childish magic into something fine.
While her sisters draped themselves in the old favourites, Laurel had spied a bag in the corner of the attic, something white and furry poking from its top. She’d taken out the coat and put it on at once. Then she’d stood before this very mirror, admiring herself, thinking how grand it made her look: like a wicked but wonderful Snow Queen.
Laurel was a child and therefore she didn’t see the thinning patches of fur, nor the curious dark stains around the hem; but she did recognise the sumptuous authority inherent in such a coat. She spent a marvellous few hours ordering her sisters into cages, threatening to set her wolves upon them if they didn’t follow her orders, cackling with evil laughter. By the time their mother called them down for lunch, Laurel had become so attached to the coat and its curious power that she didn’t consider taking it off.
Dorothy’s expression when she saw her eldest daughter arrive in the kitchen had been hard to read. She hadn’t been pleased, but she hadn’t shouted either. It had been worse than that. Her face had drained of all colour and her voice when she spoke was trembling. ‘Take it off,’ she’d said, ‘take it off now.’ When Laurel didn’t leap directly to action, her mother had come quickly to where she was standing and started pulling the coat from her shoulders, muttering about the day being too hot, the coat too long, the attic ladder too steep for wearing such a thing. Why, she was lucky not to have tripped and fallen and killed herself. She had glanced at Laurel then, the fur coat bundled in her arms, and the look on her face had been almost accusative, a mixture of distress and betrayal, almost fear. For a single awful moment, Laurel had thought her mother might be going to cry. She didn’t though; she ordered Laurel to sit down at the table, and then she disappeared, taking the coat with her.
Laurel didn’t see the fur again. She’d asked about it once, some months later when she needed a costume for a play at school, but Dorothy had only said, without meeting Laurel’s eyes, ‘That old thing? I threw it out. It was nothing more than food for the rats up there in the attic.’
But here it was now, tucked away in her mother’s trunk, kept for decades under lock and key. Laurel exhaled thoughtfully, tucking her hands inside the pockets of the coat. There was a hole in the satin lining of one, and her fingers slipped right through. She touched something; it felt like the corner of a piece of cardboard. The hem lining perhaps, pulled apart from the rest? Laurel caught hold of whatever it was and drew it out through the hole.
It was a piece of white card, neat, rectangular, with some-thing printed on it. The type had faded and Laurel had to take it to the remaining patch of sunlight to make out the words. It was a train ticket, she realised, stamped with a single fare from Lon-don to the station nearest Grandma Nicolson’s town. The date on the ticket was the May 23 rd, 1941.
Twenty
London, February 1941
JIMMY HURRIED across London, an unfamiliar spring in his step. It had been weeks since he’d had any contact with Dolly—she’d refused to see him when he tried to visit her at Campden Grove, and she hadn’t answered any of his letters—but now, finally, this. He could feel her letter in his pocket, the same spot he’d carried the ring that awful night—God, he hoped it wasn’t an ill omen. The letter had arrived at the newspaper office earlier in the week, a simple note imploring him to meet her at the park bench in Kensington Gardens, the one nearest the Peter Pan sculpture. There was something she needed to talk to him about, something she hoped might please him.
She’d changed her mind and wanted to marry him. That had to be it. Jimmy was trying to be wary, he hated to jump to conclusions, not when he’d suffered so hard after she turned him down, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts—admit it, his hopes—from going there. What else could it be? Something that would please him—there was only one thing he could think of that would do that. God knew, Jimmy could do with some good news.
They’d been bombed out ten days before. The whole thing had come out of nowhere.