Susan seared the chops in a hot pan with a sprinkling of pepper and rosemary and made a fancy kind of gravy. The chops smelled fantastic, but were half the size of my fist. That was all the meat we’d get for the next two weeks.
“A good meal lifts the spirits,” Lady Thorton said as we sat down to eat. I stared at her. Her face froze. “Ruth,” she said—whenever Lady Thorton said Ruth’s name her face screwed up like she was smelling something nasty—“Ruth, what is that by your plate?”
It was an envelope. Ruth looked down, saw it, and picked it up. She started to smile.
“It came in today’s mail,” said Susan.
Lady Thorton held out her hand. “Give it to me.”
“No,” said Ruth. Her smile disappeared. “It’s mine.” She started to tuck the envelope into her pocket. Lady Thorton snatched it out of her hand.
“Eleanor!” Susan protested.
“I consider it my duty!” Lady Thorton replied. “Mail delivered to a German in my house!” She ripped open the envelope and shook out the piece of paper inside. Ruth cried out, soft, like an owl. Lady Thorton’s face went red. “I can’t read a word of it. I should have known. It’s all German—”
Ruth pushed back from the table. “How dare you!” she shouted. Bright red spots bloomed on her cheeks. She grabbed her letter, ran up the stairs to her room, and slammed and locked the door.
Jamie whimpered. I reached under the table and squeezed his hand.
Susan said, “That was completely unnecessary.”
Lady Thorton said, “I agree. Her behavior was reprehensible.”
Susan looked her in the eye. “I meant your behavior.”
It was impossible for me to eat after that. I hated fighting. Susan never hit me, but Lady Thorton might. She looked ready to wallop Ruth for sure.
“Eat your chop,” Susan said to me.
I pushed my plate away. “I’m not hungry.”
“Eat it,” Lady Thorton commanded, through a mouthful of meat. “In wartime we do not waste food.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t eat that chop, not even to keep her from walloping me. Not when Ruth’s chop sat untouched on her plate.
“Ada is my responsibility.” Susan’s voice had an edge I didn’t understand. “I’ll be the one who decides what she does.” She swept up my plate, and Jamie’s, and Ruth’s. “Ada, Jamie, you may be excused. We’ll save the rest of this for tomorrow.”
• • •
Jamie and I washed the dishes like always. Susan and Lady Thorton sat at the table, drinking tea and talking in hard, quiet voices. I tried like anything to hear what they were saying, but Jamie splashed too much and they kept their voices down. When Lady Thorton went into the sitting room, Susan went to the larder. She cut three big slices of bread and spread them with some of the gravy she’d made for the lamb. “Take these upstairs,” she said to us. I nodded. She meant, where Lady Thorton couldn’t see.
I knocked on Ruth’s door. “Go away,” she said.
“It’s Ada. I’ve got something for you.”
“Go away.”
“I know you’re hungry.”
“Do your ears work worse than your foot? Go away.”
• • •
The next morning, at breakfast, I said to Ruth, “There’s nothing wrong with my foot.”
Ruth shrugged. “You can say that if you want to.”
“My foot’s fixed!”
“Susan called it a clubfoot,” Ruth said. “You limp. You always limp, and some days you limp more.”
“I do not.” I was lying. I knew I limped even though I tried hard not to.
“Ruth,” Susan said, “Ada prefers to keep her foot private.”
“Ah,” said Ruth. “Like my letters.”
Lady Thorton sat down in time to hear that. She didn’t flinch. “I have a right to know with whom you correspond.”
“So next time, you can ask me instead of opening my mail.” Ruth began to eat. She didn’t say who her letter was from. Lady Thorton tapped her fingers against the table. Silence stretched out. Jamie looked at me anxiously.
“Who wrote to you, Ruth?” Susan finally asked.
“My mother,” she said. “My mother, who is by herself in an internment camp.”
“What’s an internment camp?” asked Jamie.
“Jail,” I said.
“Certainly not,” Lady Thorton said. “Internment camps are merely places to keep watch on enemy aliens. Tell me, Ruth. What did your letter say?”
Ruth sniffed. “None of your business. They have censors in the internment camp. If my mother wrote anything controversial, I wouldn’t have gotten the letter.”
Lady Thorton frowned. “Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true!” said Ruth. “Why do you think it took her so long to write to me? Not because she was writing things she shouldn’t—because she’s only allowed to write one letter, one single piece of paper, each week. And she has to write to my father and my grandmother and our family back in Germany—and now she finally got to write to me, and I will never tell you what she said! I will go back to that camp myself first!” Ruth’s voice rose until she was shouting.
“We want you to stay here,” Susan said. “Lord Thorton”—Susan glared at Lady Thorton—“wants you to stay here.”
I hadn’t even realized that Ruth hadn’t received any letters. Maggie wrote her mother three times a week, and me nearly as often.
Jamie said, “Why doesn’t your mother come live with us? We’ve got a big enough cave.”
Lady Thorton made a noise in her throat, but Ruth answered first. “She can’t,” she said. “The British government won’t let her.”
I said, “In case she’s a spy.”
“Yes,” Ruth said wearily. “In case she’s a spy.”
Chapter 23
That night Susan filled our dinner plates herself and carefully set one down in front of each of us. Lord Woolton pie, the baked mess of oatmeal and vegetables. Only mine—and, I saw, looking around the table—Ruth’s and Jamie’s, had cut-up pieces of lamb mixed with it. Lamb and the lamb gravy, with wine and rosemary. Susan’s and Lady Thorton’s did not.
With the addition of meat, the Lord Woolton Pie wasn’t half bad.
Lady Thorton picked through her serving. “Is this supposed to be some sort of punishment?” she asked Susan.
“Of course not,” Susan replied. “You and I ate our share yesterday. The whole point of rationing is that everyone gets their fair share.”
Ruth’s eyes flicked to mine. She didn’t smile, but I felt like she was thinking a smile. I thought a smile back at her.
That really was all the meat we got, though, for the next two straight weeks. We’d used up our coupons and we couldn’t get more, not without buying meat on the black market, which meant illegally outside the ration. Lady Thorton had enough money to do that but she said she also had too much honor.
February continued cold and bleak. The sun rose late and set early, and between that and the blackout, it really did seem like we were living in a cave. Susan fell into a gloom. She was never as sad as she’d been when we first came to live with her—she got out of bed every day, but she rarely smiled, and she slept more than I thought she should.
One morning my schoolwork felt unbearable. Ruth was squirreled away with her maths and Jamie outside trying to dig a garden plot in the frozen ground. Susan sat dully in front of her sewing machine, rearranging some pins but not stitching anything. I shoved aside my grammar book and said, “Why don’t we train the dragons?”
Susan looked up. “What?”
“Fred says horses fought in the last big war.”
“Yes,” she said. “And in every war before that. They’re not much use in modern times, though, not against tanks and aircraft and heavy artillery.”
“Right,” I said. “So why not dragons?” I’d been thinking it through. “The kind that can fly. If we took them out of the zoos and we trained them, maybe they could attack German planes without even needing pilots on board.” It would be much safer for Jonathan.
A grin spread slowly across Susan’s face. “Ada,” she said, “you do understand that dragons are mythical creatures?”
As if I knew what she meant by mythical. I stared at her.
“Imaginary,” said Susan. “Made-up. Pretend. The stuff of fairy tales.” She coughed, then started to laugh. “My dear—oh, I’m sorry—it’s wonderful—Why don’t we train dragons?” She laughed harder. “That’d serve Hitler. A couple of ranks of dragons, and the ghost of St. George—”
I’d never seen Susan laugh like this.
I picked up the closest thing at hand—the grammar book—and threw it hard across the room. It narrowly missed Lady Thorton coming through the front door. She bent to pick it up and smoothed it in her hands.
“Ada,” she said sternly, “we do not throw books.”
Susan was still laughing. “I know I should stop—I’m not being kind—”
“Stop what?” asked Lady Thorton.
Susan said, “She wants to train dragons to fight Hitler.”
“Nobody told me they aren’t real!”
Lady Thorton considered. “A pity they aren’t,” she said. “It would be an excellent plan. Except I suppose the Germans would also have dragons.”
“Bigger dragons,” Susan said. “Stronger, taller, blonder dragons—” She looked ready to laugh again.
“How am I supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t?” I almost shouted. “Nobody tells me! Nobody tells me anything!”
“Ada,” Susan said, recovering herself, “I’m sorry I laughed. But be fair. I tell you things all the time.”
“Fairy tales,” Lady Thorton said. “What you need is a proper dose of fairy tales. Then you can move on to mythology. I’ll fetch some books from Thorton House.”
I said, “You have more books than what you brought here already?”
“Oh my, yes. We left most of them on the shelves in the library.”
Imagine. Their own library. Thorton House had a library.
• • •
Lady Thorton brought over volumes of fairy tales. Susan read them to Jamie and me all through the rest of that dreary month. She explained after each story what was real and what wasn’t. I could have guessed most of it—I already knew that animals couldn’t talk, and that people couldn’t really fly or weren’t born so small they could sleep in a teacup. But it was hard to see how unicorns, for example, were less real than horses. Dragons still seemed dead useful to me. Winged lizards? Why not? Angels were people with wings. It was hard to see the difference.
Ruth stayed downstairs to listen to the fairy tales. “I’ve never heard them in English before,” she said.
Jamie said, “They have stories in Germany?”
You never thought of Germans telling stories.
Ruth looked offended, but then, she usually did. “Of course we have stories in Germany,” she said. “Most of these stories came from Germany. They were German first.”
I didn’t want to believe her, but Lady Thorton pursed her lips and said it was true. “The Brothers Grimm were German,” she said.
I didn’t think anything good came from Germany. When I said so, Lady Thorton disagreed. “I traveled through Germany extensively when I was younger,” she said. “Dresden is a beautiful city, very cultured. You can’t judge the whole country by Hitler.”
I said, “But you judge Ruth by Hitler.”
Lady Thorton’s head snapped up, angry. Ruth bit her lip, and Susan outright smiled.
• • •
Susan finally found a book about dragons at the village library. St. George, the patron saint of England, was supposed to have killed a dragon, and so was a saint named Margaret of Antioch. It amused me to think that Maggie had been named for a dragon-killer. But saints were supposed to have been real people, not imaginary, and dragons were imaginary, not real. How could a real person kill an imaginary animal?
“The stories get a little mixed up,” Susan said. “These particular saints lived a very long time ago.”
“Back when people were stupid like me?”
“Ada,” said Susan, “if you say things like that, I’ll make you write lines.”
I didn’t know what write lines meant. I didn’t care. I repeated, “Stupid like me.”
Susan made me sit at the table until I’d written the sentence “I will not continue to conflate lack of intelligence with lack of knowledge” one hundred times. It took hours. I considered refusing to do it, but the expression on Susan’s face made me pick up a pencil instead.
“What’s conflate?” I asked.
“Combining two ideas that ought to be kept separate,” Susan said. “You are going to stop doing it.”
“Tell me all the things that are imaginary,” I said. “When I’m done with these stupid lines I want to make a list.”
“I can’t,” Susan said. “It would be an infinite list. Anything you can make up inside your head is imaginary.”
I thought about this. “So love is imaginary?”
“No, no,” Susan said. “Love exists outside your head. Think harder, Ada. Stop being so cross.”
• • •
Every day Ruth saw me wearing my jodhpurs. Every day she saw me going to the stables. Every day when I came back smelling of horses and hay she sniffed the air longingly. She looked enormously sad.
Butter made me happy every single day.
Lady Thorton hardly ever went to her own stables. She said she was too busy with the WVS to ride often, and she never ever did chores.
“You can’t take Ruth with you if Lady Thorton won’t allow it,” Susan said. “She does have that authority.”
I wasn’t used to being envied. To my surprise, I didn’t like it at all.
Chapter 24
Lord Thorton telegraphed that he was coming home for the weekend. We tried hard to make things nice for him. Instead of ducking her share of the housekeeping, Lady Thorton actually mopped the kitchen floor and polished the brass on the fireplace, and she queued for three hours to get our bacon ration while Susan stood in a separate queue for fish.
Lord Thorton arrived in his car, to our surprise. I wondered how he’d gotten the gasoline. He brought gifts for all of us. A piece of chocolate for Jamie. A potted plant for the kitchen table. A small bottle of perfume for Lady Thorton, and four new bars of smooth, silky scented soap, one each for Lady Thorton, Susan, Ruth, and me.
To my astonishment I was actually happier to get nice soap than I would have been chocolate. Soap was on ration, and all we could usually get was war soap, unscented and harsh. It made me itch. I’d gotten used to daily baths and nice soap, living with Susan. Odd when you thought about it. Mam hadn’t been much for keeping us clean.
Ruth stared at her soap as though she were afraid of it. She looked close to tears. I wondered what she was thinking. I didn’t understand her at all.
Lord Thorton was still scary, very tall in a looming sort of way, but now he spoke to me as though I was someone he knew well, and also as though he rather liked me.
“You look as though you’re getting around quite easily,” he said. “Even better than at Christmastime.”
I realized he was talking about my foot. I didn’t want him talking about my foot.
“Thank you,” I said. Across the room, Ruth looked up, interested.
“Does it hurt anymore?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I said, though it did, sometimes.
“Good,” he said. “Very good.”
• • •
“What happened to your foot?” Ruth asked that night as we climbed the s
tairs to bed.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Susan called it a clubfoot,” Ruth said.
“I know,” I said, and closed my bedroom door.
Chapter 25
A week later Maggie came home for half-term. I met her train at the village station. “I can’t believe my father brought home a German,” she said. “What’s she like?”
“Not as odd as I thought she’d be,” I said. “Course, she might be pretending. Trying to trick us into feeling safer.” Though the longer I knew Ruth, the more ordinary she seemed. “Your mother hates her,” I added.
Maggie nodded. “I’m not surprised.”
• • •
Maggie stood in the middle of our bedroom, her hands on her hips. I stood beside her. The two halves of the room no longer matched.
I’d stripped the frilly coverlet and pillows from my bed and removed the lacy curtain-thing that went around the bottom of it. I’d taken the curtain off my side of the window. I’d thrown my dictionary in with Maggie’s books on the shelves, moved my box to my bedside table, and scooted the rug partially under Maggie’s bed so it didn’t lay on my half of the floor at all.
“Did my mother do this?” Maggie asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She shook her head, lips firmly pressed together. “I can’t believe it. It’s not fair.” She grabbed the edge of the rug and tugged on it. “Help me,” she said. “This needs to go in the middle. It’s for both of us.”
“It’s not,” I said. “It’s yours.”
“That’s ridiculous. As if I wouldn’t share anything I had with you.” She centered the rug on the floor. “I thought we had two of those coverlets,” she said. “I know for a fact we had two sets of pillows.” She flung open the wardrobe door. There, stuffed against the back on the floor, were the extra pillows.
“Your mother did put them on my bed,” I said. “I just didn’t like them.”
Maggie looked at the pillows, and back to me. “Oh,” she said. “Well. You don’t have to take them. I thought my mother didn’t want to let you use them, that’s all.”