Waging War (50 page)

I searched Ringo’s eyes and saw raw pain
that mirrored my own. I would try for him, because this was what he
could do, but I knew the truth.

Archer was gone.

Ringo had avoided speaking to me directly
after we’d searched as far into the train tunnel from Holborn
station as the rubble would allow. There was no way into the
British Museum station from above or below, and even if Archer had
survived the blast, it would be months before anyone could dig him
free.

I was strangely reluctant to Clock forward,
and I sensed the same hesitation in Ringo. There were too many
unknowns in whatever future lay before us, and we were both
shattered by the events of the time we were in. So we gave
ourselves a day to build our courage, using Rachel as our excuse
for inaction. None of us gave in to sleep though – I think we were
afraid we wouldn’t find any reason to wake up again.

So, instead, the three of us walked. The
devastation from the night’s bombing was limited to just a few
neighborhoods, even so it was startling to turn a corner to find
beleaguered firefighters dousing smoking ruins with water.
Inevitably, the residents who had survived the bombs stood on the
streets, hollow-eyed with shock as they tried to make sense of the
fact that everything they owned was gone.

The exuberance with which we had run the
night before was also gone, and the effort of putting one foot in
front of the other took enough concentration to keep my mind blank
and empty. Rachel walked between us, and I felt like she was the
magnet that held us together.

We didn’t consciously decide to go to the
East End, but our legs seemed to lead us back to the neighborhood
where Ringo’s attic flat had been. The commercial building still
stood, which, after the devastation of the rest of the city, was
strangely ironic, given the average property value of that part of
town. Ringo led us through the alley to the back door, which was
locked, but in a matter of seconds Ringo had jimmied the door open
and we slipped inside.

Rachel blinked only once – when Ringo opened
the closet to reveal the hidden access to the attic – but she
followed him without comment up the ladder. I didn’t realize I’d
been holding my breath until I gasped at the view from the top of
the ladder. It was as though Ringo had just stepped out for bread
and forgot to come back – for fifty years. Nothing had been
disturbed, nothing had been changed. There weren’t even footsteps
in the dust until he walked across the floor to open a window. He
was as surprised as I was at the fact that his hiding place – his
home – had never been discovered.

Rachel studied Ringo as he moved around this
space. “This is yours?”

“It was,” he said simply.

She looked at me. “When?”

Ringo blew the dust off his tea kettle and
turned on the gas to light the burner. After a moment of
sputtering, it finally caught. “The last time I saw this place was
1889,” he said. He cranked the water tap and waited while the rusty
water cleared, then he rinsed the kettle and filled it.

I pulled the chipped mugs I knew so well out
of the cabinet. My favorite had a hand-painted owl on it, and
Ringo’s mug was blue. I hesitated before grabbing Archer’s green
mug off the shelf, but I added it to the other two on the
counter.

Rachel examined the flat with great
attention. She noticed the drape around the bed, the extra bedroll
against a wall, and the neat pile of blankets in a corner. She
studied the drawings pinned to the walls and the books stacked
against them, and when the tea was ready and I’d handed her the owl
mug, she finally spoke.

“Where did she go?”

I automatically looked at Ringo, but his
mouth was a thin line and he cradled his blue mug in his hands in
silence.

When neither of us answered, Rachel
continued. “I like her art.”

“Yeah, she’s good,” I said. I spoke in
present tense, which was pretty loaded for a Clocker to do.

“What is your art?” she asked me.

“Tagging. Street art,” I clarified. “Why?” I
was surprised by the question.

She shrugged. “Everyone has something. Mine
is machines.”

“Mine too,” Ringo said quietly.

Rachel seemed surprised. “But I don’t see
any here.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know it then.
When we—” he swallowed, “when I was here, it was books … and
stayin’ alive.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Staying alive is a
worthy art.”

We sipped our tea in silence for a long
time. Ringo’s eyes went to Archer’s green mug every time I lifted
it to my mouth. He finally spoke directly to me. “I like yer
ring.”

I stared at the gold signet ring on my left
hand in surprise. I’d forgotten it was there, and a band of pain
wrapped itself around my heart that I could ever forget something
as important as being Archer’s wife. I met Ringo’s eyes. “Me
too.”

I finally focused my gaze on Rachel. “What
do you want to do?” I asked her.

“When you go?” She didn’t mince words.

“You can come with us if you want to, or we
can take you back—”

She interrupted me. “I’m not going back. I
already told you.”

Ringo finally seemed to shake himself awake.
“The Allies will win this war. In another year it’ll be over.”

“Will it be really be over? Will I ever be
able to trust my countrymen again? I don’t see the English
informing on their Jewish neighbors.”

“England wasn’t occupied,” I said
quietly.

“Occupation is an excuse to betray your
friends? To send your neighbors to camps?” Rachel’s voice was calm,
but her hands shook.

Ringo spoke solemnly, as if it was something
he’d thought about for a long time. “Fear is the thing that shows a
man who ‘e really is. The ‘ateful ones are pointin’ fingers and
layin’ blame because that’s what they think it takes to survive.
Those people ‘ave always been there, but fear just shows the rest
of us who they are, and because of that, they’ll end up alone.
Others, like ye and Bas – ye ‘ide children and ye ‘elp strangers.
Ye’ll never be alone because ye will ‘ave the lives of every person
ye ‘elped to keep ye warm at night. Ye said there’s an art to
survivin’? Well, I say there’s an art to livin’, and ‘ow a person
deals with fear can be the difference between survivin’ this life
and really livin’ it.”

Rachel’s gaze hadn’t left Ringo’s as she
processed his words. She finally took a sip of her tea and asked
him, “What will you do next?”

“I go where Saira goes,” he said. “There are
things she needs to finish, and until they’re done, I’ll be at ‘er
back.”

Rachel nodded, then looked at me. “And
you’re going to your own time?”

“If I can, yes.”

Her eyes found Ringo’s again. “May I stay
here, in this flat?”

He tilted his head. “What’ll ye do?”

She exhaled. “I think I’d like to join the
temple.” There was a faint smile on her lips. “The one with the
chandeliers. I’m very tired of hiding my faith, and I’d like to
find a way to help where I can. Then, maybe, when the war is over,
I’ll look for my father.”

Ringo nodded. “Of course ye can stay ‘ere.
We’ll ‘elp ye stock up on things before we go.”

Which we did. Ringo had brought World War II
era money with him, and we were able to buy enough food rations
from various parts of the city that no one noticed the quantity. We
also gave Rachel whatever we had of value from our own bags, which
had become extensions of ourselves, much like the clothing we wore.
When Ringo gave Rachel his knife, it was like he relinquished a
piece of himself to her, and I think she understood how important
his gift was.

I tried to dampen the noise of anguish in my
brain with preparation tasks, but it wouldn’t go quiet, and it
wouldn’t dull. The edges of it stayed sharp and cut me when I least
expected it. Like when I first caught the silent glances that
passed between Ringo and Rachel when they thought the other wasn’t
looking. The realization that my eyes would never find Archer’s
across a room again threatened to choke me. I shoved the pain as
far down as I could push it and started to see the small things as
an antidote to pain.

Rachel was clearly aware of him, but Ringo
began to notice things about her, too. He was impressed when she
rewired a broken lamp and changed a burner on the gas stove. He
taught her how to pick locks in case they were changed on the door
downstairs, and the two of them worked together to build a cistern
for the roof in the event the water was shut off. I didn’t ask him
about her, and I doubted he would have known how to answer.
Whatever tenuous thing it was between them gave us all a little bit
of peace for the briefest of moments, and I loved them both for
it.

After a day and a night, Rachel was as
prepared as we could help her be, and Ringo and I looked at each
other with the silent understanding that it was time to go. We had
avoided our future long enough – it was time to face the
consequences of George Walter’s and Archer’s deaths.

Rachel knew it too, and her gaze was on
Ringo as he checked everything in the flat one last time. “Will you
return?” she finally asked him.

His eyes held hers. “I don’t know.”

She nodded and looked away, so I pulled her
into a hug and whispered into her hair. “If he comes back here,
it’ll be to find you. But don’t wait for him. You both have things
to do.”

“I know that,” she whispered back. “He’s
rare and special and so are you. I See greatness in you both.”

I let go of her and shouldered my bag,
feeling about as far away from greatness as I’d ever stood. “Take
care of yourself, Rachel. Rewrite your story and make sure it’s
full of hopes and dreams.”

She wore a serious expression as she studied
me. “Perhaps we’ll be able to get through the wars and move past
the deaths when we allow ourselves to dream again.”

We gave each other the cheek-kisses of
goodbye, and I stepped away toward the ladder to give Ringo some
privacy. He hugged her, and his hand went to her hair to stroke it.
Her eyes were shining as they stepped back, and when they exchanged
the cheek-kisses, I thought he might have lingered on the last one.
It was an image I tucked into the antidote box, to pull out the
next time I felt the sharp edges of pain, and when we left Ringo’s
flat, the glimpse of Rachel’s tears got tucked there too.

Present day

I Clocked us to my mom’s walled garden at
Elian Manor in the late afternoon. The plants were rioting, but
that was normal enough that I didn’t give the garden’s condition a
second thought. The garden door was locked though, and that did get
my attention.

Ringo boosted me up to the top of the wall
and scurried up after me. I could barely breathe with the shock
that coursed through me at the view of Elian Manor. It was deserted
and in a state of decay that told of years of emptiness.

Weeds grew up through the paving stones in
the driveway and paint peeled off the window frames. The door was
locked and all the windows had been shuttered. Between the two of
us and a long stick, we were able to lever the heavy cellar door
open.

The light from my Maglite sent things
skittering into the darkness, and except for spiders and whatever
was attached to the beady eyes that glowed from the corners, the
cellar was empty. The kitchen door at the top of the stairs was
also locked, but Ringo used a brick to break the lock, and we
slipped silently into the shadowy room.

“No one has been here for years,” I
whispered. Both the whisper and the statement were unnecessary
given the emptiness of the room. Ringo went to the butler’s pantry
and opened a cabinet.

“The good china’s gone, but the everyday
stuff is still ‘ere.”

There were still pots and pans as well, but
nothing to suggest anyone had cooked in the kitchen for a very long
time.

Our tour of the rest of the house was much
the same. Big white sheets covered the furniture to protect it from
dust, and clothes still lived in all the closets except the ones in
Millicent’s bedroom. Those closets were empty and the room was
bare. My mother’s old bedroom, the one I had moved into, looked
just the same as it had the first time I’d seen it. I unlocked the
cabinet where I’d found her drawings of Bedlam and my father. They
were still there.

Which meant I hadn’t taken them.

As deeply disturbing as the empty manor
house was, the fact that my mother’s drawings were still locked in
a cabinet meant that I’d never retrieved them, and without those
drawings, I wouldn’t have been able to meet my dad or rescue my
mom.

Ringo found me in that bedroom, staring at
the drawings which I had lain out on the bed. He had been exploring
the rest of the house, and his simple pronouncement made everything
so clear.

“The last date I could find that anyone
might ‘ave lived ‘ere was 1967. There was an obituary for Tallulah
Elian, and a notice, signed by Mrs. Millicent Mulroy, for the
termination of the staff.