The Amber Shadows by Lucy Ribchester

Author:Lucy Ribchester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

Chapter 13

She thought that the walk to town to collect the household ration herself might steady her. Mrs Steadman was suspicious but counted off the coupons for butter, sugar, milk, soap, tea, margarine into her palm.

Beatrix was right. She had to keep her head. There was no use falling apart. And perhaps it was true Moira was in the best place. Honey pictured serene lady doctors in white coats with their hair pinned up — lady doctors who had not been sent to the front line. Ambulance drivers in blue slacks with kind faces. A bed and morphine and rest, good food, unrationed food, to patch her mind back together.

Still she felt shivers in her torso as she passed the Home Guard, marching in their slack uniforms. She felt queasy as she saw an ambulance parked up idle beside the doctor’s surgery in town, and even sicker when she caught sight of a motor hearse pulling away from the church. Everything seemed to be a sign to her, everything, even the trees waving their winter talons seemed to scream that something was wrong.

She passed the postwoman, and her stomach dipped. ‘Has the second post come?’ she asked. On hearing it had, she hurried back to the Steadmans’. But there was nothing, no reply from Dickie. The post, Mrs Steadman said, was slow. ‘It would be easier to send a pigeon,’ she went on. ‘You should tie your letters to the collar of a hare, that’s what you should do. Then set a greyhound after it and send it in the direction you want the message to go, for all the good the bloody Royal Mail does.’

Honey climbed the stairs to her bedroom feeling lead in each step.

Her room felt like a prison, the air suffocating with secrets. In the pallid grey light she took out the pieces of amber. They didn’t glow like they had done in the bronze of her gaslamps. Now, in the cool day, they stole the light and reflected nothing back, a network of ugly bubbles and thread veins, the thousand-year-old tree’s blood no more special than cracked and scratched Bakelite. They seemed to take the warmth right out of her palms. All except the firebird. When she picked it up, its eyes still caught a glow, its wings were still poised half-open, half-embracing, as if they might take off.

She lay down on her bed and stared at the hard drips of plaster in the ceiling, watching as the pattern probed textured claws towards her, then suddenly popped inwards when she stared at it for too long. She sat up and switched the wireless on, crackling between stations to see if she could find some music that suited her mood. But there was only the one o’clock news. Air raids on the south coast. She knew already. The intercepted Luftwaffe signals had come through the day before. It was like seeing the headlines before they happened. Sometimes there was time to do something about it. Sometimes there wasn’t.

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