Chapter 11
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
—Charles Hamilton Sorley
To Germany
For days after the lecture, Ash was haunted by dreams of the Somme. Night after restless nightmare, she found herself slogging through God’s thickest mud while fire rained from heaven and grown men wept tears of angels.
Each morning when she opened her eyes, they landed first on the government-distributed gas mask, abandoned on a chair in the corner where she had dumped it the day it arrived, unwilling to contemplate a future where it would be needed.
Still and all, each morning was somehow brighter, the promise that today might be the day she’d go see Rook sweeping away the gloomy cobwebs for a time.
She should have sought him out the morning after her lecture, but she managed to convince herself it was all a dream.
She might have gone the day after that, but her feelings were too much a jumble of love and fear and grief.
Then a letter arrived from a photographer asking her to turn her lecture into an article to accompany his photographs in Picture Post, and another chance had come and gone again.
Ash prepared for each day like she was going into battle, pulling on first one stocking and then the other, her civilian uniform, like the puttees that wrapped her legs in France. Then she painted on a mask so her students might not see fear written in the shadows beneath her eyes.
Of course they knew something was coming—everybody knew. The children had been issued gas masks too. But they wouldn’t know it from her, on that point she was determined.
Instead, she taught them subtext and poetic form, and she pretended every moment wasn’t in vain, putting one foot in front of the other just as Rook had shown her in the trenches of the Somme.
“I don’t want to write an essay on war poetry,” young Madeline complained. “I don’t want to study poems written by boys.”
“You can choose any poem you like. It doesn’t have to be from the war,” Ash assured her.
“You prefer war poets.”
“Perhaps I do. But if you think they were all boys, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
Deciding the children had been cooped up from too much winter learning, Ash turned them loose to run as fast as lions and fly on falcons’ wings.
“Are we downhearted?” she asked as they escaped onto the playground.
“No, Miss!” they laughed. Silly teacher, always saying silly things.
One of the boys had brought a football, and soon sides were chosen and lines were drawn.
It was strange how a tiny moment—a strain of music, a familiar scent, a child’s plaything—could transport a body right through place and time.
Maybe it was Rook’s resurrection from the dead that made her maudlin, but there was Ashley, with the winter sun warming her face, trying desperately to be present in the moment, when the simple act of watching a young boy kick a ball as hard and fast as he could sent her reeling twenty years into the past.
She was only called back by the sound of little Mary wailing, and when Ash checked her forehead where the errant ball had left its bright red mark, she half expected to see, imprinted in ghost-inked letters, the words no referee.
“Not even a bump. Just the badge of a warrior,” she said, kissing the hurt away and sending the child back into the fray.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, taking the train to Temple Station after school. More like an instinct, like a bird flying south for winter or a pigeon with a message heading home. Her heart was drawn where it was vital for her to go.
When she turned the corner onto the Strand, they near collided, Alex Rook and she.
“I was coming to see you,” he said as she reached out to steady him.
“I… thought I’d meet you halfway,” she teased, as though she’d planned their encounter right there in the street.
“Shall we pop round to The George?” he asked. “Let me buy you a bite or a drink?”
“I can always eat,” she quipped, though it pinched at her heart to remember TomTom’s bottomless pit.
They chose a plush and cozy corner in the far back of the pub, requesting ale and Scotch eggs for a treat, but as the proprietor hurried away to fill their orders, he may as well have whisked their words off too. When there’s so much to say, it can become harder than hard to begin.
“Does—” she tried.
And, “So—” he started.
Both froze, waiting for the other to continue.
“Please,” Rook said, relinquishing the conversation but not her gaze, and it felt as though he were asking for more than her thoughts.
Ash cleared her throat. “Does your leg cause you an awful lot of pain?” she asked, wondering when it happened, and where, and how.
“Most people would say a thing which isn’t there can’t possibly hurt you.” The gravity of his words sunk low in her gut, and she turned her face towards the window so he couldn’t see the sadness in her eyes.
“We both know that’s not true,” she ventured.
He tapped the table absently, and when she looked back, he was staring deep into his ale.
“The prosthetic can be a challenge,” he finally admitted.
“But we’ve had a good long time to get used to each other, and I’ve borne worse.
” Then he did look at her, and she didn’t need to ask him what he meant.
They both knew he was looking at the worse which he had borne.
They’d been brutally severed from each other’s lives without anesthesia, and if his experience had been anything like hers, it nearly killed him, injuries aside.
He cleared his throat. “So you’re a woman,” he said echoing his observation from the night of the lecture. “I suppose that’s why I couldn’t find you after the war.”
Ash flinched, and he tore his gaze from her, as though he’d meant to smooth over the rough edges of his words and hearing them out loud he knew he’d failed.
Trying not to choke on the lump within her throat, she nodded, wanting desperately to reach out and take his hand.
Not only had she lied to him, her deception had led him on a wild goose chase, searching for the boy he thought he knew.
Perhaps he couldn’t forgive her—how could he?
She wasn’t sure she could forgive herself.
He studied the table, flattening his napkin as though ironing out her lies.
Would this be how it ended, the tale of Ash and Rook? Had she finally got him back after decades only to have him use Scotch eggs and ale to ease their final parting?
This, right here, the betrayal in his voice and in his eyes, was the one thing she’d feared most upon returning to London at the end.
The question of how one who called you their closest friend could look you in the eye and mislead you about something so intrinsic.
How something so intrinsic could be the least consequential thing at the very same time.
Ashley made a choice at the age of barely eighteen, with one singular thought foremost in her mind: saving her brother.
There’d been no room for sorrow about the falsehoods she would tell, the friends she’d have to hide from, deceit by omission, lies on lies on lies.
She’d taken out a loan with interest, and the balance was coming due.
“Was any of it true?” he rasped, his voice tight like a coiled spring, his brow crumpled with regret.
“True as Troilus,” she promised him. “Every word except the part where I’m not a man. For a little while, I thought you’d guessed.”
Rook nodded, but his face still looked like he could cry. “All the world’s a stage…? Suppose I should have. You really go by Charley?” he asked, using his fork to mush his already mushy peas.
“Short for Charlotte.”
“You joined up with your brother’s papers?”
“That part is certainly true.”
“I always thought you meant you were underage. Always wondered what would happen when they finally came for you.”
“The beauty of my plan. Charles and I are twins. I took his place. His duty became my own. No one missed me except my mother.”
“No sweetheart left behind?” he halfway teased.
She snorted and shook her head.
“So that makes you…” He studied the ceiling, calculating the years. “Forty-one? I suppose it’s impolite to ask.”
Ash smiled. “Forty-one in April.”
“And you were once called Sparrow?”
“Spatzi. The German word for Little Sparrow.”
“Your baker?”
“Yes. I suppose she missed me too.”
“You love Dickens and Shakespeare? And poetry? You detest cherries?”
She nodded. “With a passion.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
“Well then,” he said, seeming to come to a decision. “I suppose that’s that.”
It was Ashley’s turn to hold back emotion as her eyes burned and her chest heaved racking breaths. Did that mean he’d forgiven her after all?
“Don’t cry, Little Bird,” he said, reaching across the table and taking her hand.
“I wanted to tell you. But after a while, it was too hard a knot to untie.”
He nodded. “Did everything turn out as you hoped it would? For your brother I mean?”
Ash shrugged. “He made his way to Spain for the duration of the war. Didn’t write, so he didn’t know I’d taken his place.” She shook her head. “I suppose it was a foolhardy thing for me to do, but I never imagined he was resourceful enough to get himself out of the country.”
“No. Not foolhardy. Brave.”
Ash shook her head once more. “I was terrified. But I was more afraid of what would happen if he were caught.”
“Jail?”
“I never actually thought he’d go to jail. I imagined he’d be sent to the Front instead, where he would try to run away again.” She cut herself off and glanced at him, wishing she could suck the words back in.
His grey eyes looked down at the table, sad and haunted. They both knew the punishment for desertion. They both knew she’d feared Charles would end up dead.
“Well,” he finally said. “You saved him from all that.”
“I suppose. And round and round it goes.”
He tilted his head, curious.
“Don’t you feel it?” she asked, clutching his sleeve, unwilling to lose him a second time. “The inevitability that it’s all happening again?” Which meant just like the last time, war could find a way to steal Rook from her yet again.
“No. For the first time in decades, I feel hope.”
She tried to smile at his optimism, but she couldn’t muster it.
He peered at her through long, dark lashes. “Are we downhearted?” he teased.
“No, sir,” she replied with a trace of sass.
He raised his eyebrows, disbelieving, and she shrugged one shoulder.
“Maybe just a bit,” she amended with a smile when he squeezed her hand.