He unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on the bridge, climbed on the rail, and dove in.
“What took you so long?” she asked as she swam into his arms.
25
THAT’S IT,” DAVID Aldredge said.
“What do you mean that that’s it?” Joce asked.
“That’s all the story Edi wrote, or at least it’s all that I have. Alex McDowell left the papers to me in his will, and I don’t know if that’s all he had, or if Edi wrote more and it was lost. At the end, Alex was pretty bad.”
“Bad?” Jocelyn asked. “What do you mean?”
“Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t remember who he was, much less anything about a story sent to him many years ago. However…” Dr. Dave paused, as though for a drumroll, “I found something interesting just a few years ago. You know how it is, boring day, playing on the Internet, and I typed in Dr. Jellie’s name.
“This is an excerpt from a series of books about World War II. As far as I know, it’s the only place Dr. Jellicoe’s name is mentioned. Would you like me to read it to you?”
“Yes, please,” said both Luke and Jocelyn.
Dr. Sebastian Jellicoe’s contributions to WWII were never acknowledged during his lifetime, or even afterward. Anyone who met him didn’t come away talking about his great brain or how he could look at a scrambled-up jumble of words and tell at a glance what it said. What people always remembered about him was his great storytelling. He could go to the grocery and come back with a story worthy of being published.
For myself, at the time a young and eager student wanting to learn at the feet of a master, the story I remember best was about the young couple who probably saved his life. It was near D-day in 1944, and Dr. Jellie told that he was sitting by his fire on a cold, rainy night, half asleep in his chair, when he heard the noise of a horse and a man shouting curse words. He said that for a moment he was so befuddled that he thought it was Father Christmas and the fat man had just collided with his roof.
Instead, it was two tall, strikingly good-looking young Americans, and they’d come tearing across the countryside in the middle of the night in the ancient racing carriage of his old, grumpy neighbor named Hamish. Dr. Jellie said the man couldn’t get along with anyone and as a result he was left alone. It was told around the village that he’d once been a driver of carriages in races and that he’d won nearly everything until an accident made him quit. He retired to his father’s farm and spent the rest of his life complaining to his long-suffering wife and children.
But on that cold, drizzly night, here came one of Hamish’s buggies being pulled by a horse nearly as old as Hamish, and driven by a girl so tall and beautiful that Dr. Jellie said he thought maybe he’d died and was about to enter Heaven. She looked like Boadicea riding into battle.
In the back of the buggy was a young man who was taller than she was, just as handsome, but a man who obviously hated carriage riding as much as he adored the young woman.
“You certainly paid me back,”
he said to her when he got down and after he’d lost his dinner in the bushes.
“I don’t like your driving and you don’t like mine. We’re even,” she said as she smiled at Dr. Jellie and introduced herself as Eddie, and he was David. Over the years Dr. Jellie had forgotten their last names and I’ve often wondered who they were and what happened to them.
He invited them into his house to have some tea. Young David followed him inside the house, but Eddie, like the good horsewoman she was, put the horse and buggy in the barn first. When she came in, her dark hair was wet, her clothes stuck to her, and both men stared at her, speechless, for a while.
She was the one to break the silence. “Here, I have this for you.” She then handed him a copy of Time magazine that was a few weeks old.
“And what am I to do with it?” Dr. Jellie asked.
“There’s a message in it from General Austin,” she said. “I’m his secretary.”
“Ol’ Bulldog Austin. My goodness but I haven’t seen him in a long time. You mean no one’s shot him by now?”
“Everybody wants to,” David said, “but no one’s done it yet.”
“I think you should look at the message,” Eddie encouraged. “I think it’s important. You’re to go back to London with us.”
“Am I?”
“It seems that someone knows what you’re doing for the war effort,” David said.
“Oh, everyone knows that. Mrs. Pettigrew delivers the envelopes with my lunch. They’re all marked Top Secret.”
David and Eddie looked at each other with their mouths open.
“But—” David began.