Promise Me This (49 page)

This must be his
maman
’s “slip of a girl,” though he would not have described her in that way. That she could speak, regardless of what his mother believed, he knew by her tuneful humming. That his breath caught and his heart stumbled in its beating at her open and innocent beauty, he could not deny.

Phillippe Fondrey, decorated with the highest honors of France for his stalwart bravery and heroics on the battlefield, noted by his comrades for his confidence with the ladies, stepped back from the flowering hedge. Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead. His hands, usually steady as the timbers in his mother’s ceilings, trembled.

He rode hard across the hills of his estate that morning to push the image of the young Englishwoman from his thoughts. He spent the afternoon increasing the revenue of the only remaining tavern in town.

Twilight settled over the green hills when at last he returned to his mother’s estate. Phillippe lifted the saddle from his stallion, fed and watered him, then slowly brushed his coat until it shone in the stable’s lamplight.

Over dinner that night he met the young woman formally, through his mother’s introduction. After dinner the three sat by a fire in the open garden, his mother’s favorite outdoor room. Carol nursed the last of the evening’s wine as she probed her son for stories of his wartime exploits. But Phillippe had no stomach to speak of war.

“Elisabeth nursed our men in Verdun,” Carol told her son as though Annie were not there. “You were there, my son,
ce n’est pas vrai
?”

Phillippe nodded, holding Annie’s eyes for the first time.

“It was a horrific time,
certainement
,” Carol encouraged.

“Non, Maman,”
Phillippe said quietly, still looking at Annie. “It was worse.”

The connection was not lost on Carol. When nothing more seemed forthcoming, she sighed aloud.
“Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît,”
she murmured, touching her forehead lightly in apology. “I nurse the headache. Too much sun this afternoon, too much wine this evening, I fear.” She rose and kissed her son’s cheek. “If you need anything this evening,
ma chère
—” she pressed Annie’s shoulder gently—“simply ring the bell. Angele will come.”

Annie smiled faintly.

When his mother had gone, Phillippe swirled the last of his brandy and stared into his glass.

Annie rose, inclined her head as if to go indoors, and picked up her cane.

“
Pardonnez-moi,
mademoiselle. You will sit with me,
s’il vous plaît
.”

But Annie bowed apologetically and made as if to go.

Phillippe did not rise. “Indulge me, mademoiselle. You have deceived
ma mère
. I do not understand why.” He waited, but the girl, still standing, said nothing. “Is it that you wish to stay here? To live in my mother’s château for the duration of the war?”

Even in the firelight he could see the young woman’s color deepen.

“Make no mistake. I do not wish to send you away.”

Annie sank slowly into the chair. Her chest heaved.

“Your companionship is good for her. You are a project she has needed for some time.” He watched her carefully. Still she did not speak. “You should know that my younger brother, Bertrand, my mother’s pet, was killed tragically at the Marne, the first year of the war.”

Annie blinked.

“She has needed someone to look after, someone to care for, someone she can, through her attentions, restore.” Phillippe set his snifter on the low table between them. “It is helpful, when we lose someone we love so desperately, to give of ourselves to others. It eases the terrible pain. Do you not agree, Mademoiselle Hargrave?”

Annie sat for a full minute with her hands folded, until at last she raised her eyes to his. She breathed deeply and said quietly, her first words to another in weeks, “
Non
, Monsieur Fondrey. Nothing . . . nothing in this world eases the pain.”

Phillippe’s eyes widened, but he did not move for fear of breaking the delicate spell.

Annie grasped the arms of her chair, pulling herself to her feet. She steadied herself on the chair’s rail, wrapped her cardigan more tightly round her shoulders, and leaning heavily on her cane, limped into the house.

Carol, hidden in the shadows of the kitchen’s garden window, wiped stray tears from her cheeks and smiled.

The night was rent with the animal-like keening of Annie for her Michael. The first tears she had cried of anything but frustration since the shelling, the first she had opened her mouth wide since the day Liz told her of the horrible explosions, of the dead and missing.

Annie moaned that she had not gone to America when Michael and Aunt Maggie had begged her, regardless of the risk, regardless of her loyalties to the Spragues.

She cried that she had stepped foot in Aunt Eleanor’s house the day before her eighteenth birthday—a lifetime ago—the day her life was laid out like a chess game.

She screamed that she had not married Michael in secret when he’d asked her, despite her aunt’s threats to those she loved and the rules for VADs.

She keened, high and piercing and long into the wee hours of the morning, that she had not died with him in the exploding inferno of lorries and ambulances and shells and craters.

How she would walk through life without Michael, Annie did not know. And for that mystery she cried again.

Twice Carol Fondrey believed she could stand no more and rushed to the girl’s room to hold her, to comfort her. But Phillippe slept in a chair, guarding Annie’s bedchamber door the long night through. He shook his head. “The dam has burst,
Maman
. You must allow the waters to flow.”

It was nearly dawn when Annie quieted. Outside her door, the stalwart soldier listened to the silence for another half hour. Just as the cock crowed, he stood, stretched, and took to his bed until noon.

Two days later he introduced Annie to his mother’s gardener and to a garden space in need of gentle restoration. Together they toiled through the mornings: Phillippe on his knees, his mother choosing flowers and herbs and directing the gardener, and Annie in a chair, trowel in hand, giving new life to straggling planters. By the middle of the second week, the sun and fresh air, the gift of Phillippe’s kindness, and their mutual toil had planted a faint bloom in Annie’s cheeks. A small light, not before seen by the Fondreys, found its way to her blue eyes.

Phillippe Fondrey remained at his mother’s château for two weeks more, the most refreshing leave he’d enjoyed through the long war. When he left again for the front, he had secured the permission of his “
petite
Elise,” as he called Annie, to write often, and her promised return of the favor. This pledge Phillippe sealed late the last evening as the two walked in the château’s gardens, when he lifted Annie’s fingers to his lips.

Connie took the teapot from her mother’s trembling hands and poured.

For weeks she had tried to convince her distraught parents to get away. A trip to the Lake District—even in the dead of winter—would be just the thing, if only her father would agree. But the war raged on, and he had refused, saying that he could not leave London.

Maggie McKenica’s letter changed that.

“It is too much,” Mrs. Sprague cried. “I cannot celebrate Christmas with the children missing. First Annie and then Michael!

“Surely, if he were alive, if he’d found her, they would both have written. It’s been nearly a year since we’ve heard from him! But that McKenica woman is so certain. Her letters make Michael seem so much alive and Annie with him!”

“Stop torturing yourself with that woman’s letters,” her husband urged. “She is not able to accept the realities of this war, but that does not mean you must be drawn into her fantasies. We must let them go. We all must get on with our lives!”

Late that night Mr. Sprague knocked softly on his daughter’s door.

“I am sorry you heard me speak so harshly, my dear. I am concerned for your mother. It is entirely too great, this loss. For her sake, for the sake and hope of keeping your mother’s sanity, I beg you not to mention either of them again.” He hesitated. “And I must ask something more.”

“Anything, Father.”

“I must ask you to go through the post, each day, and take away any letters from Maggie McKenica—before your mother sees them. Will you do that, Constance?”

Connie agreed. She loved her mother, perhaps more than any other being on earth. She’d seen the toll the year had taken. Connie would watch and hide the letters from America. She would not speak the names of Annie or Michael aloud in the house again.

But it would not keep her from searching the hospital wards of London each day as she had done this last year. Nothing would keep her from that.

Dr. Narvett watched the quiet young man, still weak from malnutrition and recovering from leg surgeries, poke his finger into the potting soil and gently drop a seed into the tiny well. He saw him tilt his head as though trying to understand what he’d done, then sprinkle the seed with a fine layer of soil.

The doctor stroked his chin, pulling the end of his goatee. He’d not taught the silent young man to plant. He did it instinctively. It was the first sign of memory or native intelligence, indeed the first voluntary movement he had seen in the patient. The doctor shook his head and smiled; the young man would make a perfect test case for his theory.

For months, Dr. Narvett had badgered the hospital board, urging them to adopt a gardening program. “Having patients plant and tend a vegetable garden on the hospital grounds will not only help to provide food for the staff and patients alike—of which we are in great need—but it will create the most ideal therapy for these physically and emotionally scarred war veterans!

“Every Frenchman,” he’d propounded, “knows that gardening is good for the body and better for the soul. It is too bad that modern medicine has lost sight of the elementary!”

By mid-February Dr. Narvett had secured the approval needed. During the first days of March he instructed twenty patients in the potting of vegetable seeds and carefully set planting trays in the newly built cold frame. They searched the black soil daily for sprouts.