Promise Me This (37 page)

Michael, albeit pleased and flattered, had refused, feeling the impropriety of such an arrangement, even if Annie did not. He could not imagine living in the same house with her day after day and keeping his distance; he could no longer think of her as a sister.

By the time I escort you to America, Annie Allen, I hope—I pray—it will be with a ring on your finger and the promise of marriage on your lips.
Michael knew it was a bold thought—a bold and secret plan. But his love for Annie had made him bold.

In November, Mr. Sprague had responded immediately to Aunt Maggie’s letter begging for news of Annie. The man had been genuinely astonished that Annie had not written her family in New Jersey. He’d explained, as best he could, that Annie had returned to Hargrave House at her aunt Eleanor’s insistence and was running a hospital for the British wounded.

The small New Jersey family could not believe such a tale, and so Maggie had written again, and Mr. Sprague replied in more detail.

I see Elisabeth Anne from a distance once a month—if that—when I attend her aunt’s affairs at Hargrave House. She is thin and grave in her countenance, though it is little wonder. The cases sent to Hargrave House are particularly gruesome—not at all the life I would choose for any young woman.

Still, Annie refuses to see or speak with me alone. Much as I wish to, and though I am greatly concerned for her welfare, I cannot force her to return to us or hinder her from her chosen course.

“It isn’t right.” Aunt Maggie had shaken her head, her brow wrinkled. “Annie loved living with the Spragues, and she would never have returned to that woman’s home on her own! There is something he’s not telling us.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t know.” Daniel frowned. “It’s not like the girl to drop everyone—you, Michael, the Spragues—like hot tinder.”

But it had settled things in all their minds. Michael must go to England and talk to Annie. He must convince her to return to the Spragues or come with him to America. German torpedoes could not be more destructive to their Annie than Eleanor Hargrave—they were united in that belief.

So Michael left by the Swainton train late in the last week of February.

The barns were stacked with wood that Daniel would deliver to neighbors and longtime customers throughout the winter. Michael had made a special arrangement with Mr. Hook for the loan of a truck and driver once a week for heavier deliveries farther away.

He had finished all the gazebos and birdhouses he could, provided all he could, done all he could—but he hated to leave the couple he had come to love as dearly as the parents he’d been born to. Still, he loved Annie more.

Michael ran his hands through the unruly curls of his freshly cut and pomaded hair, alternately pulling it by its roots and smoothing it with his fingers as he rationalized her silence. If Mr. Sprague had not seen Annie himself, Michael would have feared that a zeppelin’s bomb had fallen on her head. He could think of nothing less that would account for Annie’s silence.

At length Michael sighed and unbuttoned Owen’s overcoat—the coat he’d grown into—and hung it on the hook nearest the door. Almost four years of Maggie Allen’s home cooking and of gardening and building in the bright New Jersey sunshine had added a foot to his height and two stone to his weight. He would be hard pressed to fill the coat’s pockets, still sewn inside, and have room for all of him.

Michael sat on the bunk, remembering the day Owen found him in the gardens of Southampton, homeless and nearly starved, his legs the size of kitchen kindling. Not since that day had he needed to steal scraps from meals others had eaten and thrown away.

That a life could grow and so change through one man’s blessing and legacy in four short years was a miracle beyond Michael’s imagination; he shook his head at the wonder of it.

Michael leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Help me, Sweet Jesus,” he prayed, “to be the blessing to someone in this life that Owen was to me. Help me find Annie, to protect and shield her. Do not let me fail in this, I beg You. You’ve given me a family. Help me not to lose it.

“Protect me from what You will, and give me courage to do what You will. Thank You, Sweet Jesus, for letting me live, for the joy of Aunt Maggie and Uncle Daniel. Bless them; give them the comfort of each other and of You. Amen.”

Michael spent as much time as he could in the ship’s library, reading the volumes available to passengers. He had no heart for walking the promenade, no wish to stare at the miles and miles of endless ocean. He forced, as best he could, the persistent images of icebergs and torpedoes from his mind, and concentrated, as much as he dared, on meeting Annie face to face.

For weeks Michael had tried to imagine how she’d grown and changed in the four years since he last saw her standing on the docks of Southampton, a young girl searching the crowds aboard
Titanic
for her brother’s face and finding only Michael. He could not deny that, miserable and hopeless waif though he was, he’d been attracted to her violet-blue eyes and the soft, golden ringlets round her face. Such a longing was safe then, in its way, he had reasoned, for she was beyond his hope or reach.

Now he dared hope, dared take the dream of marriage from his mind and turn it over and over. He would not push Annie—not even confess his love for her, at least not until she seemed ready to receive it. But to be fair, he knew he must tell her before they sailed to America. If she did not want him, then he would serve her as a brother all his days, as he’d promised Owen, as Daniel had served Maggie and Sean.

Michael sighed. He hoped to be more to her than that.

When the ship slipped through Southampton’s harbor nearly a week later, the calendar had turned to March. Michael leaned over the rail, eager to search out the docks, the streets he remembered. But the harbor teemed with ships of all sizes, and the streets of town, at least those he could see, were flooded with men in uniform—lines of soldiers and sailors, their kits stowed at their feet, cigarettes in their hands, ready and waiting to be shipped out. If his ticket had not verified this port of call as Southampton, he would have thought himself in some far-off place—for surely this looked nothing like the site of
Titanic
’s sailing four years past.

Michael strained his eyes against the sun. The deck of a ship nearby appeared to be covered with bunks—stretchers and stretchers of men in row upon row. He squinted and identified scores of British Expeditionary Force uniforms among the men on stretchers—many torn, some with only pants or shirts of a piece. Some uniforms he did not recognize at all. As he came within earshot of the dock, he heard languages he did not know interspersed among the wide variety of British accents, men of every class and county.

Michael’s chest tightened. For weeks all he’d contemplated was his hope of wooing Annie. He’d barely considered the odd dread of walking again the land in which he’d been nothing but an outcast. But here he was at last, and even those anticipated joys and dreads paled in the light of the drama, the bedlam before him, these thousands upon thousands of men.

He’d just stepped from the ship when a young woman in faded Red Cross uniform and cape slipped her arm through his and tickled a white feather beneath his chin. “And why are you not in uniform, a fine strapping bloke like you?”

“I’ve only just come,” Michael stammered, surprised as he heard himself slip easily into the heavy brogue he’d believed tamed.

“Well, Paddy, these boys have only just come from doing their duty.” She pointed to a steady stream of stretchers borne from ships.

Michael watched in horror as some of the crudely bandaged wounded—and some whose bandages had been reduced to blood-soaked, filthy rags—were carried before him and placed in rows along the docks, in the cold and open air, to await transportation and further treatment. Men stared vacantly, some with half their faces blown away, many with blisters and pus festering their eyes, their cheeks and chins, their hands and arms.

One sober-faced stretcher bearer turned aside, gagged from the stench of gangrene, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and passed without slowing a step.

“Where are they from?” Michael asked, unable to imagine a place that produced such horrors.

“Over there.” The stretcher bearer cocked his head toward the channel and France and all that lay beyond.

The persistent nurse swished the feather across Michael’s cheek. “Don’t wait too long, Paddy. You’ll not want the English and French to do all your fighting for you.” She arched her brow, tucked the feather in the buttonhole of Michael’s coat, and sauntered away in search of new victims.

Michael fingered the feather in his buttonhole, the place designed to hold a flower—a thing of beauty and grace. For just a moment he remembered the millions of flowers he and Owen had helped place aboard
Titanic
the night before she sailed, the hundreds of Bealing’s buttonholes presented to passengers, and the curtain of flowers that had rained down upon this very dock at the moment of sailing.

Michael remembered, with a pain he could not describe, all that had gone before. He viewed the scene on the dock before him as from a great distance. He realized that just as certainly as
Titanic
’s curtain of flowers had closed the stage on that long-ago part of life—English life painted in luxury, beauty, and grace—these ships, loaded as they were with crumpled human cargo, had raised the curtain on another stage, a nightmare awash in blood and death and terrors more horrific than he knew to imagine.

How long Michael stood staring, he did not know. At length he was pushed along by the sheer volume of soldiers and the din of need surrounding him.

He exchanged his American dollars for pounds and shillings but found there was no space on the London-bound train, at least not for two hours. Military took precedence in travel. Michael searched out the pub where nearly four years ago he had slipped in through a window and licked the last drops from dirty glasses. This time he placed his coins on the counter crowded by men in uniform, and he ordered a pint. He pulled from his pocket a wrapper of fish-and-chips, hot and greasy, that he’d purchased next door.

It was a taste woven of childhood longing and memory; the reality was not so dear as he’d imagined. He wondered if there was something sweeter about food that was stolen or forbidden, or if the unattainable took on a sweetness of its own. He wondered what Aunt Maggie might cook for supper that night.

With time to spare, Michael sought out Annie’s old school and watched girls in the schoolyard turning ropes, skipping to singsong rhymes. His heart quickened in the anticipation of meeting the young woman who had opened her mind and heart to him through letters, rather than the girl he’d spied upon from afar. Michael made his way to the town hall gardens, where Owen had first stumbled over a young boy’s near-skeletal form, all wrapped up in tarps against the cold.

The gardens had matured, and Michael marveled at the landscape bones Owen had laid and the beauty his plantings had grown into. He sat on the wooden bench, now weathered gray but still situated in a particular circle of evergreen ground cover. He ran his fingers beneath its seat and found the names carved there—Owen and Annie Allen—within a neat oval. And farther out, Michael found his own name, crudely carved by a young boy longing for the family he’d seen in Owen and his sister.

Michael shook his head.
I wanted to be in their circle, Sweet Jesus, not take Owen’s place, not push him aside. God, forgive me. After seeing those lads come off the ship, I’m afraid. Reading Annie’s letters and the newspapers in America, it was all so different. But I’m here now, and if I have been spared to give my body, my eyes, my life for this time, Sweet Jesus, as they have—or in Owen’s place, or for the sake of this land he loved—so be it. Give me the courage and generosity Owen lived each moment until his last. Give me that courage, Sweet Jesus, for I’ve none of my own.

The train to London stopped again and again; Michael thought it would never reach Waterloo station. So eager was he to see Annie, so afraid was he to meet her face to face, that he jumped off the train, then had to run back to retrieve the bag he’d forgotten.

Breathe, man; breathe!
he chanted in his mind as he deciphered the city map posted in the center of the station, then purchased tokens for the Underground. At Charing Cross he studied the map again but finally gave up and asked the help of a stranger.

Michael hopped the tram the leery Londoner pointed out and kept careful track of the stops and crossings. He pulled the cord and stepped off one street early, just to give himself time to steady his pounding pulse, run a comb through his tangled hair, and straighten his coat. At last he strode down the street, through the gate, and up the walk to the Spragues’ front door. He checked the number twice, pocketed the address from Annie’s last letter, and pulled the bell.