“If it means not going back to Baltimore, I might take lessons.”
The air raid sirens began to wail.
“Down to the shelter, girls,” Mrs. Griffith, the head typist, ordered, and the women filed toward the door with the calm quickness they’d practiced numerous times over the past few weeks.
“That’s a strange noise,” Susan said.
Amelia noticed it too, a droning louder than anything they’d heard before. They went to the windows and saw an ominous black shadow marring the blue sky, like a massive murder of crows as hundreds of bombers flew in formation toward the city. “I’ve never seen so many planes.”
Their belly doors opened and strings of bombs began to fall. The lights and desks rattled as explosion after explosion ripped through London. Somewhere nearby, a powerful blast shook the Embassy walls and threw the women off-balance.
“They’re targeting the city!” Susan cried as Amelia helped her to her feet. They were tossed against the walls two more times before they reached the shelter and descended with the others. The old wine cellar had been fitted with air filters and reinforced walls after Ambassador Kennedy had shipped the wine home before he’d fled Britain, certain the country was lost even before the first Luftwaffe raids had begun.
Explosions rocked the city to its Roman foundations. Amelia and Susan clasped hands in silent support as sprinkles of dust drifted down to cover the staff huddled together waiting for it to end. Each moment of quiet between the blasts teased them with the possibility that it might be over but it went on for two agonizing hours. Amelia feared they’d go crazy from the constant thudding and pounding until the echoes of the last explosion finally faded into real silence.
The all clear signal sounded and everyone filed upstairs. Dark plumes of smoke and greedy flames engulfed London and the red orange of the fires cast strange and menacing shadows on the Embassy walls. The women gasped in horror while others burst into frightened tears as they stared at the devastation outside.
Tears slid down Amelia’s cheeks. The Duke had said this was how Herr Hitler would bring Britain to its knees. Curse Wallis and the Duke, the selfish bastards.
“You’ll stay here tonight, girls. There’s no way you’ll get home through that, and the Bosch might be back before dark,” Mrs. Griffith said.
The Embassy staff spent the next two hours gathering food, blankets, pillows, and anything else they could use to make tonight a little less uncomfortable. There wasn’t time to collect it all as the sirens started to wail again, accompanied by the awful droning of bombers.
For the next nine hours, everyone huddled together in the bomb shelter, unable to sleep, wondering if a bomb would fall directly on top of them and make this their last breath. Amelia sat with her knees tucked under her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs, afraid and guilty.
Wallis is to blame for this, and so am I. If she hadn’t been blinded by the clothes, manners, and Wallis’s empty concern and promises of help and a future, she might have seen what she was up to and put a stop to it.
The next morning, the staff emerged from the shelter into devastation they’d only seen in newsreel footage of the Luftwaffe destruction of Rotterdam. Huge swaths of London were on fire. Buildings reduced to rubble were strewn across roads in a twisting skeleton of charred timbers and scattered bricks. Injured people staggered among the wreckage, stunned, hurt, and lost, not knowing where to go or what to do or think.
“We have to help,” Amelia said.
She, Susan, and many others offered blankets, food, and whatever care they could to the suffering Londoners. Amelia’s anger with Wallis and her stupid plot to become Queen grew stronger with each wound she bandaged, every shell-shocked person she passed, and every new sheet-covered body laid in the streets.
Hours later, with the wreckage of the city still smoldering, Amelia staggered back through crumbled brick to where Susan sat giving water to a little girl with a bloody bandage around her head. The girl clutched a ragged teddy bear, her eyes wide with shock. Susan looked hopefully at Amelia, who shook her head. She’d helped search for the girl’s mother but the rescuers had found her buried beneath the wreckage of her house.
“Her father’s coming.”
Susan nodded and held the girl until her father, his soot-covered face streaked with tears, gathered her in his arms, his fingernails black with grime and dirt from helping dig his wife out of the rubble.
“I want to talk to Robert,” Amelia said to Susan as they watched the man carry the child away. “He asked me to do something, and I’ve decided to do it.”
Amelia emerged from the St. James’s Park underground station and walked with the rest of dazed London past the wreckage to the address on Caxton Street that Susan had given her. She passed weary people digging out what little they could salvage from their destroyed houses while everyone around them led as normal a life as possible with hell raining down on them for the past three nights. The German bombers had returned in their quest to bomb Britain into submission, but the British stood strong.
Amelia stopped, surprised to find herself at St. Ermin’s Hotel. “This can’t be right.”
Nothing in London was right so she walked past the sandbags and went inside. Men and women hurried through the Victorian lobby with its balconies and hugging staircase, their drab military uniforms a sharp contrast to the elaborate Victorian decor. Amelia wondered what she was doing here but supposed she’d soon find out.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Morton,” Amelia said to the female soldier behind the reception desk.
“One moment, please.” The woman picked up the telephone and made a call.
Prime Minister Churchill’s voice coming from the many radios around the lobby caught her attention and everyone stopped to listen. “What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe and until the Old World—and the New—can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man’s honor, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.
“This is a time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm, as they are doing. I express my admiration for the exemplary manner in which all the Air Raid Precautions services of London are being discharged, especially the Fire Brigade, whose work has been so heavy and also dangerous. All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and fortitude with which the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they are subjected, the end of which or the severity of which cannot yet be foreseen.”
“Mr. Morton will see you now.” The receptionist led Amelia up the hugging staircase with its lush hotel carpet and past the ballroom to a small salon away from the bustle of the main hallway. She opened the door to reveal Robert standing inside.
The sight of him nearly took Amelia’s breath away. He wore a dark blue United States Navy uniform with gold buttons, his white cap tucked under one arm. He was far more dashing than was good for him or her heart.
“You enlisted,” Amelia blurted as the receptionist politely left.
“I’ve been in the Navy all along. My real title in France was Lieutenant Robert Morton, Naval Attaché in the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
There went her excitement at seeing him. “Was anything you told me about yourself real? Your fiancée, your uncle?” All the things he’d said to gain her trust in the beginning, until her heart had run away with her.
“All of it, except my job title. My fiancée did chuck me over for a classmate, and my uncle does work for the State Department. He arranged for my position, but I had to enlist to accept it. I wasn’t lying when I said I loved you or that I admire your ability to care for people.”
“Even if they don’t deserve it.” She crossed her arms over her chest, guarding herself against his flattery and how it made her heart skip a beat. She shouldn’t be so weak around him but she couldn’t help it, not when he looked at her with such earnestness.
“You did your best with Wallis.”
“I didn’t see her for who she really is, and look what’s happened because of it.”
“You aren’t responsible for what she did. If she’d cared for anyone besides herself the way you cared for her, you wouldn’t be in this position, but I’m glad you’re here. I knew you couldn’t watch everything that’s happening and not do something about it.”
