going to get out of this mess? That was first and foremost among my worries. We had been caught fair and square, so I doubted there was much I could do to talk my way out of it. There was always a chance, of course. Uncle Mick had a silver tongue, and he’d talked his way out of more than one sticky situation.
Perhaps we could claim it had been some kind of misunderstanding, that we were friends or relations of the owners of the house. But that would only work until they contacted the owners. No, that was no good.
I realized suddenly that I had never given much thought to what would happen if we were arrested. Call it overconfidence, but we had been doing this a long time, and we were very sure of ourselves. Maybe that’s where the trouble lay. A haughty spirit before a fall.
At least it had just been Uncle Mick and me who were caught. I was glad the boys weren’t here. For one thing, I was fairly certain they wouldn’t have come easily, and they might have been hurt in the struggle.
They were tough boys, my cousins, both of them bold and reckless, though they were also kindhearted and terribly clever. Colm was a mechanic for the RAF. He’d always been good with machines, and airplanes were no exception. I was glad he had found a place where he belonged and where his skills could be put to good use. He had been eager to do his bit for the cause, both my cousins had.
I hadn’t wanted to see them go, but Uncle Mick, despite his native Ireland’s neutrality in the war, felt the same way the boys did, that this country could only be defended if our young men were willing to step forward and do their part.
We hadn’t heard from Toby since Dunkirk. He was officially listed as missing, meaning he had likely been captured or killed. Ever since we had heard, we had gone about with the assumption that he was in a German prison somewhere, that sooner or later we would get a letter from him.
Uncle Mick never let on that he was worried. He said that, when the war was over, Toby would be back with his tales of adventure. He never addressed the possibility that Toby might be dead, never seemed even to consider it, and I thought surely he must be right. The four of us had always been so close—thick as thieves, Uncle Mick liked to say with a chuckle; we’d have felt something different if he was gone.
I hoped he was all right, but the truth of it was that I sometimes thought he would be better off dead than in a German prison. He had the McDonnell fighting spirit and a strong will, but I had heard enough horror stories about the Nazis to know that breaking strong wills was one of their specialties.
No good comes of worry, Nacy Dean, our housekeeper and my surrogate mother of sorts, always said, and so I tried not to fret. I prayed for Toby daily and spoke about him lightly, as though he had just stepped out of the room and would be back before we knew it.
But now was not the time to think about Toby. As hard as it was, I pushed the thoughts of him away. He would want me to focus on making the best of the situation at hand.
I tried again to determine where they were taking us. It was hard to see much with the streets so dark, but I was fairly certain this was Belgravia now, as the rows of white stucco houses rather gave it away.
We pulled up in front of one of the buildings. The outside was sandbagged against bombing, as a lot of places were now, and the windows were, naturally, blacked out, but for all that it still looked rather grand and imposing in the moonlight with its pillared entrance and wrought iron terrace. Definitely not a police station. What was happening here?
The big bloke who had seized me at the scene took my arm again as he alighted from the car and led me up the front steps and into the building. Entering through the front door, we found ourselves in a marble-floored foyer. A winding staircase ahead of us spiraled upward, the steps covered in a green patterned carpet. Behind it a hallway, papered in emerald-green stripes, extended back into the shadowed depths of