Jennifer thought about her last conversation with Count Robert. He’d seemed pretty sure that he was in for a chunk of England when the Norman Conquest did go ahead. But her father couldn’t have been that stupid—could he? She thought of some of the comments he’d made shortly before she crept off to France. She thought of her mother’s perpetual scolding about Radleigh’s intentions—and the heated arguments this had caused. She sat back in her chair and bullied herself into thinking about the present and future.
She looked at Michael, whose politeness was wearing thin after the priest’s apparently drunken rambling. “What will you do with us?” she asked.
“Now, that’s the question, isn’t it, my dear? You’re just not the standard runaway we set ourselves up to help.”
“Who are these runaways?” Jennifer asked impatiently. And she was impatient, though the question saved her from obvious thoughts about her father. Without being noticed, Pierre had gone out again. Now, he came back through the door and spoke in French about what may have been an approaching search of the district. O’Flynn looked at Jennifer and smiled blearily into her long face.
“Talking of miracles, just be looking at young Pierre. What was he in Rouen but cantor at one of the synagogues? Well, a slip in time saves nine, or so they tell. For sure, it brought Pierre over to the True Faith of the Cross. But wouldn’t he be wanting to know, just like the rest of us, who the real Pope was?” He looked at Jennifer’s tense face, and smiled more warmly.
“But you was asking who the runaways might be,” he said with an expansive wave of a cup that he’d managed to refill in just the moment she’d spent looking at Pierre, “Well, before The Break, it was Filipinos and the like that people of quality smuggled in to skivvy for them in their fine houses. Since then, it’s been Outsiders. They learn enough English to do as they’re told, though not to ask for pay. If they turn uppity, or pine too hard for their fields and forests, it’s straight out of a rickshaw they get pushed, to be shot on sight by the police, or dragged away by the Strange Meaters. But those who run off in the right direction—why, we’ve got our underground railway going deeper into France than your father ever went with his fags and rubber johnnies and oath of fealty to William the Bastard.” He stared at Michael. “But, if it’s help your young man’s wanting for his Empire, he’s come to the wrong place,” he said with clear finality. As if he’d understood, Michael nodded. “That leaves us the question of what’s to be done with the pair of you.” O’Flynn turned to Pierre and began a conversation in French too fast and with too strong an Irish accent for Jennifer to follow. But she waited until Pierre had gone out, and O’Flynn was smiling again over his cup.
“For sure, we can get you out of London,” he said. “We’re thinking the emergency’s over down on the Kent coast. Until we can put our things back in order, you’ll have to get yourselves down there. Pierre can tell you where and when the little boat will be coming in. Try not to write it down.” He coughed from a finger of brazier smoke, and slitted his eyes. “Best way there goes through a place called Tenterden.” Jennifer tried not to gasp, but failed and tried to cover this with a cough, as if she also had breathed in smoke from the brazier. Tenterden! That was where Radleigh had been going for Hooper. She realised that O’Flynn was watching her. She pulled out a soiled handkerchief and dabbed at both eyes. “I’m told the Managing Director of Anglo Oil has a big house close by,” he explained with an appearance of the artless. “Before he got himself lost in Oxford Street the other night, the Bishop was looking for someone to go and have a look down there. What he was thinking to find there he never did tell me. But it’s a good town for passing through without being stopped.”
Blinking back real tears, Jennifer got up and stared at Michael. O’Flynn still wasn’t finished, though. “But isn’t the Divine Economy just curious?” he asked, cheerful again. Jennifer stared at him. He gave a drunken burp and giggled. “Of all the people, in all the world, He could have brought together—and He joined two people who were already nearly connected.”
It might have been Blackfriars—though one Thames bridge is very like another from its underside, and in darkness. Jennifer tried her best on the web of rope ladders hung beneath it, but slipped every dozen rungs or so, to lie with her face parallel to a river she could hear and smell, but not see, as it flowed fifty feet below. It was then that she could hear the peremptory shouting, and the rumbling of traffic, on the upper side of the bridge. After one of the rungs snapped as she fell hard against it, she was finally picked up and carried by someone who had bad breath, and who muttered in an incomprehensible French.
Creeping through one of the bombsites on the South Bank, Jennifer tried to explain “her” plan to Michael. “We get right out of this country,” she said. “If my father knew something about the Gateway Project, I think that was part of his involvement in France. Count Robert may know something that will tell us exactly what is going on.” Just in front of her, Michael stiffened at the name and tripped against the lower part of a wall. Since discovering he had no rational plan, she’d been trying to get Michael to agree on getting out of England. Now he’d given way to the inevitable, she was simply relieved.
Pierre led them into one of the streets that had survived the flattening all about. He knocked an elaborate code on the door of a building about half way along, and stood back at the muffled scraping of bolts. He looked at her in the light of his dimmed torch and laughed. “Do not ze stars shine so brightly zis evening?” he asked with a blast of his winey breath. Jennifer looked up at the clouds that still glowed orange in the lighting from across the River, and shook her head. “But ‘ow can you not see zem? You are young. You are in love. Ze stars, zey always shine on such!”
“What is he saying?” Michael whispered in her other ear.
“He’s asking if we believe in God,” she lied. There was a light from within the now open doorway. But she stood in the shadow of the wall, and, if her voice shook, no one could see how red her face had turned.
Chapter Thirty One
Michael’s bottom was sore from the motion of his legs on this still unfamiliar riding machine. The thin cotton shorts he was wearing didn’t help. A few yards ahead of him. Jennifer raised her left arm to stop. He squeezed a little too hard on the brakes, and the wheels skidded on the smooth road. He came to a halt beside her, and wiped his face on the already stained sleeveless shirt.
“I think there’s another patrol just round the corner,” she said wearily. He followed her pointed finger, and looked at the queue of human traffic that was forming at the junction. Her own similar clothing, and the bandages he’d helped her bind tight about her chest, made her look like another boy. All that could betray her was the softness of her face. If the authorities were looking this far out of London, it was a young man and woman they were after—not two boys from the higher classes out for a ride in the sun. So far, the police they’d encountered at the main junctions had barely glanced at their grubby identification documents. But Jennifer had warned him of patrols that had machinery able to tell forgeries. Perhaps this was one of them.