Promise Me This (46 page)

“Annie?” Michael squeezed her hands. “The vicar has said he’ll marry us—marry us today. Here, now.”

Still Annie sat, stunned and unable to take in the group across the tent, the five huddled expectantly in lamplight.

“You do love me . . .” Michael paled slightly, then colored. “Don’t you?”

Annie shook the stupor from her brain. “Of course I love you. I love you with all of my heart. You know that.” She whispered so low that she knew Michael was forced to press his face close to hers to hear. “But don’t ask me now. We cannot marry now—you know we cannot. Not while I’m under Aunt Eleanor’s contract, not while I’m serving with the VADs.” She drew a trembling breath, willing the cobwebs away. “I can’t leave France—not until after the war.”

“But the war could go on a long time yet. And she’s dead!” Michael pulled Annie’s face up, forcing her eyes to meet his. “The witch is dead—she can’t touch you if you’re sent away from here, away with me. Matron can dismiss you for going against regulations, and I’ll follow as soon as I’m able. At least you’ll be safe!”

Annie blinked back tears, frustrated by his simplicity, desperate in the warmth of his love. “We’re not the only ones, Michael.” She wrapped his face with her fingers in return. “My darling Michael. We must be patient—for Aunt Maggie, for the Spragues, for all our life ahead. We would never know who spied on us, who might carry out her terrible plans.”

“What if this is our life? All our life?” Michael pressed.

“I cannot bear that thought! Oh, Michael. Dear God in heaven, I cannot bear that thought!” Annie clutched his arms, digging her nails through his coat.

Michael’s lips kissed away the tears that found her face. “I’m sorry, Annie. I’m sorry. ’Twas a foolish thing to say.” He pushed stray wisps of hair from her eyes and held her close. “The war will end. The war will end, and God be pleased, we’ll both go free.”

The vicar coughed discreetly and spoke from the far side of his tent. “I take it there is to be no wedding this night?”

Annie looked up to see their friends anxiously waiting, awkwardly watching, Evelyn gripping with two hands a bouquet of hand-sewn flannel roses.

The vicar stepped tentatively forward. “Is there anything I can do?”

Annie shook her head and tried to smile while wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. She wished for all the world that she might melt into Michael’s beating heart, the one she’d heard so clearly . . . or was it her own?

“There’ll come a day, Annie Allen,” Michael whispered gently, lightly, into her ear, “when I ask you and you’ll be ready. I’ll not let you off a second time.”

She held him close. “Ask me when we stand in the gardens of home—holding that bouquet in your hands. I want to stand in your beautiful gazebo to take our vows. I look forward to that day, to all our future, without threats, without shadows.”

Michael pulled Annie to her feet. “You mean you fancy something better than flint-bandage roses and our boots beneath a lumpy army cot in a charitable vicar’s tent?” He smiled sheepishly. “What about a secret wedding now and a real one later?”

She took in the forlorn scene before her and smiled at his tease, though she could not bring herself to laugh. “You know I would love to spend this wedding night here with you.” She traced the long dimple in his cheek with her finger.

He caught her hand and kissed her palm, pressing it against his heart. “We’ll wait.”

Annie and Michael stood before the vicar, surrounded by their friends, and pledged to love their life long and marry at war’s end, before Reverend Tenney in the gardens of Allen’s Run. Michael vowed to pick the bouquet himself.

As for the flint-bandage roses, Mack pinned the flowers in Evelyn’s hair. She wore them beneath her nursing veil for two days, until Matron saw the bunch pinned beneath and confiscated them for the wounded.

The cold set in with a vengeance. Annie’s hot water bottle, tucked between blankets and woollies, began to freeze again.

Firewood was still plentiful, for the trees in the hills and valleys and forests surrounding Verdun had long been blasted to kindling. But it was not enough to keep warm.

“If only we can make it through till the snow cripples things,” Liz said, “it will all slow down again.”

“Not this year,” Andee replied. “This is the big push, the final push.”

“You can’t know that,” Liz complained. “We’ve thought it before—every Christmas is to be our last, but it simply goes on and on and on. There’s never any end in sight!”

“There is this time,” Evelyn contradicted, and because of that rarity, everyone turned to listen. “The Germans are at the end of their tether. It cannot last much longer.”

“I hope you’re right,” Judy said. “And if you’re not, this will be my last month in any case. Well, I hope it will. I’m going home.”

“What?” Babs exclaimed, half-joking. “And leave us here to face the enemy alone?”

Judy’s eyes filled. She pulled a creased and recreased letter from her pocket. “Dave’s been wounded—seriously.”

“Judy!”

“His unit was nearly wiped out at the Somme. Dave is one of the lucky ones.” But she began to cry.

Annie sat beside her friend, wrapping an arm about her shoulders. She waited for Judy to calm, knowing
wounded
carried many a prognosis and that those who lived often carried losses into their futures.

“He’s been sent back to England to convalesce.” Judy stood. “I don’t care what they say. I’ll go, no matter what, if Dave needs me.”

“Of course you should,” Annie said. “You should go straightaway. I would leave today—in a moment, if I could.”

The girls turned with arched brows toward Annie, whom they’d come to refer to as Steadfast Elisabeth and who rarely spoke in their group.

“God willing,” Evelyn whispered, drawing their attention away, “we shall all go home soon.”

The sirens began at two the next morning. They rose until they screamed, then wailed and wailed. The shelling of the hospital began at 2:06 and rained like fire from heaven—no one knew how long.

Every man and woman claiming two legs to walk sprang from bed, pulling on boots and cloaks as they ran to duty.

In the light of the explosions, Michael cranked his ambulance to life and pulled into the line forming outside the ward tents.

“Évacuiez-vous! Évacuiez-vous!”
Word raced from tent to tent and throughout the encampment.

“Careful!” Matron ordered. “Lift them carefully.”

“Vite, vite!”
the surgeon cried, pushing her aside. “Nothing will matter if we don’t get these men out of here.”

Every VAD scrambled to the work of orderlies, helping to lift patients and collect bandages and medicines that had now become priceless, irreplaceable in the quantities desperately needed.

“Annie!” Michael shouted into the din, tearing through the tents.

An explosion blasted the ground next to the surgical tent. Metal pans, operating instruments, glass beakers, and rocks shot through the air . . . and blew Michael thirty feet from the site.

“Get to your ambulance, driver! Get these men out of here!”

Michael did not know where the command came from. He must obey, but he could not go without finding Annie. “Annie! Annie, answer me!” he cried and prayed and cried again.

Another explosion flooded the camp in crackling light.

“Go!” the surgeon shouted.

“She’s already with the wounded—in the ambulance with Mack! She’s on her way!” Liz pushed Michael toward the little group of ambulances as she ran back for a last load of supplies.

He stumbled to his loaded and cranked Ford, revved the engine, and followed the line headed toward the river and the road away from Verdun. He searched ahead and behind, saw Liz disappear into the ambulance behind him, and prayed that Annie had found space in one of the lorries ahead. He prayed she was safe, that she was truly with Mack, and that he would find her in Revigny.

“No headlights! Headlights forbidden!” The word swept down the line.

“Thank You, Sweet Jesus!” Michael prayed. They were nothing but marking pins for those blasted German shells.

Without so much as a match head or spark to light his way, Michael crept through the dark. With his ambulance less than two meters from the ambulance before him, his knuckles gripped white around the wheel of his Tin Lizzie.

The shelling of the hospital area and fields, just to the south, continued. Michael knew that reinforcements had recently dug new trenches in the targeted area. How the Germans knew, he could not guess. That the shelling was intended for the fresh men, he did not doubt, nor did it make a whit of difference that the hospital was leveled in the process.

Flashes of rifle fire through tunnels of barbed wire in no-man’s-land and shells exploding over trenches in the distance oriented his improvised and precarious route over fields and crumbling roads.

Piteous moans from the throats of the gassed and blinded, and from shrapnel-carved and bleeding men crammed into the back of his worse-for-wear bouncing ambulance, serenaded each meter. He hit a rut in the road; some cursed, screaming obscenities; some were silenced. Michael pitied them all but drove on, silently begging,
Where is Annie? Sweet Jesus, be with my precious Annie!

And then, above the engines and the moans, Michael heard the hateful whine, heard it draw closer and closer. Sweat beaded his forehead; still he drove.

Just rounding a curve, Michael saw the gray cylinder fall slowly against the faint-mooned sky. He saw it impact the road two cars ahead. He heard the deafening explosion in some faraway part of his brain, felt the heat of the inferno rush against his cheeks, knew the wheel of his ambulance was yanked from his death grip as he flew toward heaven.

Annie’s eyes would not open. She felt, rather than saw, that both her arms lay in casts. She could not feel her legs, and in a sudden panic to think what that might mean, she tried to lift her head. It would not do her bidding.

“She’s awake!” Annie heard the elated voice of a woman—a voice she knew from somewhere but could not immediately place.

“Oh, you’ve come back to us, Elisabeth!” Liz and Marge chattered above her head.

“You gave us quite a scare,” Liz whispered. “But you’ll be all right . . . You’ll be all right!”