He ran then, skidding across the drizzle-slick cobbles as he reached her and was enveloped in a fierce hug. To his amazement, he found that his face was on a level with hers, or perhaps a bit higher.
“Lewis Finch, I swear you’ve grown a foot.” She held him off so that she could study him. But although she was still smiling, there was something not quite right about her voice, a quaveriness. Up close, he saw that her pale skin had the faint blue cast of fresh milk, and there was a puffiness round about her eyes.
“You said you weren’t coming to visit,” he said, ignoring the tiny prickle of fear. “Did you get my present? Is that why you’ve come? Where’s Da?” Then a sound from the kitchen drew his attention, and he looked past his mother into the room. Cook sat at the table, her aprondrawn up over her face, and he suddenly knew it was a sob he’d heard, for he could see her shoulders shaking.
He looked back at his mother, stepping away. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“We’ll go for a walk—somewhere we can talk,” she said, slipping her arm through his, but she didn’t meet his eyes, and from the kitchen he heard Cook sob again.
He led her blindly, out through the gate in the back of the yard, across the blackening stubble in the pasture, to the old stone wall that marked the lip of the valley. Below them, the trees marched down the slope and up the other side, their branches as gray today as the mist that shrouded them, like wraiths standing in a sea of russet leaves.
“We had a telegram,” his mother began in a careful, level voice. “A supply convoy and its naval escort were attacked in the North Atlantic—”
“Is it Tommy? Or Edward?” Lewis interrupted, the knowledge of what was coming squeezing the air from his lungs. He heard a faint buzzing in his ears, and unbidden, the names of the German battleships he’d read in the newspapers flashed before him: the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Admiral Scheer.
His mother didn’t answer. When Lewis dared look at her, he saw that she was staring down into the valley, her face still except for a tiny tic at the corner of her mouth.
“No.” Lewis tried to shout it, but the mist seemed to catch the word, dampening it in cotton-wool fingers.
“Your brothers were born ten months apart,” his mother said slowly. “And from the very first they always wanted to be together.” She turned to him at last, touching his cheek with her cold fingertips. “Oh, Lewis … I’m afraid that’s all the comfort we have.”
