In This Grave Hour (Maisie Dobbs, #13)

by Jacqueline Winspear

It had been another long, hot summer then—the perfect English summer, they’d said—and she wondered if, indeed, weather had something to do with the outcome, pressing down on people, firing the tempers of powerful men until they reached a point of no return, spilling over to upend the world.

“We came through it, didn’t we, Maisie?” said Priscilla. “We might not have been unblemished on the other side, but we came through.” “And we shall again,” said Maisie. “We’re made of strong fabric, all of us.”

Maisie stepped away from the house, but before setting off in the direction of the underground station, she looked back and considered the many houses that seemed so ordinary on the outside—yet inside their shells lingered untold human sadness. “May they know peace,” she whispered, and went on her way.

Priscilla has always said the key to disciplining boys is in wearing them out physically so the birds in their brains fly in formation.

That’s how you get on, looking like the people who are better off than you, so you can earn more than them one day.

I mean, you try to look after them, you work hard to give them a better life than you had, and then the next thing you know, there’s a nutter somewhere over there wanting to take over the world. And that really upsets the apple cart for all of us.”

Move yourself, and you move your mind. Look at the evidence from different angles.”

Maurice always said the power in a question is not in the answer, it’s in the way the imagination gets busy when the question is at work.”

I tell you, all the money they get, these politicians, and they have nice houses to live in—yet they can’t sort out an argument to stop us all ending up at war.”

“And do you know what I saw this morning, miss? I was walking down to the tram stop, and a woman was coming towards me with a pram. I’d never seen one like it—it was like a metal box on wheels, with a little window so she could see her baby inside. It was as if the baby was in its own special chamber to protect it from gas. What kind of world will I bring my baby into? What kind of world, when the poor little mite has to have a pram like a metal box to stop it being gassed to death?”

Just because the circumstances might be almost intolerable does not mean there are not moments when the light shines in.”

I don’t see how someone could commit murder, not when there’s been so much death and going to be more. Goodness, how on earth do you do your job?” Maisie rested her hand on the door handle, ready to leave. “I do it for the dead, Miss Littleton, and for those left behind. And when I’ve done my job, Justice has to carry the weight.”

“I wouldn’t let that big dog near one of my children. German thing, you never know where its teeth might end up.” Maisie bit her lip. She had learned that sometimes it was best to let words die of their own accord, rather than fight them.

“Hard to believe how churned up this was after the war. They’ve done a marvelous job of rebuilding their towns and villages, the Belgians. If you hadn’t seen those cemeteries—and keeping them up is down to the British—you wouldn’t know a war had been fought here.” “I think I would,” said Maisie. “Not only can you feel it, but you can see the ridges across the landscape. Those scars there, as if something had scraped the topsoil—it’s where the trenches were. You can’t just fill in that amount of earth and expect it not to show.” She kept her gaze trained on the fields as they seemed to flash past. “War has left its scars here, Lawrence. And those scars might never heal.”