“There is surely no imminent threat to London,” said Hugh. He had a sudden image of Lucy, in her frothiest of frocks, sitting in a darkened Welsh parlor with an old aunt asleep over some knitting, her youth and freshness entombed and the rain beating at the windows. “It would be a hardship for her to be exiled.”
“There may not be Zeppelins coming up the Thames yet,” said the surgeon. “But London, in wartime, is a place of licentiousness and chaos. My dear wife refused to so much as sit on a public bench in the park, but yesterday my daughter rode on an omnibus and brought home to tea three young men she had coaxed to a recruiting office.”
“With your permission, it would be my honor to talk to her,” said Hugh. “And regardless of how she looks upon me, I give you my word that I will urge her to consider her safety.”
“Thank you,” said Sir Alex. “Her aunt lives in the heart of Cardiff, not some lonely crag on Snowdon. She will have plenty of suitable social life, and I can devote myself to our cause with a clear conscience.”
—
In the garden, Hugh found Lucy tucked into a chair in the small summerhouse. The chairs were covered in quilts, as if against the sort of autumnal chill that the calendar would suggest. But the weather was hot, and only the strong, peppery scent of asters signaled the changing season. As he approached, Lucy greeted him with both hands outstretched.
“You look very…smart,” he said as he bent to kiss each hand. She wore a blue serge skirt and jacket, trimmed with scarlet epaulettes and a red and white sash over her shoulder. Her hair was tucked under a jaunty cap sporting a flag of St. George pin. It was a fetching little uniform.
“I’m so glad you’ve come to see me at last,” she said. “Every inch the soldier and now a fully fledged surgeon too.”
“Your father told you,” he said.
“I wormed it out of him,” said Lucy. “I have learned to be very persistent these days.”
“Indeed,” he said.
“Do you like my uniform?” she asked, standing up and smoothing her narrow skirt. “My friends and I have started our own organization, the St. George Recruitment Brigade.”
“Do you need committees and bylaws to hand out feathers?” he asked.
“The newspaper took our photograph yesterday and published it under the headline ‘George’s Girls!’ Look, Hugh.” She presented him with a page cut from an illustrated paper which featured a large photograph of a dozen girls all hanging from the back of an omnibus and waving wildly at the camera.
“You’re going to be famous,” said Hugh. Such a photograph required several minutes of keeping still, so the waving was somewhat artificial. “That poor girl in the back has no arms,” he added.
“Maisie forgot to keep still, and so she actually waved and her arms got all blurry,” said Lucy, peering at the photograph over his shoulder.
“And is it possible you’re all wearing paint?”
“Don’t be stuffy, Hugh. Everyone knows you need a little theatrical paint for a professional photograph,” she said. “The important thing is that with such attention we can make a real contribution to the war effort.”
“Still, I can’t imagine your father is too happy,” said Hugh.
“I haven’t shown him,” she admitted. She folded up the newspaper page and tucked it in her pocket. “Now that we have helped him recruit his hundred medical men, he can’t expect me to just stop,” she continued. “The country needs all available men, and we are just the girls to get the job done.”
“Just because we’re at war doesn’t mean we should disregard propriety,” said Hugh. “I’m sure your father is only concerned about your reputation.”
“Why do you chaps insist on keeping the war all to yourselves?” asked Lucy. “We girls are not just going to sit home and knit while you go off on your adventures.”
“War is hardly an adventure,” said Hugh.
As he spoke, she glared. “Exactly my point,” she said. “In a time of national peril, all must be allowed to chip in.”
“I’m sorry,” he added. “Your father and I share the urge to protect you.”
“Sounding like one’s father is not the most attractive trait in a young man,” she said.
“I am an idiot,” he said, beating his forehead with a fist in mock despair as she laughed at him. “Tell me your adventures?” he added, hoping with all his heart to hear nothing but the most banal of activities.
Touring London in a hired and decorated omnibus seemed to be the group’s main activity. They had been invited to appear at the Albert Hall and gone to a recruiting dinner in Whitehall, but the omnibus seemed to thrill Lucy the most.
“And next month there is to be a garden party at the Palace, and we will provide an honor guard at the door and then join the party, each carrying a spray of tea roses.” She sighed.
“It sounds very exciting,” he said, resisting the urge to ask where they would find tea roses in October.
“You can’t imagine how much more exciting it is to actually do something in the world that matters,” she said, looking quite serious and clasping her hands together for emphasis. “So much more gratifying than the endless copying of case files, answering correspondence like some paid girl, or having to dust my father’s consulting room because he doesn’t trust the housemaid.” She looked so sad that Hugh was moved to clasp her hands in his. A ray of late-afternoon sun, dipping between rooftops, tipped her hair in rosy gold, and her breath escaped from plump lips pink with health and youth. Hugh could feel her hands tremble under his and see her little jacket fill with her sharp intake of breath.
“I had no idea you were unhappy,” he said.
“Until I marry, I must do my duty to my father,” she said. “But I trust you, Hugh, and I confess that I long to escape the very smell of the consulting room.”
“You deserve your adventures,” he said. “You deserve everything.” She lowered her thick lashes to her cheeks and blushed, and they sat in what Hugh hoped was an understanding silence as he tried to find words for a formal declaration.
“You know I have promised my father that were I to become engaged to be married, I would be content to go to Wales and stay with my aunt,” she said, her voice soft.
“It would be a relief to both of us to know you are safe in the bosom of family,” said Hugh.
“But next month is the royal garden party,” she said. She made a small pout with her distracting lips. “You will understand my difficulty?” she added.
“As a bride-to-be, surely you would have other concerns to attend to,” said Hugh, smiling. “I wish to ask you…” he began.
“No, no, do not ask me, Hugh,” she said, withdrawing her hands to wave them at him as if she were shooing away a small dog. “I do not wish to say no, and yet were I betrayed into saying yes, I would have to go away. Let us have an understanding without words, without promises.”
“What kind of understanding?” he asked. “And what will I tell your father?”
“I ask only for a few months, Hugh,” she said. “Then you will have everything you wanted. One day all this can be yours.” She waved her hand at the house to which she had just expressed a decided aversion.
“I ask only for you,” he said, wondering if she was really willing to join him in a serviced flat in the Old Brompton Road, or a small villa in the sort of distant suburb within the means of a young surgeon.
“Your integrity is one of your most endearing qualities, Hugh,” she said. “Not all men have it.” She frowned so seriously that he could not help but laugh at her.
“I can only hope you did not discover this truth on an omnibus?” he asked.
“Oh, Hugh!” she said, slapping him playfully. “This is why I adore you.”
He was surprised to find that instead of being devastated by her wish to delay everything a few more months, he felt strangely contented, if not slightly relieved, to continue just as they were. It was probably the war, he thought, inspiring people to hold on to the lives they already had. A brief image of laughing and dancing in a Sussex hop field flitted unbidden across his mind. He pushed it away and, for the next half an hour, was very earnest in paying attention as Lucy regaled him with stories of her much transformed London life.