Free Stokers Shadow by Paul Butler Page B

library, she tries to get her bearings. She is on Ebury Street. If she turns left, and instead of going back to Mrs. Stoker’s house, keeps on in the same direction, she will reach Buckingham Palace in less than thirty minutes, then Green Park in another five and then Piccadilly.
    She sets off. A breeze sweeps past, playing with her hair, scattering small leaves and brown paper about her feet. The air smells of soot and diesel, mixed with earthy, natural scents. Newspaper vans and omnibuses thunder past, their huge wheels spinning, exhaust pipes coughing out dark smoke.
    Soon the streets change, becoming wider, busier and more commercial. As the buildings become loftier and more ornate, with lions’ heads, dragons’ heads, griffins’ talons and angels’ wings carved into the stone, she begins to feel light and impervious to fear. Her expectation for unseen hands to reach out from doorways and correct her erring path begins to fizzle away into the sunlight. Maybe Mrs. Stoker won’t even notice. Maybe it isn’t even against the rules. She is less convinced by this second thought than by the first, but she has counted the cost and taken her risk and now she is enjoying the crime.
    Shiny wrought iron spikes to her left herald what Mary knows to be the Buckingham Palace grounds. The young women who pass her now are in the highest of fashion, with loose-fitting dresses, falling necklines, braidless hair and a carefree nymphlike manner. The way they walk is different too – gliding and effortless. Around the square outside the Palace and along the Mall, they float past in groups, linking arms witheach other like wild spring flowers turned into necklaces. Or sometimes a young woman will hold onto a dark-suited man, her spindly arms pulling at him possessively – an odd and almost indecent reversal of protector and charge. These creatures revel in the early fall, laughing at the first falling leaves and the hint of pre-decay richness which wafts and billows between Green Park and St. James and along the tree-lined promenade which leads to Admiralty Arch. Mary watches these amazing, confident women; she sees the light touch of a youthful white hand upon a shawl or shoulder fur, an action claiming the luxury of the moment rather than warmth. She is drawn by their confidence. Yet she is dimly aware there are multitudes of greyer people on the street who are less noticeable and more like herself.
    Mary continues under the grand porcelain-white arch and into Trafalgar Square with the giant black lions and the towering obelisk. The great commander, Nelson, seems to sail along in the air under the white passing clouds and Mary feels dizzy when she tears her eyes away and looks back down into the square. She sits down on the broad paw of a lion, feeling at one with the crowd from whom shouts and exclamations come without shyness or reserve. The thunderous square with its teeming life and pigeons merge in Mary’s mind with the shingle and rock beaches of her home in summer, where children dance circles on the shell-littered shores, dodging gulls and loading buckets and pans with nature’s bounty. There, too, the divisions between people seem to dissolve and the group is like one many-headed being, unified by the experience of the magical season. Although she misses Anne and her mother,she feels them in the strangers who absentmindedly press by her shoulders, and she is thrilled that such innocence and joy can be found in the very heart of the famous forbidding city.
    The sun becomes stronger as Mary moves away from the lion, her protector. She goes to a stall and buys two postcards from the man in the checkered cap in the newsstand who can’t stop talking even between customers. She will write to them both tonight she promises herself, and she will describe how she spent the afternoon. She passes by the National Gallery, thinking she ought to go in, but then decides it would be sacrilege to turn