The Wild Rose (42 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Willa opened her bruised and swollen eyes.

She expected the darkness of her prison cell, but instead there was light. Bright desert sunshine poured in through a window and spilled onto the clean white sheets of the bed in which she lay.

She held her hand up in front of her face. Her skin was clean. Her nails, which had been clotted with dirt and blood, had been trimmed and scrubbed. The filthy, tattered sleeve of the khaki shirt she’d worn for weeks was gone. In its place was a sleeve of cool white cotton.

It’s a hallucination, she thought, brought on by my illness. Or perhaps I’m dreaming. Perhaps the warden of the prison has finally beaten me unconscious and I’m only dreaming that I’m in a clean place, wearing clean clothes, and lying in a clean bed. She waited, her eyes still open, for the hallucination to stop, for the dream to be over. To find herself back in her cell, back in the darkness. But it didn’t happen.

“Where am I?” she finally murmured.

“Ah, you’re awake,” a voice said, startling her. It was a woman’s voice. It was brisk and businesslike and sounded German.

Willa sat up, gasping with the pain of her broken ribs. She turned her head around and saw that the woman was standing at her left, by a small sink. She was dressed all in white and her hair was tucked up neatly under a white cap.

“You’ve been very ill,” she said, with a smile. “In fact, at one stage I was quite sure we were going to lose you. You have three broken ribs, you know. And you’ve just come through a terrible case of typhus. Your fever hit one hundred and six a few nights ago.”

“Who are you?” Willa asked.

“I’m your nurse,” the woman replied.

“But how—”

“Not so much talking. You’re still very weak. Here, take this,” she said, putting a small white pill in Willa’s hand and holding out a glass of water.

“What is it?” Willa asked.

“Morphine. It will help with the pain. Take it, please.”

Something in the tone of the woman’s voice told Willa she had no choice. She dutifully washed the pill down with some water.

“Very good,” the woman said. “Now lie back down. Morphine can make one a bit light-headed. Especially one in a debilitated condition. I’ll be right here if you need anything.”

Something inside Willa wanted to argue, to ask more questions, to put up a fight, but the drug was already flowing through her, making her feel deliciously warm and drowsy, taking the pain in her chest away, taking all her pain away. It was stronger than the opium she smoked, much stronger. And so she did not fight. She just lay on the bed, feeling as if she was floating along on a soft, hazy cloud.

How long she remained in this state, she did not know. An hour could have passed, or only a minute, before she heard the footsteps in the hallway. They were slow and measured. They stopped at her door, then entered her room.

She tried to open her eyes, to see who it was, but she was so tired now, and so weak, that she could not make even her eyelids do what she wanted.

She felt a hand stroking her hair, then her cheek. It was a man’s hand. She knew because he started speaking to her in a man’s voice. It was familiar, this voice. She had heard it before, but where?

And then she remembered—in the prison. In the interrogation room. For a few seconds, she was gripped by terror. She wanted to get up. To run. To get out of this room, but she couldn’t. It was as if her limbs were made of lead.

“Shh,” the voice said. “It’s all right, Willa. Everything’s all right. I just have a few questions for you. Just one or two. And then you can sleep.” The voice was low and soothing. Not angry, like before.

“Where’s Lawrence, Willa?” it said. “I need to know. It’s very important that I know. You’ll help me with this, won’t you? Just like you helped me on the mountain.”

Willa tried to nod. She wanted to help. She wanted to sleep.

“No, don’t nod. Don’t move at all. You need to be still. To rest. Just speak, that’s all. Where’s Lawrence?”

Willa swallowed. Her mouth suddenly felt so dry. She was about to speak, about to tell him, when suddenly she saw Lawrence—in her mind’s eye. He was crouched over a campfire in the desert. He was with Auda. He looked at her, then slowly raised a finger to his lips. And she knew she must protect them—Lawrence and Auda both. She must tell the man nothing.

“Tired . . . ,” she said, trying to think clearly through the swirling fog in her head, trying to parry the man’s questions.

The hand on her cheek now gripped her chin. Hard.

“Where is Lawrence?” the voice said, not so kindly now.

Willa struggled to keep her wits about her. She dug down deep, mustering her last reserves of strength, in order to think of a good answer, one that would throw the man off.

“Carchemish,” she said. “He’s at Carchemish, digging. He found a temple there. . . .”

Carchemish was the ancient Hittite site where Lawrence had worked as an archaeologist before the war.

The man released her. She heard him swear under his breath, then he said, “You’ve given her too much. Between the drugs and the fever, she’s out of her mind. A bit less next time, please.”

Willa heard the sound of footsteps receding, heard the door close, and then she heard nothing more.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

“It’s madness, isn’t it, Mr. Foster?”

“Only if it fails, madam. If it works, it’s genius.”

Fiona, sitting across from her butler on the 8:15 to Oxford, nodded. “Sid said some of them love to garden. Charlie used to help me with the roses. Do you remember?” she asked.

“I do,” Foster replied. “I particularly remember one incident when he decided to concoct his own fertilizer. From vegetable scraps, fish heads, and some ale that had gone flat. He mixed it up in the pantry, then forgot about it, and then the scullery maid kicked it over by accident.”

“I remember that, too,” Fiona said, laughing. “It stunk up the entire house.”

“Indeed, it did. The fumes in the kitchen were eye-watering. Cook was furious. She resigned. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince her to stay.”

“I had no idea, Mr. Foster,” Fiona said. “Thank you.”

She looked at Foster and realized there was so much she didn’t know, so many problems she’d never had to concern herself with because he was always there, fixing things, smoothing things, making sure that the headaches of running a household never troubled her. And it seemed to her now that he always had been.

He was getting on, he was nearly sixty-five and graying, and he suffered from arthritis in his knees and hands. Five years ago, she and Joe had hired another man—Kevin Richardson—to work with Mr. Foster as under-butler and relieve him of his most arduous duties, but Mr. Foster was still in charge, and that was the way Fiona wanted it. She could not imagine her house, or her life, without him in it.

Fiona and Joe had always been good to Mr. Foster. He was compensated well for his work. He had a spacious set of rooms within their house. He was respected and appreciated. But suddenly, sitting across from him in the rattling train car, a huge basket of gardening clobber on the floor between them, Fiona felt that she hadn’t been good enough. That she’d never told him how much he meant to her, how much she valued him.

She cleared her throat now and leaned forward in her seat. “Mr. Foster, I . . . ,” she began to say.

“There’s no need, ma’am. It’s quite all right. I know,” Foster said.

“Do you?” Fiona said. “Do you really?”

“I do.”

Fiona nodded, knowing that he was not overly fond of emotional displays. In fact, when she had finally worked up the strength and courage she needed to travel back to the veterans’ hospital to visit her son, it was Mr. Foster she asked to go with her. Not Joe. With Joe, her beloved husband, the father of her damaged child, she would cry. With Mr. Foster, an ex–army man himself, she would buck up and do what needed to be done.

And what needed to be done, Fiona had decided, was gardening. Maud had kept a rose garden at her Oxford home. It contained some beautiful, blowsy, fragrant old roses, but it was not as well tended as it should be. The hospital gardener and his crew put most of their efforts into the kitchen garden, which was needed to feed both patients and staff.

Fiona had heard her brother Sid talk about the progress he’d made with some of the shell-shocked men by getting them out of their rooms and putting them to work around the hospital. Charlie had shared his father’s love of gardens and orchards and had always trailed behind Joe as he rolled down his rows of pear and apple trees in his wheelchair at Greenwich, inspecting his crops. Fiona hoped that caring for Maud’s roses might help Charlie recover.

Fiona felt the train slow slightly now. She looked out the window and saw the station approaching. “We’re here, Mr. Foster,” she said. But Foster was already up and gathering their things.

“There is one thing to keep in mind, ma’am,” he said, as she reached to the luggage rack overhead for her carpetbag and umbrella.

“Yes?” Fiona said. “What is it?”

“Rome was not built in a day.”

“No, it wasn’t, Mr. Foster, and I will keep it firmly in mind,” Fiona said.

Sid greeted them when they arrived.

“How is he?” Fiona asked her brother.

“The same, I’m afraid. No change. How are you?”

Worried, Fiona thought. Frightened. Angry. Sorrowful. Uncertain.

“Resolute,” she said.

Sid smiled. “I’ve never known you to be anything but,” he said.

“I thought we would get to work on the rose garden straight away,” Fiona said. “Could we borrow a barrow?”

Sid got them all set up as Fiona changed into an old work dress. He secured a barrow, some fertilizer, and a few tools that she had been unable to bring. Then he tucked a basket into the barrow, containing sandwiches and tea. When Fiona was ready, he took her and Mr. Foster to Charlie’s room.

Charlie was sitting on the bed, in the exact same place he had been the first time Fiona had come to see him. He was still shaking, still staring straight ahead of himself. For a moment, her grief came back and threatened to engulf her, but she heard Rose’s voice in her head, telling her she was his mother, telling her to fight for her child. And she heard Foster’s voice, right next to her, saying, “Remember Rome, ma’am.”

“Hello, Charlie,” she said, in a strong, clear voice. “It’s me, Mum. I’ve brought Mr. Foster with me. I thought we’d take a walk today. Get outside for a bit and do a little gardening. It’s a beautiful day, you know, and there are roses at the back of the property. August is waning, the hottest weather’s over, so some of them should be reblooming. Shall we take a look? Come on, then. There we go.”

Together, Sid and Mr. Foster got Charlie to his feet. His legs shook as badly as the rest of him did, and it was slow going getting him down the hallway and out of the building. Once they were outside, the two men continued helping Charlie on the way to the rose garden. Fiona, pushing the wheelbarrow, followed them.

“Oh, Charlie! Look at them all!” she exclaimed, once they’d arrived. The garden, though neglected, was still magnificent. Roses of every size, shape, and color spilled over the willow fences, over the slate stepping-stones, and over one another.

“They all need pruning and a bit of manure turned in. I see black spot on the Maiden’s Blush over there. Do you see it, Mr. Foster? And that Cecile Brunner’s become very unruly. Let’s start with the cleanup, and the fertilizing, and then we’ll clip a few dozen blooms. We’ll bring them all back to the hospital and fill vases and bottles and jam jars and anything else we can find and put them in all the rooms. Shall we do that?”

Sid said he thought it sounded like a wonderful idea and that the rooms could use some brightening, then he excused himself. He said he had to get Stephen, one of his lads, to the barn to tend to Hannibal, for Hannibal, the surly sod, was needed to harrow a field and now allowed no one but Stephen to harness him.

Fiona and Mr. Foster spread a blanket on the ground and sat Charlie down near a rosebush heavily laden with bright pink blooms. Right after they got him settled, a chattering squirrel, angered by their presence, jumped from the ground into the very same rosebush, shaking the blooms roughly and sending the dew that was still on some of them flying. Droplets of water landed on Charlie. One of the soft blooms flopped down onto his shoulder, brushing his cheek as it did.

And as it did, Fiona saw something. She saw her son’s eyes flicker toward the rose. The movement was subtle and small, it happened in the space of a split second, but it happened. For an instant, there was a tiny spark of life in Charlie’s dull, dead eyes.

She looked at Mr. Foster. He had seen it, too. She could tell by the excitement on his face. Fiona quickly picked up a pair of secateurs and clipped a rose from high up on the bush. Then she knelt down and put it into her boy’s shaking hand. She closed his fingers gently around the stem and held his hand in her own.

“I’m stronger than Lieutenant Stevens, Charlie,” she said to him. “Stronger than any bloody bomb. Stronger than all the ghosts wailing in your head. I gave you life once and the war took it away, but I will give it back to you. Do you hear me, lad?” She pressed her lips to his forehead and kissed him. “You do hear me. I know you do.”

She stood up then, clapped the dew off her hands, picked up a rake, and got to work.