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Back When We Meet Again
Chapters (57)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Prologue
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Thirty-eight
  43. Thirty-nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-one
  46. Forty-two
  47. Forty-three
  48. Forty-four
  49. Forty-five
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  52. POPULAR BOOKS FROM THE ERA
  53. When We Meet Again
  54. A Conversation with Caroline Beecham about When We Meet Again
  55. Discussion Guide
  56. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  57. What’s next onyour reading list?

Late at night Alice’s eyes flashed open. She was lying on her back, something misshapen and lumpy pressed against her side. She rolled over and reached down to lift the bedclothes, uncovering the tiny form of her newborn. But Eadie’s eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving, and Alice screamed and screamed.

She woke with a start and sat bolt upright, heart pounding as she panted into the darkness, her nightdress clinging to her damp skin. She gradually took in the unfamiliar surroundings, her breathing ragged as she struggled to work out where she was. Tears sprang from her eyes as she realized. She was at Penny’s house in Primrose Hill, and it was over a week since Eadie had been taken.

Alice wiped her eyes on the bedsheet as she tried to recover—to separate the real from the imagined, what she knew had happened and what was part of the nightmare.

Loud shrieks pierced the stillness, followed by a chorus of otherworldly cries. Then it registered: the cacophony was from the nearby London Zoo. Many of the creatures woke around dawn, and for the briefest moment Alice was drawn into a happy memory of zoo visits with her father.

She groped around on the bedside table until she found the lamp and switched it on, a small halo falling across the iron bed and the carved wooden cabinet. The rest of the room was still in shadow, except for the oak chest containing her few possessions that stood underneath the casement window. Her journal lay open on the bed, and she leafed through the pages of scribbled notes: not quite stories but memories her father had shared and which she’d recorded for Eadie. She reached the gray pencil-shaded face of the elephant, a child riding high on its back; she’d left the image in monotone but colored in the elephant’s vivid headdress. It was supposed to be Elor, who had been at the zoo since 1918, a favorite among the keepers and visitors. While the experts had said an elephant would never breed in captivity, Elor defied them by having two calves.

See, miracles do happen, Alice thought as she studied the picture.

She would find her daughter, and she would read her father’s stories to her.

Alice went to the window where she’d sat up late looking out across the rooftops, the panorama of London a checkerboard of dark and light because some buildings had been razed. The small attic window opened out onto a ledge that she’d climbed onto. From there she’d watched the sun set and wondered if Eadie was in any of the houses spread out before her.