The Dragonfly Pool (31 page)

Tally stared at the ground, unable to bear the sight of her friend driven off into captivity. Surely there was something he could do. Run, fight . . . he had been so brave on the quayside. But after all, he was going to his grandfather's house. He had a family. She had been stupid not to remember that.

Matteo certainly had remembered it. He made no attempt to hold Karil back but came and hugged him—and then the children shook hands one by one and said good-bye.

“This way, Your Highness,” said one of the footmen, and Karil got into the car and was driven away.

The last thing Tally saw was the smug-looking girl with ringlets putting her arm around his shoulders.

N
obody ever forgot where they were on the day that war was declared.

Tally was in the kitchen helping Aunt May to prepare the vegetables for Sunday lunch when the music on the wireless stopped and the announcer said that the prime minister would address the nation at eleven o'clock. Everyone had been expecting it; Hitler had invaded Poland two days before and the democratic countries had had enough. Aunt Hester came hurrying in from the garden and Tally's father from his study.

The prime minister was old and tired; he had tried to keep the peace and now he told the people of Great Britain that he had failed. An ultimatum had been sent to Hitler demanding that he withdraw his troops from Poland and it had been ignored.

“I regret to tell you, therefore, that a state of war now exists between England and Germany.”

No one ever forgot what happened next either. Almost straightaway the air-raid sirens sounded—that hideous wailing that they had only just learned to recognize.

“Quick, into the shelter,” said Dr. Hamilton, pushing his daughter toward the door.

“Oh dear, my roast will be spoiled—couldn't you go ahead, and let me—” began Aunt May, and saw her brother's face.

The shelter was at the bottom of the street. It was not really finished yet and a puddle of water had collected in the bottom. The lady from number 4 said she wasn't going down into that wetness, she'd rather be bombed than die of pneumonia. She was a very large person and the people behind her got nasty because she was blocking the door.

They had just climbed down when the all clear went. It had been a false alarm.

“Were you frightened?” Kenny asked, when he and Tally met that afternoon in Primrose's stable.

“Yes, I was—it was the noise as much as anything—that awful wailing. But I'm glad I've got it over—the first time, I mean.”

The date was September 3, 1939. The Delderton term began in just over a week.

“Thank God you'll be out of London,” said Dr. Hamilton.

That evening the king spoke to his people. The aunts as usual were more anxious about the king's stammer than about what he said, but he got through it very well, speaking slowly and pausing when things might have got out of hand.

As she listened, Tally was back at the dragonfly pool, telling Karil about the British king. That he was a kind man and that his people loved him, but that he was not like Karil's father.

Well, now Johannes lay under a stone slab in Bergania's cathedral—and Karil, too, might be dead for all Tally knew of him.

There had been five weeks of term left when they returned from Bergania, and every day Tally had waited for a letter. Karil knew her address at school and at home; all the children had exchanged addresses. For while they had hoped that Karil would be able to come straight to Delderton; they knew that there might be delays.

But there had been nothing. Tally knew now how Julia felt as she waited for a letter from her mother. None of the others had heard anything either; nor had Matteo. At first Tally had written almost every day, then three times a week, then twice . . . Pride didn't come into friendship, she told herself, and she knew it might take him a while to settle down, but still there was only silence.

Now, as the king said, “With the help of God we shall prevail,” and the national anthem was played, Tally was remembering Karil's words as they sat by the dragonfly pool.

“I would have liked us to be friends.”

She had believed him. She had believed everything he said about wanting to be free, about being weary of being a prince.

But she had been wrong. Surely there was no one who could not write a letter and put it in a letter box.

And it hurt. For the rest of the term she had waited and hoped, and here in London, too, when she came home for the summer holidays, but still there was nothing. Well, she wasn't going to turn into one of those people who sighed and hovered around postmen. There were plenty of other things to do.

And indeed, during those first few days when the long-awaited war became a fact, there was hardly a spare moment.

Aunt May went off to the town hall hoping to become an air-raid warden but was directed to the wrong room and found herself lying on a stretcher, covered in bandages and labeled SERIOUS BURNS in a first-aid practice. Aunt Hester and Tally filled sandbags in the park and tried to shoo off the little children who wanted the sand to make castles.

New gas masks were issued, but Mrs. Dawson, whose dachshund Tally took for walks, refused to be fitted for hers unless there was a gas mask also for the dog. The blackout began and Dr. Hamilton's surgery was filled with patients who had fallen downstairs in the dark or walked into lampposts. No one knew whether laying in stocks of food was sensible or unpatriotic. Aunt Hester thought it would be hoarding and therefore bad, but Aunt May thought it must be good to save space on ships which had to bring food from overseas, and bought a large sack of pepper which she put under her bed.

“They say pepper is going to be very hard to get,” she said.

Statues were boarded up and the aunts found a paragraph in the newspaper that excited them very much. Among the paintings which were being crated up and sent for safety into a disused mine in Wales were the pictures in the Battersea Arts Museum, which included
The Angel of Mercy
for which Clemency had posed.

“So she'll spend the war underground,” they told Tally. “She'll be as safe as can be.”

Evacuation of schoolchildren to the country began, but without Maybelle and Kenny.

“They didn't even try to make me go,” said Maybelle. “I drew blood last time.”

Two days after the outbreak of war, Tally's aunt Virginia telephoned to say that she was taking Roderick and Margaret down to safety in the West Country till it was time for term to begin. Fortunately she had been able to buy their new uniforms before there was talk of shortages or even rationing.

“Roderick has had such a good term,” she told them. “He has made friends with the Prince of Transjordania—such a nice boy—and Foxingham has won their cricket match against Eton. It really is a splendid school.”

She kindly offered to take Tally away with them, but Tally told her father she would rather be hung, drawn, and quartered than go with her cousins to Torquay—and Dr. Hamilton, endlessly busy at the hospital with the evacuation of patients, did not argue.

On the last night before she was due to go back to Delderton, Tally and her father climbed up the hill past the convent and looked out over London. Their own barrage balloon had been joined by dozens of others, silvered in the moonlight. They did not look like kindly uncles now, nor like benevolent sausages—but like serious sentinels protecting the much-loved city.

“We shall come through,” said Dr. Hamilton, and took his daughter's hand. “You'll see, in the end we shall come through.”

The next morning, just as the taxi arrived to take them to Paddington Station, the postman came—and there was a letter for Tally in an unfamiliar hand. In an instant she was filled with certainty and happiness. Karil had written at last—he must have been ill; she had been completely wrong to doubt him. She tore the letter open.

It was not from Karil. It was from Anneliese, the German girl who had befriended them in Bergania and who had said she did not want to die young like St. Aurelia. She had managed to write before mail between her country and Great Britain ceased; she hoped that when the war was over they would still be friends and she sent “so much, much love indeed” to Tally and her friends.

She could write from an alien country declaring her friendship, but not Karil.

At Paddington there were throngs of men in uniform and evacuees with labels around their necks saying good-bye to their tearful mothers. Among the bustle and confusion the boys of Foxingham marched, as they had done before, toward their platform, their brand-new striped red-and-yellow uniforms standing out in the gloom of the station, but Roderick was not among them. He was going straight to Foxingham from Torquay. Tally thought she could make out the serious dark-haired boy who might or might not be the Prince of Transjordania—but she turned away. She had had her fill of princes.

Then she saw David Prosser, peering at a clipboard. Even he, efficient though he was, looked as though he had mislaid a child. Not Augusta Carrington—Tally could make her out at the end of the platform. And then she saw her other friends—Julia and Barney and Borro—and ran eagerly toward them.

It was time to forget Karil and move on.

K
aril stood looking out of his bedroom window at the gray London street. He had pushed aside the heavy damask curtains, and the dusty net curtains, and the blackout curtains which had just been put up, but the view of tired-looking people going about their business did little to lift his spirits.

Rottingdene House was packed from the roof to the basement with his relations, yet he had never felt so alone.

His grandfather's home was not far from Buckingham Palace where the king lived with his two small daughters, and in many ways it resembled it. Rottingdene, too, was surrounded by spiky railings and boasted a sentry box in the courtyard and a flagpole on the roof with a flag to raise and lower to show whether the owners were at home.

It was not till one got up close to the building that one noticed that though the house was so imposing, it was actually somewhat shabby; that the woodwork needed painting and the stonework was crumbling and that altogether Rottingdene was rather a rundown place. But if the building was run down, the people who lived in it were very grand indeed.

They never went out of doors without a footman or a maid; the carriage or motor that took them through the streets of London had the Rottingdene arms emblazoned on the side, and the soldier who guarded the door had to present arms whenever anybody entered or left.

Which was only right and proper, because the house had as many blue-blooded and royal personages living in it as there are woodlice under a stone.