“Winter?” whispered Freddie.
“It can wait,” said Jones, in a tone that allowed for no arguments. “You can barely keep your feet.”
Laura said slowly, “You’re going to Fifth Army HQ tonight, Pim?”
“Yes,” said Pim. “But of course I don’t need Laura to come with me, Mary, that’s quite all right. She ought to be here, of course, with her brother—”
“No,” said Mary. “You’ve backed me into a corner, Penelope Shaw, and I’ll let you go on that one condition, that Iven goes with you. I don’t know what you’re playing at, but Iven will keep you out of trouble, if only for her brother’s sake.Youwill make sure that no one at HQ blames the hospital for this wretched contretemps. In exchange, we shall put Laura’s brother in a bed quietly, and I shall arrange for them to leave the country. All right?”
Pim was shaking her head. “No—Mary, I’d rather not—”
“I mean it,” said Mary. “That, or I send Iven’s brother straight back to the Canadian Army and they deal with him. I have no more patience for any of this.”
Pim looked suddenly tired. “All right.”
Jones said reassuringly, “The quicker you go, the quicker you can come back. I’ll find a bed for your brother.”
Freddie was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Can’t you see?” It was as though he fought to make sense, but could not.
“Stephen,” Laura said, low. “Take care of him.”
POPERINGHE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
April 1918
Young appeared in the driveright after Laura had had the quickest wash of her life, and flung on a clean uniform. In the meantime, Jones had hustled Freddie up to his own room. When Laura paused to look in on them, her brother was sitting on Jones’s bed with his boots off, his shoulders tense. “Malnourished,” said Jones, eyeing him. “In fact I don’t know what the hell he’s been living on. Look at his teeth.”
Laura didn’t answer. She didn’t think Freddie even knew where he was. He sat very still. She crossed the room, knelt. He raised his eyes to her face. A hint of trust there, a question under the confusion. How, after all this, could she possibly leave him?
Jones seemed to follow her thought. “If Borden says she’ll do a thing, she’ll do it,” he said, from behind her. “She meant this. Do it and she’ll get you both out.”
She thought he was right. But she was still afraid to go. As though, if she let her brother out of her sight for one more instant, it would snap the last thread that bound them to their past, and to each other.She felt Jones’s hand on her elbow. He drew her to her feet. Looked her in the face. “I’ll take care of him, Laura,” he said.
He was impatient, unsentimental. He gave her brother his bed. He’d taken a terrible risk, gone against his own judgment, used his own blood to save Winter’s life. And then, when Winter threw their trust back in their faces, he hadn’t said a word. She said, “Why, Stephen?”
He shrugged a little.
She waited.
“I would like you to go home,” he said at last. “And I want to hear you laugh one day. Go on, Iven.”
Laura put a hand on Freddie’s stiff shoulder. He glanced up, but he didn’t speak. Then she went.
· · ·
Young waited outside the car, looking boyish in the soft spring night, his ears absurd, the adolescent slope of his shoulders concealed by his uniform. To his credit, only a little disappointment crossed his face when he saw Laura loping along at Pim’s heels.
They got in the car and sped off. “Are you all right, Mrs. Shaw?” Young asked. “Such a dreadful ordeal. Your heroism, stopping the spy—”
Pim didn’t answer, but when she smiled and touched his hand, he fell stammeringly silent. Then Pim said, “I just wish I’d recalled sooner what that man said.”
What did he say, Pim?The question penetrated the fog of Laura’s tired mind. Something didn’t add up.
“Something that rascal said to you?” said Young, echoing Laura’s thought. “Oh, lord, when I think of him—so sly—there beside you and you unsuspecting, and the gun might easily have—”
He swallowed and fell silent. Pim had put her hand over his again. There was again that strange distress, not quite love, in Young’s face. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m all right. I must only see the general. So kind of him, to take a moment.”
“Well,” said Young with disarming frankness, “it’s got everyoneon the jump—spy on our doorstep, very nearly assassinated a general. And the Germans attacking—it’s really dreadful up there now, Ypres all to pieces with the shelling. And they had to pull back from the Ridge. It was indefensible, you know.”
