Promise Me This (47 page)

“Wha–what happened?” Annie could not think for the pain in her head. Before she blinked, she caught the anxious exchange between the two above her.

“It was the shelling—do you remember? Poor thing, you’ve been out of it for ages. January’s nearly over! Shrapnel lodged in your neck and spine, but the surgeon’s done wonders,” Liz assured.

“Shelling?” Annie tried to focus. “The evacuation . . . I remember.”

“Good. You’ve a few more to go—surgeries, I mean. But you’ll get better now.” Marge smiled. “Oh, I’m so glad.”

“Where is everyone? Did we all make it?”

“We’ll talk later,” Liz said. “We have to go, but I’ll be back just as soon as I can. I’m seeing Marge and Judy off at the station.”

“Where are you going?” Annie asked sleepily.

“Home—home to my Jake,” Marge said. “He’s got a fortnight’s leave at last, and they’ve granted me one week. I can’t wait to see him!”

“And Judy’s going for good. Dave’s recovering in Lincoln; they’re getting married the minute he’s released from hospital! Isn’t it romantic?” Liz enthused, but Marge frowned and slightly shook her head.

“It’s wonderful,” Annie said, but she couldn’t stop the ringing in her head. She felt certain there was something she should ask but could not form her thoughts into words.

“Rest easy. I’ll see you in a few days.” Liz stroked Annie’s brow.

Annie murmured, and the two girls stepped away from her line of vision. Their footsteps had reached the door of the ward when Annie thought of Michael. She opened her mouth to ask for him, but the heavy sleeping draught once again did its work.

Marge and Liz walked slowly toward the railway station.

“I hate it,” Marge said. “I don’t know how we’ll ever manage to tell her.”

“I don’t want to be the one to do it,” Liz insisted quietly.

“You nearly did! Don’t be talking to her about romance or weddings! You know how she loved him!” Marge hefted her case. “She mustn’t be told everything too soon. It could set her back.”

Liz nodded. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“Dear God,” Marge moaned, “how I hate this war!”

Doctors came and went. Nurses checked vital signs of the woman whose chart read
Elisabeth Hargrave, VAD
. Orderlies shifted her to flat boards as VADs unknown to Annie changed her linens.

She asked for Michael again and again but was told he was not at the hospital. She begged for someone to search the records for ambulance drivers, and two nurses agreed to ask, but no one gave her that vital information.

Annie’s head and neck hurt so that, heavily sedated, she slept nearly round the clock. Recurring nightmares—images of exploding lorries and white double roses, the sensation that she was flying upside down and backward, all downhill to a trench of English ivy—raced over and over through Annie’s mind as she slept.

Two more surgeries followed. By late February, despite pain in neck and spine, Annie was able to sit up in bed for ten minutes at a time and take solid nourishment when spoon-fed by a VAD. By early March, when Annie’s arms and wrists mended, she began to feed herself and to stay awake for longer stretches of time. Without the medication she began to think more clearly and to demand more forcefully answers to her questions about Michael.

Annie asked for her friends, Liz, Evelyn, Andee, and the other girls, but was told that they had been reassigned and so could not come. The orderly she asked did not know where they were stationed. No word was left.

March faded into a blustery April. Annie’s pain deepened with the torrent of spring rains. She feared the worst for Michael. She could not believe he would have forgotten or deserted her. It was not possible.

Because they’d never let Aunt Maggie know that Michael had found her, Annie dared not write to her.

Annie felt nothing below her rib cage. Even so, with the use of two wooden canes, she began to awkwardly limp short distances in the ward and then the hallways. There was talk of sending her back to England to convalesce. But for some reason, they kept her on in the ward. Annie had no doubt that somewhere along the line her name had met with resistance from one of Aunt Eleanor’s minions. She could guess no other reason for filling a needed ward in France.
A prisoner in Paris.
If it were not further evidence of the extent of her dead aunt’s power, Annie might have smiled.

On May Day, Annie dreamed of gardens and sunshine. She opened her eyes to a small bouquet of lily of the valley placed in the center of the ward. She closed them again, inhaling and savoring that dear, familiar fragrance. When she reopened her eyes, she found a young woman sporting a smile above her.

“There you are! You look ever so much better than the last time I saw you!” Liz stood back, tipping her head. “Are you feeling well?”

“Liz? Liz!” Annie struggled to sit up, feeling a flush of pleasure rise in her cheeks. “Where have you been?”

“We were all sent out for a bit of recovery, after the shelling. And then they unexpectedly sent some of us home on leave—far overdue, my parents said!”

Annie nodded. “I remember the explosions—at least some of it.”

Liz shook her head. “Oh, it was frightful! You probably blacked out straightaway. But we’re right as rain now—at least that’s true for most of us.” She leaned forward. “Babs has had a bad time of it. I don’t think she’ll ever be able to use her right arm again.”

“No?”

“No. No more nursing for her, either. She’s home in England. But she’s met the most wonderful man, so that’s all right. They’ll be married come June.”

“Married?” Annie’s familiar fear for Michael nearly crushed her chest.

“Elisabeth? What is it? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Michael,” Annie whispered. She clutched Liz’s arm. “Liz, where is Michael?”

Reverend Tenney walked into the post office just as Maggie McKenica peered into her box. He saw her run a hand round its edges, stop, straighten slowly, then close the door.

“Why do you torture yourself, Maggie darling?” Daniel whispered to his thinning wife.

Reverend Tenney turned away when the flood threatened Maggie’s eyes, then watched from the window as Daniel gently pressed his hand into her back and guided her out the door and down the post office steps, away from the prying, pitying eyes of their small community.

He stepped up to Daniel once Maggie was seated in their buggy. “Have you heard anything, Daniel? Anything at all?”

Daniel looked at Maggie, but she turned away. He lifted the black purse from her lap and pulled from it a worn letter, the envelope postmarked 9 May 1917. He handed it to Reverend Tenney, who searched Daniel’s eyes as he carefully unfolded it.

The letterhead was from A. Piatt Andrew, of the newly renamed American Field Service, in France, but was dated 31 December. It was almost the same “missing, presumed dead” letter Reverend Tenney had read two days before at the home of a grieving family in Cape May Court House. In this case, the writer had forwarded Michael’s will, hastily scribbled in his own hand and barely visible in stubbed pencil:

In the event of my death, I leave the whole of my property and effects to Maggie and Daniel McKenica, Swainton, New Jersey—my family—in the hopes that they will use it to provide for Annie Allen—my sister by Owen’s charge and my friend by God’s grace.

Michael Dunnagan

American Ambulance Field Service

Reverend Tenney could not swallow the lump in his throat. He started to speak, then rasped and tried again. “I am so sorry. So very sorry.”

Daniel nodded and silently took the letter.

“If you and Maggie wish there to be a service . . .” Reverend Tenney paused.

“Do not be so fast to bury my Michael, Reverend Tenney!” Maggie’s Irish brogue sounded thicker than it had in years. “He is not dead!”

“But the letter—”

“The letter is a scrap of paper that says they don’t know where he’s got to, nothing more. Were Michael dead I would know it in my bones. He’ll come home to us yet—by and by. You wait. You wait and see.” Maggie bore steely eyes and a tearstained face. Her chin quivered, but Reverend Tenney was certain no warrior had ever manifested a more fearsome countenance.

He removed his hat and meekly, respectfully, bowed his head. “Forgive me, Maggie McKenica. Forgive my lack of faith. I look forward to our Michael’s glad homecoming.” But he could not smile.

Maggie nodded curtly, then looked away. She dried her tears and lifted her chin. Daniel flicked the reins and drove his wife home.

Carol Fondrey pushed wide the chintz curtains of the sickroom.
“Bonjour, ma chère!”
She brushed the tousled hair from Annie’s forehead. “It is June,
ma petite
, and the roses are in full bloom. I insist you rise and that we walk into the gardens. It will do us both a world of good.”

Annie turned her face to the wall, the only indication she knew to show her displeasure. Complete sentences no longer formed in her brain. Words spoken required too much effort and more energy than she could muster. She did not know why that was or why the woman spoke in two languages—beginning in French, then English, then lapsing again into French—all in the space of a sentence. Annie did not understand all that the woman said, despite her years of schoolgirl French and the knowledge that she had nursed French soldiers for months and months in Verdun. She knew she should be curious about such lapses in memory, but she was not.

The woman, there each time Annie opened her eyes, was not to be resisted. Annie allowed herself to be pulled to a sitting position. The woman tied a dressing gown round Annie’s waist and, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, led her out the kitchen door and into a large garden.

Annie’s heart began to race. She did not want to walk in the gardens. She wanted nothing to do with gardens, never again. She closed her eyes and turned her head, groping for the door latch.

But the older woman pulled Annie’s hands away and guided her gently but firmly to a wicker chair in the sunshine. She lowered Annie into the timeworn seat and tucked a lap rug round her knees.

“
Du thé, ma chère.
I know how the English love the tea.” The woman poured a steaming amber stream from a Limoges pot. She poured another stream, this one pungent and reddish brown, into the center of the cup and stirred. “You will drink this, my pet. You will drink this and all the world will seem as it should—in time, in time.”