The House at Mermaid's Cove(19)

At lunchtime they headed off in a truck, bound for some other farm. I wasn’t sure what my duties for the afternoon would be. I walked away from the cowshed, past a row of stables with decaying wooden doors, some of which hung open at crazy angles. There were no horses inside—just antiquated hay carts and a penny-farthing bicycle whose enormous front wheel was pitted with age. Above the middle doors was a huge clock with a rust-speckled face. I stood looking at it, wondering if the time really could be twenty past two. But the hands didn’t move. They’d probably been stuck like that for years.

The cobblestone path took me on, past pigsties and a tractor shed, until I spotted the house whose imposing stone walls I had glimpsed through the trees. I hoped I wouldn’t run into Jack. I needed time to process what the Land Army women had said. I couldn’t put a name to the feeling their gossip had triggered. But it gnawed away at me as I approached the brick wall that formed the boundary between the farm and the house.

Passing through metal gates like the ones in the walled garden, I came to a set of wide stone steps in front of an arched portico. Carved into the apex of the arch was the same coat of arms I’d seen on the garden gates. Inside was a massive wooden door with ornate curlicued hinges. The words “No Entry” were printed in large black letters on a notice nailed to the door. Beneath the words was the symbol of an anchor and the letters RF.

Merle appeared as I stood staring at it. She was wearing an apron over her clothes, and her face looked flushed.

“Hello,” she said. “You’ve finished in the dairy?” She wiped her hands on a corner of the apron.

“The others have gone,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what else needed doing.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Well . . .” It was five hours since I’d eaten the last slice of the loaf Jack had brought me. And the muck shoveling was the hardest physical work I’d done in years. But I was reluctant to admit how ravenous I was feeling, knowing how little food there was to go around.

“Come with me.”

She led me round the back of the house, in through a door with peeling green paint, and down a passageway whose flagstones had been worn down in the middle from centuries of footsteps. I could smell baking—something savory, like sausage rolls or a meat pie.

“It’s for tonight, really,” she said over her shoulder, “but it’s almost ready.”

She sat me down at a long table whose surface was as timeworn as the floor of the passageway. When she brought me a glass of water, it was difficult to find a place where it would stand upright.

“This house goes back to Tudor times.” Merle ran her fingers along a deep groove at the other end of the table. “Generations of servants, cutting and chopping. We could do with a few of them now.”

I watched as she thrust her hands into a pair of oven mitts crisscrossed with burn marks. Bending her knees, she drew an enormous metal baking tray out of an old-fashioned range.

“Rabbit pie.” She set it down on a marble slab, her cheeks pink with the heat from the oven. “We don’t often have meat these days, but there’s going to be a houseful tonight.”

“I heard that there was military training going on here.”

She took a knife and sliced into the pie. “They come and go. We’re never quite sure how many will be staying on any one night.”

“And you have to cook for them?”

“Not only me; there’s a girl from the village who comes to help.” She put a steaming slice of the pie down in front of me. “I used to run a restaurant on Guernsey—before the children came along. I like cooking. It gives me something to do while they’re at school.”

“It smells delicious.”

“I should wait a minute before you eat it—you might burn your mouth.”

I was dying to taste it, but I laid the knife and fork back down on the table.

“Do you like cooking?” she asked.

“I . . . haven’t had much opportunity.” It felt better, telling the truth. But her eyes had a searching look. “Being a nurse,” I went on, “we had all our meals provided at the hospital in London.”

“Which hospital was it?”

I wasn’t expecting her to put me on the spot. I should have thought of that, of course. Had an answer ready. “Not one you’ll have heard of,” I replied. “It was an isolation hospital on the outskirts—for tuberculosis cases.”

“And it was bombed?” She sounded surprised. I realized I’d tripped myself up.

“They don’t always fall where they’re supposed to,” I said, paraphrasing what Jack had said about the bombing raid in Falmouth. “It was such a shock,” I added, trying to look as if I meant it.

“Were many killed?”

“Thankfully, no.” To lie about people dying was more than I could stomach. “But the building was too badly damaged to be usable.”

“What happened to the patients?”

“They were all transferred—up north.” I borrowed Janet’s expression. My knowledge of the geography of northern England was sketchy. I hoped Merle’s was, too.

“Didn’t they want you to go, too?”

“I . . . I couldn’t. I got glass in my foot. It’s only just started to heal.”