Katie’s Hero (12 page)

If she did, she would see him in tears.

“Katie. I have an appointment in London on Friday,” Michael announced when their paths crossed by chance outside the library. “I’m seeing another surgeon about my back.”

Good, Katie thought. A breathing space from the angst. The kiddies might calm down at least. “I hope it goes well, sir.”

“Thank you. I need you to come with me.”

Katie was certain she must have misheard.

“It’s just for a couple of days. I’ve booked us into the Savoy.”

“The Savoy Hotel?” she said, in astonishment.

“Yes, I always go there.”

“You want
me
to go to the Savoy Hotel with you?”

“That’s about the size of it. Can you make the necessary arrangements with Jessop?”

“Sir, is this some kind of joke — some schoolboy prank I am not familiar with?”

“No. I need you to come to London with me on Friday.”

She could see he was starting to get annoyed. Katie shook her head. “It’s impossible, sir. I need to stay here with the children.”

It must have been the look on her face just before she shook her head that really angered him. His grip tightened on the polished wooden arms of the wheelchair. “There was a time,” he said, through barred teeth, “when any girl I asked would have been
thrilled
to go to London with me.”

Katie looked up at him, feeling more disgusted than ever before. “Even if she were one of your servants?” she asked.

“
Especially
if she was one of my servants.”

Katie shook her head. “I can’t agree to it, sir.”

“As your employer, I could insist that you obey me.”

“You could, sir,” she said, “but that would be unreasonable. It would be most improper for us to go to London and stay the night there. What will people think?”

“May I remind you that they will
not
think you are having a torrid affair with a man in a wheelchair!” he yelled.

“Michael, you engaged me to look after the boys. Someone has to get them up and ready for school, somebody has to — ”

“I’ve approached Marjory Mallory, and she’s willing to come up on Thursday night and stay until Saturday afternoon, when we return.”

He had it all worked out.

“Why don’t you ask Mrs. Mallory to go with you to London, then, if she’s so ready to help?”

“Because I would much prefer to go with you. I don’t want Marjory bossing me about as if she was taking me to prep school for the first time!”

He had a point. That’s exactly how Mrs. Mallory would treat him. But it was still highly irregular and would cause no end of gossip in the village. “I don’t want to be the foolish girl that everyone is laughing about, sir.”

“Katie,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry. It was offensive, what I said before about taking girls up to London. I don’t know why I imagined making you think I’m a cad would help.”

“I can assure you it hasn’t.”

“I’ve got to see a new fellow, a specialist. He runs a private clinic in Harley Street. He’s my last hope as far as getting out of this thing goes. My very last hope.”

She bit her lip.

“Please, Katie. I’m … I’m nervous.”

He had to force that last word out.

“You’re nervous?” she said, with just a hint of skepticism.

“Very. It would help if I had someone with me, especially if it isn’t good news. Someone who will help me discuss the doctor’s advice.”

“That might be rather a lot to expect from an ignorant Irish nursemaid.”

“Katie, you are not that.”

“Irish? I can assure you that I am,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I’m a nursemaid, too, and unless the terms of my employment have changed, trips to Harley Street were not included … ”

“Ignorant. You are not ignorant.”

Katie went upstairs to pack. She was going to London, with a man — her employer, no less. The stationmaster would tell his wife, and she would tell her sister, who ran the post office and she would tell the entire village.

Katie looked through her meager collection of clothing. She had a smart navy blue hat, because hats were not on ration. That was a start. She tried it on and admired herself in the mirror. It set off her auburn curls to perfection, and with scarlet lipstick and fake pearls, she’d look presentable, but only from the neck up. It was what to wear below that bothered her. Her serge skirt was perhaps the next smartest thing she possessed, but it had seen a lot of wear and had been patched and darned. She had a gray blouse and a cardigan that she had knitted herself out of darning wool. It made a shabby ensemble. She imagined herself going through the door of the Savoy Hotel and sighed.

“It isn’t important how I look,” she murmured, “it’s what I do for people that counts. Michael sacrificed his health for his country, and he needs me. Supporting him is the right thing to do.”

“You’re talking to yourself again, Miss Rafferty.”

Katie gave a start, and swung round to find Roy standing in the doorway with Bob beside him. The smaller boy came in, uninvited, and knelt shyly on the bed, fingering the shiny buttons on Katie’s clothing.

Bob had a surprising interest in ladies apparel, Katie had noticed.

“What are you going to wear at night?” he wanted to know.

“This,” said Katie, and stuffed her long, shapeless blue nightie into the bag. Bob immediately got it out again and examined it critically.

Roy sniffed. “Not very alluring, is it?”

Katie was surprised Roy even knew the word.

“And what would you know about being ‘alluring,’ Roy?”

“More than you’d think. Me mum was a working girl.”

“What did you say?”

“A tart. A one-woman knocking shop.”

“Roy! Don’t speak about your late mother like that! I’m sure she was no such thing. She’d probably be mortified to know you’d even uttered those words.”

Roy sniffed again. “She’d have gone for shocking pink. Or black, with lots of lace and not much material.”

“Yes, yes, well I don’t possess anything along those lines, Roy, so I’ll be taking my ordinary nightie, thank you very much. It’s not as if I need to impress anyone. I’m not packing my trousseau.” And most likely, she never would, Katie thought to herself. She hadn’t exactly succeeded in saving herself for a white wedding.

“He’s got a crush on you, anyone can see that. That’s why he wants you to go with him.”

“He has to have someone go with him, Roy, he can’t manage otherwise.”

“He didn’t ask Mrs. Jessop, the crumbly old hatchet face. And he’s taking you to the bleedin’ Savoy, for goodness sake. There’s only ever one reason why a toff takes a girl like you to the Savoy. Grow up, Katie.”

Katie was scandalized that she was receiving these home truths from a twelve-year-old boy. She reddened with horrified embarrassment. “Will you shut your mouth before I ask you to wash it out with soap and water?”

Then she realized that Bob was trying to put on the blue nightie, and had almost gotten lost inside it.

“Don’t do that, Bob, there’s a dear, you might put your foot through it,” Katie declared. “And then what will I do?”

“You’ll have to sleep in the altogether,” Roy said with a snigger.

“Roy, I am going to slap your face in a minute. Bob, give me that right now.” She reached out and wrestled the blue nightie away from the child and flung it down into the depths of her overnight bag.

“Out, the pair of you!”

Reluctantly, the smaller boy scuttled out of the room and Roy sauntered off.

Katie was left to ponder two important questions. Had Roy’s late mother really been a “one-woman knocking shop,” and was he right about his lordship’s intentions?

Katie grabbed her hat and coat and picked up her bag from where it was sitting on the concrete bed. She checked her makeup in the tiny mirror and hurried downstairs to the front hall, where Michael was waiting for her. Her heart almost died when she saw him.

“Why are you dressed like that?” she said, in alarm.

It was six o’clock in the morning. He was wearing his RAF uniform — the whole outfit, including the peaked cap. The dress uniform of a flying officer. It was air force blue, like his eyes, and it suited him.

“I’m perfectly entitled to wear it,” he said tersely. “I’m still in the RAF.”

She tried to slow her breathing down to normal. She was anxious enough about this trip to London, without this. It probably was the same jacket. The one he had worn that night in the Tube station. She could remember the rough texture of the wool against her face. She remembered him calling her a brave girl. And then the pain and the heartache that came after.

“Technically, I’m still on sick leave,” he explained.

“Sick leave?”

“Yes. I’ve come up for review a few times, and I keep putting them off.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake? They’ll have to discharge you in the end.”

“Not if I get better first.”

But you aren’t going to get better.
She stopped herself just in time from saying it aloud.

Hammond arrived to take them to the station. It was a cold, crisp morning and Katie shivered as they loaded Michael and the wheelchair into the old black Austin. She tucked a plaid blanket over his knees.

“Don’t,” Michael grumbled. “I feel like some decrepit relic from the Boer Wars when you do things like that.”

“I don’t want you catching a chill.”

Perhaps it was too late. His manner was very chilly indeed.

• • •

Michael picked at the plaid blanket that lay over his knees and fumed. For years he had caught trains at this platform — trains that took him away to boarding school or to the seaside during the holidays. Trains to Cambridge University where he was a madcap student with all his friends. Trains to London to see shows, and to flying school, and away to the war.

Never before had he caught a train looking and feeling like this.

“Bloody train will be late, of course.”

Katie smiled weakly at him. “It isn’t even ten to, yet, sir. If it came now it would be early.”

He ignored her and made a few more gloomy predictions about how long they might have to wait. “These days the trains don’t run according to the timetable at all. I think it’s a deliberate strategy to confuse the enemy — and it will, if the invasion ever comes.”

“God willing, it won’t,” Katie said. “You RAF boys have seen to that.”

Michael was rather gratified to hear her talk about him like that. RAF boys. That was the world he knew. That was where he belonged. Miraculously, the train steamed into the station only seven minutes after it was due.

Michael bore the indignity of being carried onto the train in the porter’s arms as stoically as he could, and finally they were on board, in a compartment all to themselves.

Michael arranged his useless legs in front of him so they looked like the legs of any languid young man. His smartly pressed RAF trousers were loose enough to hide the wasted muscles, and his black leather shoes had been polished to a high shine.

Katie was sitting beside him, wearing brown hand-knitted gloves — awful things some elderly aunt in Ireland must have given to her for Christmas, he supposed, and Katie was much too thrifty to throw them away. He’d love to get her some new clothes, but that was complicated, what with the shortages. He supposed he’d have to get her something on the black market. He’d like to get her out of those clothes, though. Then he smiled. Yes, he’d
love
to get her out of those clothes.

She seemed determined to engage him in conversation, although he would have been quite content to gaze out of the window and watch the melancholy English countryside slip by. But she was a chatty little thing. Michael tried to resist her conversational gambits at first, giving only clipped, defensive replies. Katie, quite clearly, had other ideas.

“Why does Mrs. Mallory owe you a favor?” she asked.

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell it to me.”

He sighed before smiling. Resistance was useless.

“Marjory’s son Peter was a flyer, like me,” he began. “We trained together, with several other friends of mine, from school.”

She leaned forward expectantly, and he could see from the way her eyes sparked with interest that she was hoping for a good yarn. He’d do his best.

“We were great chums … ”

“Oh, I love the way you say
chums
! I’ve never heard anyone say that before.”

Michael scowled. “Don’t keep interrupting. We were the best of friends. But Peter was in a couple of nasty dogfights — one of them badly damaged his plane and he limped back to the aerodrome with the wings full of holes and smoke pouring out. He belly flopped on the runway. All the emergency vehicles had to scoot over and put him out. Peter climbed out of the hatch without a scratch on him, but his nerves were shot to pieces. Usually we laughed off such things in the officers’ mess and we were fine next time we had to go up. But not Peter. He said if he got back into that cockpit one more time, he was a dead man. He convinced himself he’d die if he flew again, because his number had been up that time and yet somehow he had managed to bring his plane in. His whole attitude changed, and people started calling him a coward.”

“Is that the reason Mrs. Mallory is so keen to do her patriotic duty, because of Peter?” Katie interjected.

“Marjory has patriotism like the rest of us have sandbags, Katie. Peter was tremendously patriotic, too, at the start of the war. But the near miss broke him. Of course, that kind of attitude didn’t go down too well and the RAF was desperately short of good pilots. The medical officer said he was fit, and I knew if I didn’t step in, Peter would be hauled up in front of a disciplinary committee. I pulled some strings for him. I got him sent to a different MO, who wrote up a report about Peter’s nerves. Then I called up a fellow I knew from my Cambridge days and got Peter assigned to a desk job. Peter didn’t feel good about it. In fact, he hated himself, but he accepted the job. I have to say, flying a desk suits him, and he’s still alive. He’s the only one left out of the whole gang of us apart from me. And I hardly qualify as being alive, do I?”