1
PROLOGUE
Aboard theQueen Mary
November 1947
“Marguerite!” The friendlier of my bunkmates, a cheerful girl named Paula, burst into our stateroom. “Come and see!” She shouted it, because her baby, Abigail, was crying again. Abigail wasn’t the quietest baby I’d ever known, but she certainly had personality.
“Come see what?” I asked. “I’m getting ready.”
“How?” Paula asked. “Without a stitch of makeup, and your hair barely curled? No, pet, you’re not getting ready, you’re hiding. Not that you aren’t ten times prettier than most of us all the same. Certainly prettier than that cow Louisa, for all her airs and graces. Thinks she’s a duke’s daughter, when you know and I know that no British toff would ever let his daughter marry some Yank who’s probably about as common as mud—because ten pounds says that’s what he is—and head off to the States, never to be seen again. Unless she was born on the wrong side of the blanket, of course. Maybe I should suggest that, whatcha think?”
“Your hair’s fixed too nicely for that,” I said. “She’d surely pull it.”
Paula made a noise in her throat. “If she wasn’t a shopgirl—a veryrefainedshopgirl, I’m sure—I miss my guess, and I never miss my guess. When your dad’s a publican, you learn to size people up pretty smartly. Same way I knew youweren’tany kind of shopgirl, whatever you say. Posh, that’s what you are, and just what Louisa isn’t. Class, the kind you get born into. That’s why she can’t stand you.”
“Not because I’m German?” I did my best to laugh. “That seems like a larger issue, under the circumstances. And makeup doesn’t have stitches.”
Paula waved her free hand. “Nah. Thatshouldbe it, o’course, but with you talking like the Royals, I keep forgetting. No, it’s that she and her little circle can’t manage to snub you, not with you staring them down the way you do. They can’t work you out, either. Now, I’m not asking why you’re here and not with your family, although I’ll tell you, everybody’s imagining the worst. Father a high-ranking Nazi, they reckon, from some noble family—is it Prussian I’m thinking of, now? Are those the touchy blokes with the monocles and dueling scars?” When I didn’t answer, she went on, “I’ve told them I don’t know and I’m not asking. Not that I’m not curious, mind, but am I asking?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Any number of times. And I believe I’ve mentioned, in reply, that my family died in the firebombing of Dresden, and my father wasn’t a Nazi.”
Paula went on as if I hadn’t answered, because, yes, my story was decidedly thin. “Louisa issureyou’re a Nazi. She’s probably imagining reporting you right now, as if you haven’t been through the wringer same as all of us to get your documents, and they’d have found you out soon enough. I’ll never forget having to strip down in front of those doctors so they could shine a torch on my privates. And asking me if I’veever been a prostitute! When I tell John about that, he’s not going to believe it. There I was, guarding my virtue that hard until I had the ring on my finger, only for some geezer to peer at my naughty bits in front of God and all the saints—and in front of all the rest of you, too. I must’ve been red as a beet, but you hardly turned a hair. Comeon,though. It’ll be gone.”
I gave up on my hair-brushing—Paula was right; I was hopeless—grabbed my coat, and followed her along passageways and up staircases. TheQueen Marydidn’t look much like a luxury liner these days—not painted battleship gray and with a big gun mounted on her main deck, she didn’t. Nearly two thousand war brides and their rather loud offspring didn’t raise the tone much, either. The regular passengers had a distinct tendency to look pained as they strolled the sun deck amidst the prams and nappies, or ate their breakfast to the sound of thousands of chirping female voices and too many wailing babies and discontented toddlers.
When we emerged onto the deck, the frigid wind whistling around us, I forgot all that, for there, on her own little island, rising from the fog, the Lady with the Lamp stood and held up her torch. A chill ran down my spine, and I lost my breath.
“That’s a sight, innit?” Paula asked happily. “The Statue of Liberty, that is.”
“Yes,” I said. “There’s a poem inscribed on the base, too.”
“Ooh, poetry,” she said. “You do know the oddest things, for a Kraut.”
“I had to memorize,” I said absently, gazing at the green lady, standing so strong and proud and sure. She was everything I wanted most to be. Of course, she was made of metal, which probably helped.
“Poem?” Paula prompted.
“Oh. Here’s the last bit, anyway.”
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“Not sure I like being the tired and poor,” Paula said. “Or ‘wretched refuse,’ either.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not very complimentary, is it?” We were both laughing, then. “But I like the part about lifting her lamp.”
“Welcoming, is what she looks,” Paula agreed. “Ooh, I think I see the pier. Crikey. I hope John remembers me! Just wait, he’ll go for some other girl instead, thinking she’s the one. I’ve only seen him once since the end of the war, and now with Abigail and all … Well, he signed the paper, so he’s stuck with us.”
