Fragile Wings Read online

  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  By the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Books Available From Bold Strokes Books

  Synopsis

  Evelyn Hopkins leaves everything she knows and heads to London at the height of the Roaring Twenties, intent upon living her life to the fullest. But will the dark cloud of the Great War keep her from happiness and love?

  Edward Hopkins returned from the war, but he is a shadow of his former self, broken by his experiences. His sister makes him a promise: to live her life well enough for both of them. London is a colorful world of jazz, fashion, and opportunities for lust and romance at every turn. When Evelyn meets handsome, eccentric Jos—with her butch style and gentle manner—she knows true attraction for the first time. But can love sustain them through tragedy and carry Evelyn into a new life she can be proud of?

  Fragile Wings

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  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

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  Fragile Wings

  © 2016 By Rebecca S. Buck. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-547-3

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: January 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Ruth Sternglantz

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  By the Author

  Truths

  Ghosts of Winter

  The Locket and the Flintlock

  A Queer Kind of Justice: Prison Tales Across Time

  Fragile Wings

  Acknowledgments

  The first draft of this book was written about a decade ago. It has been read by friends and family, rewritten and reread on many occasions. It’s impossible to thank everyone who has helped and influenced me through that period. You all know who you are, and I hope you know I am grateful.

  A few people do deserve to be mentioned by name. The earliest beta readers of this book were Michelle Lisbona and Amanda Tindale. The novel is immeasurably changed from the first draft, but your influence remains. In its present form, I thank Cindy Pfannenstiel (and Michelle Lisbona once again) for careful reading and thoughtful comments. Mum (Jayne Timmins) and Dad (Jeff Buck), you both read this book and offered encouragement when being a published writer was just a distant dream. Thank you.

  That this final version is a huge improvement on the first draft is partly due to my amazing editor, Ruth Sternglantz, not just for your well-judged editing of this novel but for the way you’ve helped me improve and grow as a writer in the five years I’ve now known you. It’s still an honour to have you help me craft my words and to consider you a friend.

  I thank the whole Bold Strokes Books team, those involved in creating this beautiful book and the wider team, who are all fabulous. A family I feel grateful to be part of.

  The changes in what was a draft manuscript called Butterfly to the finished novel Fragile Wings are many and varied, Evelyn’s changing fortunes, loves, and emotions reflecting my own over the years. The journey this manuscript has been on has been, in many ways, a personal journey too. Allowing it to fly free into the hands of its readers is at once liberating and frightening. Thank you to each of you who picks it up and reads my words.

  For all those who did not directly influence my writing, but who have been part of my journey, I extend a huge thank you. Again, you know who you are. That there are now too many to name where once there were very few is a measure of how far that journey has taken me. You’ve all played a part.

  A final acknowledgement must go to my literary influences. I don’t believe I’d have been able to create the world of 1920s London and that desperate, decadent post-war era without reading the words of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Michael Arlen, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.

  And to Chris Morris. For everything you are and for loving me. When I write romance now, I know what it means.

  To my great-grandparents who lived through the Great War. Particularly to William J. Buck (c.1892–1928), my paternal great-grandfather, who survived the conflict only to succumb, ten years after the end of the war, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, to the long-term effects of being gassed, leaving his wife and two young sons.

  We are not very far removed from the generation who witnessed it and lived beyond it, remembering.

  Prologue

  London, 1916

  The skies above Greenwich were dark, cloudy, and starless that night. But still the shadow was visible as it loomed into view. The unworldly visitor from a foreign place, bringing only destruction. A vast black oval against the night sky, a darkness against the dark. Then the fire was unleashed.

  Searchlights roamed through the night, their vivid beams illuminating the giant Zeppelin, but being able to see it only made it more terrifying. Floating above the houses and factories of London, it dropped its bombs with no apparent effort.

  The night was quiet no longer. The explosions, so loud they made the ears ring, caused walls and floors to shake, filled the air with the rumble of collapsing masonry. Fires crackled, springing to life where hearths and gas mains had been. The acrid stench of smoke, the dry dust of crumbled brickwork, made it difficult to breathe.

  This was the horror of this Great War. Wars, for centuries, were something fought on a faraway field. But the massive Zeppelins brought the war to London. As if it wasn’t enough that the people had sent sons, husbands, and fathers to die in the trenches, now the Germans aimed their bombs at the families waiting at home.

  Joselyn Singleton crouched under the heavy kitchen table of her family home, her hands over her ears. All she could think of were her twin brother and her parents. She had not seen them since she had returned home and had no way to know where they were in the house, or even if they were home. She had only been inside for a few minutes when the raid had begun. The first bomb had shattered the windows and she had taken shelter under the table.

  Joselyn, halfway through her eighteenth year, had been working as a conductor on the buses all day. It suited her rather more than being a volunteer nurse, the option many of her friends had taken. She was rather squeamish about the sight of blood and, besides, she did not think she could bear to see suffering on so great a scale. Before the war, she’d been culti
vating a career on the stage, but that had felt very frivolous in such a time of desperation. So now she clipped tickets on buses in her smart uniform, rather enjoyed the freedom to roam around London, and tried not to remember that she did so because there was a war raging across the sea.

  Of course, she could not forget. Her own brother was part of the war. Vernon was not away fighting, but rather serving a clerical duty at a desk in London, as a result of a string of childhood diseases that had left him with reduced lung capacity and made him unfit for active duty. She supposed she should be ashamed that she was glad, but he was the other half of her, her twin, and she could not bear the idea of hearing of his death via telegram one bleak day. His administrative role was just as fundamental to British victory, and both of them were rather scornful about the supposed glory in battle and prayed for an end to the madness.

  Now, Joselyn cowered under the table and desperately wondered where Vernon was. He sometimes worked late into the night, but he could equally be somewhere in the house, or visiting their neighbours. Bombs were exploding across Greenwich and with every explosion she winced. Her parents had been to visit her mother’s sister in Chelsea but she had no way of knowing if they were still there.

  Another bomb fell, closer this time, so close that she heard objects in the house falling. The dark room was now illuminated with an orange glow from the fires burning outside. She could hear men’s voices, shouting urgently.

  Then there was a crash above her, a flash. And then, nothing.

  Devon, 1918

  “Promise me, Evelyn!”

  Evelyn sobbed and struck her brother on the shoulder, with no intention to harm him, simply to express her anguish. He stood solid, his eyes imploring her.

  “How can I promise that, Eddie? How can you ask me to even think about it?” Evelyn’s voice was hoarse with crying. She’d barely stopped since Edward had received his papers, demanding he go to fight for his country.

  “How can you not promise it, Evie?” There were tears in Edward’s eyes too, a strain in his voice.

  “Because I don’t want to even consider that you won’t come back, Eddie! I can’t think about it. If I promise you, it’s like tempting fate. I couldn’t live with myself.” She looked up into his familiar face. Other young men from West Coombe had gone to fight, and had died. But it couldn’t happen to her brother. He was too kind to kill, too vital to die. She reached up a hand and stroked his cheek.

  “Evie”—Edward cradled Evelyn’s face in his hands—“I don’t want to think about it either. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to see anyone else die.” Evelyn could hear the fear in his voice and anxiety gripped her heart tighter. “But I don’t have a choice. You wouldn’t want me to refuse to go, would you?”

  “I wish I could…” She knew there was no alternative. Edward was no conscientious objector—his patriotism, though latent, had been stirred by the struggle against Germany. Although it had not turned out to be the quick and glorious war they had hoped for, that day in ’14, he still thought there was something worth fighting for. They had always known he would reach the age where he would have to go to the front if the war did not end. There was still no sign of it ending.

  “I know, Evie. And if it wasn’t for duty and all that, I wouldn’t go. But since I have to, please, promise. If I don’t make it back, live your life for both of us. Do something extraordinary. Don’t just live and die here in West Coombe. Strive to be happy—don’t settle for contentment.”

  Edward’s eyes had grown wide and desperate. Evelyn could sense his pain. It wasn’t an idle expectation he had of her. On many nights she’d sat up with him in the sitting room, talking about how she found life rather too small, how she wanted something more but wasn’t sure what that was. He always told her he felt the same, that one day they’d leave together if they had to. Now he demanded she commit to that, even without him.

  “But you won’t die.” Her protest was quiet.

  “I might, Evie. I might. And if I don’t, then we’ll go on as before. But if I do, in the moment when my life is slipping away, if I can think of you doing everything we’ve talked about, and more, then I will be satisfied and at peace.”

  Evelyn held his gaze for a long moment. The pain in her throat was so intense she could no longer speak above a whisper. “I promise, Eddie. I promise. But please, don’t die.”

  Edward smiled sadly. “I’ll try. I promise you that. And thank you.” He bent to place a light kiss on her forehead. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she did not try to stop them.

  “I love you, Eddie.” Edward did not answer. He simply held her close. Her memories of their childhood together, of that innocent happiness, tormented her. He was just over a year older than her. It was a gap of three years down to their younger sister, Annie, and another two years again to Peter, who was just twelve. Edward and Evelyn had always felt themselves different to their siblings, older, wiser, and more worldly. Edward, as the eldest son, had received the best education, but everything he’d learned at the High School, he’d shared with Evelyn. His help had dulled the pain, three years ago, when she’d been required to leave school and help her mother and father in the town grocery shop. A girl’s education did not matter so greatly, providing she knew enough not to be ignorant as a wife and mother.

  Her mind went back further, to playing on the beach in the bay with Eddie, digging deep holes in the sand. Eddie would tease her and say she’d dig all the way through to Australia. The picture in her mind changed again. Eddie at her dolls’ tea parties, pretending happily to drink from the miniature china tea set. Eddie at his birthday just last year, delighted with the cake Evelyn had made for him. It had always been Eddie and Evie. Although she felt a sisterly love for Annie and Peter, she did not share the level of friendship and the meeting of minds that she did with her older brother.

  And now he would be snatched away from her and taken to a foreign land, where men who did not know him at all would try to take his life. She felt the sobs rising again and held him tighter.

  Chapter One

  November 1927

  Evelyn Hopkins slipped out of the back door of her home about half an hour before the time her father would usually rise. She’d not slept at all, lying awake for a while in the empty room. She reflected on the stories of women she had read in the newspapers. These were modern times—the war had changed everything. There were women who were lawyers now, civil servants, doctors. Women who lived alone and knew their hopes of marriage had died in the mud of Flanders. These surplus women, as she’d seen them referred to, had no choice but to be independent. Even before the war, the suffragettes had made their voices heard, and not always quietly. These people made her world seem small, her expectations so limited. Now it was her time to be brave and see what came of it.

  She thought of her brother, too, and wanted to go back to him. Had he slept last night? What impact would her decision have on a body and mind already so damaged, a man who had lived through such trauma?

  She whispered into the early morning silence. “This is that moment, isn’t it, Eddie? That we always talked about, like birds and butterflies. The moment where you take to the air and find out if you can fly, or if you’ll just plummet to the ground. But even if you plummet, at least you had the chance of flying.”

  If Eddie could go to war, live through a war, she could do this. Edward had climbed onto a train, then a ship, and had been transported to a foreign land where men were trying to kill him. So many other men had done the same. So many had not returned. This unexpected trip to London with a half-planned scheme to stay awhile and see a little of the world was really nothing more than a tourist jaunt in comparison. It was certainly nothing like as dramatic as it felt.

  As she walked the three miles to the station, she thought about Edward. He had returned from the war, although, for a while, they’d believed him dead. After the Battle of Valenciennes, they’d received a telegram to say he was missing. So many of the missing turned o
ut to be dead that her family’s grief was instant and deep.

  Other families in town had lost sons, fathers, uncles. The community tried to support each other, as they all tried to fathom the loss. But Evelyn had not wanted their comfort. Eddie was gone and she was certain no one felt it as deeply as she did. Of her promise to Eddie, she’d thought very little. Loss and emptiness pervaded everything.

  But a few months after the end of the war, they’d received a letter from a military hospital near Brighton. A solider who had been transported there from France at the end of hostilities. His face had been badly wounded and heavily bandaged, as had both of his hands. His uniform had gone and somehow there was no trace of his identification papers. He had not spoken since he had first arrived at the hospital. Eventually he had written his name and place of birth on a piece of paper. Tracking down the Hopkins family in a town as small as West Coombe had not been difficult.

  Evelyn remembered her parents’ delight. Edward was not dead and he was coming home! She was delighted too, the heavy weight of grief finally lifted. But the thought of Eddie so injured he could not speak made it impossible to dispel the darkness entirely.

  They’d gone to meet him from the train, walking the same roads and lanes as she did this morning. Evelyn’s memory of the day was vivid still, seven years later. The steam from the train, the black coal smoke, hung heavy on the platform. Passengers alighted into a haze and looked around confusedly for those who had come to greet them. Evelyn and her family peered through the fog for the figure so familiar to them. They could not see him anywhere, and her mother had begun to wonder out loud if there was some kind of mistake.