The Foreshadowing (31 page)
In fact, for a long time, I had no vision of any kind.
Now I can see again, but like any normal person, nothing more.
I was put on an ambulance train later, still unable to see, still fighting to breathe, and ended up in Rouen.
And there, as some friendly nurse cut away my uniform, they finally found out I was a girl.
Blind, I reached up and grabbed the nurse’s arm.
“Whoever you are,” I said, “please help me. I’m a nurse. I swear, I’m a nurse.”
And bless them, they did.
I was put in a private room, and they nursed me back to health, and slowly, ever so slowly, my sight came back.
They said it was a miracle, but I knew I had to see again, and I did.
One day, I had a visitor.
I was sitting in the hospital gardens. It was a warm, hot day at the end of August, and I looked up to see a soldier walking toward me.
It took me a moment to realize it was Jack.
He was different. He was smarter. Cleaner. I had never seen him clean-shaven before, and his hair was smart too.
“Alexandra,” he said, and put his arms around me.
I held him away from me and smiled.
“You can see again?”
“I knew I had to see you again,” I said, and he laughed.
“Your hair’s growing back,” he said, as if it was the most amazing thing in the world.
“I’ve got something for you,” he went on, and pulled a small package from his pocket. “I went back for it.”
He handed me something wrapped in newspaper, and nodded at me. I opened it. It was Miss Garrett’s book of Greek myths.
I began to laugh, with tears in my eyes.
“Thank you, Jack.” I smiled. “Thank you. I said I’d take good care of it. Now I can send it back to her.”
“It’s a little worse for wear,” he said. “A month in the rain.”
I laughed again, and then he told me everything that had happened since the day we’d found Tom.
He’d got away with being absent from duty, he said, by claiming his bike had broken down in the middle of nowhere. He said they just about believed it because it was easier than trying to prove he’d deserted. And after all, he’d come back, and so hadn’t deserted in the end, anyway. As for stealing me from the camp at Bethune, there was no proof that it had been Jack who had done it. They seemed to have let it drop.
“There’s a war on,” Jack said, grinning. “Much worse things to worry about.”
We talked for hours in the sunshine.
It was wonderful to see him again, and he told me how much I’d helped him. He said he’d come to a new kind of understanding about his premonitions. That maybe what you thought you saw was not the
only
truth, but just
one
possible truth. Maybe you could change things to another, different truth if you tried hard enough.
Like I had, he said.
He said he still had visions, but they worried him less now.
“What about you?” he asked.
I told him that they had gone. That they had left me when I went blind, and so far had not returned.
But still an awful thought hung over me.
I had seen the very thing that had taken me all the way to find Tom, and it was I who had shot him. Maybe none of this had to happen at all, had I not made it.
“Perhaps,” said Jack. “But your brother would probably have got it anyway.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“His battalion went up from Death Valley to High Wood a few days after we were there. It was a mess. They were annihilated. Almost none of them came back.”
I thought for a while. I realized that I’d never really seen anything about myself. Of course, I’d had the raven dream many times, but never seen that I was the one pulling the trigger.
And somehow, I understood something else. Maybe it had to happen like this. Extraordinary as it is, I think this might be the thing that brings my family back together, in the end. Edgar is gone, but my memory of him is a happy and proud one now, and I know he felt the same about me.
Then something else came to me. I suspected something.
“Why did you agree to help me, Jack?” I asked. “After you got me out of Bethune, you just wanted me to go home. Did you see what was going to happen? When you touched me?”
Jack sighed.
“Yes. In a way. I couldn’t believe it, but I went along with it. I wondered if there was a way out of it for you after all. I didn’t say anything to you. What could I have said? But when I saw you aiming the gun . . . then I wanted to stop you, but it was too late.”
After a while, Jack left me to my thoughts.
Before he went, we held each other once more.
“Do you see anything?” he asked, looking into my eyes.
“No,” I said. Then, almost too nervous to ask: “Do you?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “Just a long and good life. Be happy, Alexandra. You deserve it.”
I waved to him from my bench in the garden as he turned the corner of the hospital, and vanished from sight.
And so I am left alone, but not alone.
I have decided to stay here.
I spoke to the commandant of the hospital here in Rouen, and told her some of my story, though not all of it. I told her I was a VAD nurse who had got into the danger zone, and that all I wanted to do was try to help men get well.
She asked no more questions. They need every pair of hands they can get out here.
One day, I might go home to my parents. I will write to them soon. I don’t know what they will say, but for now, I am happy.
It’s funny, but out here I often think of Clare, my friend from long ago. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’s because I hope I’m making up for things at last, by helping with the wounded men.
Father didn’t want me to be a nurse at all, and now here I am, in a war in France, doing just that. Maybe, like Edgar, he thought I wasn’t up to it. But I realized a few days ago that I am. I went all the way to the front to find Tom, and though I was very scared, I did it.
I did it after all.
So I am happy. I am busy.
The bells are sounding.
Wounded men are coming.
And I must go. I have my work to do.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. In order to give it credibility much of it is based on real places and events, but all characters in the story, both in England and in France, are fictitious. However, instances of reported premonition were not uncommon in the trenches, and the epithet Hoodoo is from a genuine case.
The French name for High Wood is not Raven Wood, though this is what Robert Graves asserts in his autobiography,
Goodbye to All
That.
It was from here that I took the idea for Alexandra’s visions, but I have not been able to find any other original source calling the wood by that name. The French word for raven is
corbeau,
or in the dialect of Picardy,
cornaille,
but the French name was
Bois des Foureaux,
or sometimes
Bois des Fourcaux.
(These names have no obvious translation, the former meaning maybe “waters of the kiln,” but though the wood may have once been the home to charcoal burners, there is no river or stream running through it. I think the name is more likely to be a corruption of
fourchette—
the sweet chestnut trees were used by the local people to make pitchforks.)
Whatever the name of the place, it was here that the Nineteenth Brigade, with the Twentieth Royal Fusiliers among them, were heading in mid-July 1916. On Saturday the fifteenth they became part of the vast number massing in Death Valley, in readiness for their part in the assault on High Wood. Gas shells fell among them that morning.
On July 20, their turn came to go up to the engagement in High Wood, and the battalion was almost annihilated.
The official divisional record simply states:
Attack continued, extremely
difficult to form précis of fighting.
About the Author
Marcus Sedgwick worked in children’s publishing for ten years; before that he was a bookseller. He is also a stone carver and a wood engraver. His first book,
Floodland,
was hailed as “a dazzling debut from a writer of exceptional talent” and won the Branford Boase Award for a best first novel for children.
Witch Hill
and
The Book of Dead Days
were nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery for Young Adults.
The Dark Horse
was short-listed for the
Guardian
Award and the Carnegie Award and was a
School Library Journal
Best Book of the Year. Marcus Sedgwick’s most recent books are the thrilling companion novels
The Book of Dead Days
and
The Dark Flight Down.
Published by Wendy Lamb Books
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Marcus Sedgwick
All rights reserved.
WENDY LAMB BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sedgwick, Marcus.
The Foreshadowing / Marcus Sedgwick.
p. cm.
Summary: Having always been able to know when someone is going to die,
Alexandra poses as a nurse to go to France during World War I to locate her brother
and to try to save him from the fate she has foreseen for him.
eISBN : 978-0-307-43388-6
[1. Extrasensory perception—Fiction. 2. World War, 1914–1918—France—Fiction.
3. World War, 1914–1918—England—Fiction. 4. Nurses—Fiction. 5. Great Britain—
History—George V, 1910–1936—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S4484For 2006
[Fic]—dc22
2006005135
Lines on page 97 from “Song of Cassandra,” © 1999 John Gilbert
v1.0