Chapter 8
I was twenty years old when alarm was sent,
And that was a night ago;
Now I am old and worn and bent,
I have paid the Price, but my youth is spent –
I am one of the Men-Who-Know.
—Cyril Morton Horne
Chrysalis
Twilight faded into darkness, but still Rook—her Rook, her sullen sniper—held her in his arms. At first the foot traffic flowed around them, parting and rejoining on the other side, but soon it slowed altogether, until it was only them, just as it was inside their minds.
Ash had run outside without coat or hat, but no chill could reach her in the warmth of his embrace as they clung to each other, his cheek resting atop her bowed head, neither of them saying a word, neither willing to let the other go.
Two decades she’d mourned him, his friendship and his face, and now, like some kind of miracle, he was here. But could she keep him?
A nearby cough infiltrated their bubble, a bobby with a bemused expression that said they should take their reunion somewhere more private.
Rook shifted the weight, off his right leg, peering into her face. “Let me walk you home?” he rasped, his voice an invocation and a plea.
Ash looked over her shoulder at the auditorium. “I left my coat and handbag inside.” She was loathe to part from him, even long enough to blink. What if stepping away awoke her from this perfect dream?
“I won’t disappear,” he promised with a cheeky grin. Still, she couldn’t resist the urge to glance back over her shoulder as she walked, drinking in the sight of him bathed in the streetlamp’s golden light.
“There you are,” Professor Richards said. “You were a smashing success. Three different journalists asked for your address. Is everything all right, my dear? Only you look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Something like that,” Ash murmured as Richards followed her to the room where she’d left her things. “I’m glad it was a success.”
She didn’t pause to button up before turning back towards the door, towards Rook on the other side of it.
“Have you reconsidered your aversion to writing poetry yourself? You’ve such a keen grasp of the subject it seems a waste not to.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” she assured him, smiling politely and shaking his hand. “Good night.”
“Yes, good night,” he said, though she hardly heard him as she dashed back out to the street, breathing a sigh of relief to find Rook right where she’d left him.
Not much of a poet just now, she was completely lost for words—unable to do anything but grin at him, shy and bewildered and somehow, finally, whole.
He offered his right elbow obligingly, so he could maneuver the cane with his left hand.
It was disorienting, him treating her like a lady acquaintance rather than throwing an arm around her shoulders as he would have in the war.
Still, she settled her hand into the crook of his arm, grateful for any contact as they strolled towards the Underground station, neither in a terrible hurry for the walk to ever end, though he seemed a bit relieved to sit down in the empty car.
His eyes bored into hers as they swayed with the gentle motion of the train, and her skin prickled with awareness.
Rook had seen her, of course, in all sorts—mud caked and blood spattered, sunburned and tear stained, in threadbare clothes that reeked and barely held together the frayed edges of her tattered soul.
But he had known her as a boy, befriended her as a boy, loved her—as a boy—flush with the innocence of youth, even as that innocence was daily shattered.
Now she was a woman, ripe with middle age, her breasts no longer bound flat by bandages but not so very large, nor was her brown hair shorn close to the scalp as it once had been.
But she lacked the patience to fuss with curls and pins, so it was cut into a bob a few years out of fashion and already streaked with bits of grey.
She knew without looking in a mirror that her face bore evidence of every lost companion, every year of grief and torment, every minute she and Alex Rook had been apart.
Still he stared at her, a tiny smile tugging at his fine, thin lips, as he shook his head back and forth like he couldn’t quite believe that she was real.
“I enjoyed your lecture,” he finally offered.
“Did you? I don’t even know a word I said.”
“I don’t either,” he admitted with a laugh so familiar it threatened to rip her heart in two. “Best damn lecture I ever heard.”
Ashley allowed herself to laugh as well. God above, how she’d missed laughing with him.
Realizing she still clung to his elbow though they were seated side by side without the excuse of walking, she forced her fingers to release him, made herself face forward, placed her hands upon her thighs.
Unwilling to relinquish contact, however, he covered her left hand and squeezed it tight.
Such a simple, companionable gesture stripped away her last reserve, and she melted into the seat, into him, letting her head fall to rest upon his shoulder as though they were back in a weary trench somewhere in France.
“How in the world did you come to be at my lecture?” she wondered.
“Suppose the credit should go to Reverend Haley. He had to dash off, or I’d have introduced you. I meant to go with him, but I turned back.”
“Your companion in the cap and specs?” she realized. “D’you know, for a moment, I thought he was Tom.”
Rook grew quiet, lost to introspection. Perhaps he knew as well as she did, Tom was gone. “He—the Reverend Haley, that is—mentioned seeing a notice in the paper and I just… felt compelled to tag along,” he explained, catching and holding her eye in the reflection of the dark train window.
“I’m glad you felt compelled.”
“As we made our way over to the university I thought to myself, A lecture on war poetry. By God, Ash would’ve loved this.”
She chuckled sadly. He must have believed her just as dead as she’d thought him.
“When you stepped out in front of that podium and they introduced you as Charley Ashley… I imagined I’d conjured you somehow.”
“A ghost.”
He nodded.
Ash exhaled a long, shaky breath. For the first time since leaving France, she was finally home, here on this underground train somewhere between Temple and the Tower.
When they reached Aldgate East, she reluctantly rose.
Rook followed, using his cane to heft himself up, and she wondered how much pain the trip was costing him.
She should tell him she’d be fine to make her way alone as she always had, but she couldn’t bring herself to surrender him back into the London mist for another twenty years.
“I’m just around the corner,” she said, giving him the choice. He held out his arm for her to lead the way, so she preceded him up the stairs, conscious to take them at his own slow and steady pace.
It truly was just round the corner, a revoltingly short distance to the flat she shared with her mother and Frau Wintter.
The women had grown close during the war, with Charles gone into hiding and Ashley far away.
When the old flat was condemned after a raid by German bombers, the Wintters had invited Ashley’s mother to use an extra room above their bakery.
Years later, after Herr Wintter passed and Frau Wintter retired, she had moved in here with Ashley and her mum. It was small, but cozy.
“This is me,” Ash said, stopping in the doorway, releasing his elbow but catching his hand. “We haven’t got a telephone, but send a message round any time.”
He looked down at their two hands, running his thumb back and forth across her knuckles, seeming just as unwilling to part as she.
“You can reach me at Temple Church,” he promised.
When he released her hand, he reached up, stopping short of touching the hair that peeked out from under her blue cloche hat. “This suits you,” he said.
And something a great deal like hope blossomed in her chest, foreign and strange and new.
“Fly safe, Little Bird,” he whispered, kissing her cheek and turning slowly away.
“Fly true,” she called after him, and he looked back over his shoulder, that tiny smirk once more upon his lips.
“True as steel,” he replied, his brow creasing momentarily, perhaps from the memories their words evoked.
With an overwhelming urge to chase after him and an equally strong fear she might weep, Ashley forced herself to open the door and step inside.
Her mother and Frau Wintter sat at the kitchen table, all too innocently sipping cups of tea.
“How was your lecture?” Frau Wintter asked.
“Fine,” Ash replied absently, still staring at the closed door as though willing it to open and reveal him on the other side.
“Was that a gentleman seeing you home?” her mother teased, though she had long since given up hope of Ashley stepping out or settling down and filling her life with grandchildren.
“Not a gentleman. A ghost,” Ash said, ignoring their confused and curious glances as she passed through to her tiny room and shut the door.