Beryl laughed. “They are the bane, Jesse, of my every waking hour. Flopping in my eyes and not minding the bobby pins. But I know you can solve what’s become a rather serious condition.”

  “Aye, I can,” responded Jesse, guiding Beryl to the back for her shampoo.

  With a deep inhale, Beryl sat back in the washing chair, head tilted over the sink basin, taking in the languorous scent of the potions lined up on the shelf behind. If this war continued, Jesse would soon run out of these magical elixirs. Her well-provisioned shop would close. Surprising it had lasted this long.

  “Any new word from your husband?” Jesse inquired as she combed out the wet strands.

  “Yes, in fact, I’ve received another letter. He’s well—as well as you’d expect.”

  “Two years now, right?”

  “Longer, actually. You know, Jesse, I don’t even count the days anymore. Don’t find it helpful. We don’t truly know if we’ve lived another day closer to defeat or a day closer to the way things used to be. My boy—all the way up in Elsworth. I thank God every night—I do—that he is safe there, away from this bloody bombing. But we can’t get these years back, can we? None of us can, I suppose.”

  “And Lieutenant Clarke?” Jesse pressed. “What news did his letter offer?”

  “Truly, not much, Jesse. The censors black out any hard information. He’s received three postcards from me through the Red Cross, even though I write every week. He’s aware of the damage in London.”

  “And how would he learn of that, do you think?”

  Beryl paused. It was a question she’d considered again and again. Did the Nazis terrify their British captives with news of the destruction in England? Did they hint at it? She suspected the camps were more porous than the captors might have liked.

  “I’m not sure what they hear officially from the camp officers, but when new POWs arrive in the camp, they bring news. In his letters to me, Gordon continues to talk about our garden and his hopes for me to spend long hours there in the evening—wants me in our Anderson shelter, is what he’s saying. He raves over his occasional package from the Red Cross. He also talked about a work detail he’s assigned to—architectural work of all things, constructing some sort of wooden arbor over the garden in a nearby house. A simple project, really, too simple for his talents but it beats hard labor, I’d say. Isn’t that rich? The Nazis beautifying their surroundings as they bomb humanity all to hell.”

  Jesse listened, nodding kindly, sympathetically, making notes in her head of all Beryl had shared.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality…. In Poland, …the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews… None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women, and children.

  –Joint Declaration by members of the United Nations

  December 17, 1942

  East Anglia, England, 1943

  They had christened their B-17 “The Florida Gator” in homage to their pilot and instead of the more common rendering of a pin-up girl, they’d painted toothy jaws on the nose and a cartoon of a Nazi soldier, drawers down around his knees, with this helpful subtitle: “Taking a Bite Out of Hitler’s Ass.” And indeed, Hitler’s ass was more visibly exposed now with the Allies taking Tobruk from Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Red Army’s valiant stand at Stalingrad. But the Nazis now occupied the entirety of France and ongoing intelligence pointed to mass evictions of those they deemed undesirable from the Loire and southern France. Trains bearing refugees continued to thunder across the Reich, newsman Edward R. Murrow declaring over the BBC radio broadcast the fliers tuned into each day that the purpose of these camps was not concentration, but extermination.

  In their early days at Kimbolton, Jack and the nine other men of the Gator had flown sorties only as far as France, to pound a steel center in Lille, the railroad marshaling yards farther north, and to stir the waters of the U-boat pens at Brest and Lorient. Across and back, a handful of hours in the air with the sparkling if frigid waters of the Channel below, convenient for bailing out if needed. But it was clear, now, they would soon trade those milk runs for higher-risk missions and higher-risk targets in Germany thanks to improved fighter aircraft that could better shield the bombers from German fire. Not shield, really, but at least these little friends, as they came to call them, afforded the lumbering Fortresses the time and space to drop their payloads over targets and gave them a fighting chance to return to base. The P-51 Mustangs—re-engineered with more capable Rolls Royce engines—and P-47 Thunderbolts could theoretically accompany the B-17s all the way to Berlin, hang out while the bombardier spotted the target in his bomb site and did the deed, then escort the crews home. And while advancements in the capability of the fighter escort aircraft degraded the German counteroffensive, it did not disable it. The cost to the Allies—in men and materiel—was still horribly, painfully high.

  When Jack sat down to breakfast, he knew some of the men he broke bread with would not be present at dinner. Perhaps he would be the unlucky guy decapitated by anti-aircraft fire or, if fortune prevailed, fall to earth and find himself a POW. Beginning ten, eleven hours after a mission commenced, the crewmen who had prepped the planes—seeing to the engines and loading the bombs and ensuring the flight and electrical systems were running perfectly—made their way to the top of the control tower, searching the skies for returning B-17s, counting them as they came in. Every one that failed to return to its hardstand at Kimbolton meant ten men lost. Ten telegrams to wives or more often parents that explained with deep regret that their airman was killed or missing in action. The 379th Bombardment Group had lost a squadron and a half already—18 aircraft and 180 men who flew bravely into the fight against tyranny because their country needed them to. Farm boys and accountants, engineers and postmen, graduates of midwestern high schools and the Ivy League, who were asked to save the world and agreed to do it. Men whom Jack had come to know and respect during their months of training and men whose loss he tried not to think about too often lest he grow distracted and share their fate.

  The Brits did what they could to help the fliers avoid despair, given the unrelenting, high-wire tension of their work. Scores of British girls in their teens and twenties staffed the Aero Club—a string of Nissen huts on the base where the men could blow off a little steam. Busses ran several nights a week collecting fliers from other bases looking to have a little fun with the guys at Kimbolton. There were card games—bridge but more often, poker—a piano to pound, libraries of books and magazines, and a favorite option, listening to the radio, both the BBC and the German propaganda they could pick up from a signal out of Luxembourg. But what most of the American soldiers wanted to do was dance because that meant they could get their hands on willing young women eager to do almost anything to support Americans who were crucial to winning the war. Often there were lively bands doing their best renditions of “Moonlight Serenade” and “I’ll be Seeing You;” other times, the tinny phonograph offered recorded versions, the little speaker unable to replicate the bass as it sounded live, so deep that it vibrated through the very bones of the dancers, feeding their yearning and sense of dark romance. And while some of these liaisons became instantly sexual, producing a useful and distracting counterpoint passion to the high drama of the skies, others did not. Often, these girls and boys—close in age and both suffering the same piercing wartime disruption—simply became friends. He told her all about the girl back home; she told him about her soldier in Tunisia or somewhere in the Pacific or worse, interned by the Axis. Many of the girls invited the airmen and their crews to their homes for a meal and to meet parents and grandparents, little brothers and sisters, the family pet. A meal circumscribed by rationing, but rich in the soul-sustaining nourishment that unfolds when keeping company with kind people in a warm home, comfortably seated on an ancient sofa with doilies draped just so across the padded arms, the smell of tea laced with cinnamon wafting in the air.

  For Jack, it was his meals with Ivy and the constellation of children that comprised her household that relieved the tension, that restored him and allowed him to close his eyes and sleep at night. He and his co-pilot Buck Myers had a standing invitation to dine with the Hughes on Saturdays and when they weren’t flying or in pre- or post-mission briefings, they headed over to Boxworth Road. The men repaid Ivy in military-issue cigarettes and chocolate, along with tea bags and sugar packets lifted from the Aero Club. Buck was a Chicagoan, a graduate of Northwestern who took a degree in journalism and worked at the Tribune before Pearl Harbor. His fastidious fact-gathering contributed to his success in the cockpit and, more widely, the success of each mission he flew. There was not a detail that escaped his notice, from the readings on his gauges to how the aircraft responded to changing demands and variables, to the evolving defense strategies of the Germans. The mission debriefs were always longer when Myers was involved, but Jack, and indeed every man in the group, appreciated his precision. Luck, they knew, favors the well-prepared.

  Given the hundreds of questions Hugo and Colin posed to the fliers at these dinners, Jack joked the boys could probably fly a B-17 themselves at this point. Colin worked to understand the physics of flight—of lift and drag and pressure while Hugo was all numbers: how many squadrons in a group? How many groups in a wing?—his brain quickly extrapolating how many aircraft the United States Army Air Forces, Eighth Air Force Command must be massing on their missions across the Channel—and how many thousands might be spread across the English countryside. With their fathers gone, Jack slipped into their lives as a surrogate, called upon to answer questions of military strategy, wartime economies, along with the basics of geometry and what made girls the way they were. One evening, with Ivy overseeing the twins’ bath in advance of church the next day, the conversation turned to when Jack and Buck thought the boys’ fathers might return. Jack replied that Colin’s dad would be freed from his POW camp at the war’s end when the Allies won.

  “But when do ya think that’ll be, Jack? This year? Another year?” Fourteen now, his lengthening frame and deepening voice presaged that adulthood was not so long away. Colin made his inquiry as if returning his father to England were somehow within Jack’s power to effect. Looking into eyes shrouded with concern, Jack wished he could lie to make this boy happy for just this moment, to assure him the war’s near finished—that soon, soon, his father would be restored to the family. But no. He owed him better than that.

  “The good guys have got to get a foothold in Europe, son,” Jack began. “The bombing we’re doing is for sure demoralizing the Nazis and slowing ’em down—but we’re a long way from them quitting. So, the generals are figuring out the best way to get troops into France and then on into Germany. And that’s gonna take a while. Maybe a few more years.”

  Colin nodded, calculating. How old would he be when his father returned? Sixteen? Eighteen? Would he attend university someday, or would England need him to follow his dad into the British Army? The first of the evacuees with whom Colin had arrived in 1939 were now approaching their eighteenth birthdays. Wilbert, the red-headed boy who’d arrived on his very train, had received a letter from his mother that the conscription board was already looking for his registration papers.

  “But you’re certain we can smash the Germans?” inquired Hugo. “I mean, if we didn’t win—I believe we will, for certain, but say we didn’t. Would they let Colin’s dad go if they won? Or can they keep them because they came out on top?”

  “Prisoners of war are repatriated when the conflict ends. Both by the losers and the winners.”

  The boys considered this, then Hugo heaved a sigh and looked Jack square in the eye. “And what about my dad?” he asked. “What do you think his chances are?”

  Buck and Jack exchanged a long glance. Responding to Hugo’s question proved much tougher duty. In the unsteadying years since Hugo’s father was declared missing in action, Colin’s presence had helped give Hugo something solid to lean on when his worry over his father got the best of him. Hugo aspired to be like the slightly older boy, mature and grounded, and was past the sudden crying rants—tantrums, really—that had characterized the previous year.

  “Hugo,” Jack began, believing there was little chance that now, after three years, his father still lived. “We’ll just have to wait and see. I’m not losing hope. Don’t you either, okay? We don’t know nothin’ about nothin’ ’til we know somethin’, right?”

  And despite his fear, the hollow feeling in his gut that stayed with him most of the time, Hugo smiled and slowly shook his head. “How is it you Yanks never, EVER learned how to speak properly?”

  “Hey, buddy,” laughed Jack, “when we win this thing, and we ship out for home, you’re gonna miss hearing us talk. Know what I mean?”

  Hugo did. He knew Jack spoke the truth.

  The door knocker sounded, and Colin leapt to his feet. His mum. She was to have joined them for dinner and finally meet Jack and Buck, but had not arrived in time. This happened frequently, passenger train schedules subjugated to the army’s claim on the rails.

  Colin opened the door and there she stood, slightly disheveled from a long day of waiting and postponed plans, but beaming at the sight of her beloved boy, healthy and safe.

  “Mum! What was it? A broken-down train?” he asked, reaching his arms to hug her, both of them noticing that he had crossed a threshold: he was taller than she and had lost the last traces of the round, boyish face with which he had departed London three years ago. He pulled her head into his shoulder, the grownup, proprietary gesture surprising them both.

  “My sweet one,” she said, her face a mixture of pride tinged with sorrow. “You have eclipsed me! I’m now a squat old lady with you growing this tall in just a few months. You’re a man. You don’t even need your old mother.”

  Colin laughed with genuine delight. “Yes, mother, you are so bloody old. Ancient! Time to move you into a home for the aged, where they can feed you your meals all mushed up. Let’s hope your pension covers it.”

  “Actually, there are days I would be more than happy to eat mush if I had someone to prepare it for me,” she replied.

  “Looks to me like you haven’t been eating all that much,” he said, stepping back and apprising her. “That skirt is practically dropping off you.”

  “Never you mind. It’s just the work, Colin. Terribly busy. But I’m fine and have plenty to eat and I do not wish you to give it another thought because I want to hear all about everything here.”

  Hugo and the men stood quietly in the sitting room and watched, warmed by Colin’s obvious joy and not wishing to intrude on it. These two were so obviously related, appearing more like siblings than mother and son. Their green eyes shone, hers more tired and drawn than her son’s, but happy still.

  “Mrs. Clarke!” Hugo called finally, stepping up and extending his hand before she pulled him into an embrace.

  “My other son,” she smiled. “You’ve gotten taller too! Taking good care of each other, I see.”

  “We are, ma’am. And here are our Americans—the ones we’ve told you about.”

  She turned to greet Jack and Buck, surprised when her heart caught at the sight of them. These were the young men whose exploits Colin detailed in his letters to her, their bravery and kindness and patience. They appeared so much like the hundreds of airmen who had practically taken over London since the Americans had joined the war. But this pair was standing in for two missing fathers, providing a sense of normalcy, sturdiness, to the boys’ interrupted lives. Not to mention a bit of excitement.

  “Our Americans!” Beryl echoed, surprised by the tremble in her voice. “I am honored to meet you both, Officers, and so grateful to you for all you’ve done for Hugo and Colin—and for me.”

  Jack spoke first. “You’ve got it backwards, ma’am. It’s the boys who have kept us on our toes since we’ve been here. They remind us what we’re fighting for. You’ve got a pretty smart kid there.”

  Buck agreed, extending his hand and joking that he stayed up nights studying his flight manuals to stay ahead of the boys’ questions.

  “And who might this be, coming to my cottage at all hours?” Ivy called as she descended the steps, Margaret and Patsy skirting around her.

  “Mrs. Clarke!” squealed Margaret. “What have you brought us?”

  “Margaret!” Ivy intervened. “We’ve discussed this. You do not go asking adults for gifts like that. It is entirely improper, even when you know the adult quite well. Remember? Try again.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Clarke,” Margaret began in a monotone. “So lovely to see you.”

  “I hope you had a safe journey,” continued Patsy.

  “I did, girls. Thank you both awfully for asking.”

  “Dear Beryl. Hello. Delays again?”

  “Ivy, I do apologize for being so tardy.” She smiled and reached to hug Colin’s foster mum. “The train left Kings Cross, moved a few miles, then just sat on the sidings. I considered just turning around and heading home since I’ve missed the meal and all.”

  “Indeed. That would be hospitable. We shall dispatch you back to London with an empty stomach and hope for the best. Sorry. You’re out of luck.” She winked at the boys. “Come, let’s warm a bite or two for Colin’s mum.”

  In fact, Beryl had brought a gift for the twins: The Quest of the Missing Map, the newest Nancy Drew mystery which they received with enthusiastic appreciation before charging up the stairs where they could read aloud to one another, chapter by chapter. The men joined Beryl at the table as she ate her meal, pouring her a bit of the Kentucky bourbon they’d brought from the base exchange, chuckling as her eyes grew wide and surprised at the first sinus-clearing taste. Halfway through her soup, she asked if Jack would pour a wee bit more. Then a spot more after that. With his mother seated next to him on the long bench, Colin appeared content, settled, watching his mother tell her stories as if he were committing each nuance to memory for later, when he needed to summon a bit of her. As she finished her meal, Beryl relaxed against her boy and he reached his arm around her, snugging her in to his side.