The Stars We Share Read online

  “June,” he says. He exhales, and then it’s as if he’s himself again, the affected public school chap gone and replaced by the boy with stars in his eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  They have developed rituals for these reunions. They go to the kitchen and bother Cook, who adores Alec and has made his favorite cake, a sandwiched Victoria sponge, special for him. Alec and June sit at the heavy oak table in the kitchen with thick mugs of tea, and June’s heart warms at the way he trails his fingertips through the extra jam at the seam of the layers. Then, full of cake, Alec and June lie on benches in the conservatory and talk about their schoolmates, working their way back to the way they are here, in Fenbourne, at home. For the first time, Alec is quiet about school, and she can’t quite put a finger on why.

  Later, they stop at the cottage and spin the globe in Aunt Constance’s parlor, Alec quizzing June about the geographical details he knows she loves. After a while, he stops the globe with his palm across India and sighs. “In India my ayah told me stories about painting the world with mud and saffron, so I wanted to show you, but . . . I haven’t any saffron, and the mud here is all wrong.”

  “But . . .” June frowns. “Why is that bothering you today in particular, Alec?”

  Alec shrugs, the small boy showing through for a moment. “There’s a new fellow at school, from Pondicherry. He was talking about the monkeys who lived out behind his house.” He looks down at the globe, his fingers tracing the equator.

  Now his reticence about school makes sense, if there is some new talk of India, or any of the kaleidoscope of things that makes him fall into memory. Sometimes June wishes he could be more here, more now. He’s been in England for almost seven years, and now and again she feels as though he thinks he’s working out a punishment for something, and then he can go back, join the cavalry with his uncle or some such idea. But how could he be so far from her? What would either of them do? But then he’ll smile, or perform spectacularly for his side in the annual village cricket match, and she’ll go back to believing he almost feels at home here.

  “It’s not just mud,” she says, hoping to distract him. “It’s all the present and past of the riverbank, all at once.”

  He grins at her. “Historical mud, then? Possibly some old Normans catting about in it?”

  June laughs. “Quite.” Something is shifting between them, and June knows he can feel it too, this new thrum of tension between them.

  “I missed you.” He stares down at the globe, his ears red. June has never made a boy blush, as far as she knows. Or at any rate, not like this. Not in a good way.

  “I missed you too, Alec. I’m glad you’re back.”

  He smiles at her, and June, abruptly aware of how near he is, says, “It’s awfully warm up here, isn’t it?”

  “We could go sit in the garden,” Alec says, and June nods. They make their way outside and sit beside each other on the old bench beneath the larches. After a moment, he says, “Once upon a time, there was a river, and on that river there lived a bear.”

  He had been taken from the forest as a cub, but he was too small to fight the other bears in the pits. And there was a keeper, a man named Rowland who had spent too much time among the animals of the forest, and he believed that a bear was almost like a human.

  On the south bank of the Thames, Rowland’s bears were known for being smarter and larger than the other bears, but as likely as a wild bear to take off a man’s head. But the small bear, who Rowland taught to dance, was known to be his favorite.

  The Thames froze hard that winter, and tents sprang up almost overnight between the boats held captive by the ice. A group of men from one of the theaters built a pit out of rocks and ice and bags of ash. They asked Rowland for a bear, and another man for a brace of hounds to torment it, and when Rowland said no, they spat at his feet.

  He walked the ice for two days, wondering how to keep the little bear safe. A princess from India watched Rowland from her sleigh, pulled by immaculate white oxen. The glassy eyes of the furs she wore shone so bright Rowland nearly believed she balanced an actual leopard around her shoulders. Maybe she was a witch, he thought, and he pulled his tattered coat around him and walked on.

  He pauses, and June reaches out and puts her fingers on his wrist. The air tightens between them. Then, as he leans closer and her face turns up to the sun and his smile, a clatter of lorry and work boots pounds along the lane. Alec jerks away, his face going crimson.

  And June reminds herself to breathe. All in good time, she thinks. Like the ends of the bear stories, like everything. All in good time.

  * * *

  • • •

  The summer they turn eighteen, Alec takes her up the River Lark in a borrowed punt. The water is running high again this summer, and she trails her hands in it like a Victorian heroine. Alec grins down at her, his shirtsleeves rolled up over taut forearms, and she’s glad to have this time to spend with him. She has seen the way other girls in the village look at him, and soon he’ll be off to university, where she imagines he will cut a dashing figure. He’ll play cricket for his college at Cambridge, and she can see already how he’ll look in the whites, standing ready with his bat on the endless green of the pitch. She is going to Oxford, to read mathematics at Somerville College. She would have liked it if Alec had come to Oxford too; she can imagine them punting on the Thames and wandering the ancient town together. But he will be happy at Clare College, following in his father’s footsteps. At least he is staying in England. When his uncle Roger had visited over Easter, full of tales about the Frontier and the bandits of the Hindu Kush, June had felt Alec’s longing for India to be as dense as the thick weave of a tapestry.

  She closes her eyes and listens to the water, to the shush of the pole against the current and the riverbed, imagines the light splashing of a frog somewhere, or a fish. The afternoon climbs through her like a film, all crystalline black and white.

  Alec whistles quietly. Then he says, almost under his breath, “June? There on the bank.”

  At first she doesn’t see it, but then the otter moves again, gliding into the water with a suspicious glance at Alec, the punt, everything.

  “It’s good luck,” Alec says, and goes back to guiding them up the river. And then, before she’s really ready to be there, wherever there is, he adroitly steers the punt into the bank and ties it to a willow tree’s convenient branch. He anchors himself on the riverbank and reaches down for her. She takes his hand, and for just a moment, there’s a shift between them.

  “Look,” he says, pulling his gaze from hers, and helps her up the gentle slope of the bank. In the field opening before them, there are five horses the color of sugar just before it burns. They’re grazing, and then one tosses his head and sends his mane sparking out from the arch of his neck. He whinnies, his ears pricked forward, and then he runs, gathering speed. She is still holding Alec’s hand, and she knows he will not let go.

  When he turns to face her, his eyes questioning and all brown and gold in the sun, she says nothing. And when he bends to kiss her, his hand still tight around hers, she lets him.

  Is this how it happens, then, falling in love? In stages for years and years, then one swift tumble of feelings at the end?

  BOOK TWO

  1940, Fenbourne

  The news from Dunkirk is appalling—German forces everywhere, the French and English shoved off into the docks in chaos, equipment abandoned. June has never felt more useless in her life. At the vicarage, she tunes in to the wireless with her parents, greedy for news about where the Germans are, hoping always for a morsel of new information about Alec’s squadron. If she thinks too much about the peril Alec is in, the war threatens to swallow her.

  With her father in his study more, drafting sermons meant to help the village through the darkness, June is untethered. But she doesn’t need the scroll of maps, except to act
as a sort of rosary to ward off her fears—all of Europe exists in her mind, the borders and fronts porous and shifting as she ponders the span of the war. Yet the vicarage feels claustrophobic, and she’s glad to escape to the comforting shimmer of midsummer sun on toadflax and yarrow when her worries become too vast.

  She bicycles through the village, visits Alec’s aunt, does sums in her head. For the first time, she regrets the way she accelerated through university; had she taken her time, she would have the possibility of school in the autumn. Although—the war might have stopped that too, the way it’s stopping everything else. She feels selfish, sometimes, fretting about that. After all, Alec’s path through university has been interrupted, his service in Cambridge’s student RAF cadet program transferred to the No. 600 City of London Squadron. They fly sorties as the war in the air fills the skies with menace, and when a cluster of planes passes overhead, June stops what she’s doing—is Alec among them, just out of reach? His squadron changes bases so frequently that she is often a step or more behind, but the dots on the maps in her head help. But then in the night she worries—Alec is doing his part, risking his life every day for King and Country, but what is she doing?

  Her mother has taken in a ragged cluster of children evacuated from London, and the press of that duty helps June, although the chaos sometimes leaves her feeling a bit strangled. Her mother says they’re doing good work, important work, providing a place for the children. And June knows the truth of that—these children may well be alive because they’re in Fenbourne, bedded down on cots in June’s old nursery, surrounded by wallpaper with pictures of rabbits and cats in woolly jumpers and ridiculous hats. June has always hated that wallpaper, and she doesn’t wish it on the evacuees. When eight-year-old George Cowan, a banty little Cockney, takes a pen and a bottle of India ink to the animals, she secretly supports his cause. Other than George, though, June finds the children daunting at best, and she’s glad enough to accept the help of the girls from the village, who seem perfectly able to navigate the tumult.

  Letters come from Alec, always a combination of his tendency to tell her everything and his need to be relatively circumspect about his squadron. She stores the letters in a small wooden box, keeping them close to try to hold the worry at bay, even as it blurs with her frustration that she’s not doing more.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s a damp Sunday in August, the sun too hot through the rain, the sound of birdsong and frogs from the fens almost too much to bear, when her father sends for June. Waiting in the drawing room with her father is an old friend of his from his own university days.

  “June,” Mr. Attwell says, kneading his hands anxiously before him, “you remember Sir Reginald, I’m sure?”

  “Of course,” June says. She puts out a hand, and one of Sir Reginald’s eyebrows quirks upward as he reaches to shake it.

  “Can’t say when I last saw you,” he says. “A dog’s age.”

  “Quite,” June says. She stands before the men, wondering whether she should look bold or demure. Her mother would counsel demure, but . . .

  “You’ve just done at Oxford?”

  “I have,” she says. “Applied mathematics.”

  He laughs quietly, his mustache bristling across his upper lip. “Don’t be shy, Miss Attwell. You took a double First, if I’m not much mistaken? And Firsts in languages as well?”

  June blinks. Her academic honors at Somerville College are a source of pride for her, perhaps too much pride, if her father’s sermons are any indication, and she is unused to talking about them. They often seem to have no real purpose in the life she sees playing out before her, although sometimes there is a tug from an unseen string, pulling her toward something bigger that she can’t quite name. Hearing her accolades from someone else is new, and doubly so in the case of someone like Sir Reginald Cooper-Byatt, whose career at Whitehall is something June’s father has never described clearly; it is incomprehensible that he knows, or cares, what she did at Oxford.

  June nods, trying to find her way through the conversation. Next to Sir Reginald, her father frowns, his hands wringing together so intently that June idly wonders if they might burst into flame.

  “I believe we have a mutual friend,” Sir Reginald says. “Floss Corbett.”

  “Oh, yes,” June says. “He was one of the Fellows at Balliol. He took me under his wing.” Floss is the Honorable Alastair Corbett, an earl’s youngest son, twelve years June’s senior, and, outside of Alec, her closest friend. One of the lecturing Fellows in the mathematics department, nominally attached to Balliol and not part of the faculty at Somerville, he had read her research and challenged her endlessly. There had been innumerable nights when their insular group of mathematicians had stayed up together until nearly dawn, drinking sherry and building ever more complicated puzzles to challenge one another. By the start of her third year, she had become his confidant, despite their age difference, and he her mentor.

  “Corpus Christi man myself,” Sir Reginald says. “Any rate, Corbett speaks quite highly of you. Said you might be just the girl we need.”

  June smiles, pleased by the reference Floss has given her, and even more curious as to what Sir Reginald might be asking.

  “It’s clerical work mostly,” he continues, “lot of Foreign Office claptrap, but we need girls who will do it right the first time.”

  “Anything,” June says, startled and confused. She glances at her father. He nods encouragingly. Clerical does not sound like much, and yet. The words Foreign Office seem magical, quite the opposite of Fenbourne. And she will be helping, doing her part, performing her duty. For a moment she is lost in the idea of living in a flat in London, going to Whitehall or somewhere else where people are actually doing something.

  Sir Reginald smiles. “Good girl.” He looks at her father again, more serious now. “You worry too much, Attwell. We’ll take care of her.”

  Her father regards her with a watery, benevolent smile. “It will be good for you, I imagine, keep you busy while you wait for your young man to come home.”

  Sir Reginald chuckles. “Yes, I expect she’ll be considerably occupied. Lots to do.”

  The three of them discuss it a bit more before Sir Reginald leaves, and June’s mind turns to the lists she needs to make, the whole unknown future for which she must plan. She’d been away from home for school, but this will be very different. This time it will stand for something.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next few weeks pass in a blur of aptitude tests in London—drills to test June’s acumen at Morse and simple codes like the Caesar shift, complicated crosswords run on very tight clocks, stilted conversations in German about the weather or what she might find at the greengrocer. It would all feel so basic, except that everywhere she goes there is an undercurrent of tension. It already seems so long ago that she’d gone downstairs to find Sir Reginald waiting with her father. Not a week later she’d gone up to London, to the Admiralty, where a liveried page had led her through the hushed corridors to Sir Reginald’s office. He had sat behind a wide ocean of mahogany and slid a paper across to her. Sign, he’d said, and then we’ll chat, yes? Floss had been there too, as sleek and ageless as a rook, and stooped from a long-ago fever and the cane it left him dependent on.

  They had given her a moment to realize she was looking at the Official Secrets Act, enacted to fight espionage in the years before the Great War, and bolstered not long thereafter: Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, it began. She had paused over that and the dire tone of the rest of it, and Sir Reginald had watched her hesitate and smiled quietly. You’re right to think it through, he’d said, as she’d read it again. Everything you’ll do with us will be strictly confidential. You’ll report to Corbett, but not a word to anyone else—that would be treason and handled accordingly. She had considered the Rubicon she was about to cross, and wh
at it would mean. She had always told Alec everything, and now that would be different. But she had known as well that signing the Act was what would let her do her part for King and Country. And so she had taken a breath, excited and a little scared, and signed her name. Attwell, Floss had asked her then, grinning like a fox, do you remember when I showed you the Vigenère cipher back in your second year?

  * * *

  • • •

  In October Floss takes her to an old manor house in Bedfordshire, where a cluster of mathematicians and engineers show her how best to sweep the dial of a wireless machine and pick even the tiniest sounds out of the emptiness of silent frequencies. She learns about ionospheres and frequencies, and how to change the tubes in the back of the wireless—wherever she’s going, Floss tells her, she may need to fill more than one role. So she absorbs everything they teach her, and before long her rudimentary skills at the wireless blossom into an aptitude for telegraphy and plain-language intercepts.

  As autumn deepens, June goes back to London, where she’s staying with Ainsley Finch-Martin, a friend from Oxford, although it often feels as though she spends more time at the commandeered girls’ school in suburban Mill Hill. Her days are full of Morse code and increasingly convoluted discussions in German. Almost everyone she works with comes from a background in maths because, as Floss explains, the newer codes need more lateral thinking than language thinking. The night after he tells her this, June lies awake, remembering how much time he had spent at Oxford guiding her into taking German and more theoretical mathematics. From this distance she can see the skeleton of what must have been his plan all along—how long had he known there would be another war? How long ago had he decided to insert himself into her life with the aim of bringing her into his corner of this strange secret world?