The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (23 page)

“Liv?”

He stepped out of the shed. Agnes wailed again.

“Liv?”

“Raybould? Raybould, come here!”

He dropped the plant he’d been working with and dashed back to the house, picturing a ghostly man attacking his family. Liv looked pale and drawn where she kneeled in front of the wireless in the den, Agnes clutched to her chest. She reached for him, pulled him to her. Now she was the one to shiver.

“—intensive Luftwaffe bombing, torpedoes, and artillery barrages
from the First Panzer Division onshore. Royal Navy destroyers lost during the evacuation include the
Grafton,
the
Grenade,
the
Wakeful,
the
Basilisk,
the
Havant,
and the
Keith.”
The molasses-smooth baritone of Alvar Lidell paused, as though the announcer were turning a page.

“They’re saying they’ve abandoned the evacuation,” said Liv, squeezing Marsh’s hand. “They won’t, will they?”

The news continued: “Vice Admiral Ramsey today announced that despite a most difficult situation, a total of over twenty-eight thousand fighting men have been evacuated since Sunday.”

Left unsaid, of course, was the number of men left behind on the beaches of Dunkirk. Nor was there any count of civilian craft obliterated by the Luftwaffe, though the toll on the ragtag flotilla must have been very high.

They listened through the night. The BBC gave no such numbers. If it knew them, it wasn’t likely to report. But Marsh, who had been there not three weeks earlier, knew the combined total French and BEF roster spread across northern France approached half a million men.

He didn’t share this with Liv. There was no need. By sunrise, a grim reality dawned on the world, leaving Marsh to wonder what sort of future Agnes would inherit.

Britain had lost an army.

T
hey arrived in numbers that blackened the sky, and at the beaches, they feasted.

Amidst sand and iron, surf and steel, ravens gorged on the dead. The first few hours were best, before sunlight and seawater fouled the meat. But soon the carrion reek attracted more than birds. New men arrived to clear the beaches. The ravens, scavengers themselves, watched while these new men picked what they could from the dead. Derelict armaments. Cigarettes. Pocket watches.

And when the dead turned noisome with rot, the men used their clattering machines to excavate trenches and pile the bodies. The fires burned for a day, a night, and a day.

More men arrived, with still more machines. They amassed at the shore, facing west, while a fleet of boats and barges assembled in estuaries
up and down the coast. Like some great predator poised to lunge upon its prey, this assembly fixated on the island across the Channel.

Large predators, the ravens knew, brought down large prey. Large prey meant a bounty of carrion.

And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

New shapes darkened the sky that summer. Wave upon wave of these fliers screamed over the water in angry gray wedges of aluminum and glass. Other machines, flown by other men, leapt into the sky to meet them. This was a new kind of dance, a ballet not yet seen in the surge of armies and waltz of empires.

And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

Twined contrails traced sigils in the bright blue sky over the island. The attackers swarmed around the lattice masts dotting the coast like honeybees drawn to sunflowers. One by one, the towers fell, rendering the defenders blind. It was as though their eyes had been plucked out in homage to some ancient myth.

The battles moved inland, beyond the horizon, deeper over the island every week. Each day saw fewer defenders taking to the sky than the day before. The crows and ravens here had it harder than their Continental cousins, for the mounting dead were crushed under timber and brick and so did not make for easy picking.

Sensing its time had come, the army on the coast roused itself and focused on the island with renewed vigor.

And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

But then, at the height of summer, the weather in the Channel . . .
changed.

The fog—improbably thick—appeared within hours. It heeded neither sun nor wind. Distant shores disappeared, shrouded in per sis tent gloom. Sunlight could not dispel the haze that wreathed the island.

Phantoms writhed within the cloud bank. Fleeting patterns of light and shadow, noises like voices too faint to make out, lingering scents that evoked empty memories.

The phantoms danced within the water, too. The waves on the Channel assumed impossible geometries: pyramidal waves sliced past
one another like serrated saw teeth; towering, needled-tipped spindles whirled through the troughs between the waves; whitecapped breakers defied time and gravity like immense crystal sculptures.

But although these elements rendered the crossing impassable to all manner of ship and landing craft, they did not gird the heavens. The bombs continued to fall. And fall they did, in numbers too great to count.

That autumn, the ravens of Albion abandoned the Tower of London.

31 August 1940

Paddington, London, England

A
n air of white-knuckled desperation had settled over the platforms at n Paddington Station. It put Marsh in mind of Barcelona. But there the mass of refugees swarming the port had comprised entire families fleeing the Nationalist victory. Here the atmosphere was charged with heartache as parents said good-bye to their children.

It simply wasn’t possible to evacuate all of London. A long, hard summer had put billet space in the countryside at a premium.

Marsh carried Agnes, wedging gaps in the crowd for Liv, who maneuvered Agnes’s pram. Every child at the station wore a pasteboard tag clipped to his or her clothing. Sunlight fell on Agnes’s tag and illuminated her evacuee number: 21417. She’d drawn a high number in the evacuation lottery. Her parents had suffered several sleepless weeks waiting to see if they would send their baby girl away before the relentless
Blitz caught up with them. The long bellows of their daughter’s anti-gas helmet dangled over the side of the pram as Liv navigated the crowd.

Every child had a gas mask. Many carried, or dragged, canvas duffel bags brimming with blankets and clothes. Rag dolls peeked from a few sacks. A box of lead soldiers spilled onto the platform when one boy dropped his bag. Marsh fended off the throng and helped him gather his toys.

Marsh hated crowds. He hated the prickly feeling that took root between his shoulder blades when Liv and Agnes went out. It had been that way for months, ever since he’d come to suspect the Jerries were watching his family. And now they were about to send Agnes from the city. She’d be away from the bombs, but she’d also be where Jerry could watch her and her father couldn’t.

A man lost his footing and lurched out of the throng. He approached too closely, too quickly, and nearly crashed into Agnes. Simmering resentment, something Marsh had carried for weeks without fully realizing it, boiled over. Months of frustration at being unable to
do
anything sought release. Marsh’s elbow caught the man under the jaw and snapped his head back.

“Guhh—”

Marsh glared into the widened eyes of the coughing man. “You need to step back, friend.”

The man did, clutching his neck as he did so. His companion, most likely his wife, glared at Liv as she wheeled past the pair. Marsh raised his arms to fend off others rushing to claim the spot he cleared for Liv on the platform. He hip-checked a woman who tried to barge in with her own pram.

The assisted private-evacuation program had taken on a frantic quality after the Luftwaffe had systematically destroyed the Chain Home radar stations lining Britain’s coast. With that electronic fence out of commission, the Luftwaffe had been free to obliterate the RAF Fighter Command sector stations in the southeast. The ops rooms had fallen even more quickly than the radar masts. The methodical dismantling of Britain’s air defenses had proceeded with such inexorable logic that it
seemed directed by a higher intelligence. Now the bombs fell on London day and night, and two months into this Blitz, the evacuations to the country couldn’t proceed quickly enough.

The overseas evacuation scheme was a failure. Less than a fortnight ago, a U-boat had torpedoed the
City of Benares
and killed ninety-plus children bound for Canada.

The smell of wet paint mingled with the stink of panic and sweat on the train platform. Marsh kept it all at bay with the scent of Agnes. When the invaders came—and they would, everyone knew, just as soon as the odd weather in the Channel cleared up—they would be hard-pressed to find a single signpost, milepost, or placard that might help them gain their bearings. More than a few pubs whose names might have provided a clue to geography had been repainted and rechristened in the process. Every train platform in the nation had likewise received new coats of paint. Only the schedules printed in tiny lettering and posted in glass cases at select locations within the station offered any useful information at all.

All of which had made finding the proper train rather difficult. But now here they were, waiting to meet the lady from the Women’s Voluntary Services who would escort Agnes to the countryside.

Liv’s aunt Margaret was a billeting officer in Williton, and had reluctantly agreed to care for Agnes herself. The most recent, and therefore most stringent, regulations governing the evacuation forbade mothers from accompanying their children, even infants. Evacuation space was reserved strictly for children and pregnant women.

Marsh nudged his wife. “Look,” he said, pointing at a row of expectant mothers. All were clearly in the final months of their pregnancies. He had to speak up so she could hear him. “That must be the Williton Balloon Barrage.”

Liv grimaced, but the play on words didn’t ease the tightness at the corners of her eyes. “You’ve been spending too much time with Will.” Her gaze flitted over the crowd. “How will we find her in this mess?”

“I’d hoped she’d find us instead.”

“I can take Agnes if you want to have a look about.”

“No,” said Marsh, shaking his head. “Let’s not split up. Not yet.”

“It’s only temporary,” she said, repeating their mantra of recent days. By repeating it constantly, Marsh could almost convince himself it was true, as though he could sculpt reality with the force of his belief.

“She’ll be safer out of the city.” Another mantra.

Agnes mewled. Marsh bounced her in his arms. “Liv,” he said. “Maybe you should get on the train, too. Margaret will have no choice but to find space if you show up on her doorstep. She’s a billeting officer, after all.”

“Oh, heavens, no. No, no, my dears,” said a voice in the crowd.

Marsh and Liv turned to face a wizened little woman. She carried a clipboard in one hand and an infant on her hip. Wisps of graying hair waved under the brim of her hat and from where they had worked loose from her bun. She wore wool socks that had fallen down below the hem of her dress, one higher than the other. Her mouth was full of crooked yellow teeth that looked ready to tumble over, like gravestones in an untended churchyard.

Were they expected to entrust their daughter’s well-being to this harridan?