The Wild Rose (59 page)

“You know her?” Willa asked.

“I think all of Paris does. Thanks to that photograph of her at Bobino’s, standing onstage in a pair of feathery wings and very little else. I saw it a few nights ago, hanging on the wall at La Rotonde. Did you take that one, too?”

Willa nodded. “That shot was published in one of the daily papers here. The editor was outraged such an act is permitted on a Paris stage. Ever since he ran it, Josie’s show has been sold out,” she said, laughing. “The show’s very cheeky. Have you seen it?”

Oscar said he had not, and Willa said he must. “We’ll go this very evening,” Willa said. “I’ll take you. Are you free?”

Oscar said he was, and Willa said it was a date, then. They’d get a bite at La Rotonde first.

“I thought you said the show’s been sold out. Will we be able to get tickets?”

“Josie will get us in,” Willa said. “We’ve struck up quite a friendship, Josie and I. We get along quite well. In fact, we’ve made a pact—neither one of us is allowed to talk about the past. There
is
no past when we’re together, only the present. We don’t talk about the war, or what we’ve lost. We talk about paintings and the theater and what we had for dinner, and whom we saw, and what we wore. And that’s all. She’s originally an English girl. Did you know that?”

“No, I thought she was as French as onion soup.”

Willa laughed. “She lets me come backstage and photograph her and her fellow actresses. I get shots of everyone and everything. The stage manager. The back-door johnnies. The girls in their costumes. The romances and the rows. In return, I give her prints of anything I take of her.”

Willa looked at the shot Oscar was holding and smiled. She was quite proud of it. “Josie’s a fascinating entertainer,” she said. “Even though she’s English, she embodies Paris, a place that’s been battered but not broken. A place that’s still beautiful, still defiant.”

Willa gazed at the photograph for a bit, then said they should get going. Coats and hats were gathered. As they walked toward the door, another photograph, one hanging over another divan—that Willa used as a bed—caught Oscar’s eye. It showed a young man standing on top of a mountain peak, with what looked like the whole world spread out behind him.

“Where was that taken?” he asked.

“On Kilimanjaro. On top of the Mawenzi peak,” Willa said.

“That’s him, isn’t it? The naval captain?”

“Yes, it is. It was taken just after we’d summitted. And just before I fell. And shattered my leg.”

Willa told him the story.

“My God,” he said, when she finished. “Can you still climb?”

“Only foothills,” she said, touching the photograph gently. “I loved climbing more than I loved anything or anyone, except for Seamie. We had such plans, he and I. We were going to climb every mountain in the world. We used to talk about what made a good climber. We decided it was longing—the overwhelming desire to be the first, to lay eyes on a view no human being had ever seen before.” She smiled ruefully, then added, “That was many years ago. Before I lost my leg. And Seamie lost his life. But I still think about it—Kilimanjaro, Everest, all of them. And in my dreams, I climb them. With him.”

The aching note of sadness in her voice was not lost on Oscar. “It’s an awful thing, isn’t it?” he said quietly, as Willa opened the door for him.

“What is?” she asked, fishing her key out of her pocket.

“That which drives us,” Oscar said, starting down the stairs. “The quest. We are prisoners, both of us. One of music. One of mountains. And neither will ever be free.”

“Perhaps freedom is overrated,” Willa said, locking the door. “What would either of us be without our quests? Me without my mountains. You without your music.”

Oscar stopped midway down the flight of stairs. He looked up at her.

“Happy,” he said. Then he turned and kept on walking.

Willa, laughing ruefully, followed.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

He was going to die. He knew that now. He hadn’t eaten for three days. Hadn’t drunk for two. There was no more food, no more water, and no hope of getting either of those things.

The guards were gone. Two weeks after Armistice Day, they’d heard the war was over, and they’d left. News traveled slowly in the desert. They’d taken the camels, the goats, all the weapons, and plenty of food and water, and they’d buggered off, leaving their charges—seventy-two British prisoners of war, survivors of U-boat attacks in the Mediterranean—to fend for themselves. In the middle of the desert.

They’d unlocked the doors to the cells. That was something. It had enabled the men to get out—those who could walk, at least—and reconnoiter the prisoner-of-war camp to take stock of supplies.

It had been a very quick exploration. The prison, such as it was, was merely a series of stone huts—the remains of a small village, the men guessed—that had been fashioned into cells by bolting strips of sheet metal over the windows and adding padlocks to the doors. There were no toilets, no sinks, no cots. Just some rags on the ground upon which to sleep. For meals they had got whatever half-rotted mess their jailers saw fit to feed them. Temperatures usually reached 110 degrees during the day and often sank into the fifties at night.

Out of the seven who’d survived the U-boat attack with him, three had died of their injuries during the first week. Walker had starved to death three days ago. Liddell, last night. Benjamin was hanging on, but only barely. He’d likely be gone by nightfall.

And Ellis, well . . . he didn’t know if Ellis was alive or dead. Ellis had walked out with two other men nine days ago, vowing to make it to Damascus, but there were more than one hundred and fifty miles of heat and sand between this godforsaken place and that city, and he and his comrades had been sick, weak, and malnourished. Most likely, they’d dropped down dead one by one in the desert.

Which would mean that no one on their side knew now that he, Benjamin, and the other prisoners were even here.

The Germans had pulled him from the sea three months ago. He’d been clinging to a piece of wood. His clothes had been in shreds. Blood had been seeping from his nose and mouth. He’d had a deep gash across the back of his head. His right side was burned down the length of it—arm, torso, and leg.

“You were nearly dead by the time they pulled you out,” Ellis, his quartermaster, had told him. “You were raving. Out of your mind. You didn’t even know your own name.”

Bir Güzel,
the Turkish guards had called him—“beautiful one.” It was their little joke, for with his bruised and swollen face, he’d been anything but beautiful.

When he was better, when he could open his eyes and talk, Ellis told him that he’d been unconscious for days. They’d tended to him—Ellis and the others—they’d kept him alive.

He couldn’t remember a thing when he’d first come to. Little by little, though, the memories returned. The ship-to-ship message. The German U-boat. The torpedoes. The horrible way the rest of his crew had died. The noise and the fire and the screaming. And then the awful silence as the ship went under.

The guards told them little. They’d had no idea the Allies had won until the day the guards let them out of their cells and informed them that the war was over and they were free to go. They pointed south and told them Damascus was that way, and that it was in the hands of the British now, and that it would take them five days to reach it. On a camel. If they could find one. And then they’d ridden off. One had looked back and tossed Ellis a compass.

They’d talked among themselves that night, all the men, after they’d seen how little food and water they had, and decided to send a party south to the city. The three strongest would go. Hopefully they’d be able to get to Damascus and bring help back before it was too late for the ones left behind.

His burned legs had not healed and he could not walk. He could barely sit up. There was no question of him walking to Damascus. He had lain in his cell for most of the past eleven days, drinking and eating what little the others brought him. Until, finally, there was no more to bring.

They were good men, his fellow prisoners, and he hoped they survived. It was too late for him, but he hoped desperately that help would come for them.

He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep, hoping he would not wake again to the horrifying thirst and the gnawing pain in his guts. He dreamed of his young son. And of the boy’s mother. He dreamed of a dark-haired woman with green eyes. She was standing at the foot of a mountain, smiling at him. She was so beautiful. She was a rose, his wild rose. He would let go now—let go of the pain and the sorrow and the suffering, let go of everything. But he would find her again one day. He knew he would. Not in this life, but in the next.

He was ready to die, death held no terror for him, but the sound of men’s voices, loud and urgent, pulled him back from it.

“Holy Christ! There’s a dead body in here! And another one there!”

He heard someone kicking at his door—closed most of the way against the fierce heat.

“This one’s gone, too, Sergeant,” a second voice said, a voice that was very close by. “Wait a minute! He’s not . . . he’s breathing! He’s still alive!”

He opened his eyes and saw a soldier standing over him, a British soldier. He saw him kneel down, then he felt water on his lips and in his mouth, and he drank it greedily, clutching at the canteen with shaking hands.

“There you are, that’s enough. Slow down or you’ll be sick. There’s plenty more where that came from. What’s your name, sir?”

“Finnegan,” he said, blinking into the bright desert light flooding into his cell. “Captain Seamus Finnegan.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

“Here, James, love, give one of these to Charlie and one to Stephen,” Fiona said, handing her nephew two ornaments she’d taken from a huge box. It was Christmas Eve, and she, Joe, their children, and little James, were spending it with the men at the Wickersham Hall Veterans’ Hospital.

James carefully took the ornaments from her, then walked over to a young man who was standing by the tree. “Here, Stephen,” he said, handing him a snowman. “Put it high up. No, not there. Higher. Where we haven’t got anything yet.”

James then walked over to Charlie, who was sitting on a settee, staring ahead of himself. He placed the second ornament in Charlie’s hand, but Charlie made no move to get up and hang it on the tree. James, too little to know what shell shock was, or to feel the tragedy of it in a seventeen-year-old boy, simply got impatient with him. “Come
on,
Charlie!” he said. “You’ve got to do your share, you know. That’s what Granddad always said. He said we’ve all got to do our share and no shirking.” When Charlie still didn’t move, James took hold of his free hand and tugged on it until he did. “Go put yours by Stephen’s,” he said.

“A right little general, isn’t he?” Joe said fondly.

Fiona, watching the two cousins, one tall and one so small, nodded and smiled. It was the simplest of actions—putting a Christmas ornament on a tree—and yet seeing Charlie do it made Fiona so happy. He was making progress—slowly, but steadily.

In the months since he’d come back from the front, his shaking had lessened, he’d learned to feed himself again, and he could now help with simple chores. He still had difficulty sleeping, though, and almost never spoke.

They had tried taking him home, Fiona and Joe, back in October, hoping that the sight of his old house might help to bring him out of himself. It had been hard going, though. The younger children had been devastated by the sight of him and day-to-day life with him was arduous. He had difficulty eating and sleeping. He had nightmares. It was hard for him to go up and down stairs. Reluctantly, she and Joe had decided to bring him back to Wickersham Hall, for he did better there. It was quieter and things were done on a schedule. Routine seemed to comfort him.

Fiona and Joe sent to Europe for specialists and brought them to the hospital, one after the other. None of them had helped Charlie at all. During one terrible visit, the doctor, a man from Prague, had decreed that Charlie was hopelessly insane, and said that he could only benefit from something called convulsive therapy—a new treatment he’d invented. A high does of a stimulant drug—the name of which Fiona couldn’t even pronounce—would be administered to Charlie. It would induce a grand mal seizure.

“That’s a generalized seizure,” the doctor said, “one which affects the entire brain. It is my hope that by inducing the seizure, I will reorder the damaged pathways in his brain. Have no fear, Mrs. Bristow. He will be properly restrained. Leather straps and shackles work quite well, with little bruising or chafing to the patient.” He’d smiled cheerily, then added, “And even less to the doctor!”

Furious, Fiona had told him to get himself back to Prague and out of her sight. She’d grabbed her unhappy child’s hand and dragged him out of the room and off to the hospital’s orchard. She sat him down in the grass so he could not hurt himself, then went to pick some pears for the cook. She’d only taken her secateurs with her, not a basket, so she gave the fruit—she’d cut off a lot—to Charlie to hold, forgetting in her anger and sadness that he shook so, he could hold nothing. When she turned around again, he had stopped shaking. Not entirely, but mostly. He was holding one of the pears and looking at it. He lifted it to his nose and inhaled its scent. And then he looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time since he’d come home, and smiled. “Thanks, Mum,” he said, quite clearly.

Fiona had nearly shouted with joy. She’d hugged him and kissed him. He’d dropped his head again, looked away, as he always did when people came too close. But he’d made gains since then, talking every now and again, making eye contact. It was a slow awakening, a slow returning to them. But Fiona was convinced that she would have her son back one day.

The very next day, back in London, she turned over the running of her tea businesses to her second in command, Stuart Bryce. She made him chairman, and gave him absolute authority, letting go, in a matter of mere hours, the business she’d taken a lifetime to build.

“Are you sure, Fee?” Joe had asked her, when she told him of her decision.

“I am,” she said, without a doubt, without a tear, without a second’s hesitation. Her tea empire was important to her; she loved it, but she loved nothing else in the world as much as she loved her children. Her son Charlie needed her desperately, and now so did her little nephew James.

She spent as much time as she could at Wickersham Hall, always taking James with her, and sometimes the twins, too, and staying at the Brambles. Together, she, Charlie, and the children did the work that Wickersham Hall’s gardener couldn’t manage. They dug and planted and clipped and pruned, preparing the plants and trees for the winter. They planted two hundred crocus bulbs. Three hundred tulips. Five hundred daffodils.

Autumn had come, and with it, a gathering sense that the war would be over soon. The Americans had come into it, fighting on the side of the Allies. Their numbers tipped the balance. The kaiser couldn’t hope to hold out much longer. Day by day, Fiona’s hopes grew—hopes for a quick end to the fighting, and for the safe and speedy return of her brother, Seamie.

And then came the awful day Joe had arrived at the Brambles unexpectedly and Fiona knew immediately what had happened. She didn’t need to read the telegram he was holding; she could see it in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Fiona,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Charlie had been the first one to go to her. The first one to put his arms around her. “There, there, Mum,” he’d said to her as she sank down in a chair, keening with grief. For herself. And for James, who in the space of mere weeks had lost both of his parents. “There, there,” Charlie had crooned to her, just as she had to him when he couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep. When the memories were too much for him.

Sid had grieved, too. Deeply. The loss of his brother had hastened his decision to return to America. To a place that contained no memories of Seamie. India had hired another doctor—one who could take over her responsibilities: Dr. Reade. She’d left the hospital in her care, and then she, Sid, and the children had left for Southampton and America. They’d made it safely to New York, and then across the country to California and Point Reyes, the place they loved so much. Fiona missed them terribly, but she understood their wanting to leave.

Seamie’s personal effects had arrived from Haifa a few weeks later. She had nothing of him to bury—there were no remains—so she simply put a headstone next to Jennie’s, in the Finnegan family plot in a churchyard in Whitechapel, and then she and Charlie planted a yellow rose between the two graves. Yellow for remembrance. She would never forget the brother whom she loved so much. She knew he was with their parents now, and with their baby sister, Eileen, and with his wife, Jennie.

Whenever she went to visit her family’s graves, Fiona asked her parents to hug Seamie for her, the poor, restless soul. Happiness wasn’t his gift. Once, years ago, it had seemed that he’d found at least some happiness, when he’d found Jennie and they married. But even then, there was still something sad and restless about him. Fiona knew that he’d seen Willa Alden again, at her father’s funeral, and she suspected that Seamie had married Jennie even though he’d never got over losing Willa. She understood the pain that came from that. She had very nearly done the same thing herself. A long time ago in New York, when she thought that Joe was lost to her forever, she’d nearly married another man whom she thought she loved—William McClane. Had she done so, she would have lost the chance for true love forever. She could hardly bear to imagine that, to imagine her life without Joe in it, and her heart hurt anew for her brother as she thought how he had missed out on a life with Willa, his own true love.

Fiona glanced at the Christmas tree now. James had at least eight men gathered around it, and Joe, too, and was still handing out ornaments. It seemed to do them good, the patients—having a tree in their midst, records on the gramophone, and cups of mulled cider and hot chocolate to drink. It was the first real Christmas most of them had had in the last four years.

Fiona was glad of the cheer the holiday brought, for the veterans’ sakes—and for her family’s. Earlier in the month, Joe had won a grueling campaign to retain his Hackney seat. The prime minister had been ousted, but Joe had been returned. In fact, he’d been appointed Labour secretary by David Lloyd George, the new prime minister. Sam Wilson—whom Katie had campaigned so hard for—had won his seat, and Labour as a whole had made many gains. It had been a hard contest, and Joe and Katie were exhausted. It would do them good to rest for a few days.

“Come, James, you take this one and put it on,” Fiona said now, lifting another ornament out of the box and handing it to him. “You’ve got all the lads hanging ornaments, haven’t you? It’s time you put some on yourself.”

“It’s an angel, Auntie Fee,” James said, admiring the pretty porcelain ornament as he took it from her.

“Yes, it is,” Fiona said.

“My mummy’s an angel,” the little boy said. “My daddy, too. They’re in heaven now.”

Fiona had to steady her voice before she could reply. “Yes, my darling,” she said, “they are.”

Fiona watched as James put his angel on the tree. She was thinking that Seamie had been the same age as James when he lost both of his parents. She had raised him. Now she would raise his son.

When James had hung the ornament, he turned to her and said, “I’m hungry, Auntie Fee. Stephen ate all the mince pies.” He left the common room, where they’d been working, and took off down the hallway, toward the kitchen.

“James? Come back, will you? Where are you off to now, you little monkey?” Fiona called after him. “To pester Mrs. Culver for another mince pie, no doubt,” she said, sighing as she climbed down from the stepladder she was standing on. “Charlie, love, you can put some more ornaments on the tree, if you like. I’ve got to go after James.” Charlie nodded.

Always exploring and roaming, our James, Fiona thought as she hurried down the hall after him. Just like Seamie when he was little. She doubted very much that her brother was in heaven, despite what James had said. Heaven couldn’t hold him. He was at the South Pole, or the North Pole, or on top of Everest. She hoped that wherever Seamie was, he was finally at peace.

“There you are!” Fiona said, when she caught up with her nephew. He was sitting at the cook’s worktable, next to his cousin Katie, who was laying out next week’s edition of the
Battle Cry
and drinking a cup of tea. He was watching the cook roll out pastry for the meat pies she was baking. “I hope you’re not bothering Mrs. Culver,” Fiona said to him.

“Oh, he’s no bother at all,” Mrs. Culver said. “He’s right good company, aren’t you, laddie?”

James nodded. His mouth was full of mince pie. Mrs. Culver had readied two more platters of them for the common room.

“Leave him here, Mrs. Bristow. I don’t mind a bit. He can help me roll out the dough.”

“Are you sure, Mrs. Culver?”

“Quite.”

“All right, then,” Fiona said. “I’d very much like to finish with that tree.” She touseled James’s hair, picked up a platter of mince pies, and turned to leave the kitchen. As she was walking past the windows toward the hallway, she glanced outside and saw an older man, a hard-looking man, walking with one of the patients.

“Who is that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him here before.”

Katie looked up from her paper. She followed Fiona’s gaze. “That’s Billy Madden,” she said. “
The
Billy Madden.”

Fiona stared, stunned. “How do you know that, Katie?”

“I spend a lot of time in Limehouse. So does he,” Katie said wryly.

“Billy Madden . . .
here
?” Fiona said. “Why?”

She remembered, very well, how Billy Madden had tried to kill her brother Sid.

“He’s here to visit his son. His youngest. The lad just arrived last week,” Mrs. Culver said.

“Peter Madden,” Fiona said. She’d seen his name on the roster of incoming patients last week, but she’d never imagined he was Billy’s son.