Chapter 18
Her feet were healing nicely, but Ash wasn’t technically supposed to do much in the way of marching or running for a bit, and so she was granted a four-day pass to leave.
She had no desire to abandon her friends, but it had been a year since she’d last seen her mother or experienced the sights and sounds and smells of her London home.
The train ride from Folkestone seemed somehow longer than before, and at the same time all too short to prepare her mind.
As the miles fell away, she grew more and more agitated, well aware she was a different person than the one who’d left.
What if her mother didn’t recognize her?
Or worse—what if, since Charles had so thoroughly disappeared, she tried to stop Ash from returning when her leave came to an end?
At King’s Cross, she decided to walk the three miles on to Whitechapel because, doctor’s orders or no, she was far too restless to sit quietly on the Tube.
Instead she became a nameless, faceless soldier strolling through the city streets, the same as any other man back home on leave.
But it was startling how very… normal everything seemed.
Men and women came and went, going about their everyday lives—doing their shopping and taking in their wash—much the same as life had ever been.
No ambulances careened around corners, no strafing filled the air. There was nothing to set the rhythm for her heart to beat to. It was all just people working and living, as though across the channel no war raged, no lives were being shattered and scattered, never to be the same again.
It was near impossible to reconcile the one with the other, like wandering into one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, unsure quite what to feel.
When she reached the flat in Whitechapel, she froze with her hand in midair, much too much a stranger to simply let herself inside. And so she knocked.
Light footsteps thumped across the floor, and then the door was opened to reveal a tiny girl of three or four.
“Who are you?” the child asked, and Ash stepped back to check the number, just in case she’d come to the wrong flat by mistake.
“Who is it, Dorrie?” her mother’s voice called from another room.
“Are you my father?” the little girl asked, tilting her head to one side.
“No,” Ash said. “I’m… Charley.”
“Charley? Is that you?” her mother exclaimed, yanking the door wide and pulling Ash into a fierce one-armed embrace while the other arm held a second toddler on her hip.
“Mum?” Ashley asked, feeling as though in stepping off the train platform she’d passed through Alice’s looking glass. Her mother looked the same, and yet the flat was topsy-turvy, even smelling like some other family’s home.
“Sorry, love, I was changing this one’s nappy,” her mother said, setting the little boy on his wobbly legs. With a pat on his bottom she pointed him towards the girl. “Go and play with sissy now.”
Then she turned back to Ashley, pulling her into another crushing embrace, and kissed her check before examining her from head to toe with tear-filled eyes.
“You look thin,” she said.
“C’est la guerre,” Ash replied with a shrug.
“Doesn’t the army feed you? Let me get you some tea.”
“Who are they?” Ashley asked, watching the children play across the room, like little phantasms of baby Charles and Charley etched into the memory of the walls.
“Dorrie and Michael,” her mother explained as she put the kettle on. “The neighbor’s children, do you remember? Her husband’s away, of course, and she’s working in the munitions, so I keep them during the day.”
Guilt swept over Ash. “Do you need money? Should I be sending more home?”
“No.” Her mother huffed out a laugh. “I need the company. They’re such a handful, they keep my mind off things. Besides, you’re doing your part, and I want to do mine.”
Across the room, Michael knocked down a stack of blocks Dorrie had been building and she shoved him to the ground, where he began to cry.
“How long are you home for?”
Ash propped her rifle in the corner and dropped her haversack beside it. “Just a few days.”
“I got your postcard. You were in hospital?” her mum asked, eyeing the gun.
“I’m fine,” Ash said.
“What happened?”
“I was careless. I’ll be all right. Everyone gets leave now and then, and my captain thought I needed a rest.” She glanced back at the children again, blonde little angels, wrestling on the floor.
“They won’t be a bother. I’ll keep them quiet.” She poured Ashley a cup of tea with a little sugar and offered her a plate with fruit and jam biscuits. “Do you want a wash? Leave out your things and I’ll clean them for you.”
“I can do it, Mum.”
“I want to,” her mother said. “Is there anything special you’d like to eat?”
Ash couldn’t even remember what real food was. “I’ll eat what’s put in front of me, but thank you.”
Her mother shook her head, trying to hide her glassy eyes. “My dearest darling. I can’t believe you’re here.”
That night Ash laid awake for hours, tossing and turning in the too-soft bed, listening to the too-quiet sounds of nighttime.
She didn’t miss the drone of war exactly, but she’d grown accustomed to sleeping at all hours, hearing the cacophony of shouted voices and soft snores of her comrades, the chirrups of frogs, the changing of the watch.
At some point, she threw her blanket and pillow onto the rug and curled herself up on the floor, finally drifting off into a restless sleep.
The children came again the next morning, so Ash went out to visit Wintter’s Bakery.
“You look thin,” Frau Wintter told her, echoing her mother, before pulling her into another tight embrace. She smelled like honey and chocolate and home.
“The Franzbrotchen was very much appreciated last Christmas. Thank you,” Ashley told her, kissing her cheek.
“Come back before you leave. I’ll give you more.”
“Promise,” Ash agreed, buying six small Butterpl?tzchen to share with her mother and the tots and gobbling two before she even reached the street.
With money in her pocket on the streets of London for perhaps the first time in her life, window shopping felt a little different. She wandered into a bookshop and spent an hour browsing every shelf.
In the back corner, she found a row of tiny leather-bound Shakespeare plays. Reverently, she ran her finger along their gilt-lettered spines. Julius Caesar. King Lear. Measure for Measure.
“Looking for anything specific, soldier?” the clerk asked.
“Troilus and Cressida?”
He shook his head. “That’s one you don’t hear every day.”
“I’m sure I’ll find something else,” she replied, her eye falling on a copy of As You Like It. Could she be Rosalind, running through the forest disguised to all the world as a young man? And if all the world’s a stage, could Rook be her Orlando?
She bought the soft leather book and continued on her way.
Morning and evening, Ashley searched the papers for news of her friends, but news from the Front was slow, and as vague as her own letters home had to be, and she grew frustrated and restless.
She walked until her feet ached, all the way across the river to Battersea Park, and then she ran because she needed to feel the wind on her face and forget about everything else, like how she was pretty sure she’d fallen in love with Rook, despite denying it to TomTom.
And how her secret was eating her up inside.
When she got back, she was going to tell him. She had to. And if they survived the war, she’d make sure they never parted in this life or the next.
“What’s it really like over there?” her mother asked for the hundredth time, as they ate roasted chicken and potatoes Ash felt guilty even tasting, while her friends were stuck with rations and old hard tack.
Ash paused and licked her lips, remembering the fallen, remembering Reid ordering her to strip and Rook being buried alive in mud.
“I’ve never had so much fresh air in my life,” she said. “As you no doubt noticed, we get fairly dirty, but sometimes when it’s quiet, we watch films and play cards. We got the new Mary Pickford. And The Three Musketeers.”
Her mother frowned. “And you’re safe?”
“Course,” Ash said. With Rook nearby, it was almost not a lie.
Her mum kept on frowning. “It’s just… reading the papers, it sounds quite awful. Were you at the Somme?”
Ash reached across the table and took her mother’s hand, swallowing the potato lump inside her throat. “Don’t read the papers, Mum.”
“You don’t have to go back, you know,” she whispered. “All this time, without a word—who can say if Charles is even alive?”
Squeezing her mother’s hand, Ash shook her head. “I can’t do that. My friends—”
“Friends? Young men who’ve mistaken you for another young man?”
It was a painful reminder of her lies.
“They haven’t all mistaken me,” she protested. “There’s one who knows.”
Her mother’s face turned stricken. “Charley, that isn’t safe. A girl surrounded by all those men? You must promise not to tell another soul.”
Ash studied her plate. She didn’t want to promise. She was desperate to come clean with Rook at least.
“Please, my darling, if you must go back, please at least promise me that.”
Heart breaking a little, she nodded her agreement. It wasn’t forever. One day this war would end, and then she could finally tell him the truth.