The Last Night in London by Karen White (reading list .TXT) 📕

“But this—” I slid the cut photograph of the woman on the bench closer so they could compare. “It’s a different nose from the one of the woman on the bench. Completely straight and smooth. And look.” I tapped the photo, showing the nearly hidden mark on Precious’s neck. “There’s this, too. It’s concealed but not completely. But in all of the cut photos of the woman with this nose, it’s not visible at all.”

“So it’s not the same woman?” Hyacinth asked—a little gleefully, I thought. As if she enjoyed puzzles, even personal ones.

“No. It’s not.” I turned to Colin’s father. “James, would you mind turning your head a little, so we can see your profile?”

With a questioning look, he did as I asked. I felt rather than heard the intake of breath of the three people standing behind me. I turned to meet Colin’s eyes. “What do you think?”

“I’m not sure what to think. But one thing I do know is that whoever that woman sitting on the bench is, she is somehow related to my father. And to me, too, I suppose.”

“But who is she?” James asked. “Is that the elusive Eva?”

I stared at the photo for so long that I began to lose focus. Precious’s words echoed in my head. Just because a person is lost doesn’t mean they want to be found. She’d said that about Eva. And she’d liked to imagine that she and Graham had run away together to their house by the sea.

I recalled the thought that had bounced around my brain when I’d first emptied the purse back in Precious’s flat. A thought so outrageous and unbelievable that I had pushed it aside, unwilling to recognize it as the truth that had been dancing around me longer than I cared to admit. It startled me to realize how long I’d known, but had been too immersed in my own drama to look up and acknowledge it. And because I knew it hadn’t been my secret to tell.

But the time had come for Precious to explain why someone who is lost might not want to be found. It was time to help a dying woman find atonement.

I looked up and met Colin’s eyes. “No,” I said. “That is definitely not Eva Harlow.”

CHAPTER 37

LONDON

FEBRUARY 1941

In the months following Precious’s revelation, Eva waited. Waited for Precious to make some kind of plan for her baby. Waited for the bombs to stop, for the fires and the destruction and the death to end. For Alex to release her, and for the weather to warm.

And she waited for Graham.

She hadn’t seen him since November, when he’d kissed her in the Savoy’s basement. When he’d told her they had left so much unsaid. That they’d both made mistakes and would need to forgive the unforgivable. She wanted to ask him what he’d meant, to explain. But he remained elusive, a ghost around each corner as she walked to work or headed out at night with Alex. She felt watched, and she found it oddly comforting. She continued to deliver envelopes to Chester Terrace, unsure who would tell her when to stop. And she waited.

She also worried—mostly about Precious and her unborn child, the child Precious thought might be due in April. Despite Eva’s furnishing her with pen and paper, Precious wouldn’t write to Paul to tell him about the baby. With some shame, Precious had admitted that the last time she’d seen Paul, he’d told her he was married. She didn’t want to have any further communication with him. Eva’s plan of soliciting help from his parents had evaporated, leaving her with no other option than the hope that Paul might try to contact Precious.

Christmas came and went with little remark. The weather remained dull, wet, and cold; although people were quick to say that it wasn’t quite as cold as the previous winter, snow and frost did nothing to raise a Christmas spirit or disguise the rubbled ruins that huddled like frightened children on nearly every street.

The one bright spot had been the survival of St. Paul’s during the brutal air raid on the twenty-ninth of December. The WVS had assigned Eva to tea duty for the firemen known as the St. Paul’s Watch. She’d sat in the cavernous crypt under a vaulted arch near Lord Nelson’s tomb, amid the firemen’s coats and hats, with a makeshift tea cart and tins of biscuits and pitchers of milk. She had no idea that Hitler had chosen that night for the Luftwaffe to destroy the landmark cathedral—along with what remained of the British people’s morale.

The first wave of planes came as a new shift was suiting up. The lights flickered, and the floor echoed with the impact of shells exploding nearby. Richard Kobylt, a teacher by day at Turner’s Free School for Poor Boys, held tight to his hat and looked at Eva with wide eyes. “Hitler’s angry tonight, miss. Not going to be many tea breaks for us, I’m thinking.”

And there hadn’t been. The church was hit that night by twenty-eight incendiaries, each burning ember and piece of falling ash doused by the tireless firemen, who together saved Wren’s architectural masterpiece from disaster.

At dawn, Eva climbed out of the crypt, dismayed to see daylight through the east-end wall of the cathedral, but amazed that the church seemed relatively unscathed. As she made her way back home, passing through the smoking streets that surrounded St. Paul’s, the dome of the church hung over the pinkening sky of the burning city like a phoenix. It was a miracle in a city desperate for miracles.

As the gray days progressed and her baby grew inside her, Precious became quieter and seemed to turn inward. Eva found herself missing her friend’s constant chatter and perpetual good mood; she dreaded returning home from running her daily errands, making a round of the shops clutching her ration books, to see that her friend still