She dropped the old shirt on the bridge, then went to her belt, but the horse began to act up and Edi started to go to him.
“Shut up!” David said to the horse, and it instantly became still.
Smiling, Edi unfastened her belt buckle and let the trousers fall to the bridge.
“They were wrong,” David whispered.
“About what?” Edi asked.
“Your legs. They have to be four feet long.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never measured them. Would you tie the rope around me?”
“Yes,” he said, but he took his time, looking at every inch of her while he slowly walked toward her.
He put the rope around her waist, tied the end to the side of the bridge, then nodded toward the other rope in the back of the buggy. “What’s that for?”
“If there’s anything still in the car, I’m going to get it out.”
“Meaning your suitcase?”
“Yes, my own clothes,” she said, as she glanced down at the big trousers he wore. “Did you bring anything that would fit without the brace?”
“Yes, but I don’t want you to bother with getting it. If you can find the Allen wrench, fine, if not, then nothing else is important. You understand me?”
“You’re going to make a great father,” she said, “but I already have one. I think if the car is hidden, then the water is deep enough for a dive, don’t you?”
“No!” David half shouted. “We’ll go to the edge and you can walk in. You don’t know—” He broke off because she climbed onto the railing and did a perfect swan dive into the river. He held his breath as he waited for her to come up and every terror went through his head. Had she hit bottom? Was she unconscious? He was halfway over the railing when she came up.
“It’s cold!” she said.
“What did you think it would be? Tropical?” he said, doing his best to hide his fear. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. It feels great. I’m going to wash my hair. Throw me that soap off the seat, will you?”
“Soap!” he said, mumbling. He just wanted her to get this done and get out of there. With his leg held stiffly, he half ran, half hobbled to the buggy and got a bar of soap off the seat, then tossed it to her. “Good catch,” he said.
“I was the best batter on my school baseball team,” she said. “I could hit the ball just ten feet and still outrun them all.” She was soaping her hair while treading water. Turning, she looked at the car, then swam to it and climbed on top.
“Look at me,” she yelled.
“Yeah, look at you.” She had on a clinging teddy that was wet and transparent, and she was standing on top of an upside-down car that couldn’t be seen above the water. She looked like she was standing on the water. “My kingdom for a camera,” he whispered, but he had none.
“Be careful on that thing,” he called. “The bottom of a car isn’t as smooth as a mattress.”
She kept rubbing her hair with the soap, then threw the bar back to him. To his shame, he missed it and had to chase it across the bridge. When he looked back, she was gone, and for a moment his heart seemed to stop beating.
He waited what seemed to be minutes but there was no sign of her. He gave a tug on the rope, but she didn’t tug back, and she hadn’t released it. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he said. “I knew it. I should have stopped her. I should have forced her to—”
“To what?” she said and she was below him, her hand on a pillar of the bridge.
“Forced you not to do this.”
“I’d like to have seen you try,” she said in a suggestive way. “Can you reach my hand?”
David got down on his stomach and reached down until he touched her hand—and she passed him the Allen wrench. He clasped it tightly, then rolled onto his back and for a moment held it to his chest. Such a little thing, but so very important.
“I got it,” he said, “so now you can come up.” But when he looked, she was already gone. With lightning speed, David unbuckled his trousers and pushed them off, then he gave one last look of hatred to the steel brace and began loosening screws. For the sake of comfort, all the screws were recessed so the protruding heads wouldn’t chafe a person’s skin, but that made it necessary to use an unusual tool to remove the cage.
Half of the screws were too tight from water and rust, and one of them broke as he twisted. But with David’s determination and just plain anger—not to mention the desire he had for Miss Edilean Harcourt—he kept working.
He broke blisters and made some new cuts as he wrenched the thing off his leg, but he managed to tear it away from his skin, then he threw it toward the far end of the bridge.
When he was free of it, he had trouble standing, but he made it. He had to bend his knee half a dozen times before it began working again. His leg was a mess, with blisters and bloody patches and bits of cloth stuck to raw places, but to him it looked great. “I’m out of it,” he yelled as he looked back at the river, but Edi didn’t answer him.
He unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on the bridge, climbed on the rail, and dove in.
“What took you so long?” she asked as she swam into his arms.
25
THAT’S IT,” DAVID Aldredge said.
“What do you mean that that’s it?” Joce asked.
“That’s all the story Edi wrote, or at least it’s all that I have. Alex McDowell left the papers to me in his will, and I don’t know if that’s all he had, or if Edi wrote more and it was lost. At the end, Alex was pretty bad.”
“Bad?” Jocelyn asked. “What do you mean?”
“Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t remember who he was, much less anything about a story sent to him many years ago. However…” Dr. Dave paused, as though for a drumroll, “I found something interesting just a few years ago. You know how it is, boring day, playing on the Internet, and I typed in Dr. Jellie’s name.
“This is an excerpt from a series of books about World War II. As far as I know, it’s the only place Dr. Jellicoe’s name is mentioned. Would you like me to read it to you?”
“Yes, please,” said both Luke and Jocelyn.
Dr. Sebastian Jellicoe’s contributions to WWII were never acknowledged during his lifetime, or even afterward. Anyone who met him didn’t come away talking about his great brain or how he could look at a scrambled-up jumble of words and tell at a glance what it said. What people always remembered about him was his great storytelling. He could go to the grocery and come back with a story worthy of being published.
For myself, at the time a young and eager student wanting to learn at the feet of a master, the story I remember best was about the young couple who probably saved his life. It was near D-day in 1944, and Dr. Jellie told that he was sitting by his fire on a cold, rainy night, half asleep in his chair, when he heard the noise of a horse and a man shouting curse words. He said that for a moment he was so befuddled that he thought it was Father Christmas and the fat man had just collided with his roof.
Instead, it was two tall, strikingly good-looking young Americans, and they’d come tearing across the countryside in the middle of the night in the ancient racing carriage of his old, grumpy neighbor named Hamish. Dr. Jellie said the man couldn’t get along with anyone and as a result he was left alone. It was told around the village that he’d once been a driver of carriages in races and that he’d won nearly everything until an accident made him quit. He retired to his father’s farm and spent the rest of his life complaining to his long-suffering wife and children.
But on that cold, drizzly night, here came one of Hamish’s buggies being pulled by a horse nearly as old as Hamish, and driven by a girl so tall and beautiful that Dr. Jellie said he thought maybe he’d died and was about to enter Heaven. She looked like Boadicea riding into battle.
In the back of the buggy was a young man who was taller than she was, just as handsome, but a man who obviously hated carriage riding as much as he adored the young woman.
“You certainly paid me back,”
he said to her when he got down and after he’d lost his dinner in the bushes.
“I don’t like your driving and you don’t like mine. We’re even,” she said as she smiled at Dr. Jellie and introduced herself as Eddie, and he was David. Over the years Dr. Jellie had forgotten their last names and I’ve often wondered who they were and what happened to them.
He invited them into his house to have some tea. Young David followed him inside the house, but Eddie, like the good horsewoman she was, put the horse and buggy in the barn first. When she came in, her dark hair was wet, her clothes stuck to her, and both men stared at her, speechless, for a while.
She was the one to break the silence. “Here, I have this for you.” She then handed him a copy of Time magazine that was a few weeks old.
“And what am I to do with it?” Dr. Jellie asked.
“There’s a message in it from General Austin,” she said. “I’m his secretary.”
“Ol’ Bulldog Austin. My goodness but I haven’t seen him in a long time. You mean no one’s shot him by now?”
“Everybody wants to,” David said, “but no one’s done it yet.”
“I think you should look at the message,” Eddie encouraged. “I think it’s important. You’re to go back to London with us.”
“Am I?”
“It seems that someone knows what you’re doing for the war effort,” David said.
“Oh, everyone knows that. Mrs. Pettigrew delivers the envelopes with my lunch. They’re all marked Top Secret.”
David and Eddie looked at each other with their mouths open.
“But—” David began.
“I thought—”
Dr. Jellie looked at the Time magazine. “I’ve seen this issue. Is it the one Aggie took? Are you two the Americans who were searching for it?”
“We had no idea you were so close,” Eddie said. “But we couldn’t have come anyway because we didn’t have the magazine and we needed it. I really must insist that you look at it. I think that what’s in there is very important.”
“Oh poppycock!” he said. “They never mark anything that’s valuable as important. Those envelopes that say Top Secret on them? Seed catalogs. It’s the letters from my daughter that hold the secrets.”
“Your daughter works in London?” David asked.
“I don’t have a daughter.”
“Oh,” Eddie said.
In the next second, Dr. Jellie threw the magazine on the fire, and both David and Eddie jumped. “Only thing it’s good for,” he said. “I’m sure everyone in the village has seen it by now. You two caused quite a stir, what with missing the bridge and putting your car in the river.”
“We did not—” David began, but stopped as he stared at the magazine burning in the fire. “I’m afraid we’ve come here for nothing,” he said, but as the words came out, he gave a look at beautiful young Eddie that nearly set the house ablaze.
“Did Austin give either of you anything else?” Dr. Jellie asked.
“Nothing to me,” Eddie said. “He gave me a map which I don’t think was accurate, and a packet of money. I left them back at Hamish’s farm. Should I go get them?”
Just then a clap of thunder came, and Dr. Jellie said, “No, dear, I think it can wait.” He looked at David. “What about you? Did you receive any paper?”
“No. Austin had a steel brace put on my leg that was like a medieval torture and he—”
“But no paper?”
David shook his head. “Except for the invitation, there was nothing.”
“Let me see it,” Dr. Jellie said.
“What invitation?” Eddie asked David.
“To a dance where you wore an electric blue gown.”
“The Officers’ Ball,” Eddie said, “but that wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Those invitations go out to a lot of people directly from the printer.” She watched as David got his wallet out of his back pocket and removed the envelope. It didn’t appear to have even been wet, but she knew it must have been underwater.
“How in the world did you keep that dry?” she asked him.
“You take care of things that are important to you,” Dr. Jellie said as he looked at David, smiling.
“Yes, sir, you do.”
“Waxed cloth? Courier’s packet?”
“Yes,” David said, grinning back at him. “We fished our suitcases from out of the car in the river and that was inside mine and as dry as when I put it in there.”
“Good boy,” Dr. Jellie said, getting out of his chair. He took the invitation over to a table and opened a box that contained glass jars of what looked to be alcoholic beverages.
“I could use some of that,” David said, putting out his hand.
“Drink one of these and your tongue will dissolve in a very unpleasant fizz.”
David drew his hand back.
“Now let me see,” Dr. Jellie said, “which one should I try?”
David put his hand on Eddie’s arm and drew her toward the fire to give Dr. Jellie some privacy. A couple of awful smells came from his direction but at last he said, “There, now, I have it. I’m to go to London with you two and Austin is going to send me to the U.S.”
David was the first to recover. “That’s it? But we already knew that. We told you that.”
“Spies have a rather frequent habit of disappearing, so they find that paper is better.”
“But that paper ended up on the bottom of a river.”
“Ah, but even then it was protected. My guess is that Austin knew it would be so precious to you that you’d take care of it.”
“Yes,” David said, looking at Eddie and smiling. “Very precious.”
“Well now that that’s done, I suggest we all get a good night’s sleep and start off to London tomorrow. Do you require one room or two?”
“One!” Eddie said quickly, and held up her left hand to show the ring she wore on her trip around the country. “We’re married.”
“So you are,” Dr. Jellie said, smiling.
He said that the next morning the beautiful Boadicea rode off in the carriage to return it to Hamish and an hour later came running down the hill. He said he’d never in his life seen a more beautiful sight than that tall girl running down the hill toward her lover. Dr. Jellie said he always wondered how different his life would have been if there had been a woman who looked at him like that, but, alas, there never was.
He told how the three of them took the train back to London and he said that he’d never seen any two people more in love than they were. They had eyes only for each other, only wanted to be with one another. There was someone waiting for Dr. Jellie when they got to London, and the beautiful Eddie and her love, David, were swept away. He never saw or heard about them ever again.
26
JOCE WAS SITTING quietly in Dr. Dave’s study and she was thinking about Miss Edi and her beloved David. She knew what happened next. He was killed and she was burned.
“That’s only the beginning of the story,” Luke said softly.
“The beginning? That was the end of it.”
“No,” Dr. Dave said. “Right after you told me about General Austin I wanted to go to New Hampshire and see if I could get the letters.”
Joce looked at Luke. “That’s what you two were talking about that night at dinner.”
“Yes,” he said, “and that’s why I didn’t want you to go with me, but you nagged until I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I let you go, then you got your feelings hurt because—”
“You two already sound like an old married couple,” Dr. Dave said. “Save it for later. Show her the letters.”
Luke pulled a single piece of paper out of his grandfather’s briefcase and handed it to her. She dreaded reading the letters, as she was sure they’d be full of the accident and what Miss Edi had gone through in the two years it took her to recover.
6 October 1944
Remember Harcourt, the best secretary I ever had? I sent her on assignment with my driver,
and it looks like they did more than I asked of them. She’s four months pregnant. I got so mad I would have made them get married, but he was sent to another unit and even I can’t find him. Harcourt wanted to transfer out but I won’t let her.
18 December 1944
Remember Harcourt? That guy she married got killed. Her kid’s due in the spring, so I’ll have to send her away after Christmas. Thank God she hasn’t grown a big belly yet so nobody knows. Without her my office will fall apart.
21 April 1945
Remember Harcourt? I just heard she was in a horrible accident where she was badly burned. She’s not expected to live. The nurse I talked to said the kid was stillborn. I don’t think any loss in this war has hurt me as much as this one. I had her transferred stateside so she can die at home.
Jocelyn read the excerpts three times before she looked up at Luke and Dr. Dave. “Baby?” she whispered, and tears came to her eyes. “That poor, poor woman. She lost more than even I thought she did.”
“No,” Dr. Dave said as he took Jocelyn’s hands in his own. “You have my grandson to thank for all of this, as he was the one who was suspicious.”
“Suspicious of what?” she asked as Luke handed her a tissue.
“That nothing rang true,” Luke said. “If you’d known Uncle Alex you would have understood. He said he owed Edilean Harcourt his entire life, and he wanted to pay her back. Giving her a job, letting her live for free in a house, that meant nothing to him. He’d done that for several people who’d worked for him all their lives.”
“Luke, what are you trying to tell me?”
“With Gramps’s help, I hired an entire team of researchers in England and we went back through a lot of World War II records.”
“To find out where the baby was…was buried?” Joce asked softly.
“Yes and no.” He sat down on an ottoman in front of her. “It was the name Clare that did it for me. Remember in the section where Miss Edi said she kept calling for David when everyone thought she was going to die?”