“I don’t know how to answer that question. I cannot believe or accept what I’m seeing.”
“Come on.” She put her arm through his. “It’s getting light. We have to go.”
Hector drove out through the Middle Tower and turned west, away from bomb-ravaged London.
A small man standing at a corner watched them leave, went to a telephone box, and called a number.
6
An hour later, ahead of the rising sun, Hector had driven out of London and passed through Windsor with Caitrin asleep, curled up in the seat next to him. She had hardly moved in over an hour, and he appreciated the silence while delighting in taking surreptitious glances at her. Those glorious red curls, begging to have his hands run through them, had fallen across her face, leaving only a closed eye and her lips exposed. Such tempting lips. The eye remained closed, but the lips moved enough to murmur, “Hecky, does your mum really own ten cocker spaniels, or is it just one very active dog that races in and out of the house and gets counted ten times?”
Alarum! Beware, England, the Welsh are awake and across the border. A new day with new challenges has begun.
Caitrin sat upright, stretched, yawned, and smiled at him. Hector felt his heart pulse. Caitrin Colline was a glorious, beautiful, and mercurial force of nature. She smacked her lips and said, “My mouth tastes like the newspaper on the bottom of a budgie cage.”
He had no answer to that, so instead said, “Good morning.”
“And a fine good morning to you.” She squinted at him. “First question of the day. Are you sure you’re a real, authentic English lord?”
He arched a curious eyebrow at the question. “Reasonably certain. Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re not a chinless chump with only one eyebrow.” She improvised a squeaky upper-class English accent. “And because so far you haven’t once said spiffing, topping, or what a dreadfully frightful bore, darling.”
“That’s a different kind of lord.”
“What kind?”
“A silly one. Are you sure you’re a bona fide member of the working class?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“To start, you have your own teeth.” He attempted a working-class accent. “And you haven’t once said ee by gum, where there’s muck there’s brass, lad, or trouble at t’mill.”
“That’s a different kind of working class, northern England serfs.”
“What do Welsh ones say?”
“Nothing. They’d never talk to an English lord. Where are we?”
“On the B4507 and just turning onto Fawler Road, which takes us to the quaint village of Uffington in the county of Berkshire.”
“Where, I pray to gods various and sundry, there is a café. I swear I was five years old the last time I ate.”
“There is, and a good one too.”
The Sixth Bell Tea Shop—set in a chalk block, red brick-detailed, and thatched cottage—was on Broad Street opposite St. Mary’s Church, where they could park outside and keep an eye on the car while they ate breakfast. Caitrin refused to say a word until she had drunk her first cup of tea. Then, primed, she said, “Hecky, m’lud, don’t you think this is all a bit daft?”
“Uffington?”
Caitrin waved her fork at the tea-shop window. “No, I mean everything. There is yet another war to kill millions, the second in my lifetime, preceded by the Slump with so many people unemployed and going hungry. A week ago, I was leading a predictable life, but not without humble aspirations, and now here I am wandering around England in a ruin of a dog-smelling Humber Super Snipe pulling a horse box full of hay bales, under which we have concealed the . . .” Her voice dropped to a melodramatic whisper. “The Crown Jewels, which we must deliver in eight days to a boat in Scotland to go across the perilous deep to Canada before the perfidious Nazi overruns this sceptered isle and dooms us to forever eat sauerkraut for breakfast. Heaven forfend! That sort of daft.”
“Top marks for saying that all in one breath, and while Victoria may be redolent of cocker spaniels, she most certainly is not a ruin.”
“Victoria?” She sat back, eyebrows raised. “You actually named your car Victoria?”
“I didn’t; my father did,” Hector mumbled and forked a generous helping of bacon into his mouth in a bid to end the conversation.
“What’s in a name, huh? What is in a name? Pray tell all about the double-barreled Neville-Percy name.”
“The Neville and Percy families go back centuries.”
“Please pretend you’re reading me a bedtime story, skip the early centuries and all the begats, and touch the high, scurrilous points before I fall asleep.”
“All right, I’ll try my best. Since medieval times, the House of Percy has been one of the most powerful families in northern England. They still are and still quite wealthy. The House of Neville was equally powerful, and they were mortal enemies.”
“So if you northern chaps were mortal enemies, always bashing lumps off each other, what happened with the Neville-Percy coming together to produce your family bit?”
“No one knows the exact details, or at least no one is telling. I suppose it brought much shame on both houses, but unlike the Nevilles or the Percys, we, the Neville-Percys, are not wealthy. There are actually only two of us left: me and my mother.”
“And not forgetting the ten cocker spaniels.”
“Tell me about you. Colline. What’s in that name?”
“We’re not medieval or landowners. When the Welsh colliers sailed to Ireland, they needed ballast after they unloaded their coal. So they filled the holds with Irish immigrants. My grandfather was first ballast and later fodder for the coal mines.”
“And Caitrin?”
“Means pure and clear.”
