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ready for the Blackshirts to disrupt the May Day parade, and they showed up on schedule, jeering and harassing. There were fistfights on side streets as groups peeled off and then rejoined the march scratched, bruised, and bloody. At some point, Decca saw her sisters Diana and Unity, both statuesque like twin nautical figureheads, up on some prow pedestal or perhaps just standing on cars and above the crowd as they liked to be, waving their swastika flags and giving the Nazi salute. Decca shook her fist back, though they were too far away to see her. She later said she would have gone for them, too, anything to shake their smug confidence, but Esmond and Philip held her back and then threw themselves into the fray. Decca saw a fascist gang armed with rubber truncheons and knuckledusters beaten back by the Bermondsey faction. Later, Esmond and Philip would wear their bloody cuts and black eyes as badges of honor.
     
    DECCA’S MOTHER AND sisters Debo and Unity continued to visit when Esmond was at work. They brought gifts and fluttered around Julia, whom Muv thought “too thin.” Every week, Decca would bring her baby to one of the Labour Party’s free health clinics to be weighed and for a dose of free cod liver oil. Toynbee admired Decca’s resourcefulness, her “light-hearted maternal competence.” Then Julia caught the measles.
    As soon as she had heard of the latest measles epidemic raging through London that May, Decca had visited her clinic to ask about the danger to Julia. The overworked, inundated nurse explained about the contagion of childhood diseases and the immunity conferred by a breast-feeding mother. But a mother could only confer immunity if she had had the disease herself, and Decca hadn’t. There was no inoculation. A few days later, both Decca and her daughter contracted the disease. Decca suffered with a high fever for two days. Esmond did his best, with nurses to help, but little Julia caught pneumonia and died on May 28, 1938.
    Did Decca blame Muv, who believed in the good body’s ability to heal itself? Or Esmond, who had stubbornly refused Nanny Blor? Or herself, for
acquiescing? Nanny Blor might have known what to do. Decca couldn’t listen to anyone’s sympathy. Philip hadn’t wanted to, but one drunken night, Decca and Esmond forced him to tell them what people were saying at their dinner parties: It was because they’d exposed their child to the vapors and stink of the East End. Esmond had been roundly excoriated, while she was supposedly some kind of pitiable, mesmerized zombie. Their marriage, strangers and friends alike supposed, would never survive this.
    Decca and Esmond left London the day after their baby’s funeral. They wanted to escape and to grieve without the added burden of family solicitude. Esmond had made it his business to put a lot of distance between the Mitfords and them. He knew they would have to run for it before the women in their black clothes led them back consolingly to the bosom of the clan. Esmond and Decca agreed they could best console each other if they got as far away as fast as they could. They made for Corsica, though not before Decca wrote a polite thank you letter to Debo. “Dearest Hen, Thank you so much for writing. We are going tomorrow morning, so I do hope you will write to yr. hen. Please give my love to Muv, & thank her for her letter & for offering to help with the house, but as a matter of fact Esmond has already arranged for Peter Nevile to try & let it for us. If any of you hear of a likely person, would you let him know?”
    The Corsican months included many nights of weeping and drinking and regret. Decca swam in the sea and let herself be fussed over by the ladies of the Grande Hotel de Calvi, who had heard the whispered gossip. Everyone knew her secret, though no one was crass enough to say it aloud. They plied Decca with the local delicacies: the sea urchins, strong Corsican cheese, figatelli , donkey sausage, and dark purple wine