Chapter 26
Over the summer, Dusty contracted trench fever, earning him a ticket home.
With no one left to depend on but each other, Ash and Rook grew ever closer.
The rest of B Company came to know them as a package deal, nearly always a pair unless orders forced them apart.
They ate together, kept watch together, slept side by side under the stars.
To the world, they were best friends—mates who’d lived the same hell for two and a half long years.
To Ash, it was more than that. Rook had become a part of her.
He was her left hand, her second skin, her severed soul.
She had no doubt the man would die for her without a moment’s thought, nor would she hesitate to do the same for him.
As they marched towards their next assignment at the end of August, Ash felt a growing sense of what the French called déjà vu.
They’d been back and forth for months across the whole of northern France, but the scenery was an ever-changing morass.
The terrain seemed eerily familiar, and yet the pockmarked, burned-out landscape was unrecognizable as any place she’d ever been, and Hawkins hadn’t provided her with new maps.
It wasn’t until they passed the basilica that she recognized Albert, where she’d bought fine cheese and postcards long ago.
“She’s gone,” she heard herself whisper, staring up at the crumbling roof where the golden statue of Mary had once leaned down.
No longer tall and watchful, nor falling towards the earth, no infant in his mother’s outstretched arms—the war had finally taken them as it took all things of beauty, every ounce of peace that walked upon the land.
Ash stopped marching, causing the next man to stumble with a curse.
So she stepped aside, still staring at the void.
“She survived and we survived. That was all that mattered,” she echoed TomTom’s wise and comforting words.
“Now where’s she gone? What d’you suppose it means, that she’s fallen?
” she asked as Rook gently guided her back in line to resume their forward march to God knew where.
She couldn’t shake the haunted feeling as they headed into trenches. Certainly, one and another looked very much the same. But a nervous, fretful tingle skittered up her neck and down her spine like cold fingers of the ghosts they’d left behind.
Then she heard another soldier murmuring, “The Somme,” and she realized she was back where she’d begun. One glance in Rook’s direction and she knew he’d caught it too. Like a carousel, the circle was coming back around.
“The river of blood,” she said. They’d all escaped its wraith-like grasp once upon a time, before fate had picked her friends off one by one. “Remember how Blake used to go on about the plagues of Egypt? I always thought the Somme was the river of blood.”
Rook nodded. He was solemn, but still so solid at her side.
“Then came frogs. And lice. And flies,” she remembered.
“Death of the livestock?”
“How many horse carcasses have we hidden behind in No Man’s Land? Not to mention I once heard they were dying of some disease.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Then Tom got boils,” Ash said soberly. “And we’ve certainly had our share of thunder and hail. What came next?”
Rook thought a moment. “Swarms of locusts.”
“More bugs?” she moaned.
“And they shall cover the face of the earth, that no one will be able to see the earth. And they shall eat every tree which grew for you out of the field,” Rook quoted from memory.
Together they turned to study No Man’s Land, where nothing remained but char and ashes, alongside the burned-out remnants of long-dead trees.
Ashley licked her lips. “And then what?”
“Three days of total darkness.”
“Feels as though we’ve had three whole years of that. And then the death of the firstborn sons?”
Rook nodded. “That’s been going on the whole time too.”
“Are you the firstborn son?” she asked. “You had no older brothers come before you?”
“No. Just me. What’s your older brother up to, hey?”
All Ash could do was shake her head. She’d come to war to prevent the tenth and final plague from touching her own family, but without any word from Charles she had no idea if she’d succeeded.
The night before the big push was the same as any other, and yet somehow it felt so much more extreme.
Ash was practically vibrating with pent up nerves and agitation, the usually unflappable Rook as on edge as she.
Captain Hawkins kept him at the fire step all through the night, and Ash refused to leave his side, not to change her socks or so much as take a piss.
Before dawn they were ordered to assemble, and Ashley felt her stomach drop.
“It’s time,” Rook whispered, pulling her to her feet.
A frisson of electricity ran between their two clasped hands, and Ash looked into his weary, glistening eyes.
“Fly safe, Little Bird,” he begged her.
“Fly true,” she murmured in reply.
Then he licked his lips, as though he were going to say true as steel but was unable, and it unnerved her that he couldn’t muster the words just one more time.
Everything about the push felt more perilous than before, and Ash began to spiral into the same terrified girl who fell apart on her first day, overcome by the same terrible need for one last confession.
“Rook—” she began, her voice breaking along with her heart. She had to tell him. It was now or never.
“I’ll find you on the other side.”
“Do you promise?” she asked.
He nodded, and then glancing quickly down the trench, he pressed his lips to hers, firm and full of life and full of everything.
He pushed her back against the damp trench wall, his tongue all warmth and honey as he kissed her, and she clutched at his shirt until just as suddenly he pulled himself back, staring at her with wide, panic-stricken eyes, casting about to make sure no one had seen them.
He spun away, taking up his rifle and his kit, and fell into line, while Ash stared after him, one hand to her lips, the other holding tight to his red identity disc which had come away in her grasping fist.
She thought he’d known. For one perfect moment, she thought he must have known she was a girl, and that he loved her. But from the look on his face, it seemed she was mistaken. He might well love Ash the soldier, but he thought he’d kiss a lad right there in the middle of the trench.
Scarcely breathing, Ashley stood up straight and tall and followed him into line full of too many painful questions.
Moments before the whistle blew was no time to try and sort out such questions.
Stiff upper lip, she reminded herself. And so she donned her gas mask and turned to see that he had done the same.
Even wearing the ghoulish hood, she knew him. Her heart knew his, as it thudded so loudly it felt like it might crack her ribs, might just burst right through its cage and splat down in the mud still beating.
Hawkins blew his whistle, and they scrambled up the ladders, out of the trench, and into the smoky fog to run like hell, determined they would see the morning through.
Ashley didn’t know when she lost Rook in all the chaos.
She had no memory of being hit. One moment she was charging across No Man’s Land, vibrating with vinegar and mettle, and the next she was gasping awake on an operating table where a nurse who thought her undercarriage had been blown off discovered she was, in fact, a girl.
“Rook?” she gasped as they removed shrapnel from her shoulder and her thigh. “Lance Corporal Alex Rook?”
“It’s all right, Miss Rook,” the nurse told her. “The Germans are retreating, and the war’s over for you now. You’ve had your fun.”
“I’m not Rook, I’m Private Ashley. Hasn’t anyone seen Lance Corporal Rook?” she screamed through the blinding pain.
“Quiet now. You’re going to be fine. Most of them weren’t so lucky.
There’s a good girl,” the doctor said when the laudanum finally settled her.
“If you were a man, we’d patch you up and send you right back out again.
But aren’t you lucky? You’ve got a ticket home.
And since you were wounded in the line of duty we shan’t report you. ”
She tried to tell them London wasn’t home anymore.
That her place was there in France, right alongside the sniper Alex Rook.
But it was as though the exposure of her gender turned her into nothing and no one.
They couldn’t even hear her whimpered screams. No longer Ash the Flash, runner of the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment—she was just Red Riding Hood in soldier’s clothing, with Rook’s name tag still clenched so tightly in her fist that his name had been imprinted on her skin.