Bitter Seeds Read online

  He bumped the end table, knocking to the floor a leaflet from the Ministry of Information and the War Office: If the Invader Comes. Liv had set it next to the bowl of water and the blankets. Hide your food. Hide your maps. Lock up your bicycles. Leave nothing for the Germans.

  Her voice, all chimes and flutes, called from the kitchen. “In here.”

  He went through the den. Liv had put the bassinet there, so as to keep an eye on Agnes while preparing dinner.

  Their daughter was a pudgy scrunch-faced bundle in pink swaddling. He brushed her forehead with his lips, as lightly as he could so as not to wake her. She smelled of talcum and baby. He swelled his lungs with the scent of his daughter. If there existed a more potent anodyne for an unsettled mind, Marsh couldn’t imagine what it might be. He stood there, wishing he didn’t have to breathe, didn’t have to release her essence.

  The thought of breathing reminded him of the man who rescued Gretel, and speculations about his vulnerabilities. He shook his head, banished the memory.

  “Papa’s home,” he whispered.

  Agnes mewled and shifted, crumpling her face into a new pattern of wrinkles. Her blanket undulated in little fits and starts, powered by the spasmodic motions of her arms and legs before she settled again.

  “Papa missed you.”

  He watched her for another minute before going to the kitchen. Liv stood at the sink with her back to him, chopping vegetables for a Woolton pie—something new recommended by the Ministry of Food—as she sang along to the music on the wireless.

  He wrapped one arm about her waist, pulled her close, and kissed the nape of her neck as he thrust the bouquet before her with his other arm. “Ta-da,” he said through the fringes of chestnut hair stuck to his lips.

  “Oh! They’re lovely.” She took the bouquet of daffodils, snapdragons, and delphinia.

  She twisted in his embrace. “Thank you,” she said, kissing him. He pulled her closer. She was soft and warm.

  “You’re shaking,” she said. “Are you getting ill?”

  “Just cold. Hold me a bit.”

  She did. Liv read his face when she came up for air. One of her slender eyebrows arched up, as though rearing back for a better look at him. Her face wasn’t so round as it had been just before Agnes was born, but still not yet so thin as it had been when they’d first met. She still carried some of Agnes on her.

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Are the flowers for me or for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re feeling guilty about something.”

  When had she burrowed inside him like that? This was part of Liv’s magic, the way she saw into him, saw the man inside him. She’d done it since the moment they met, as though she’d made a study of him all his life.

  “Of course they’re for you, dove.” Marsh sighed. He shook his head. “Bad day at work.”

  She didn’t ask. She didn’t need to.

  “So they are for you, then.” She poked a finger in his stomach. “Cheeky.”

  He jumped. “Never.” Somewhere inside him, storm clouds thinned, turned from coal to lead.

  “Hmm,” she said. With the vegetable knife she trimmed the flower stems. Then she plucked a glass preserves jar from the narrow shelf above the sink. Water sprayed in every direction, jetting from the spout, when she filled the jar. It darkened her blouse, shone like diamond droplets on her eyelashes.

  She frowned, blinked at him. “I wish you’d mend that.”

  “I’ll do it now.” He opened the cabinet beneath the sink. She arranged the bouquet on the windowsill overlooking the back garden where the Anderson bomb shelter and Marsh’s shed crowded together. She bumped his head with her hip, ever so carefully, as she did. A breeze swirled through the open window to tug at the petals.

  He touched the back of her knee, rested his hand on the curve of her calf. “Someday, Liv, you’ll have a real vase. You won’t be using jam jars forever.”

  “I think it’s cozy.”

  Marsh’s toolbox jangled as he pulled it out from under the sink. The sink needed mending on a regular basis.

  Agnes cried. Her wails, surprising in their intensity from a package so small, drowned out the wireless.

  Liv lifted Agnes from the bassinet. She hugged the blanketed bundle to her chest, swaying on her feet in time with the music. “Shhh, shhh.”

  She sang along with Vera Lynn on the wireless, lulling Agnes to rest. “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when . . .” Marsh hummed while pulling the faucet apart.

  “Tsk, tsk.” Liv cooed to their daughter. “Your father couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. What should we do with him? Should we keep him?”

  “What’s that, pretty girl?” She leaned her head toward little Agnes resting against her shoulder, as though listening to a whisper. She fixed Marsh with a long sly look. “Yes, I suppose he is. In a rugged sort of way.” One of her tresses bounced across the pale curve of her neck as she shrugged. “If one goes for that sort of thing.”

  Despite himself, Marsh smiled.

  “What else should you know about your father? Hmmm. What a curious girl you are. Now let me think.” She put a finger of her free hand to the corner of her mouth and frowned, eyebrows hanging low over her eyes.

  “Well, he is rather sharp. Or so his friends tell me.”

  Marsh replaced the washer, chuckling to himself. Somewhere, the sun burned through storm clouds and gloom. He felt inside the valve seat with the tip of his finger. It was worn and rough.

  “There’s the problem,” he muttered to himself. “Have to replace that.” Until he did, it would keep chewing up washers, forcing him to replace them regularly.

  “And occasionally,” said Liv, “he shows a glimmer of usefulness about the home. Not often, however.”

  He tightened everything, reopened the valve beneath the sink, and tested the faucet. Water gushed from the spout and nowhere else.

  “On second thought,” Liv said to their unconscious daughter, “let’s keep him round a bit longer.”

  Marsh embraced her. They swayed to the music. Quietly, he asked, “How long until we eat?”

  “A little while.”

  “In that case, I’ll go out to the shed. Try to get something done before it’s too dark.” He kissed Liv on the cheek. “It’s past warm enough to get the tomatoes in the ground, and I should do it soon. Otherwise, it’ll be a long wait for a proper salad this summer.”

  “Go, you. I’ll call when it’s time to eat.”

  Music floated through the open window all the way to Marsh’s shed, though it was too faint to make out. He hummed the Vera Lynn song to himself as he worked. We’ll meet again . . . don’t know where . . . don’t know when . . .

  He inspected the tomato vines, checking for hornworms and fungus. Just as he’d been taught when he was very young. He’d been putting the plants out every morning to harden them in preparation for transplanting to the garden. In another day or two, they’d be ready to stay out overnight.

  Crash. From inside came the noise of a shattered dish.

  “Liv?”

  He stepped out of the shed. Agnes wailed again.

  “Liv?”

  “Raybould? Raybould, come here!”

  He dropped the plant he’d been working with and dashed back to the house, picturing a ghostly man attacking his family. Liv looked pale and drawn where she kneeled in front of the wireless in the den, Agnes clutched to her chest. She reached for him, pulled him to her. Now she was the one to shiver.

  “—intensive Luftwaffe bombing, torpedoes, and artillery barrages from the First Panzer Division onshore. Royal Navy destroyers lost during the evacuation include the Grafton, the Grenade, the Wakeful, the Basilisk, the Havant, and the Keith.” The molasses-smooth baritone of Alvar Lidell paused, as though the announcer were turning a page.

  “They’re saying they’ve abandoned the evacuation,” said Liv, squeezing Marsh’s hand. “They won’t,
will they?”

  The news continued: “Vice Admiral Ramsey today announced that despite a most difficult situation, a total of over twenty-eight thousand fighting men have been evacuated since Sunday.”

  Left unsaid, of course, was the number of men left behind on the beaches of Dunkirk. Nor was there any count of civilian craft obliterated by the Luftwaffe, though the toll on the ragtag flotilla must have been very high.

  They listened through the night. The BBC gave no such numbers. If it knew them, it wasn’t likely to report. But Marsh, who had been there not three weeks earlier, knew the combined total French and BEF roster spread across northern France approached half a million men.

  He didn’t share this with Liv. There was no need. By sunrise, a grim reality dawned on the world, leaving Marsh to wonder what sort of future Agnes would inherit.

  Britain had lost an army.

  interlude

  They arrived in numbers that blackened the sky, and at the beaches, they feasted.

  Amidst sand and iron, surf and steel, ravens gorged on the dead. The first few hours were best, before sunlight and seawater fouled the meat. But soon the carrion reek attracted more than birds. New men arrived to clear the beaches. The ravens, scavengers themselves, watched while these new men picked what they could from the dead. Derelict armaments. Cigarettes. Pocket watches.

  And when the dead turned noisome with rot, the men used their clattering machines to excavate trenches and pile the bodies. The fires burned for a day, a night, and a day.

  More men arrived, with still more machines. They amassed at the shore, facing west, while a fleet of boats and barges assembled in estuaries up and down the coast. Like some great predator poised to lunge upon its prey, this assembly fixated on the island across the Channel.

  Large predators, the ravens knew, brought down large prey. Large prey meant a bounty of carrion.

  And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

  New shapes darkened the sky that summer. Wave upon wave of these fliers screamed over the water in angry gray wedges of aluminum and glass. Other machines, flown by other men, leapt into the sky to meet them. This was a new kind of dance, a ballet not yet seen in the surge of armies and waltz of empires.

  And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

  Twined contrails traced sigils in the bright blue sky over the island. The attackers swarmed around the lattice masts dotting the coast like honeybees drawn to sunflowers. One by one, the towers fell, rendering the defenders blind. It was as though their eyes had been plucked out in homage to some ancient myth.

  The battles moved inland, beyond the horizon, deeper over the island every week. Each day saw fewer defenders taking to the sky than the day before. The crows and ravens here had it harder than their Continental cousins, for the mounting dead were crushed under timber and brick and so did not make for easy picking.

  Sensing its time had come, the army on the coast roused itself and focused on the island with renewed vigor.

  And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

  But then, at the height of summer, the weather in the Channel . . . changed.

  The fog—improbably thick—appeared within hours. It heeded neither sun nor wind. Distant shores disappeared, shrouded in per sis tent gloom. Sunlight could not dispel the haze that wreathed the island.

  Phantoms writhed within the cloud bank. Fleeting patterns of light and shadow, noises like voices too faint to make out, lingering scents that evoked empty memories.

  The phantoms danced within the water, too. The waves on the Channel assumed impossible geometries: pyramidal waves sliced past one another like serrated saw teeth; towering, needled-tipped spindles whirled through the troughs between the waves; whitecapped breakers defied time and gravity like immense crystal sculptures.

  But although these elements rendered the crossing impassable to all manner of ship and landing craft, they did not gird the heavens. The bombs continued to fall. And fall they did, in numbers too great to count.

  That autumn, the ravens of Albion abandoned the Tower of London.

  eight

  31 August 1940

  Paddington, London, England

  An air of white-knuckled desperation had settled over the platforms at n Paddington Station. It put Marsh in mind of Barcelona. But there the mass of refugees swarming the port had comprised entire families fleeing the Nationalist victory. Here the atmosphere was charged with heartache as parents said good-bye to their children.

  It simply wasn’t possible to evacuate all of London. A long, hard summer had put billet space in the countryside at a premium.

  Marsh carried Agnes, wedging gaps in the crowd for Liv, who maneuvered Agnes’s pram. Every child at the station wore a pasteboard tag clipped to his or her clothing. Sunlight fell on Agnes’s tag and illuminated her evacuee number: 21417. She’d drawn a high number in the evacuation lottery. Her parents had suffered several sleepless weeks waiting to see if they would send their baby girl away before the relentless Blitz caught up with them. The long bellows of their daughter’s anti-gas helmet dangled over the side of the pram as Liv navigated the crowd.

  Every child had a gas mask. Many carried, or dragged, canvas duffel bags brimming with blankets and clothes. Rag dolls peeked from a few sacks. A box of lead soldiers spilled onto the platform when one boy dropped his bag. Marsh fended off the throng and helped him gather his toys.

  Marsh hated crowds. He hated the prickly feeling that took root between his shoulder blades when Liv and Agnes went out. It had been that way for months, ever since he’d come to suspect the Jerries were watching his family. And now they were about to send Agnes from the city. She’d be away from the bombs, but she’d also be where Jerry could watch her and her father couldn’t.

  A man lost his footing and lurched out of the throng. He approached too closely, too quickly, and nearly crashed into Agnes. Simmering resentment, something Marsh had carried for weeks without fully realizing it, boiled over. Months of frustration at being unable to do anything sought release. Marsh’s elbow caught the man under the jaw and snapped his head back.

  “Guhh—”

  Marsh glared into the widened eyes of the coughing man. “You need to step back, friend.”

  The man did, clutching his neck as he did so. His companion, most likely his wife, glared at Liv as she wheeled past the pair. Marsh raised his arms to fend off others rushing to claim the spot he cleared for Liv on the platform. He hip-checked a woman who tried to barge in with her own pram.

  The assisted private-evacuation program had taken on a frantic quality after the Luftwaffe had systematically destroyed the Chain Home radar stations lining Britain’s coast. With that electronic fence out of commission, the Luftwaffe had been free to obliterate the RAF Fighter Command sector stations in the southeast. The ops rooms had fallen even more quickly than the radar masts. The methodical dismantling of Britain’s air defenses had proceeded with such inexorable logic that it seemed directed by a higher intelligence. Now the bombs fell on London day and night, and two months into this Blitz, the evacuations to the country couldn’t proceed quickly enough.

  The overseas evacuation scheme was a failure. Less than a fortnight ago, a U-boat had torpedoed the City of Benares and killed ninety-plus children bound for Canada.

  The smell of wet paint mingled with the stink of panic and sweat on the train platform. Marsh kept it all at bay with the scent of Agnes. When the invaders came—and they would, everyone knew, just as soon as the odd weather in the Channel cleared up—they would be hard-pressed to find a single signpost, milepost, or placard that might help them gain their bearings. More than a few pubs whose names might have provided a clue to geography had been repainted and rechristened in the process. Every train platform in the nation had likewise received new coats of paint. Only the schedules printed in tiny lettering and posted in glass cases at select locations within the station offered any useful information at all.

  All of which had made finding the proper train
rather difficult. But now here they were, waiting to meet the lady from the Women’s Voluntary Services who would escort Agnes to the countryside.

  Liv’s aunt Margaret was a billeting officer in Williton, and had reluctantly agreed to care for Agnes herself. The most recent, and therefore most stringent, regulations governing the evacuation forbade mothers from accompanying their children, even infants. Evacuation space was reserved strictly for children and pregnant women.

  Marsh nudged his wife. “Look,” he said, pointing at a row of expectant mothers. All were clearly in the final months of their pregnancies. He had to speak up so she could hear him. “That must be the Williton Balloon Barrage.”

  Liv grimaced, but the play on words didn’t ease the tightness at the corners of her eyes. “You’ve been spending too much time with Will.” Her gaze flitted over the crowd. “How will we find her in this mess?”

  “I’d hoped she’d find us instead.”

  “I can take Agnes if you want to have a look about.”

  “No,” said Marsh, shaking his head. “Let’s not split up. Not yet.”

  “It’s only temporary,” she said, repeating their mantra of recent days. By repeating it constantly, Marsh could almost convince himself it was true, as though he could sculpt reality with the force of his belief.

  “She’ll be safer out of the city.” Another mantra.

  Agnes mewled. Marsh bounced her in his arms. “Liv,” he said. “Maybe you should get on the train, too. Margaret will have no choice but to find space if you show up on her doorstep. She’s a billeting officer, after all.”

  “Oh, heavens, no. No, no, my dears,” said a voice in the crowd.

  Marsh and Liv turned to face a wizened little woman. She carried a clipboard in one hand and an infant on her hip. Wisps of graying hair waved under the brim of her hat and from where they had worked loose from her bun. She wore wool socks that had fallen down below the hem of her dress, one higher than the other. Her mouth was full of crooked yellow teeth that looked ready to tumble over, like gravestones in an untended churchyard.