Promise Me This (53 page)

Connie was grateful when her parents agreed to stay the spring in the Lake District. Her father had written that her mother’s health had greatly improved and that he, for the first time since they were newly married, was digging a spring garden.

Connie was glad she’d not written to them of Annie or of her late-May marriage plans.
It would prove a distraction from their happiness.

After she had begged Annie to reconsider her plans to marry a man she was less than head over heels in love with, she’d written enthusiastically in response to Annie’s second letter proposing her and Phillippe’s plans to visit London and the Spragues near the end of their monthlong wedding trip. She might not think Annie’s decision a wise one, but she did not wish to alienate her friend.
Goodness knows there are too few of us left.

Connie explained to Annie that she felt that would be time enough to share the news with her recuperating parents. She hoped Annie would understand. Either way, Connie intended to protect their holiday.

Nor did Connie tell her parents that she was working in the influenza wards. Indeed, she’d not known when they went away before Christmas that she would be reassigned.

But the pandemic was impossible. Military personnel and civilians alike were struck by the thousands. Patients slept on blankets on the hospital floor, each waiting for the man in the cot above him to die that he might be placed in his bed. Medical personnel fell ill by the hundreds, leaving each section desperate for help. Though the number of new cases had slowed, there was no end in sight.

As she walked to and from the hospital, Connie passed young girls—those untouched by the disease—chanting ditties as they turned jumping ropes:

“I had a little bird;

His name was Enza.

I opened up the window

And in flew Enza!”

Connie shook her head and wished for all their sakes that the girls’ parents would censor them. But she would not wish the girls inside. Their chance of survival depended on fresh air.

Today Connie had already served twelve hours in a new ward with no time for a cup of tea, let alone a biscuit. The arches in her feet screamed, as though a thousand tiny pitchforks prodded them over an open flame; the pain in her lower back made her cringe. Her uniform was spattered in blood and smeared with vomit. She had washed enough men and changed enough sheets and scrubbed enough bedpans to last a lifetime.

She prayed that the tram would still be running when she finished her fourteen-hour shift. She could not think of walking the sixteen blocks home.

Connie had just stripped and changed the linens from a newly emptied cot. The skin of the patient who’d died had darkened so that his family did not recognize the body. She was returning with fresh blankets when she heard the new man behind the screen whimper, “Annie!”

Connie’s heart leaped in her chest. Her breath stopped. “It can’t be,” she whispered. “It can’t be.” She steadied herself. Having been disappointed so many times, she knew better than to hope, to believe. She rounded the linen screen run around each cot, the hospital’s attempt to isolate the deadly breathing of each man.

He was so changed, so thin and pale compared to the handsome young man she remembered. His eyes stared at the ceiling, but glassy as they were, she was certain he saw nothing. She waved her hand in front of his face. He did not blink but continued to moan softly, to whimper, “Annie, Annie.”

Connie blinked back tears. From habit or simply because she did not know what else to do, she lifted his chart from the foot of the bed and read
Michael.
No last name, no details of rank or birth date—simply
Michael.

Connie swallowed the fire in her throat. She read the details, the date of admission on the chart. He was not newly admitted but newly moved. Two weeks had passed since his admission. It was, in her experience, a miracle that he was still alive. That he would regain consciousness or be alive tomorrow, she could not hope.

Violating every rule, she sat on his cot, took his hand in hers, and wiped the sweat from his brow. She wrung a cloth and sponged his forehead, his cheeks, his mouth, his neck. She filled the cloth again and moistened his lips. She whispered, “I am here, Michael.”

When Connie left, two hours past midnight, she penciled
Dunnagan
on Michael’s chart and wrote her own name as nearest relation.

All the way home she wondered if she should write to Annie. But Annie and Phillippe’s wedding was scheduled for the last Saturday in May. What if Michael did not live? What if she wrote Annie and Annie canceled her wedding only to have Michael die in her arms? Annie had suffered so much. How could she drag her through more?

When Connie reached home, she was too bone weary to walk up the steps to her room. She dropped in the winged chair of her father’s library.

The maid, upon hearing Connie’s step, pulled on her dressing gown and brought up from the kitchen a pot of tea and a tray of cold sandwiches. But Connie never knew, and Tilly, after building up the fire, crept away.

One bright morning in mid-May, Annie stepped onto the dressmaker’s platform temporarily set in the middle of her room. She turned slowly as Madame Desmettre critically viewed the hem, the flow, the lines of the wedding gown she had uniquely designed and sewn, every tiny stitch by hand.

“C’est magnifique!”
Madame Desmettre smiled at last. “And you, Mademoiselle Hargrave, are beautiful—so very beautiful. It is the perfect wedding gown for the perfect wedding!”

Carol clapped her hands. “Oh! Maud was correct! She knew you would do as no one could, Deborah! It is all I hoped!” She held out her hands to Annie. “And you, my dear, do you not love it?”

Annie placed her hands willingly in Carol’s and smiled her thanks to Madame Desmettre. “It is more lovely than any gown I could imagine.”

“And do you not already feel the bride?” Carol teased, turning Annie to view her own reflection in the oval mirror.

The young woman staring back at Annie was indeed beautiful. The flowing silken gown created the perfect sculpture of her form. The sheer and delicate veil fell from a mobcap design in an icy waterfall over her upswept hair. Her shoulders and the hollow of her throat formed an exquisite backdrop for the sparkling necklace—large diamonds interspersed with midsize sapphires. Diamonds and smaller sapphires dangled from her earlobes, setting the blue of her eyes alight.

She looked a perfect Parisian fashion plate. But she looked nothing like Annie Allen.

Annie hoped that Carol Fondrey did not think her less exuberant than she. She did not want to hurt or disappoint her delighted friend.

Behind the screen Annie carefully stepped from the gown. A housemaid knocked timidly on her door and brought in the morning post on a silver tray.

“J’en suis jalouse!”
Carol pretended to pout. “Not one letter for me today, and yet for you there are two—one from America and one from your soon-to-be and soon-to-be-here husband!”

But Annie wondered. Already Phillippe had been delayed twice. He’d not been granted leave at Christmas.

Wars,
he had written,
may conclude, but peacekeeping efforts labor on.

Annie had forced herself to write Phillippe of her disappointment and shared that disappointment with Carol on Christmas morning. But when Easter came and Phillippe did not, Annie looked in the mirror and knew better than to belie her relief, a relief she did not wholly understand.

When Annie walked round the screen, tying the sash of her dressing gown, Carol playfully waved the letters before her.

“A mother is never so lucky as the bride!” Carol laughed happily and linked her arm through Madame Desmettre’s as they made for the door. Turning, she whispered coyly, “I can guess which you will open first!” The women laughed as if old friends and closed the door behind them.

But Carol was wrong.

When Annie finished reading Aunt Maggie’s letter, she held it to her heart and sat on the edge of her bed.

Gradually the morning light gave way; patches of sunlight crossed the floor.

At last she walked to her dressing table. Annie stared long into the mirror. She turned her head one way and then the other as she pulled the diamond-and-sapphire earrings away. She leaned forward to unfasten the exquisitely designed necklace—an early wedding gift from Phillippe. She placed the valuable jewels in their blue velvet box, arranging them carefully across the satin lining.

She raised her head and viewed the unadorned woman reflected before her. She wondered who Annie Allen truly was, what it would mean to find out—to put care and concern for herself above that of others, just once—and if Phillippe would understand such a quest. Would such searching be selfish?

What do You require of me, Lord?

She shook her head at the absurdity of her quandary. She did not, could never love Phillippe as she had loved Michael. That much she must face. But she cared for him, and who would not? Phillippe was a good and kind man, fully deserving of a wife’s undivided love and affection; she could not bear to hurt him, nor his dear mother, her generous friend.

Which is worse: Marry him and carry forward a pretense with the hope that I will one day love him enough, be enough for him—for them? Or tell them I am sorry, but that I love a ghost more? Would they forgive me? Could I forgive myself for not being his happiness? Can I forgive myself for pledging my love to anyone other than Michael? How has it come to this? Where do the borders between sacrificial love end and loving and owning the life I’ve been given begin?

Is this presumption, to think that their happiness depends upon me? I can’t be salvation for them. Only Christ can be that.

Is that what I tried to be for the Spragues, for Aunt Maggie and Michael, in shielding them from Aunt Eleanor? And yet, I had to protect them—didn’t I?

Was that truly the sort of sacrifice Owen gave in helping to save others rather than trying to save himself? What is the difference between a willing sacrifice and a coercion—a blackmail—even on behalf of those I love?

The questions were so hard, the ramifications so deep, that they made her head hurt.
But perhaps,
she mused,
if Phillippe is delayed anyway, if we must postpone the wedding for a month, I could write Aunt Maggie. . . . I could—

Carol rapped madly on the door of Annie’s bedchamber. “Elise! Elisabeth!” Unable to wait for an answer, she pushed it open and cried, “
Ma chère!
A telegram from Phillippe—
il arrive en train le lendemain!
”

Connie did not write to her parents of Michael. She didn’t expect him to live, and she could not burden them with false hope. They’d return to London in a heartbeat; of that she was certain.

She did not write Annie, though she debated that decision hourly.
So many secrets,
she worried.
So many, and the burden too heavy.

Connie spent every spare minute by Michael’s bedside, though he did not know. She told the hospital staff that Michael Dunnagan was her Irish cousin, thought lost in the war, and that he was closer than any brother; she was all he had in the world.

The matron, having been pestered every day for a week and finally threatened with Connie deserting her post, for which she was desperately needed, relented at last and permanently assigned her to Michael’s ward.

Connie did not know whether to pray that Michael would simply fall asleep forever or to hope for his recovery. She’d seen patients affected mentally and nervously beyond repair from bad cases of the influenza. She could not pray for such a life for Michael.

For nearly another week his only sign of intelligence was a constant murmuring for Annie. Each time Connie heard him, she brushed the damp curls from his brow, traced the slight dimple in each cheek, and whispered, “I am here, my love. I am here.” Content, he returned to sleep.

If he awoke, she’d no idea what she would do, what she would tell him. She would cross that bridge when she came to it, if she came to it.