Chapter 15
Jack came back a week after my trip to Falmouth. He emerged from the trees, Brock at his heels, as I was going to fetch water from the stream.
“Alice!” His voice had a treacherous effect on my body. It unleashed a powerful surge of pure joy, instantly tainted with dark swirls of jealousy.
“Hello,” I called back. “How was London?” I tried to sound casual, carefree, but the way it came out wouldn’t even have deceived a child.
“Depressing,” he replied. “It’s good to be back. Have you had breakfast yet?”
I shook my head.
“Good.” He shrugged off his knapsack. “I have bacon and sausages. We might have to share them with Brock, though. He hardly touched his food in London. It’s as if he could smell the fear.”
I bent down to stroke the dog’s fur. It felt warm and silky soft, not yet matted with salt water and sand, as it would be after a few minutes of frolicking on the beach. I didn’t ask why or how we were having bacon and sausages for breakfast. It seemed terribly extravagant. But I didn’t want to cast a cloud over his good humor. He’d sought me out and he’d brought me something special. For that I was happy, despite the warning voices in my head.
“I thought you might like to know how those men are,” he said when we were sitting on the beach, eating with our fingers. “They arrived in London a few days after me—all in good shape. They’ll be back in action by the time we do our next run.” He broke off a chunk of sausage and tossed it to Brock, who caught it between his teeth before it could fall onto the sand. “They asked me to pass on their thanks. You did a terrific job in difficult circumstances.”
“I’m glad they’ve all recovered,” I replied, “but I don’t like to think of them having to go back to what they were doing.”
He glanced up from his plate, a forkful of food suspended on its way to his mouth. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I saw in London. The Germans dropped a bomb on a school. According to the news reports, it was deliberate—not accidental. It cut the building in half. The children were having their lunch when it fell. Thirty-eight of them were killed, and six teachers.”
The piece of bacon in my mouth suddenly felt like cardboard. A school. What kind of wickedness made men drop bombs on children?
“Those men we rescued are pilots,” he went on. “So many have been lost. We need every single one of them if we’re going to win this war.”
I picked up what remained on my plate and offered it to Brock. “What if they get shot down again?”
“Then we’ll do our best to rescue them. If anything, coming so close to being captured makes them even keener to get back out there—they’ve seen firsthand what it’s like to live under German occupation.”
Something flickered in his eyes as he said it. I wondered if he was thinking of what the injured airmen had been through in France, or whether his mind had leapfrogged to another place. Was he thinking about the girl in the photograph? No doubt people on Guernsey were experiencing the same kind of treatment the Germans were meting out to the French. If Morwenna was trapped on the island, Jack would have no way of knowing what had become of her.
I’d heard enough horror stories about the Great War when I was at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium to know that it was not only men who were victimized when soldiers invaded. Some of the older nuns at the convent where I lived in Brussels had harrowing memories of being made to strip naked by German troops who accused them of being spies. Baseless charges, they said: the only purpose was humiliation—but they counted themselves lucky not to have been raped.
No wonder Jack sometimes looked as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. If what I suspected was true—if he’d spirited Morwenna off to Guernsey to avoid a scandal—he must be racked with guilt at having to leave her to the mercy of the Nazis.
Listen to me, Sister Anthony: the tighter you pull those strings, the better you will restrain the imagination.
The voice of Sister Margarita rang through my head, transporting me back to the novices’ robing room in Dublin, where I had first put on the hated skullcap. It was as if, because I no longer wore it, my mind had lost the discipline of rational thinking. I told myself that I had no concrete evidence to support my wild theory of Jack fathering an illegitimate child with the girl Leo Badger had seen him with one summer, years ago. The baby in the photograph could be anyone’s child. I didn’t know for certain that the girl was Morwenna—or that the snapshot had been sent from Guernsey. For all I knew, Jack could simply have used an old envelope to store the photo. And as for Ned being the child, surely that was venturing into the realm of fantasy.