Censorettes

By Elizabeth Bales Frank

For a young woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, being sequestered from the dangers of WW2 on the idyllic island of Bermuda is maddening. She is determined to get into the fight—then the fight is brought to her.

Lucy Barrett is a Censorette, part of a branch of British Intelligence stationed on the island to inspect mail between North America and European nations at war. Determined to contribute in a more substantial way, Lucy uses her Cambridge education and love of Shakespeare to detect a Nazi spy ring operating out of Brooklyn. Just as she is promoted to a dangerous job overseas, her good friend is murdered. Should she embrace her new assignment, or seek justice for her friend?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stonehouse Originals
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988754338

Elizabeth Bales Frank

Elizabeth Bales Frank is the author of the novel Cooder Cutlas, published by Harper & Row. Her essays have appeared in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, The Sun, Barrelhouse, Post Road, Epiphany, The Writing Disorder and other literary publications. She was awarded a residency at Ragdale, where part of this novel was written. She earned a BFA in film from New York University, and an MLIS from the Pratt Institute. She lives in New York City.

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CENSORETTES

A novel by ELIZABETH BALES FRANK

Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Bales Frank

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

used without prior written consent of the publisher.

Stonehouse Publishing Inc. is an independent

publishing house, incorporated in 2014.

Cover design and layout by Anne Brown.

Printed in Canada

Stonehouse Publishing would like to thank and acknowledge the support of the Alberta Government funding for the arts, through the Alberta Media Fund.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Elizabeth Bales Frank

Censorettes

Novel

ISBN 978-1-988754-32-1

Part ONE

Censorettes

01.

Bermuda, 1941

Lucy Barrett did not intend to spend the war in paradise. After her mother was killed in the Blitz, her father sent Lucy out of England, all the way to Bermuda, deaf to her pleas that there was no place of safety in this ever-growing war.

But Bermuda seemed determined to prove her wrong, this cossetted island of keen colours: coral beaches, sunsets, pastel-painted limestone houses bearing up rain-scrubbed white roofs. Lucy walked under a placid sky unburdened by barrage balloons, bomber planes, or even the soot of industry or the exhaust of motor cars. The morning dew breezed away the brine as though the air, like Lucy, relied on a restorative wash to cleanse bad dreams and brave the new day. She departed from the resort hotel where the Censorettes were lodged, the Bermudiana, and walked a lonely slope with her roommate, Rebecca Lark, called Lark, to the resort hotel where they worked, the Princess Hotel. Hamilton was the only city on the island, and Princess, named for Louise, a daughter of Queen Victoria, had popularized Bermuda as a vacation spot when it had until then not been known for much except pirates and onions, smuggling and shipbuilding.

Now it was clip-clopped by one-horse carriages called gharries, or traversed by bicycles bearing pleasant clerks to their offices in downtown Hamilton: good morning, good day. Lucy’s task, as a member of the Imperial Censorship Detachment, was to read letters in the Reading Room, a basement in the Princess Hotel. She had arrived in grey January. It was now March. Among the hundreds of letters she had read, she remembered only one clearly, written by a Joe in Brooklyn to an address in Bremerhaven, Germany. It had made an obscure reference to Shakespeare.

This March morning, Lucy read another letter from Joe. She pulled her blouse collar away from her sticky neck and re-read the letter:

The store caught the fire and burned down, but fortunately most of the goods were still in the wear house in Red Hook. The waiting is hard, but we must have the patience. The days are long and full of wonder. But remember the words of Romeo, ‘Do nothing until you hear from me.’

Sincerely, Joe.

Another reference to Shakespeare. But this second letter was pocked with tiny bumps.

Lucy traced her fingers along the bumps. Was it Braille? Did it mean something? Did any of her work with the Detachment mean anything? The men of the Detachment boarded the ocean liners traveling between warring Europe and the neutral United States. They knocked down cabin walls, ripped open luggage, and seized contraband: funds, bonds, stolen artwork. They interrogated, threatened. They clapped potential saboteurs in handcuffs and hauled them into custody. The men of the Detachment did not read letters in a basement.

She raised the letter to her reading lamp to study the letter’s indentations. The letter bowed toward her like a weak wave cresting. "But remember the words of Romeo ‘Do nothing until you hear from me.’"

Someone’s words, mayhap, Lucy thought, but not poor Romeo’s. In Brooklyn Joe’s first letter, he had referred to Shakespeare as the ‘Swan of Avon,’ rather than the ‘Bard of Avon.’ Although no one asked her to, Lucy had investigated the ‘Swan’ reference. It was a mystery she could try to solve, unlike the question of why her father had decided that this remote colonial outpost was the best use of the skills she had acquired after years of rigorous schooling. Swan of Avon. Romeo. Wear house.

On her Saturday half-days, she bicycled through the narrow lanes of Bermuda, past palmetto trees and hibiscus shrubs. First, she stopped at the Bermuda Library, a grand name for a large cottage with a small yard, enclosed by a stone wall. The full-time librarian had devoted a fruitless hour to the ‘Swan of Avon’ question before suggesting that Lucy interview the island’s schoolteachers. Each teacher met her with civility, services of tea, and no insight beyond a suggestion of another resource. They sketched rough maps to guide her to her next destination, until Lucy knew the parishes of the fishhook-shaped islands better than the back of her hand. The back of her hand, actually, had tanned into a stranger’s, despite the many pairs of white gloves Granny Barrett packed for her when it became manifest that Lucy could not escape her exile to Bermuda.

Lucy pedalled the island unenlightened, unimpressed. Bermuda’s greatest casualty of war was the absence of tourists enjoying her slim beaches, rolling golf courses and discreet hotels.

Finally, Lucy returned to the Bermuda Library on the last Saturday of the month when, the librarian had told her, the cataloguer, Clara, came in to log the collection’s new arrivals.

Excuse me, Lucy had said to the back of a head of curls bent over a book, The Constellations as Seen From the North Atlantic. I’m told you might know, has Shakespeare ever been described as the ‘swan of Avon’?

Funny you should ask. Clara was the first to find it amusing. Her curls framed a tawny face. Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the ‘sweet swan of Avon’ in a eulogy published in the First Folio. There’s a bit about the constellations later on in the eulogy. She gestured at her book.

Why ‘swan’? The question had nothing to do with the case, but it seemed ages since anyone had taken Lucy seriously.

The Greeks believed that the souls of poets set up house in swans after they died. You sound like you’re from London. Have you ever seen one?

A Greek?

A First Folio, Clara said. They’ve a few at the British Library. I used to dream of getting a job there. Small chance of it now, though.

"Yes. So, the First Folio? I suppose they’re quite valuable."

The last ones went for seven to ten thousand American dollars. I was at Smith at the time. Smith College, she explained, in response to Lucy’s inquiring look. One of the Seven Sisters.

Seven Sisters. Lucy glanced at Clara’s book. Constellations. The Pleiades?

No, it’s a nickname, Clara smiled. For a group of women’s colleges in the States. Anyhow. The First Folio. Only a hundred-odd copies still around.

Fewer still if the Luftwaffe hit the British Library. Was Brooklyn Joe a rare book dealer, flogging a First Folio to raise funds for the Nazis? Valuables were smuggled out of Europe all the time. The August before Lucy arrived in Hamilton, men from the Detachment had found a small art gallery behind a panel in a stateroom on the SS Excalibur of the American Export Line: canvases by Renoir, Cezanne, and Manet, confiscated by the Nazis from Jewish owners, headed to New York for sale.

Paintings were solid proof. ‘Swan of Avon’ was an errant phrase. When Lucy brought the first letter in to her supervisor, Colonel McKay, he had dismissed it. But now she had a second letter. And it had bumps.

She walked to McKay’s office at the end of the reading room. McKay, the supervisor for Lucy’s division, Encrypted in Plain, had lost a piece of his right leg and some movement on the left side of his face in the Great War. His workaday expression was one of bemusement, as though he wondered daily how his valour in the first apocalypse had brought him to a post shepherding a flock of women in the second one.

At her knock, he looked up. Yes? Barrett? What’s that?

Another letter from this man Joe from Brooklyn. When McKay responded with a palms-up shrug, Lucy elaborated, I’ve flagged him before.

One of the ten thousand letters which’ve passed through, you mean? Very well. Set it down and return to work. I’ll call for you.

Lucy returned to her seat and continued reading. The letters from Europe: Please send funds for our passage. They favour those with an essential trade. We must leave here, but no one will take us. So many countries have closed their borders. I am a welder. I am a carpenter. We have had no word of him since his arrest. We hope to make it to Lisbon.

And the letters from the States: weddings, babies, christenings, although not always in that order. What can you do? The young will be young. Two months of reading felt like twenty generations, like a chapter from the Old Testament. The Book of Tedium. The naughty characters were more compelling than the good. But all of these escapades, however engaging, had to be quickly scanned if they did not involve Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.

And of the few useful responses from New York, none reached Europe if they came through the hands of the Detachment. Items destined for a country in the hands of the Germans—Poland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, France, any place turned dark on the map—were confiscated. And it was out of the question to pass along funds. The Censorettes turned over funds immediately: a roll of dollar bills whose grubbiness testified to the toil spent accumulating them, a thin gold bracelet heavily wrapped in protective paper, a wedding ring. Of all of this, sent off to be pawned into a glutted market by desperate sellers, none would reach its destination.

Lucy watched Rebecca Gwynne, called Gwynne, sashay through the Reading Room with a tea tray and a file. McKay’s secretary, Gwynne was a buxom Cockney resentful of the Censorettes and their university degrees. She was a teenaged widow, her boy husband killed in France. From this tragedy, she had forged a steely cloak which she donned when delivering telegrams bearing news of death back home. It was Gwynne who would deliver the bad news about Lucy’s brother Matty, if bad news were to come. He was an RAF pilot who had not returned from Dunkirk. When she left McKay’s office, though, Gwynne paused by Lucy’s table only to say, Colonel will see you now.

McKay was sipping tea and reading her personnel file when Lucy entered his office.

I remember now. McKay drained his tea and nibbled a biscuit. Our Brooklyn Shakespeare scholar. ‘Wear house,’ is that what troubles you? He wiped crumbs from his chin.

‘Do nothing until you hear from me,’ Lucy said. "That troubles me. It’s not the ordinary sort of wrong, like ‘wherefor art thou, Romeo?’ Everyone thinks it means where is Romeo, instead of ‘why are you Romeo?’ ‘Wherefor’ like the French ‘pourquoi’ or the Italian ‘perque?’ Anyway, Lucy added, as McKay’s attention had drifted toward her uneaten biscuit. Romeo never says that."

You’ve memorized the play? McKay reached for Lucy’s biscuit.

My family performed Shakespeare often after dinner.

I see. How nice.

Lucy might have been a small granddaughter displaying a grubby embroidery project.

In her father’s study, there were often as many as a dozen copies of one play, so each player could hold a volume. Chuckling dinner guests lured into the study with the promise of brandy were pressed into service (No, no, Barrett, I’m rubbish at this sort of thing!) only to become so caught up in the drama that their shouting roused the dozing cats.

My mother wished to improve her English.

Ah yes. He glanced at her file. "Your mother’s an Italian."

Yes. She was. It still happened, that clogged throat that prefaced her correction of the verb tense, the tight twist in her gut, like a contraction. Well, what was a contraction but the indication of loss, an apostrophe where a letter had been, won’t for will not, as in we won’t ever see her again. Maria Theresa Gheldini Barrett. Tessa. Lucy’s eyes filled. She blinked rapidly, but a tear fell to her chin before she could stop it. She was killed. In a Luftwaffe bombing.

Yes. Frightful business. McKay failed to indicate whether it was Tessa’s death or the Blitz which was frightful. Your degree, he went on. French, German. But not Italian?

I’m cradle-fluent in Italian. Lucy dabbed her eyes with her wrists, claimed her cup of tea. My father chose German. In German, you decline nouns, adjectives. Learning to decline would teach me to decline men, he said. His favourite joke.

Never had daughters. McKay rubbed his hands together as though cleansing them of the threat of female offspring. He peered at the file of this man who had withstood two daughters, mitigated by the one son, Matteo. Paul Nicholas de Guise Barrett, Royal Naval Intelligence. There was a de Guise when I was at Dartmouth. Sebastian.

My great uncle.

"Indeed? A de Guise married an Italian. So," he went on as the tips of Lucy’s ears burned at this second spitting out of Italian, What does your Joe mean by ‘do nothing until you hear from me’?

Just that. No action is to be taken. What the goods are, where they are going—that’s still unknown. And then there’s this.

Lucy held the letter to the light. The page had been used as a cushion to protect the platen of a typewriter. She remembered all too well from the painstaking term papers on Dante and Goethe she had typed at Girton, manually adding accents and umlauts. This paper was used as second sheet on a typewriter. Whatever was typed here might be useful as well.

McKay stood, leaned on his office door, bawled Smith! and sat again. He took the letter back from Lucy. ‘The days are long and full of wonder,’ he read. He has a point, your Joe.

A freckled young woman with abundant unruly red hair arrived at the doorway. She flinched when she saw Lucy and shaded her eyes with the back of her hand, as though caught in the beams of a searchlight. McKay put his hand on her shoulder. This is Miss Barrett, Smith. She’s in the Languages Division.

McKay nodded at Lucy with impatient encouragement, as Granny Barrett had when Lucy as a child became tongue-tied meeting visitors at tea.

How do you do, Miss Smith, Lucy said with the formality she had learned in her grandmother’s parlour. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Her words sounded unnatural to her own ears, as though she were trying the phrases in a new language (Arabic was her latest), but they seemed to do the trick. The woman lowered her arm, blinking rapidly, appraising Lucy. Then she said, You’ve been crying. Is someone dead?

She asked as though unaware that all of them were there, in a basement on an island, because thousands of someones were dead with each new day. When Lucy shook her head, McKay handed Miss Smith the letter.

What do you make of this?

As she studied it, her eyes moved up, down, left, right, the way one takes in a painting, not left, right, the way one reads. As she read, she rocked gently, as mothers rock infants. She pulled a tendril of her wild hair and twisted it around her finger.

The ‘Swan of Avon’ man, she stated.

You’re certain?

The same T’s. D’s. Dots his i’s with a semi-crescent. She held the paper to the light. This is second sheet. These marks—

Yes. Can you read them? McKay asked.

‘In reference to your shipment of 12 February, the condition of the goods received was’—I can’t make that out. ‘We are therefore return them with this post. Please to redeliver to Red Hook location when goods are complete. Regards, Joe Karte, Warehouse Manager.’

Warehouse, Lucy repeated. Spelled correctly?

Yes. The woman plucked a pencil off McKay’s desk and was rubbing it against the paper before he could rise from his chair and remove the pencil from her grip. He said in a tone Lucy found surprisingly mild, You’re not to alter the documents, Smith. Remember? Be a good girl and go copy it out for me. Exactly. Then bring it back.

She walked out without a nod or a further word.

Who on earth was that? Lucy blurted. What division is she in?

Ruth Smith? I thought you knew. Bit notorious. Rather her own division, McKay said. Needs a bit of handling, that one. Oh, and Barrett? She’s to be your new roommate.

02.

Lucy already had a roommate, a fine and pleasant one, thank you very much. Rebecca Lark was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Ontario, Canada, and had been embraced by the congregation of the big pink St. Andrew’s Church downtown next to the Parliamentary buildings. It was also next to the Bermuda Cathedral, which was Anglican and whose services Lucy should have attended had she any denominational loyalty. But her loyalty, for the comfort she received in her early days as a stranger in a strange land, was to Lark.

On Sundays, Lucy accompanied Lark to church in the mornings and in the afternoons, served as her caddy, cycling behind her as she pedalled to the golf course, lugging her golf bag up and down the damp slopes. She wiped the clubs dry before she handed them to Lark, paced the distance to the hole. As a caddy, she was meant to determine wind direction. But on Bermuda, the wind blew in all directions: it keened; it slapped sheets of brine into Lucy’s face like a ghost enraged by her meagre mourning. It wept in pity for Lucy’s banishment.

Lark returned from church duties to read volumes of a medical journal called The Lancet, which were as well-worn as her Bible. She ministered to Lucy’s grief, never complaining when Lucy’s nightmares woke her. When Lucy wrenched awake from visions of her mother, the Blitz, her brother, she found provisions from Lark resting on her bedside table: a cup of tea, a peach-coloured rose, a freshly ironed pillowcase to replace her tear-dampened one. Lark sat on Lucy’s bed, content to chat, hand in hand, and listen to tales of old Barrett life. Brother Matteo was in the RAF? Matteo for Matthew? And Lucia for Luke? And the young sister was Marcia, for Mark? After the apostles? That was nice! On some nights, Lucy fell back to sleep with her head in the soap-and-violet-scent of Lark’s lap.

The assignment of additional roommates, in a new hotel, so much further from St. Andrew’s, was so inconvenient. Lark was not one for complaining, but—

"Lucy, I’m not one for complaining, but our meals are served here, and it’s so close to the church. And what of your crying? I don’t reproach. My father counsels that grief is a river and we must make navigate its tributaries, detour us how they might. But do you think you’re ready for new people and a new room? Four of us in a room!"

It turned out to be two enormous rooms, a sitting room and a bedroom, each larger than any bedroom Lucy had ever seen, let alone occupied. Lucy, Lark, and Hector, the Princess Hotel porter, stepped off the elevator with their suitcases and foot lockers, but before they could knock, the door was swept open.

Welcome! cried a blonde so glamorous she could have pranced off a cinema screen. She wore tennis whites and bore on her wrist three bracelets of keys looped through pieces of string. I’m Georgina Taylor. Call me Georgie. I’m your roommate. Rebecca Lark, Lucy Barrett, she bestowed a key on each of them, identifying them before they could introduce themselves. Ruth Smith is our fourth. She was already here at the Princess, so it’s only a matter of hauling her things up. Speaking of, have you more things than these?

My books, Lark said. Two boxes. They’re still back at the Bermudiana.

"Books. Very well. We’ll send for them." Georgie’s tone was bemused, as though Lark had included a beehive in her luggage. Lucy thought of a beehive because Lark often returned from church carrying sticky jars of honey, which she ate happily from the jar with a spoon, like Winnie-the-Pooh. Georgie, Lucy noted, had traveled here with three tennis racquets, pressed into their wooden frames, leaning against the sofa in the sitting room.

The sitting room was sequestered from the foyer by a door, and from the bedroom by a pair of windowed French doors. The sitting room held a wet bar on the immediate right, and an upright piano on the far left. There was also a long white couch, coffee table, chairs, two wardrobes, and a desk. The bedroom held a large four poster bed, two bureaus and a wardrobe. Another pair of French doors opened onto a balcony which faced inland. Lark strode to the balcony and opened the doors. She then opened all the windows. The room was on a corner; windows faced both south and east. On the left wall, a bathroom abutted a spacious walk-in closet.

The honeymoon suite, in happier times, Georgie told them. Newlyweds of the upper crust, film stars, bits and bobs of minor royalty. And now, us! I say, Hector, could you ask someone to find Ruth Smith? She’s on the third floor, and she has red —

Yes, ma’am. I know who she is.

But when Hector opened the door, Ruth Smith walked in, staring at her fingers, which she knitted together and apart in a rapid version of the finger game Lucy had taught her sister Marcia: here is the church and here is the steeple/open the door and see all the people.

I am not late, she informed them without looking up. You are early. You are Lucy Barrett, Rebecca Lark, and Georgina Taylor. It is exactly noon. I’m to sleep here? I see one bed.

I’ll set up camp in the sitting room, Georgie told her. The couch pulls out. I won’t be here all the time, so that will suit me. We’ll have that large bed removed and replaced with three single beds. Ruth?

Ruth had wandered in to the walk-in closet. She pulled a string, igniting an overhead light in a frosted glass shade. They gathered in the closet door to watch her. She said, I want this room.

My dear, said Lark. This isn’t a room. It’s a closet.

I want it. Ruth emerged, holding her hand against the glare of sunlight streaming from the windows.

Will you have enough space? Lark asked.

I don’t mind about space, Ruth said. "I mind about quiet. I like a piano. She nodded at it. I like the idea of one. But with all these people, she shook her head at Lucy and Lark, as though they were a clamouring mob, I need time alone. I was told, she addressed this last to Georgie, to tell you what I need."

She pulled from a pocket of her dress a folded piece of paper. Georgie opened it, and immediately closed it again.

We’ll manage something, Georgie said, with an air of quelling competence that reminded Lucy of Granny, although Granny accommodating a guest’s aversion to strawberries did not seem akin to obliging a Censorette’s demand to live in a closet. If you don’t mind a cot. A single bed won’t fit. So we’ll need two singles to replace— She waved at the four-poster. If you two can bunk in together for a few nights before I get that sorted.

We can bunk in every night! Lark sat on the mattress, patting it. Such a firm mattress, must you send it away? Come, Lucy. I only thought, with your bad dreams …We’ve grown quite cozy, Lucy and me, she said to others, who, occupied with their own luggage, paid no attention. Although, she’s a bit untidy. In fact, Lucy, why don’t you let me unpack for you.

As Lark dragged Lucy’s suitcases toward the bed, she added, Georgie, you’re keen on tennis? So is Lucy. Golf’s my game. Maybe you two could partner? But not this afternoon, if you don’t mind, Lucy. You said you’d help me about the lilies.

It was the Saturday before Palm Sunday. Lark wanted to ask some of the lily farmers in Bermuda to donate lilies for the Sunday service at St. Andrew’s. Lucy knew many of the farms, from her bicycling in aid of the Brooklyn Joe mission.

Then Lark removed Lucy’s framed photo of Matty in his RAF uniform, and placed it on the bedside table farthest from the eastern light. Lark pressed her fingers against the top of the frame, as though blessing it.

Georgie hummed in appreciation. "Dishy. Your beau?"

Her brother, Lark told her. Matty.

Available? Georgie asked.

He’s not available even to his family, Lucy said. He’s on active duty. And wherever he is— Lucy yanked open the top drawer in the desk of the sitting room and pulled out pre-war embossed stationery, The Princess Hotel, Hamilton, Bermuda. "—He’s not in a honeymoon suite in a fancy hotel in the middle of nowhere."

Lucy’s face twitched with frustration. Lark hummed happily, hands full of knickers and brassieres. I’ll place my smaller garments in the second drawer, and yours in the top?

Whatever you like. Lark, can you see about the lilies by yourself?

I suppose I could. But won’t you come with me? I don’t know where to go.

South Road and then turn left. Away from the golf courses. Smith Parish is good. Here. She hastily drew a map on one of the sheets of stationery. I’m sorry, I must write to my father before the next post goes out. I could just make it.

The Pan Am flying boat left Darrell’s Island at two-thirty on Saturdays, having stopped en route from New York for a refuelling. It then proceeded to Portugal. The Censorettes were not encouraged to add their letters to its haul. But then, the Censorettes were not encouraged to do very much at all.

***

Hector the porter informed her that hotel policy dictated that unaccompanied ladies were not permitted in the Gazebo Bar, yes, ma’am, even during wartime when there were no guests in the hotel to presume the lady was in a bar for immoral purposes and even when the lady was being quartered in the hotel and needed to write a letter. Orders of the Censorship. He offered her the patio by the hotel’s saltwater pool. Lucy set up at a glass-topped table with the stationery from her room and wrote.

April 5, 1941

Dear Father,

You and I are a world apart and both living in grand hotels. We were so recently a family of five at 5 Mowbray Crescent. It seems ages ago.

03.

London, 1940

"I believe they speak English in Bermuda, as it’s a territory, Lucy says. They’ve no need of my language skills."

Her father’s standing floor globe, a wedding present to her parents, displays countries whose borders and names have changed too often since 1919. Lucy and Maddy played with it, studied it, drew maps from it on so many rainy Saturday afternoons. Lucy gazed at it when performing Shakespeare in the study, when the men had chosen a war play, one of the Henrys, and she waited through hours of arcane blather to deliver a single impassioned speech: O yet, for God’s sake, go not to these wars!

She shivers in her father’s study, lit only by the fire in the fireplace. It is chilly, but still light out. The darkness is his preference. The windows, shrouded with blackout curtains, face the kitchen garden, never good for much except for the cook’s tiny plot of herbs and shallots and turnips, a place to shoo the cats when they became too unruly. Now the garden is untended, and the cook and the maids gone for war work. Matty is lost in France, Tessa a month buried. Marcia has been sent off to Knoll House for the duration, with the cats—Lucy’s tabby Horatio among the thoroughbreds—apart from Charmian, Paul’s smug charcoal Persian who stretches along the length of his thigh, deigning to accept his strokes. Paul is as ferocious about not parting from this ungrateful animal as he is cold about dispatching Lucy across an ocean.

So why on earth should I go there?

Matty counselled that Lucy should call Paul Dad, and not Daddy if she wanted him to heed her. But since her mother’s death, she could call him Prime Minister and still be no more heeded than a voice calling in the wilderness. Between Matty and Lucy, they call him Paul, because he has always been more a figure than a father, one who funds their talents and decrees their fates. He has always been a dictator. It is only recently that he has become a despot.

The Censorship Detachment is moving there, Paul says. They’ve been in Liverpool, but that’s being bombed to bits as well. So, Bermuda. They need clever girls. You’ll be of use, Lucia. I fail to see why you’re making such a fuss.

We agreed on diplomacy. I was grateful for it, that I could even have a career, sss—

The half-formed word catches in her throat: since. Since Tessa hadn’t, since she met you as soon as she peeked outside her convent school. "A