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Evie sensed the worry behind the exasperation. ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Jack. I hate keeping secrets from you, but that was…well, quite a big one. Please don’t tell Lizzy.’
‘Don’t be silly; of course I’m going to tell her! But I won’t tell your mother.’ He ran his hands through his hair and sighed, dropping his voice considerably. ‘In all seriousness, love, don’t let anyone else find out or Archie’ll cop it.’
‘He had no idea,’ Evie protested, her own voice little more than a harsh whisper. ‘I didn’t even know I was going to do it, so it wouldn’t be fair to blame him.’
He looked at her steadily. ‘We’ve just seen how close things can come to “not fair”,’ he reminded her. ‘The point is you were in his care.’
‘He helped me bring Will back,’ Evie said. She turned to her husband again, who was clearly deeply regretting having spoken up. ‘If it weren’t for him Will would have died out there.’
‘You’re as bad as each other.’ Jack shook his head again. ‘Archie’s a good lad, Evie. I’d hate to see him get into trouble over this.’
‘He won’t,’ she assured him. ‘We’ll keep it to ourselves now.’
I couldn’t imagine what had been going through Evie’s mind to go out into no man’s land, not after what we’d both seen. The thought of her and Archie out there in the dark, just a few feet away from the German lines, gave me chills, but I wanted to know everything. ‘Will you tell me about it though, Evie?’
‘Of course.’ She glanced around us at the crowded ward. ‘When we’re back at Dark River. Speaking of which—’ she brightened ‘—how’s Lizzy?’
We chatted for a while longer, then I noticed Will was starting to sweat slightly, and his breathing was shorter. Evie noticed at the same time, and turned to look for a nurse. ‘It must be time for your next injection,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll go and find someone.’
‘It’s another hour yet.’ He caught at her hand before she could rise. ‘It’s all right; they’re very good. I’m never left waiting past my time.’ He managed a brief smile. ‘Don’t want to get addicted to the stuff, do I?’
His words ricocheted around us, and Evie’s face paled. ‘Don’t say that,’ she said, her voice low and worried. ‘You won’t get addicted.’
It was only then he realised what he’d said. ‘Of course I won’t! Evie, please…don’t worry.’
‘But look at you!’ She was close to tears. ‘You can barely breathe, you need something.’
‘I’ve got something,’ he said gently, and lifted their still-linked hands. ‘Just sit with me? Don’t mind if I drift a bit. Just…sit with me.’ He let out a slow, difficult breath and his eyes closed. I saw his jaw tighten against a small sound of pain, and Evie raised his hand to her lips and kept it there.
Jack and I murmured our goodbyes and started to drift away, but Evie caught up with us before we reached the door. ‘He’s sleeping already,’ she said. ‘He’s so tired. Hopefully he’ll sleep until it’s time for his next injection.’
Jack put an arm around her. ‘I was never certain I’d say this, but I think he’s worthy of you, Evie.’
‘I love him so much,’ she said, choking on the words as she looked back to where Will slept. The lump of bandage beneath his pyjamas stretched right across his waist, and around his left side, and I guessed the surgery had been intensive, and more dangerous than Evie had wanted to say.
‘He’s going to need a lot of help to stay off morphine once he’s out,’ Jack said, and while I knew it had to be discussed, I thought he might have delayed a bit. But Evie was made of sterner stuff than me, and she nodded.
‘But it’s a good sign he didn’t let me call the nurse over, isn’t it?’
‘It is. I think he knows how scared you are though, and if you’re not careful he could go the other way.’
She gave him a horrified look. ‘You think he’d actually deny himself pain relief?’
‘He loves you, sweetheart,’ Jack reminded her, and kissed her forehead. ‘He’ll do anything.’
‘Are you all right, Skittles?’ Evie asked me, and put a hand on my arm. I nodded, but I was starting to feel distanced again, as if I were watching from the other end of the tunnel.
‘I’m just tired,’ I told her, and smiled. ‘A good sleep and I’ll be right as a trivet.’
Five minutes later the three of us were outside, listening to the crump of guns and the shouts of men and a newly arrived convoy. Now the worry over Oli was eased, all I could think about was Archie. I could see Jack’s mind had turned inward, and wondered if he too was thinking about his nephew.
‘I’m going back to Belgium tonight,’ he said to Evie, confirming it. ‘I want to be there when the lad gets back.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Give him a hug from me, won’t you?’ She glanced at me as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but I smiled and gave a tiny shake of my head. If I’d had any remaining doubts about her love for Will, they’d have been dispelled as soon as I’d seen the couple together.
‘Will you take me straight to the ferry, or am I coming back with you?’ I asked Jack.
‘I’m sure you’d like to see Oliver once more before he’s shipped back, wouldn’t you? I can take you to the hotel again if you like, and you can see him in the morning. I’m not sure you’re up to a channel crossing by the looks of you anyway.’
‘I’d feel better for sleeping in a bed,’ I admitted, and Evie gave me a hug.
‘You take care, sweetheart. You’re still not back to your old self.’
We said our goodbyes, and while I sank with relief into Jack’s passenger seat, Evie went, with equal relief, back down to spend another long night at Will’s bedside.
We arrived back in Belgium in the early hours, and I fell into bed with deep gratitude. The travelling, the cold and the tension had all gradually chipped away at me, and I still felt a low ache in my belly but I couldn’t tell if it was a physical pain or the emptiness of losing the baby. Frances had been appalled at the way I’d embraced the blame, and she denied any possibility that I deserved it, but I felt the truth wrap itself around my heart and it was a hard truth to forget.
Late in the morning I managed to spend ten minutes with Oliver before he was marched out, dressed in civilian clothes and looking so very young it made me want to run after him and hold him while we both cried. But I remembered Jack’s words, and instead gave him the strongest smile I could muster, then returned to my hotel and collapsed into bed once more. I remained there all day, drifting in and out of a fitful sleep filled with fever-dreams, and during my lucid, waking moments, I told myself over and over again that Will was alive, that Oli was safe, and that Archie would be too. What more could any of us hope for?
In the early evening I rose, much recovered, to have a shallow, lukewarm bath, and to find something for dinner. The big guns were quiet tonight, and it wasn’t until I went outside after my meal that I heard the light cracking of rifles. I tried to shut them out, to reduce them to the same background noise as they had been before, but the image of Will in that hospital bed wouldn’t leave me. It seemed madness, after all the pain and injury I’d seen, that any one person could bring the horror home to me so completely, but he had. And now all I could think about was Archie out there in no man’s land. What if that rifle shot had been the very one that signalled the end of his life? Or that one? A life was being taken for almost every single one. Why not his?
My hands trembled as I drew on my gloves against the evening chill, and I was concentrating on smoothing them over my fingers, so it wasn’t until he spoke my name that I saw him. He was covered in mud, his hat shoved under his arm, and there was a smudge of blood across his forehead, but he was smiling, and he was whole.
‘Been playing in the dirt again?’ I asked, trying to hide the surge of joy that cramped my insides.
‘Aye. Lost our football and we had to go over and ask Jerry could we please have it back.’
I lost the battle, and laughed out loud, hearing my voice shaking in the evening air. ‘I take it you’ve seen Jack?’
‘I have. He told me about Oliver,’ Archie said, and took a step towards me. He was looking at me oddly, and I couldn’t work out what he was thinking. Then he reached out and gently lifted my hat off my head and dropped it to the ground, along with his own. Seizing my face in his two hands, he looked at me with a fierce, intense expression and then, finally, our lips touched, igniting a flare that shot through me from crown to toe. I heard my own gasp, and then his groan, and the touch grew firmer, his lips parting, and his tongue flickering along my teeth.
For what seemed like hours we remained locked together, my heart thundering, my hands finding their way into the thick hair at the back of his head and curling into the warmth there, and it took a while for me to realise I was pressing against him with my whole body. My gloved fingers caressed the back of his neck, and I could feel his thumbs brushing first my cheeks, and then my temples, before the kiss broke and he drew my head against his chest, holding me there as if there was a chance I might try to draw away.
‘Oh, bloody hell, Kitty,’ he murmured. ‘What have I done?’
‘You’ve come back safe,’ I tried to say, but the tears were choking the words off in my throat, because the kiss had awakened everything I had been trying so hard to suppress. And it was too late.
I did draw back then, and wiped my eyes with my still-wrinkled gloves, belatedly feeling my face flame at the way I’d behaved. ‘I’m glad you’ve come back,’ I stammered. ‘But I’m sorry for…’ I waved a vague hand, unable to find the words to excuse my overeager response. My family would be mortified.
He straightened away from me. ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘Strange, how we react to danger. I’ve been over, and made it back before, but this time it felt…I don’t know, like I had more to lose.’
I wanted to ask what, but no matter what he answered it would be wrong; to hear what I’d hoped to hear would hurt more than anything else.
‘Well,’ I said instead, ‘it’s understandable that we should have felt…’ Again I couldn’t find the words, but I went on. ‘I mean, it’s been a terrifying time. For all of us.’
‘Aye.’ His voice lost that confused, longing tone, and became brisk. ‘Uncle Jack has asked me if I’d bring you back to England. But I can’t get away.’
‘No, of course.’ I cleared my throat. ‘That’s… I wouldn’t expect it.’
‘I didn’t want you to think we’re abandoning you.’
‘Don’t worry. Really.’
‘I’ll arrange for a driver to take you to the ferry. I’ll try and get some leave once Will’s able to return.’
‘That’ll be nice.’
‘Aye.’
‘So, then,’ I said, at the same time as he said, ‘Right.’ We looked at each other and smiled, a little hesitantly, but the smiles were real.
‘I’ll write,’ he said, holding out his hand, then bent to pick up my hat and handed it to me. ‘Sorry about this.’
I pushed away the thundering memory of how it had felt when he’d taken it off me, and took it, then looked back down at the ground, where his own cap still lay. ‘Don’t you want that?’
He picked it up, and gave it a pointless dusting-off, smearing the mud across the flat crown. He shrugged and grinned. ‘Ah well, could be worse.’
‘Archie?’ He raised an eyebrow, and my voice was soft. ‘Come back safe next time, too.’
‘Nae bother,’ he said, exaggerating his own accent, and this time the kiss was as chaste and brotherly as they had been all my life. ‘Don’t work too hard; you’re not up to it yet.’
And he turned away, leaving me standing in the street with the memory of our first and last kiss tingling on my lips.
Chapter Five (#ulink_d2dcf555-b703-5ed0-aa5a-2efe0aec75ec)
Dark River Farm, May 1917
He did manage four days’ leave, when Will came home, two of which were spent at the farm, and they had been two days filled with relief and happiness, and the warmth of our old friendship. But there was something new between us now as well, something beautiful and helpless, and doomed. Tomorrow morning would see him leaving again for Belgium and his other life, and while the largest part of me battled with the terror of it, and the longing for him to stay, some smaller, hidden part accepted the relief of knowing his attention was no longer on me. On what I could not give him.
Evie, Will and Lizzy were in the kitchen on this last evening, and I knew they’d start talking about us as soon as one of them glanced out of the window and saw Archie had come into the yard to find me. As always, I watched his approach with the same mixture of longing and apprehension, fixing a smile on my face and hoping I’d find the strength, once again, to resist touching him.
‘Young Kittlington,’ he said, and his voice was almost enough to break down that resistance; he sounded tired, exhausted even, and I knew this short leave had not provided the rest he needed. He’d spent most of his time helping Mrs Adams do various jobs, and the rest in talking to me—I was much the harder work of the two; I knew that. I also knew I was the reason he’d come here at all, instead of going home to Scotland.
‘Captain Buchanan,’ I returned, leaning slightly away to discourage contact, but broadening my smile to compensate. ‘Are you all set?’
‘Aye. Not much to pack,’ he pointed out, and turned to lean on the fence. He seemed absorbed by the high-stepping chickens as they pecked at the food I’d just thrown them, and didn’t speak for a moment, so I joined him at the fence; it was easier to stand beside him and not have to look at his face.
After a while he cleared his throat. ‘Look, Kitty, I know you understand how my feelings for you have changed, grown into something else.’
‘Archie—’
‘No, wait. Please. All these years you’ve been Oli’s sister. Sweet, but just a child. Even when Evie told me what had happened to you, who we thought did it, and I wanted to rip Drewe’s driver limb from limb, I was feeling it as the shock of someone hurting my family. The anger blinded me to everything else. At first.’
‘And what of your devotion to Evie?’ I couldn’t help saying. ‘Did she feel like family too?’
A flush touched his neck. ‘I thought I loved her. Perhaps I did, and perhaps I still do, but not in that way.’ His voice dropped, became urgent. ‘Kitty, that time I came to find you at the hotel, and I saw you concentrating so hard on your gloves, you looked so intense, but so sad. It hit me harder than I’ve ever thought possible, but I couldn’t accept it. It felt wrong, and I thought I’d frighten you if I told you how I felt—I know you’ve always looked on me as a brother. I’d have hated more than anything to lose your trust.’ He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands, pressing his fingers to his closed eyes. ‘That’s why I lied, and arranged for someone else to bring you back when Uncle Jack asked me. It’s why I let you come back alone, when all I wanted to do was take hold of you and never let you out of my sight again.’ He dropped his hands away from his face and fixed his eyes on mine again. ‘I have never felt so…fiercely, about anyone, the way I feel about you. Now I’ve accepted it, and let it in, it actually hurts.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ I whispered, without meaning to. I couldn’t look away, but my eyes burned.
Archie searched my face, and finally asked, in almost a whisper, ‘Do you think you could ever feel the same way about me?’
I couldn’t speak. Didn’t he realise? Didn’t it blaze from my eyes, the way I felt it in every part of me? He caught my hands in his, and I was too startled to pull away.
‘Will you wait for me, when all this is over?’ He let out a ragged breath. ‘Kitty Maitland, will you marry me?’
I could have wept for all the years I’d longed to hear him say it, and more than anything I wanted selfishly to entrust myself to those familiar arms which, I knew without a doubt now, would keep me safe for ever. But I never could, and I couldn’t even tell him why; he would only persuade me I was wrong, and that would ruin him because I would believe him. His trembling uncertainty of my love for him formed the words I heard falling into the tense silence.
‘I’m sorry, but no.’
The pain on his face was echoed in my heart, and I hated myself for putting it there. Almost more, I hated the fact that it was not a surprised pain; his face just paled, and his eyes closed briefly, and the resigned look that drew his brows together told of someone hearing what they’d already braced themselves to hear.
‘I understand,’ he said in a low voice, but he didn’t let go of my hands. I wanted to tell him he didn’t understand, not at all, not if he believed it was because my feelings were not every bit as fierce, and every bit as hopeless.
‘We’ll still be friends though, aye?’ he said, and his mouth flickered into a smile, although his eyes remained shadowed.
‘I hope so,’ I said in a small voice. He touched my cheek, and while I fought every instinct I possessed not to lean into his hand, I told myself this was the right thing to do. He deserved someone unspoilt and respectable, someone he could be proud of, someone bright and lively who could make him laugh… God knows he needed that, after all he’d seen. Yes, I was doing the right thing.
I wondered when I’d start to believe it.
Dark River Farm, June 1917
‘What’s that?’ Belinda stubbed out her freshly lit cigarette on the floor of the barn, and I turned to the door, my mind racing; if Mrs Adams caught us drinking and smoking we’d be given vile jobs to do tomorrow, but even worse, for me at least, would be her disapproval.
‘Is someone out there?’ I hissed.
A light cough confirmed it, and Bel went to the open door and peered across the yard towards the house. ‘No-one’s come out,’ she called back in a low voice, while I patted around for the cork to stop up the wine bottle again. My fuzzy-headedness had faded quickly with the sudden shock of possible discovery, and I stood and picked up the long-handled broom with which I’d been beating rats out of the pile of sacks. Although who would believe we’d been working, when we could barely see to—
‘Oh!’ Bel turned, and in the near-complete darkness I saw the gleam of her teeth as she grinned. ‘It’s him!’
‘Who?’
‘The chap who gave me the wine! He’s coming over. Quick, light the lamp.’
I stared, unable to move. A man was coming to the barn? And she knew him? ‘Who is he?’
‘I met him earlier today in town. We talked a bit but I didn’t think he’d—’
‘Well well,’ a pleasant voice said, ‘it’s the beautiful blonde Belinda. Hello again. I was about to knock at the house when I heard voices out here.’ The man who appeared in the doorway was little more than a silhouette, but I saw him lean to look around Belinda and straight at me. ‘Good evening, and what’s your name?’
‘The lamp!’ Bel urged, and drew the stranger into the barn. ‘Mr Beresford, this is Kitty Maitland. She’s sort of Land Army too.’
‘Nice to meet you, Miss Maitland. Sort of Land Army?’
Belinda had given up waiting for me to light the paraffin lamp, and bent to do it herself. ‘She’s more like the family really.’ She straightened and turned to me. ‘I met Mr Beresford in town today, and in exchange for some advice on where to stay, he gave me that wine you’re enjoying so much.’
‘Ah, glad it’s being put to good use anyway,’ Mr Beresford said, and in the newly flickering light I noticed he was quite short, but exceptionally good-looking. He held out his hand to me, and, without thinking, I put mine in it ready to shake. But he lifted it to his lips instead.
‘I’m actually rather glad I was unable to find room at the hotel you told me about, or I should never have come here and met two such stunning girls.’
