by Charles Todd
He’d nearly said bad news.
I thanked him and hurried back inside, to sit by the fire as I opened the envelope.
The letter was from Madeleine.
You must come at once. They’ve exchanged Alain for one of their own, and he’s in Paris, with me. He’s in terrible straits, and I don’t know what to do. Please find a way to come. I beg of you.
That was all. But it was enough.
I sat there, reading it over again, trying to think what Madeleine had meant by “terrible straits.”
And then I jumped up, realizing that I must go.
But there was Peter, what was I to do about Peter? He was so much stronger, so much better, he had come so far . . .
He would need the motorcar. He wasn’t ready to take the train. I couldn’t leave without making certain Peter was all right.
I crossed to the Wrights’ house, went upstairs and packed my valise, then went in search of Mrs. Wright. She was out in the back garden, feeding the hens, and she looked up as I called to her.
“What’s wrong? Is anything wrong?” she asked, seeing my face.
“A friend is in trouble. I must go,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wright, but it’s urgent. I’ll drive back to London and leave the motorcar there for the Captain. If I don’t—tell him—tell him I’ll write as soon as I can.” I couldn’t go on.
Our extraordinary interlude at Walnut Tree Cottage had come to an end.
I thought my heart would break.
And then I was out in the motorcar, turning to go back to Midhurst, where I could pick up the road to London.
The morning had been dull, but as I was reversing, a ray of sunlight came through the clouds, bathing the walnut tree in light.
I stopped, got out, and ran into the front garden, finding a walnut for Sister Blake. I didn’t know when I’d see her, but it would do no harm to have it with me, ready to pay our “rent.” And then I was gone.
I was halfway to London when I remembered the other letter that Mrs. Hennessey had posted to me. It could wait. I needed no official letter to tell me what I had lost.
Once in London I drove directly to Mrs. Hennessey’s house.
Bess was in residence, having been given a week’s leave. She was just on her way to Victoria Station to take the train to Somerset. I stopped her and begged a favor.
“I know you are eager to see your family,” I began, “but I need your help desperately.”
“What’s wrong? What do you need?” she asked instantly, ready to help.
I explained about France, and how I must reach Paris as soon as possible.
Why Peter was in St. Albans and must return to Sussex.
She listened, then nodded. “It will be all right, I’ll drive to St. Albans and retrieve your Peter, then take him to Sussex. What shall I tell him? He’ll want to know why you’re deserting him.”
“Tell him—just tell him I was called away. And, Bess, could I borrow one of your uniforms? I’ll return it to you as soon as possible.”
“Yes, of course, they’re in my wardrobe in the flat. But where are yours?”
“It’s a long story. For another day. Hurry, Peter will be waiting.” And I dashed into the house and up the stairs, leaving her with her kit and Peter’s motorcar.
I changed quickly. It was against all rules to wear this uniform without proper sanction. But I couldn’t imagine that I would be allowed to travel to France as a civilian. A nursing Sister returning to her post would stand a fairly good chance.
I had a little trouble getting a ticket for Dover. Once there I found a ship’s officer I knew and told him that I had missed my connection because my train was delayed. He agreed to land me in Calais. “I don’t have a cabin for you,” he ended, in apology.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be fine.” I thanked heaven he hadn’t asked for my orders, assuming I had them.
The crossing was winter rough, and I sat on deck, watching the waves crashing over the bow. A good many of the new recruits were seasick, lying on deck where it was cooler than the stuffy quarters below or hanging over the rail, moaning in agony and praying for the ship’s corkscrew motion to stop.
I shut them out of my mind, wondering how I would manage to reach Paris once I was in France. But that turned out to be no problem. I found a convoy of lorries on their way to Rouen, and once in Rouen, I took the first train in any direction. It was heading south, but it didn’t matter, for I was able to pick up another going on to Paris once I’d reached Lyon.
It was interesting to see that my uniform—Bess’s—a few well-placed lies or sous, and the reputation of the Nursing Service got me through, where once orders had been paramount. I was grateful for the changes time had brought.
In Paris I found a taxi to take me to the Villard house, and finally, tired, travel stained, worried almost to the point of feeling ill, I was lifting the Villard’s massive knocker and waiting for someone to answer my summons.
It was Marie, Madeleines’s maid, who came to the door. She exclaimed when she recognized me and ushered me inside. At that moment, Madeleine herself came rushing down the stairs, her face alight with surprise and relief.
“Elspeth? Is that you? Of course it is! Come in, Marie will make tea for you while you warm yourself by the fire.” She enveloped me in a loving embrace, then linking her arm with mine, she led me into the little morning room where she wrote her letters and dealt with household accounts.
“We seldom light the fires in the drawing room,” she said, pulling up a chair for me. “Coal and wood are hard to come by, and we make do as best we can. Oh, this is the first time I’ve seen you in your uniform. Turn around and let me—yes, very nice, but it isn’t you, is it, Elspeth, my dear?”
“It was this uniform that brought me across England and then over half of France, to you,” I told her. “A ball gown or an evening gown wouldn’t have worked at all.”
And then I regretted my sharpness. How was Madeleine to know how much my nursing had meant to me? But she laughed, thinking I was teasing.
“Tell me—your letter just reached me a few days ago, and you said in it that Alain had been exchanged?”
“We had an officer they wanted rather badly. Henri managed to include Alain in the price for him. And just as well. He’s been so terribly ill, Elspeth, so changed, in such despair.”
“What happened? You said he’d been wounded when he was captured, but no one seemed to know where or how seriously.”
“They had to take his arm, Elspeth. At the shoulder. It was that or let him die of gangrene.” She began to cry, the pent-up emotions of Alain’s return and his condition too much to hold in any longer. “His arm, Elspeth. I can’t bear it.”
I had seen more amputations than she could imagine in her wildest dreams. But this was Alain. Her brother, the man I’d thought I wanted to marry when he marched off to war.
And then I realized the full impact of his amputation. I could hardly tell him now that I’d fallen in love with someone else. Not now, not ever.
“I want to see him. Will you take me up to his room?”
“Have your tea first, Elspeth. You’ll need all your strength to face what’s ahead.”
I could have told her I needed nothing but to see Alain for myself. Still, I was a guest in her house, and she had ordered the tea especially on my account.
And so I sat there and drank my tea, ate the little cakes that the Villard cook had added to the tea tray, and listened to the rest of Madeleine’s news.
Little Henri was growing, just learning to crawl. Henri was no longer with the British forces as liaison but back with his old regiment.
“I worry about him every day, pray for him every night. He came home with Alain, twenty-four hours, that’s all he had. But he saw his son, I held him in my arms, and that was that. He was gone away again almost as soon a
s he’d come.”
I was glad for both their sakes that they’d had even that little time together.
“And he says—he says that the war that was to end by Christmas will go on and on and on. There’s no way of knowing how or when it will end.” She was crying again. “What will I do if something happens to Henri? Bad enough that Alain is like he is. But my God, what if it had been Henri?”
I comforted her as best I could and finally persuaded her to take me upstairs to see Alain. At the door of his bedchamber, she stopped.
“Go and see him, Elspeth. Let me wait here for you.”
It was then I realized that she had been putting off seeing him because she herself dreaded going into his room.
I braced myself for a shock, knocked lightly, and when Alain’s familiar voice called gruffly, “Come,” I opened the door and walked into his bedroom.
He was sitting by the fire. So thin that I hardly knew him, his fair hair cropped short as a result of his fever, and his face drawn with pain and despair.
He recognized me at once, and I saw from his expression that Madeleine hadn’t told him that she’d written to me.
It was his right arm that was missing, the shoulder of his shirt sagging where it had been.
Trying to rise to his feet, he nearly fell, and swore with feeling under his breath.
“Elspeth,” he said. And that was all he could manage.
“Alain. My dear,” I said, crossing the room to the hearth and holding out my hands to the blaze. I wanted so much to take him into my arms and comfort him, but he would have seen that as pity. And pity he didn’t want from me. “It was a cold journey. I’m glad to be here. How are you?”
“As you see,” he said bitterly.
“Yes, you’ve been through a terrible ordeal. How is the shoulder?”
Shocked that I should ask, he couldn’t answer at first. Then he said, “I feel the arm. Every day. Every night I dream that I’m whole. And every morning I wake up to find that it’s not there.”
“It’s not uncommon,” I said slowly. “It could fade with time. There’s no way of knowing.”
“I asked Madeleine not to tell you,” he burst out angrily. “I forbade her to write to you. But I see that she has. I shan’t be able to forgive her.”
I turned to face him. “Did you think I wouldn’t wish to know? I’d been told that you were missing, that you were taken prisoner, that you were wounded and very ill. Did you think I wouldn’t care?”
He had the grace to look away. And then he turned back to me and said, “You aren’t wearing my ring.”
I lifted my hand and pulled the chain free of my collar, letting the light play on the gold and the ruby stone. It looked like fresh blood.
“I was not allowed to wear such things as a nursing Sister.”
“Yes, I’d heard that you had trained. I admire your courage.”
It was the first kind thing he’d said to me. “Thank you. My cousin Kenneth didn’t see it that way at all. He insisted that I resign.”
“And did you?”
“That’s another story,” I said evasively. “Will you ask me to sit down? Or shall I remain standing, like you?”
He gestured to a chair across from his, and once I had seated myself, he took the other, but awkwardly, his body not yet accustomed to balancing without that right arm.
We sat in silence for several minutes.
Then Alain said, “In a way I’m glad you’ve come. I have been trying to think how to tell you that I will not be speaking to your cousin after all.”
I tried not to show my shock. “Your feelings toward me have changed?”
“Nothing has changed, Elspeth. Except for this.” He indicated his shoulder. “I can’t very well expect you to marry a wreck of the man you knew before the war began.”
“Why should that make any difference? I’ve seen terrible things in the aid stations where I’ve served. Losing an arm is not the worst of them.”
“Don’t make light of what I’ve been through,” he said angrily. “And don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m saying.”
I was thinking that it could just as easily have been Peter who had lost his arm, not Alain. God had chosen. And I must make my choice. Clearly. Now.
“I’m not making light of anything. If you don’t care for me any longer, I can understand that and I can learn to accept it. What you are doing instead is denying me the right to choose. And I won’t allow you to take that from me, Alain. I told you before you left to join your regiment that I was pleased that you were intending to speak to Cousin Kenneth when the war was at an end. Well, it has ended for you. I can carry a letter to Scotland. It will be some time before you can travel, and Cousin Kenneth will take that into account.”
“I’m not marrying you or any woman. Not now, not ever.”
“There are other offers for my hand. Will you let him decide to accept one of them instead?”
“I have no choice.” There was anguish in his voice.
“Then you don’t love me, do you? I’m sorry.” It was merciless—but it was the only way to break through his stubborn resistance. I didn’t know if it would do more harm than good in the end, but I had come all this way to find him again, and I refused to be turned away.
I stood up, preparing to leave the room.
“For God’s sake, Elspeth, think what you’re doing to me.”
“No. It is what you are doing to me, Alain. Let’s be clear about this.”
He stood up, anger in his eyes, his jaw taut. “All right. If you want to know, I love you still. As much as I did in August. More, because I’ve thought about you every day in that wretched prison. You were the brightness in my darkness, and I think the only reason I survived at all was because of you. But that’s a two-edged sword, Elspeth. I have loved you too much. And I should have died. I should never have lived through that surgery.”
I wanted desperately to go to him, hold him. And I dared not.
“Do you think I only loved you when you were whole?” I asked. “Alain, do you think I’m so shallow?”
He stared at me. “My dear girl. I’m not what I was!”
“You are still Alain, aren’t you? Write that letter, and I will take it to Scotland in your place.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.”
I turned away, hiding the tears in my eyes. “I’m very tired, it was a long journey and I wasn’t able to sleep very much. I’d like to lie down. When I’m rested, I’ll come back. Don’t shut me out, Alain. Please.”
And with that I left the room.
Madeleine was still outside the door.
“I heard you shouting at each other,” she said uneasily.
“Yes. But in the end, I think I got my way.”
She embraced me then, holding me fiercely. “You’ll still be my sister, won’t you? And we’ll be just like we were before, the four of us, happy together.”
“If only we could,” I said, against her fair hair.
And meant it.
Chapter Twelve
When next I saw Alain, he was in a very different mood. I told myself that my bluntness had brought him to his senses. He began to talk about the weeks before the war, about his sister’s schooling at the Académie, about his life growing up at Montigny.
But never about the fighting he had seen along the Marne.
Over the next week, we settled into a comfortable way of going on.
One afternoon Alain talked about seeing me for the first time. He had come to escort his sister home for the Christmas holidays, and I had been in the foyer of the school as he walked in.
“You were frowning,” he said. “An absolute thundercloud. I asked Madeleine later what it was that troubled you, and she told me that you hadn’t wanted to leave England to finish your education. That
you had lost your father and it had been very painful because it was so sudden, so unexpected.”
“That’s true,” I said, remembering. “It seemed that I’d lost everything. My father, my home, my country. Cousin Kenneth is a very good man, he tries to carry out my father’s wishes in every way. But sometimes he’s dreadfully inflexible.”
“As in forcing you to leave the Nursing Service.”
I regarded him for a moment. “Would you refuse to consider marrying me because I had been a nursing Sister in the war?”
“I was a soldier,” he said very simply. “I knew your worth. To men in pain, men dying, you were sisters of mercy. I would not have felt that this changed you in any way.”
He had used the past tense. I was wearing his ring now. He had commented on it. And I had changed into the clothing I had worn here before the war began, left in the wardrobe of my room, cleaned and pressed with loving care by Madeleine’s maid.
I had come here to find him again. To see if the man he had been was changed in any way. Save for that first night, he had become the Alain I knew, his anger gone.
But now the use of the past tense worried me. I didn’t know how to probe for his feelings, for one could hardly ask a onetime suitor if he still wished to marry one.
Suddenly I was reminded of a story about Queen Victoria, that she had had to propose marriage to Prince Albert, for she as a reigning queen could not be offered marriage in the usual way.
Well, wasn’t I an Earl’s daughter? And for all his blue blood, Alain Montigny could be considered a commoner, without a title . . .
I said, “I have another question. You can’t travel to Scotland—Cousin Kenneth can’t come to Paris. At least, not very easily in the middle of a war. But the post still carries letters to and from Scotland. I don’t think it would be very proper for me to write to Cousin Kenneth on your behalf. But perhaps there is someone you could ask. A priest, a solicitor. I don’t want to lose you a second time.”
He looked away. “It’s too early, Elspeth. I have hardly healed. I can’t rise from a chair without risking a fall. I must see my doctor every week. I haven’t yet learned to use my left hand properly. I’m not prepared to be a bridegroom.”
