Harvest of War (24 page)

Leo felt her legs give way under her. She sagged against the doorpost, almost unable to breathe. ‘You have given my child away to a stranger? God knows what he may have done with her! What proof did he give you that he came from the Malkovic family?'

‘The child had a locket, left with her by the doctor who brought her into the world.'

‘Yes! Yes!'

‘The man was able to tell me what was inscribed inside it, so I knew he must be genuine.'

‘But I am her mother!' Leo was sobbing now. ‘She belongs to me, not to them! Where has he taken her? Where?'

Yelena Popovic shrugged. ‘Belgrade, I suppose. That's what he said. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. Alexandra has gone to live with her real family. You will have to speak to them.'

‘But how can I? Belgrade is still in enemy hands . . .' Her words were cut short by the slam of the door.

For a long time Leo stood propped against the doorpost, tears running down her face. Men passing by threw her curious looks and one muttered something about ‘got her in the family way and then chucked her out, I shouldn't wonder'. Slowly she regained control and began to think. If the man knew what was inscribed in the locket, the family motto of the Malkovics, then he must have come from them, and the only person who could have sent him was Eudoxie, Sasha's wife. Somehow she must have heard about Alexandra's birth. That was not so surprising. Plenty of people had been around at the time and gossip had probably reached Eudoxie in Athens. Leo wondered what had happened to the new will he had mentioned in his last letter, in which he repudiated his marriage and declared her child as his heir. If that had been destroyed was it possible that Eudoxie might be prepared to pass Alexandra off as her own? She offered, after all, the only possible way of continuing the Malkovic line and much would depend on that in terms of money and land, once the occupying Bulgarians had been driven out. The child could have been born during her time of exile in Athens. No one would be any the wiser.

With an effort Leo straightened up and began the long walk back. The situation was becoming clear: Eudoxie had heard about the birth, and presumably been told the name of the foster mother, and she had sent out men to search, just as Leo herself had been searching. The bitter fact was that one of them had reached his target just before her own arrival. There was only one course of action open now. She must wait until Belgrade itself had fallen and the Bulgarians had finally been ousted. Then she would go to the Malkovic home and demand her child. The threat of a scandal should be enough to ensure her victory.

A chill wind was coming off the mountains and Leo found she was shivering. By the time she reached the bus stop the shivering had become convulsive, her head was burning and she felt faint. Mercifully a bus appeared quite quickly, but that only took her to the city centre. She still had to get back to the place where the hospital had set up camp. Only half aware of what she was doing she began to plod in that direction. A wave of dizziness swept over her and she caught at a lamppost for support. Then, somehow, she was sitting on the cold ground and darkness was closing in around her.

Leo regained partial consciousness to the sensation of being lifted and moved but then she lapsed back into oblivion. After that she was only aware of alternately burning with fever and shivering, of the unending ache in all her muscles and the pain in her head. Arms lifted her, cups were held to her lips, her face and neck were bathed with cool water but she hardly knew where she was or how she had got there. Then, one morning, she woke with the instinctive knowledge that the fever had left her. She was weak, so weak that she could hardly lift her head off the pillow, but the pain and the burning had gone. Gazing up at the ceiling she realized that she was no longer in one of the tented wards of the field hospital. She was in a private cubicle, but from the sounds she could hear from beyond the walls she guessed that it was part of a larger ward. She tried to remember what had happened just before she collapsed, but her last clear recollection was of hearing the triumphant news that Skopje had fallen.

It was a relief when the door opened to see a face she recognized. It was a young Irish nurse called Jeannie.

‘God be praised, you're awake!' the girl exclaimed. ‘How are you feeling?'

‘Death warmed up – but only slightly.' Leo's mouth seemed reluctant to obey her and the words came out slurred.

‘Well, that's not surprising. Let's see if we can make you more comfortable. Then I'll call Doctor Pierre. He'll be mightily relieved to hear you're on the mend. To be sure, there have been times in the last day or two when we thought we were going to lose you altogether.'

Leseaux came hurrying in soon afterwards. He looked at the chart at the end of her bed, felt her forehead and took her pulse and nodded. ‘So, we are over the worst – or let us hope so. You have given us some very anxious moments,
ma petite
. But what happened? One of our drivers found you collapsed at the side of the road. Did you find the little one?'

‘The little one?' Leo queried. Something was stirring in her memory but her brain seemed to be full of fog.

‘Your daughter. You went to find her. Do you remember?'

It came back to her then, with the force of a physical blow, so that she whimpered with the pain of it. Leseaux took her hand in his. ‘
Ma chère
Leo! Forgive me. I did not mean to distress you. Can you tell me what happened?'

‘Not there,' Leo mumbled. ‘Taken away. A man took her away.'

‘A man? What man?'

‘I don't know. She said . . . the woman said he was taking her back to her family.'

She jerked up in the bed, so that Leseaux laid his hand on her shoulder to press her back, murmuring, ‘Rest, rest. You must try to be still.'

‘Belgrade!' Leo said. ‘He has taken her to Belgrade. I have to go there!'

‘You must be patient. You are far too weak to go anywhere and anyway our forces have not yet reached Belgrade. It will not be long but you must wait for a while yet.'

The recollection of the wider conflict came back to her. ‘The war! How is it going? Have we got the Bulgars on the run?'

‘Better than that. The Bulgarians sued for peace the day our forces took Skopje. The armistice has been signed.'

‘Then why aren't our people in Belgrade already?'

‘Because the Germans are not yet ready to admit defeat. But it cannot be long, now. New towns fall to our troops every day. The Germans are being beaten back on the Western Front, too. Everyone says they cannot sustain the fight here as well.' He laid his hand on her forehead. ‘Now, no more talking. You must rest and eat and regain your strength.'

The days passed slowly. Leo slept and woke and slept again and tried to summon up the energy to eat, until one morning she woke and felt that she was ready to get up. She slid out of bed, on to legs as wobbly and uncontrolled as a newborn colt, and began to look for her clothes. At that moment Jeannie came in.

‘Oh, no! No, you don't! Doctor Pierre has said you must stay in bed for at least another week.'

‘Oh, don't be silly!' Leo responded. ‘If I go on lying around I shall just get weaker. It'll do me good to get back to work.'

Jeannie retreated, but only to fetch Leseaux. He hurried in and took Leo firmly by the arm. ‘No, no,
ma petite
. You must stay in bed. You know as well as I do that once the fever is gone there can still be complications. We are not – what is the English expression? – not out of the woods yet. You must be patient.'

By that time Leo had realized that she was not as strong as she had imagined and she was not sorry to give in and return to bed, but over the next few days her frustration increased. News of the advances made by French and Serb troops only increased her impatience. On the tenth of October news came that they had taken Pristina and the following day the town of Prizren fell. Then, at last, they heard that the Germans had asked the American President, Woodrow Wilson, to arrange an armistice with the Serbs. The whole hospital rang with cheers at the news.

That evening Leo felt the symptoms she had been dreading. Her temperature went up in a sudden peak and she began to cough and find it difficult to breathe. She had nursed enough sufferers to know what that meant. The complications mentioned by Leseaux had set in. She was suffering from bronchitis, which might easily turn into pneumonia.

For two weeks Leo fought for her life, and Leseaux and the rest of the staff fought with her. There were times when she felt she was sinking into a bottomless well, from which she would never surface; but at those moments a vision came to her to call her back – a vision of a small, chubby-cheeked girl with amber hair. She had never seen her daughter but she was convinced that in some mysterious way the child had been sent to keep her alive and she struggled to live for her sake. And eventually the fever lost its hold on her and she began the slow process of recovery.

One morning Leseaux came into her room and after he had carried out his usual checks he said, ‘Well, today is a great day. Do you know what the date is?'

‘I have no idea.'

‘It is November the first and today the Serbs will re-enter Belgrade. For us, the war is over.'

‘Oh, praise God!' Leo exclaimed weakly. ‘But how I wish I could be there to see it!'

‘You are well on the way now. I think today you could get up for a while and sit in a chair. Tomorrow you can walk round the room. Soon you will be well enough to travel. But are you sure you want to go to Belgrade? You told me your child has been taken by her father's family. I do not think it will be easy to persuade them to give her up.'

‘I should never forgive myself if I didn't try,' Leo said. ‘At least . . . at the very least . . . I must see her. And then, if it seems she is happy and being well cared for . . .'

She faded into silence. In the last few days the thought had dogged her that Alexandra might be better off with her own people, speaking the language she had learned at her foster mother's knee and with the wealth and prestige that came with her father's rank. Even if she could persuade or force the countess to hand her over, would she be doing the child a favour? She had been roughly transplanted from one home to another already. Would it not be cruel to inflict another upheaval on her? But Leo could not forget the vision that had sustained her through her illness. She knew that she could not give up until she had at least seen the real child.

Ten days later Leo was on the train to Belgrade. Before leaving she had had to say farewell to the people she had lived and worked with for months. The field hospital was no longer needed. The patients had either been discharged or moved to other hospitals and the staff were going back to the various countries from which they had come. Pierre Leseaux was returning to Paris, to pick up the threads of his former medical practice. Saying goodbye to him had been hardest of all and Leo felt she had lost her last close friend. Sitting on the train as it rattled through the war-devastated countryside she thought that she had never been so alone. Even the prospect of returning to England held no comfort. Tom was no longer there, waiting for her. Ralph and her grandmother were both dead and she had no other family. Her mail had caught up with her just before she left Skopje but the few letters had only served to remind her of her isolation. She had never endeared herself to what was called ‘society' and her only close friends before the war had been the women who trained with her in the FANY, but her decision to leave Lamarck in favour of joining Mabel Stobart in Serbia had not been popular and in the upheaval of the following months it had been hard to keep in touch with anyone. Then, when she eventually returned to England after the birth of her child she had been too depressed to make an effort to renew contacts so long left dormant. Her letters consisted of statements from her bank, a couple of reports from her estate manager at Bramwell and a long letter from Victoria, which only served to emphasize the distance between them.

To pass the time on the journey Leo took the letter out of her handbag and reread it. Victoria wrote in enthusiastic terms about the beauties of the New Zealand landscape and the warmth of the welcome she had been given by Luke's family.

Of course,
she went on,
it was a bit daunting to find myself with a ready-made family, not just in-laws but children as well. But I must say they seem to have accepted me more easily than I had any right to expect. Anton is a fine lad. He will be six next birthday and is very independent and gallops around on his pony as if he was born in the saddle. He even sounds like a New Zealander, except that he still speaks Macedonian Serb with his grandmother. She is a magnificent old girl, and determined to keep her Macedonian heritage alive. Of course, she isn't his real grandmother. I still find it hard to remember that he is Sophie and Iannis's son and so no blood relation to Luke or anyone else here. Poor Sophie! When I think back to those far-off days at the hospital in Adrianople I remember how much in love she and Iannis were. I think she probably came to love Luke just as much, but they had so little time together before he was sent back to Europe. Just long enough for her to conceive little Nadia but not enough for him to see his baby daughter.

She's a beautiful child but likes to have her own way and creates hell when she doesn't get it. I think Luke's mother is quite relieved to hand over the reins to someone else, but I don't want to become the wicked stepmother who only wields the big stick (metaphorically, of course), so I'm trying to strike a balance between spoiling her and instilling some discipline. (Not easy.)

Family life has its complications but I find I enjoy it much more than I thought I would. Perhaps that's because of my last and best bit of news. I'm pregnant! It must have happened on the boat home because the baby is due in January. I can't get over it because I honestly thought I should never be able to have a child, after what happened.
(Leo had read that sentence over several times, but without finding any explanation. She had no recollection of anything happening to her friend that might have given rise to such fears.)
So we shall be a triple-decker family!
the letter went on.
And in a wonderful way it seems to bring together all the things that have happened to us over the last six years – Bulgaria: you and me and Luke; Adrianople, with Sophie and Iannis; Luke and Sophie, then Luke and me again. There's only one thing missing. Darling, forgive me for rambling on like this. I don't know if you have managed to find Alexandra or not. I hope and pray that you have. All I need now to be completely happy is to see you with your own little girl. Please write! And if you possibly can, come out to stay with us. There will always be a warm welcome for you here and I know you'd love the place.