How everything had changed. How I had changed.
The period that I spent convalescing at Copt Hall was a time of not merely gaining in strength, but in much reflection. It was also a time of growing. The first month, all of January, I spent mostly in bed. Jack sat most nights in the wing-backed easy chair by my bed, alternatively sleeping (and snoring softly as his head tipped against one of the wings of the chair) or, when he was awake, reading or watching me. I would often wake in the night, and see him there, and I felt so cared for, so protected, that I felt as if nothing could ever touch me.
During the days when Jack was out and about, often with Harry, trying to track down a copy of Londina Illustrata, or trying to discover as much as he could about this new Game, Malcolm sat with me. We talked about his wife, Boudicca, and what had happened two thousand years ago, and what had happened on New Year’s Eve when Boudicca came to me, and one day he asked me if I were afraid.
I smiled. “Afraid? No, Malcolm, I am not afraid. I am at peace, mostly, with both the world and with myself.”
“Not afraid of Catling?”
“No. What happens will happen. But she has no power to terrify or terrorise me now.”
“And what of your sister, the White Queen?”
I fell quiet at that, because, to be frank, she did disturb me. I could not help remembering that night, so long ago now, when she’d asked if I would die for Jack.
And I had said yes. I would say it again, but, oh, I wished I knew what she had meant by it.
Of course, Boudicca’s little warning hadn’t exactly calmed my disquiet, either.
“Be wary of the White Queen,” Malcolm, said. “Trust what she says, but always be wary of it.”
“Oh, come now, Malcolm! What kind of advice is that?”
He just shrugged, annoying me.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, irritated with him for unsettling me, and wanting to put a stop to the conversation, “and I need your arm to help me get there.”
By February I was feeling much better. I’d gained weight, and my flesh had started to plump out from my bones. My strength had largely returned, and I spent more time out of bed than in it.
Even though it was cold, I spent an hour or two each day, wrapped well in a coat and scarf, my breath frosting about me, the frozen leaf litter crunching under my boots, walking Epping Forest with Jack.
These were good hours. Jack and I grew day by day into a deeper intimacy. It wasn’t sexual—we had not become lovers—but something far greater: a sharing and trusting, an ever-deepening understanding and friendship. We explored each other in a way I think few people do, exposing our sins and our hopes, our frailties and the strengths we have made of them. We explored our powers, the depths and possibilities inherent in those abilities and in each other.
We each understood the other, and we were completely, utterly, at peace.
What we were doing was forging a partnership. This process had been in progress for at least a year, but it solidified during the early months of 1941. By the end of February neither of us had any surprises left unknown to the other, only an infinity of possibilities.
Our intimacy was extraordinary, and I felt blessed by it. One day, when we were atop Ambersbury Banks, I turned to him, and tried to put into words what I was feeling.
“Jack…” I said. “Jack…”
I could have felt like a fool then, standing there with my face all pinched with the cold, my hands thrust deep into the pockets of my coat, staring at the man standing before me, and once I would indeed have felt like a fool. But today I didn’t. I knew he would understand.
He did. He smiled, so gently, and stepped forward and kissed my forehead, then just gathered me to him.
We stood there for almost an hour, not speaking, just standing close, the forest watching, the leaves frosting under our feet, fallow deer rummaging about in the trees for whatever nourishment they could find, and felt the land turn about us.
We’d both had disastrous lives, and we stood in a place where once the people of this land had met a disastrous fate at the sword of an invader.
We’d both been marked, one way or another, by the land, and those who had lived on it.
We both hoped, more than anything, that we could walk away from this place of death, and this time turn all the disasters that had nourished us into something triumphant.
At the very end of February Harry sent word that a book dealer by the name of Lionel Sutherland was making a brief trip back to London to see a relative. He was one of London’s premier rare book dealers, but had fled, together with all his stock, some three or four months before the declaration of war (being a man of caution, Sutherland was taking no chances with what had taken him a lifetime to acquire). Sutherland had heard from various sources in the book world that Harry had been searching out a copy of Wilkinson’s Londina Illustrata for friends, and Sutherland had what he claimed was “an almost” complete copy.
“The best you’re ever going to get,” was what Harry told Jack and me the man had said.
And Sutherland was bringing the set to London, if perchance Harry’s friends wished to view it.
Jack and I looked at each other. “Almost complete” was not quite what we were after, but this wasn’t a chance we wanted to ignore.
“When can we meet him?” Jack asked.
THREE
Copt Hall
Monday, 3rd March 1941
Jack drove Grace down to London in his Austin convertible (its cloth hood up against the cold) to meet Sutherland in a teashop by the British Museum in Bloomsbury. Now that Grace was able to accompany Jack, Harry was staying behind at Faerie Hill Manor.
“How does it feel to come back to London?” Jack asked, glancing from the road for a moment at Grace sitting still and introspective in the passenger seat. Every time he looked at her he couldn’t believe the difference two months’ worth of rest and Malcolm’s never-ending supply of chicken soup and ham-and-cheese sandwiches had made. She was looking better than ever he’d seen her, and that was not only as a result of her physical recovery, but also a wonderful sense of inner peace, a contentment with both herself and her world, that Jack had never seen in her previously. As far as he could tell, she rarely allowed her doubts about the White Queen to bother her.
Grace tipped her head slowly from side to side, as if considering what to say.
“I have barely given Catling a great deal of thought over the past two months,” she said. “Oh, we have talked of her, and of what we might do with this Game the White Queen has gifted us, but she has mostly been far from my thoughts…for the first time in all my life.”
“Catling has been very quiet,” said Jack. “At least so far as we’re concerned.”
But not for the Londoners. The city and suburbs had been subjected to horrific attacks. While not as large as that on the twenty-ninth of December, the air raids had been extensive, and caused heavy casualties, not the least because underground stations had been targeted, as also had Buckingham Palace.
Catling may not have been visiting personally, but her message was coming through as clear as day: Finish me, or people will continue to die.
She might not touch Grace again, but both feared the horrors Catling might visit on the Londoners, and they hoped they could discover the secrets of the White Queen’s Game before Catling moved.
Eventually, as they were driving through the northern suburbs of London, Grace roused herself from her thoughts.
“I hope this Sutherland has the set we’re after,” she said.
“If you ask me,” said Jack, “it’s a damn shame the White Queen couldn’t have left us a set where she’d know we could find them.”
Grace turned to look at him then, smiling gently. “What? If we’d found a set in early January then we would have lost these past two months of relative peace. I’m not sure, Jack, if either of us would have wanted that.”
He flickered a glance her way, amusement shining from his eyes. “I could stop the car right here, Grace, and we could walk the rest of the way down to Bloomsbury. That would give us an extra two or three days to enjoy each other’s company.”
“Keep driving, Jack. I’m not sure that even you are worth tired feet.”