Chapter 31
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
—Rupert Brooke
IV. The Dead
Throughout late summer, Ashley’s students continued to weed and harvest their little garden, which was a good thing or the tomato plants would have climbed the wall and spilled ripe fruit all down the lane.
What produce the children didn’t take home to their families was sold to local shops to seed a general classroom fund.
On rainy days they wrote poems and painted pictures, which they sold on the corner two for a penny, and by late August they had raised enough—secretly supplemented with Ashley’s own savings—to help buy each child a warm winter coat and shoes to replace the ones they’d outgrown.
It was a good lesson in economics, and an even better distraction from the headlines hawked by other children on opposite street corners. Best of all, it gave Ash something to do besides dread the looming, stalking first days of September.
On the last day of August, Rook met her at the school looking dashing in his sepia-colored suit.
When he invited her on a picnic, the boys began to howl and whistle, while the girls looked on and giggled with dreamy eyes.
His face was sweet and earnest, curls tamped down beneath his cap, leaving Ash no choice but to dismiss class and take his arm.
They found a bench in an unusually secluded part of Queen Mary’s Garden, and there, surrounded by flowers in every shade and hue, it was almost possible to forget there was a world outside.
Rook had brought a basket with cold ham, sugar snap peas, fresh brown bread, and savory chunks of cheddar.
“This is a meal fit for Queen Mary herself,” Ash marveled, and he smiled and tilted his head back to let the sun warm his face, utterly content.
“How was school?” he asked.
“It hardly seems fair to call it school, but at least they won’t be barefoot when they go.”
“Dare I say there are times when that’s more important than book learning?”
Ash put a hand to her chest in mock horror. “More important than Shakespeare?”
“You’ve given them a solid foundation so they can spend the rest of their lives reading Shakespeare. They’ll thank you for every last thing you’ve done these past few months.”
“If only it felt like enough.”
“Well nothing’s ever enough, is it? Did you imagine this life, when you were a little girl?”
“Teaching? No. Even as a child, I didn’t daydream much about the future. I expected it would involve a lot of scrubbing—floors or pots or laundry—and painful, chapped red hands.”
She glanced down at her hands as she said it, and he caught them in his.
“No dreams of handsome strangers to whisk you away from all that scrubbing?”
Ash snorted.
“No, you wouldn’t. How about a brood of children to help you then?”
She shook her head. “I knew what I was.”
“A magpie?”
Ash laughed. “One for sorrow, two for joy?”
“Curious and resourceful and fiercely protective.”
She smiled. “Thank you for the compliment, but I was going to say, an ugly duckling. And far too headstrong for my own good. Afraid of my own shadow, though God forbid I let anyone know it. Get my back against the wall and I would fight, but I didn’t like to.
I think all I ever truly wanted was to feel safe. ”
“Do you feel safe? Here in this garden?”
Ash looked up at the cloudless sky and imagined incendiary bombs falling all around them, the flowers going up in smoke and flame. But the sky was too blue and perfect, the songbirds far too happy to imagine any such thing for very long.
“Yes,” she answered truthfully. She always felt safer when he was near.
It must have been the right answer because he took her hand again and squeezed it, then nodded towards a bird flapping away on the ground. “What kind of bird is that, Miss?”
She laughed. “Some kind of flycatcher, isn’t it?”
“Is it injured?”
“I hope not,” Ash replied, standing up to get a better look, but her shadow sent the little creature racing for the safety of a nearby tree. “All good it seems,” she said, turning back around to find Rook, shifted forward on their bench, holding out a ring that glinted in the afternoon sunshine.
Her heart warmed, then froze, and she fought the urge to burst into tears yet again.
“I’ve been struggling with the right words to tell you in a way I haven’t already said.
Somehow, despite everything, my years at war were the best years of my life because of you.
That might sound maudlin and more than a little tragic, except it can’t be tragic, because there was you and there was love—a love that has sustained me all the decades in between.
Marry me, Ash, so we can start our lives over with one shared soul between us as it was always meant to be. ”
“I—I…” She wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t. She was trying to say, I can’t, but her throat wouldn’t allow that either, and instead she just stood there like a puppet without any strings.
Some of the light dimmed from his eyes. “Must I go down on one knee?” he teased, scooting to the edge of the bench so he could maneuver it.
“Please don’t,” she said, and he paused, light all but fading. “It’s—it’s not a no,” she added feebly.
His smile was sad as he placed the ring in his breast pocket where her poem used to be, leaving his hand there as though his whole chest ached. “It’s also not a yes,” he said gently, staring at the ground.
“Please, Rook. I love you more than the flowers love the sun. Every beat of my heart is in answer to yours. But are you sure this isn’t just September looming over you as it does me?”
“September may have parted us once, but why not let this September unite us again for always?”
“Always. How can you speak of always with war knocking at the door?” she asked, retaking her seat on the bench and tucking her feet beneath her.
“What better time?”
“It is selfish, Rook.”
He looked as though she’d slapped him.
“What can you call it but selfish? For me to prioritize my own happiness when all around us people are preparing to be torn apart? When I must ready my students to be ripped from the arms of their parents, when I must find a way to protect my mother and Frau Wintter from everything they barely survived the first time? It feels selfish indeed to think of what I want.”
“All right,” he said, nodding with quiet determination and patting her hands. “All right.”
“Please don’t be angry.” She bit her bottom lip to stop it trembling.
“I’m not angry. Perhaps I can even help. Let me walk you home.”
They sat silently on the train to Aldgate East, the picnic basket like a solid wall between them. Ash wanted to say she didn’t need an escort, but she couldn’t bear to send him away after refusing his ring.
She wanted to apologize for ruining their lovely luncheon, but she couldn’t bear to hear him tell her it was all right for a third time.
“Come in for a cup of tea?” she offered when they reached her flat, fully expecting him to decline so she could go straight to her room and sob into a pillow.
“I’d like that very much,” he said instead.
Her mother and Frau Wintter made him welcome, asking after his health and his choristers and whether he was getting enough to eat. And when they were all sat awkwardly around the table, he told them, “Actually, I’ve a proposal for you ladies, if you’ll allow me.”
Eyes wide, Ashley’s mother shot her a look.
“Not that kind of proposal mother,” she sighed, an edge of warning in her voice for Rook because she couldn’t imagine what he meant.
He raised his eyebrows and held her gaze as if to say that sort of proposal was still very much on his mind, and her stomach heated and turned somersaults to spite her.
Then he reached into his pocket, and for one brief moment she thought he was actually going to pull out the ring and ask her again in front of God and everybody so she couldn’t say no without looking most terribly cruel.
Instead, he withdrew a folded piece of paper, Dear Lord, a poem or some sort of proposal speech?
“I received a letter from one Major Henry Davies. He was captain of B Company when we were in the war.”
We, her mother mouthed.
“The officer you bumped into at the seaside?” Frau Wintter asked in a tone that said she didn’t believe for one minute Ash had ever gone to Brighton.
“Mm-hmm,” Ash confirmed, as amusement glinted in Rook’s eye.
“Major Davies would have come to make this offer in person, but he’s been kept quite tied up at the Home Office of late. He’s behind the plan to evacuate city children to the country in the event of war.”
“Evacuate?” Ashley’s mother repeated. “Is he afraid they’ll send more aeroplanes this time around?”
“Yes,” Ash said emphatically. “That’s exactly what he fears.”
Her mother and Frau Wintter shared an uncomfortable look.
“To the point,” Rook said, “Major Davies is the owner of a rather grand estate in the Midlands, nearish to Wales. Having no family or heir, he has decided to open the house to some of those evacuated children.”
“How very kind.”
Ashley’s eyes shot to Rook’s. She hadn’t known this was part of the Old Man’s plan.
“Indeed. But he only has a small staff, and with all those children, he’ll need a great deal of bread and biscuits. He has an undercook who’s keen to take it on, but she hasn’t the skill nor the training. That’s where you come in, Adele.”
“How does this Major Davies know I exist?”
“I believe he tasted your Butterpl?tzchen somewhere in Italy, the Christmas of ’17.”
Frau Wintter turned to Ashley in amazement.
“I was taught to share.”
“Now, he’s not asking you to do the baking yourself, of course.
He merely hopes you’ll tutor his newly promoted chef.
If you’re amenable, you’ll have room and board and a generous stipend, and he’d like you to take the train north at your earliest convenience.
The post is not dependent on hostilities being declared.
He doesn’t think it would be sporting to make his cook’s promotion hinge on war. ”
“My goodness,” Frau Wintter said, blinking rapidly. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes, Oma,” Ash told her. She didn’t know exactly how this plan had come about, but it was an answer to her nightly prayers.
Anti-German sentiment in London had caused more than one angry mob to ransack Wintter’s Bakery during the first war.
She couldn’t imagine what might happen this time around.
“There’s a proposal for you as well, Mrs. Ashley.”
“Clara,” her mother reminded him.
He smiled. “Clara. The government is seeking volunteers to ride with the children so they’re not completely alone on those trains to the country.
Major Davies asks if you’d be willing to take on that position, and then to remain in the Midlands at Collingwood to help manage the care of the children living there—not changing nappies or anything.
Just overseeing it all in his absence and keeping him apprised. ”
“Why me?” she asked, in almost as much shock as Frau Wintter.
“He needs someone he can trust,” Rook explained, as though it were self-evident.
“He’s always had the highest opinion of our Charley here, and so he thought of you.
He also supposed it might be hard for you to lose the companionship of Frau Wintter at a time like this.
In his words, this would be a win-win-win. ”
“Well. How about that?” she said, turning to Ash, face shining with admiration for the daughter who went to war.
The heavy yoke which had hunched Ashley’s shoulders until she wanted to curl into a fetal ball finally began to dissipate, and the knot which had kept a chokehold on her throat for months on end finally began to ease. At last she drew a long, deep, satisfying breath.
“What do you say, Adele?” her mother asked. “Shall we start our next chapter as a pair of rusticating ladies?”
“I would like that very much.”
Across the table, Rook nodded gallantly, but he only had eyes for Ash. “I shall send word to Major Davies the moment I leave.”
“Please pass along my gratitude,” Ash rasped.
“My very deepest, most heartfelt thanks.” She knew full well Rook had somehow been the composer behind this clever orchestration, but her message was received.
He nodded at her and kissed her forehead before leaving, and that night, all felt just a little more right with the world.