Kissed a sad goodbye - Deborah Crombie [129]
William banged through the door from the corridor, bringing Lewis back to his unfinished essay with a start. “I’ve finished mine,” William taunted him with a grin. “Race you to the shops. Edwina wants a newspaper before they close, and she said I could get some glue for my model.”
“Right,” said Lewis, letting his chewed pencil bounce onto his paper, and they jostled one another out the door and into the courtyard.
A sun the color of blood was setting against a translucent sky etched by the black skeletal silhouettes of trees, the air smelled of frost and wood smoke, and the last of the leaves swirled suddenly on the courtyard cobbles as if stirred by an invisible hand. Lewis stopped, seized by a sensation he couldn’t quite put a name to, but it reminded him of the way he’d felt when he’d watched one of the great ships steam into the docks at home.
Then the moment passed as William shouted for him to hurry, and he pounded off down the drive.
A WEEK LATER, LEWIS WAS CROSSING the courtyard after finishing up his midday chores in the barn when he looked up and saw his mother standing in the kitchen doorway. He stopped and blinked, believing for a moment that his eyes were playing tricks, but it was his mum in her old bottle-green coat and the plum-colored felt hat she kept for “best,” and she smiled and held out her arms to him.
He ran then, skidding across the drizzle-slick cobbles as he reached her and was enveloped in a fierce hug. To his amazement, he found that his face was on a level with hers, or perhaps a bit higher.
“Lewis Finch, I swear you’ve grown a foot.” She held him off so that she could study him. But although she was still smiling, there was something not quite right about her voice, a quaveriness. Up close, he saw that her pale skin had the faint blue cast of fresh milk, and there was a puffiness round about her eyes.
“You said you weren’t coming to visit,” he said, ignoring the tiny prickle of fear. “Did you get my present? Is that why you’ve come? Where’s Da?” Then a sound from the kitchen drew his attention, and he looked past his mother into the room. Cook sat at the table, her apron drawn up over her face, and he suddenly knew it was a sob he’d heard, for he could see her shoulders shaking.
He looked back at his mother, stepping away. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“We’ll go for a walk—somewhere we can talk,” she said, slipping her arm through his, but she didn’t meet his eyes, and from the kitchen he heard Cook sob again.
He led her blindly, out through the gate in the back of the yard, across the blackening stubble in the pasture, to the old stone wall that marked the lip of the valley. Below them, the trees marched down the slope and up the other side, their branches as gray today as the mist that shrouded them, like wraiths standing in a sea of russet leaves.
“We had a telegram,” his mother began in a careful, level voice. “A supply convoy and its naval escort were attacked in the North Atlantic—”
“Is it Tommy? Or Edward?” Lewis interrupted, the knowledge of what was coming squeezing the air from his lungs. He heard a faint buzzing in his ears, and unbidden, the names of the German battleships he’d read in the newspapers flashed before him: the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Admiral Scheer.
His mother didn’t answer. When Lewis dared look at her, he saw that she was staring down into the valley, her face still except for a tiny tic at the corner of her mouth.
“No.” Lewis tried to shout it, but the mist seemed to catch the word, dampening it in cotton-wool fingers.
“Your brothers were born ten months apart,” his mother said slowly. “And from the very first they always wanted to be together.” She turned to him at last, touching his cheek with her cold fingertips. “Oh, Lewis