Mr. Churchill's Secretary Read Online Free PDF Page B

houses and antiquated plumbing. But when the house didn’t sell, Maggie was forced to settle into Grandmother Hope’s battered old Victorian. And she found the house was repairable, the tea was lovely, and the English people were of a much kinder character than she’d first given them credit for.
    Those people, whom she now thought of as
her
people, were being killed at Calais and Dunkirk. Englandherself might any day be attacked—by sea, by air, by marching armies of ruthless brown-clad soldiers. The cheerful, ruddy-faced youth; the children playing jacks under Mummy’s watchful eye; the old grizzled men in the parks, walking their even older and more grizzled dogs—all mowed down by Hitler’s goose-stepping troops.
    Maggie had come to see the Nazis not as a people, as selfish and misguided and ultimately defensible as any other, but as robots blindly following the orders of a madman. One article she’d read in
The Times
was the catalyst for her hatred: about Nazi soldiers who’d invaded a town and lined up all the older Jewish women. They’d made the women, most of them grandmothers, climb up into trees and then chirp like birds. They must have been terrified, Maggie thought. And there was something about the new technology of waging war that made her realize this was an entirely unprecedented conflict.
    In spite of her own ego and inherent selfishness and petty concerns, she’d grown to love England. London was not just the place where her parents had lived before their tragic car crash but where she would have grown up if that hadn’t happened.
    She found she’d given her heart to England and wanted her to be safe. She couldn’t leave now. Running back to America would have meant turning her back on her heritage, on her home—ultimately, on herself. It didn’t matter whether John understood that, or whether Aunt Edith did, either, for that matter. Maggie had made her decision to stay, and she was going to stand by it.
    “True,” she said finally, “but if we left, then where would you lot be?”
    “If only we could get the United States—and not justyou two—to join in the fray,” David said wistfully. “The Old Man’s trying everything, you know. Practically getting down on his knees and begging Roosevelt for some old warships.”
    “I can see Roosevelt’s point, though,” Paige said. “Another war? After the last one? And the Depression?”
    “Americans,” John said, snorting. “Late to every war.”
    “The Americans
will
join!” Maggie said, annoyed, for John took every opportunity to snipe at what he saw as a lack of American involvement. “And not just to supply boats and bullets but troops, too.”
    John was nonplussed. “I fear your President has the moral compass of a windsock.”
    Maggie glared. “And Britain didn’t sit by and watch while Hitler annexed Austria and invaded Sudetenland? What about Czechoslovakia? And Poland?”
    John was taken aback. “Not if it had been up to Churchill—”
    “And up until the last few months, Churchill’s been painted by the papers as old, insignificant, a warmonger—spilling English blood thoughtlessly, and trying desperately to preserve a way of life that’s been over since the death of Queen Victoria,” Maggie concluded.
    “All right, all right, you two!” Paige exclaimed. “Do we need to separate you?”
    “
And
I’m not so certain it’s such a good idea to let foreigners have such sensitive positions in wartime,” John added.
    Annoying, annoying man
. “John, not only am I British by birth, but I’m doing my part for the war effort.” Maggie put her hands on Chuck’s and Paige’s. “We
all
are. So maybe you should be grateful for a little help.”
    David grinned. “Ah, that charming Yankee modesty.”
    “Look, I don’t mean to insult you,” John said, tracing an ancient pint ring stain on the wooden table. “It’s just that … these are uncertain times—as Diana Snyder learned too late.”
    “The girl who