Fall of Poppies

by Heather Webb

“Besides,” I continued caustically. “I have my career—­”

  “Where? Doing what? What have you been doing since he died?”

  A dull, angry flush of shame rose against my skin at the insinuation in his tone. It pricked that small, hidden part of me that knew Charles’s family would have rejected me anyway, once they’d discovered what I had done to survive.

  “I am a performer; there are still plenty of ways in which I can support myself. I could even return to England, where my career began.”

  He stared at me, his dark eyes so intense, and then he turned away to start the motorcar.

  “There’s something I want to show you.”

  The something Sidney wanted to show me was the Casino de Paris. Its art nouveau edifice was familiar to me, since I had danced there once, after my mother’s death prompted me to risk moving to Paris with my very poor French and rudimentary experience onstage. However, to my surprise, Sidney took me around the corner to the backstage entrance, where I was immediately assaulted by memory. The smell of greasepaint and—­to be frank—­sweat, the flash of sequins, the chalky sawdust coating the floor, and the general bedlam of mounting a performance fired my blood.

  This bedlam was also how we managed to maneuver through backstage with little question, and when the curtain separated us from the actual stage, Sidney stopped to push it aside. I peeped at glimpses of whatever revue had captured Paris’s attention until Sidney’s finger drew my attention to the band in the pit. My eyebrows rose in surprise: a colored band. And—­my ear fairly jumped in delight—­they were playing that jangling new type of ragtime a few were calling jazz. Another surprise was the drummer, who dominated the band. His drumsticks moved rapidly across the drums, almost faster than my eyes could see.

  “Louis Mitchell,” Sidney murmured.

  We watched Louis Mitchell and his band for another quarter of an hour until Sidney touched my arm, gesturing for me to follow. This time he led me to a tiny dressing room, where the discarded sheet music and half-­smoked cigarettes denoted that this space was designated for the Mitchell band.

  “Are we permitted to be here?” I said as I sat on the chair he pushed in my direction.

  “Louis won’t mind,” Sidney said, lighting one of the abandoned cigarettes. “In fact, he’ll probably be delighted to see me. Has been after me to join him here after I’m demobilized.”

  “Shall you?”

  Sidney made a face, examining the cigarette in his hand. “It’s possible, but I’d prefer . . .” He gave me an embarrassed, abashed sort of smile that made me sit on my hands to quell my initial urge to touch his dimples. “I’d prefer to own a nightclub of my own, or at least part ownership. I’ve had my fill of playing gigs where the wind takes me—­I want something settled. Permanent.”

  I glanced at him, almost afraid to wonder if he had stressed the word permanent.

  “I thought you might like to join me—­well, not me, but the club,” he stammered. “Since you’re an experienced performer. I’m sure you’d prefer something permanent as well.”

  A corner of my mouth lifted in bemusement. “You’re awfully certain of yourself, Lieutenant Mercer.”

  “That’s one lesson learned at my daddy’s knee that stuck—­sublime faith,” he said with a laugh. “You’ve just got to leap and feel in your bones that you’ll be caught.”

  “Even despite the war?” My bemusement faded. “Its unspeakableness.”

  He gazed at his cigarette for a moment, where a curlicue of smoke twisted into the air like one of the Egyptian dancers I’d once seen at the Alhambra.

  “What we saw out there wasn’t unspeakable in its horror, but in its hope. Not even sunrise was a thing to cling to—­that made it easier for the Huns to pick you off. And so you sometimes hoped for death. A quick and painless one, of course, because you watched and heard the suffering of the wounded trapped in No Man’s Land, their dying pains echoing in the air long after they’d expired—­”

  “Stop it!” I gripped the seat of my chair until my arms quivered. Suddenly, death, which I had blamed for so much of my unhappiness, didn’t seem like something to embrace as an end to suffering.

  I wanted to live. Like Sidney, like the other men who’d made it to Armistice Day, I wanted to live.

  And I wanted Sidney Mercer. I wanted him so badly I trembled.

  My hand trembled in his as he urged me to my feet. I hadn’t danced since—­oh God—­since that night in Strasbourg’s train station, when the four of us had been merry with assurance that the railway delays created by the start of the war weren’t too serious. We’d foxtrotted and sung the melody on the railway platform beside the idling cars of the Orient Express, laughing as other passengers waiting to enter France joined in our lighthearted gaiety. Our foolish, naïve, stupid gaiety.

  Here Sidney and I had meant to enter into a foxtrot or a tango, but somehow found ourselves standing still in the middle of the dressing room, arms tight around one another.

  I suppose I must have moved first, but he was the one to touch me, his fingers sinking into my hair as he swept me into a kiss from the ages. The kind of kiss Cleopatra must have given Caesar and Mark Antony. One that had toppled kingdoms and moved mountains. A kiss that shattered and healed in equal measure. I turned away, entirely overwhelmed by his touch.

  “I shouldn’t have done that.” He sighed into my hair.

  “Is it so wrong?” I asked quietly, an entire host of fears taking room in my mind. “Any man would despise someone like me.”

  “No, don’t say that.” He held me slightly away with a frown. “You survived. No one can fault you for that.”

  “How magnanimous of you.” I couldn’t help the faint asperity in my tone. “I don’t suppose your father would agree.”

  “Considering my father considers laughter on the Sabbath a black mark that could damn one’s soul for eternity, there aren’t many he considers untainted.”

  The laughter in his eyes made me snort.

  “But he would like you—­Daddy always had an eye for a pretty girl.”

  Pretty Girl. I had the unshakable memory of my father holding me up high to see my mum performing onstage, my arms wrapped around his neck and my chubby cheek pressed against his. “Look at mum, Pretty Girl.”

  And later, Charles pushing his way through the greenroom after a Christmas panto, in which I’d played a Lost Boy and him a member of Captain Hook’s crew, declaring his intention to kiss the prettiest girl beneath the mistletoe.

  My focus drew back to Sidney when he touched my face, his finger tracing the faded scar from the corner of my left eyebrow down to my jaw. The product of my own skirmish to survive. I hadn’t been Pretty Girl for a long while.

  “And just what do you want, Morven? Now that the war is over?”

  “Home,” I said softly. “I just want to go home.”

  A stricken look crossed his face, and his fingers tightened around my waist. All traces of humor vanished from his expression, leaving his sharp and strong features stark with emotion. “There’s something I must—­”

  He released me to reach into his tunic pocket. His expression tightened as he began to place it into my hand.

  “Wrong envelope.” He snatched it away, but not before I’d glimpsed the American Express emblem.

  The envelope he pulled from his other pocket was plain and small, with my name written in neat lettering across its surface.

  I bowed my head to read the restrained copperplate script of Charles’s mother, Mrs. Rose Williams.

  My eyes stung with hot, unshed tears. I was wanted. I had a home.

  Sidney swallowed, his expression uncertain and almost hopeful. He held the other envelope loosely, and I snatched it back and tore it open. A cashier’s cheque for two hundred American dollars. That was forty pounds. One thousand French francs. He had certainly assumed I had a
price for silence and disappearance.

  “Morven—­”

  “When—­” I paused to wet lips dry with disbelief. “When were you going tell me? And which of the envelopes had you intended to give me?”

  My voice cracked with bitterness.

  “I was going to tell you when we met—­”

  “When? After you’d paid me off, like . . . like a thieving whore?”

  “No! I wasn’t sure who you were, and I thought it would help. I wanted to help you.”

  I looked away from the entreaty in his eyes, wanting to deny what else was written all over his face.

  “Tell me who you are. You must be connected with Charles since you also come from Mississippi.”

  “His cousin. Years younger.” Sidney’s laugh was short and airless.

  I wanted to laugh as well. At my stupidity. Charles was there—­not as beautiful, but there in the shape of Sidney’s eyes and the timber of his voice.

  “Charles was . . . he was already married when you married him. Julia Hammond was her name. They’d wed young, possibly because their son was on the way.”

  I sank onto my abandoned chair as a pleasant numbness spread from my heart to my limbs. Sidney made a gesture, possibly to touch me, and I flinched, not that benumbed. He tucked his hands behind him and continued.

  “Julia died last year. After she passed she willed my aunt Rose, Charles’s mama, her papers, including a scrapbook of newspaper clippings she’d kept since Charles ran away to become an actor, and I saw you.” His swallow was audible in the silence. “I saw you and realized that if Charles had been killed, you were somewhere in France, possibly without resources—­”

  “And you came to find me.”

  “My aunt wanted you to come home. It didn’t matter that Charles hadn’t been free to legally wed you—­you were his wife and you belonged with your family.”

  “She—­Julia—­was the one who . . .”

  “I’m certain,” he replied flatly. “If she weren’t already dead, I’d strangle her. Morven, you aren’t alone. You were wanted. I . . . well, I want you.”

  I closed my eyes rather than allow myself to be swayed by the longing in his voice. He had lied to me. They had both lied to me. My skin flushed with the humiliation of where Sidney found me. He knew without a doubt what I’d done to survive and fully intended to treat me in kind.

  “I will go,” I said finally. “But I never want to speak to you again.”

  “Morven, please—­”

  I ignored him and grabbed my kitbag in a blind sort of panic, only for it to pop open, spilling its contents all over the floor. Spilling a yowling, very angry cat onto the floor.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry as I stared down at this persistent feline.

  “What—­who is this?” Sidney bent to reach for the cat, who, to my surprise, went contentedly into his arms.

  “He’s yours,” I said spikily, stuffing my belongings back into my bag. “Even animals believe they can do as they please, not caring about what someone else wants. Or needs.”

  “Morven, forgive me, please.” He looked so young and appealing, and sweetly absurd holding that bloody cat, and my heart quivered. “What can I say to make this up to you? I’m sorry. I lo—­”

  “Don’t.”

  That stiffened my resolve and I tightened my grip around the handles of my bag. Sidney stared at me, his mouth set in a mutinous line, but he made no move to stop me from leaving. For which I was grateful, because when I passed him, the brief flash of his warmth threatened to thaw my chill. I walked alone into the night, but now the promise of home, of family, beckoned—­what I’d hoped for and—­yes, reluctantly prayed for—­to the very marrow of my bones.

  Paris—­June 1919

  COME ON, MERCER, you’re off beat again!”

  Sidney twirled his drumstick between his damp left-­hand fingers. They sweated less from the sweltering early summer heat than from the anxiety that had plagued him since returning to France after his discharge from the army. He had done Morven wrong by not telling her that she was wanted, that her rejection had been the response of a bitter, abandoned wife. Damn Chas. He wished he could strangle his dead cousin to (a second) death for the mess he’d made of their family.

  If it wasn’t for Chas—­no, if it wasn’t for Julia—­

  Sidney set the sticks to the drums again. He was to blame for further muddying the waters. Aunt Rose hadn’t sent him to France to find Chas’s “wife” and pay her off. That had been his own arrogant solution to tidying away the sin of bigamy; he was more like his sanctimonious daddy than he liked to admit.

  The five-­piece jazz band he’d recruited to play at the club he opened with the Comte de Fontaine Delibes’s backing was in top form—­when he wasn’t missing his cues, that was. Sidney tempered the pride that wanted to burst forth at the thought of his very own nightclub. It wasn’t open yet, and though he wanted to hurry its debut to beat the other jazz nightclubs he’d heard were opening soon, he wanted everything to be perfect.

  Perfect for Morven.

  Would she come? His brow furrowed as his drum strokes slowed, his mind wandering to when he’d last seen her. She hadn’t responded to any of his letters, either.

  “Mercer! If you don’t stop your nonsense!” His bandleader, Gene Cheatham, tugged his conk until it stood up on end.

  “Sorry, Cheath.” He dropped his sticks onto the taut skin of his snare drum. “I just need a break, some time to cool my head.”

  Cheath muttered something he was certain was obscene, but he told them all to take it easy.

  Sidney got up from his drum set and went to the bar. It wasn’t stocked, mostly because they were still waiting for their liquor license, but there was half a bottle of Scotch the last owner of this joint had left behind. Sidney poured a glass and leaned against the counter, sipping the smooth liquor as he examined the nightclub. Antoine—­the comte, who’d been the officer over his battalion once the AEF had booted the colored infantries to the French army—­had given him carte blanche with his checkbook. Who was he to turn that down?

  The décor was swank, all done up in greens and golds, with a large floor for dancing and shows, a stand for the band and a feature singer, and dozens of small tables for the revelers.

  He thought the cat motif was a nice touch. The nightclub’s namesake lay behind the bar, curled atop a makeshift bed of linen scraps. He rose from his nap and stretched his furry spine before twining himself around his ankles with an earsplitting meow. Sidney picked him up and sank his fingers into the cat’s nape as he purred.

  “She’s sure to be missing us both by now,” he murmured.

  The cat gave him a skeptical look with green eyes uncannily like Morven’s, and then squirmed out of his hold to stalk off into the club. Damned cat.

  He finished off his Scotch and rummaged behind the bar for pen and paper. She would come, even if he had to use Antoine’s largesse to fund the sending of a letter a day until she arrived.

  Mississippi—­August 1919

  THE STEAMSHIP TICKET arrived by post with an invitation to the opening of a nightclub on the rue Pigalle. LE CHAT OR was emblazoned across the header, and beneath, the promise of the hottest jazz band, authentic southern cuisine, and a glittering cabaret show. I couldn’t suppress the smile tugging at my mouth, as the name and logo of his nightclub quelled my anger as thoroughly as tossing a bucket of water onto flames. I used the invitation and ticket as a fan, flapping away the sultry, sluggish heat of the Mississippi Delta. There were times where I couldn’t feel more British, accustomed as I was to the milder, often wetter climate of the isle of my birth.

  It was midday, the sun high in the sky, and I shielded my eyes to see the figures moving slowly across the cotton fields toward the Big House in anticipation of luncheon. I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around
the fact that cotton actually grew from the earth. The Williamses’ fields stretched for acres, from what I could see out of my window each morning; row after row of this magnificent plant. When I first arrived, I attempted to go out and help, flush with gratitude and guilt over my indolence, but Mother Rose—­Charles’s mother—­Sidney’s aunt—­gently shooed me back inside.

  My fingers, blistered and cracked the next day, spoke loudly of my unsuitability. I had, according to Mother Rose, more than given to my new family, having tirelessly nursed Charles’s sisters and his son back to health after the Spanish flu swept through this tiny, fertile corner of the South.

  I could also help in the kitchen, where I was welcomed after shattering the skepticism of Charles’s female relations by preparing the popovers—­biscuits, I had to remember to call them—­for breakfast. Granted, I’d had a few mishaps trying to come to grips with an American range, but the biscuits emerged from the oven light and golden-­brown, each bite drenched in melting butter. I could smell them now, just in time to feed the hungry men in the fields, and made my way through the parlor to the swinging white door that led to the kitchen.

  The tongue-­teasingly delicious scents of well-­seasoned meat and sweet yams swirled through the air, now familiar and comforting after the past six months residing with the Williams. Oh how they’d laughed at my bewilderment over such dishes as collard greens and hog maw—­though the latter was somewhat similar to the haggis my mum used to search for in the nearest greengrocer’s each year for Rabbie Burns Day.

  I found my mother-­in-­law and a few other relatives busily preparing heaping trays of food.

  “Butter the corn bread for me, Morven,” Mother Rose tossed over her shoulder. “Then tell that daughter of mine to pull her nose from her books to set the table.”

  “I can do that, Mother Rose,” I said, rolling up my sleeves to slather the fresh butter over the tins of corn bread laid out on the counter. “Cynthia requires time for studying if she’s to attend Fisk.”

  “She’s already told you her plans.” My mother-­in-­law rolled her eyes a little. “Now what’s that poking out of your pocket?”