The Wild Rose (32 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“They say now that the Yanks are in, it’ll be over soon,” Allie Beech said.

“I heard it might be as soon as this year,” Lizzie Caldwell said.

“Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Having them all home again?” Jennie Finnegan said.

“I remember when my Ronnie enlisted. It was all a big lark, wasn’t it? The boys were going off to give old Gerry a big black eye. They’d be home in two months, three at the most. It would all be over before we knew it,” Peg McDonnell said.

“And here we are, March of 1918, going on four years,” Nancy Barrett said.

“And millions dead. And so many others badly injured and in hospital,” Peg said.

“Peg, dear, pass me the teapot, won’t you? I’m parched,” Jennie said, wanting to stop any talk about dead and injured men before it got started.

Jennie was sitting in the kitchen of her father’s house, the rectory house of St. Nicholas’s parish. She’d moved back here to be with her father after Seamie had enlisted. He’d wanted that. He hadn’t wanted her to be alone in their flat with a new baby. He’d felt it would be good for all of them—herself, the reverend, and little James—to be together during this long, hard, horrible war.

She put her knitting needles in her lap now, poured herself another cup of tea, then set the pot on the table. She and half a dozen women from the parish were knitting socks for British soldiers. They met here every Wednesday evening at seven o’clock.

It had been Jennie’s idea to start this knitting circle. She knew the women of her father’s parish and knew that many of them were suffering greatly. They were lonely for their men and worried they’d never see them again. They were raising their children alone, without enough money, and—thanks to the German U-boats that prevented supply ships from getting to Britain—without enough food, either. Rationing had made them all thin. Jennie scrimped on her own rations to provide a pot of tea and a few thin biscuits for these evenings. But she did it gladly, for their lives—and hers—were difficult and uncertain and it bolstered all their spirits to spend an evening sitting together and talking, to make socks and send them off and feel that they were contributing, if only in a small way, to the comfort and well-being of the men on the front lines.

“Gladys, can I pour you more tea?” Jennie asked the woman sitting on her right.

“No, thank you,” Gladys Bigelow said, never taking her eyes off her knitting.

Jennie set the pot down on the low tea table in front of her, frowning with concern. Gladys no longer lived in the parish, but Jennie had asked her to join them anyway. She was worried about her. As the years of the war had dragged on, she’d watched Gladys turn into a shadow. Once plump and bubbly, she’d become thin, pale, and withdrawn. Jennie had asked her several times what was troubling her, but Gladys would only smile wanly and say that her work was demanding.

“Sir George is always the first to hear what ship was torpedoed and how many were lost,” she’d explained. “It takes a toll on him. Takes a toll on us all, doesn’t it? But I mustn’t complain. So many have it so much worse.”

Jennie had taken her hand then and had quietly said to her, “At least we have the comfort of knowing that we’re doing our part, along with Mr. von Brandt, to help save innocent lives. And perhaps even hasten the end of this dreadful war.”

Perhaps she’d only imagined it, but it had seemed to her then that Gladys, already pale, had gone even whiter at the mention of Max’s name.

“Yes, Jennie,” she’d said, pulling her hand away. “We always have that.”

Jennie had not mentioned Max again, but she had continued to take the envelope Gladys gave her, after every Tuesday night suffrage meeting, just as Max von Brandt had asked her to do three and a half years ago.

This very evening, before the women had arrived, while her father was busy giving James his bath, Jennie had quietly slipped down to the church’s basement to tuck this week’s envelope inside the broken statue of St. Nicholas.

She had often wondered if the man who took the envelope was nearby when she placed it under the statue. Was he in the tunnel, waiting for her to leave? Was he in the basement itself, watching her? The thought made her shiver. She was quick about her work, never tarrying, and felt glad only when she’d climbed back up the steps and closed the basement door behind her.

Jennie had never opened the envelopes, not once, though she had been tempted. Sometimes, on a long, sleepless night, she would lie quietly in her bed and wonder if Max von Brandt had told her the truth, if he was really on the side of peace. She would remember how he’d mentioned Binsey to her, and the cottage there, and how her heart had stuttered inside her at his ugly threat. And then she would resolve to open the very next envelope Gladys gave her, to find out the truth once and for all.

But then the night would give way to day, and her resolve would give way with it, and she would tell herself she must not open it. Max von Brandt had told her not to and he’d likely had a reason. Perhaps to do so might somehow breach security. Perhaps the envelope might not be accepted if it was opened. Perhaps she might even endanger an innocent person’s life with her foolish curiosity.

Jennie told herself these things, because to believe otherwise—to believe that Max was not what he said he was, that he was using her to aid Germany and harm Britain—was simply unthinkable. And so she refused to do so. She had become very practiced, over the last few years, at not thinking about difficult things.

“I hear that a lot of soldiers are coming down with the influenza,” Lizzie said now, diverting Jennie’s thoughts from Max and Gladys. “The new one . . . the Spanish flu. Supposed to be worse than any other kind. I’ve heard it can kill you in a day.”

“As if there wasn’t enough to worry about,” Allie sighed. “Now that.”

“Allie, how’s your Sarah doing at the secretarial school?” Jennie asked, trying, yet again, to steer the conversation away from worrisome topics.

“Oh, she’s getting on like a house on fire!” Allie said, brightening. “Her teacher says she’s top of the class and that she’s going to put her name in for a position at Thompson’s—it’s a boot factory in Hackney—in the Accounts Department.”

“Oh, I’m so pleased!” Jennie said. She’d taught Sarah at her school.

“She always was a bright one, your Sarah,” Lizzie said approvingly.

As the talk drifted to other children and their doings, Jennie finished the sock she was working on. She had cast it off her needles and was just starting the second of the pair, when she heard the sound of small feet in the hallway and a little voice calling, “Mummy! Mummy!”

She looked up and saw a blond, hazel-eyed, pink-cheeked boy run into the kitchen—her son, James. Her face broke into a radiant smile. She felt her heart swell with love, as it always did at the sight of him. He stopped a few feet past the doorway and said, “May I please have a biscuit, Mummy? Grandpa says I might have milk and a biscuit if I ask nicely.”

Jennie never got the chance to answer him. The others beat her to it.

“Of course you may, my duck!” Peg said.

“Come here and sit with your auntie Liz, you little dumpling!” Lizzie said.

“Wait your turn, you lot. I’m closest and I get him first,” Nancy said.

James, giggling, allowed himself to be squeezed and kissed, passed around and cuddled and fed too many biscuits. He’d single-handedly managed to do what Jennie could not—take the women’s minds off the war and their absent men and their worries.

“Look at the color of his hair. And those eyes!” Nancy exclaimed. “Why, he’s the spitting image of his mother.”

Jennie forced a smile. “Yes, he is,” she said aloud, silently adding, His real mother—Josie Meadows.

Anyone glancing at her and then at three-year-old James would think them mother and child. They both had blond hair, hazel eyes, and porcelain skin. But if that same person were to look closer, he would notice differences.

Jennie looked at James now, as the women around her continued to fuss and chatter, and she saw Josie in the shape of the eyes, the tilt of his nose, and the curve of his smile. She remembered, with a sudden, startling clarity, the day the letter had arrived from Binsey—the letter from Josie telling her that she’d had the baby, that Dr. Cobb from the village had delivered him, and that he’d written Jennie Finnegan’s name on the child’s birth certificate, for that was what Josie had told the doctor her name was. When Dr. Cobb had asked Josie who the father was, she’d smiled and said, “My husband, of course. Seamus Finnegan.”

Jennie, still faking her own nonexistent pregnancy, had left for Binsey that very same day. She’d met Josie at the cottage that evening, and then she’d met her son—James.

Josie was holding him and cooing to him, but as soon as she saw Jennie, she put the baby in her arms. Then she put her jacket on.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Jennie said, surprised. “I only just got here. You have to stay. At least for a day or two. And you said you’d travel to London with me. That we’d say you were a girl from the village.”

Josie, her eyes bright with tears, had shaken her head no. “I’m sorry, Jennie. I can’t,” she said. “It gets harder every second I’m with him. If I don’t go now, I never will.”

Jennie looked into her friend’s eyes, and in them she saw what it cost to surrender a child. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t take him from you. He’s your baby.”

“You have to take him. I can’t stay here. You know that,” Josie said. “Billy Madden doesn’t forget and he doesn’t forgive. He’ll beat me within an inch of my life and put the baby into an orphanage—and that’s if he’s in a good mood. This is the best thing, Jennie. The only thing.” She’d buttoned her jacket, put on her hat, and picked up her suitcase. “I’ll write. Under a different name. Once I have a flat and get myself settled,” she said. “Write me back and tell me about him. Send a picture now and again, if you can.”

“I will. I promise. He’ll be loved, Josie. Loved and cared for. Always. I promise you that.”

“I know he will,” Josie said. She kissed baby James and then Jennie, and then she left, suitcase in hand, never once looking back.

Jennie had spent a strange and terrifying and wonderful week alone with her new son, and then she’d got on a train back to London. She told her father and her friends and Seamie’s family that the baby had come a bit early. There was some surprise, and she’d had to endure a bit of scolding for going off to the country on her own so close to her due date, but mostly there was joy and delight in the tiny new life in their midst. No one suspected her of passing off another woman’s child as her own—why would they? Only her father and Harriet knew the exact nature of the injuries her accident had caused. Her father, being a man of faith, simply accepted James’s birth as yet another of God’s miracles. Harriet Hatcher, being a woman of science, had posed a bigger problem, but Jennie had got round it by telling Harriet that as she was spending so much time in Binsey, she had decided to see the doctor there, Dr. Cobb, for her check-ups. Harriet said she understood and told Jennie to come back to her after the baby was born, but Jennie never did. And never would.

It would have been a far trickier thing to pull off had Seamie been in London. He would have seen that her body had not changed during her pregnancy, and that her breasts were not full of milk, and would likely have wanted to know why. She told any woman friend who asked if she was nursing James that her milk was scanty and so she’d decided to bottle-feed him instead. Seamie might also have wanted to go to Binsey, to see Dr. Cobb and thank him for delivering his son, but Seamie had been hundreds of miles away on a British warship when James arrived, so that had not happened.

Jennie’d had a photograph taken of the baby, which she’d enclosed in a letter to Seamie, informing him he was now the father of a strapping son. She’d written that she hoped he didn’t mind, but she’d named the boy James, after him. When he’d come home on furlough, nearly a year later, he’d fallen in love with the child at first sight and made Jennie promise to send him photos of James every month.

And so, amazingly, Josie’s mad plan had worked—perfectly. Josie herself was safely away from London, working as a chorus girl in Paris under a stage name. Her child was safely in Jennie Finnegan’s care. And no one was the wiser.

Jennie should have been happy. She had the child she’d desperately wanted. James was hers. He was her pride and her joy, her beautiful, golden boy. And she loved him fiercely. She had her handsome, war-hero husband. She had the love of family and friends.