Chapter 20
But here the moonlit hours flow softly on,
Unheeding that o’er half the World a pall
Of unthought sorrow lies; and peace is gone
From many homes; and many men must fall
Before the dawning New Year dies anon.
—Geoffrey Wall
New Year’s Eve, 1915
One warm and sunny Sunday in May, Ashley got up the nerve to take the Underground to Temple Station, and she slipped into the back of the church just before the service began.
Rook was warming up the choristers. Their treble voices, high and pure as gold, made Ash feel like weeping, but what didn’t these days?
Would those same boys grow up and go off to fight as she and Rook had done? Make friends and lose them as she and Rook had done? Come back with shattered spirits and missing limbs, those who made it back at all?
Their warm-up finished and Rook took his place behind the organ, his long, lithe fingers flying expertly across the many rows of keys. The ancient templar sanctuary swelled with celestial sound, his back rippling as his whole body seemed to sway with the music, keeping time.
This was the Rook Ash alone had known—during quiet, private moments—not the stone-cold, sullen sniper the others knew. In some ways it was jarring, and yet in all the ways that mattered, he was Rook: calm and confident with a cool exterior, but inside, sweet and steadfast and relentlessly kind.
Ash had grieved for him after the war, deeply. Desperately. So certain he had died in battle, too terrified to ever know for sure. Now she grieved for the years after, for all the time wasted living half a life not knowing, when what a life they might have known instead.
Not as lovers but, messy romantic nonsense aside, he was her Zwillingsseele as Frau Wintter had suggested. Charles might be her corporeal twin, but Rook was the missing half of her beleaguered soul.
Too focused on his perfect posture at the bench, she heard little of the sermon, but when it ended, she found herself unable to move, as though her feet had taken root within the floor.
And so she stayed, letting his final notes wash over her like a benediction—if only they could wash away her sins and make her new.
The last note still lingered in the ancient, vaulted ceiling when he turned to leave, and for a moment he seemed to blanch as if being startled by a ghost.
Ash looked away. Ashamed. Had it been a mistake to visit him here? To impose herself on his most inner sanctum, un-invited and unannounced?
She collected her handbag, and shifted to the edge of the wooden bench, but he was already there, moving down the aisle to her, a welcome smile now gracing his freshly shaven face.
“You play beautifully,” she told him.
“Only because I didn’t know I had an audience. You caught me by surprise.”
“You had a whole congregation.”
“Yet only one that mattered,” he teased.
Ash looked away again, his gaze far too intense. It was like trying to stare directly into the sun. What did he mean, saying such things?
“I guess it worked—the knitting,” she said. “Preserved your dexterity through the war?”
“If only I’d been more worried about my footwork than my hands,” he said with a grimace.
“Same complaint my teacher had when I was ten. But I was never going to play Bach’s Fugue with the Philharmonic, and fortunately for my hands, there was this troublesome private in my regiment with a seemingly endless need for socks. ”
“Then you’re welcome,” she said with a smile.
He nodded towards her feet. “Any lasting difficulties?”
“Oh, you know. They ache and they’re cold most of the time. Nothing to write home about.”
His own smile turned sympathetic—him, of all people, who’d lost an entire leg, or enough of one. He lowered himself onto the bench beside her and looked around as though taking in the majestic church with a stranger’s eye.
“I came here once before,” she admitted, and he turned his head to listen to her story.
“It was the Night of the Long Knives, what—five years back? I was drawn here. To light a candle and say a prayer, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was praying for.
The only word I could think over and over was simply, Please.
But that night, I felt certain you were with me.
Your spirit—I imagined—I wanted so badly to conjure you from thin air. ”
“You wore a long green coat and a flat cap like a man might wear…”
Ash turned sharply, studying the pain in his glistening grey eyes, his face gone suddenly white. “How—?”
“I recognized your profile cast in shadow. Thought I was seeing your ghost,” he murmured. “Then you stood, and I saw the coat for what it was—a lady’s coat—and I…”
Cold washed down her spine at the realization they could have been reunited that much sooner had he only known the truth.
He frowned back at her, the same Rookish scowl she’d once held so dear.
“I came to light some candles of my own,” he explained.
“One for every man—or woman for all I know—a candle for every life I took those four long years. Sometimes it seemed like enough candles to light the whole world.” He was still scowling when he added, “Will you come to mine for a cup of tea?”
Rook didn’t live far, which pleased her. She hated to think of him walking on bad days through cold or rain. His flat was small but tidy and remarkably cheerful, with plenty of light to make it cozy, and a hydrangea bush flourishing in the tiny garden just outside.
“There’s a peg in the closet to hang your coat up if you’d like.”
The room was warm, and so she opened the closet door.
Inside, next to his slicker, she found a pair of crutches and what must have been a spare prosthetic leg.
She frowned, realizing for the first time quite the extent of his injury as she studied the wooden piece, bent slightly by a metal hinge to replicate the knee.
“Damn,” he whispered, realizing what she’d seen. “Sorry. I forgot. I don’t have people over.”
“It’s fine,” she said, slipping out of her coat and hanging it, feeling guilty for being caught staring. “Nothing to be sorry for.”
He grimaced and turned back to the kettle. “I got used to drinking mine without milk or sugar in the war, and I tend to brew it strong enough to trot a mouse on,” he said, forcing a laugh as he set about preparing the tea. “I do have both, though, if you want them.”
Laying the table with charmingly mismatched cups and saucers, he added a sugar bowl and a bottle of milk. Then he brought out the pièce de résistance: a plate of pastries, which made Ash look at them twice.
“Is that…?” she trailed off because it couldn’t be.
“Franzbrotchen,” he confirmed, holding out the plate for Ash to take one.
When she bit into it, she closed her eyes, and the sweet butter and cinnamon melted on her tongue like honey made from drops of the sun.
“These were always my favorite,” she told him, though Frau Wintter rarely ever baked them now.
Rook grinned. “I’d have bought them for your birthday, but I never searched out a new baker after realizing yours had closed.”
“You’ve been to mine?” she asked, then blinking amended, “To Wintter’s?”
“When I first returned to London, I searched every bakery in the East End.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. I thought I’d know it was yours with a single taste.”
“And did you?”
He took a breath, deflating a little. “I didn’t have to. I knew just by looking in the window, before I ever stepped inside.”
“Charles,” she gasped, realizing with horror he must have seen her twin who’d spent most of his time down in the shop when he was over from Spain.
Rook nodded. “That was the first time I ever thought I saw a ghost. But not the last time I went chasing them.”
Ash swallowed, eyes burning. “He didn’t recognize you. Of course he wouldn’t. Did you think I had amnesia?”
“No. Once I got over the shock, I knew immediately he wasn’t you. I believed then you must truly be gone or else I would have found you—or you found me. But somehow I never stopped looking.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks.
“Don’t be sorry, Little Bird,” he whispered, cupping her cheek and stroking it with his thumb.
“I’m sorry for listening to those who urged me not to tell you I was a girl.”
“What did the Bard say? Thou shalt not trust the air with secrets?”
“I’ll have this secret from thy heart or rip thy heart to find it.”
“I’d never rip your heart,” he whispered. “Everyone has secrets.”
“But I so wanted you to know. It just all became too big.”
“I don’t mind, Ash. I suppose I might have once, but where’s the sense in it? Didn’t stop me finding you in the end.”
He wrapped both arms around her, pulling her close to his chest, tucking her head beneath his chin, and it felt so right. So perfect. So much like being home.
“I did trust you,” she swore to his chest.
“It was twenty years ago. We were, all of us, just trying to survive.”
When she could finally speak again without a hitch in her voice, she said, “The tea will get cold,” and so he released her and poured two cups of God’s strongest brew.
Fortified, she tried to explain what she’d wanted to tell him since January.
“I was shattered when they sent me home. Convinced I’d truly lost you out there—hoping against hope you were still alive.
I even took a brief nursing course, telling myself then they’d let me go back to the Front where I could find you.
But in the end, they assigned me to a hospital in Plymouth.
We had a handful of wounded Surreys pass through—Sergeant Major Chapman for one. ”
“Really?”
“Even in his sorry state he recognized me, though he knew naught word of you, nor did any of the others. Since he caught me, I had no choice but to confess what I’d done. He seemed to find it hilarious.”
“He would. Napier, too.”
She smiled, but her throat grew tight and her eyes grew hot, so she took another long sip of tea, wincing at its strength.
“Later that night, Chapman died. Of shock, they said. And I knew from my training it could happen to a body which had undergone far too much strain, but I couldn’t shake the terrible feeling it had actually been the shock of my revelation.
That perhaps I’d mistaken humor for hysteria. ”
“No,” Rook said, and she shrugged. Not ready for him to absolve her.
“A few days after that, Stew came through with Max still by his side. Gas blindness. The dog knew me instantly and Stew recognized my voice, but I was so afraid of shocking him to death, that I pretended to just be… Charlotte. Told him truthfully I had no idea where my brother was. We maintained a correspondence for a few years until his letters eventually stopped coming.”
Rook squeezed her hand. “Stew’s alive,” he said, and she gasped in a sharp, deep breath.
Alive.
“Did his vision recover?”
“No. But on the bright side, it saved him from the mines.”
And well, that was something at least.
“After the war ended and Charles was out of danger, I so desperately missed…” She looked up into his eyes, unable to admit the whole, unvarnished truth.
“I missed my dearest, dearest friends. Tom was the only one who ever figured out my secret, and I needed his advice, so I took myself off to Runnymede, to the big house where his family worked.”
A chill ran through her, body and soul, and she rubbed her arms before taking another sip of the strong, milky tea.
“One of his sisters told me. He never made it home. I think I’d known it in my heart, but not knowing officially had somehow made it easier to pretend it wasn’t true.
I was wrecked after that. I couldn’t bear to ask any more questions.
I was certain I’d lost you, as well, but I couldn’t bring myself to inquiry further.
The thought of clinging to unlikely hope only to lose you all over again… ”
Ash shook her head. She could scarcely breathe for holding back unwanted emotion, she who’d rather die than shed a tear. What an absolute ninny he must think her.
But he merely shook his head. “You didn’t lose me, Ash,” he promised. “Just misplaced me for a while.”
And those simple words made her love him all the more.