The Wild Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “No. I’ve decided that I’m going to stand for Parliament on the Labour ticket. I can’t wait until I’m thirty to participate in my own government. I just can’t. Mr. Lloyd George might’ve placed a high age bar on voting—he couldn’t have us women wielding too much influence in government, now, could he? But he set a lower one on standing for Parliament. I can’t vote for eleven more years, but I can run as soon as I turn twenty-one—which is less than two years away. And I will. As soon as I’m out of university, I’m going to start planning my campaign.”

  “Oh, Katie,” Fiona said, her eyes shining. “That’s the most wonderful news. I’m so excited. And so proud.”

  “Thank you, Mum. I hoped you would be. Oh, look! The king’s free. Be right back!”

  “The king? Katie, you’re not going to …” Her voice trailed off. It was too late. Katie was making her way over to the monarch.

  Fiona felt someone take her hand and squeeze it. It was Joe. “Looks like she’s gone off to buttonhole old King George,” he said.

  “You don’t think she’s going to give him a copy of this week’s Battle Cry, do you?” Fiona said. “She’s got articles by Ben Tillet, Ella Rosen, Annie Besant, and Millicent Fawcett in there. Every firebrand in London. She’ll give him heart palpitations.”

  “She’s already giving him heart palpitations,” Joe said, “and it’s not because of her newspaper.”

  Fiona laughed. The king was looking at Katie, motioning for her to come forward. He was smiling at her. Of course he was, Fiona thought. Katie had that effect on men. With her black hair, blue eyes, and slender figure, she was a beauty.

  “Have you heard her news, then?” Joe asked.

  “I have,” Fiona said. “You wouldn’t have had anything to do with it, would you now?” she added, raising an eyebrow.

  Joe shook his head. “Katie makes her own decisions. She’s her own girl, you know that.”

  “I certainly do.”

  Joe smiled roguishly. “I will say I’m pleased she’s going into the family business, though,” he said.

  “Politics, the family business,” Fiona said wonderingly. “It used to be barrows and the docks. Who’d have thought it, Joe? Back when we were our children’s ages, I mean. Who’d ever have believed it?”

  Katie dropped a curtsy to the king, then stood up straight, squared her shoulders, and started talking. Joe and Fiona couldn’t hear what she was saying, but they both watched as the king, nodding his head, leaned in closer to listen.

  “Poor sod,” Joe said. “He has no idea what he’s in for.”

  Fiona shook her head, then she said, “You know, luv, earlier tonight, I thought it was ended. I thought the struggle—at least one of them—was over. I thought …”

  Joe was about to answer, but his words died away also, as he and Fiona, both incredulous, watched their daughter pull a folded copy of the Battle Cry from her purse and hand it to the king.

  “Yes, Fee? What were you saying?” Joe said, when he could find his voice again.

  “Forget what I was saying,” Fiona said, laughing. “Nothing’s over. Nothing’s ended. With our Katie in the fray, it’s only just beginning.”

  “Joe! There you are!” a familiar voice said. Fiona turned. David Lloyd George was at Joe’s side. “Greetings, Mrs. Bristow. How are you today? Well, I trust. I must tell you both, that daughter of yours is a firecracker of a girl. Just had the most fascinating conversation with her. All about her newspaper. She gave me a copy and made me promise to subscribe. She’s an excellent saleswoman, and as smart as a whip!”

  “Takes after her mum, she does,” Joe said proudly.

  “She also told me that she planned to run for Parliament just as soon as she turned twenty-one,” Lloyd George said. He smiled at Joe and added, “I think you’d better watch out for your job, old boy.”

  Joe smiled back and said, “Actually, Prime Minister, I think you’d better watch out for yours!”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “They say now that the Yanks are in, it’ll be over soon,” Allie Beech said.

  “I heard it might be as soon as this year,” Lizzie Caldwell said.

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Having them all home again?” Jennie Finnegan said.

  “I remember when my Ronnie enlisted. It was all a big lark, wasn’t it? The boys were going off to give old Gerry a big black eye. They’d be home in two months, three at the most. It would all be over before we knew it,” Peg McDonnell said.

  “And here we are, March of 1918, going on four years,” Nancy Barrett said.

  “And millions dead. And so many others badly injured and in hospital,” Peg said.

  “Peg, dear, pass me the teapot, won’t you? I’m parched,” Jennie said, wanting to stop any talk about dead and injured men before it got started.

  Jennie was sitting in the kitchen of her father’s house, the rectory house of St. Nicholas’s parish. She’d moved back here to be with her father after Seamie had enlisted. He’d wanted that. He hadn’t wanted her to be alone in their flat with a new baby. He’d felt it would be good for all of them—herself, the reverend, and little James—to be together during this long, hard, horrible war.

  She put her knitting needles in her lap now, poured herself another cup of tea, then set the pot on the table. She and half a dozen women from the parish were knitting socks for British soldiers. They met here every Wednesday evening at seven o’clock.

  It had been Jennie’s idea to start this knitting circle. She knew the women of her father’s parish and knew that many of them were suffering greatly. They were lonely for their men and worried they’d never see them again. They were raising their children alone, without enough money, and—thanks to the German U-boats that prevented supply ships from getting to Britain—without enough food, either. Rationing had made them all thin. Jennie scrimped on her own rations to provide a pot of tea and a few thin biscuits for these evenings. But she did it gladly, for their lives—and hers—were difficult and uncertain and it bolstered all their spirits to spend an evening sitting together and talking, to make socks and send them off and feel that they were contributing, if only in a small way, to the comfort and well-being of the men on the front lines.

  “Gladys, can I pour you more tea?” Jennie asked the woman sitting on her right.

  “No, thank you,” Gladys Bigelow said, never taking her eyes off her knitting.

  Jennie set the pot down on the low tea table in front of her, frowning with concern. Gladys no longer lived in the parish, but Jennie had asked her to join them anyway. She was worried about her. As the years of the war had dragged on, she’d watched Gladys turn into a shadow. Once plump and bubbly, she’d become thin, pale, and withdrawn. Jennie had asked her several times what was troubling her, but Gladys would only smile wanly and say that her work was demanding.

  “Sir George is always the first to hear what ship was torpedoed and how many were lost,” she’d explained. “It takes a toll on him. Takes a toll on us all, doesn’t it? But I mustn’t complain. So many have it so much worse.”

  Jennie had taken her hand then and had quietly said to her, “At least we have the comfort of knowing that we’re doing our part, along with Mr. von Brandt, to help save innocent lives. And perhaps even hasten the end of this dreadful war.”

  Perhaps she’d only imagined it, but it had seemed to her then that Gladys, already pale, had gone even whiter at the mention of Max’s name.

  “Yes, Jennie,” she’d said, pulling her hand away. “We always have that.”

  Jennie had not mentioned Max again, but she had continued to take the envelope Gladys gave her, after every Tuesday night suffrage meeting, just as Max von Brandt had asked her to do three and a half years ago.

  This very evening, before the women had arrived, while her father was busy giving James his bath, Jennie had quietly slipped down to the church’s basement to tuck this week’s envelope inside the broken statue of St. Nicholas.

  She had often wond
ered if the man who took the envelope was nearby when she placed it under the statue. Was he in the tunnel, waiting for her to leave? Was he in the basement itself, watching her? The thought made her shiver. She was quick about her work, never tarrying, and felt glad only when she’d climbed back up the steps and closed the basement door behind her.

  Jennie had never opened the envelopes, not once, though she had been tempted. Sometimes, on a long, sleepless night, she would lie quietly in her bed and wonder if Max von Brandt had told her the truth, if he was really on the side of peace. She would remember how he’d mentioned Binsey to her, and the cottage there, and how her heart had stuttered inside her at his ugly threat. And then she would resolve to open the very next envelope Gladys gave her, to find out the truth once and for all.

  But then the night would give way to day, and her resolve would give way with it, and she would tell herself she must not open it. Max von Brandt had told her not to and he’d likely had a reason. Perhaps to do so might somehow breach security. Perhaps the envelope might not be accepted if it was opened. Perhaps she might even endanger an innocent person’s life with her foolish curiosity.

  Jennie told herself these things, because to believe otherwise—to believe that Max was not what he said he was, that he was using her to aid Germany and harm Britain—was simply unthinkable. And so she refused to do so. She had become very practiced, over the last few years, at not thinking about difficult things.

  “I hear that a lot of soldiers are coming down with the influenza,” Lizzie said now, diverting Jennie’s thoughts from Max and Gladys. “The new one … the Spanish flu. Supposed to be worse than any other kind. I’ve heard it can kill you in a day.”

  “As if there wasn’t enough to worry about,” Allie sighed. “Now that.”

  “Allie, how’s your Sarah doing at the secretarial school?” Jennie asked, trying, yet again, to steer the conversation away from worrisome topics.

  “Oh, she’s getting on like a house on fire!” Allie said, brightening. “Her teacher says she’s top of the class and that she’s going to put her name in for a position at Thompson’s—it’s a boot factory in Hackney—in the Accounts Department.”

  “Oh, I’m so pleased!” Jennie said. She’d taught Sarah at her school.

  “She always was a bright one, your Sarah,” Lizzie said approvingly.

  As the talk drifted to other children and their doings, Jennie finished the sock she was working on. She had cast it off her needles and was just starting the second of the pair, when she heard the sound of small feet in the hallway and a little voice calling, “Mummy! Mummy!”

  She looked up and saw a blond, hazel-eyed, pink-cheeked boy run into the kitchen—her son, James. Her face broke into a radiant smile. She felt her heart swell with love, as it always did at the sight of him. He stopped a few feet past the doorway and said, “May I please have a biscuit, Mummy? Grandpa says I might have milk and a biscuit if I ask nicely.”

  Jennie never got the chance to answer him. The others beat her to it.

  “Of course you may, my duck!” Peg said.

  “Come here and sit with your auntie Liz, you little dumpling!” Lizzie said.

  “Wait your turn, you lot. I’m closest and I get him first,” Nancy said.

  James, giggling, allowed himself to be squeezed and kissed, passed around and cuddled and fed too many biscuits. He’d single-handedly managed to do what Jennie could not—take the women’s minds off the war and their absent men and their worries.

  “Look at the color of his hair. And those eyes!” Nancy exclaimed. “Why, he’s the spitting image of his mother.”

  Jennie forced a smile. “Yes, he is,” she said aloud, silently adding, His real mother—Josie Meadows.

  Anyone glancing at her and then at three-year-old James would think them mother and child. They both had blond hair, hazel eyes, and porcelain skin. But if that same person were to look closer, he would notice differences.

  Jennie looked at James now, as the women around her continued to fuss and chatter, and she saw Josie in the shape of the eyes, the tilt of his nose, and the curve of his smile. She remembered, with a sudden, startling clarity, the day the letter had arrived from Binsey—the letter from Josie telling her that she’d had the baby, that Dr. Cobb from the village had delivered him, and that he’d written Jennie Finnegan’s name on the child’s birth certificate, for that was what Josie had told the doctor her name was. When Dr. Cobb had asked Josie who the father was, she’d smiled and said, “My husband, of course. Seamus Finnegan.”

  Jennie, still faking her own nonexistent pregnancy, had left for Binsey that very same day. She’d met Josie at the cottage that evening, and then she’d met her son—James.

  Josie was holding him and cooing to him, but as soon as she saw Jennie, she put the baby in her arms. Then she put her jacket on.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” Jennie said, surprised. “I only just got here. You have to stay. At least for a day or two. And you said you’d travel to London with me. That we’d say you were a girl from the village.”

  Josie, her eyes bright with tears, had shaken her head no. “I’m sorry, Jennie. I can’t,” she said. “It gets harder every second I’m with him. If I don’t go now, I never will.”

  Jennie looked into her friend’s eyes, and in them she saw what it cost to surrender a child. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t take him from you. He’s your baby.”

  “You have to take him. I can’t stay here. You know that,” Josie said. “Billy Madden doesn’t forget and he doesn’t forgive. He’ll beat me within an inch of my life and put the baby into an orphanage—and that’s if he’s in a good mood. This is the best thing, Jennie. The only thing.” She’d buttoned her jacket, put on her hat, and picked up her suitcase. “I’ll write. Under a different name. Once I have a flat and get myself settled,” she said. “Write me back and tell me about him. Send a picture now and again, if you can.”

  “I will. I promise. He’ll be loved, Josie. Loved and cared for. Always. I promise you that.”

  “I know he will,” Josie said. She kissed baby James and then Jennie, and then she left, suitcase in hand, never once looking back.

  Jennie had spent a strange and terrifying and wonderful week alone with her new son, and then she’d got on a train back to London. She told her father and her friends and Seamie’s family that the baby had come a bit early. There was some surprise, and she’d had to endure a bit of scolding for going off to the country on her own so close to her due date, but mostly there was joy and delight in the tiny new life in their midst. No one suspected her of passing off another woman’s child as her own—why would they? Only her father and Harriet knew the exact nature of the injuries her accident had caused. Her father, being a man of faith, simply accepted James’s birth as yet another of God’s miracles. Harriet Hatcher, being a woman of science, had posed a bigger problem, but Jennie had got round it by telling Harriet that as she was spending so much time in Binsey, she had decided to see the doctor there, Dr. Cobb, for her check-ups. Harriet said she understood and told Jennie to come back to her after the baby was born, but Jennie never did. And never would.

  It would have been a far trickier thing to pull off had Seamie been in London. He would have seen that her body had not changed during her pregnancy, and that her breasts were not full of milk, and would likely have wanted to know why. She told any woman friend who asked if she was nursing James that her milk was scanty and so she’d decided to bottle-feed him instead. Seamie might also have wanted to go to Binsey, to see Dr. Cobb and thank him for delivering his son, but Seamie had been hundreds of miles away on a British warship when James arrived, so that had not happened.

  Jennie’d had a photograph taken of the baby, which she’d enclosed in a letter to Seamie, informing him he was now the father of a strapping son. She’d written that she hoped he didn’t mind, but she’d named the boy James, after him. When he’d come home on furlough, nearly a year later, he’d f
allen in love with the child at first sight and made Jennie promise to send him photos of James every month.

  And so, amazingly, Josie’s mad plan had worked—perfectly. Josie herself was safely away from London, working as a chorus girl in Paris under a stage name. Her child was safely in Jennie Finnegan’s care. And no one was the wiser.

  Jennie should have been happy. She had the child she’d desperately wanted. James was hers. He was her pride and her joy, her beautiful, golden boy. And she loved him fiercely. She had her handsome, war-hero husband. She had the love of family and friends.

  But she was not happy. She was tortured and miserable, for her happiness had all been built upon lies. She had lied to Seamie about her ability to have children. She hadn’t told him about her miscarriage. And she’d lied again by telling him James was their son. And though she’d got away with those lies, she knew that God was nonetheless punishing her for them, because Seamie, her beloved husband, no longer loved her.

  He had never said as much. He was good to her. Concerned about her. He signed all his letters to her with love. He tried his best to love her, but he did not. There was no fire in his touch anymore. His eyes, when he looked at her, were kind, but distant. There was a sadness and a heaviness to him always, as if the fire that had burned so brightly inside of him, the fire that had carried him to places like Kilimanjaro and the South Pole, that had made him brave and daring, that had kept him always on a quest, had gone out forever.

  She had found the letter Willa had written to him, the one in which she told him good-bye. It was crumpled in the pocket of one of his jackets. And she’d found one he started to write to her after she left—torn into pieces at the bottom of the rubbish bin in his study. In it, he’d told her that she’d done the right thing by leaving, that she’d been stronger than he had. He told her that he was sorry for being unfaithful to his wife and that he was going to spend the rest of his life being a good husband to her and a good father to their child, but that he wanted her, Willa, to know that no matter what happened, no matter how many years passed, even if he never laid eyes on her again, he loved her and he always would. She was his heart and his soul.