Page 69 of The Unknown Birds

“But I so wanted you to know. It just all became too big.”

“I don’t mind, Ash. I suppose I might have once, but where’s the sense in it? Didn’t stop me finding you in the end.”

He wrapped both arms around her, pulling her close to his chest, tucking her head beneath his chin, and it felt so right. So perfect. So much like being home.

“I did trust you,” she swore to his chest.

“It was twenty years ago. We were, all of us, just trying to survive.”

When she could finally speak again without a hitch in her voice, she said, “The tea will get cold,” and so he released her and poured two cups of God’s strongest brew.

Fortified, she tried to explain what she’d wanted to tell him since January. “I was shattered when they sent me home. Convinced I’d truly lost you out there—hoping against hope you were still alive. I even took a brief nursing course, telling myself then they’d let me go back to the Front where I could find you. But in the end, they assigned me to a hospital in Plymouth. We had a handful of wounded Surreys pass through—Sergeant Major Chapman for one.”

“Really?”

“Even in his sorry state he recognized me, though he knew naught word of you, nor did any of the others. Since he caught me, I had no choice but to confess what I’d done. He seemed to find it hilarious.”

“He would. Napier, too.”

She smiled, but her throat grew tight and her eyes grew hot, so she took another long sip of tea, wincing at its strength. “Later that night, Chapman died. Of shock, they said. And I knew from my training it could happen to a body which had undergone far too much strain, but I couldn’t shake the terrible feeling it had actually been the shock of my revelation. That perhaps I’d mistaken humor for hysteria.”

“No,” Rook said, and she shrugged. Not ready for him to absolve her.

“A few days after that, Stew came through with Max still by his side. Gas blindness. The dog knew me instantly and Stew recognized my voice, but I was so afraid of shocking him to death, that I pretended to just be… Charlotte. Told him truthfully I had no idea where my brother was. We maintained a correspondence for a few years until his letters eventually stopped coming.”

Rook squeezed her hand. “Stew’s alive,” he said, and she gasped in a sharp, deep breath.

Alive.

“Did his vision recover?”

“No. But on the bright side, it saved him from the mines.”

And well, that was something at least.

“After the war ended and Charles was out of danger, I so desperately missed…” She looked up into his eyes, unable to admit the whole, unvarnished truth. “I missed my dearest, dearest friends. Tom was the only one who ever figured out my secret, and I needed his advice, so I took myself off to Runnymede, to the big house where his family worked.”

A chill ran through her, body and soul, and she rubbed her arms before taking another sip of the strong, milky tea.

“One of his sisters told me. He never made it home. I think I’d known it in my heart, but not knowing officially had somehow made it easier to pretend it wasn’t true. I was wrecked after that. I couldn’t bear to ask any more questions. I was certain I’d lost you, as well, but I couldn’t bring myself to inquiry further. The thought of clinging to unlikely hope only to lose you all over again…”

Ash shook her head. She could scarcely breathe for holding back unwanted emotion, she who’d rather die than shed a tear. What an absolute ninny he must think her.

But he merely shook his head. “You didn’t lose me, Ash,” he promised. “Just misplaced me for a while.”

And those simple words made her love him all the more.

Chapter 21

Piave, December 1917

The third round of fighting at Ypres dragged on for three long months, and like so many other units, the Surrey regiment took heavy casualties. Tom was dragged in from No Man’s Land, every bit of exposed skin plagued with boils from mustard gas, and Ash received five stitches in her calf from a run-in with a nasty bit of barbed wire, but neither was enough to provide the pair a trip back to Blighty.

Lieutenant Napier, however, was not so lucky. He paid for his ticket home with the loss of his left arm, though Captain Davies assured B Company their lieutenant’s spirits were as high as ever.

“He was only glad he still had one hand with all his digits, so he could put two fingers up to the Germans on his way out,” Davies told them to a round of morose laughter as they imagined Napier flicking the V from his ambulance seat.

By December, his place had been filled with the transfer of one Lieutenant Hawkins. But the consensus among the Surreys was that the new man fell short in every way. Along with Hawkins came new orders for a divisional relocation to the Italian Front, where they might expect to see action along the Piave River.