The Wild Rose (40 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Fiona stopped dead at the front doors of the Wickersham Hall hospital—a hospital she and Joe had helped fund, one they visited often. Never did she think she would one day come here to visit her own son.

She, Joe, and Sid had come up from London early this morning on the train. A carriage had met them at the station and brought them here. She’d alighted, waited until Sid and the driver got Joe’s chair down and got Joe into it, and then she’d proceeded with her husband and brother to the hospital doors. Now, however, she found she could go no farther.

Sid had come to London last night to tell her and Joe, and the rest of their family, about Charlie. They were all in the drawing room, sitting by the fire. It was late when they heard the knock on the door, and Fiona had felt her heart falter inside her. She got to her feet immediately, waiting for Mr. Foster to come into the drawing room. With a son in the army, she lived in terror of a knock on the door.

“He’s
not
dead. Oh, thank God!” she said, when Sid came into the drawing room where she and Joe had been sitting by the fire. “They send a telegram to tell you when your son’s died, not an uncle.”

“No one’s dead, Fiona,” Sid had said, closing the door behind himself.

“It can’t be good, though, your news, can it? You wouldn’t have come all this way at this hour if it was,” she said, steeling herself. “What’s happened?”

Sid made her sit down first. She’d known then that whatever he had to tell her would be very bad. People always made you sit down when the news was very bad. And it was. She cried when he told her about Charlie, and then she kept crying—all night long. She wanted to leave for the hospital right away, but Sid was against it.

“He’s only just arrived,” he said. “Let him sleep. Maybe a good night’s rest in a safe, quiet place will help calm him.”

The three of them had left for Paddington Station early. They were on the first train out. Fiona left the younger children in Mrs. Pillower’s care. Katie was in Oxford.

Fiona looked up at the large doors now. She had walked through them in happier days, years ago, when she’d come to visit Maud. It felt like such a long time ago, like another lifetime. She remembered another set of hospital doors that she’d walked through once. Even farther back in her past. When she was only seventeen years old. She’d walked through those doors, rushed through them, to see her injured father, right before he died.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

Joe, who was by her side in his wheelchair, took her hand. “You have to, love,” he said. “Charlie needs you.”

Fiona nodded. “Yes, you’re right,” she said. She gave him a brave smile, and together they went inside.

India was waiting for them. She hugged and kissed them wordlessly, then she and Sid led them down a long hallway and into a patient’s room. Fiona looked at the poor young man sitting on the bed. He was shaking and pale and as thin as a scarecrow. He was staring at the wall. She looked away again, confused.

“Where is he? Where’s Charlie?” she asked.

Sid put his arm around her. “Fee . . . that is Charlie.”

Fiona felt her heart shatter inside of her. She covered her face with her hands. A low animal moan of pain escaped her. She took a deep breath and then another and then she lowered her hands. “It can’t be,” she said. “How did this happen? How?” she asked. “Do you know?”

“We know, Fiona,” Sid said hesitantly. “India and I read the medical reports yesterday.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“It was a hard thing to read, Fee,” Sid said. “And probably it’s a harder thing still to hear. I don’t think—”

“Tell her. Tell us. Both of us. We have to know,” Joe said.

Sid nodded. He took them out of the room and then he told them.

“According to the reports of the medical officer in the field,” he said, “Charlie had been in the trenches, on the front lines, for five straight months prior to the final attack on his unit. He’d held up under terrible conditions and had always conducted himself bravely. He’d rushed enemy lines during the heat of the battle many times. And then, during an attempt on an enemy position early one morning, two shells in succession hit very close to him. One shell deafened him. The other blew his friend, a lad by the name of Eddie Easton, to bits. Charlie was covered in Eddie’s blood, and in pieces of his flesh.” Sid had to stop speaking for a bit. “I’m sorry,” he said, clearing his throat.

“Go on,” Fiona whispered, her fists clenched at her sides.

“Charlie lost his mind,” Sid continued. “He couldn’t stop screaming, and couldn’t stop trying to shake the blood and gore off himself. He tried to crawl back into the trench, but his commander wouldn’t let him. The man—Lieutenant Stevens—kept screaming at Charlie to get back out to the battlefield, but Charlie couldn’t. Stevens called him a coward and threatened to have him shot for desertion if he didn’t return to battle. Charlie kept crying and shaking. Another shell exploded nearby. He curled into a ball. Stevens grabbed him and dragged him back to the front lines. He hauled him into no-man’s-land and tied him to a tree. He left him there for seven hours. Said it would set him straight, make a man of him. By the time the shelling stopped and Stevens finally gave the order to bring him back, Charlie was catatonic. The two soldiers who went to untie him said they could get no response from him at all. They carried him back to the trench. Stevens had at him again, yelling at him, slapping him—all to no effect. He then ordered him invalided.”

When Sid finished speaking, Fiona turned to Joe, but he was facing away from her, from all of them. His head was bent. He was crying. This man, this good, brave man, who’d never cried for himself when he’d been shot, who’d never shed one tear when he’d lost his legs, and very nearly his life, was sobbing.

Reeling, Fiona walked back into Charlie’s room. She took a halting step toward her son. And then another, until she was standing next to his bed. She knelt down beside him and gently stroked his arm.

“Charlie? Charlie, love? It’s me, it’s Mum.”

Charlie made no response. He just kept staring at the wall and shaking uncontrollably. Fiona tried again. And again. And again. She squeezed his arm. Touched his cheek. She took his trembling hands in hers and kissed them. And still Charlie gave no sign that he knew her, that he knew himself, that he knew anything at all. Finally, when she could bear it no longer, Fiona leaned her head against her son’s legs and wept. She thought that she had been through everything a human being could go through. Losing her family as a young girl. Losing her beloved first husband, Nicholas, and then almost losing Joe to a criminal’s bullets. But she discovered now that she had not, for this pain was like nothing she’d ever known. It was new and terrible. It was a mother’s pain at seeing her precious child destroyed.

And Fiona realized that for once in her life, she did not know what to do. She did not know how she would ever get off her knees and stand up again. She did not know how she would manage to take her next breath.

She did not know how to bear the unbearable.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Willa Alden expected death to come.

She had hoped for it, prayed for it, and sometimes, alone in the darkness of her cell for days on end, she had begged for it. But death did not come.

Loneliness came, along with despair. Hunger came, and the bone-chilling cold of desert nights. Lice came and, with them, fever. But not death.

She learned to tell day from night by the levels of noise and activity outside her cell. Morning was when the warden walked from cell to cell, opening a small sliding hatch, peering in at his prisoners to make sure they were still alive, then closing it and moving on again.

Midday was when her jailers brought her a jug of fresh water and her one and only meal, and emptied the tin pot that served as her toilet.

Evening was when a hush fell over the prison.

Night was when the rats came out. She had learned to leave some food for them on her plate and to push her plate into a corner, so they would fight one another for the scraps and leave her alone.

She kept track of the passing days by scraping marks in the wall with a stone she’d found on the floor of her cell. She thought she’d been locked away for thirteen days.

The jailers worked in teams. They talked as they worked, but only to each other. When she was feverish, which was most of the time, she could do little but lie mute on her filthy cot. On the few occasions when she could muster the strength to sit or stand, she tried to engage her jailers. She tried to find out why they were holding her and what they planned to do with her, but they would tell her nothing. She understood a bit of Turkish, however, and from the snatches of conversation she could hear, she was able to make out the words “Lawrence,” “Damascus,” and “Germans.”

It was still August; she was sure of that. Had Lawrence marched on Damascus so soon? she wondered. Or had the Turks held the city with the help of the Germans? And for God’s sake, where was she? And what were her Turkish captors going to do with her?

Willa finally got her answer nearly two weeks after she’d been brought to the prison. Shortly after the warden made his morning rounds, her door was opened again. The warden was standing in it, along with two of his men. One of them carried a lantern. The warden wrinkled his nose at the smell, then barked at Willa to get up. She could not. The fever she’d been running off and on for most of her imprisonment had spiked up the night before. She was weak and delirious and did not have the strength to stand.

“Get her up,” the warden said to his men.

One of them swore under his breath. He did not want to touch her, he said. She was filthy and full of fever. The warden shouted something at him, and he smartly did as he was told. Willa was marched out of the cell and down a long corridor. The daylight, coming in at the windows, blinded her. She had been in the dark for so long her eyes could not cope with brightness. They had adjusted somewhat, however, by the time she arrived at her destination—a small, well-lit room at the back of the prison. There was a metal chair in the middle of it. Underneath the chair was a drain. Willa’s stomach knotted at the sight of it.

Please, she prayed. Make it quick. “Death rides a fast camel,” Auda always said. Willa fervently hoped he was right.

The men sat her down in the chair and tied her arms behind her back. In the light of the room, she could see how filthy she was. Her clothes were in tatters. Her shoes had been taken away weeks ago. Her feet were covered in dirt. A dull red rash covered her ankles.

“What is your name?” the warden asked her. In English.

“Little Bo Peep,” Willa said. She’d been asked her name several times since she’d arrived at the prison and had steadfastly refused to reveal it.

The warden slapped her across her face. Hard. Her head snapped back. She slowly raised it again, sat up straight, and stared straight ahead.

There were more questions. More smart answers, or no answers. The questions got louder. And the slaps turned to punches. Willa felt her right eye swell up, tasted blood at the corner of her mouth, and still she gave them nothing. She thought of Seamie. Of Kilimanjaro. Of their time together in London. And she gave her captors nothing.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to you, you filthy bitch?” the warden finally said to her in English. “I’m going to stick my big fat cock up your ass and make you scream. And when I’m done, my men will have a turn.”

Willa, her head lolling on her chest now, laughed. “Are you? For your sake, I hope you have a cold,” she said. “A bad one. I hope you can’t smell a thing.”

The warden cursed at her. He turned to one of his men and, forgetting to switch back to Turkish, said, “I’m not touching her. She stinks like a sewer. Her hair’s crawling with lice. She probably has typhus. He’s here now, isn’t he? Go and get him. He can do his own dirty work. From what I hear, he’s very good at it.”

Typhus, Willa thought woozily. Well, that’s me done for. I only wish it had carried me off sooner.

She wondered who the
he
the warden had talked about was and wondered if she would stay conscious long enough to find out. The door opened again. Someone new walked into the room. She heard harsh words. It was a man. He was speaking German. A rough hand grabbed hold of her hair and yanked her head up.

“
Um Gottes Willen!
” the man said. He was close now. His voice sounded strangely familiar.

There was the sound of laughter, mirthless and bitter. And then the man said, “I should’ve guessed it was you.
Namaste,
Willa Alden.
Namaste
.”