Page 67 of The Unknown Birds

Of unthought sorrow lies; and peace is gone

From many homes; and many men must fall

Before the dawning New Year dies anon.

—Geoffrey Wall

New Year’s Eve, 1915

One warm and sunny Sunday in May, Ashley got up the nerve to take the Underground to Temple Station, and she slipped into the back of the church just before the service began. Rook was warming up the choristers. Their treble voices, high and pure as gold, made Ash feel like weeping, but what didn’t these days?

Would those same boys grow up and go off to fight as she and Rook had done? Make friends and lose them as she and Rook had done? Come back with shattered spirits and missing limbs, those who made it back at all?

Their warm-up finished and Rook took his place behind the organ, his long, lithe fingers flying expertly across the many rows of keys. The ancient templar sanctuary swelled with celestial sound, his back rippling as his whole body seemed to sway with the music, keeping time.

This was the Rook Ash alone had known—during quiet, private moments—not the stone-cold, sullen sniper the others knew. In some ways it was jarring, and yet in all the ways that mattered, he was Rook: calm and confident with a cool exterior, but inside, sweet and steadfast and relentlessly kind.

Ash had grieved for him after the war, deeply. Desperately. So certain he had died in battle, too terrified to ever know for sure. Now she grieved for the years after, for all the time wasted living half a life not knowing, when what a life they might have known instead.

Not as lovers but, messy romantic nonsense aside, he was her Zwillingsseele as Frau Wintter had suggested. Charles might be her corporeal twin, but Rook was the missing half of her beleaguered soul.

Too focused on his perfect posture at the bench, she heard little of the sermon, but when it ended, she found herself unable to move, as though her feet had taken root within the floor. And so she stayed, letting his final notes wash over her like a benediction—if only they could wash away her sins and make her new.

The last note still lingered in the ancient, vaulted ceiling when he turned to leave, and for a moment he seemed to blanch as if being startled by a ghost.

Ash looked away. Ashamed. Had it been a mistake to visit him here? To impose herself on his most inner sanctum, un­invited and unannounced?

She collected her handbag, and shifted to the edge of the wooden bench, but he was already there, moving down the aisle to her, a welcome smile now gracing his freshly shaven face.

“You play beautifully,” she told him.

“Only because I didn’t know I had an audience. You caught me by surprise.”

“You had a whole congregation.”

“Yet only one that mattered,” he teased.

Ash looked away again, his gaze far too intense. It was like trying to stare directly into the sun. What did he mean, saying such things?

“I guess it worked—the knitting,” she said. “Preserved your dexterity through the war?”

“If only I’d been more worried about my footwork than my hands,” he said with a grimace. “Same complaint my teacher had when I was ten. But I was never going to play Bach’s Fugue with the Philharmonic, and fortunately for my hands, there was this troublesome private in my regiment with a seemingly endless need for socks.”

“Then you’re welcome,” she said with a smile.

He nodded towards her feet. “Any lasting difficulties?”

“Oh, you know. They ache and they’re cold most of the time. Nothing to write home about.”

His own smile turned sympathetic—him, of all people, who’d lost an entire leg, or enough of one. He lowered himself onto the bench beside her and looked around as though taking in the majestic church with a stranger’s eye.

“I came here once before,” she admitted, and he turned his head to listen to her story. “It was the Night of the Long Knives, what—five years back? I was drawn here. To light a candle and say a prayer, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was praying for. The only word I could think over and over was simply, Please. But that night, I felt certain you were with me. Your spirit—I imagined—I wanted so badly to conjure you from thin air.”

“You wore a long green coat and a flat cap like a man might wear…”

Ash turned sharply, studying the pain in his glistening grey eyes, his face gone suddenly white. “How⁠—?”

“I recognized your profile cast in shadow. Thought I was seeing your ghost,” he murmured. “Then you stood, and I saw the coat for what it was—a lady’s coat—and I…”