“Thank you for your help, Dr. Atherton. I never imagined I’d say this to a woman, and certainly not here on the front lines, but you’re a fine doctor.” Someone called him, and he hurried away.
Eleanor looked at Fraser. “Will you be coming back to the CCS as well?”
He shook his head, his expression flat. “No. My week of light duty is up. Dalrymple can take my stitches out. I’m needed here.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I see.”
He made a sound low in his throat. “Don’t do that, Eleanor. Not now. You can’t stay, and I can’t go. We should never—” He swallowed and looked away. “What happened between us—it can’t happen again.”
She met his gaze bravely. “Do you regret it, then?”
He shut his eyes. “No, of course not.”
She followed his gaze to the ambulance. They were waiting for her, and there wasn’t much time. She wanted to stay, even here, if it meant being with him. It was a woman’s decision as much as a doctor’s. More, perhaps. She pulled him behind a stub of broken wall. It offered scant privacy, but there was nowhere else. The yard bustled with wounded, with men watching others, looking for danger, or something to distract them from pain and war.
“Fraser, I want to stay in France. Not at the CCS, of course, but with the Red Cross. We could see each other now and then, perhaps, and—”
His eyes snapped back to her, and he scowled. “Don’t be daft. Ye could be killed, and I’ll have that on my conscience, too.” He looked at her sleeve, at the bullet hole. “That one was close. Too close. If not for ye, then for me. The next one— Look, this is no place for ye. Go home, Eleanor. Forget all this, and me. Especially me.”
She gritted her teeth. “I don’t want to forget. I’m tired of secrets and half-truths, and I can’t go home, not now. What would I be? ‘All this,’ as you call it, has changed me. You’ve changed me. Fraser, I lo—”
“No!” He made a gesture to cut her off, to keep her from saying it, but she let it show in her eyes, saw him read her love there and understand. He groaned again.
“Damn it, lass, this isn’t the time or the place.” He lowered his eyes to her lips, and she swallowed, remembered his mouth on hers, his body surrounding her, inside her, and knew by the way his jaw tightened that he felt it, too. She wanted him to hold her, to kiss her, to touch her, but he stared at the ground and said nothing. He didn’t walk away, and that was something.
“When something is right, even amid something so terribly wrong, I’ve learned to find it, to feel it. You taught me that. I want more than one night with you, Fraser—I want everything.”
He scowled. “You think we have a future? Here? That night only happened because we both thought it was goodbye. What else could it have been but goodbye? No, there’s a war on, and there is no future, not for anyone.”
“A kiss should never mean goodbye. For me, kissing you was the start of something, not the end.” She swept her hand around the ruined farmyard. “There has to be a reason why I’m here, why you’re here, don’t you see that? We might never have met, but we did. I’ve done things, seen things here I never thought I’d see. Not just terrible things, but kindness, and bravery, and hope. And love, Fraser, that as well.”
He looked ragged. “Love?” The word came out rough, as if it hurt him to say it. “There’s no place for love in the middle of a war. If you’ve learned nothing else here, surely ye can see that. God, ye should never have come here. It will destroy all that ye are even if it doesn’t kill ye.”
She swallowed. “None of us are what we were, but after the war ends, the world will change—”
“What if it’s never over?” he muttered bitterly. “What if the killing and the dying never stops?” He pointed to a wooden door, once painted bright blue, but faded now, hanging off its torn hinges and riddled with bullet holes. “What if next time a bullet finds its mark, it’s me, or you? I couldn’t bear it, not now. And seeing ye here in this place, at the front these past few days, under fire, riddled with lice, in constant danger, has been torment.” He shut his eyes. “I don’t want to fret for ye, worry over ye, or anyone. I’ve spent all the months—years—I’ve been here making sure I don’t have attachments, that there’s no one to mourn me when I die, no one I’ll regret leaving behind. I’ve lived longer than most bearers. I’ve been lucky so far, but luck runs out here. I doubt I’ll see home again, and I’d made my peace with that.” He scanned her face. “That was before ye came, before I—” He turned his head away and looked around him, scanning the devastated farm and the ambulance, visible through a shattered window in the broken wall. Men watched from the loaded vehicle, bandaged, waiting, and curious. He glared at them, moved so Eleanor was concealed behind him, the way he’d done on the train. It made her love him all the more. “Go,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s no place here for love. There’s only death here.”
She walked around him and stood before him, forcing him to look at her, to ignore the waiting ambulance, the stares, the activity on the other side of the wall. “Seeds take root in the worst ground, where the earth has been scarred and burned almost beyond bearing. Poppies and wild roses grow on the graves here, life amid death. And love—the men who die don’t curse the enemy, they speak of loved ones, of home, of friendship.” He flicked a glance over her, hopeful for an instant before he closed his eyes tight.
“Not all. Some fight death, Eleanor. They don’t slip away quietly, they rage against the frailty of their own bodies, the injustice of this bloody war. They suffer, mourn the living. I don’t want to die like that, knowing I’m leaving someone to heartache and torment, wondering if I died a hero or in agony. Even heroes die in agony. Ye know that. You’ve seen it.”
She stepped closer, tried to touch him, but he pulled away. She dropped her hand to her side. “All I know is that no matter what happens, I won’t forget you. You will be my first thought in the morning and my last one at night, always, for as long as I live. I will love you, and wait for you, and look for you once this war is over—”
“When it’s over,” he interrupted bitterly. “If we’d met on the street, in Edinburgh or London, or anywhere else, ye’d have passed by me without a second glance. I’m naught but a gamekeeper’s son, and you’re a doctor. You’d never even have looked at me.”
“I’m looking now, Fraser MacLeod, and I won’t look away again.”
He scanned her face. “Ye think ye mean it, but what of your family, your friends, your pilot?”
Frustration welled in her breast. She was exhausted. She wanted a bath, and bed. More than that, she wanted Fraser MacLeod. They were both bloody and dirty and unfit for any other company, but they were fit for each other. More than fit—right, perfect—and he couldn’t see it, or refused to. “I don’t care a whit about class or fortune or what other people think. We can make a new future, our own future. I want to live life on my own terms. Don’t you see? You taught me that—courage, and bravery, and compassion.” She met his eyes. “You taught me how to love.”
There was agony in his eyes as he reached out and touched her cheek gently, then dropped his hand. “I should have left ye alone for both our sakes. It’s not real, lass. Those qualities were always part of ye. It’s what I lo—” He stopped himself. “Don’t stay. Go home, lass. Let me have that, the knowledge that you’re safe,” he pleaded.
She shook her head. “I won’t leave you.”
“Then go to Paris, find your flier.”
She gritted her teeth. “He’s not my flier.”
“Then Blair. He’s a good man, a suitable man, of your own class. This is because I was your first, that’s all, because we’re here, and ye think ye see a friend, an ally. I’m not that. I used ye. I used ye when the wounded came in, and I used ye the way a soldier uses a convenient woman.” His voice was ragged, raw. His eyes were full of anger and pain. How unlike the cool, flat, guarded way
he’d looked at her the first time they’d met.
“No.”
He made a sound low in his throat, frustration, loss. “You’re the damnedest woman I’ve ever met, Eleanor Atherton. Goodbye. Wherever ye go from here, I wish ye luck.”
He tried to turn away, to go, but she caught his sleeve and held on, shaking his arm like a terrier until he looked at her. “I love you,” she said again. He scanned her face as if he wanted to memorize it, to hold a piece of her with him.
He loved her, and he couldn’t hide it. Her heart bloomed under the dirty soldier’s tunic.
“You won’t die, Fraser. Don’t you dare. Promise me.”
“I can’t promise ye that.” He touched her cheek, a brief brush of his knuckles. “I wish— Lass, if ye love me, then make me a promise. Promise me you’ll go home.”
She reached inside his open greatcoat and laid her hand on the rough wool of his tunic, over his heart. “I am home, Fraser.”
A soldier stepped around the building, his eyes darting over them. He cleared his throat. “Driver’s ready to head back, Doc.”
Fraser grabbed her wrist and moved her hand off his chest. “She’s coming.”
The soldier turned and left them.
“Will you kiss me, Fraser MacLeod?”
He stared down at her for a moment, and she held her breath, waiting, but he stepped back, out of reach, and looked at her with bitter anguish in his eyes. “Better not. Better to leave it. Otherwise you’ll be in my thoughts, in my blood, a distraction. I can’t kiss ye, lass, not for goodbye.”
“Sergeant?” someone called him, and he lifted his head, his eyes on her for a moment more.
“Coming,” he replied.
He turned and walked away from her without looking back.
CHAPTER FIFTY
March 20, 1918
Someone shook Eleanor awake when they arrived at the CCS, and she climbed out of the ambulance, her body stiff and sore and weary. She’d left Fraser at the aid post. She’d been at the front for six days, and here before that for three weeks, and her entire life had changed. The CCS felt as familiar to her as home. A number of patients sat outside the tents, enjoying the mild air of the last day of winter or waiting for transport back to the front or onward to other hospitals and the next step in their long journey home.
“What have we got?” a doctor she didn’t know asked as the orderlies began to unload the wounded from the ambulance she’d arrived in. She scanned his unfamiliar face. Some things had changed here after all.
“Broken leg, tibia,” she said. “Treated with antiseptic, splinted in the field, tetanus shot given.”
He looked at the splint. “Someone up there did a damn fine job.”
“That would be me,” she said, and he looked at her in surprise.
“Good God, you’re a woman!”
“And a doctor.”
“Are you really? I’m Captain James Wilmot by the way, surgeon, fresh from England. I was assigned to Number 4 General Hospital at Amiens, but no sooner did I arrive there than they sent me here. I’m to stay until your surgeon returns.”
“Captain Blair isn’t back yet?”
“No. Delayed, I understand,” Wilmot said.
“Miss Atherton,” she heard Matron Connolly say, her tone sour, and she turned to see the matron leading a phalanx of nursing sisters out to tend the new casualties. “Into more trouble, I see. One can be hanged for impersonating a soldier—or a doctor, for that matter.”
“Impersonating? I say, where did you attend medical school?” Wilmot asked.
Eleanor ignored him, keeping her eyes on Matron Connolly. “Captain Blair’s brother was dying. I merely took his place for a few days so he could go to him—”
Wilmot frowned. “There are rumors of German spies impersonating medical personnel. Where did you say you’re from?”
“I’m from Yorkshire,” Eleanor said, glaring at him. “I’ve been at a frontline aid post for several days. We were busy with patients for all that time. There are a number of men who saw me there—Sergeant MacLeod, Corporal Chilcott, and Captain Dalrymple, to name a few. Dalrymple’s the new medical officer—”
“Angus Dalrymple? From Aberdeen?” Wilmot said. “Old classmate of mine. Fine fellow.”
Curious eyes were watching them even as the patients were being unloaded from the ambulances, and Eleanor turned to the men she’d treated at the aid post and began with the first in the queue. “This man needs a bed, Matron, and—” Eleanor began.
“I don’t take orders from you!” the nurse said. “I’m going to get the colonel at once.”
Wilmot whistled softly as she strode away. “Why are matrons always so bloody fierce? So what’s it like up there at the front? I’ve never been.”
She looked at his jolly face, the cocky half smile, the easy way he stood as if he were on holiday, as if the wounded could wait.
She thought of Charlie’s death, and the agony and terror of trying to save lives while bombs fell and bullets flew. And she thought of Fraser. She felt a lump form in her throat, and she moved on to the next patient without answering his question.
“This man’s been blinded. There’s mud embedded around his eyes, and it will need to be cleaned out under anesthetic,” she said, keeping her comments to the treatment of the wounded.
“I say,” Wilmot muttered, frowning as he stared at the soldier’s horribly swollen eyes.
“There are three gas cases in the second ambulance,” she added, moving on. “Two fractures—a collarbone and a rib, and four amputations that will need to be checked and monitored. There are six men in shock, and three sick.”
“Sick? Is it influenza?” Wilmot asked.
“Or trench fever, or typhus, or any number of other things,” she said.
“Dr. Atherton!” Reverend Strong was leading the gas cases. Their eyes were bandaged, and they held one another’s shoulders in a slow, shuffling parade. The chaplain held the elbow of the man in front, guiding the queue. “How nice to see you back safely.” He barely glanced at her clothing. “Captain Blair sent word he’ll be returning in the morning.”
“His brother?” she asked.
He shook his head. “The captain was with him at the end, but there was nothing to be done. At least he got to say goodbye, thanks to you. It was a kind thing, but rather a dangerous one. The colonel was most concerned about you.”
“Dr. Atherton!” She heard the colonel’s bellow clear across the CCS. He was striding toward her with Matron Connolly following.
“Uh-oh,” Wilmot murmured. “Looks like more trouble.”
She waited for the colonel to reach her side. He gaped at her, red-faced and affronted, taking in her rumpled uniform, her baggy britches. “You’ve managed to thwart the rules and raise holy hell yet again.”
“Really, sir, I must object to such language in front of a woman,” Wilmot said, and Bellford glared at him.
“Dr. Atherton has been here for several weeks. I daresay she has heard all the inappropriate language there is. In fact, it is entirely likely that a number of new words have been coined just for her.”
Eleanor blushed, and she jumped aside as a stretcher was carried past.
Bellford looked at the patient, then at the others coming off the ambulances. “Bad, was it?” he asked her quietly.
“Yes, sir,” she said soberly.
“Don’t blame Dr. Atherton, Colonel. It took a great deal of courage to do what she did,” Reverend Strong interrupted. The gas cases cocked their bandaged heads to listen. “Captain Blair’s brother—”
Colonel Bellford held up his hand. “Yes, I know, Reverend.” He turned to the matron. “Looks like we have wounded to see to. Prepare the surgical cases for Captain Wilmot. I’ll be along shortly.” He waited for her to obey his orders and move away before he turned back to Eleanor.
“I may admire the sentiment that caused you to undertake such a foolish, dangerous mission, and the skill it took to provide medical care in such a rude place, under fire, but not from you, not from a woman. Can you imagine the difficulties it would have caused if you’d been killed?”
“Yes, sir,” she said again, as if she truly was a soldier.
“Your brother sent a letter. He agrees with Matron Connolly. He threatened to report you and me and to have me relieved of my duties and court-martialed if I didn’t send you home at once. You could also be arrested, imprisoned by our side, or even hanged by the enemy.”
“So Matron tells me,” she murmured. “Did my brother say—”
“I promised to send you home the moment you arrived back—if you arrived back. I could not spare anyone to go and fetch you. I am relieved to see you safe, but I cannot allow you to stay any longer. You must leave at once.”
“If I may, sir, it’s late. It will be night soon,” the chaplain said.
“Is it?” one of the gas cases said. “No wonder it’s dark.”
“I daresay Dr. Atherton could use a meal, and a chance to bathe and change her clothes. By the look of her, I’d say a night’s rest wouldn’t go amiss, sir,” Strong added.
Bellford took in her filthy uniform and her dirty face and paused at the ruin of her hair. He sighed. “You will leave at first light, is that clear?”
Corporal Swiftwood appeared. His sandy brows rose at the sight of Eleanor in trousers. “You’re wanted in theater at once, Colonel.”
“Very well, Corporal,” Bellford said. He gave Eleanor one last look. “First thing in the morning, Dr. Atherton,” he reminded her. “I am so very tired of saying those words. This time I expect to be obeyed, or I will arrest you myself. For the final time, this is goodbye.” He turned on his heel and strode away.
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