Page 61 of The Unknown Birds

“Come back before you leave. I’ll give you more.”

“Promise,” Ash agreed, buying six small Butterplätzchen to share with her mother and the tots and gobbling two before she even reached the street.

With money in her pocket on the streets of London for perhaps the first time in her life, window shopping felt a little different. She wandered into a bookshop and spent an hour browsing every shelf.

In the back corner, she found a row of tiny leather-bound Shakespeare plays. Reverently, she ran her finger along their gilt-lettered spines. Julius Caesar. King Lear. Measure for Measure.

“Looking for anything specific, soldier?” the clerk asked.

“Troilus and Cressida?”

He shook his head. “That’s one you don’t hear every day.”

“I’m sure I’ll find something else,” she replied, her eye falling on a copy of As You Like It. Could she be Rosalind, running through the forest disguised to all the world as a young man? And if all the world’s a stage, could Rook be her Orlando?

She bought the soft leather book and continued on her way.

Morning and evening, Ashley searched the papers for news of her friends, but news from the Front was slow, and as vague as her own letters home had to be, and she grew frustrated and restless. She walked until her feet ached, all the way across the river to Battersea Park, and then she ran because she needed to feel the wind on her face and forget about everything else, like how she was pretty sure she’d fallen in love with Rook, despite denying it to TomTom. And how her secret was eating her up inside.

When she got back, she was going to tell him. She had to. And if they survived the war, she’d make sure they never parted in this life or the next.

“What’s it really like over there?” her mother asked for the hundredth time, as they ate roasted chicken and potatoes Ash felt guilty even tasting, while her friends were stuck with rations and old hard tack.

Ash paused and licked her lips, remembering the fallen, remembering Reid ordering her to strip and Rook being buried alive in mud.

“I’ve never had so much fresh air in my life,” she said. “As you no doubt noticed, we get fairly dirty, but sometimes when it’s quiet, we watch films and play cards. We got the new Mary Pickford. And The Three Musketeers.”

Her mother frowned. “And you’re safe?”

“Course,” Ash said. With Rook nearby, it was almost not a lie.

Her mum kept on frowning. “It’s just… reading the papers, it sounds quite awful. Were you at the Somme?”

Ash reached across the table and took her mother’s hand, swallowing the potato lump inside her throat. “Don’t read the papers, Mum.”

“You don’t have to go back, you know,” she whispered. “All this time, without a word—who can say if Charles is even alive?”

Squeezing her mother’s hand, Ash shook her head. “I can’t do that. My friends⁠—”

“Friends? Young men who’ve mistaken you for another young man?”

It was a painful reminder of her lies.

“They haven’t all mistaken me,” she protested. “There’s one who knows.”

Her mother’s face turned stricken. “Charley, that isn’t safe. A girl surrounded by all those men? You must promise not to tell another soul.”

Ash studied her plate. She didn’t want to promise. She was desperate to come clean with Rook at least.

“Please, my darling, if you must go back, please at least promise me that.”

Heart breaking a little, she nodded her agreement. It wasn’t forever. One day this war would end, and then she could finally tell him the truth.

Chapter 19

Flanders, July 1917

When Ash returned to Calais, her company was not where she had left them, and it took two more days of confusion and misdirection before some major general finally figured out the entire Fighting Fifth Division, of which the Surreys were a part, had headed north and across the border into Belgium, to a town called Passchendaele. Another few hours in the back of a lorry and she found them there, encamped outside of town.