She just shook her head a little. Freddie saw that she had bloody hands. She looked up at Faland and said, “Well?” He could see the shine of her tears in the billowing light. Freddie wanted to cry too, but his mind and his memory were in too much chaos.
“We have to get out of here,” said Jones.
“That way,” said Winter.
Laura said nothing, and neither did Freddie. But they both turned when the other two prompted them, and the echoes of Faland’s music chased them out of Poperinghe. The crowd heaved with the emotion of it, and at the very edge of hearing, Freddie thought he heard Faland’s voice.
“Farewell, Iven,” said Faland, and laughed. “Try not to think of me too much.”
· · ·
They walked. Winter, leaning on Freddie’s shoulder, alone of them all seemed to have some idea where they were going, which lanes and roads would conceal them. Perhaps that was how he’d survived, all those months. When he stayed. Looking for Freddie.
Freddie didn’t know how to feel.
They walked until it felt that they’d always been walking.
Jones spent the whole time insulting them, chivvying them, ordering them to keep going. And Winter set his jaw and kept going, as he had on the battlefield, his courage as bright as it had been there.
So they went.
Finally—and Freddie could not have said exactly when it happened, except that day was breaking and he was utterly spent—theystopped walking and found themselves on the outskirts of an ordinary town, with the mutter of war quieter than the send and suck of the sea. Freddie didn’t know how far they’d gone. He could not muster enough of himself to care. He felt like he’d wakened from a dream, and half-wished he hadn’t.
Laura’s face was still streaked with tears; she was gray in the morning light and her skirt was bloody. Winter’s face was expressionless, but he and Freddie had held each other up, that last distance, each instinctively seeking the other’s strength. “We must find a rooming—house—run by Belgians,” Laura said. “A modest rooming house. And pay them well. So they won’t ask questions. Or talk.”
“I’ll go,” said Jones. He looked as though he’d no idea what had happened. But he was the only one of the four neither bloodied nor wraithlike. His glance lingered briefly on Laura. Then he went.
It hardly took half an hour, which was good because they were all, to varying degrees, on their last legs. It wasn’t even that difficult. No one, in those bad days, would turn down hard currency, no matter how strange the appearance of a doctor and a nurse, and two hollow-eyed men that kept to the shadows. They took two rooms, and locked the doors, and then it was quiet, and Freddie didn’t know what to do. He and Laura took one of the rooms, Jones and Winter the other. Freddie didn’t say anything. The darkness was prosaic now, the world’s horrors gray, unleavened with Faland’s malice, his painful empathy. Freddie stood there, feeling hollow.
· · ·
The mattress was suspect and the plumbing shrieked. Freddie hadn’t said a word. But Laura was too tired and too grieved to worry about that; he wasthere,alive, dragged back to her against the odds. She’d saved him, she reminded herself. She’d come there to save him, and she’d saved him. Even if she could not save Pim.
It hurt to think of Pim.
She took off her stained dress and put it to soak. Stood there in her combination and stockings, wrapped a blanket around hershoulders. Freddie was still standing there, looking around at the homely room as though he could not quite believe it was real. When she went to him, he was passive; let her help him peel off his clothes, washed his face when she put the cloth in his hands. “Is this real?” he asked her once, low.
“Just rest,” she told him.
And finally, he went to bed, and fell into a restless sleep. His white-threaded hair stuck to his cheeks. Laura sat awake, watching, as though she could make it all right for him if she just never looked away.
She could not, of course. Freddie woke screaming, at some point, in the darkness. No effort on her part, no pleading, no comfort, no touch, no words, would quiet him.
Preoccupied, she didn’t see Winter come into the room, didn’t hear his halting footsteps until he was standing beside the bed. He’d been with Jones next door; Jones had cleaned and dressed his wound. She would have thought he’d be dead to the world now. But he was there, standing by Freddie’s bed, his expression guarded.
Freddie raised his head, looked at Winter as he had not looked at Laura. He said, “It’s dark.”
Winter said to Laura, although his eyes never left Freddie, “Sometimes, waking, I’m back in the pillbox with no way out. There’s no light. There’s no air. I would have died, if I’d been alone. I’d have gone mad, if I’d been alone.” Pause. “I think for him it’s the same.”
Like sharing the same death, the same birth. Laura understood. She also felt an unholy jet of rage. How dare he? This German, this enemy. He’d have killed Freddie out in No Man’s Land but for a strange quirk of fate. How dare he stand there, looking at her with steady eyes, as though he knew her brother, the last family she had, better than she ever could?
Her brother who’d all but forgotten her. Her brother whom she loved. Who was all she had left in the world. Whose eyes were open wide, stark and afraid. He’d given up oblivion to try to come back to her. She’d saved him from that.
But she could not save him from this.
Perhaps they’d never find their way back to each other. But they had a chance to try. Because he was alive.
She owed Winter that.
