Promise Me This (50 page)

But it was the young man who intrigued Dr. Narvett in his classes of war-worn veterans—military and civilian alike. Whether the lesson concerned the care and use of tools or the proper amount of water to pour as rain over seedlings, the young man seemed to know exactly what to do before he’d been told or shown. It was the first light of purpose Dr. Narvett had seen in the patient’s eyes.

“And what is your name, my son?” Dr. Narvett asked each day as casually as if he were petting a dog. The young man did not reply. He did not seem to hear or understand the question.

By mid-April the sprouts were ready to plant in the ground. The patient worked with a will. When his allotment of plants was finished, he sat beside the slower patients and, guiding their hands, helped them plant their sprouts.

Dr. Narvett and his wife walked between the garden rows as the patients worked, watching their progress.

“Why have you not sent this one to England? His body has healed.” Glenda nodded toward her husband’s patient of special interest.

“Ah, his body. But not his mind. He would be wheeled into a corner and forgotten there. See what progress he makes in the garden? See how he helps those who are weaker?”

“You will drive yourself mad with that one,” she observed, standing with one hand on her hip. “Can you not see he is unable to connect two thoughts?” She shook her head. “Whatever happened to him has removed his ability to speak, to reason. He will do no more than plant seedlings.”

“You judge harshly, my dear,” Dr. Narvett replied quietly.

“And you, Armand, are a dreamer,” his wife teased, nipping his earlobe. “And I love you for it.”

“I love you,” the patient repeated in a monotone, never lifting his head.

The doctor and his wife gaped first at the patient and then at each other.

Dr. Narvett nodded.
“Très bien. C’est un début.”

The lilacs of 1918 were the most fragrant, the most brilliant that Annie could remember.

“You must press these petals and send them to Phillippe,
ma chère
.” Carol smiled. “He will find their fragrance reminds him of home, of life, and of you, Elise.”

Annie smiled. She had grown used to the pet name the Fondreys had given her. She had grown used to life in the beautiful old château, to songbird mornings in the gardens, and to the pleasure of sharing Phillippe’s letters with his mother by the fire on chilly evenings or outside once the days grew warm. She’d grown as fond of Carol as of Phillippe in their different ways and wondered if this might be what a family was like. She could barely remember.

Through the long winter Annie had confided to Carol her love for and loss of Michael and of her brother, Owen. Saying the words aloud somehow helped Annie to shape them, to mold them into a story she could grasp, tragic though it was.

She did not explain the misery caused by her aunt in England or the loving-kindness of the Spragues and her relatives in America.

Annie had learned through a letter from Liz that Matron Artrip was killed when the lorry of nurses crashed and rolled over and over, down the hill that night—the crash Annie could not clearly remember. Though she suspected that her long hospital stay in Paris and her convalescence in France were part of her Aunt Eleanor’s far-extended web, she could not guess who might be directing those affairs now. She could not imagine Carol or Phillippe Fondrey capable of such deviousness. She prayed that her aunt’s minions had either forgotten or lost track of their charge. But she could not be certain.

Aunt Eleanor was dead, Owen was dead, and Michael—but still the Spragues and Aunt Maggie lived. For love of them, she would remain where she was. With Michael gone, there was no reason to evade or even wish to shorten her contract to remain in France until the war’s end.

Now that the Americans—the Yanks—had come with their fresh troops and invigorating spirit, the war would end soon. At least that was what everyone in the village predicted. And when it was over, Annie would at last be free. Free for what purpose, she could not guess.

Carol had listened to Annie with an aching heart, hoping that the pouring out of such sadness would allow the young woman to release the ghosts of the men she had loved, to put those dead finally to rest. She hoped that by the time Phillippe returned—her dear Phillippe, who desperately needed love and restoration of his own—Elisabeth Hargrave would be not only fully healed in body but ready to embrace the living.

Carol sighed. She had her own losses and their ghosts to count in the night.
It has been a long, long war. It will be good to fill these rooms with children again and with laughter.
She smiled.
I sound the old woman, do I not?

“Eh bien.”
She shrugged. “I am, perhaps. I have need of patience.”

By late summer Annie was able to do without her cane. She resumed the morning and evening constitutionals of her adolescence, walking daily the perimeter of the Fondrey estate. She’d regained the weight lost in her months at Verdun. Fresh air and exercise had put roses in her cheeks and, by mid-September, vitality in her step. Annie knew she should offer her nursing services to aid the war effort and not hide behind the walls of the grand old château. There was no denying the need in the field was great. But it seemed the VADs had forgotten her. So she did not offer to go, and Carol did not press her.

Phillippe came home on three days’ leave the last week in September. His first embrace, his first kiss was not for his mother, but she laughed and said she did not mind. Nor did she seem to mind that the young couple left her alone to stroll through the gardens, long after the sun sank into the fields beyond the walls, the harvest moon rising to replace it.

On the last day of Phillippe’s leave, the three sat at the long, candlelit table of the dining room. “This is the day of Michaelmas, the great feast your people celebrate in Britain,
non
?” Carol commented over dinner.

Annie could not swallow the marrow she had placed in her mouth. A sudden tear escaped.

“
Ma pauvre
Elise, you are sad.” Phillippe grasped her hand. “Do not worry. I will not be away long. It is the last push. We will be victorious yet—I hope before Christmas. At Christmas we will celebrate as we have not celebrated since before the war—a new year for our new life.” He brushed her fingers with his lips.

Annie blinked and looked away until the moment passed. She could not say what was in her heart, what the reminder of the holy day meant to her.

What could she say when Phillippe carried such hope, such confidence in his eyes? She must not let him return to the front with anything less than joy in his heart. That she owed both him and his mother this, she was certain. And perhaps, in time, she could love him in the way he believed she did.

Before Phillippe left for the railway station, he pushed a stray tendril from Annie’s eyes and held her face between the palms of his hands. “You will be here when the war is over? You will wait for me,
ma petite
Elise?”

“I will be here, Phillippe, when the war is over.”

“I will await your answer—until then. You will consider me?”

Annie buried her head in the wool of his coat. “Yes, Phillippe, but you must allow me time to think.”

He folded her in his arms. “Then I will wait for this war to end. Do not make me wait longer.”

Dr. Narvett handed the letter to his wife and pulled back the drapery. He could see the hospital grounds and gardens from his office window.

“Ah,” she said.
“C’est enfin arrivé.”
She read the notification of her husband’s transfer to Paris with apparent satisfaction. But when she looked up, she frowned. “
Tu n’en es pas content,
Armand?”

Joyful? Happy?
he wondered.
Is the directorship of such a hospital not the position I have worked so diligently to achieve? Is it not the very thing for which I am most eminently suited?
But when he spoke, he spoke quietly. “No, in all irony I do not think that after all I am joyful. Not now.” He dropped the drapery.

“You do not wish to leave Vittel?”

He solemnly shook his head. “I did not expect to see what I have seen here. I did not expect to do what I have done here.”

“It is that young man—the one with the blue eyes and the dark locks. You think you have achieved something with him.”

“I know I have achieved something!” he corrected. “It not only concerns the gardening; it is the remembering. It is as though the gardens create the peace and tranquility—the open field, if you will—for the mind to grow . . . and for these men to remember. That man is one among thousands in need of healing.”

“He does not even remember his name! You have taught him to plant peas—to harvest salad for the table!” She tugged his coat sleeve. “What is this compared to the research you will do in Paris?
N’importe
, Armand! Do not throw away this opportunity for such daydreams!”

He pulled her gently to the window and pushed it wide. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows down the empty garden rows—empty except for Dr. Narvett’s special patient, his test case, seated along the garden’s edge.
“Ecoute, ma chère,”
he whispered, pointing to the young man.

Glenda sighed, clearly weary of the conversation. She leaned from the window and tilted her ear in the patient’s direction.

From the gardener patient’s lips came a broken, tuneful ditty.

She could not make out the smattering of words, could not place the tune, until she hummed along. “
Les chants de Noël
—they are the carols of Christmas he sings!”

Dr. Narvett nodded. He’d captured her attention. “
Et regarde
, just there.” He pointed across the garden to a small building on a pole.

“It is a model of the hospital,
non
? Why have I not noticed it before?”

Dr. Narvett smiled broadly at his wife. “I set it up today. Our patient made it—with his own hands and no instruction from me. It is perfect.”

“But how?”

“I found him searching through the wood scraps behind the potting shed. Once I saw him shaping a house for the birds—yes, that is what it is—I offered him my tools. And that is what he produced.”