Somewhere in France

by Jennifer Robson

  In the opposite direction was the ward tent. Did she dare go in search of Robbie? Or should she wait for him to come to her?

  He might still be in surgery, but he never went to bed without checking on his patients. She would see if he was there.

  Her path took her past the marquee tent, so close to the dud shell that she found herself holding her breath as she walked past. As she drew near, she noticed a flicker of light in one corner of the tent. What if a fire had broken out?

  But it wasn’t a fire, she soon saw; it was the glow of several kerosene lanterns. She edged closer, moving carefully so as not to trip on the wreckage strewn all about, stopping when she was still safely outside the circle of light. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the brightness of the scene, and then long seconds more to adjust to the horror of what she saw.

  Private Dixon was lying on the ground, a gauze mask over his nose and mouth. Private Harris crouched by the injured man’s head, a bottle of ether at the ready; Nurse Greenhalgh knelt in the dirt, a huge gauze pad in one hand and an enameled basin in the other. Private Gillespie was leaning over them all, a lantern in each hand.

  And she saw Robbie, using a scalpel and saw to cut free the mangled remnants of Private Dixon’s left leg, which had been pinned to one of the marquee’s support timbers by a twisted, blackened strip of shell casing. At Robbie’s side was a tray, piled with the bloodied tools of his trade. Lilly’s stomach roiled in protest, but she forced herself to look. This was what he did. This was his life.

  At last Private Dixon was free. Gillespie and Harris dragged him onto a stretcher, an awkward procedure since Nurse Greenhalgh was pressing the gauze pad to the stump of his leg, and the group shuffled off in the direction of the operating hut.

  Robbie pulled off his gloves, letting them fall on top of the surgical instruments. Then he looked up. His eyes met Lilly’s without the slightest hesitation.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was worried about you. I hadn’t seen you since the shells—”

  “I was in surgery all day. I’d just finished when they found Dixon. He’d been buried under the debris.” He doused the lanterns, one by one. “Just go, Lilly. Get back to your tent. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He walked away and he didn’t look back.

  There was nothing she could do now; he was too upset, and rightly so. She’d been a fool to go chasing after him.

  She had only taken a few steps in the direction of her tent when the rush of air hit her, knocking her down as roughly, and certainly, as a prizefighter would have done. A wall of sound assaulted her next, filling her ears, her head, her mind with its inescapable baritone roar. Gravel and dirt and mud rained over her, stopping her nose and mouth, forcing her eyes shut.

  She tried to take a deep breath but found herself choking on the acrid, burning air. Desperate to escape the onslaught, she rolled herself into a ball, but there was no escape, no way out.

  It was hopeless, oh God, it was hopeless. It would bury her, she knew it would, and no one would ever find her.

  “LILLY, OPEN YOUR eyes. You need to open your eyes.”

  Someone was tapping her face, first one cheek, then the other, tapping and tapping—would they never cease?

  “Stop, please,” she mumbled.

  “I’ll stop as soon as you open your eyes and look at me. Open your eyes now.”

  She did so with the utmost reluctance. Robbie was kneeling beside her, covered in mud and dust, but alive and, it seemed, in one piece.

  “The dud went off. Thank God you weren’t any closer. Lie still, for a moment, until I know you are unhurt.”

  She said nothing, just stared at him avidly. His face was so very solemn, so weary. Why would he not smile for her? She reached up and traced a tremulous line across his forehead and down his cheek.

  Instead of reciprocating, he simply took her hand and placed it at her side. “Lie still, Lilly.”

  His hands were in her hair, but no trace of passion animated his touch as he searched her scalp for any sign of injury. She thrilled at the feel of his fingers moving gently along her spine and shoulders, then skimming along her limbs, feeling carefully for broken bones or shell-fragment wounds.

  He took up the lantern that Constance held out—she, Bridget, and Annie were just behind him—and adjusted the shutter so its light fell directly on Lilly’s face.

  “Look right at me,” he directed. “Don’t close your eyes.”

  Apparently content with what he saw, he handed the lantern back to Constance, stood, then took Lilly’s hands and hoisted her to her feet.

  Just then, a voice called out in the darkness. “Captain Fraser!”

  “I’ll be right there,” Robbie shouted back. He turned to look at Lilly’s friends.

  “Miss Evans?”

  “Yes, Captain Fraser?”

  “I need you to watch over Miss Ashford for me. Don’t let her sleep, whatever you do. Keep her warm, give her tea if you like, but do not let her sleep. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where are you going?” Lilly asked.

  “To finish what I started with Dixon. I’ll be back once I’m done.”

  Lilly allowed Constance to lead her into the tent and settle her in bed. She tried to unbutton her coat, but her hands were shaking too badly to manage the buttons. Her friend took over, helping Lilly to shrug out of her clothes and into a nightdress.

  “I’m not sure how we’ll ever get your skirt and jacket clean,” Constance fussed. “Perhaps we’ll be able to brush off the worst of it once they’re dry.”

  Lilly nodded, clutching her mug of tea. “Constance?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Can you spare another blanket? I’m so cold.”

  Constance built Lilly a cocoon of blankets, but it was no use. She was chilled to the marrow, and no matter how hard she tried to calm her mind, tried to tell herself that all was well—she’d only been knocked over; she hadn’t been hurt—she couldn’t stop the shaking that beset her.

  She couldn’t stop thinking of the way he had looked at her. The expression on his face, as if he were the one who had been knocked down. Broken.

  As if he had given up.

  Chapter 33

  Robbie stood in his tent, naked, and poured a pitcher of lukewarm water over his head. He’d have committed murder for a proper bath, but the washhouse was tilting like the Tower of Pisa and this was the best he could expect until it was put to rights. At least Matron had let him borrow one of her enamel trays to catch the overflow from his sponge bath.

  Working quickly, he scrubbed the grime from his skin and rubbed a bar of carbolic soap through his hair. It stung his scalp in a few places; no doubt he’d been hit by debris when the dud shell had gone off.

  He rinsed off the soap, wincing as it ran over the cuts and scratches on his back, toweled himself dry, and dressed in the cleanest of his trousers and shirts.

  If only he could simply fall into bed and forget everything. Forget the terror that had consumed him when the shell had gone off and Lilly had been swallowed up by a hurricane of dirt and razor-sharp shell fragments. Forget the danger that stalked her every day, and the role he’d played in bringing her here.

  Even worse, he’d kept her here. Instead of trying to persuade her to seek another posting, he’d encouraged her at every turn. What were all those letters and clandestine meetings but a way of keeping her close to him?

  It had to stop, now, all of it. It had to stop or he would lose whatever shred of sanity he still possessed.

  It would stop tonight.

  THE WAACS HAD been waiting for him. He’d only just stepped up to the threshold of Lilly’s tent when the flap that covered the entrance was pulled back and he was beckoned inside. They were all there, even the two cooks.

  “Good evening, ladies. I need to beg a favor of you. May I ask—”

  “We were just going to the mess tent, Captain Fraser,” one of them interrupt
ed. Was it Annie or Bridget?

  “Thank you very much. I won’t be long.”

  The WAACs filed out, a hesitant Miss Evans propelled along by her friends, leaving him alone with Lilly. He found a chair, drew it near to the head of her cot, and tried not to stare at her. She sat so primly, her blankets drawn up around her hips, her white nightgown the perfect foil to her beautiful dark eyes and hair.

  “How is Private Dixon?” she asked.

  “He’ll live. I managed to save his knee, so that’s something. He might even walk again, if he’s fitted with a decent prosthetic.”

  “That’s good news,” she answered. “Robbie, I am sorry—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “It is I who should be sorry. I never ought to have encouraged you. The letters, our meetings. It wasn’t right.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you upset about earlier? I’m sorry I intruded. It was thoughtless of me.”

  He shook his head. “It’s your being here that isn’t right.”

  “How can you say that? Would you say that of the nurses, or of the other WAACs?”

  “No, but—”

  “Why should they be given the chance to do their duty, but not me? Why, Robbie?”

  He would not say it. Could not confess the truth of his feelings for her, not here, in this terrible place.

  He pressed on, determined to convince her. “Lilly, I want—I need you to ask for a transfer. There are any number of postings you can take that would allow you—”

  “No. I told you when I arrived that I was here to make something of myself. I thought you understood what it means to me, this chance to prove myself.”

  “I do, Lilly, but what good is it if you’re dead?”

  “How can you say that to me? You, of all people? Don’t you remember what you told me the night of the ball? You said I could do anything I wanted with my life. That we lived in the twentieth century and anything was possible.”

  “I was wrong.”

  The color drained from her face; at last he had made an impression on her.

  “I see,” she said.

  “The world we grew up in has changed, Lilly. It has changed out of all knowing. And all that matters, now, is that we survive. Tell me you understand. Tell me you agree.”

  He dragged the chair closer, meaning to take her hand in his, but she drew back from him as if he repelled her.

  “You do see it, don’t you? That it’s for the best?”

  At that she sat up straight and met his gaze. He was astonished to see that anger, not chagrin or sorrow, burned in her eyes.

  “It’s not for the best. Not my best, at any rate. This is all about you, Robbie. You are worried, you are scared, and you want me to suffer for it.”

  “Of course I’m afraid,” he shot back. “I’m afraid you will be the end of me. You’re all I think of, day and night. Everywhere I turn, there you are. Even when I sleep, you’re in my dreams. Haunting me. Tormenting me.”

  “So why did you ask me to write to you? Why did you ask me to go with you to the garage, the night of the ceilidh?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I could manage it. But how do you manage an obsession? That’s what you are. An obsession. And I’m afraid of what you’ll do to me. I’m a good doctor, a good surgeon. I know I am. But not if my mind is elsewhere.”

  “You’re reacting to the shock of the attack. You must see that.”

  “For God’s sake, Lilly, give me some credit. A few shells going off isn’t enough to unhinge me. But the chance of your being hurt or killed is.” He dropped to his knees beside her cot. “Until today, it was only an abstraction. A theoretical possibility.”

  “I wasn’t hurt, Robbie.”

  “Today you weren’t. But what about tomorrow? And the day after that?” He bowed his head, running his hands through his hair, pulling at it savagely. “I’ve been in France for thirty-six months now. That’s more than a thousand days of hell, Lilly, and there’s no end in sight. A thousand days . . .”

  He looked up at her, met her reluctant gaze. He had to say it. Had to make her see. “If I’m to survive this war, I cannot think about anything else apart from the work I do. And that includes you.”

  At least a minute passed before she spoke. When she did, her voice was eerily calm. “Your mind is quite set on the matter?”

  “It is. I’m sorry, Lilly.”

  “And I am sorry, too. For I cannot do what you ask. As much as I want to help you, I will not go.”

  A wash of cold swept over him. “Nothing I say will change your mind?”

  “Nothing. Forgive me, Robbie.”

  Had he actually thought she would relent? If so, he was a fool. A fool who could see but one path forward, though it killed him to contemplate it.

  He got to his feet and walked away from her, his heart withering in his chest with every step. “Then there is nothing more for us to say to one another. Good-bye, Lilly.”

  “Good-bye? I just told you I am staying.”

  “I know.” He forced himself not to turn around. “But we are done, you and I. So this is our good-bye.”

  PART THREE

  They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy

  Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all

  Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky . . .

  —Siegfried Sassoon, “Prelude: The Troops,” 1918

  Chapter 34

  December 1917

  Just before Christmas, Edward wrote to ask if Lilly might join him for a short leave in Saint-Omer. Fortunately, Miss Jeffries was amenable to Lilly’s request and granted her two full days, beginning at noon on December 28. It had been her first leave since joining the WAAC nearly nine months earlier.

  Miss Jeffries, for all her spit-and-polish approach to the WAACs under her command, must have noticed how miserable Lilly had been in the weeks since the 51st had been shelled. Most likely she attributed it to delayed shock, and shock it was, of a sort. It was a mercy indeed that she knew nothing of Lilly’s heartache, or of its cause.

  We are done, you and I. We are done. We are done . . .

  Robbie’s words sounded constantly in the back of Lilly’s mind, a dirge that deadened her spirits and weighted her every step, and no matter what she thought or did, they would not be banished. They haunted her in her sleeping and waking hours, never ceasing, never abating, and though she tried to combat them with words of her own—it’s for the best, you will survive, you must do your duty—they rang hollow against her heart.

  Edward was waiting for her on the platform when she arrived in Saint-Omer late in the afternoon. After embracing her at length, he shouldered her carpetbag and led her through the rain to the tiny, rather shabby premises of the Pension Saint-Bertin, the best that he had been able to manage on such short notice.

  But Lilly’s room was clean and pretty, with a white linen counterpane on the narrow bed and an eggcup of delicate snowdrops, or perce-neige, as the pension’s proprietor had called them, on the lace-topped chest of drawers. Best of all, there was enough hot water for her to have a sponge bath before supper.

  Edward was little changed from a year ago at Christmas, when she’d last seen him, though he’d shaved off his mustache. He was, Lilly thought, one of the handsomest men she had ever known, and quite possibly the most charismatic. All he had to do was smile and look a person in the eye and he or she fairly leaped to do his bidding. Madame Mercier had been no exception: when she had first greeted them her expression had been dour and unyielding, but Edward had taken her hand in his, thanked her in flawless French for her hospitality, and had proclaimed her home delightful in every respect.

  Bowled over by the effect of his regard, Madame Mercier had rewarded them with huge bowls of fish stew and fresh-baked bread for supper, and had even produced a small carafe of white wine. They retreated to the pension’s salon afterward, where a fine coal fire had been laid, and Lilly read aloud from Idylls of the King, which she had brought along for just that purpose. After a
half hour, she set the book aside and turned down the oil lamp on the mantel, and they began to talk, their voices hushed, their faces lit only by the flickering glow of the hearth.

  They started with news from home, of which Lilly was entirely ignorant, as neither their parents nor sisters had written to her since her departure from Ashford House. Their aunt Augusta had died some months earlier, Edward informed her, and had left her considerable fortune to the Battersea Dogs Home.

  “All of it?”

  “Every last shilling. Mama was livid. You know how she had been cultivating Aunt Augusta.”

  “That’s one thing I haven’t missed,” she said. “The way Mama always seems to be angry about something.”

  “It made for a nice interlude in her letters. Usually she’s rabbiting on about how dear everything’s become in the shops. As if she’s ever set foot in a butcher’s in her life.”

  “She has no sense of the world beyond her own doors, does she?”

  “She never has. But she and Papa have been doing their bit for the war, you’ll be glad to know.” Edward paused, his eyes twinkling. “They had the lawns at Cumbermere Hall dug up last spring and planted out with vegetables and potatoes.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “They hadn’t much of a choice. Once the king had the deer park at Windsor plowed up, Papa had to give in, else look like a shirker.”

  “At least they won’t go short of potatoes,” Lilly commented, trying and failing to stifle a giggle.

  “They won’t, will they? But enough of our parents for now, else I’ll end up with indigestion. Tell me about Miss Brown instead. How is she?”

  “Very well. She had Christmas off this year, her first proper leave from the hospital in ages, so she went home to her parents’.”

  “Where is she from again?”

  “Somerset. Her father is a prebendary at Wells Cathedral.”

  “No beau as of yet?” Edward asked, his eyes fixed on the fire.

  “Charlotte? Of course not.”