The Wild Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  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. “Commander 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 memori
es 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.

  “Aye, that’s him. Billy’s two older boys were killed on the Somme, I heard. The one here with us was shot in the head. He has brain damage. Dr. Barnes says there’s no hope for him. He’ll never be right,” Mrs. Culver said.

  “I know Peter,” James said. “He’s new. He’s very quiet.”

  Watching the man, stoop-shouldered and broken-looking, walking past with his silent, shuffling son, Fiona almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “I’ve heard such dreadful things about him,” Mrs. Culver said, looking out of the window, “but they’re hard to credit. I mean, look at him … he hardly looks like a fearsome villain, does he? He looks like he’s been gutted.”

  “Who’s gutted? Who’s a villain?” James asked, looking out of the window, too.

  Fiona, her eyes still on Madden, felt a shiver go up her spine.

  “Auntie Fee? Who’s a villain?” James asked again. “That man out there? Is he Peter’s daddy? He doesn’t look like a villain. He just looks sad.”

  “No one’s a villain, James,” Fiona said. “Eat your mince pie, love,” she said, still gazing at Madden.

  Madden, who had his son’s arm, pointed at something, smiling. Fiona followed the direction of his finger. It was a huge hawk, circling a field.

  Mrs. Culver thought Madden a broken man, a changed man, but Fiona wasn’t so sure. Men like Madden never really changed. She knew that well enough. The violence never left them. It stayed inside, coiled like a viper.

  Fiona suddenly heard a door open and bang shut again, and the next she thing saw was James running across the lawn. Running to Billy Madden. He had something in his hands.

  “James!” she shouted, banging the p
latter of mince pies down and running after him. “James, come back!” she shouted again, once she was outside.

  But James was already at Billy Madden’s side. He tugged on Madden’s jacket. Madden turned around and James handed him something. As Fiona drew closer, she saw it was a mince pie. He gave one to Peter, too.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  Madden, still holding his pie, knelt down to the boy. His face had gone white. As if he’d just seen a ghost. As Fiona watched, he reached out and took hold of James’s hand.

  “William?” he said. “Son, is it you?”

  His voice sounded tortured. His eyes, huge in his pale face, were boring into James. He was scaring him.

  “Let go of me,” Fiona heard James say, as he tried to break free of his grasp.

  Fiona, panting, finally reached them. “Let go of him,” she said, her voice low and hard. “Now.”

  As if suddenly remembering himself, Madden released the boy. He looked up at Fiona. “I’m … I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, sounding confused. “I didn’t mean to frighten the lad. Or you. It’s just … it’s just that he gave me a bit of a shock. You see, he looks exactly like my oldest son William did when he was a boy. Spitting image. It’s … it’s downright uncanny.” He swallowed hard, then said, “William was killed in France, ma’am. Last year.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Fiona said. “I see you’re walking with Peter. We won’t disturb you. Come along, James.”

  James took Fiona’s hand and together they walked back to the kitchen. Fiona could feel Madden’s eyes on them as they did.

  “What was that about, Mum?” Katie asked, as Fiona stepped back inside, shepherding James before her.

  “Run along into the common room and check on your cousin for me, will you, love?” Fiona said to James.