Hawthorn (34 page)

IN THE YEARS
to come I sometimes wondered if we had really won after all. Yes, the shadows in the world, without a master, scattered willy-nilly (where to, we would learn only too well in the years to come), but once set in motion, the war rolled on like some horrible machine grinding young lives in its vast pitiless gears. The German advance
was
stopped a few weeks after the Battle of Bouillon at a battle along a river in northeastern France. Nathan and the Hawthorn Fusiliers fought in the Battle of the Marne. Nathan won the Silver Star, and Private James Jenkins first class and a dozen other Hawthorn boys lost their lives.

It soon became clear that the only boys who were going home “before the leaves fell” were the ones whose souls we Darklings carried off the battlefield. There were so many souls to ferry that we needed more Darklings. They came from every corner of the earth. Aesinor offered the Castle of Bouillon for their base of operations. I stayed there a few months, but when Raven joined the Hawthorn Fusiliers (Mr. Farnsworth, working in the British War Office, wrangled him a commission) I decided I couldn't spend the war helping only the dead. I volunteered for service at a field hospital near the front where
Miss Sharp had become head nurse and Miss Corey drove an ambulance.

I asked Helen if she wanted to volunteer, but she said she wasn't cut out to be a nurse. She went back to Paris and with Manon started a relief society for Belgian refugees. She raised money by going around to Blythewood “old girls” living in Paris, including Georgiana Montmorency and Andalusia Beaumont, who were living together in Montmartre. Frustrated at having to rely on charity, she and Manon opened a lace school and clothing manufacturer that made bandages, socks, sweaters, and other war supplies. “Not exactly high fashion,” Helen wrote to me, “but I do like to think our soldiers will be the best dressed on the front.”

I wondered if they were more than well dressed. When I asked Manon about how she had managed to create a lace shawl with the magic to heal Helen's wounds from the shadow net and free Helen from van Drood's power, she had shrugged with Gallic insouciance and replied, “A woman always feels at her best wearing something beautiful,
n'est-ce pas
?” Miss Corey thought Manon must be a natural spell weaver, able to convey healing spells through needlework. I liked to think that every sock and scarf Manon knitted for the front kept some soldier safe from harm.

Marlin was too injured to join the army, but he and Louisa Beckwith (whose years of card playing had made her an adept at ciphers) worked with British intelligence on breaking German codes. Cam Bennett, masquerading as a boy, flew aeroplanes to gather intelligence to bring back to the Allies. Daisy went to work at the American Embassy in Paris along with Mr. Bellows,
Agnes, and Sam Greenfeder. She wrote articles for the
Kansas City Star
exhorting Americans to come to the aid of France and Britain. As far as I could tell, she hadn't become a spy. Dolores was the one who went again and again behind enemy lines to bring back intelligence of German troop movements. She and Gus were shot down somewhere over Alsace in the spring of 1915. Beatrice, heartbroken over her sister's death, returned to America with her father on a speaking tour to rally American support for the war. On her way back to Europe she took the
Lusitania
. It was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland and sunk within eighteen minutes. Beatrice rescued a dozen survivors, including her father. Beatrice went on to become a tireless campaigner for America joining the war.

During the Battle of the Somme I held my breath, fearing all the time that I would hear that Rupert Bellows had fallen, even though Mr. Bellows was still working in the embassy in Paris. Instead Nathan walked into the hospital with a wounded soldier covered head to toe in blood. It was only when he was laid out on the operating table that I realized he was Raven.

“Get Ava out of here,” Miss Sharp barked at Nathan.

“I would,” Nathan replied. “Only I actually don't think I can walk another step.”

I saw then that Nathan had a piece of shrapnel sticking out of his right leg. I helped him to a bed and dressed his wound while Miss Sharp and a young surgeon from Liverpool operated on Raven. “What if they don't know how to fix a Darkling?” I fretted.

“I think all the parts are pretty much like ours,” Nathan
said, wincing as I bathed his wound. “Excepting the wings and whatever organ controls foolhardy blockheadedness. We were under machine gun fire and the Bosch threw a grenade into our trench. Raven saw it and took it into his fool head to grab it and fly it into no-man's-land, only it exploded before he could drop it.”

“And I suppose you're the one who went into no-man's-land to get him,” I said, biting back tears.

“Well, if I hadn't I was afraid you and Helen would never speak to me.”

I poured a whole quart of carbolic lotion on his wound and he yelped. “What the bloody hell was that for?”

“For risking your life,” I said, and then kissed him and went off to see if there was any news about Raven, but he was still in surgery. I washed and rolled about a thousand bandages before Vionetta appeared, white-faced.

“He's alive,” she told me, “but his wounds were very serious. We'll just have to wait and see.”

“I can do more than that,” I told her.

I flew that night back to Bouillon and found Wren. When I told her she sent Sirena into the woods to collect certain plants. Before we left, Aesinor embraced us both and told us that she would light a candle for Raven. We flew back over the scorched, blasted woods and wasted fields of Belgium and France. What good had it done for me to come back to change the future if Raven wasn't going to share that future with me?

When we landed at the hospital, Wren took my hand. “I've watched my son become a man these last two years,” she said.
“I would not have had him miss the love he bears for you or the love he's shown for these humans. You must not regret what has happened, even if . . .” She couldn't finish.

“We won't let him die,” I said. “Between the two of us we'll keep him alive.”

We found him lying in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages, still as death, barely breathing. Vi told Wren the extent of his injuries while I sat down beside him and took his hand. It felt cold. I helped Wren change his bandages and administer the herbal salves she'd brought. Vi asked if the herbs would work on humans and Wren answered that she thought they might. For the next six weeks the only time I left Raven's bedside was to fly into the woods to find the plants Wren needed to treat him, which Vi now also used on other patients. I'd only leave, though, when Nathan was there to sit with him. Nathan had become almost as protective of him as I had.

“I'm going to limp for the rest of my days because of you, old man,” I heard him tell Raven one day, “so you'd bloody well better live.”

Helen came to visit, bringing medical supplies she'd wrangled out of her network of rich benefactors, and raspberry biscuits for Nathan. She also arranged to have Raven and Nathan both evac'ed to a hospital in Paris to recuperate. “It will be much nicer than those ghastly places in the provinces and we can all be together. Of course Ava will stay with me at my new place on the Rue de Varenne. I've already arranged about her leave.”

And so in the midst of war, Raven, Nathan, Helen, and I had a little holiday in Paris. Once Raven was well enough, Nathan snuck him out of the hospital to join us for dinner at the
bistros and brasseries where Helen had cultivated the friendship of all the head cooks and waiters. She also, we discovered, had an unlimited access to the black market and used it to “fatten up our boys” on butter and eggs and good French cheese. During the day I would take Raven on slow strolls through the Tuileries, where little boys still sailed boats on the grand basin and old men still walked with their hands folded behind their backs. The only difference was that now the only young men were the injured—like Raven. He still limped, but he was making so much progress that he started talking of going back to the front.

“Is it wrong that I'm considering breaking his other leg so he can't go?” I asked Helen.

“I've been thinking of having Nathan kidnapped by Gypsies—I know some living in the Marais—but I don't think either of them would forgive us. Surely the war can't go on much longer. . . .”

It went on for two more years.

When the United States finally entered the war, Rupert Bellows resigned his post at the embassy and took a commission in the U.S. Marines.

He fell, carrying a soldier back from no-man's-land, at the Second Battle of the Somme. The soldier's name was Roger Ignatius Appleby.

Daisy and Ig named their first son after him. Rupert James Appleby.

But I get ahead of myself.

When the war finally ended, Daisy and Ignatius went back to the States, as did Agnes and Sam, and Cam Bennett, but many of us stayed on in Paris. Vionetta Sharp and Lillian Corey opened up a little bookstore in the Latin Quarter called Shelley & Company. Helen insisted that she couldn't leave her lace factory. She and Manon had plans to open a couture house, which Manon insisted must be called Madame Hélène's. Raven said he'd just as soon stay in Paris. We found out that the artist who lived in our garret had decided to stay in Morocco, and we were able to rent it. Raven enrolled in classes in the Sorbonne and got a job at a watch shop in the Marais. Nathan and I also signed up for classes, but he seemed to lose interest quickly.

“He can't seem to settle to anything,” Helen fretted.

“It's understandable,” I told her. I was having trouble focusing on my classes, too. It was hard to concentrate on literature and philosophy after all we had seen in the war. I felt like I needed something that would keep my hands busy. And so I asked Helen for a job in her workrooms. She tried to get me to take a position as a partner, or at least a manager, but what I really wanted, I found, was to sit in a workroom sewing with a lot of other women who laughed and gossiped. It was like being back at the Triangle—only we were better paid and the workroom was well lit, spacious, and clean and we had a delicious hot midday meal made by Manon's
grand-mère
.

Helen did finally get me to take over as manager, but only so she and Nathan could take a honeymoon on the French Riviera. They were married in June of 1919 in a chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (mostly, I think, to scandalize Mrs. van Beek's Protestant sensibilities). Helen said she didn't want a fuss but wept
when we girls in the workroom presented her with a peau de Chine gown trimmed in point d'Angleterre. For a veil she wore the one Manon had made for her in Bouillon. Vi and Lillian brought armfuls of orange blossoms from their country place in Saint-Tropez, which Daisy, Beatrice, Cam, Agnes, and I tossed in her wake as she and Nathan motored away for their honeymoon.

My tenure as manager stretched to six months as Nathan and Helen prolonged their trip, traveling to Spain, North Africa, Italy, Greece, and Istanbul. Helen sent me cheery postcards—
Nathan almost gored by bull at Pamplona! Nathan almost impaled by shark deep-sea fishing in Spain!—
that didn't quite disguise her concern that Nathan was still restless and unsettled. Still, I was shocked when they came back at how thin and drawn Nathan had become. We had dinner with them at the Closerie des Lilas, and Nathan ordered bottle after bottle of wine and insisted we all go out afterward to a cabaret in Montmartre. Raven went with him while I took Helen home.

“Sometimes,” she confided, “I think the shadows never really left him.”

The sky was lightening by the time Raven came back to our garret, smelling of absinthe and Turkish cigarettes. When I told him what Helen had said, he replied, “He's not the only fellow to come back from the war with a few dark places in his heart.”

After that Raven always made sure to get Nathan home before dawn and to keep him from drinking too much. One day I happened upon Nathan at the Café St. Germain scribbling in a notebook. The saucer of his espresso cup was full of pencil shavings and cigarette ends. I asked him what he was
writing and he answered, “Utter rot,” but then conceded it was a story.