Chapter 19
When Ash returned to Calais, her company was not where she had left them, and it took two more days of confusion and misdirection before some major general finally figured out the entire Fighting Fifth Division, of which the Surreys were a part, had headed north and across the border into Belgium, to a town called Passchendaele.
Another few hours in the back of a lorry and she found them there, encamped outside of town.
“About time you showed up,” Rook said, his face beaming at the sight of her in a way that made her feel buttery-soft like she’d eaten a million biscuits. “We were preparing to send out a search party.”
“Had to walk to the ends of the earth to get you your promotion present,” she replied, handing off a package wrapped in The Illustrated London News.
“I did say you owed me one. But then you gave me a sonnet, so I thought we were square,” he added, putting one hand to his chest for a moment, as though surprised, and it warmed her again that he would think her poem a fair trade for the life-saving socks.
Ashley shrugged, so he tore open the paper, revealing the tiny volume of Shakespeare she had bought. “As You Like It,” he read the title.
“Do you know that one?” She licked her lips and searched his face for a flicker of recognition, begging him to understand the deeper meaning. If he figured it out on his own, then she wouldn’t be breaking the promise to her mother. “It’s a comedy.”
“Good,” he sighed. “We’ve tragedy enough to spare. How was home?”
“Strange,” she said, relieved and a little heartbroken by his lack of reaction. “It was the same and not the same. I’m the same and not the same at all. But the pastries are still divine,” she added, showing him the baked goods Frau Wintter had promised.
Summoned by the scent of treats, TomTom arrived as though he were the dog and not Maxie, and he scooped Ash into a side-armed hug so rough she nearly dropped the sweet rolls.
“Glad you’re back. It’s been frightfully dull,” he said, already shoving a pastry in his gob.
“Ash the Flash!” Cooper called. “How are the feet?”
“Well enough to beat you in the mile,” she answered.
“Oh-ho! Fighting words,” he laughed, tucking into his own Franzbrotchen.
“Keep eating those, Ash and Rook will beat you with their legs tied together,” Blake teased.
“Worth it,” Cooper said, mouth still crammed full to bursting, and the others all nodded their agreement.
Within days, word had reached them of a new threat back at home. No longer content with nighttime zeppelin raids, Germany had sent aeroplanes to level parts of London in broad daylight.
“Where in London?” Ash asked Blake with a sinking feeling in her gut. He’d been reading them the article from The Wipers Times.
Blake looked at her and then back at the paper. “Dunno. Doesn’t say,” he told her before folding it up and putting it away, and she just sort of knew it had been the East End.
Sick with worry, Ashley dashed off a letter to her mother and took it straight to Private Merle for the mail, but as the days and weeks went by with no reply, she grew more frantic and more twitchy.
“No doubt the Royal Mail’s been disrupted by it all,” Rook suggested, offering her half his chocolate bar one night.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” she agreed, dying just a little bit inside. She’d gone to war to save her brother, now missing, and to save her mother the pain of losing him. What would she do if she lost both of them instead?
Rook offered her a hesitant smile. He understood better than anyone. At least they had each other.
Almost one year and one month to the day after her baptism at the Somme, Ashley and her regiment found themselves heading back into the line near Ypres.
The weather in Belgium was hotter than hot had any right to be, and the air felt thick and heavy in the trenches.
“Hotter, even, than the devil’s own arsehole,” as Cooper was fond of reminding them, and the lads stripped off their sweat-soaked shirts while they worked to refortify the walls and parapet.
Ash, of course, could not remove her top, and the lads made endless fun at her expense, often led by Tom, who deftly diverted questions and persuasion into jokes about her physique.
“Ashley’s back is so pale the Red Baron would think it was a signal from a mirror on the ground,” he teased. “That’s the real reason for the nickname Ash the Flash.”
“Ash once took his top off and a seagull attacked, thinking he was its mother,” he said another time, and, “Ash’s shirt is so dirty, if it came off the whole thing would crumble into dust,” and so on and so forth, keeping the others laughing to keep them from asking why. God bless dear old Tom.
She was terribly uncomfortable and jealous of the lads, but only until their sunburns all set in.
And until Rook took off his own shirt, exposing taut muscles and a chiseled chest, with a dusting of dark hair that trailed down his sternum and into his trousers.
Then, well… Ashley didn’t exactly mind the view.
Even if it did make her excessively thirsty.
“Don’t you think it’s time I should tell them?” she asked Tom when they finally had a moment alone.
“No.” He shook his head emphatically, and she sighed.
“You were angry I kept it from you.”
“That’s different,” he argued, toeing the dirt with his boot.
“I don’t think they’d give me away.”
“Keeping secrets is hard, Ash. Especially when there’s people around who don’t know there’s a secret to be kept.”
Oh. She hadn’t thought about the strain her identity might have put on Tom. She’d formed her new life around pretending she was a boy, and that was how she usually pictured herself —just one of the lads. Sometimes she was still surprised to remember she had to sit down if she wanted to piss.
“It’s been a burden…” she realized. “Do you wish you didn’t know?”
“Didn’t say that. Only it’s dangerous. You know what some blokes are like.”
Despite the oppressive heat, Ash shivered, because she knew it all too well.
“And if someone did blab? I don’t know what I’d do with myself if you were sent home before me.”
“Fine,” she agreed.
It hadn’t occurred to her that telling them might be selfish—and dangerous in more ways that one, if it made them take extra risk to keep her safe.
But the lies still felt too heavy after carrying them so very long, a betrayal of all their friendship, and something worse with Rook.
“Anyway, I don’t think everyone would understand.”
He said it offhand. Like it was nothing but an afterthought. But the words etched themselves under Ashley’s skin and deep into her bones.
She’d proven herself for fifteen long months, but dishonesty was a hard thing to overcome. They had to rely on each other every moment of every day—and twice on Sundays. She couldn’t bear it if the truth undermined their trust.
Besides, Tom had been hurt by her deception after only a few months, and that was ages ago. Before socks and sonnets and pastries from back home.
So Ash let it go. She would keep her secret locked up tight and not tell another soul, for now.
All too soon, orders trickled down the line. She put on fresh socks and loaded her rifle and lined up to wait for the whistle to advance. Their goal was to capture the ridge and force a German retreat.
“Don’t get lost,” Tom told her as he pushed his eyeglasses further up his nose.
“Don’t get shot,” she offered him their favorite gallows humor reply.
“Fly safe,” Rook murmured on her left side.
“You too,” she told him, her eyes boring into his, desperate to say more, but now was not the time.
Adrenaline coursed through her veins, anxiety to have it over laced with a teaspoonful of fear, but even the slaughter had become almost routine after more than a year of it. Being afraid simply slowed a body down.
The trick, Ash had found, was to forget. Forget about the bullets and the shells flying overhead, forget about the danger, forget to worry about her friends. Just run with a singular focus until she reached the other side. She could deal with what she found there once she arrived.
When next she slept, there would be time enough to shiver, time to sweat out the terror lying dormant in her pores, recalling every moment until exhaustion claimed its prize. But in the midst of battle, fear had no place to call home, and so she ran and ran and ran.
Out of the smoke emerged a figure, much too close for Ash to dodge. They collided and she thanked God no bayonet had pierced her gut. Both falling to the ground, she skittered back and he skittered like her mirror, dazed and young and frightened and alone.
Then he lifted his rifle in shaky, untried hands.
Ash darted off like it was Brigade Sports Day, dodging behind a bombed-out tank for cover.
It was hard to get her bearings through all the smoke and chaos before running, running, running, never pausing for a moment to look back until a German trench appeared and the edges of her terror crept up like hellhounds at her heels.
What if it was an active enemy trench and not the one the Allies had already taken?
Too late to cede to caution, she hurdled the remaining barbed wire along with the rampart in one haphazard leap and tumbled pell-mell down into the trench and whatever fresh hell awaited her below.
People.
Bodies.
A whole slippery pile of them.
Tawny brown hair, sanguine and matted. For a moment she feared it was Tom, but the uniforms were all wrong, not blood-stained khaki but cold, steel grey. These were not Ashley’s friends but the enemy, mown down upon their own fire step before they could even seize the day.
Ash couldn’t get her legs to work. She was sliding on flesh and bones, not wanting to touch them, unable to avoid it. She scrambled to right herself despite bodies everywhere she turned trying to pull her beneath the pile and crush the breath from her lungs.
Wheezing and desperate to inflate those lungs, she couldn’t get her chest to listen, and she grew light-headed with the trying.