Chapter 17
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
—John McCrae
In Flanders Fields
Days and weeks passed pleasantly enough despite Ashley’s growing sense of dread.
War had stolen happiness from her once, and she loathed how the mere shadow of another one looming threatened to steal it all again.
But at least there was Rook. For now, there was Rook.
And that was enough because it was everything.
As March became April, she saw him most every day.
He seemed as eager to have his friend back as she was, making up for lost years.
They were both hungry to know the person each had become.
It became a habit, his showing up to walk her home from school—often enough the children were calling him her beau despite her insisting he was just a very good chum.
They didn’t understand that he might be a flirt but some men preferred men, and that was the way of things.
Sometimes she and Rook stopped by the pub and other times the pictures. Walking home after dark, Ash tried to always make a point of gazing up at the stars. So many years removed from the trench, and still, she never took the clear, open sky for granted.
Their preference at the cinema ran to comedies, though this afternoon it had been The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, which left Ash melancholy, reminiscing about her races against dear old Coop.
“Shall we wander a while and soak up the sun?” Rook asked, as finely attuned to Ashley’s moods as he’d ever been.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s wood. It doesn’t tire,” he insisted, the stubborn mule. And so they walked in the direction of the nearest park. “Cooper would’ve loved it if they’d shot that twenty years ago, hey?”
“Can you imagine? Hamming it up—he’d have been the only face on screen. Do you suppose they filmed at the actual stadium?” Ash wondered as they ambled along.
“Oh yes, that was definitely Highbury. And you’re right. No one else would’ve stood a chance.”
“So you’ve been there? Highbury?” she asked, hesitantly. “You kept in touch.”
Rook opened his mouth, then closed it like he’d changed his mind, the specter of her deception wedging itself between them as they walked.
“I did,” he finally admitted. “Though it’s been a few years now. For a time I went to every match, hoping against hope you might turn up.”
“I wanted to,” she blurted. “How could I? But I very badly wanted to.”
“You could have.”
“I was too afraid he wouldn’t be there, and then I’d know.”
“Know?”
“Know he hadn’t ever made it home. Until one day I saw the papers, and I learnt he did make it back. Then I was too afraid… he wouldn’t want to know me.”
“He did know you. We all did.”
She shook her head. They had all been closer than close, and she had kept so much from them. Lied to their faces day after day after day.
“I’m sorry. It must have been hard feeling that way.”
But Ash didn’t want his sympathy or his regret. It was her place to be sorry for not trusting them with the truth, for trusting him with everything else but that—her fault and her sorrow alone to bear. “I can’t say I wouldn’t do things differently if I had the chance.”
“No use in that.”
“No.”
They walked along in silence then, stopping when they reached the park, where a group of fresh young army recruits had been assembled to practice their drills.
“Shall we sit and watch them?” Ashley asked, nodding to a nearby bench. “Pass judgment like a pair of crusty old crows?”
Rook laughed, but he seemed happy enough to rest in the sunshine, so they joined the pigeons to watch the young men march.
The whole unit’s timing was terribly out of sync. They tripped over each other, one in every three treading on the boots of the man in front.
“Halt!” their leader finally called out, but the boys were so green the parade rest was an even worse shambles than the marching.
Leaning in close enough for his breath to tickle Ashley’s skin, Rook whispered, “Abysmal.”
She snickered, trying to ignore the way the hairs on her neck pulled towards him as if in recognition.
“You call that bloody marching?” he went on, imitating Sergeant Major Chapman’s grumpy shout. “Just where did you train? The seaside?” he added in Lieutenant Napier’s earnest deadpan.
“Stand to, stand to, you soft, lazy sots. Christ, what a sorry lot,” Ash whispered back.
“Line up evenly, or I shall line you up,” Rook added, making Ashley chuckle despite herself. And even though the teasing invited more ghosts to join their rank, the millstone around her neck began to slacken.
A handful of the soldiers were sent off a ways to run a relay of a few hundred yards. They were awkward and a little slow, but there were one or two promising sprinters among the lot.
“D’you ever miss it? Running?” Rook asked.
“I do,” she said, frowning at the admission. “Sometimes I miss it very much. It just came naturally—I was always and forever shouted at for running as a girl.”
“When was the last time you did?”
She shook her head. She hadn’t run a day since her final race across No Man’s Land.
“You can tell me. Just because my running days are over doesn’t mean yours should be. I never much cared for it anyhow.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I…” She shrugged. “It’s not the done thing. Women don’t run.”
“Rubbish. Titled ladies, perhaps, but there are women’s running clubs. You should go for it if you want to.”
She huffed a laugh at the idea of her hoofing it down Whitechapel Road like she was a girl of fourteen.
“I mean it,” he said. “Let me live vicariously.”
“You just said you hated running,” she protested.
“It’s not about the run though is it? It’s about how it makes you feel.”
“Tired?” she teased.
“Have it your way,” he sighed, crossing his arms, pretending to be put out.
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“A pair of Plimsolls, I’d imagine. Aren’t they all the rage for running in?”
“Should we ask them?” she said, nodding towards the soldiers.
“They’re infants. They don’t know anything.”
He’d meant it as a joke, but somehow it sobered them both. They’d been infants in uniform once too, though Ashley hadn’t known Rook in his infancy.
“I read your article,” he said to change the subject. “War and the Art of Poetry.”
Ashley’s heart gave a tremulous thud. She hadn’t realized the issue was already on newsstands. “What did you think?” she asked, a little breathless.
“Brilliant, of course. Almost made me wish I’d paid better attention during your lecture.”
“Almost?”
He smirked sideways. Charming. Disarming. “You left one poem out.”
She tilted her head, unsure what he could mean. She’d left a great many poems out, whole poets for that matter. Tough choices were made—there simply wasn’t room for them all.
From his breast pocket, Rook withdrew a folded piece of heavy paper, yellowed now with age, and her breath caught.
“You kept it?” she rasped.
“In a little tin, right here.” He pointed to that same breast pocket.
Ashley swallowed, then swallowed again. As was becoming her wont, she couldn’t think quite what to say. “It’s only a first effort. It doesn’t belong beside their work.”
“These words saved my life, Ash. More than once.”
Tears sprang to her eyes, and she shook her head, not wanting to think about his life in need of saving.
“When they dragged me in from No Man’s Land, they saw the bullet in my chest and thought for certain I was done. Turned out, it had lodged itself in that tin, just a tiny burn mark on my skin where it had lain.”
Absently he rubbed his chest until Ash covered his hand with hers. He squeezed her fingers, then lifted her knuckles to his lips in benediction.
“The doctors and nurses gathered all around me, flabbergasted as to how that little tin could have stopped a Mauser cartridge in its tracks. It was impossible, they said. But I knew. It wasn’t the tin.”
He placed the poem in her hand, still warm from his body heat, so Ash could see the singed round hole. He didn’t mean the paper had saved him either. He meant her. He meant friendship. Fealty. Maybe even love.
“Keep it,” she said, closing his fingers around the postcard once again and turning back to face the boys marching on the field. “Lord knows you might need more saving before all this is through.”
Slowly Rook refolded the poem like it was something sacred and tucked it safely back inside his pocket. “I’ll be fine. The British Army doesn’t make a habit of conscripting forty-three-year-old men with only one leg. Are you worried for Charles?”
She wasn’t, not really. Her twin was, as Rook had pointed out, hardly of an age. Shaking her head, she sighed. “Charles went back to Spain. And then Canada when their own war broke out. There were too many white feathers here for his liking.”
“White feathers for cowardice? Even after the war, when everyone believed he’d done the thing?” He tried to hide it, but his voice held a little disdain for her twin’s part in the deception.
“Not from women. From the sky.”
Rook tilted his head, confused.
“He was paranoid. Or I suppose he noticed them because they meant something to him. He blamed himself for my melancholy. His relationship with my mother was in tatters. He’d always been her favorite, but she never quite forgave him for running away without a word.
I think she blamed him for my distress, as well. ”
Ash shook her head. It wasn’t really fair to blame Charles. Her depression stemmed from losing Rook, and she wouldn’t have traded knowing him for all the world.
“So when he started seeing white feathers everywhere—on the street, in the alley, alongside his favorite park bench—he couldn’t stand it, and he went back home to Spain. No, whatever happens, Charles will take care of Charles, although his son will soon be of age.”
She shuddered, and Rook squeezed her hand.
“It’s my mother and Frau Wintter that keep me up at night worrying. Seems like a miracle they survived the last time between the bombings and the anti-German hate. And then my students of course, past and present.” And you. “I suppose I fear for all of London, really.”
There was still evidence of the previous destruction if you knew where in the city to look, and every time she used the Underground, Ash caught her eyes darting to the best places to hole up and hide.
There was no reason to suppose another war wouldn’t bring about more destruction.
More aeroplanes raining bombs down on the capital like tears from on high.
Loss was loss, whether at the Front or at home.
Rook listened quietly to her worries, holding space for them as he held her hand. He knew better than to offer empty promises, not to her. And somehow just voicing those fears out loud made her chest loosen and her shoulders light.
“What’s your plan then—for the future?” he asked hesitantly. “If war comes, will you study the poems that come with it as that student at your lecture asked?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you write more articles? Tour the country giving speeches?”
“I… don’t like to think too far ahead.”
“No?”
“No, I… it seems a surefire way to be disappointed. Why, what do you have planned?”
He gazed at her, but didn’t answer, and she couldn’t help wondering what he wasn’t saying.
She imagined he must have a lover—as handsome and charming as he was—how could he not?
Perhaps the Reverend Haley who’d brought him to her lecture.
But she couldn’t ask him. Honest answers about such things could get a man imprisoned, so it was safer not to ask.
When she’d been quiet a few minutes, he teased, “Are we downhearted?” with just enough cheek to make her laugh.
“I’m really trying not to be.”
He smiled and put his arm around her, pulling her close, and she melted into his side, losing herself in bergamot and basil.
“I almost forgot,” he said, drawing a small, wrapped parcel from his coat pocket and handing it over. “Many happy returns, Ash.”
Because of course he still remembered her birthday.
She opened the lilac and gold paper, and out fell a pair of thick, green knitted socks.
“The traditional birthday footwear. As I was wrapping them, I realized nylons would probably be more welcome,” he said, wincing with embarrassment.
“I hate nylons,” she interrupted, just for the joy of seeing relief flood his face and relax his shoulders. “My feet are always cold. These are perfect, thank you. It’s been too many years since I’ve had proper wooly socks.”
He grinned. “Then I shall ensure the tradition continues,” he said, stretching his arm along the backrest and turning to watch the marching boys once more. And something inside of Ashley, some tension in her bones, finally began to think about letting go.