‘N-No, you are surely mistaken?’ she stammered.
‘Am I? I have a hidden radio. There are fierce battles under way near Warsaw. The Soviets are advancing from the south and the east. When they get close, those bastard Nazis will...’
He gestured to the dark pits and held an imaginary gun to his head.
She stood on the precipice of the pit, her thoughts spiralling.
Nathan gripped her shoulders.
‘Do yourself a favour, Dorotha, and wake up to the reality. He or she who hides, survives. May God be with you.’
Dorotha staggered, so weak with exhaustion, it took every bit of concentration to focus on Nathan’s face. Her feet were burning from frostbite and her thoughts were racing.
To go into hiding would mean forfeiting their food rations. Who knew how long it would take for the Soviets to reach them, if at all? They could starve to death in hiding. And if they were discovered, they would be executed on the spot. But if she chose to ignore Nathan’s advice... She looked down into the pit she had just helped to dig. Staring down into her own grave was so chilling, the realisation cut through the fog of her thoughts.
Those bastards would toss her in with the bodies of so many others. By the time the Allies arrived, the falling snow would already have covered over the unmarked graves. She would forever remain a haunting question mark. There was no easy answer to this. Dorotha tipped her head back, felt the flecks of snow settling in the hollows of her face. A desperate desire swept through her.
Secret Society. I wish you were here to help. I have a child to keep alive. What do I do?
19
Joyce
London, April 1941
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Bulletin No. 22
Friends. On this strangest of wartime days, I leave with you my favourite Virginia Woolf quote fromA Room of One’s Own... ‘I like reading books in the bulk... Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.’
Yours with love, Joyce
Ten hours to go. Then it would all be over. The travelling library would park up for good. So many stories would remain unread, imaginations just that bit duller, lives a little more colourless.
‘Ready?’ Adela asked, shaking her from her reverie.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ Joyce replied.
Adela eased her foot off the clutch and they drove in silence to their first stop, Joyce gazing out of the window as North London slid by. The sky was a handkerchief of clear blue and a fresh breeze chased clouds across the patched-up rooftops. London was such a curious sight these days. Pigs in royal parks. Allotments in Buckingham Palace. Libraries built over underground tunnels and bunk beds on station platforms.
‘I wonder what Dorotha’s looking at right now?’ Joyce didn’t know what made her say it.
Adela’s fingers tightened round the steering wheel. ‘I dreamt of her last night. She was standing in front of a high bridge and I kept pleading with her to cross the bridge, to get to safety. But instead, she turned to me and smiled mysteriously. Then she was falling, falling through a deep, dark forest, but instead of trees it was filled with books, their spines the trunks.’
Joyce lapsed into silence, trying to work out what to reply, when her gaze was snagged by a newspaper billboard.
‘Pull over.’
Adela parked and Joyce dashed out and bought a copy of theDaily Herald.
‘Oh no . . .’ she cried, scanning the headline.
‘What is it?’ Adela called from the library van window.
But Joyce couldn’t speak.
virginia woolf believed dead.
