Chapter 32
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
—Isaac Rosenberg
Break of Day in the Trenches
Germany invaded Poland the very next day.
Ash and Rook saw Frau Wintter safely to the station and put her on a train to the Midlands, where Davies’s butler would meet her and take her home. It was a tearful goodbye, but she promised to send a telegram the minute she arrived, and Ashley swore she’d visit the first chance she was able.
“When did you manage to arrange all this?” she asked Rook, as they walked together back to her flat.
“I mentioned it to Davies the first evening at Collingwood, when you were indisposed. I thought you might be sick with worry for them.”
“Thank you.”
“It was nothing.”
“It was everything. Truly.”
“Win-win-win,” he teased, echoing the Old Man’s words. “Win-win?” he added hopefully, motioning between himself and her. “Will you take a chance on selfish happiness with me now?”
“Rook…”
He nodded. “Still not a yes.”
“Still not a no.” She took a deep breath. She was so tired and muddled and frightened. The latter most of all. “Can you give me time?”
“To think about it?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Of course not. There’s nothing to think about, only I’m just so terribly afraid.”
He stopped and took both her hands in his. The street was eerily empty, the air heavy with the promise of rain. “Afraid I’ll be inconstant? Because I kissed you when I thought you were a lad?”
She shook her head. “No. But I’m not the person you fell in love with. That person was somehow brave and bold and brash.”
“And that’s not you?” he asked with a glimmer of amusement and disbelief in his warm grey eyes.
She bit her lip and shook her head again.
“What are you most frightened of, Little Bird?”
“Everything. Always have been. I was afraid of the big boys in the streets and the bigger men in the alleys. Of going hungry or my mother getting sick. I was afraid of the bombs and of something terrible happening to my brother.”
“You were, and yet you still fought to protect Charles time and time again.”
“Because I had to! And then one day, I put on a pair of his trousers and pretended I was a man. I wore a mask and acted like I had the confidence I wished I felt, but I was still just a scared little girl inside—right up until I met you and you spoke of strawberry pie.”
He grinned impishly at her, looking years younger, and she choked on a laugh.
“The stupid thing was, I should have been even more afraid after that, because you were the only thing I couldn’t afford to lose. Somewhere in all of it I forgot I was pretending, and I stopped being afraid for a little while.”
“So what happened?”
“The war gave you to me, and then the war took you away. And they sent me home, and I took off my trousers and put on my dress, and I remembered what it was to be afraid.”
“Then for Christ’s sake, woman, go home and put on a pair of trousers and marry me so we can make the most of the time we have left!”
“I don’t want the time we have left,” she said fiercely, looking at him with watery eyes. “I want the last twenty years, and I want the next forty.”
As long as we both shall live, he mouthed, pressing his forehead to hers and tracing her lips with his thumb.
He kissed her, tenderly at first, and then hungry and bruising, the promise of what she could have every single day—and twice on Sundays—for as long as fate would allow it, and Ash knew if he asked again, it would be impossible to refuse.
The rest of the day passed in a whirlwind as she helped pack her mother’s meager belongings into one small trunk.
“I’d ask you to come with me and teach those children, but I understand why you can’t, of course.”
“I’m needed here,” Ashley said, turning to gaze through the window at the city street outside.
“Mmm. When will you put him out of his misery?”
Ash turned back to her.
“That man would marry you tomorrow if you’d have him. It’s written all over his face.”
“I know. Would you be angry if I did, while you’re away?”
“Seeing as I could be away for a very long time, I’d be rather more angry if you didn’t.” She took Ashley’s face gently in her hands. “You deserve to be happy, my darling. Stop punishing yourself for the past.”
“Mum…”
“I don’t know what you lived through in the war, but I can certainly remember what it was like to be parted. And I know what love looks like. This is a gift you’ve been given. A second chance very few people ever get.”
Ash threw her arms around her mother and squeezed her tight.
“Promise me you’ll look after each other, whatever happens?”
“Try and stop us,” Ashley laughed.
In the morning, her mother reported to the train station while Ash reported to the school one final time. Her students were all there, dressed in hand-me-down shoes and winter coats and solemn faces.
“It’s time for your next great adventure,” Ashley told them as well as their parents.
“Like David Copperfield?” Sarah asked.
“Exactly like David Copperfield,” Ash agreed. “The best I can tell you is, if you pretend to be brave for long enough, sometimes that’s all it takes to actually become what you need to be.”
Together they marched to the station, good little soldiers all in a line. Ash distributed railway tickets and helped them find their trains as they hugged and kissed their parents through nervous tears.
Then she assisted other people’s children, embraced other children’s parents, comforted other families split apart for someone else’s war.
She was a shoulder for weeping mothers, wiping countless tears, until finally the last train chugged away.
Then she dragged herself back to her empty flat feeling wrung out and alone.
Everywhere she turned, she saw only what wasn’t there—her mother’s embroidered silk postcard on the mantle, Frau Wintter’s tea set on the sideboard, the portraits of Herr Wintter and Charles which had hung on the parlor wall.
So she changed out of her skirt into a pair of old worn overalls buried in the back of her wardrobe these twenty years.
She might as well scrub down her empty classroom before it was needed for some other purpose.
Surely that would be the next right thing to do.
Reaching in the pocket, she found an unexpected gift—the old bronze medallion Frau Wintter had given her long ago, emblazoned with the initials A and R. They were Frau Wintter’s maiden initials, but somehow it felt like a message, like a holy sign.
Ash couldn’t say how the necklace had come to be inside her pocket, but as she gazed down at the soft, warm metal, the word Zwillingsseele flitted through her mind, lighting up her senses like a summer glow-worm.
He would marry you tomorrow.
She’d never been more certain in her life.
She must go to Alex Rook.