Maggie Bright by Tracy Groot

Mary was nothing but a vacancy, ruled over by the one who had absorbed her so completely that nothing was left, her lord, her master, Uncle Sebastian   —Clare made her escape just in time before she suffered the same fate, and when she did, met Mrs. Iris Shrewsbury.
    No vacancy was she; she made the air quiver for the simple fact that she was in the room. She was demanding and kind and interested and controlling, and sometimes treated Clare like a child; and in all these things she was utterly unapologetic, and in all these things there were no eggshells to tread upon, no worries that Clare was perceived as utterly incapable of correct thought or action. Such notions would never occur to the Shrew. It wasn’t in her.
    The Shrew, Captain John, something in the Burglar Vicar, and now Murray Vance. Clare dashed at her eyes, laughing suddenly at Mrs. Shrew’s imperious claim upon Seville marmalade, glad to have found real people once more. Life seemed to have come full circle to a place long forgotten. A place she last knew as a child.

    Captain John seemed pleased whenever Clare popped in to ask if he needed anything when she went out. His wife had died several years earlier, and he must miss the feminine fuss.
    It was a chilly May morning on the Thames, with a brisk breeze coming down from the northwest, and she buttoned her light jacket the rest of the way as she stepped from Maggie’s boarding plank tothe dock. She faced east at her first footfall on the wooden dock, as was her habit; one day she would sail Maggie Bright east on the Thames down to the sea. She’d round at Sheerness, sail south, and follow the Channel west, then pass by the continent southward until she came to Spain and the Straits of Gibraltar; then she would enter the Mediterranean, and that would be Maggie’s first full sail with Clare at the helm.
    Of course   —once she learned to sail.
    She’d never even taken her out by motor. Maggie hadn’t left this dock since she was hers. No matter! Vision, courage, and singularity of purpose would make all the way it should be.
    Clare walked the dock, looking about. She didn’t see the captain in the boatyard. Didn’t see him aboard his fishing trawler, the Lizzie Rose . He must be in the boathouse at the dock’s end, a little bait and supply shop for boaters. His living quarters were at the back of the shop.
    She tapped on the shop’s door as she entered.
    “Hello? Captain John?”
    No one about, and she didn’t smell tea. Rather chilly in here, too   —he didn’t have the little space heater on. Odd. If he wasn’t in the boatyard or pottering about on his fishing trawler, he was here, stocking shelves or chatting with someone or making tea behind the counter.
    She turned to go, but heard a rustle. It came not from his rooms past the counter, but through the doorway to the Anderson shelter.
    It wasn’t any surprise for Clare to learn that before she came to Bexley-on-the-Thames from Liverpool, Mrs. Shrew was a devoted ARPer   —Air Raid Precaution worker. In addition to the stack of government pamphlets on how one should conduct oneself during a war, she’d brought her own gas mask and pronounced it as the only thing up to code at Elliott’s Boatyard. Upon taking a room aboard the Maggie Bright , she insisted that a bomb shelter go in at the boathouse. She had her own Anderson hut, a regulation-issue movableroom made of corrugated iron, transferred by train from her home in Liverpool to Elliott’s Boatyard, where mason workers fused it to the small supply annex built into the side of the boathouse. Clare never dreamed her name would one day label a peg upon which hung her own gas mask. A bomb shelter! Who could imagine?
    The first thing Mrs. Shrew installed in a corner of the shelter was a modesty screen, behind which sat a chamber pot. (“One must think of these things. You will thank me later.”) She also made sure that the shelter remained stocked with necessities, and periodically