China Blue (The Dudley Sisters Saga Book 3) by Madalyn Morgan (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

tears and her friend tried to console her: ‘He promised to come back and marry you, Maisie. Don’t cry now. Upsetting yourself like this isn’t good for the baby.’ Maisie looked at her friend, her eyes wide with incredulity, and howled. Claire looked briefly at the girl’s stomach. If he’s coming back to marry her before the child’s born, he’d better only be going away for the weekend, she thought.

A train came in and Claire was almost knocked over by women of all ages running across the platform. She turned to see servicemen waving out of the windows and doors. There were more tears, this time of joy. On a platform further along, girls were dancing round excitedly as another train came in. Claire turned away and, weaving this way and that, finally left the platform.

The concourse was no less crowded. In a sea of Navy, Air Force blue and Army brown, it looked as if half the armed forces were coming to, or leaving, London. Claire looked around and spotted the sign for the Underground. Moving against the tide, she pushed her way across the concourse. She suddenly felt very lonely and wondered when she would next see Eddie. They had been together since the first day at Morecambe. If Eddie had passed her French oral exam the SOE might have recruited her. She would have loved to have told Eddie about the SOE; her father too. She had never kept anything from her dad before. None of the Dudley sisters did. He was easy to talk to. He understood things, where her mother often didn’t. She wanted to tell him that all her hard work had paid off, make him proud of her, but she couldn’t. Claire bit her bottom lip. She shouldn’t have told Bess, but she knew that while Bess wouldn’t tell anyone, she would say the right things to put their parents’ minds at rest if she wasn’t able to write home. Claire smiled. Bess had always been there for her and her sisters. Always thinking and caring about other people. Claire wished her older sister could find someone to care for her, love her. If anyone deserved to be loved, Bess did. But she couldn’t think about Bess now, or anyone else. Leaning against the wall near the escalator, Claire took the Underground map from her pocket. Reminding herself that she needed to change at Leicester Square for Baker Street, she returned the map and stepped onto the moving stairs.

After travelling south through four stations, Claire left the train and followed the signs for the Bakerloo line. She jumped on the first train to arrive at the platform, checking first that it had Hammersmith on the front. The first stop was Piccadilly Circus, the second Baker Street.

Alighting at Baker Street, Claire felt the nerves on the top of her stomach flapping like a thousand butterflies. She quickly found number 64. It was an imposing five-storey building with rows of windows, one above the other. She focused her mind on the business in hand and, head held high, walked to the door. Lifting the brass knocker, she rapped twice.

The door was opened by a tall slim woman with dark hair that was loosely waved at the front with a small neat bun in the neck. She fingered her spectacles, which were attached to a gold chain around her neck. ‘Miss Dudley?’ Claire nodded. ‘The colonel is expecting you. If you’d like to follow me?’

Colonel Smith’s office was on the fourth floor at the end of a long corridor. The woman – his secretary, Claire thought – opened the door without knocking. ‘Miss Dudley is here, sir,’ she said, and stood back to let Claire pass.

The room was big and square – and cold. It wasn’t as smartly decorated as Claire had imagined it would be. Nor was it furnished adequately for someone of a colonel’s rank.

‘Sit down, Miss Dudley.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Claire put her suitcase down by the door, walked across bare floorboards to the colonel’s desk, and sat in the only other chair in the room.

‘I hope you’re not cold. We moved into the building in October,’ he said. ‘You’d think the basics would have been sorted out by now.’ He was clearly annoyed that they hadn’t been.

Claire had noticed how cold it was as soon as she entered the room, but said, ‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘Good.’ The colonel looked down briefly at a sheet of paper on his desk, lifted his head and smiled. He seemed different, more relaxed than when she had met him at Coltishall. ‘Tell me about yourself, Miss Dudley – about your childhood, your family, where you were born and brought up.’

‘My father served with the Royal Mounted Engineers in the last war,’ Claire began. ‘His regiment built bridges, on horseback. He had five horses killed under him. The last was in 1918, three months before the end of the war. A bullet went through his knee and into his horse’s heart. The horse was killed and Dad was invalided out.’ The colonel said nothing, so Claire carried on. ‘Dad was a wonderful horseman. When his leg healed he got a job as a groom on a country estate called Foxden. I was born there, in an estate worker’s cottage.’

‘Tell me where you went to school,’ the colonel said.

‘I went to Woodcote Infant and Junior School in the village down the road from the estate until I was eleven. I passed the Eleven Plus, but my parents couldn’t afford to buy the grammar school uniform, so I went to the Central School in Lowarth. That’s the nearest town to Foxden.’

‘Was it at the Central School that you learned to speak foreign languages?’

A smile threatened. ‘No, sir. The Central School only taught English. I learned Polish from a pilot who escaped from Poland and crashed in France. He and his comrades were brought to