In the summer when it’s warm, we’ll set up a lean-to in the field. No light, no water, no heat. Just us under a trench coat tied between two trees on the side of a meadow. It will pour with rain for days. It won’t matter. We’ll be together.
What are we going to do under a trench coat for days? she says.
I will show you.
Mia is skeptical. Can you imagine me, getting down in a tent, she says.
Oh, you’ll get down in a tent, all right, Julian says.
And she laughs.
* * *
They survive Sheffield, with new small wounds, new cuts, new burns, their old wounds seeping fresh blood. Several hundred of them were in the woods. Eight have died. The rest get slowly transported by buses and trucks twenty miles east to Doncaster, where they wait another day for a train to take them forty miles north to Leeds.
Did you catch the names of the towns we passed, she asks. Dinnington, Doddington, and Diddington. Which one for you?
I’d like to live here, in Loversall, Julian says, pointing to a few glum shacks in the middle of the desolate flatness.
In Leeds, there are no civilian trains on the docket. They have the rest of the day free to find the Leeds Cathedral on Cookridge Street, a half-mile from the station. The church is unharmed and quiet. To their surprise it’s also Catholic! This does not distress Mia. She tells him her family is Catholic.
“Mine, too,” says Julian.
They’re both pleased. “I can’t believe it, Jules. Both of us Catholics, on top of everything else. It’s like we’re meant to be.”
“You think?”
They sit inside the cathedral the rest of the afternoon, waiting for the five o’clock Mass to begin.
“I feel bad that so much of the time we live as if there’s never been a cave in Bethlehem or a cross on Calvary.” Mia sighs. “But inside we all want to believe so much, don’t we? Believe that there is light eternal somewhere over yonder.”
“There is,” Julian says. “I know there is.”
“Oh, that you know.”
“I know it!”
They fall asleep in the pews until a deacon wakes them, sternly saying there is no sleeping inside the church. He softens when he sees their battered bodies.
“Did you pray?” Mia whispers to Julian.
“Of course.” God on high, hear my prayer. Help her—please.
“What did you pray for?” she asks.
“What did you pray for?”
“My priest once told me besides the sacramental prayers and the Jesus prayer, there are only two personal prayers ever worth bothering God for. One of them is help me. And the other is thank you. Which was it for you?”
He smirks. “Mine is almost always help me,” he says. “You?”
“Mine is almost always thank you,” Mia replies. “Because what have you got, really, that you have not received?”
24
Mytholmroyd
TWO EVENINGS LATER, AFTER FINALLY CATCHING A TRAIN out of Leeds, they stop twenty miles east in a picturesque upland town called Mytholmroyd, high in the Yorkshire moorlands. They’re ordered off the train, which has been requisitioned for the military. They’re told the next civilian train won’t be until the day after tomorrow. They have just sixty miles to go until Blackpool, yet can’t seem to get there.
Christmas is six days away.
And Boxing Day is seven.
Julian is distraught, but Mia is enchanted. “There’s a town right below Mytholmroyd called Hoo Hole,” she exclaims, studying the map at the station. It’s not even four in the afternoon, yet the sun has already gone down. “I want to live in Hoo Hole, Jules! If not live, I want us to find an inn there.”
He doesn’t want to travel too far from the station in case there’s an earlier train. “Look,” he says, pointing across the road. “There’s a perfectly good inn right here called Shoulder of Mutton. What’s wrong with that? It’s on a brook.”
“Shoulder of Mutton! What happened to the romantic in you?”
“It’s on a burbling brook!”
At the Shoulder of Mutton, all the rooms but one have been taken by travelers without leg injuries and broken clavicles who didn’t take so long to peruse maps and dream of Hoo Hole. Their room is in the dormered attic up on the third floor. It takes them a while to climb the steep narrow stairs. The room is nice. It has a bathtub and a small standing balcony between the dormers.
“Mia, look,” he says, “a view. Overlooking the brook perhaps.” It’s hard to tell because it’s blackout, and all the lights are off for the war, even at the foot