Seamie, busy tightening the girth strap on his camel’s saddle, did not reply.
“Allenby will send men out to hunt for her,” Albie said.
“What men? In case you haven’t noticed, Albie, there’s a war on,” Seamie replied. “Allenby’s not going to use valuable troops to hunt for one person—a person who’s not even supposed to be in the desert.”
“But you’re wounded! You can’t ride with your injuries. And even if you could, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t even know where you’re going!”
“He does,” Seamie said, pointing at a man sitting atop a second camel, his Bedouin guide, Abdul.
Albie shook his head. “The two of you … all alone in the desert. You’ll be hopelessly lost within a day. And for what, Seamie? Willa’s plane crashed. The pilot was killed. It’s likely she was badly injured, and it’s equally likely that she is now dead.”
Seamie sighed. “That’s our Albie, ever the optimist.”
“What about your ship? You’re supposed to take command of a new ship in just under five weeks’ time. How are you going to get out to the Jabal ad Duruz hills, search the area around them, and get back to Haifa in time? If you’re not at the docks the morning of the day your commission begins, you’ll be classed as a deserter. You know what the British military thinks of deserters, don’t you? You’ll be court-martialed and shot.”
“I’ll make sure that I hurry then.”
As Albie hectored him, Seamie looked inside his saddlebags, double checking that he’d packed both of his pistols, sufficient ammunition, basic medicines and dressings, and his field glasses; then he rechecked his food and water supplies. It was difficult to see in the darkness. The sun had not yet risen over Haifa.
He had made up his mind to find Willa right after he’d finished reading Allenby’s memo. The news had devastated him. He couldn’t stand the thought of Willa, possibly injured, certainly afraid, in the hands of cruel and vicious men. It nearly drove him mad.
Instead of going to dinner at the officers’ mess, as he and Albie had planned, he’d spent most of the night preparing for the trip. He’d found a guide before the sun had even gone down, and they’d spent the following day gathering supplies. When night fell again, he slept for a few hours, then rose at four A.M., dressed, and made his way to the gates of the city. He’d met Abdul by the east wall just after five o’clock.
Albie, who’d been against the plan ever since he’d heard of it, had met them at the wall and was still trying to talk Seamie out of it. He’d used almost every argument he could think of—every argument, that is, except the one that mattered most to him. He hadn’t want to use that one, but he saw now that if he wanted to stop his friend from doing something rash, he had no choice.
“Seamie …,” he said now, hesitantly.
“Yes?” Seamie said, buckling one of his saddlebags.
“What about Jennie?”
Seamie stopped what he was doing. He stared straight ahead of himself for a few seconds, then turned to Albie. Albie had never broached the topic of Seamie’s affair with Willa; he’d never so much as mentioned it. For years, Seamie thought Albie hadn’t known anything about it. Now he saw that he was wrong. He saw something else, too.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Albie?” he said quietly. “You’re the one who told Willa to go. To leave London. And to leave me. I always wondered if somebody had said something to her. Willa’s note … her decision to go … it was all so abrupt.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Seamie. It was wrong. For you. For Willa. And for Jennie. I went to your flat one night to see you. You weren’t there, but Jennie was. She was very upset. She knew, Seamie. And she was carrying your son. You and Willa are the most important people in the world to me. How could I do nothing? How could I let you destroy yourselves and everyone around you?” Albie looked at Seamie. “You’re furious with me, aren’t you?”
Seamie felt gutted by his friend’s revelation, and by the knowledge that he himself had caused Jennie such grief. “No, Albie, I’m not furious with you,” he said. “I’m furious with myself. I had no idea that Jennie knew,” he said, sadly. “I thought I’d managed to keep it from her.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve only caused more pain by bringing this all up. I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, Albie. I’m the one who made a mistake. Quite a few of them. I made one when I married Jennie. And another one when I took up again with Willa. And I’ve tried to set things right. I’ve tried my best to be a good husband and a good father. And when this war is over, I will try again.”
“Is going after Willa your idea of being a good husband?” Albie asked him.
“For God’s sake, Albie!” Seamie said angrily. “I’m not riding out into the desert to rekindle a love affair. What do you want me to do? Sit on my backside while she rots in a Turkish prison? While her guards beat her or starve her … or worse?”
“Lawrence will search for her. If she is alive, he’ll find her.”
Seamie laughed joylessly. “And risk giving away his position? The size of his troops? Right before an offensive? I doubt it. Lawrence is a soldier through and through, Albie, and you know it. As much as he might want to rescue Willa, he cannot risk the lives of thousands for the life of one.”
“You mustn’t do this.”
“What the hell is it with you, Albie? Don’t you want me to find her?” Seamie said, but he regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth. The pain they caused Albie was evident on his face.
“Of course I want her found. She’s my sister, Seamie. We have been at odds over the past few years, but I care about her greatly,” Albie said quietly, looking at the ground. “But I don’t think you can find her. I think all you can do is recover her body. Which is what I will attempt to do from here with the help of local contacts—Bedouin traders, Turkish informants, and the like. I wish you would help me in that. I wish you would stay here and …” He faltered.
“What?”
Albie looked at Seamie. “I’m afraid this will be it, the thing that finally kills you. I’ve always thought you’d do each other in, you and Willa. Always. As children on my father’s boat. In Cambridge, when you climbed up buildings. You came damned close on Kilimanjaro. And then in London I thought you’d do it by breaking each other’s hearts. You still might. It’s a madness what you have between you. Love, I guess you call it. It almost destroyed Willa in Africa. And again in London. She’s likely dead now, Seamie. I know it, and you do, too, but you can’t accept it. And now you’re hell-bent on destroying yourself on this impossible mission. If you’re captured by the enemy, well, you know what will happen …” His voice trailed off.
“Albie,” Seamie said. “I have no choice. Can’t you see that? She is my heart and my soul. There’s a chance she’s still alive, even if it’s a slight one, and while there is, I can’t abandon her. I can’t.”
Albie sighed. “I knew I wouldn’t dissuade you,” he said heavily. He reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out a folded paper. “It’s a map of the region. The most current we have. Destroy it if you’re taken.”
Seamie took the map. Then he pulled Albie close and hugged him tightly.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “She’ll be back, too. In the meantime, get off your skinny, bespectacled arse and find some spies, will you? So my next boat doesn’t get blown up like my last one did.”
And then Seamie mounted his camel, and he and Abdul were off. As they rode away, Albie heard the song of the muezzin rising from within the walled city, calling the faithful to prayer. He was not a religious man, but he never failed to be moved by the beauty and emotion of the muezzin’s voice, and as the sun rose, sending its golden rays across the desert dunes, he sent up a quick prayer of his own.
He asked God to protect Willa and Seamie, these two people whom he cared about so deeply. He asked Him to overlook the mad and reckless love that bound them, and then he asked for one more thin
g—he asked God to please spare him from ever knowing anything like it.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Fiona stopped dead at the front doors of the Wickersham Hall hospital—a hospital she and Joe had helped fund, one they visited often. Never did she think she would one day come here to visit her own son.
She, Joe, and Sid had come up from London early this morning on the train. A carriage had met them at the station and brought them here. She’d alighted, waited until Sid and the driver got Joe’s chair down and got Joe into it, and then she’d proceeded with her husband and brother to the hospital doors. Now, however, she found she could go no farther.
Sid had come to London last night to tell her and Joe, and the rest of their family, about Charlie. They were all in the drawing room, sitting by the fire. It was late when they heard the knock on the door, and Fiona had felt her heart falter inside her. She got to her feet immediately, waiting for Mr. Foster to come into the drawing room. With a son in the army, she lived in terror of a knock on the door.
“He’s not dead. Oh, thank God!” she said, when Sid came into the drawing room where she and Joe had been sitting by the fire. “They send a telegram to tell you when your son’s died, not an uncle.”
“No one’s dead, Fiona,” Sid had said, closing the door behind himself.
“It can’t be good, though, your news, can it? You wouldn’t have come all this way at this hour if it was,” she said, steeling herself. “What’s happened?”
Sid made her sit down first. She’d known then that whatever he had to tell her would be very bad. People always made you sit down when the news was very bad. And it was. She cried when he told her about Charlie, and then she kept crying—all night long. She wanted to leave for the hospital right away, but Sid was against it.
“He’s only just arrived,” he said. “Let him sleep. Maybe a good night’s rest in a safe, quiet place will help calm him.”
The three of them had left for Paddington Station early. They were on the first train out. Fiona left the younger children in Mrs. Pillower’s care. Katie was in Oxford.
Fiona looked up at the large doors now. She had walked through them in happier days, years ago, when she’d come to visit Maud. It felt like such a long time ago, like another lifetime. She remembered another set of hospital doors that she’d walked through once. Even farther back in her past. When she was only seventeen years old. She’d walked through those doors, rushed through them, to see her injured father, right before he died.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t do it.”
Joe, who was by her side in his wheelchair, took her hand. “You have to, love,” he said. “Charlie needs you.”
Fiona nodded. “Yes, you’re right,” she said. She gave him a brave smile, and together they went inside.
India was waiting for them. She hugged and kissed them wordlessly, then she and Sid led them down a long hallway and into a patient’s room. Fiona looked at the poor young man sitting on the bed. He was shaking and pale and as thin as a scarecrow. He was staring at the wall. She looked away again, confused.
“Where is he? Where’s Charlie?” she asked.
Sid put his arm around her. “Fee … that is Charlie.”
Fiona felt her heart shatter inside of her. She covered her face with her hands. A low animal moan of pain escaped her. She took a deep breath and then another and then she lowered her hands. “It can’t be,” she said. “How did this happen? How?” she asked. “Do you know?”
“We know, Fiona,” Sid said hesitantly. “India and I read the medical reports yesterday.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“It was a hard thing to read, Fee,” Sid said. “And probably it’s a harder thing still to hear. I don’t think—”
“Tell her. Tell us. Both of us. We have to know,” Joe said.
Sid nodded. He took them out of the room and then he told them.
“According to the reports of the medical officer in the field,” he said, “Charlie had been in the trenches, on the front lines, for five straight months prior to the final attack on his unit. He’d held up under terrible conditions and had always conducted himself bravely. He’d rushed enemy lines during the heat of the battle many times. And then, during an attempt on an enemy position early one morning, two shells in succession hit very close to him. One shell deafened him. The other blew his friend, a lad by the name of Eddie Easton, to bits. Charlie was covered in Eddie’s blood, and in pieces of his flesh.” Sid had to stop speaking for a bit. “I’m sorry,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Go on,” Fiona whispered, her fists clenched at her sides.
“Charlie lost his mind,” Sid continued. “He couldn’t stop screaming, and couldn’t stop trying to shake the blood and gore off himself. He tried to crawl back into the trench, but his commander wouldn’t let him. The man—Lieutenant Stevens—kept screaming at Charlie to get back out to the battlefield, but Charlie couldn’t. Stevens called him a coward and threatened to have him shot for desertion if he didn’t return to battle. Charlie kept crying and shaking. Another shell exploded nearby. He curled into a ball. Stevens grabbed him and dragged him back to the front lines. He hauled him into no-man’s-land and tied him to a tree. He left him there for seven hours. Said it would set him straight, make a man of him. By the time the shelling stopped and Stevens finally gave the order to bring him back, Charlie was catatonic. The two soldiers who went to untie him said they could get no response from him at all. They carried him back to the trench. Stevens had at him again, yelling at him, slapping him—all to no effect. He then ordered him invalided.”
When Sid finished speaking, Fiona turned to Joe, but he was facing away from her, from all of them. His head was bent. He was crying. This man, this good, brave man, who’d never cried for himself when he’d been shot, who’d never shed one tear when he’d lost his legs, and very nearly his life, was sobbing.
Reeling, Fiona walked back into Charlie’s room. She took a halting step toward her son. And then another, until she was standing next to his bed. She knelt down beside him and gently stroked his arm.
“Charlie? Charlie, love? It’s me, it’s Mum.”
Charlie made no response. He just kept staring at the wall and shaking uncontrollably. Fiona tried again. And again. And again. She squeezed his arm. Touched his cheek. She took his trembling hands in hers and kissed them. And still Charlie gave no sign that he knew her, that he knew himself, that he knew anything at all. Finally, when she could bear it no longer, Fiona leaned her head against her son’s legs and wept. She thought that she had been through everything a human being could go through. Losing her family as a young girl. Losing her beloved first husband, Nicholas, and then almost losing Joe to a criminal’s bullets. But she discovered now that she had not, for this pain was like nothing she’d ever known. It was new and terrible. It was a mother’s pain at seeing her precious child destroyed.
And Fiona realized that for once in her life, she did not know what to do. She did not know how she would ever get off her knees and stand up again. She did not know how she would manage to take her next breath.
She did not know how to bear the unbearable.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Willa Alden expected death to come.
She had hoped for it, prayed for it, and sometimes, alone in the darkness of her cell for days on end, she had begged for it. But death did not come.
Loneliness came, along with despair. Hunger came, and the bone-chilling cold of desert nights. Lice came and, with them, fever. But not death.
She learned to tell day from night by the levels of noise and activity outside her cell. Morning was when the warden walked from cell to cell, opening a small sliding hatch, peering in at his prisoners to make sure they were still alive, then closing it and moving on again.
Midday was when her jailers brought her a jug of fresh water and her one and only meal, and emptied the tin pot that served as her toilet.
Evening was when a hu
sh fell over the prison.
Night was when the rats came out. She had learned to leave some food for them on her plate and to push her plate into a corner, so they would fight one another for the scraps and leave her alone.
She kept track of the passing days by scraping marks in the wall with a stone she’d found on the floor of her cell. She thought she’d been locked away for thirteen days.
The jailers worked in teams. They talked as they worked, but only to each other. When she was feverish, which was most of the time, she could do little but lie mute on her filthy cot. On the few occasions when she could muster the strength to sit or stand, she tried to engage her jailers. She tried to find out why they were holding her and what they planned to do with her, but they would tell her nothing. She understood a bit of Turkish, however, and from the snatches of conversation she could hear, she was able to make out the words “Lawrence,” “Damascus,” and “Germans.”
It was still August; she was sure of that. Had Lawrence marched on Damascus so soon? she wondered. Or had the Turks held the city with the help of the Germans? And for God’s sake, where was she? And what were her Turkish captors going to do with her?
Willa finally got her answer nearly two weeks after she’d been brought to the prison. Shortly after the warden made his morning rounds, her door was opened again. The warden was standing in it, along with two of his men. One of them carried a lantern. The warden wrinkled his nose at the smell, then barked at Willa to get up. She could not. The fever she’d been running off and on for most of her imprisonment had spiked up the night before. She was weak and delirious and did not have the strength to stand.
“Get her up,” the warden said to his men.
One of them swore under his breath. He did not want to touch her, he said. She was filthy and full of fever. The warden shouted something at him, and he smartly did as he was told. Willa was marched out of the cell and down a long corridor. The daylight, coming in at the windows, blinded her. She had been in the dark for so long her eyes could not cope with brightness. They had adjusted somewhat, however, by the time she arrived at her destination—a small, well-lit room at the back of the prison. There was a metal chair in the middle of it. Underneath the chair was a drain. Willa’s stomach knotted at the sight of it.
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