Water Song (Once Upon a Time (Simon Pulse))

by Suzanne Weyn

  She got up from the chair and cast him an offended glance. “If you don’t mind, I’ve just been nearly drowned. I’d like to find a towel to dry my hair, and to put on some dry clothing.”

  He stood there feeling her rebuff like a slap. Granted, until now he’d been making this request lightly, as if it were a joke, but that had been to cover his insecurity. He’d never really believed then that she would kiss him.

  This time, though, he had dared to think that something had changed… .

  Apparently not.

  Finding dry clothing in her drawer, she headed for the small bathroom. She closed the door with a slight bang and latched the lock decisively. Something in the resolute clack of the lock told him she had locked him out in every way possible and that she had no intention of ever being his friend or anything more.

  “But we made a deal,” he said quietly.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Something New

  “Hey, sug, anything to read around here?” Jack asked the next morning. “I mean, is there a book in this place?”

  Emma was brushing her hair in front of the mirror and turned slowly toward him. “There’s a library downstairs.”

  “What?” he questioned.

  “You heard me.”

  “I hear you, but I don’t get it,” he replied. “How can the library be in a person’s home? Do people around here come in and borrow books from you?”

  She rolled her eyes impatiently. “It’s not the public library. It’s my parents’ library.”

  “That sure beats all,” he said, clearly surprised. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Imagine having your own library. And there it was right underneath me all the time.”

  She suppressed a smile, pleased to have impressed him with something she knew, for a change. He must be truly amazed—too stunned to make fun of her or say he’d have to ask the queen about it or some other jab. Maybe he was trying to be more civil, to be more of a friend.

  She would try too. Truly she felt just a bit guilty for not giving him his friendly kiss. She owed him after he’d given her the locket and even opened it for her. She just couldn’t believe he would be so crude as to want the kiss right after she’d nearly drowned! It had annoyed her and she’d reacted without thinking. Today she would try to make it up to him.

  She twisted her hair up and pinned it. “Do you want something from the library?”

  “Name me an English book everyone would know,” he requested.

  “Maybe something by Charles Dickens? Oliver Twist? Great Expectations?” she suggested.

  “Great Expectations!” he decided immediately. “I like the sound of that! Come to think of it, bring me both those books.”

  “All right. When Colonel Schiller comes by, I’ll ask if we can go to the library.” She wondered if he would really read the books or if he was simply trying to impress her, to show that he was as literate as she.

  “An’ yes I can read!” he added, once again seeming to read her mind. “I might be a little slower than you are in reading, but I did go to school—at least while my mam was alive.”

  Caught again! How did he do it? Were her thoughts really that transparent?

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t,” she replied, trying to sound casual, but turning so he couldn’t see the blush rising in her cheeks. She suddenly felt embarrassed by her snobbery, for feeling superior about the imbalance in their reading skills.

  That afternoon, Emma prevailed on Colonel Schiller to allow them to visit the library on the second floor. He told her that she could go, but not Jack. “He should rest,” he said.

  “I bet he wants to escort you there by himself,” Jack grumbled when she told him the news. “I think he’s sweet for you. Be careful of him.”

  She shushed him, knowing that Colonel Schiller was waiting just outside the door to escort her down to the library. “That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed, even though the same thought had lately occurred to her.

  Emma got the two Dickens books for Jack and picked out Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen for herself. When she returned to the room, she found him sitting on a straight chair by the window, gazing out at ominous thunder clouds rolling in from over the fields. Crossing to him, she handed him the thick, heavy volumes.

  “Are your eyes strong enough to read?” she asked. The swelling was almost all gone, and she noticed that he actually had very nice eyes, deep brown rimmed with thick black lashes, but they seemed unfocused sometimes and she wondered how much of his vision had returned.

  “Sometimes it’s better than other times,” he answered vaguely, taking the books from her. “Thank you for getting me the books.”

  “You’re welcome.” She had the satisfying feeling of having done something friendly for him. It made her feel she’d done her best to keep up her end of the promise. In the future she would try to find other friendly gestures she could make that wouldn’t involve kissing.

  “What book have you got there?” he asked. She held up the cover so he could read it. “Pride and Prejudice, huh? Hey, that’s me and you.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, suddenly on guard against another taunt.

  “I think you do,” he replied with a smirk, opening Oliver Twist as though the subject were closed.

  How could she be friends with him when he criticized her at every opportunity? Oh, he was too exasperating! He was not going to just get away with it this time!

  “No! I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that,” she insisted as she settled into the upholstered chair with the book.

  “Yeah, you do,” he insisted.

  “Well, maybe I do,” she shouted, getting up again angrily, “if what you mean is that you are annoyingly proud and prejudiced against me because my parents have money. Because all I can see is that you are constantly jabbing at me, implying that I am a silly rich girl and that you are somehow better than me, more real, because you don’t have money!”

  “That’s funny!” he shot back, also standing, equally angry. “All I see is you looking down your nose at me and acting like I’m a low-class fool that you have to put up with ’cause we’re stuck together in this room!”

  His outburst took her by surprise, mostly because she didn’t think of him that way at all. At first, possibly, there had been some of that in her opinion of him. But it wasn’t what she thought now.

  He was clever, intuitive, and resourceful. And good company; she liked to listen to his stories. When he wasn’t busy being awful, she enjoyed his sense of humor.

  She found him attractive, too. Maybe not classically handsome, but still … she liked to look at him, especially when he was unaware of her.

  “You’re wrong about how I feel,” she told him quietly. “If all you can see is me looking down on you, then maybe you’re not really looking.”

  It was his turn to appear surprised, taken aback. “Is that so?” he asked. He surveyed her face as though really taking her in for the first time. “It’s possible, I suppose, that this war has hurt my eyes more than I realized.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment before she sat and began reading again, glad for an excuse to put her head down and conceal her expression from him. Some new emotion had taken hold of her. This new feeling was chaotic and frightening. It made her want to hide from him until she understood it better.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Reading Partners

  Jack rubbed his eyes and then continued counting the words in Great Expectations. The little lamp at the table beside the upholstered chair threw only a dim light and his eyes were getting tired. He’d had sharp eyes before the gas attack burned into them. It scared him to think that they might never be as good again.

  Emma rearranged her position in the large chair where she was sleeping and mumbled something. They’d spent the last three rainy days quietly reading companionably together.

  Since their blow up, she’d become somehow different toward him, quiet, almost watchful. He felt changed t
oward her, too. He still found her beautiful and he longed to kiss her, but he no longer felt so defensive.

  Now that he knew she didn’t view him with contempt, he could relax in her presence. He savored her words: You’re wrong about how I feel. He heard her say them repeatedly in his mind. But he longed for more explanation. If she didn’t disdain him, think him a lowly, unworthy creature, then what did she feel toward him? His pride, and his fear of receiving some lukewarm, evasive reply he didn’t want, kept him from asking.

  He had to banish these obsessive thoughts from his mind, push them aside with all his willpower. He had a task that required his full concentration, and thinking about what she might—or might not—have meant was a major distraction.

  And so they had spent the quiet, rainy days finding pleasure in reading there together. At least she’d thought he was reading, although he was really counting the words in the book on his lap, squinting hard with his damaged eyes, concentrating on keeping track of his count. Directing himself not to think of her.

  Now that she had gone to sleep, he used pencil and paper to transform the information Claudine had given him into the code. On the top of a piece of paper he wrote Great Expectations 85. He also wrote down the publisher of the book and what edition of it he was using. That instructed the reader to get the exact same copy of that book and turn to page 85. Then he wrote out his message by finding the letters he needed on the page. If the first letter he needed was the twentieth letter on the page, he wrote 20. If the second letter was the thirteenth letter on the page, he wrote 13, and so on. It was tedious work.

  Emma mumbled again in her sleep, and he put down his pencil and turned toward her. He recalled how earlier that day she had looked up from her book and seen him with his finger under each word, moving it along as he counted. He knew she thought that he read like that, slowly, moving his finger from word to word like a child. Despite his new ease with her, it embarrassed him to have her think that. But Claudine was right: They didn’t want to endanger Emma with the knowledge of what they were doing. The less she knew, the better.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Possible Escape

  “You will listen carefully today,” Colonel Schiller said to Emma as he helped her climb into the wagon on the next market day. “I want to know anything you hear that pertains to the war.”

  She nodded as two guards climbed in behind her, different ones from the time weeks before when she’d gone to the market with Willem and Claudine.

  Willem snapped the reigns to move the massive horse forward. One of the guards smiled at her and she responded with a tight, perfunctory smile in return. “You do not intend to escape, do you?” he asked in German.

  “Of course not,” she replied, also speaking German. “There would be no place for me to go.”

  “That is what I thought,” he said pleasantly. “It is not so unpleasant for you at the estate,” he added.

  “Not terribly,” she agreed as the wagon rumbled on. It was true that conditions there weren’t really so bad. Each day Claudine brought up trays with whatever food the soldiers ate. She’d have liked a proper bed but she’d grown used to curling up in the chair. Now that Jack was so much better, she would ask him to take the chair some nights.

  “The colonel expects you to find information for him?” the soldier, a boy with dark hair, went on. “You are aware of that, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I know why you are willing to do this,” the second soldier, a tall blond, chimed in.

  “Why is that?” she asked, curious to know what he thought.

  “Because he will shoot you if you don’t,” the second soldier blurted, laughing. The first soldier jabbed him in the ribs, scowling at him for his crudeness.

  He can’t shoot me if I’m not there, Emma thought, angered at the insinuation that she had no choice in the matter.

  Despite the fact that the soldier thought it was a joke, the threat was real. She had no new information to feed the colonel. She would be forced to learn something and hope that it was an unimportant, stale piece of information, one that would not truly jeopardize the Allied war effort. At the best, it would be tricky; at the worst, impossible.

  She fingered the chain of the gold locket she now wore around her neck. Could she bribe these two soldiers by offering them the locket? Would it be enough?

  They continued on without speaking. To test the possibility of bribing them, she took the locket off and opened it. She wanted to take the photo of her parents out before offering it and she also wanted to gauge their interest. The dark-haired soldier watched her as she picked at the damaged, wrinkled photograph.

  “You are going to tear that if you try to lift it,” he noted after watching her attempts to extract the picture. “You should leave it be.”

  She nodded, snapping the locket shut and returning the chain to her neck. If the picture couldn’t be taken out, she wouldn’t let go of it. It was all in the world she really had, at this point. She hadn’t realized how much the picture meant to her until she saw it again.

  “You miss your parents?” the dark-haired soldier asked.

  “Very much.”

  He nodded in sympathy. “Me too.”

  In another ten minutes they arrived at the marketplace outside a small farming village. As Willem halted the carriage and helped Claudine to climb down, the blond soldier climbed forward into the driver’s seat, followed by the other soldier. “We are taking your carriage to see some girls we know,” the blond soldier told Willem. “We will be back for you in two hours.”

  “They don’t understand German,” Emma explained as Willem helped her down from the wagon.

  “Then make them understand,” the blond soldier barked at her.

  Emma watched the soldiers ride off down the road. She wasn’t really too concerned about communicating the soldier’s words to the couple since she didn’t believe they had any intention of running off.

  Behind her, the market bustled with activity. It was too early for new crops to be sold, but there were fresh eggs, root vegetables stored in cellars from the autumn before, bread and other baked goods. Normally she liked to visit the woman who created her own lavender soap, and her husband, who made creamy cheeses and yogurts from the milk their goats produced. But today she looked beyond the stalls and tables, concentrating instead on the aisles leading to the pathways into the woods.

  Turning her attention from Claudine and Willem, she surveyed her surroundings. A stall selling smoked meats and fish was nearest the woods. She would buy a basket of provisions for herself, going to the smoked table last. From there, she would slip into the woods. Without the soldiers watching her, it wouldn’t be too difficult.

  She’d been in those woods as a child when she’d accompanied Claudine to market along with her mother. She thought she recalled a path that her mother had once told her wound all the way north toward the sea. Keeping to the woods and back roads, she’d try to follow the coastline over to Dunkirk. The Germans might have already taken control of the coast. She had no way of knowing. She might encounter enemy soldiers but she’d pose as a local farm girl and they’d have no reason to stop her. She hoped.

  Willem and Claudine had gone over to a butcher they seemed to know, a tall fellow wearing a blood-splattered apron. Emma watched the welcoming delight on the big man’s face as he greeted them. They obviously knew one another well. The last time they’d been to market they’d spent a long time together. She wondered how someone so seemingly jolly could spend his days among slaughtered carcasses, killing the animals himself, in all probability. But then, this war had already taught her that people were much more complex—and capable of more good and more bad—than she would ever have dreamed possible.

  Emma didn’t know if Claudine and Willem were being held prisoner or had simply stayed on because they had no place else to go. They’d been taking care of the estate for years and probably didn’t care too much who owned it.

  Scanning the cro
wd, she saw that uniformed German and Austrian soldiers seemed to be stationed at every aisle. What exactly were they guarding?

  Taking the money Colonel Schiller had allotted her from the cloth purse she’d slung across her shoulder, she purchased a net bag from a vendor. One stall at a time, she filled it with food for her trip. When she came to the husband and wife who made the soap and cheese, she noticed that they exchanged darting, meaning-filled glances as she approached.

  Emma was about to ask for a log of the goat cheese from the farmer, but instead of taking her order he beckoned surreptitiously to his wife. “You are Emma Winthrop from the estate, yes?” the wife whispered in a German heavily inflected with Flemish.

  Emma nodded.

  “Our son is fighting with the Belgian army,” the wife continued, leading Emma over to her soap table and pretending to show her different products. “Recently he smuggled a bag of mail to us and we are trying to deliver it to the proper people. We had a letter for you but didn’t know how to deliver it with the Germans encamped in your home. They would have taken it and arrested us. They are very concerned with spies passing secrets beyond enemy lines. Most of these guards are just here to listen and observe.”

  “They have tried to enlist me as a spy,” Emma confided, smelling one of the soaps as she spoke.

  “You would never?” the wife gasped.

  “No,” Emma assured her. “In fact, I hope to escape down that path.”

  The wife reached into her apron. “I have a letter here for you. When I saw you at the market last week, I knew I would have a chance to deliver it to you.” Lifting the letter from her pocket, she put it down on a wrapped bar of soap. “Take the soap and letter and drop it into your bag,” she instructed.

  Emma didn’t dare examine the letter but she knew instantly from the elegant, formal writing that it was from her father. Did he have a plan to rescue her? She ached to rip open the letter but fought down the urge.