Ah! Jack stubbed out the cigarette. He could make no sense of the “who” behind the arranging, and thinking about what it all meant was frustrating.
If not nightmarish.
Jack recalled how he’d felt as he’d danced with Grace on Ambersbury Banks, and it terrified him.
“This is the last bloody thing I need,” he muttered as he finally turned the ignition key on the Austin.
SEVEN
London
June to September 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
There were three things about that night of Friday the fourteenth of June that made it memorable. The first was that Jack said to me, You have no reason, none, to think that you can only ever exist in your mother’s shadow, and actually sounded as if he meant it.
The second was the confusion in his eyes as we danced. I had expected to see boredom, perhaps even some condescension. But not confusion.
The third was when Catling appeared to me once I’d gone to bed.
The night had started poorly enough. I have no idea what in the world made me think that going to the dance would prove my courage to anyone. It had been a stupid idea. Once I had arrived, I realised I would hate it, but I didn’t want to be rude and leave immediately. I didn’t fit in, I couldn’t share the gaiety, I didn’t want to dance with any of the young men, I didn’t want to chatter meaninglessly with the other women, and so I headed for the kitchen to wash the dishes.
Gods, I am so hopeless.
When Jack appeared behind me I was so startled I thought for one horrible moment I would actually faint. Then I discovered that Stacey had blabbed: Jack knew about the attack and I was sure he would demand then and there that I should stay home and be a good girl. He wanted to, I could see it, but he didn’t. I suppose I should have told him of that terrible sense of the shadow “rushing” at me during the imps’ attack, but I knew if I did, then Jack would demand I stop helping him. So that I kept to myself.
Then he took me dancing, and then…then he took me to heaven and back, although it wasn’t the dance or anything he said. He did it by paying me the ultimate compliment of assuming I had both the skill and the courage to be able to handle his Kingman power. He made me feel as though I mattered, as if I wasn’t just a tragedy needing to be saved, and for that I think I would have given him anything, had he asked.
The melding of powers. It felt magnificent, mostly because it made me feel intimately close to someone, and I hadn’t felt that since I was a tiny baby and not yet under Catling’s hex.
So, it was a good night, and particularly when Jack remembered my birthday.
I went to bed convinced I wouldn’t sleep; that I had too much to think about—and to anticipate—if I was to meet with Jack tomorrow to resume plotting out the course of the shadow. But I did sleep, almost as immediately as my head hit the pillow.
About three a.m. I woke, suddenly, and saw Catling sitting on the chair in the shadowed recesses of the room.
Instantly, all the good feeling and the warmth vanished. I felt sick, and chilled to the marrow of my bones.
She rose, that hateful, cold-faced woman, and came close to the bed.
Iciness radiated out of her, and I shuddered.
“I thought you’d stay home and shiver,” she said, “after what those imps did to you. What they might have done.”
“I wasn’t scared,” I managed, stunned to hear her speak. I had managed to convince myself that her words to me on Ambersbury Banks had been an aberration. “You don’t scare me.”
My Lord, that sounded completely pathetic, and Catling laughed. “Very good,” she said, “I like that.”
I opened my mouth, wanting to goad Catling into revealing what she actually meant by those words, but she forestalled me.
“How did it feel,” she said, “when he held you in his arms?”
That silenced me, and I gaped at her.
“Tell me, Grace. I want to know. How did it feel? How did Jack’s body feel, pressed against yours in the dance? Did it delight you? Would you…” She paused, looking at me as if she were about to ask me something of the utmost importance. “Would you put everything else aside for him? Give your life for him?”
“Go away. Leave me in peace.”
“No. Answer me.”
What preposterous questions. “If I tell you, will you go away?”
“You want me to go away?”
I closed my eyes, not sure if I could put into words the fact that my entire life was dedicated to wanting her to “go away”.
“Were you delighted, Grace?”
“Yes,” I whispered, opening my eyes again, “I was delighted.”
“And would you give your life for him, Grace? Would you live in darkness, if it would save him?”
“Would I be free of you, if I did?”
She smiled, so cold. “Yes.”
“Then, yes, I would die for him, or live in darkness for him, if that would free me of you.”
Something shifted in her eyes, and I hoped I hadn’t made some horribly stupid vow with those words. I meant then to retract my statement, but suddenly Catling was gone, and I was left staring into the dark bedroom.
Over the next weeks and months I continued helping Jack plot out the extent of the shadow. I was careful never to stay out later than mid-afternoon, unless I was in the company of someone else (often Matilda, or another of Eaving’s Sisters), and the imps did not bother me. Jack gradually relaxed (I had noticed him trailing me on more than one occasion, keeping an eye on me), and he and I slipped into a quasifriendship. It was an “almost” friendship, because even though Jack was friendly enough with me, there was a distance in his manner that hadn’t been there previously. We talked about what we were doing and discovering, or of light and inconsequential matters, but often I caught him studying me with those unreadable black eyes of his, and I felt as if I was being judged in some manner.
If I grew obviously uncomfortable under his regard, then he relaxed it instantly, laughing and passing away the look with some light comment. Jack was very good at reassuring me, and I never worried, until the next time I would see him watching me with that peculiar, inscrutable stillness.
He did not ask me to demonstrate my labyrinthine powers again, nor did he touch me with his Kingman power.
That disappointed me more than I had thought possible, but then I knew Jack had so many things to trouble himself with, that I must surely be the least of them.
He appeared to have forgotten my birthday present, but that did not concern me. The fact that he’d remembered my birthday had been gift enough.
I met with him in teashops, once or twice at Faerie Hill Manor, and several times at Copt Hall where the enigmatic Malcolm served me tea and sandwiches. Occasionally Jack would drive me home to the Savoy, where he and Stacey nodded to each other warily. That amused me, mainly because it made me feel better, more confident, to think that there were some creatures who could still unsettle Jack.
My mother often joined us. She was intimately involved with trying to decipher this puzzling shadow (I noticed now that neither Jack nor my mother ever called it a weakness in my presence), and what I discovered on my walks and explorations around London I shared as much with her as with Jack. I minded her presence, but not as much as previously. Every so often I would catch Jack’s eyes on me, and the ghost of his words would cross my mind: You do not stand in your mother’s shadow, Grace.
Then I would remember how well we had danced together, and the confusion in his eyes, and suddenly the presence of my mother did not matter.
Besides, however much I might have minded her presence, I couldn’t deny that we needed her. Within a week of the dance at the parish hall, Hitler opened his air offensive against Britain. On the Wednesday night following the dance, Cambridge was bombed, and thereafter on most days and nights German aircraft appeared in the sky somewhere over Britain, dropping their payloads of bombs onto factories, airfields, ports and, increasingly, houses and suburbs. The air of optimism—even gaiety—that had characterised the last few months now vanished. Day and night the RAF fighters went up against the bombers. People stood in fields, or outside their suburban houses, watching the dogfights going on overhead. I remember one day walking in the Greenwich area, and hearing in the far distance the drone of fighter planes, and looking up, seeing the faint lines of combat far to my south.