Epilogue

EPILOGUE

We sat in the kitchen, eating our tea and listening to the radio. Mabel, Kate’s former housemaid, was washing up. Frankie wolfed down his bread and jam, eager to get outside before dark. Mabel had her eye on his plate, at the uneaten crusts. She’d have her own meal after us, but I knew she’d eat his scraps too. She’d been hungry every day of her life until she came to us, she’d told me. Not something you leave behind quickly or easily.

Elizabeth was quiet. Margaret had been a surrogate mother. She’d taken to spending hours alone, walking the fields.

Mabel liked listening to Lord Haw-Haw – a traitor who’d fled England and cast his lot in with Hitler, broadcasting from a secret location, deep in the Reich. He had better music than the BBC, in her opinion, and we found his propaganda so ludicrous it was comforting. Listening to his programme was illegal, but they’d have to arrest the whole country.

‘This evening we have a special visitor to the studio,’ Haw-Haw said in his exaggerated, Eton accent. ‘Lady -Miriam Matheson, a recent exile from her home in Great Britain. Lady Matheson, what prompted you to leave your ancestral home and settle in Germany?’

‘Wasn’t that the one we had doing our harvest?’ Mum asked, excited to hear someone on the radio she might have met.

The door banged behind Frankie. I envied him, an evening of rabbits and sticks and all the fun a ten-year-old boy could have in the fields and the woods on a summer evening.

‘Thank you for having me,’ the guest speaker said, her voice rising and falling, fighting through static as it carried across the airwaves, hundreds of miles. ‘I saw such poverty in England,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s starving to death, and of course the harvests have all failed. I knew a farmer in -England, and he said the game’s about up, so I hopped on a boat and made my way over.’

Elizabeth glanced at me, a questioning look on her face.

‘I understand the Luftwaffe will have control of the skies within the week, then we can launch the invasion proper. Hitler’s given me his word I’ll be back in London by the end of the month.’

I put a finger to my lips. Elizabeth did the same.

She smiled.

If you enjoyed this book, don’t miss the first thrilling instalment in the series, The Last Line , available now!