During the Battle of the Somme I held my breath, fearing all the time that I would hear that Rupert Bellows had fallen, even though Mr. Bellows was still working in the embassy in Paris. Instead Nathan walked into the hospital with a wounded soldier covered head to toe in blood. It was only when he was laid out on the operating table that I realized he was Raven.
“Get Ava out of here,” Miss Sharp barked at Nathan.
“I would,” Nathan replied. “Only I actually don’t think I can walk another step.”
I saw then that Nathan had a piece of shrapnel sticking out of his right leg. I helped him to a bed and dressed his wound while Miss Sharp and a young surgeon from Liverpool operated on Raven. “What if they don’t know how to fix a Darkling?” I fretted.
“I think all the parts are pretty much like ours,” Nathan said, wincing as I bathed his wound. “Excepting the wings and whatever organ controls foolhardy blockheadedness. We were under machine gun fire and the Bosch threw a grenade into our trench. Raven saw it and took it into his fool head to grab it and fly it into no-man’s-land, only it exploded before he could drop it.”
“And I suppose you’re the one who went into no-man’s-land to get him,” I said, biting back tears.
“Well, if I hadn’t I was afraid you and Helen would never speak to me.”
I poured a whole quart of carbolic lotion on his wound and he yelped. “What the bloody hell was that for?”
“For risking your life,” I said, and then kissed him and went off to see if there was any news about Raven, but he was still in surgery. I washed and rolled about a thousand bandages before Vionetta appeared, white-faced.
“He’s alive,” she told me, “but his wounds were very serious. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“I can do more than that,” I told her.
I flew that night back to Bouillon and found Wren. When I told her she sent Sirena into the woods to collect certain plants. Before we left, Aesinor embraced us both and told us that she would light a candle for Raven. We flew back over the scorched, blasted woods and wasted fields of Belgium and France. What good had it done for me to come back to change the future if Raven wasn’t going to share that future with me?
When we landed at the hospital, Wren took my hand. “I’ve watched my son become a man these last two years,” she said. “I would not have had him miss the love he bears for you or the love he’s shown for these humans. You must not regret what has happened, even if . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“We won’t let him die,” I said. “Between the two of us we’ll keep him alive.”
We found him lying in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages, still as death, barely breathing. Vi told Wren the extent of his injuries while I sat down beside him and took his hand. It felt cold. I helped Wren change his bandages and administer the herbal salves she’d brought. Vi asked if the herbs would work on humans and Wren answered that she thought they might. For the next six weeks the only time I left Raven’s bedside was to fly into the woods to find the plants Wren needed to treat him, which Vi now also used on other patients. I’d only leave, though, when Nathan was there to sit with him. Nathan had become almost as protective of him as I had.
“I’m going to limp for the rest of my days because of you, old man,” I heard him tell Raven one day, “so you’d bloody well better live.”
Helen came to visit, bringing medical supplies she’d wrangled out of her network of rich benefactors, and raspberry biscuits for Nathan. She also arranged to have Raven and Nathan both evac’ed to a hospital in Paris to recuperate. “It will be much nicer than those ghastly places in the provinces and we can all be together. Of course Ava will stay with me at my new place on the Rue de Varenne. I’ve already arranged about her leave.”
And so in the midst of war, Raven, Nathan, Helen, and I had a little holiday in Paris. Once Raven was well enough, Nathan snuck him out of the hospital to join us for dinner at the bistros and brasseries where Helen had cultivated the friendship of all the head cooks and waiters. She also, we discovered, had an unlimited access to the black market and used it to “fatten up our boys” on butter and eggs and good French cheese. During the day I would take Raven on slow strolls through the Tuileries, where little boys still sailed boats on the grand basin and old men still walked with their hands folded behind their backs. The only difference was that now the only young men were the injured—like Raven. He still limped, but he was making so much progress that he started talking of going back to the front.
“Is it wrong that I’m considering breaking his other leg so he can’t go?” I asked Helen.
“I’ve been thinking of having Nathan kidnapped by Gypsies—I know some living in the Marais—but I don’t think either of them would forgive us. Surely the war can’t go on much longer. . . .”
It went on for two more years.
When the United States finally entered the war, Rupert Bellows resigned his post at the embassy and took a commission in the U.S. Marines.
He fell, carrying a soldier back from no-man’s-land, at the Second Battle of the Somme. The soldier’s name was Roger Ignatius Appleby.
Daisy and Ig named their first son after him. Rupert James Appleby.
But I get ahead of myself.
When the war finally ended, Daisy and Ignatius went back to the States, as did Agnes and Sam, and Cam Bennett, but many of us stayed on in Paris. Vionetta Sharp and Lillian Corey opened up a little bookstore in the Latin Quarter called Shelley & Company. Helen insisted that she couldn’t leave her lace factory. She and Manon had plans to open a couture house, which Manon insisted must be called Madame Hélène’s. Raven said he’d just as soon stay in Paris. We found out that the artist who lived in our garret had decided to stay in Morocco, and we were able to rent it. Raven enrolled in classes in the Sorbonne and got a job at a watch shop in the Marais. Nathan and I also signed up for classes, but he seemed to lose interest quickly.
“He can’t seem to settle to anything,” Helen fretted.
“It’s understandable,” I told her. I was having trouble focusing on my classes, too. It was hard to concentrate on literature and philosophy after all we had seen in the war. I felt like I needed something that would keep my hands busy. And so I asked Helen for a job in her workrooms. She tried to get me to take a position as a partner, or at least a manager, but what I really wanted, I found, was to sit in a workroom sewing with a lot of other women who laughed and gossiped. It was like being back at the Triangle—only we were better paid and the workroom was well lit, spacious, and clean and we had a delicious hot midday meal made by Manon’s grand-mère.
Helen did finally get me to take over as manager, but only so she and Nathan could take a honeymoon on the French Riviera. They were married in June of 1919 in a chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (mostly, I think, to scandalize Mrs. van Beek’s Protestant sensibilities). Helen said she didn’t want a fuss but wept when we girls in the workroom presented her with a peau de Chine gown trimmed in point d’Angleterre. For a veil she wore the one Manon had made for her in Bouillon. Vi and Lillian brought armfuls of orange blossoms from their country place in Saint-Tropez, which Daisy, Beatrice, Cam, Agnes, and I tossed in her wake as she and Nathan motored away for their honeymoon.
My tenure as manager stretched to six months as Nathan and Helen prolonged their trip, traveling to Spain, North Africa, Italy, Greece, and Istanbul. Helen sent me cheery postcards—Nathan almost gored by bull at Pamplona! Nathan almost impaled by shark deep-sea fishing in Spain!—that didn’t quite disguise her concern that Nathan was still restless and unsettled. Still, I was shocked when they came back at how thin and drawn Nathan had become. We had dinner with them at the Closerie des Lilas, and Nathan ordered bottle after bottle of wine and insisted we all go out afterward to a cabaret in Montmartre. Raven went with him while I took Helen home.
“Sometimes,” she confided, “I think the shadows
never really left him.”
The sky was lightening by the time Raven came back to our garret, smelling of absinthe and Turkish cigarettes. When I told him what Helen had said, he replied, “He’s not the only fellow to come back from the war with a few dark places in his heart.”
After that Raven always made sure to get Nathan home before dawn and to keep him from drinking too much. One day I happened upon Nathan at the Café St. Germain scribbling in a notebook. The saucer of his espresso cup was full of pencil shavings and cigarette ends. I asked him what he was writing and he answered, “Utter rot,” but then conceded it was a story.
I asked if I could read it, and he showed it to me reluctantly. “This isn’t half bad,” I told him (when, in fact, it was very good). “You should show it to Vi and Lil. They’ve started a little magazine . . .”
In the end I showed it to Vi and Lil and they published it in the Bell & Feather. A New York editor on holiday got a hold of it and asked Nathan if he had any more like it. Nathan said he didn’t but he’d see if he could dash off a few more. He started writing in the cafes, and drinking less, and began to look a shade less haunted.
“I’m married to a writer!” Helen remarked one day gleefully. “My mother will be mortified!”
Although she professed annoyance with her mother I knew that Helen sent regular checks to support Mrs. van Beek in her suite at the Franconia Hotel in New York, and I heard from Caroline Janeway, who together with Etta and Ruth Blum had opened the New York branch of Madame Hélène’s, that Mrs. van Beek spent her afternoons at the shop bragging to clients that her daughter was a successful couturière.
I was just beginning to think that it might be time for all of us to go back home—at least for a visit—when we got a telegram from Dame Beckwith.
Grave situation in the Blythe Wood STOP Council meeting called for August 26 STOP Your presence needed!
“My mother always exaggerates,” Nathan said. “It’s probably just an excuse to get us to come visit.”
“Well, that’s reason enough,” Helen said. “I need to go to New York to see how the new shop is doing.” I knew that wasn’t strictly true. Miss Janeway and the Blum sisters were more than capable of running the store, but I backed her up.
“I would like to see my grandmother.”
“And I’d like to have a fly over the Gunks again before they get too built up,” Raven added.
“Then let’s go,” Nathan said. “I can visit with my new editor. Have I mentioned that Scribner’s is publishing my first novel?”
36
THE FOUR OF us sailed to New York in the summer of 1920. Agnes and Sam, married the spring before, met us at the dock with my grandmother. When I saw how frail my grandmother had grown, I was sorry I’d stayed away so long. (She had refused to set foot on a ship since her experience on the Titanic.) Still, when she embraced me I felt a steely strength in her arms.
“Don’t look at me as if I’m on death’s door, girl. We Hall women aren’t so easy to kill off.”
We dined at my grandmother’s house on Fifth Avenue and spent the night there—in separate rooms since Raven and I weren’t married, a fact that my grandmother commented on several times at dinner much to my embarrassment. The truth was that since my reaction to his first proposal, Raven hadn’t asked me again, and even though I knew that a modern girl wouldn’t sit around waiting for a proposal, I was shy of bringing it up. Among our friends in Paris it didn’t seem to matter, but back in New York it might.
The next day we took the train to Blythewood. Gillie met us at the station in a horse-drawn open carriage festooned with flowers. While Helen rushed to embrace the caretaker, Raven stared at the carriage. “It looks so . . .”
“Quaint?” I finished for him. “Old-fashioned?”
“I imagine that there will come a time when a horse-drawn carriage will be a novelty,” Raven said.
“Good riddance,” Nathan said. “Give me a Gold Bug Speedster any day. Hullo, Gillie, old man!” He clapped the tiny man on the back. “What say we go down to Poughkeepsie later and look at the latest Fords?”
The sky turned an ominous green as Gillie grumbled that he didn’t need “no newfangled contraption.” Raven was still staring at the carriage, an odd look on his face.
“What is it?” I asked. “Are you nervous about going to Blythewood?” It had occurred to me that because the school had once been at war with the Darklings, Raven might feel uncomfortable there. “We can stay at Ravencliffe if you prefer.”
“No,” Raven replied, shaking himself as if shedding cold water. “I was just wondering what else about our lives might someday seem obsolescent and hopelessly outdated.”
“You need only stick with me,” Helen said, tossing her long fringed scarf over her shoulder and adjusting her cloche hat, “and you will always be in style. I shall never obsolesce.”
Raven broke into a grin. “No, I don’t believe you will.”
It was a perfect summer day to ride down River Road, the sky so blue it seemed to seep through the sycamore branches overhead. The apples were ripening in the orchards and the hedgerows were full of white flowers—hawthorn flowers. The flowering tree the fairies had planted to protect the vessel and the door to Faerie had spread from the woods into the fields. In the Ardennes, where we had gone in the spring to lay a wreath on Mr. Bellows’s and Jinks’s graves, the woods were still blasted and bare. Aesinor, who still stood guard over the last vessel, said that most of the fairies had vanished from the woods.
“What are you thinking about now?” Raven asked.
“Only that it feels strange to be back somewhere that hasn’t been a war front,” I answered.
“We’ve had our own wars here,” Gillie said, turning his head to look at me. His eyes were the sharp green of new leaves, and I felt a restless stirring in the trees on either side of the drive as we turned into the gate. The scrolled ironwork motto—Tintinna vere, specta alte—looked a bit rusty. “Ring true, aim high,” we were taught to translate it. But the last part also meant “look up.” I looked up now, half expecting to see shadow crows, but here was only the melting sweetness of a summer sky and the gentle flutter of green leaves . . . and the ringing of bells, so clear and sweet they sounded like the soft air had been given voice.
“Oh, they’re ringing us home!” Helen cried. “Look, it’s dear old Blythewood! It looks just the same.”
And it did. The stone castle walls shone honey gold against the deep blue of the mountains across the river. I’d seen many castles since I’d last seen Blythewood, but none as pretty or serene. My eyes filled up with tears and Raven squeezed my hand. “You saved it,” he said. “You’ve kept it from being ruined.”
“We saved it,” I answered. “You held the door and Nathan led an army and Helen went into the shadows . . .”
“Oh, but the gardens are rather overgrown,” Helen said as we drew closer. “Gillie, why have the gardens been let go?”
“We don’t have so many students no more,” he replied, “and so there’s no’ so much money for extras like gardens.”
“Why is the enrollment down?” Nathan asked.
“Weel, your modern female doesna have to go to a girls’ school anymore and this new generation thinks the school’s old-fashioned. Besides,” he added in a lower voice, “there’s no need to defend the world against fairies now. There’s hardly any left.”
“But why . . . ?”
“The Dame will tell ye more. It’s why she wanted you to come.”
“Not another council meeting,” Nathan grumbled. “I thought that was just an excuse to get us back to the States.”
Gillie glared at Nathan over his shoulder. “It’s no’ all about you, lad.” Then he added in a gentler voice, “But your mother will be right glad to see you.”
Dame Beckwith was standing on the front steps as we came into the circular dri
ve. I was startled by how much older she looked. Perhaps it was just that the last time I’d seen her had been in Helen’s dream space when she’d been much younger, but when she stepped forward to greet us her step seemed a bit unfirm, and when she clasped my arms and looked me in the eyes I saw that her characteristically piercing gaze was clouded over by cataracts.
Her voice, though, was as rich and commanding as ever. “Ava, you look more and more like your mother. And Helen, you’re . . . why, you’re glowing! Are you . . .”
“Just a few weeks along. Nathan thought I was seasick on the boat but I never get seasick.”
Dame Beckwith’s eyes filled with tears as she looked toward her son. “Don’t worry, Mother,” he said, “Helen’s sure it’s a girl, so you’ll have another student for Blythewood.”
A cloud seemed to pass over her eyes, or perhaps it was just the sun reflecting off the cataracts. She hugged Nathan fiercely and then turned to Raven. “You look so handsome, young man, your parents will be so proud to see you.”
“My parents are here?” Raven asked.
“Of course. This concerns the Darklings most of all. Come along—there’s a buffet in the Great Hall but the meeting will take place in the garden. Help yourself to tea and sandwiches.”
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