Page 23 of The Unknown Birds

“Suppose the credit should go to Reverend Haley. He had to dash off, or I’d have introduced you. I meant to go with him, but I turned back.”

“Your companion in the cap and specs?” she realized. “D’you know, for a moment, I thought he was Tom.”

Rook grew quiet, lost to introspection. Perhaps he knew as well as she did, Tom was gone. “He—the Reverend Haley, that is—mentioned seeing a notice in the paper and I just… felt compelled to tag along,” he explained, catching and holding her eye in the reflection of the dark train window.

“I’m glad you felt compelled.”

“As we made our way over to the university I thought to myself, A lecture on war poetry. By God, Ash would’ve loved this.”

She chuckled sadly. He must have believed her just as dead as she’d thought him.

“When you stepped out in front of that podium and they introduced you as Charley Ashley… I imagined I’d conjured you somehow.”

“A ghost.”

He nodded.

Ash exhaled a long, shaky breath. For the first time since leaving France, she was finally home, here on this underground train somewhere between Temple and the Tower.

When they reached Aldgate East, she reluctantly rose. Rook followed, using his cane to heft himself up, and she wondered how much pain the trip was costing him. She should tell him she’d be fine to make her way alone as she always had, but she couldn’t bring herself to surrender him back into the London mist for another twenty years.

“I’m just around the corner,” she said, giving him the choice. He held out his arm for her to lead the way, so she preceded him up the stairs, conscious to take them at his own slow and steady pace.

It truly was just round the corner, a revoltingly short distance to the flat she shared with her mother and Frau Wintter.

The women had grown close during the war, with Charles gone into hiding and Ashley far away. When the old flat was condemned after a raid by German bombers, the Wintters had invited Ashley’s mother to use an extra room above their bakery. Years later, after Herr Wintter passed and Frau Wintter retired, she had moved in here with Ashley and her mum. It was small, but cozy.

“This is me,” Ash said, stopping in the doorway, releasing his elbow but catching his hand. “We haven’t got a telephone, but send a message round any time.”

He looked down at their two hands, running his thumb back and forth across her knuckles, seeming just as unwilling to part as she. “You can reach me at Temple Church,” he promised. When he released her hand, he reached up, stopping short of touching the hair that peeked out from under her blue cloche hat. “This suits you,” he said.

And something a great deal like hope blossomed in her chest, foreign and strange and new.

“Fly safe, Little Bird,” he whispered, kissing her cheek and turning slowly away.

“Fly true,” she called after him, and he looked back over his shoulder, that tiny smirk once more upon his lips.

“True as steel,” he replied, his brow creasing momentarily, perhaps from the memories their words evoked.

With an overwhelming urge to chase after him and an equally strong fear she might weep, Ashley forced herself to open the door and step inside.

Her mother and Frau Wintter sat at the kitchen table, all too innocently sipping cups of tea.

“How was your lecture?” Frau Wintter asked.

“Fine,” Ash replied absently, still staring at the closed door as though willing it to open and reveal him on the other side.

“Was that a gentleman seeing you home?” her mother teased, though she had long since given up hope of Ashley stepping out or settling down and filling her life with grandchildren.

“Not a gentleman. A ghost,” Ash said, ignoring their confused and curious glances as she passed through to her tiny room and shut the door.

Chapter 9

The Somme, July 1916

After a few days of rain, the Surreys were ordered to take up their kits and march towards their new home in the front line of nearby trenches. Just after dark, lit only by a handful of torches, they tripped down short steps into walls of mud and net and sandbags as periodic gunfire rent the quiet and the occasional shell whistled overhead, each one causing Ash to jump.

A damp chill permeated the stagnant air, like one of Dickens’s days where it was summer in the light and winter in the shade, as though the creeping finger of death had already traced their names down each slick wall, claiming them all as its own.