“Don’t say you couldn’t,” Dave pleaded. “Please say you’ll try. We must each do our bit.” He had forgotten for the moment that this was not his war.
“Yes, I know,” Cherry breathed. “There’s mother, you know. She was a World War nurse. Now she’s directing an entire ward. Alice has her refugee children. And I—I just sit in the sun and tend the sheep.”
“Yes. And you might be the most talked-of girl in England!” Dave was bursting with his new idea. “Just go up to London with me tomorrow. My uncle has a trans-Atlantic news broadcast. He’ll arrange it all. Wi—will you go?”
“Sure! Shake on it.” The girl put out a slim hand.
“It’s just as I thought,” declared the Little Lord, as the men came stomping back into the room a moment later. “Those bombs were rather small. A Messerschmitt can’t carry a heavy load. But they can keep all of England on edge with their nuisance flight.”
“Cheerio!” Cherry sprang to her feet. “At least one Messerschmitt has ceased to be a nuisance, and that, I’m told, is because a certain Young Lord learned how to fly long ago.”
“All part of a day’s work,” the Young Lord grinned. “I’d like just such a scrap every morning before breakfast.”
At that the cook brought in cakes and steaming coffee and they all took seats by the great broad three-inch thick table that had served the Ramsey family for more than a hundred years.
In the meantime Alice was telling her young refugees the promised spy story.
“Once,” she began, “in that other terrible war, the one in which my father and your grandfather fought, there were two spies named Louise and Charlotte.”