Read Online The Report by Jessica Francis Kane - Free Book Online Page A

Land,” it became, and for more than two hundred years, the trust had fended off others’ attempts to purchase and build on the site. No doubt the founders of the charity were mainly concerned with preserving the view from their front windows, but nevertheless they had done something noble, and the charity survived. The land today, with only a few building additions (St. John’s church and vicarage in the nineteenth century, the Museum Cinema and the Tube-station entrance in the twentieth), looked much as it might have in the seventeenth century, and the income still supplied the local poor with coal.
    But if Laurie defended Bethnal Green and its high-minded history in one breath, he condemned it in the next. He thought the working classes an increasingly troubled lot. He sometimes harshly described the people who appeared in his court, but with an authority informed by experience. He saw them every day; he knew their local and domestic disputes, their confusions and misunderstandings, their habits and obsessions. What did his friends know, when they saw these people only on their occasional forays to the market at Covent Garden? And then did not even deign to make eye contact? As a metropolitan magistrate—part judge, part mediator, part counselor—Laurie wanted to improve the lives of the poor.
    Take, for example, a recent dispute before his court at Bow Street, in which a man stood accused of smashing lightbulbs and vandalizing the public surface shelters in his neighborhood. Rather than punishing the man, Laurie asked why he was intent on this damage. Mr. Brimmer explained, rather eloquently, that he thought the government’s standard of protection too low. He was forty-five years old, had fought in the first war, and followed the current one in the papers in great detail.
    “Those shelters are safe from a five-hundred pound bomb only if it falls fifty feet away. What’s the use of that?”
    Laurie asked him if he could agree to put his argument in a letter to the home secretary, then redirect his energy to clearing bomb sites.
    Mr. Brimmer eyed him, then agreed that he could. They shook hands, and Laurie inquired about his work. In good humor, Mr. Brimmer told him the family business was a bakery.
    “Brimmer’s Bread and Broken Bulkheads,” Laurie said, knowing the alliteration would be joke enough. And indeed, Brimmer laughed.
    Laurie looked across the fire at Armorel, wrapped snugly, stitching. Her skin was dry and red this time of year, symptoms of a mild allergy to wool. “How’s the landscape?” he asked.
    Armorel and their daughter, Georgina, were members of a sewing circle preparing a section of a topographical quilt for the Royal Air Force. Folds and folds of material—shades of green and gray—covered the floors of their rooms, and Laurie found bits of thread on everything. The RAF insisted these “flexible landscapes,” as they were known, were invaluable to pilots studying the terrain before bombing missions. Armorel’s circle had been assigned the hills north of Hamburg, and sewing circles all over London had other portions of the map.
    “How does a mother save her child in a crush like that? I don’t understand the geometry of it.”
    “Armorel,” he said.
    “The sewing’s fine. I’ve taken over Elizabeth Fulton’s part.”
    “Why?”
    “She’s not on it anymore.”
    “I see. Had a falling out, did you?”
    Armorel stopped sewing and looked at him. “Not at all. Toby’s been killed.”
    “Oh, God.”
    He was their son’s good friend. Andrew, also in the army, had known him since childhood. Laurie turned to the window and watched several crows balancing on the thin top branches of the plane trees in the park. Against the low sky, the birds seemed huge, ungainly. What was wrong with them? Did they grow larger in winter?
    “Might that make her want to sew more?” he said. “For the war effort?”
    Armorel wiped her eyes. “Not at the moment. That’s just