A Song Unheard (Shadows Over England, #2)

by Roseanna M. White

The army would either straighten him out or crush him when he refused to be straightened. Either way, he wouldn’t come home the same person he’d left as. Either way, it deserved some mourning.

She’d been musing about whether they could work a secret code into knitting somehow. A letter assigned to every stitch. A for a knit, B for a purl, C for a yarn over, D for a make-one-left. She’d come up with a whole alphabet. . . but was no good at actually telling what she’d done just by looking at the finished product. Someone else could, perhaps. Someone who had years of experience with knitting.

But a lie was just a matter of mathematics—the correct proportion of truth and falsehood, delivered at the correct rate, with breaths and blinks interspersed at correct intervals. Lies were easy. Until one had to confess them to one’s priest. But surely it wasn’t a sin to protect one’s brother from the Germans. She was ninety-eight percent certain that God approved.

“We are neither of us fond of falsehoods, but sometimes the Lord asks us to do the unexpected for a greater cause. We are helping Britain. We know that.”

But family policy said nothing stolen could be given as a gift. So Willa had cut her hair and sold it.

Handsome, charming men were all the same. Flirting with a woman long enough to get what he wanted from her, then flitting off to the next. Leaving the poor girl in a state of panic that could last for a year. Years. And never once bothering to come back and see if she had survived his leaving.

He would no doubt teach her rules. And she detested rules. What were they but contrivances created by the powerful to keep the masses in line?

But then the realization that it had taken someone else to give her sister that happiness. That Willa, and the family they had forged from necessity and sheer grit, wasn’t enough. She was never enough.

He didn’t expect an answer. God had never answered him—though to be fair, Lukas had probably never really listened. Never really expected any kind of response. Had rarely prayed beyond the words uttered by rote during Mass.

In that nebulous someday of the future. Someday when he was older and ready to be boring. Someday when the star of his fame had dimmed. Someday when he cared more about pleasing them than about pleasing himself. It had never once occurred to him that there wouldn’t be a someday—which proved what a fool he was.

But how did one go about turning filth over to a God of purity? How did one get to know His voice? How could one ever escape the fear that one’s sins had ruined more lives than one could ever put to rights?

“I’m sorry.” The words—simple, small—brought Jules’s feet to a halt. “I beg your pardon?” Was it that odd for him to apologize? Lukas tried to think of another time when he’d said those little words in a similarly serious tone—about his own behavior—and came up blank. Blast, but it was a wonder he had any friends at all.

Where was God’s voice in these everyday noises? Perhaps learning to pick it out would be akin to finding that one voice in an orchestra—a particular cellist or horn player. It was by no means easy when the whole point of the symphony was to hear a creation somehow greater than the sum of its voices. But it could be done when one had a practiced ear.

A father, was He? Yes, perhaps so. Absent. Invisible. Someone who set a life in motion and then disappeared, leaving his family to fend for themselves and spend their every second longing for him. To be with him again, in her mother’s case. To know who he blasted was, in hers. Yes, God was just like a father. Never there, except when it was to rob her of what little she had.

“I daresay they give only what doesn’t make them feel a pinch. And how is that generous? It is only worth noting if it hurts.” Like Pauly, who gave what he didn’t really have to keep orphans from starving. That was benefaction worth touting.

“Kriegsraison. The right of a government to disobey a law if it is to accomplish a wartime objective or avoid extreme danger.”

But Belgium . . . A nation has only the rights it is strong enough to protect. Yours, fräulein, cannot stand on its own. And so it can offer its people no rights.” It itched so much it burned. “It is God who gives us our rights.” “Nein. It is the state. And when your state is weak .

The ordinance of 1899 gives the military the right to kill any civilian who is assisting the enemy or their allies.” Her blood ran cold. “Define assisting.” He shrugged. “There is no definition. It is entrusted to the soldiers to determine that in the moment.” A chill wracked her. The killing was far from over, then. And they would do it with impunity.

Thieves dealt simply in things, which could be replaced easily enough by the marks who lost them. And in the case of their family, they made it a policy only to steal from those who could well afford the loss. Spies sold information that got people killed. And one couldn’t just replace a life, no matter how deep one’s pockets.

But if it weren’t, if she admitted it, if she drew that line in the sand, didn’t that then mean she was admitting there was a side she was on? Something greater than herself or her family that was worth fighting for? That was dangerous. That could lead her to make decisions that put something above her family.

“There is a saying, I believe, about hiding our lights under a basket. Perhaps Jesus was talking of our faith, but I believe it applies to the gifts He has given us as well, n’est-ce pas? This miracle He has given you, ma cherie—you must not hide it. You must share it with who you can and spread that light. The joy that only music can bring. I like to think it is a sacred duty. A . . . calling.”

They hadn’t known then that he would be gone within months. But if they had, they wouldn’t have spent those weeks any differently.

“At some point, Willa-Will, you’ll realize that you’re letting them win by not letting anyone close. You’re being nothing but what they made you—an abandoned child.”

But maybe he’d just never known true depth of feeling until these last few months. He’d just never discovered that when something hurt enough, it didn’t demand noise and fire—it demanded silence and ice.

The twelve who had stayed, become family, were just a portion of the ones he’d taken in for a night or two, until they split again. Street rats didn’t often like to stay in one place for long.

“You can spend your life regretting what you’ve lost. Or you can thank the Lord for what He’s given. We could have been alone. Each of us. We could have struggled and fought and starved and likely died or landed in prison. But instead . . . we have a family. A blamed good one, if you ask me. One I love every bit as much as I did the one I was born into.” More. More, because they’d chosen each other.