‘The Excitements’ Chapters 43-48

“Besides what?”

“I don’t think I could do what I had to to, you know ...” She waved at Josephine’s bump.

“It just sort of happens naturally when you’re in love,” said Josephine. It was rare that she was more experienced in something than her friend. “You’ll meet the boy of your dreams and you’ll find that you want to.”

Connie shook her head again. “I don’t think I’ll ever find the boy of my dreams, Josie-Jo.”

“Oh you will ...”

“Not me. I want a different kind of life. A different kind of sweetheart. Someone ... Not a man.”

Josephine’s mouth dropped open.

“Don’t tell anyone,” said Connie. Josephine mimed buttoning her lip.

“Anyway the minute I’m eighteen, I’m going to London, where nobody knows me.”

“What will you do there?”

“I’m not going into service, that’s for sure. I’m going to do my bit for the war effort. I saw a Red Cross advert in the post office window. They need ambulance drivers. I can do that. I’ve been driving the estate van since half the gardeners went off to war.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being bombed?”

“I’m more afraid of never getting out of here. I don’t want to have the life my parents did, spending their days cleaning up after their betters. I’m sorry, Josephine,” she added quickly. “I know you are my better.” She doffed an imaginary cap.

“Stop it.”

“It’s not for me, being someone’s servant or someone’s wife. I want to choose my own destiny. I want to do what I want and love who I want and never have to answer to anybody else ever again.”

“That sounds lovely,” said Josephine, suddenly feeling the weight of her own destiny very heavily indeed.

“You could run away with me and bring the baby. Really, we could run away together. Set up home in London. What do you say?”

The two girls held hands and locked gazes. Over the years, they had made a great many plans to run away, mostly to avoid getting into trouble with their parents over some childish escapade. Once, when they were both nine years old, they’d packed their favourite toys and stole food from the kitchen and made it almost as far as the train station before Penny—furious at being left out—had sounded the alarm and Josephine’s grandmother called the station manager to warn him that two runaways were heading in his direction. Now however, there was a seriousness in Connie’s suggestion this time that made tears prick Josephine’s eyes. They were almost grown women. No conductor would stop them boarding the train for wherever they wanted to go. They knew how to look after themselves. Well, Connie definitely did ... Josephine had a little bit of money saved up.

“We could do it.”

“I can’t,” Josephine said. I can’t.”

Connie stroked her cheek. “Well, I’ll go first and you can come and find me later.”

 

FOR THE LAST month of Josephine ’s pregnancy, the weather had been terrible—the sun barely seemed to bother getting up, reflecting the mood inside the house. But the day before her baby’s birth, the sun finally broke through the gloom and it felt as though the whole world was ready to begin anew.

Though Connie had done her best to tell Josephine what to expect, her second-hand knowledge of labour was sketchy. Connie hadn’t explained to Josephine that her waters would break, so when she woke up on a damp bed Josephine assumed she must have wet herself. She started hauling the sheets off, thinking she could get them changed before anyone noticed the mess, but a cramp had her bending double and she sat down with the job half finished. She was in so much pain. It couldn’t possibly be right. She had never felt such waves of agony. Was she dying?

It was the middle of the night. The house was quiet. She wanted to call for help but even in this moment of fear and distress, she didn’t want to risk waking her grandmother. If she got her out of bed for nothing—just to tell her she’d soiled the sheets—she would be furious. But the pain was making it hard to think straight. What were her choices? Make her grandparents angry—angrier, than they were already—or die?

Instinctively, she got down on all fours on the floor next to the bed and tried to find a comfortable position. When the pain came, she screwed up her face and held her cries inside. But she couldn’t do that forever. She crawled to the bedroom door and called out into the corridor, her voice thin and wavering.

“Can somebody help me? Please? Connie?”

Connie, whose bedroom was two empty rooms away, was awake, reading, and heard her call.

“I think it’s coming.”

“I know what to do,” Connie said, as much to comfort herself as Josephine. “I’ve seen my sister do it enough times.”

The truth was that neither of the girls really had any idea how the last stages of labour should unfold. Connie’s bravado was misplaced. She’d always stayed at the head end of the bed when her sister was in labour. Racked by another contraction, Josephine bit down on a pillow to soften the urge to scream. Connie rubbed her back and whispered encouragement and occasionally asked if she shouldn’t wake her mother, to which the answer was always an emphatic “No. Please, no. Not yet. I just want you.”

With every contraction, Connie shyly checked Josephine’s progress, then exhaled deeply to stop herself from fainting at the sight.

“I’m breaking in half. Is this what’s supposed to happen?” Josephine managed to pant.

“Yes, yes,” Connie assured her. “You just keep pushing.”

“I don’t know how. I’m too tired.”

“Hold my hand and really, really squeeze. Then imagine doing the same with your, your you-know, at the same time.”

“Make it stop, Connie.”

“I can’t. Nobody can. You just have to keep on pushing.”

It was too late now.

Kneeling on the floor between Josephine’s legs, Connie caught the baby as he suddenly slid out and onto her lap. She was speechless.

“Give the baby to me,” Josephine had to tell her. “Give it here.”

Connie handed the baby over and then lay down on the floor in a swoon.

The baby was a boy. Josephine held him in her arms, umbilical cord still attached. His eyes were screwed tight shut as if in indignation at being hauled out into this cold, strange place. What kind of world had Josephine delivered him into?

When he did finally open them, his eyes were small, dark, and shiny, and already ancient though he was just a few minutes old. They seemed to search hers out.

“I’m here,” she said. “Mummy’s here.”

The baby didn’t cry. He was as quiet and still as she and Connie had been, as if he understood that they were not to make a fuss at such an ungodly hour. Josephine didn’t know what she was supposed to do now she had him. When he mewed, she put her finger in his mouth. He sucked on it fiercely.

Sitting up again, Connie just gazed at the pair of them, her expression like one of the kings in Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi. Josephine would never forget it, how Connie had looked at her baby that night. Pure love.

“I’ll get some scissors,” Connie said eventually, backing out of the room. “For the cord. You stay there.”

“Don’t be long!” Josephine begged.

But when Josephine next looked up at the creak of the door, it wasn’t Connie who had come back. It was her grandmother, with Connie’s mother, the cook, alongside her.

Her grandmother was angry. “Why didn’t you wake us?”

“I didn’t want to ...”

Grandma Williamson was already barking instructions to Connie’s mother.

“Send the boy to fetch the doctor then bring some hot water up here. We need to get you cleaned up,” she said to Josephine. “Give me the baby.”

“Not yet. I can’t. I don’t want to let him go.”

But she did let him go.

Josephine heard her baby crying for the first time as he was bathed in another room.

 

DR. MUIR ARRIVED shortly afterwards. He’d already attended another birth that morning, down in the village. The butcher’s daughter had delivered her first son.

“Beautiful child. The family is delighted,” he told Mrs. Williamson. But Dr. Muir examined Josephine without a word—not of reassurance or congratulation—announcing his verdict, “She’ll be fine,” to her grandmother instead.

“And my baby?” Josephine asked. “Have you examined him?”

The doctor and her grandmother shared a look.

“I’ll leave you to it, Mrs. Williamson,” Doctor Muir said. Mrs. Williamson followed him out into the corridor.

Josephine strained to hear the hushed conversation between her grandmother and the doctor outside her bedroom, but the walls of her grandparents’ house were built for Scottish winters and she could not make out the words though the tone of the exchange seemed heated. The conversation continued out onto the driveway. Josephine thought she heard the sound of her baby crying out there too, which couldn’t be right. Eventually, Dr. Muir left. She heard the wheels of his car spinning on the gravel outside, as though he couldn’t wait to get away.

Though she begged and cried, Josephine was not allowed to see her son again. She was not even allowed out of her room while a housemaid—not Connie—changed the bed sheets and brought a clean white nightdress to replace the one smeared with blood.

The house fell silent. When her grandmother came back to the bedroom around an hour after the doctor’s visit, her face was stone-hard.

“What’s going on?” Josephine asked her.

“The baby is dead.”

“But I heard him crying outside not fifteen minutes ago.”

“You’re imagining it. The doctor pronounced him dead when he got here. He thought it would be better if I told you. The baby was too small,” her grandmother said.

That made no sense either. The baby was at least as big as George had been when he was born. Bigger even.

“Is it my fault? Did I do something wrong?” Josephine asked.

Her grandmother made no move to suggest that Josephine hadn’t. She didn’t answer the question. Instead she said, “The doctor says you are to stay in bed and get some sleep.”

“I want to see my baby.”

“You can’t,” her grandmother all but shouted. “He’s dead and it’s for the best. What’s done is done, Josephine. Just be glad it’s over.”

 

DOCTOR MUIR HAD left something behind to help her sleep. Josephine didn’t want to sleep but her grandmother must have slipped the powder into her milk anyway. When she woke up again, it was a whole day later. She was told that her baby had already been buried.

She hardly dared ask where. And later, when she did dare ask, she would wish she hadn’t.

Connie too, was gone.

“She had altogether too much to say for herself,” said Josephine’s grandmother. “London can have her. Now you’d better write a letter to that boyfriend of yours, telling him what he put you through. I’ll get the cook to post it when she’s next in town.”

A week later, Josephine was on her way home, breasts bound tight to stop the milk, under strict instructions to “forget she ever had a baby and move on with her life.”

When she picked her daughter up from the station, Cecily Williamson did not mention the reason for Josephine having been away. The baby—whom Josephine had named Ralph in her heart—was never spoken of again.

 

MEMORY IS A strange thing. In her old age there were days when Josephine could hardly remember what she’d had for breakfast, but she would never forget the first time August Samuel took her hand in the summer of 1939, or their first kiss, or their baby’s small brown eyes shining in the early morning light on the one day he spent on this earth. Neither would she ever forget Connie’s goofy smile at the sight of the child she had delivered. In fact, it seemed the further the events retreated into the past, the stronger those memories became. Was it because as time moved ever faster they were coming closer from the opposite direction? Were they coming for her now? Her old lover? Her old friend? Her child?

On the floor of the auction house, Josephine struggled to open her eyes and when she did, she saw nothing but white light. Yes. This must surely be the end. She was surprised not to feel in the least bit afraid. On the contrary, she was happy. It felt like the right time to say goodbye at last.

 

Forty-Six

Paris, 2022

“Stand back, please. Stand back. Give the lady some air.”

It wasn’t a heavenly glow that lit the back of Josephine’s eyeballs. It was a torch.

“There’s a reaction,” said the paramedic.

“I’m not dead,” Josephine said out loud. “Though I feel as though I ought to be.”

“You probably should be,” the paramedic agreed. With infinite care, she helped Josephine into a more comfortable position. “Someone must be looking out for you.”

Though the media would later report that Josephine had been saved from a bullet by her Légion d’honneur medal, the glitzy medallion wasn’t quite that strong. In fact she had been rescued from death by another secret layer of protection. Beneath the medal, in the breast pocket of her favourite navy-blue jacket, was that piece of lucky shrapnel that she had carried on her person for more than eighty years. That tiny piece of bomb casing built to kill in a German munitions factory had saved her. The paramedics marvelled at the small square of dull metal with its perfect bullet-head-shaped dent.

While the gunmen and Dragomir Georgiev were bundled into separate police vans and whisked away from the scene, Josephine was loaded into an ambulance to be taken straight to the hospital where she could be more thoroughly checked.

In the ambulance alongside her was Penny, who had been wired up to all sorts of machines. First thought when dealing with chest pain was always “heart attack” and goodness knows the siege should have been enough to bring on one of those in someone fifty years younger. Penny was pale, which was consistent with a cardiac event, but she was also loudly insisting, “I feel absolutely fine now. I don’t know what was going on in there but I really do not need to go to hospital. Please send me back to the hotel.”

Though she chatted with the nice paramedic all the way and that was a good sign, there was no way Penny was going to be allowed to leave without a proper check-up. Likewise Veronique, who couldn’t stop shaking from the shock of it all. She was in the ambulance behind, together with Archie, who had a bump on the back of his head the size of a chicken’s egg from his faint. He also thought he’d done something to his wrist again when he pulled that Defendu backflip.

Stéphane had been the first to Archie’s side once the police had neutralised all the weapons in the auction room.

“My darling boy!” he called him, wrapping him in his arms.

Malcolm tried to get in on the act, suddenly looking much smaller than he had before.

“Oh, go away,” said Stéphane. “You would have let me die in there. You’d have let all of us die. You let an old lady take your place in the firing line. A ninety-seven-year-old lady. Where’s the heroism in that. Thank God, Archie saved us all.”

“It was PTSD from rehearsals for the film,” Malcolm pleaded. “Faced with a gun, I was reliving René Tremblay’s last moments before the firing squad.”

“Oh, take your bloody method acting and shove it up your arse,” was Stéphane’s retort. “You’re not brave enough to say that Resistance hero’s name.”

Archie tried not to look triumphant as Malcolm slunk away.

“I can’t believe I fainted,” Archie said. “I feel like such a wimp. I was so frightened.”

“You didn’t faint from fear,” Stéphane reassured him. “You fainted because you’d been sitting cross-legged with your hands on your head for half an hour. You didn’t have any blood in your legs. No wonder they buckled beneath you. And after that, you absolutely redeemed yourself. Bloody hell, Archie. Where did you learn those moves?”

 

AT THE HOSPITAL, Penny’s doctors were surprised to discover that according to an ECG her heart was in perfect working order, beating as strongly and evenly as that of someone decades younger. But the chest pain Penny had experienced had been strong enough to bend her in two. Had they missed something? Stress? Indigestion? A broken rib? Elderly bones might break at the slightest provocation.

“I absolutely don’t need a scan,” Penny said crossly when one was suggested. “Please concentrate your efforts on my sister.”

Josephine had already been examined. She was bruised and in shock but the prognosis was good.

“You have a least another decade in you,” the chief medic said kindly.

However she would not be going back to the hotel that night.

“And neither will you,” the medic told Penny. “Unless we can be sure you’re entirely fit. And that means finding out what gave you that chest pain.”

Arlene, who had come to the hospital to act as Penny’s advocate (not that she wanted one) agreed.

“You’re ninety-seven,” she reminded her.

“So I should probably know my own mind,” Penny retorted.

Penny was sure she was as fit as she might expect to be. She had also remembered by now exactly what must have caused that pin sharp jab that had knocked her off her feet. The sharp edges of a ballerina mount.

“I refuse to have any sort of scan,” she said firmly. “Though I would appreciate it very much if somebody could find me some sort of laxative. Fast-acting, if you please.”

 

Chapter  Forty-Seven 

The following morning, the sisters and Archie were reunited in Josephine’s hospital room.

“Well,” said Archie. “I think we had enough excitements to last a lifetime last night, don’t you?”

The sisters agreed. For the moment. There was, however, still work to be done. As soon as Josephine and Penny’s doctor gave the green light, Police Inspector Emile Allard and his junior, Detective Nathalie Urban, arrived to take the sisters and Archie’s statements regarding the previous evening’s events at Brice-Petitjean. Penny claimed that her recollection of events in the run-up to the arrival of Angel and his accomplices was a little murky. “I just had a little potter around the room and looked at some of the jewels,” she said. “I’d asked Archie to take me back to the hotel. At my age, one doesn’t like to stay up too late.”

The detectives were understanding and didn’t press Penny for too much detail. They had the hostage-takers and Georgiev in custody, after all.

“We hope not to have to bother you again,” said Detective Urban.

But there were other visitors to come. A little later, Arlene brought the remaining contingent of elderly British veterans to the hospital, so that Davina and Sister Eugenia could explain their part in the way the evening had unfolded.

“Sister Eugenia was telegraphy. I was command and control,” Davina explained. “Eugenia gave the police a minute-by-minute feed of your Morse conversation and I plotted coordinates on a map.”

“Well, I never,” said Josephine.

“Did I say anything rude?” asked Penny.

Sister Eugenia looked up to the ceiling. “Let’s just say, I wasn’t translating verbatim.”

Then Stéphane arrived, with armfuls of flowers, and charmed them all. “If I had known I would be in the presence of so many beautiful women, I would have dressed up,” he told them. He was of course, immaculate, in the way that only a French man can be.

He handed one of the bouquets to Archie. The look that passed between them made all the ladies sigh.

“Is Malcolm OK?” Archie asked in what was obviously meant to be a nonchalant fashion.

Stéphane visibly bristled. “I believe he’s in a meeting with the producers of his film, who think they might want a couple of casting changes before they go ahead with the shoot. The optics from the auction house weren’t exactly edifying. But enough about that. I thought you would like to see the newspapers. There are some lovely photographs of us all.”

“But I look awful,” said Archie. One of the papers had a photograph lifted from CCTV footage, which showed Archie all but lifting the gunman off his feet with the power of an old metal matchbox.

“You look like a hero,” Stéphane assured him.

The auction house siege had made all the papers—French and international—but it had been knocked off the top spot in Paris that morning by another piece of local news, which perhaps explained why it had taken so long for the police to form their initial response to events at Brice-Petitjean. While the siege was underway, half the city’s police force was already in the sixteenth, responding to an emergency that required the evacuation of three whole apartment blocks.

A young couple—“Totally Bobo,” as Stéphane described them—had made a shocking discovery while renovating their recently-purchased apartment.

“It’s a Resistance arms cache. Guns, bullets, grenades. You name it. All under their bathroom floor. Just imagine. It’s been hidden there for nearly eighty years. It could have gone up at any moment. The police estimated there was enough live ordnance beneath those floorboards to have blown up the entire building and half the street in each direction. I imagine it’s put their renovation plans back a couple of months.”

Penny pored over the photographs. The exact address of the apartment block in question had not been given but the building looked familiar. The pictures of the police cars and army bomb disposal team outside were supplemented by a photograph of the same building “believed to be taken in the 1930s.” Was that Madame Declerc scowling from the door that led from the street to the courtyard where Penny and Josephine once played?

Penny snatched up another paper, looking for another angle on the story. More pictures. None of the stories said exactly where in the building the apartment was but the fact that the Resistance arms cache wasn’t the only thing hidden beneath the floor in the bathroom gave another clue. The police had also found a safe, full of cash, letters, and a small velvet bag full of gems. Including a ring set with a green stone the size of a Fox’s Glacier Mint. There was a photograph.

“Efforts will be made to reunite the jewellery with the descendants of its owner ...”

While the conversation in the room returned to Archie’s heroism—“I remember when he was learning Defendu,” said Josephine. “Wrecked an Ercol standard lamp. His mother was not in the least bit happy”—Penny excused herself to the bathroom. She had a feeling that the Declercs’ cursed “lucky” emerald was ready to make its return.

 

AS IT HAPPENED, the Declercs’ emerald was not ready to come out, but having seen the photographs in the newspapers, Penny had another reason to feel slightly unwell. The apartment with the arms cache and the safe beneath the bathroom floor had to be the apartment that once belonged to the Samuels and then the Declercs. The safe had lain there untouched for years. It must have been in place in 1947, when Penny tried to prise the floorboard up again before she was interrupted by Madame Declerc’s return. Gilbert and his mother had not found the Grand Duchess’s ring or the hand grenades.

Had they looked? Penny remembered Gilbert’s face when she told him about the secret stash of gems. His sense of integrity had shone through. He did not want to know a secret about his friend that his friend had not already thought to share.

“You shouldn’t have told me.” That was what he’d said to her. “It’s about trust. August is my friend.”

Had Penny got Gilbert all wrong? And his mother too?

For decades, she had hated Gilbert Declerc, for betraying the Samuel family and buying a new life for himself with their riches, only to discover that the “stolen emerald” was a peridot. Penny could see that even from the pictures. The colour was entirely different. All those years ago, young August must have embellished the stone’s provenance for his audience. The ring August claimed had belonged to a Grand Duchess wasn’t quite worthless but it would be worth just a fraction of the real thing—the emerald ring that Gilbert Declerc must really have inherited from the mysterious great-uncle from Bordeaux.

Penny emerged from the bathroom, looking as green as the ring which remained nestled somewhere inside her.

Sister Eugenia beckoned Penny to sit beside her and whispered in her ear. “You were a terribly long time in the bathroom, dear. I always carry Ex-Lax in my bag, if it might be of any help.”

“I’m perfectly fine,” Penny told her.

“But you told Josephine about a ring in Morse, didn’t you? Said that you’d swallowed it. I left that out of my decoding.”

“Have you told anyone since?”

“I decided to ask God for guidance first.”

“And what did God say?”

“He said ‘Mind your own business, Prinz Eugen.’”

 

STÉPHANE MADE HIS excuses. Once the police had finished extracting evidence from the auction house, he and his team would be making an inventory of the auction lots that had been on display.

“There’s no reason to think that anything would have gone missing, but with all the chaos you never know.”

He left the others watching a news show which featured the siege and then the story of the Resistance arms cache.

“It’s unlikely that the sender of the letters found at the Rue du Mont Olympe is still alive,” the police spokesperson said.

But Josephine knew exactly to whom those fragile old letters had once belonged.

“Archie, will you make a telephone call for me?” she asked.

 

Chapter Forty-Eight

The letters from the Rue du Mont Olympe were delivered to the hospital that afternoon and brought to Josephine’s room on a tray decorated with a rose in a bud vase. It was a sweet touch, confirming that Josephine was already a firm favourite with the staff. Several news channels had asked for interviews—they were camping outside the hospital—but Josephine refused them all. This was not something she could do with an audience. Not even Penny was beside her as she opened the first of the envelopes and began to re-read her side of a correspondence that had once meant so much.

The letters were all in date order. Josephine hoped that was how they had been found. She hated the idea that a stranger had read through them all and carefully filed them before they were handed over, though she knew that must have happened. Who wouldn’t at least have opened a couple of the envelopes and flicked through the yellowed pages inside, eager to be the first to read those words in eighty years?

 

THOUGH THESE WERE Josephine’s own letters, she found herself surprised by the lightness of the earliest notes in the little pile: the ones she’d sent from school in the autumn of 1939. The margins were full of doodles—lots of little love hearts and unkind caricatures of the teachers at St. Mary’s to illustrate Josephine’s complaints about the same. It was surprising that Matron had let those slip by.

“Really, could any teacher be more appropriately named than Miss Bull?”

“The Jolly Girls made short work of the lacrosse team from The Laurels yesterday afternoon ...”

“Penny has now been knitting the same sweater sleeve for six weeks in a row. Talk about knitting for victory ...”

There was a little section in code at the bottom of each note. A very easy code that should hardly have passed the censorship of matron. It said, “I love you. I am forever yours.”

The letters looked well read and they were all still in the envelopes they’d been sent in. They’d been treasured. That made Josephine happy. But then she came to the first letter she sent from Scotland. The one she had written under the supervision of her grandmother. The one telling August that she no longer wanted to be in correspondence. Her grandmother had practically dictated the words.

“Ours was a summer romance and I realise it would be foolish for both of us to continue to pretend it has a future.”

The last line, “Yours sincerely, Josephine,” so very formal, was smudged with what looked like a tear. Had it been hers or August’s? Josephine could weep anew both for the girl who sent that letter and for the young man who received it.

Yet here was the letter Connie had smuggled out for her a few days later.

The one which told the truth.

“They made me write that horrible letter, August. I still love you. I will love you forever. I am having our child!”

And then the last from Scotland, which her grandmother said would be posted by the cook, Connie’s mother.

 

Our baby was born on Thursday morning. He lived for just a couple of hours. The doctor said he was too small to survive. I am so sorry, my darling August. When I held him in my arms, I felt so full of love. When he opened his eyes, it felt as though you were looking out at me from his face. He wrapped his tiny fingers around mine and held on so tightly. He seemed so strong. I had no idea that he would be called away so soon.

I named him Ralph. You once said you liked that name, remember? It was the name of the hero in a book you were reading. I don’t remember the title. My grandmother had the vicar come and perform a funeral on Saturday while I was dead to the world thanks to some kind of sleeping draught from Doctor Muir. He is buried in the family graveyard at Grey Towers.

I hope you can forgive me. I think about you every day. I love you.

I am forever yours.

 

Reading that eighty-year-old letter, the pain of losing Ralph was just as fresh as it had been at the moment she heard of his all-too-early death. The sharp stab of it to her heart made Josephine wish she hadn’t insisted on being alone to read the letters. She needed someone to hold her hand now. She needed Penny. She needed Archie. She needed them both.

While Josephine was waiting for her sister to pick up the telephone in her room at The Maritime, she put the last letter from the pile back in its envelope. Laying it upside down in her lap, she noticed for the first time that someone had scribbled something on the back of that envelope in pencil, in small cramped handwriting, that seemed familiar somehow. Just four words in English and a pair of initials.

“He is not dead. CS.”