Page 91 of The Unknown Birds

“Of course,” Davies said, concern marring his brow. “Only let me or the staff know if you should need a thing.”

She could feel Rook’s gaze follow as she brushed past him to the hall, smell his bergamot and basil scent all the way up the stairs and to her room.

Alone at last, she collapsed onto the foot of her luxurious bed and began to weep, fevered wrenching sobs the likes of which she’d kept locked inside for more than twenty years.

Chapter 26

The Somme, September 1918

Over the summer, Dusty contracted trench fever, earning him a ticket home. With no one left to depend on but each other, Ash and Rook grew ever closer. The rest of B Company came to know them as a package deal, nearly always a pair unless orders forced them apart. They ate together, kept watch together, slept side by side under the stars.

To the world, they were best friends—mates who’d lived the same hell for two and a half long years. To Ash, it was more than that. Rook had become a part of her. He was her left hand, her second skin, her severed soul. She had no doubt the man would die for her without a moment’s thought, nor would she hesitate to do the same for him.

As they marched towards their next assignment at the end of August, Ash felt a growing sense of what the French called déjà vu. They’d been back and forth for months across the whole of northern France, but the scenery was an ever-changing morass. The terrain seemed eerily familiar, and yet the pockmarked, burned-out landscape was unrecognizable as any place she’d ever been, and Hawkins hadn’t provided her with new maps.

It wasn’t until they passed the basilica that she recognized Albert, where she’d bought fine cheese and postcards long ago.

“She’s gone,” she heard herself whisper, staring up at the crumbling roof where the golden statue of Mary had once leaned down. No longer tall and watchful, nor falling towards the earth, no infant in his mother’s outstretched arms—the war had finally taken them as it took all things of beauty, every ounce of peace that walked upon the land.

Ash stopped marching, causing the next man to stumble with a curse. So she stepped aside, still staring at the void. “She survived and we survived. That was all that mattered,” she echoed TomTom’s wise and comforting words. “Now where’s she gone? What d’you suppose it means, that she’s fallen?” she asked as Rook gently guided her back in line to resume their forward march to God knew where.

She couldn’t shake the haunted feeling as they headed into trenches. Certainly, one and another looked very much the same. But a nervous, fretful tingle skittered up her neck and down her spine like cold fingers of the ghosts they’d left behind.

Then she heard another soldier murmuring, “The Somme,” and she realized she was back where she’d begun. One glance in Rook’s direction and she knew he’d caught it too. Like a carousel, the circle was coming back around.

“The river of blood,” she said. They’d all escaped its wraith-like grasp once upon a time, before fate had picked her friends off one by one. “Remember how Blake used to go on about the plagues of Egypt? I always thought the Somme was the river of blood.”

Rook nodded. He was solemn, but still so solid at her side.

“Then came frogs. And lice. And flies,” she remembered.

“Death of the livestock?”

“How many horse carcasses have we hidden behind in No Man’s Land? Not to mention I once heard they were dying of some disease.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Then Tom got boils,” Ash said soberly. “And we’ve certainly had our share of thunder and hail. What came next?”

Rook thought a moment. “Swarms of locusts.”

“More bugs?” she moaned.

“And they shall cover the face of the earth, that no one will be able to see the earth. And they shall eat every tree which grew for you out of the field,” Rook quoted from memory.

Together they turned to study No Man’s Land, where nothing remained but char and ashes, alongside the burned-out remnants of long-dead trees.

Ashley licked her lips. “And then what?”

“Three days of total darkness.”

“Feels as though we’ve had three whole years of that. And then the death of the firstborn sons?”

Rook nodded. “That’s been going on the whole time too.”

“Are you the firstborn son?” she asked. “You had no older brothers come before you?”

“No. Just me. What’s your older brother up to, hey?”