Page 22 of The Unknown Birds

Now I am old and worn and bent,

I have paid the Price, but my youth is spent –

I am one of the Men-Who-Know.

—Cyril Morton Horne

Chrysalis

Twilight faded into darkness, but still Rook—her Rook, her sullen sniper—held her in his arms. At first the foot traffic flowed around them, parting and rejoining on the other side, but soon it slowed altogether, until it was only them, just as it was inside their minds.

Ash had run outside without coat or hat, but no chill could reach her in the warmth of his embrace as they clung to each other, his cheek resting atop her bowed head, neither of them saying a word, neither willing to let the other go. Two decades she’d mourned him, his friendship and his face, and now, like some kind of miracle, he was here. But could she keep him?

A nearby cough infiltrated their bubble, a bobby with a bemused expression that said they should take their reunion somewhere more private.

Rook shifted the weight, off his right leg, peering into her face. “Let me walk you home?” he rasped, his voice an invocation and a plea.

Ash looked over her shoulder at the auditorium. “I left my coat and handbag inside.” She was loathe to part from him, even long enough to blink. What if stepping away awoke her from this perfect dream?

“I won’t disappear,” he promised with a cheeky grin. Still, she couldn’t resist the urge to glance back over her shoulder as she walked, drinking in the sight of him bathed in the streetlamp’s golden light.

“There you are,” Professor Richards said. “You were a smashing success. Three different journalists asked for your address. Is everything all right, my dear? Only you look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Something like that,” Ash murmured as Richards followed her to the room where she’d left her things. “I’m glad it was a success.”

She didn’t pause to button up before turning back towards the door, towards Rook on the other side of it.

“Have you reconsidered your aversion to writing poetry yourself? You’ve such a keen grasp of the subject it seems a waste not to.”

“I’ll give it some thought,” she assured him, smiling politely and shaking his hand. “Good night.”

“Yes, good night,” he said, though she hardly heard him as she dashed back out to the street, breathing a sigh of relief to find Rook right where she’d left him.

Not much of a poet just now, she was completely lost for words—unable to do anything but grin at him, shy and bewildered and somehow, finally, whole.

He offered his right elbow obligingly, so he could maneuver the cane with his left hand. It was disorienting, him treating her like a lady acquaintance rather than throwing an arm around her shoulders as he would have in the war. Still, she settled her hand into the crook of his arm, grateful for any contact as they strolled towards the Underground station, neither in a terrible hurry for the walk to ever end, though he seemed a bit relieved to sit down in the empty car.

His eyes bored into hers as they swayed with the gentle motion of the train, and her skin prickled with awareness.

Rook had seen her, of course, in all sorts—mud caked and blood spattered, sunburned and tear stained, in threadbare clothes that reeked and barely held together the frayed edges of her tattered soul. But he had known her as a boy, befriended her as a boy, loved her—as a boy—flush with the innocence of youth, even as that innocence was daily shattered.

Now she was a woman, ripe with middle age, her breasts no longer bound flat by bandages but not so very large, nor was her brown hair shorn close to the scalp as it once had been. But she lacked the patience to fuss with curls and pins, so it was cut into a bob a few years out of fashion and already streaked with bits of grey. She knew without looking in a mirror that her face bore evidence of every lost companion, every year of grief and torment, every minute she and Alex Rook had been apart.

Still he stared at her, a tiny smile tugging at his fine, thin lips, as he shook his head back and forth like he couldn’t quite believe that she was real.

“I enjoyed your lecture,” he finally offered.

“Did you? I don’t even know a word I said.”

“I don’t either,” he admitted with a laugh so familiar it threatened to rip her heart in two. “Best damn lecture I ever heard.”

Ashley allowed herself to laugh as well. God above, how she’d missed laughing with him.

Realizing she still clung to his elbow though they were seated side by side without the excuse of walking, she forced her fingers to release him, made herself face forward, placed her hands upon her thighs.

Unwilling to relinquish contact, however, he covered her left hand and squeezed it tight. Such a simple, companionable gesture stripped away her last reserve, and she melted into the seat, into him, letting her head fall to rest upon his shoulder as though they were back in a weary trench somewhere in France.

“How in the world did you come to be at my lecture?” she wondered.