave to travel up to London. Now, a week later, she was finally home, though home seemed sadly changed.

She shifted the heavy weight of her valise off her shoulder to relieve the growing ache of stiff muscles as a trickle of sweat ran down her spine. The day was warm, and it had been months since she'd walked so far. But she'd not the fare for a cab even if one could be found. Besides, she couldn't very well complain at being passed over for a posting due to her injuries and then wilt at a bit of effort. There would be effort and more if she returned to the front.

No, not if . . . when. When she returned to the front. There was no
if
about it. She had not become a VAD to sit safely in Blighty making tea and playing cards while others risked their lives.

She passed the church and the greengrocer's, rounded the
corner, her steps hastening as shattered glass crunched under her boots. Her hands slid clammy on the leather strap of her bag, and her damp skin itched beneath the heavy wool of her uniform.

Buildings leaned drunkenly on their foundations, their windows blown out, doors knocked from hinges. A jagged gap like a missing tooth was all that was left of the butcher's shop. The pub looked comfortingly unscathed until she approached, then she noticed a tumbled slide of bricks and shingles where the roof had collapsed. A gleam of brass railing poked up through fallen plaster and splintered beams. A pint glass stood half-filled on a table in a corner. A dart stuck dead center in the dartboard still hanging on the back wall.

Ten paces. Twenty. The damage greater, the houses tumbled and spilled like a child's toppled building blocks. Smoke hung low like a morning fog across the Thames. A few firemen replaced their hoses upon a truck. A policeman unrolled a coil of rope across the pavement where a set of marble steps led to . . . nothing.

No.

Anna's chest tightened. Her throat closed around a hard painful knot. Pain lanced down her leg, buckling her ankle. The awkward weight of the valise knocked her to her knees. Dirt bit into her skin, scraped her hands raw. She retched, but there was nothing in her stomach except the weak tea she'd drunk this morning on the train. Still, she felt her insides shriveling, darkness crowding the edges of her vision.

It couldn't be. There was some mistake. She was having another nightmare. She would open her eyes to see curtains at the windows and geraniums on the stoop. Graham and Prue standing on the steps to meet her.

“Here now, miss. Are you all right? You took a nasty spill on these cobbles.”

One of the firemen.

Anna opened her eyes, her memories as ephemeral as the smoke blowing east toward Shoreditch. She swallowed down her horror, clamped her mouth over the sobs threatening to overwhelm her. “The people who lived here . . . do you know what shelter they might have been taken to?”

The firemen exchanged awkward glances before one shouldered the burden for all and faced her, shaking his head. “I'm sorry, miss. Ten died in this block alone. Seven more around the corner.”

He need say no more. There would be no welcoming embrace. No comforting advice. And no revelations about her mother. She stared disbelieving at the wreckage.

“Have you a place to go?” the fireman asked in a deep, smoke-harshened voice. “Someone you can stay with?”

“No,” Anna said, finally looking away. “No one at all.”

T
he grammar school served as a temporary shelter for those who'd lost their homes in the air raids. With nowhere else to go, Anna climbed its steps as the sky purpled to twilight, the streets emptying of crowds, the growing dark slashed only by the sweep of arcing spotlights from antiaircraft batteries.

The building was packed, a lucky few finding seats on the narrow benches, the rest making do with the cement floor. Sleep was impossible, though a few managed catnaps curled on blankets, some wrapped in their coats, heads on their arms. Every now and then, the heavy krump of Bofors guns could be heard, followed by distant dull explosions and the constant moan of sirens.

Anna was handed a cup of coffee and a sandwich upon her arrival, but she'd no stomach for food and the coffee cooled untouched to a black tarry goop. With fumbling fingers, she pulled her locket from its place at her throat. What began as a childish charm against
the bogeyman when she was six had become a talisman during her long, painful months recovering in hospital. A link to the familiar when the rest of the world seemed bent on chaos.

She ran her thumb over the enigmatic inscription engraved upon the back—
Forgive my love—
before flipping the locket open to stare at the grainy photographs nestled within: the woman's delicate features at odds with her mulish chin and defiant posture; the soldier's lean good looks still obvious beneath his battle-weary scruffiness.

As always, she sought shades of herself in these two ghostly figures, the curve of an eyebrow, the slope of a nose, the firmness of a chin. Did she have her mother's laugh? Her father's smile?

She snapped the locket shut with a disgusted snort.

Mother? Father?

Those terms should signify more than egg and sperm and a name on a birth certificate. The faces immortalized in her locket might be better termed sire and dam; clinical names that didn't confuse conception with parenthood.

In every way that mattered, Graham and Prue Handley had been her mother and father. They gave her a home when it would have been all too easy to send her to an orphanage or workhouse. They had comforted her when she broke her arm falling out of a tree at seven years old and when she had her appendix removed at twelve. They had tolerated her teen complaints at being forced to practice the piano while other girls her age were going to the cinema with boys. And when they introduced her to strangers it had been as their daughter, a statement of love and belonging she'd always taken for granted.

Where did she belong now?

“Anna? Anna Trenowyth? Is that you?”

She looked up to see her old next-door neighbor Mrs. Willits pushing through the crowds toward her. She wore a flower-printed
nightgown under a man's mackintosh and gum boots on her feet. Her hair was wrapped in a red chiffon scarf, and a string bag dangled on her wrist. She barreled her way through a group of chattering housewives and stepped over an old man curled on his coat, who grumbled and turned his back.

“It
is
you,” Mrs. Willits announced, as if she were broadcasting for the BBC. “I thought I recognized that ginger hair of yours.”

Anna smoothed a curl back from her forehead, suddenly self-conscious of the wild tangle of red-gold curls barely contained beneath her storm cap.

“What on earth are you doing here, my dear?” Mrs. Willits shoved herself onto the bench beside Anna with a huff of breath. “We'd all heard you were still recuperating in Surrey.”

“I came up on the train this morning. I . . .” Anna disguised her emotion with a sip of her cold coffee.

“Oh dear, yes, I see.” Mrs. Willits patted Anna's knee. “Not the homecoming you were expecting, I daresay.”

Rage and grief sat like a sour weight in the pit of Anna's stomach, but it was regret that gnawed at her nerves until she shook as if she were fevered. She had taken them for granted, imagining they would always be there as they had always been. As unchanging and familiar as the cluttered little terrace house that forever smelled of Graham's Grousemoor tobacco and Prue's rosewater perfume. Anna stared hard into her cup, vision blurring, but now was not the time to fall apart. She blinked back her tears and forced herself to straighten her shoulders, though she felt as if her spine might snap with the effort. “Forgive me, Mrs. Willits. I'm all at sea.”

“Of course you are, and there's nothing to forgive, child. I know it's hard, but we mustn't lose heart. We must carry on and keep faith in our soldier boys and Mr. Churchill.” She pulled a perfumed handkerchief from her cleavage and handed it to Anna. “The Hand
leys wouldn't want to see you all red-nosed and blotchy. Not when you've only just got yourself healthy again after that horrid mess in France.”

Anna dabbed at her eyes with a weary smile. “It doesn't seem real yet. I mean, I know they're gone, but I can't feel . . . I don't want to feel. If I do, then I'll have to face the truth that they're really gone, and I can't do that. Not yet. Is that wrong? Is it disloyal?”

“Of course not. When you're ready, you'll mourn them properly, and until then, you can take solace knowing they were happy in each other to the end, and few can make that claim, can they? They were proud as peacocks of you and your war work. Always bragging to the neighbors, reading us your letters from France to let us know how their girl was getting on over there.”

She crushed the handkerchief in a trembling fist. “But I wasn't their girl, was I? Not really.”

“Pish tush! Of course you were. Has someone been needling you?” Mrs. Willits eyed the sea of weary faces, as if seeking out a perpetrator to confront. “Has someone been talking out of turn?”

“No, nothing like that.” Anna paused to gather her breath and her scattered thoughts. Spoke before she could think twice. “Do you recall my mother? My real mother?”

Mrs. Willits leaned back with a lift of her brows. “Of course I do. She was a dear sweet thing. Not at all what you'd expect from a . . .” She pressed her lips together, as if threading through a difficult problem.

“Earl's daughter?” Anna offered. “Or fallen woman?”

Mrs. Willits's shoulders gave a quick, agitated jump before she recovered with a shrug and a wave of her hand. “Take your pick. She was quiet but always polite and never standoffish. You'd never have known the one by her demeanor nor expected the other if you weren't toddling about the back garden.”

“What about my father?”

Mrs. Willits's open gaze grew shuttered. “Your mother never spoke of him and it wasn't my place to pry. I don't think even the Handleys knew who he was, only that he'd perished in the Great War and left your mother with a child but no wedding ring.” She paused. “What do you remember, Anna?”