He needed to feel alive, and right now Rose made him feel that more than any other person on earth.
He closed the door softly, watching her in profile as she looked out behind the curtains then turned and met his gaze. Perhaps it was way the light filtered through her blouse as she undid the buttons, outlining the curve of her breast. Or perhaps it was the way she didn’t smile, but undid her skirt instead, letting it drop to the floor with her undergarments as she lifted her now bare legs out and stepped forward, dragging the rest of her underthings over her head and standing at last, naked, unapologetic and proud. Or perhaps it was the lift of her chin as she met him squarely and walked over, her body lush and beckoning. Whatever it was he lost control, forgetting his intention of taking things slowly, and devoured her mouth, her breasts and kissing that maddening spot behind her ear. She clutched at his clothes, undressing him as they fell onto the bed.
He took her quickly, her cries spurring him on; their passion burned their skin and filled their senses. He felt her name draw from his throat as the intensity exploded and he climaxed within her, unable to stop, drawing himself to and fro. She rolled him onto his back and traced his arms and shoulders with her mouth and lower, down his stomach, and soon he was ready again. Rose took control this time, riding on top and finding her passion in full force. Soon it was her turn to cry out and she clenched and shuddered over and over as he drove hard and fast, grabbing her firmly and joining her.
It was some time later, as they lay naked and sprawled, his hand tracing circles on her breasts, when he finally spoke. ‘I can never give you up now.’
Strange that he should choose the same words that Gregory had once used at Greenshades, Rose mused, and strange how different they made her feel when she felt the same way.
Twenty-seven
Bolougne, 23 July 1916
Twenty-three days. Twenty-three days and twenty-three nights that were distinguished by light and dark and little else. Man after man, torn, ripped. Pale and dying. Alive and tortured with pain. Dead.
The town was filled to capacity, as was Calais, and still they came. Later ‘the Somme’ would be a name synonymous with loss as they came to know the true extent of the cost. Hundreds of thousands more would die and many more would be wounded, but for now great chunks of the glorious British army lay in shattered threads on the fields of France. Some were sent mad from the terror of the constant rain of shells – bombardments so severe news reports told they could be heard from England. Others were victims of a new torment: poison gas. One young man clung to Emma the whole way in the ambulance, shaking and in shock, constantly crying out his poor mate’s name, only to die as they reached Boulogne. Others were stretchered into hospitals only for doctors to find them already cold on the table. Often they never found out which injury killed them.
The new Australian troops had been thrown to the slaughter at Fromelles, a woefully misjudged attack that left many of them exposed in open fields at the mercy of German machine guns. Five thousand casualties and no ground taken. Rose knew she would never be able to wipe the images of stilled young faces and near-new uniforms from her mind.
She’d stopped being able to eat, being able to sleep. Rose was living a nightmare that had rudely interrupted her beautiful dream, and what little time she had to think of Clarkson was shared with duty now as she hurtled along towards more mutilation and death. Brief stolen moments of fear as she scanned the skies as she drove, searching for his plane, in constant dread of death streams lining the blue.
He was caught just as she was in an exploded world, the beasts locked in ferocious battle now, teeth bared and tearing in bloody madness.
Still, somehow he had managed to send her a message. Just a small box with a single chess piece inside. Someone would sit to play one day and wonder where on earth the queen had got to.
She was pulling into the station, returning with more wounded from the front with Emma and Beatrice, when Private Ben Hill ran towards them.
‘It’s Pozières. Heavy losses. We need to get up there now.’
The girls didn’t comment, just helped unload in practised haste and jumped back in with Ben, heading towards the French village in silence. After Fromelles they dreaded what carnage they would find.
Clarkson searched the late-morning sky as Captain Roger Standing came up behind him. ‘He’s down.’
Clarkson looked to the ground, forcing emotions away as he struggled to accept it.
‘Major says you’re not to go up for a few hours. Says he knows you’re on no sleep for days and he needs you alert,’ he continued, clearing his throat as his own eyes filled. ‘Try and get some rest, Clarkson. There’s nothing else we can do now.’
Clarkson stared at the plumes of smoke that billowed on the horizon. ‘He may still be alive.’
Standing nodded, patting Clarkson’s shoulder before moving back to barracks and leaving him to his thoughts. Rookie’s face imprinted itself on his mind; the image of him waving, his smile enormous beneath his goggles as he and Rose watched him fly over them that day.
He shook his head and strode towards his car. Damn doing nothing and damn sleeping. Rookie could be there, lying in the fields near Pozières, waiting for someone to find him and take him to the clearing station. To where Rose most likely was.
Gregory flattened himself against the wall, heaving. Why the hell had they chosen his regiment, the British 17th Warwickshire, to support these bloody mad Australians? They fought wars like they did everything else. Rash, undisciplined and reckless.
A bomb exploded nearby and he saw Second Lieutenant Pankhurst’s body fly past, landing in a lifeless heap in the rubble, a great gash across his neck and chest. Stupid fool, he thought, angry and repulsed at the same time. How had they got so bloody close? Why had he listened to Pankhurst when he’d suggested cutting through this part of the village? Gregory’s heart pounded and he decided there was only one thing for it.
‘Retreat!’ He called to his party.
‘But, Captain–’
‘You heard me, move back!’ Gregory yelled. He’d done everything he could to stay alive in this damn war and he wasn’t about to die now.
Clarkson pulled over, trying to take in the sheer scale of the wounded and the desperate efforts of those trying to save them at the clearing station. Hundreds of maimed men, perhaps thousands. All was in constant flux: stretchers, ambulances, white cotton covered in blood. Dead bodies. A savage scramble for life under deafening shelling that promised more death.
He drove around it, scanning the fields nearby, hoping for some sign of Rookie’s plane. There was nothing. Only farmland littered with the incongruous articles of war. He parked the car, unable to progress any further, and made his way across to the front of the station, where the men were being stretchered in from aid posts. And there among it all, checking each passing casualty, issuing instructions and covered in the blood of her boys, was his Rose.
The bombs were echoing deep in her core. Rose well understood how the men continued to shake like leaves after days of it crashing through their nerves. The wounded kept coming, some not even on stretchers, just carried, often by other wounded.
‘Take him to the right and bandage that gash hard, here.’ She pointed where the blood continued to pour out from the man’s shin, knowing he would likely lose his leg.
Cut, burned, gassed, shot. It came in a blur as she worked.
Clarkson.
Everything else didn’t seem real then, like she was standing inside one of her own dreams, knowing she would wake up. He was here. Something was whole and alive. Death wasn’t clutching at him. Not yet.
He came and took the corner of the next stretcher, winking at her and giving her his slow dazzling smile. Rose smiled back and, somehow, it was all she needed.
They worked together, the tall pilot and the redheaded ambulance driver, doing what they could to hold the lifeblood inside the Australians that afternoon. It wasn’t what either of them would ever have imag
ined they would choose to do – bear witness to atrocity and gruesome suffering for hours on end. But there was nowhere else either of them would have chosen to be. The beasts had sliced with their claws and ripped great chunks of flesh in a frenzy of killing and the giant lay bleeding, torn and decimated at their feet. They would do whatever it took to save the pieces that were left.
‘Pilot. There’s a pilot,’ called one voice from a stretcher near Clarkson.
‘That’s right, fella. I’m a pilot,’ Clarkson shouted back, turning towards him.
‘Pilot. Like you,’ the man called out, coughing. ‘In the field. Other side of farmhouse. Plane went down…hours ago.’
‘How do you know?’ Clarkson went to him and clutched the man’s hand.
‘Watched him. We was…trapped all day…so I watched. He is…moving.’ The man coughed again, grasped at Clarkson, then managed to point to the east. ‘He’s alive.’
Clarkson followed the man’s pointed finger and looked out to a farmhouse that obscured much of the field beyond. He stared for a moment, seeing what he had to do.
‘What is it?’ Rose called over the noise. Clarkson grabbed a few bandages and supplies, throwing them in a bag before going over to her. ‘It’s Rookie. He’s down. I think…I think he is still alive.’ He paused to grab her shoulders and kiss her briefly. ‘I have to go, my love.’
He gave her one last look before running out of the station and towards the line of trees that led to the farmhouse.
‘You can’t go into the battle area,’ said Beatrice, watching Rose from nearby.
Rose looked around her as she finished bandaging the soldier’s arm she had been tending. ‘It’s quietened down for now.’
Beatrice surveyed the area and realised it was true. There was a lull. She turned back to argue further but Rose was already gone.
Gregory hunched further into the stall. The animals were well gone but the place stank of manure. Still, it was the best option he had for now, trapped in this sector as they were.
Curse Pankhurst and his stupidity.
‘Messenger!’ called his young lieutenant, Harris.
‘Captain,’ panted the man as he arrived at the barn. ‘At last! Pardon, sir. Message from HQ. They want you to report back. Leave Pankhurst in command, sir.’
‘Pankhurst’s dead,’ Gregory informed him, sizing up what was left of his party. ‘Harris,’ he called, ‘take over.’
The young lieutenant looked set to protest at being left in the barn, in charge of a band of terrified men under a raining hail of bombing, but Gregory wasted no time on that. He was getting out.
‘Rookie,’ Clarkson said. ‘It’s me.’
The sun was crimson behind the heavy clouds and Rookie stared at him, his breathing sharp and short.
‘Clarkson?’
‘It’s me, mate. I’m here.’ Clarkson tried not to let the tears slide down his cheeks. He’d seen enough death to know that he was too late.
‘The Jerries…’ Rookie said, his young body shaking with the pound of each explosion.
Clarkson shook his head. ‘They can’t see you here, mate. You chose a good field to crash in.’ Looking around him, he acknowledged it was true. The crash site was in a valley and only visible from the farmhouse.
‘Rose,’ Rookie said, looking over his shoulder.
‘She’s…’
‘…here.’
Clarkson turned in surprise as Rose crouched next to him. Rookie tried to smile at her then turned his eyes back to Clarkson. ‘…I got one…a Jerry. Grandfather…owes me a car…’
The blood trickled from the side of his mouth and Rose wiped it away with her apron as Rookie drew his last breath. She closed his eyes and Clarkson allowed himself his first tears of the war.
He was running. The messenger had been hit as the bombs continued in endless succession and he now ran alone. Gregory fell into the cover of the tree line that ran along a farm near the village and followed them along. Hunted. Afraid. Furious. Pressing himself against a large trunk he paused to heave air back into his lungs, watching the red sun set behind a curtain of black smoke. This was all because of his wife. If he hadn’t needed to stay in England to hunt for Rose he would have gone back to damnable Australia to his house in Melbourne to wait out the war. He never would have been forced by his mother to take this commission. He never would have been made to change his carefully planned life.
He never would have lost his child.
Gregory watched as a woman and a man crossed the field below, walking away from plane wreckage. The pilot seemed to have survived. A tall man. Vaguely familiar. And the woman…not unlike the red-haired slut he’d married.
Gregory’s entire being froze as the hatred ran through him like iced water.
Rose. With her lover, Clarkson, after all. Walking across before him through the middle of the war. In his sights at last.
He lifted his gun as they reached the rise and took aim.
I told you I would never let you go.
Clarkson didn’t hear the shot in the noise of the artillery, he only saw her fall, stumbling backwards and holding her stomach where a scarlet stain spread. As he turned to catch her the bullet in his back drove him straight into her arms.
‘Captain!’
Gregory turned as he headed past the farmhouse, gritting his teeth as a major called him over.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Get these men over to the right, near the second house. We need to take out that gunner.’ He pointed out the objectives as he shouted his instructions, pressing himself against the stone as a bomb exploded nearby.
‘I have to report to HQ–’
‘HQ can wait!’ The major yelled, pulling his gun around and taking aim. ‘Go!’ He waved his arm and the lot of them went, Gregory forced to go with them.
The village was by now reduced to half-shells of buildings and rubble and Gregory ran and weaved his way, losing sight of the men almost immediately in the dust. He threw himself behind a broken wall, the explosions around him shaking it as it crumbled further.
She was dead. There was no time to relish the satisfaction as the hell around him flashed in white explosion after explosion, jolting him again and again. A severed arm landed on him and he recoiled, throwing it off in horror. Enough.
He ran again, away from the men, away from the explosions, away from the war. This time he didn’t pause.
The machine gun shot him in the back and his last awareness was of grim satisfaction. At least she was denied life too.
He felt her heart growing weaker as he laid his head against her breast, his own breath shallow and ragged. She was still warm and soft and it seemed impossible that she would ever be otherwise. He managed to lift his hand and hold hers, forcing himself to roll onto the ground to ease his weight upon her. It cost him. The pain shot through his back and for a moment he thought he was already dead as the white blinded his vision. Then she spoke and his entire being focused on her words as she drew him back to consciousness.
‘Stay with me.’
‘I told you before, I could never…leave you now.’
‘You said never give me up.’
‘Did I?’ He paused to find breath enough for words. ‘Not my choice.’
‘What’s that…supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t own you…can’t give you up. Your choice who you give yourself to.’
She smiled, applying what little strength she had left to squeezing his hand. ‘I give…to you.’
He felt the white coming closer. ‘When can I seal the deal…with a kiss?’
She smiled again. ‘Typical man.’
Beatrice packed the last of the wounded that could be moved, glad of the morning light at last. The sunrise would have been glorious if not for the constant plumes blocking its beauty, denying the wretched souls here even that comfort.
She scanned the line of trees, wondering desperately where Rose and Clarkson were. Had they stayed near the plane all night?
&n
bsp; She paused, focusing on something in the nearby field in the strange orange light, then turned to Ben. ‘What’s that?’
‘Where?’ He squinted.
‘Just near the rise…’
They ran, staying close to the treeline, then across the rise to the flash of white apron she’d seen in the morning glow.
There were two bodies.
Drawing closer she recognised one was a woman, and her steps faltered as she saw a sight that would remain with her for the rest of her days.
Redsped and her captain lay pale against the earth, their hands in each other’s palms as they both stared sightlessly beyond the clouds of death and into the dawn of a new day.
They were buried together, two little white crosses side by side on a green patch of earth in France. In a seaside town nearby a little girl stood at the gate and wondered why her mother didn’t come as her great aunt took her hand, telling her they were about to go on a big ship to a wonderful land far, far away.
Twenty-eight
Highview, August 1916
Her back ached and she stretched upwards, holding her bulging stomach and yawning. The doctor said it wouldn’t be long now and Veronica certainly hoped so as she pulled back the curtains, looking for Pattie, who’d said she would visit this morning. It would be a cheerful distraction from the monotony and boredom of her life at the moment. Sitting about feeling useless and fat was hard to get used to after her busy life as a nurse.
She sighed, walking out onto the verandah. Spring was set to arrive at Highview. The air was thick with the last of the wattle and the jasmine seemed ready to burst from its purple sockets. She picked one early bloom and inhaled the sweet scent. Maybe she should name the baby after a flower if it was a girl, regretting the thought as Rose’s face flashed through her mind.
They’d heard the news just two days earlier and the story was starting to filter through in pieces of just what had happened to her over the past few years. It had surprised Veronica at first to hear that she was working with the wounded, but then she remembered that day when she’d been bitten by the snake and the way Rose had handled things. She’d always felt there was more to Rose after that and the role of ambulance driver suited her well in light of that memory.
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