The Legend of Nimway Hall: 1940-Josie Read online

  “Yes, plainly,” said as though she were holding back a question that she was too shy to ask–this woman without a shy bone in her body. “Well, then, Gideon, what are your plans for tomorrow? Anything I should be warned about in advance of your men setting off explosions in the paddock?”

  Bloody hell, had the woman been spying on them at the ice house? “Explosions?”

  She laughed and caught back her hair in a bundle. “Only that school starts tomorrow morning for the children and I prefer they not be distracted by military maneuvers in the middle of the lake.”

  Josie Stirling was a crack shot at hitting the truth. “I’ve no plans to blow up anything in particular. And you?”

  “Just more of the same. Winning the war against tyranny.” She picked up her jacket by the collar and grinned.

  The air was warm now, the fire crackling. She was standing not two feet from him, mouth damp, cheeks pink, her eyes raised to his and glistening. Every ounce of blood in his body raced toward his groin, urging him to finish the embrace they had begun that afternoon in the woods.

  Oh, but that wouldn’t be a very good idea, old boy. Not in the long run. “Well, then,” Gideon said, to his great regret, “shall we meet again here tomorrow night?”

  She sighed then nodded, smiled wanly. “Yes, of course. Half-ten, on the dot.”

  Then she was gone, taking the brightly charged air with her, leaving an empty space inside him that he’d never known needed to be filled.

  Tomorrow night, half-ten, was the only thought remaining in his head.

  Having plenty of work to do before tonight’s assignment was finished, Gideon banked the fire, turned out the light and made his way upstairs to his sitting room with its very yellow decor.

  Finally he would have a moment to decrypt the message from Arcturus. He removed the rolled-up piece of paper from the floor safe then, out of habit, positioned himself in his desk chair so he was facing the door should anyone enter as he was decrypting the message. As arranged by the SOE, they were using a simple poem code in these initial messages, simply checking that the drops and signals between them were working.

  And Arthur and his knighthood for a space

  Were all one will, and through that strength the King

  Drew in the petty princedoms under him,

  Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame

  The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reigned.

  Tennyson. Poetic and patriotic. Not the sort of message he had expected from an SOE agent, especially one as highly thought of as Arcturus. Even for a test message. But the finely wrought sentiment spoke to the character of the agent he’d yet to meet but couldn’t help admiring. A man of unwavering honor, stalwart, brave, willing to sacrifice his life for his comrades, his country, to willingly face down the fiercest enemy.

  Arcturus could be any man who regularly passed through the area: a lorryman or a local officer at the air station, a farmer, a regular soldier posted to the base in Shepton Mallet; anyone at all with a set route along the A37 and an easy exit into Balesborough, a stop that wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary to a local or the casual observer.

  Not that the identity of Arcturus mattered to him or his mission at the moment.

  Once the dead drop communication line was secured and trusted, he and Arcturus would meet in a planned live drop and would then set about establishing a vital link between a half-dozen strategic centers that would go into action in the event of a German invasion.

  His knee and back beginning to ache and stiffen from the day’s exertions, Gideon stood and stretched as he read through the message from Arcturus one final time, absorbing its words and meter, stowing away his speculation about the identity of the man on the other end of the message before he finally struck a match to its corner and watched it burn to ashes on his teacup saucer.

  He read reports until he could no longer hold his eyes open, then spent a restless night on a feather counterpane on the floor instead of in the great buttercup yellow tester bed, in solidarity with his men whose mattresses had yet to be delivered.

  Try as he might to shift his thoughts to Arcturus and the work ahead of them, he finally relented and drifted off to sleep with Josie on his mind, slipping lithely through in his dreams.

  Chapter 7

  The next day began for Josie as so many others had since the war began, and seemed to go on forever. Awake before dawn, followed by a dozen tasks that needed her immediate attention, never quite catching up with herself–seeing Gideon only from afar as she and the children were helping Mrs. Higgins chase the chickens into the secure yard for the night.

  She shared dinner with Mrs. Tramble and learned all about the first day of school, the many successes (recess and lunch) and where the patient woman could use additional help. Especially if Nimway was adding four more school-aged evacuees.

  A few hours later, Josie and Winnie were on their way back to the Hall from the dairy barn with time to spare and plans to prepare for her meeting with Gideon–more than prepare.

  A quick bath and time to change into a soft blouse and wool flannel trousers, perhaps to dash on a bit of foundation powder to cover her freckles. Certainly to comb and style her hair into something less like a bird’s nest and more like a young woman who appreciated being noticed by a man. Even this particular man, who aggravated and attracted her like both poles of a magnet.

  They had nearly reached the kitchen garden when she noticed a pale light shining through the trees, coming from the direction of the schoolhouse in the upper field.

  With all the excitement and confusion of the first day of school, Mrs. Tramble must have left a light on and the blackout curtains open. Not wanting to suffer an encounter with the ARP Warden, Josie whistled for Winnie and the dog went loping up the path ahead. By the time Josie arrived, Winnie had bounded inside, the door was gaping open and a blue-white glow was spilling out onto the gravel stoop.

  Even before she entered, she knew the light wasn’t going to be the golden glow of an incandescent bulb, it was coming from Aunt Freddy’s orb.

  Oh, damn! Wanting no part of the devilish thing, Josie snatched it off of Mrs. Tramble’s desk, wrapped it inside the folds of her jacket and slammed the door behind her and Winnie.

  “Let’s find a place to hide the thing, girl!”

  Winnie took off down the dark slope toward the lake and Josie followed, slipping and sliding all the way to the bankside.

  “As good a place as any, for now.” Certain she hadn’t seen the last of it, Josie gave the orb a wild toss through the darkness, hopefully toward the water, heard a great splash just as she felt her boots slipping out from under her. She wheeled her arms, tried to gain her balance only to have her legs slip out from under her and land on her backside into a cold, mucky patch of reeds.

  “Oh, damn, damn, damn!” Mud from head-to-toe and late again for her meeting with Gideon! Still, with any luck, the orb would take the hint and stay put for a while.

  Fifteen minutes later, Josie stomped into the library, dripping mud, teeth chattering, startling Gideon, who was lounging in the wingback chair in front of the brightly flickering fire.

  “I’m late again. Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.”

  Double damn the man for standing, as though she were a princess and he her subject, for that charming smile and those understanding eyes. “Somehow I was thinking you might need this tonight.”

  He slipped her jacket off her shoulders and wrapped her in the blanket that had been warming on a footstool in front of the fire.

  “How could you possibly know I would fall into the water?” Was he suddenly in league with the orb?

  “Was that it?” He laughed, tugged the blanket closer around her shoulders and moved her closer to the fire. “It was raining earlier. I thought you might be cold when you arrived.”

  “Well. Thank you.” She couldn’t help snuggling into his warmth, savoring his breath on her cheek as he looked down at her. “How does your tomorrow look?”<
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  He smiled again, took a step back from her. “Certainly less interesting than tonight. And yours?”

  “Apart from the usual, your mattresses. They’re arriving in the afternoon. Someone will need to sign for the delivery and move them into the upstairs rooms.”

  “Consider it done. My men and I will be grateful beyond words. Your carpet is soft, but I’m a man of flesh and bone and I’m beginning to creak.”

  Of course! Gideon had been sleeping on the hard floor. No wonder the girls had seen him limping! She’d be limping too if she couldn’t fall into her own comfortable bed every night and sink into an exhausted sleep.

  “Ah, then, good!” she said, gathering her jacket from the floor and the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. “Shall we try this again tomorrow night.”

  “Half-ten?”

  “Absolutely.”

  With the plans for the Operational Base complete and the construction materials in process, Gideon was able to spend the next evening working on his training notes for the Auxiliary Units and composing another reply to Arcturus’ most recent communique, the second exchange. A test of their codes, public news of the war in Africa, equipment requirements for the Aux Units. Soon he would request the roster of names so he could start building the unit.

  He’d seen Josie only twice today, in the morning, hurrying toward the dairy barn and later with Isaac in the garage with the Fordson. Both distant encounters, but just the sight of her had made him glad all day that he would be seeing her again that night.

  He’d arrived a few minutes early, was sitting in the library, absorbed in a book, certain that Josie would be late again.

  But as the mantel clock chimed half-ten exactly, the door to the service corridor swung open and Josie ran into the library, her dungarees covered in straw and mud.

  “I’m not late this time, Gideon. But I can’t stay. Jill is giving birth–“

  ”Good God, who is Jill? And why aren’t you with her!”

  “Jill is a lovely young Guernsey and she’s about to calve. Let’s try to have our meeting again tomorrow night.”

  “All right. Go.”

  She reached the door, returned and touched his arm. “Would you care to lend a hand? Since the war has called up every man and woman, I’m always short on help in the loafing shed. Especially at this hour.”

  It wouldn’t be his first calving, only the first spent in the company of the remarkable Josie Stirling.

  “Let’s not keep the lady waiting.”

  “Thank you, Gideon!” She grinned broadly, grabbed his hand and ran with him through the darkness all the way to the barn.

  Gideon was still dazzled by the adventure two days later, still exhausted, still in thrall to a woman who had entered his days and his dreams like a whirlwind.

  Her scent of mint one day and fresh lavender the next, her laughter, her bright eyes, her gentle encouragement to the calf and its mother at the birthing, the flush of elation on her cheeks as the cycle of life was made new again. He’d caught himself tearing up and turned away while he composed himself, and cheered along with her when the calf stood and began nursing like a champ.

  The days went by quickly in the planning of the OB, and the nights as well. He was sleeping much better now, on the mattress with his knee propped on a pillow, the wound healed enough in his judgement to abandon the dressing altogether.

  Their meetings in the library now started on time, but always seemed too short. Tonight he was going to suggest they play a game of cards, or something. Anything to keep her from dashing off to her office and leaving him alone.

  Ten-fifteen. He switched off the lamp at his desk, plunging the room into darkness that would have been complete, had it not been for a throbbing glow around the margins of the blackout shades and shutters against the northwest windows.

  When he opened the interior shutter and pulled aside the blackout curtain, a helpless dread ran through him. Bristol was aflame on the distant horizon. The pulsating orange glow was doubtless the docks again, the German offensive against English shipping went on nightly. There had been no local air raid siren warning of the action in Bristol, but crews from all over Somerset would be on their way to fight the fires and rescue people from the destruction.

  He was about to close the curtain when another glow caught his attention. Much closer by, in the darkened garden that stretched beneath his window to the far hedge. A blueish glow moving like a ghost along the gravel paths. Not the faint amber of a shuttered torch lighting someone’s way, more like a ball of moonlight carried through the darkness by a fantastical creature.

  Quite fantastical, he realized, as Josie stepped out from under the cover of an arch of lime trees and hurried along the pale gray pathway toward the back of the Hall.

  As he watched, the brightness abruptly vanished, seemed to be absorbed by the woman as she tucked it beneath the folds of her coat. The very same device she had dismissed and tried to hide from him that first night in the library.

  He’d thought of it often since then. The strong, white ball of pulsing light, embedded inside a milky oval of opalescent glass, encased inside a metal bracket of some sort, with a slightly pointed base that had caused it to roll and wobble across the floor like an American-style football.

  It was the base that intrigued him most, the source of the power. An astonishingly new sort of accumulator, obviously developed by the military. But developed where? By whom?

  If that was the case, what the devil was Josie doing in possession of such a powerful device?

  Rather than waiting for Josie to meet him in the library, he went down the backstairs to the darkened utility room just outside the farm office, where he paused in front of the closed door. He raised his fist to knock at the very moment Josie yanked the door open.

  “Gideon, hello!” she said, stepping back and smiling in surprise, the device glowing from somewhere behind her. “Am I late for our meeting? I was hoping to surprise you and be five minutes early!”

  “Actually, I’m early.” Hopefully, just in time.

  “Good, then. Shall we have our meeting here tonight instead of in the library? Then we’re both on time.”

  “Agreed.” He followed her into the office, unsure what to expect. Certainly not to find the device sitting openly in a basket of onions on the worktable.

  “Can I get you anything? Tea? A sherry?”

  “No thank you, Josie,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant as he continued, “Oh! I see you found the device from the other night. Where has it been hiding?”

  “I don’t know—” she shrugged out of her jacket and hung it on a hook by the exterior office door. “Around, I guess.”

  “Do you mind if I examine it?” Do you mind if I kiss you, was his other thought, his most pressing desire.

  She nodded. “Go right ahead, Gideon. Take the damn thing with you if you’d like.”

  A bold offer, or a feint? No. Not his Josie. “You don’t mind?”

  “It’s not up to me. Here, it’s yours.” She lifted the device from the basket with both hands, her face lit as though by the brightest moonlight. Its rays streamed through her hair, spilled across the floor onto his own trousers, his shirt, into the center of his chest, nearly blinding him to everything in the room except the woman who was now holding out the orb toward him. “Here you are, Gideon. Take it, please.”

  His thoughts jumbled by the sight of her and suspecting the power source would somehow extinguish itself should he touch it, he took a wool scarf from the bar of coathooks and bunched it onto the desk blotter. “Could you please set it here?”

  “Of course.”

  He felt her gaze follow him as he bent closely to examine the thing under the tungsten incandescence of the desk lamp. The design surprised him, intricate and obviously crafted by an artisan of rare skill. The milky glass object was held in the fierce grip of a golden eagle’s claw, its base made of gold.

  “How did you acquire the device, Josie?”

>   “I didn’t ‘acquire’ it.” She sat on her desk chair and dropped one of her wellies onto the floor. “It acquired me.”

  “What do you mean?” He wanted dearly to look at her, to share this electrifying moment. But danger lurked there in her eyes, hidden and all-consuming.

  “It’s been in my family for ages—” she dropped the other wellie “–but I’d never seen it myself before that first night in the library. With you.”

  Another fantastical Nimway myth that had no basis in science, though the memory caused his pulse to race, his senses to rise.

  The device was exhibiting energy properties completely unfamiliar to him. He was an engineer, deeply familiar with current military technology. A portable power source such as this could only have been created in a secret lab and must be returned immediately.

  “Where did you say you found this?”

  “In the yew hedge on my way back from checking on the new calf–who is doing very well, by the way.”

  “Yes. Good.” Her smile was soft and lit her eyes, nearly distracting him from the track of his question. “You found this— this object lying in the hedge, where anyone could find it?”

  “Not just anyone, Gideon. Me. Or possibly you.”

  “Me? What are you saying? Who gave this to you?” He pulled her to her feet by her upper arms, brought her close, suddenly terrified by the implication. “Josie, did anyone—a stranger, perhaps—approach you about hiding the device until it could be collected by someone else.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Josie, there are German agents all over England, looking for people just like you–“

  ”Like me?”

  “Innocent citizens who might inadvertently serve as a conduit for our country’s greatest secrets, stolen by our greatest enemies, and used against us.“

  ”Are you calling me an enemy spy, Gideon?”

  “God, no.” Please no! “Just—”

  “Just what? Stupid?” She flattened her hand against the middle of his chest and shoved him away. “A traitor?”

  This wasn’t going well. “I didn’t mean to imply–“