Chapter 4 #2
“Is that you, Will? Didn’t they have a horse to hire.”
“No need, Ma,” Will said. “Maggie and the children are here.”
She spun around, her hands white with flour. “Here! My dear child, you’ve come all this way alone? And I’ve not even made your bed up with clean sheets, yet. And these are my grandchildren! Oh, how splendid they are! What a wonderful Christmas this is going to be!
Some thirty minutes later, with the children changed into clean dry clothes and the bread set to rise, they settled in the parlor.
The adults had a cup of tea each, and the children had milk, though they had currently both abandoned their mugs in favor of the little feast Ma had produced from her biscuit tins.
Eva was sitting on her grandmother’s lap, with a piece of biscuit in her hand, and Billy was, rather cautiously, perched on his father’s knee.
Will had lost his heart to them both, and so had Ma, and if he still had no memory at all of marrying Maggie, he was certain it had been the best decision he had ever made.
“Billy wants Neddy,” the little boy announced, suddenly.
Without interrupting the story she had been telling Ma about Eva’s birth in a Spanish convent, Maggie dug into the little bag full of the children’s things, which she’d kept beside her. Her hand came up empty, and her voice trailed off. She pulled the bag onto her lap and looked inside.
“Excuse me, Ma,” she said. “I need to check the other bag.”
“I’ll get it for you,” said Will. He set Billy on his feet and fetched the bag from the porch. She went through that, while Billy clambered back on Will’s knee and watched, his thumb in his mouth and his eyes somber. The muffled word he said around the thumb was probably Neddy.
“It is his wooden horse,” Maggie explained. “It isn’t here.”
Billy’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Neddy?” he asked.
“When did you last see it, dear?” Ma asked Maggie.
Maggie was certain. “He had it in the Flemings’ cart.” She got up from the floor where she’d been sitting to search the bag. “I’ll have to catch them. Billy loves that horse.” Billy wriggled down from Will’s knee and ran to his mother to clasp her around the knees. By now, he was wailing.
“I’ll go,” Will said. “Mr. Fleming said they would be working in the village today. I’ll find them.”
“It’s pouring with rain,” Ma protested.
“We’ve marched in worse,” Will said. “Fought in worse, too, Ma. Billy, I’m going to get Neddy. I will be back as fast as I can.”
The Flemings were easy to find. The cart was gone from outside of the tavern, but when Will poked his head inside to ask which way they had gone, they were both there— Mr. Fleming sharpening knives on a whetstone and Mrs. Fleming examining the holes in a couple of pots.
“We can mend these as soon as we can set up our stove,” she was telling the tavernkeeper.
They all looked around when Will opened the door further and stepped inside. “Mrs. Fleming, gentlemen. Mrs. Fleming, Billy has lost his wooden horse. May I look in your cart to see if it is there?”
“I will check for you,” she replied. “Wait here,” and a moment later, she was back, with the little toy in one hand.
She beamed as she held it out to Will. “You are a good father to go out in the rain to make your little boy happy,” she told him.
But Will could not reply. As he took the horse, his hands remembered the shape and he could feel it taking its current form under his knife.
It had taken several nights, sitting by the fire in the cottage they were sharing with another two couples, Maggie sitting next to him with baby Billy in her arms.
That memory unlocked others, and for a time he was blind and deaf to his surroundings as nearly three years’ worth of experiences tumbled out of the suddenly unlocked part of his mind and filled the hole in his memory.
He suddenly realized that the Flemings and the tavernkeeper were talking to one another about him. “Never knew him to have fits.” That was the tavernkeeper, sounding anxious and a tad irritated.
“Yes, put it there, Fergus. Now, Mr. Parker, sit down.” That was Ginny Fleming. She had hold of his arm and was trying to encourage him to sit in a chair that had appeared in the middle of the room where no chair had been before he touched the horse.
“I am well,” he assured her. “My memories came back, all at once. It was the horse, you see. I remembered carving it for Billy, and just like that, everything I had forgotten since the bump on my head at Toulouse came crowding back in. It blinded me for a moment, there. I’m right again, now.
I need to get home and tell Maggie! My Maggie.
I can’t believe I couldn’t remember her. ”
“Fergus and I will see you home,” Ginny declared, and would not take no for an answer.
He invited them in at his mother’s, but perhaps they understood that he wanted to be alone with his family, for they said they had to get back to work. “We’ll pop by tomorrow before we leave town,” Ginny promised.
“Stop in for a cup of tea,” he asked, grateful to these people who had helped Maggie, but having to use all his discipline to remain calm and polite when all he wanted to do was close the door in their faces and hurry through to the kitchen and see his beloved wife and precious babies.
Ma had Eva tucked against her shoulder and was walking the floor with her, crooning as she went.
Billy was so big! Will could not believe how much he had grown. Changed, too, from a babe in arms into a harum scarum broth of a boy, clambering or running everywhere and never still.
But it had been more than a year. Children of that age grew fast. Will would have to be patient and loving.
Billy would get to know him again. He crouched down and held out the wooden horse.
“Neddy,” the child cried, and threw himself across the room to retrieve the toy. “Da made it,” he informed Will.
“Yes,” Will agreed. “I made it. I carved it with a knife in the winter of the year before last, while we were in winter quarters, and you were a baby.” Billy ignored the long explanation and Will tried something simpler. “I am your Da.”
Billy looked up from his close examination of Neddy to cast Will a look redolent with disbelief.
Maggie and Ma had similar expressions. Ma spoke first, asking Maggie, “Did you tell him that, about the winter quarters?” Maggie shook her head without taking her eyes off Will.
“I remembered everything,” Will told her. Told them both, but most of his attention was on Maggie. “As soon as I was holding Neddy, my memories flooded back.” He chuckled. “The Flemings thought I was having a fit. I couldn’t wait to get back to my little colonel and the recruits.”
Laughing, while tears streamed down her cheeks, Maggie told Ma, “He has always called me his little colonel, and the children are the recruits, of course.”
She walked into the arms that Will had opened to receive her. After a moment, he stretched one of them out to Ma.
Tears running down her face, Ma said, again, “It is going to be a wonderful Christmas.”
Even as she stepped gladly into his embrace, Billy pulled on Will’s trousers, demanding, “Up!”
“I haven’t a free arm, Billy-boy,” Will said. “Your Ma will pick you up, and we’ll all have a hug.”
So that was what they did, Maggie holding Billy, Ma holding Eva, and Will holding them all. And at last, Will Parker, a year after leaving the battlefields of Europe, felt he had come home.