The Wild Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “Might I have a pot of coffee?” she suddenly asked Fatima.

  Fatima’s eyes widened. “Coffee? But it’s so strong. Will it help him?”

  “No, it will help me,” she said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Hours passed, then the night, and then the following day. Willa refused to sleep. Over and over again, she raised the boy’s head, held the glass of tea to his lips, and coaxed him to drink. Over and over again, she bathed his thin body. And somehow the child, Daoud was his name, hung on. He did not open his eyes. His fever did not break. But his diarrhea stopped, and somehow, he held on. Willa gave him another dose of aconite. And then one of quinine. She drank more coffee, ate flatbread and roasted goat, and waited.

  They talked, she and Fatima, while they kept vigil. About the sheik. About the desert. About camels and goats. About Lawrence. About Willa’s accident. About Fatima’s wedding day. About their lives.

  “There is a sadness in you,” Fatima said, as the first night gave way to day. “I see it in your eyes.”

  “I’m not sad, I’m tired,” Willa said.

  “Why have you no husband? No child of your own?”

  Willa didn’t answer, so Fatima pressed.

  “There was someone once. A man. I loved him very much. I still do. But he’s with another,” Willa finally said.

  Fatima shook her head. “But why can he not marry you both? This other woman and you. He would have to give his first wife more jewels, of course. And a better tent. That is her due. But you would be his second wife and that is not so bad.”

  Willa smiled wearily. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way where I’m from,” she said. “They don’t let men have more than one wife in London, and there’s no place to pitch a tent.”

  “I do not understand these English.”

  “Neither do I,” Willa said.

  “Fatima,” she said later, as the day lengthened into night again and still Daoud would not open his eyes. “Do you and the other women of the Beni Sahkr ever mind your lot in life? Do you ever long for something different?”

  “No,” Fatima said slowly, as if she’d only just now—for the first time—even considered having a different life. “Why would I? This is the life Allah ordained for me. This is my fate. Do you mind your life?”

  “No, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I’ve nothing to mind. I have my freedom.”

  Fatima laughed out loud. “Is that what you think?

  “Yes, that’s what I think. What on earth is so funny?” Willa asked.

  “You are. You might have your freedom, Willa Alden, but you are not free,” Fatima said. “You are a driven creature. Possessed by something. What, I do not know. But whatever it is, it haunts you. It takes you from your home, causes you to chase phantoms in the desert with madmen like Auda abu Tayi and the sheik Lawrence.”

  “It’s called a war, Fatima. I’m fighting for my country. It will be different when it’s over. I’ll go home then. I’ll buy myself a nice little house in the country and be peaceable and contented and sew by the fire.”

  “No, I do not think so,” Fatima said.

  “But I thought you did think so!” Willa chided her. “I thought I was supposed to find a husband and have children. Isn’t that what you told me last night? Isn’t that what you want me to do?”

  “Yes, but what I want is of no consequence. It is Allah’s will that matters, and He has much work for you yet, and it does not involve sewing.”

  Willa was just about to tell Fatima that she was an impossible woman, when they both heard a small, raspy voice say, “Mama?”

  It was Daoud. His eyes were open and clear. He was gazing at his mother. Fatima, who’d been pouring tea into a glass, dropped both the pot and the glass and flew to him, praising Allah as she embraced him.

  “I’m thirsty, Mama,” he said, still weak and confused.

  Willa got the child more tea, and then she ran to find his father. They hurried back to Fatima’s tent together, and then Willa left the family to themselves. For some reason, the sight of the fierce Bedouin sheik sitting on his child’s bed and kissing his small hands made her cry.

  “He’s out of the woods,” she told Lawrence. Then she staggered back to the Khalaf’s sixth wife’s tent—where she’d gone to wash when she first arrived at the encampment—sank down on some cushions, and slept for fifteen hours straight.

  When she awoke, Fatima was sitting across from her, smiling. “He is doing well,” she said.

  Willa smiled back. She sat up. “I’m so happy, Fatima,” she said.

  “Khalaf wishes to see you once you have eaten. But I wanted to see you first,” she said. She stood up, crossed the small room, and knelt down by Willa. She drew a necklace from the folds of her robe, and before Willa could protest, she fastened it around her neck.

  “Khalaf gave it to me when Daoud was born. A present for the woman who gave life to his first son. You gave my child life again, Willa Alden. Now you are his mother, too.”

  Willa, speechless, looked down at the necklace lying against her chest. It was made of gold medallions set with turquoise and strung together with red amber and agates. Fatima picked the necklace up off Willa’s chest and shook it. The medallions made a soft jingle.

  “Do you hear that? It is to ward off evil spirits.”

  The necklace was very valuable. Willa wanted to give it back, she wanted to tell Fatima that it was too great a gift. But she could not. To refuse a gift gave great offense to the Bedouin.

  She embraced Fatima. “Thank you,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “I will wear it always, and think of the one who gave it to me.”

  Willa washed, dressed herself in clean clothes, and went to Khalaf al Mor’s tent. The sheik smiled when he saw her. His smile broadened when he saw the gift his wife had given her. He bowed to her, then thanked her for the life of his son.

  Two days later, with promises of five hundred men and two hundred camels from Khalaf for the march on Damascus, she, Lawrence, and Auda said their good-byes. They had a long ride ahead of them back to Lawrence’s own camp.

  “I wish you would stay with us, Willa Alden,” Khalaf said as he stood outside his tent, watching them mount their camels and bidding them farewell. “I must tell you, I tried to buy you from Lawrence, but he will not part with you. Not even for twenty thousand dinars. I do not blame him.”

  “Twenty thousand dinars?” Auda thundered. “I blame him! Twenty thousand dinars would buy us all the guns we need!” He stuck his chin out at Willa. “I would have parted with you for five,” he said. Then he snapped his crop against his camel’s haunch and rode off.

  Laughing, Willa and Lawrence said a final good-bye to Khalaf, then set off after Auda.

  “Twenty thousand dinars,” Willa said, as they rode out of the Beni Sakhr encampment. “My word, but that’s an awful lot of money. And you didn’t take it. I think you like me, Tom. I really do.”

  “No, that’s not it all,” Lawrence said, looking at her, mischief sparkling in his eyes.

  “It isn’t? Then why didn’t you sell me to Khalaf?”

  “Because I’m holding out for thirty.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Ben Cotton, twenty-one years old, from the city of Leeds, and a patient at Wickersham Hall, a hospital for injured veterans, sat on the edge of his bed, hands clasped, head down. A new artificial leg, complete with flexible knee joint, lay on the floor next to him where he’d thrown it only moments before.

  Sid Baxter, standing in the doorway to Ben’s room, his cane in one hand, a pile of clothing in the other, looked at the fake leg and then at Ben. Tough nut, this one, he thought. Ever since he’d arrived, the lad had barely eaten, barely spoken, and had refused to wear his new leg. Dr. Barnes, the head psychiatrist, had given up. He couldn’t do a thing with him, he said, so he’d asked Sid to have a go.

  “Ben Cotton, is it?” Sid said now.

  “Aye,” Ben said, not raising his head.


  “I brought some clothes for you. A pair of trousers. Shirt and tie. A jumper,” Sid said. He got no response.

  “I thought you might need them,” he continued. “There’s a girl down in the visitors’ room who wants to see you. Says she came all the way from Leeds. Says she’s staying in a little inn in the village but she can’t stay much longer. It’s costing her quite a bit, you see. She’s been coming here every day for a week, hoping to see you. I figure you haven’t gone down yet, because all you’ve got to wear is that silly bloody nightshirt.”

  “I told Dr. Barnes to tell her to go home,” Ben said.

  “Who is she?”

  “My fiancée.”

  “A bit rude of you to stay in your room when she’s come all this way to see you, wouldn’t you say so, lad? It’s a beautiful June evening. Sun’s still out. Birds are singing. Why don’t you go down and sit out in the garden?”

  Ben picked his head up and looked at him then, and Sid saw that his eyes were filled with anger.

  “Just waltz downstairs on my one good leg and say hello, will I? Maybe have a nice stroll round the grounds and a spot of tea while I’m at it?”

  Sid shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Why not? Why not? How can I go down to her? How can I let her see me?” he said bitterly, gesturing at his missing leg. “I’m not even a man anymore.”

  “You’re not?” Sid said. “Why’s that? Did Gerry blow your nuts off, too?”

  Ben blinked. His mouth dropped open.

  “I guess he must’ve. It’s the only thing that might explain why you’re sitting up here on your bed whinging and moaning and feeling sorry for yourself instead of going to see that pretty little lass of yours.”

  Ben scowled; he started to tell Sid off, but then burst into laughter instead. The laughter grew until it became hysterical, and then it turned into great, wrenching sobs. Sid had seen it before. The doctors here were a fine and educated lot, but they didn’t speak to the men as bluntly as he did. And sometimes bluntness was exactly what was needed to draw them out.

  Sid sat down on the bed, patted Ben’s back, and waited patiently for his emotion to subside. “You finished?” he said when the lad had gone quiet.

  Ben nodded. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

  “I know your story,” Sid said. “I read your records. You signed up right away. Fought for your country. You spent over three years on the front in France, earning yourself some nice commendations for bravery while you were at it, until one of Gerry’s bombs took your leg. You almost bled to death in the mud. Then an infection almost took you. The field doctor who fixed you up wrote that it was a miracle you didn’t die. ‘One of the toughest, bravest lads I’ve ever seen,’ he wrote. You’re a man all right, Ben Cotton. You’re more of a man on one leg than most are on two.”

  Ben said nothing, but Sid could see his jaw working. He reached down, picked the artificial leg up off the floor, and handed it to Ben, hoping he’d take it. Ben did. He started to buckle it on.

  “I can’t walk on it properly,” he said. “I hobble around on it like an old man.”

  “You can’t walk on it properly yet,” Sid said. “It takes a bit of practice. Give it some time.”

  “What happened to your leg?” Ben asked. “I’ve seen you around here. You walk with a limp. Was it the war?”

  “No, it was a steer. And a bad doctor. Years ago. In Denver. I broke it in a slaughterhouse. Steer rushed at me and knocked me down. Doctor set it badly. It didn’t heal right. Mostly I can manage. Sometimes, if it’s paining me, I need a cane.”

  “You’re married, aren’t you?” Ben asked. “To the lady doctor?”

  Sid could hear the worry in his voice. “I am,” he replied. “She liked me before my leg was broken. And she liked me after, too.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Here’s the clothing I brought,” Sid said. “The docs have you lot running around in these bloody nightshirts all the time, I don’t understand it. No wonder you don’t feel like a man. You’ve got no trousers on.”

  Ben thanked him. He reached for the clothes, pulled them on, then stood up. He took a few clumsy steps, then turned around in the doorway, fists clenched, and looked back at Sid. “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “I don’t blame you, lad. Women are scarier than anything in Gerry’s whole bloody arsenal.”

  Ben smiled bravely. Then he squared his shoulders, turned around again, and started walking.

  Sid waited for a few minutes, then he followed him downstairs, casting a quick, casual glance into the visitors’ room. The girl, Amanda was her name, was crying, but she was laughing, too, and Sid could see that her tears were tears of joy.

  As Sid ducked out of the doorway, Dr. Barnes walked by, wearing his overcoat and hat, and carrying his briefcase. He, too, peered into the visitors’ room, then ducked out again, smiling.

  “Well done, Mr. Baxter! Bravo!” he said quietly.

  Sid smiled. “I expect we’ll see Ben eating and talking a bit more. Maybe even trying a bit harder with the new leg. Amazing, isn’t it, how women make us want to buck ourselves up?”

  Dr. Barnes laughed. “What’s amazing is your effect on the hard cases,” he said.

  “I suppose it takes one to know one,” Sid said.

  Dr. Barnes told Sid he was leaving for the night and asked if he was heading home, too.

  “Soon,” Sid replied. “But I thought I might visit Stephen first. If you’ve no objection.”

  “Of course not,” Dr. Barnes said. He frowned, then added, “Any signs of life there?”

  “Maybe,” Sid said cautiously.

  “Really?” Dr. Barnes said eagerly.

  “Don’t get excited, mate. I said maybe, didn’t I? I really don’t know. I thought I saw something. Yesterday, when I took him into the stables. I found out his people are farmers, you see. …”

  “How did you find that out? Stephen doesn’t speak.”

  “I wrote his da. Asked him to tell me as much as he could about Stephen’s life. Before the war, I mean.”

  Dr. Barnes nodded, impressed.

  “Anyway,” Sid continued, “I got the idea to take him into the stables and walk with him past the horses and the cows, and I thought—like I said, maybe I only imagined it—but I thought I felt the trembling subside a little, and I saw his eyes go to Hannibal, the big plow horse. Just for a second. I thought I’d take him again this evening. When they’ve all come inside from the fields and the cows are being milked.”

  “You’ve a most unorthodox method, but please, by all means, keep it up. Good night, Sid.”

  “Ta-ra, Doc.”

  Sid made his way down a long hallway to a set of rooms at the back of the hospital, rooms that had padded walls and no beds, only mattresses—rooms for men suffering from the horrors of shell shock. Many of them had no physical signs of injury, and yet Sid knew that of all the patients at Wickersham Hall, these men were the most damaged, and the hardest to reach.

  He remembered now how he and India had barely any idea of what shell shock was when they’d opened the hospital. They’d been prepared for amputees, for men who’d been badly burned, even brain-damaged by bullets or shrapnel to the skull, but they’d been woefully unprepared for the wretches who came to them shaking and trembling, or sitting in wheelchairs, impossibly still. Some came with their eyes screwed shut, others with eyes downcast and blank, or impossibly wide open, as if still staring at the carnage that had driven them mad.

  Dr. Barnes had wanted them to talk about their experiences on the battlefield, to share what had happened to them and not keep it inside. Sometimes the talking cure worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sid observed the doctor’s method, and knew that his intentions were the best, but privately he wondered how reliving the hell that these men had suffered through was supposed to help them.

  “Who’d want to talk about it over and over again?” he’d asked India. “Wouldn’t a geezer just want to forget it all? To look at a tree or pat a dog and forge
t he’d ever set foot in a trench? At least until he regained a bit of strength and could cope with the memories?”

  “Sounds like you have an idea,” India said.

  “Maybe I do,” Sid replied. “Maybe I do.”

  The next day, he’d gone to see Dr. Barnes and asked if he might take some of the men outside, for a stroll around the grounds. He said he thought the fresh air might do them good. Dr. Barnes, overwhelmed as he was by the needs of his patients and desperate for any helpful measures, quickly agreed to Sid’s request.

  Sid had started with a nineteen-year-old boy named Willie McVeigh. Willie’s entire unit had been slaughtered on the Somme. Willie himself had been shot in the side and had lain on the battlefield, next to his dead and dying comrades, for two days before a field doctor had found him. When he’d arrived at Wickersham Hall, his body was rigid and his eyes were as wide, and as wild, as a frightened horse’s.

  Sid had taken Willie by the arm that April morning, and they’d set off around Wickersham Hall’s grounds—all three hundred acres of them. As they walked—slowly, for Sid had a cane and Willie’s gait was stiff—Sid had pointed out the daffodils and tulips poking through the ground. He’d showed Willie the new green willow leaves and the lilac buds about to burst open. He’d sat him down in the freshly tilled kitchen garden and put his clenched hands into the rich, wet dirt.

  He did these things for five weeks straight, with no discernible effect whatsoever. And still he persisted, until, after two months of strolls and hikes and nature walks, Willie suddenly bent down in the garden, picked a strawberry from one of the plants growing there, ate it, and asked if he might have another.

  Sid gave Willie another strawberry. He gave him a whole basketful. He’d have picked every strawberry in the garden if the lad had asked him to. He stood there watching Willie eat them, wanting to whoop and twirl and click his heels together.