Page 6 of The Last Kiss

“I’ll tell the others.” Taff waited for Harry to nod before he scrambled back over the rubble of the church toward where the rest of the company were sprawled, reading their mail.

Harry couldn’t join them yet, he needed a little longer to get his ill-disciplined feelings under control. Leaning back into the shadows, hidden from the world for a moment, he allowed himself the risky joy of pressing his lips to the letter, to the places where the captain had touched the paper.

“Thank you, God.”

It was the first prayer of gratitude he’d offered in years.

CHAPTERTHREE

Five months later — April 26th 1918, Hampshire, England

“Ashleigh, darling, do be careful.”

His mother’s voice chased him across the lawn to the edge of the stream where he watched the water flow past in an endless spill and dance. It glittered in the fresh spring light, untouched and unchanged by the passing of the years. As boys, he and his brother Dodge had played here, the usual things boys did, he supposed: racing paper boats, catching tadpoles in jars, splashing around until they were soaked to the skin.

Dodge worked for the War Office now. Mother and Father were terribly proud of their eldest son. He’d had a good war and the peace, when it came, promised to be even better; his election as a Member of Parliament was all but guaranteed. To that end, Dodge had married the Honourable Emily Medhurst four months ago and there was already a baby on the way.

Ash found himself praying it was a girl. He couldn’t bear the thought of bringing another boy into the world, of teaching him to laugh and play on the banks of an English stream only to send him to flounder and drown in the filthy mud of Flanders.

“Darling!” His mother startled him, her hand touching his elbow. “Don’t stand so close to the edge. What if you topple in?”

He gritted his teeth against her kindness, adjusted his grip on his cane, and turned to say, “I w-won’t topple in. But if I d-d-did, I’d get w-wet. That’s all.”

She tutted and tugged him back a step. “For me, Ashleigh. Think of your poor mama.”

His poor mama in her elegant summer dress of palest yellow, dark hair barely tarnished by a scattering of grey, and her narrow face shadowed beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Her hand on his arm was part comfort and part tether, holding him there in the garden, in his parents’ house, in the unreal, unchanged world. Not that he had anywhere else to go. He’d only been on his feet — foot — again for three months, and that with difficulty. The thought of returning to his position at the bank made him breathless, made him cling to the illusory securities of his childhood home.

Made him want Harry West at his side again, with his bright grin and warm hazel eyes, lighting Ash’s world even at the darkest of times. But West was still at the front. He may be dead. Ash didn’t know because he hadn’t had a letter in two weeks.

Mother pressed his arm. “Come along, we’ll have some tea and cake. You’re still too thin, you know. Oh, and I’ve invited the Allens to tea. You remember Miss Allen? Olive Allen?”

“Of c-course.” He turned, unable to swallow a grunt of pain when the stump of his leg, lost just below the knee, rubbed against his newly fitted prosthetic.

His mother’s grimace was half pity and half embarrassment. She hid it quickly, adopting a bright smile as she looped her arm through his. “Olive was supposed to marry Percy Cross, poor thing.”

Percy Cross, who’d copped a packet in the first year of the war. A laughing, handsome boy, Ash remembered. Like so many other boys who’d never come home, whose bodies were left to rot in the mire. Boys like Jimmy Tilney, with his penny whistle and insolent grin, who’d drowned in the mud because Ash couldn’t save him.

“But she turned him down — much to her mama’s displeasure — and then the war came and… Well, she can’t be so fussy now.”

Ash blinked, the green grass suddenly too vivid and the sky a dizzying blue. He couldn’t catch the meaning of his mother’s words. “Too fussy about w-what?”

She gestured with one hand, as if shooing away a fly. “You’re still a handsome boy, darling. Despite everything.”

He stopped walking, leaning on his cane to take the weight off his sore leg. “Mother — ”

“Now!” She held up a staying hand. “Your war is over, Ashleigh. It’s time to think about the future. And Olive Allen is such a capable young woman. She’s a VAD, you know, at the auxiliary hospital they’ve set up at Chewton Lodge. She could look after you and — ”

“I d-d-don’t — I d-don’t need looking after. I’m n-not a…a…c-c-cripple.”

But he was in her eyes, and in the world’s. He wasn’t the man who’d marched to war a lifetime ago. He was someone else now, someone who limped along with a cane and couldn’t face taking the train to London. Someone who woke shouting in the night, sweat-soaked and shaking, who couldn’t quite believe that this world of spring gardens and tea parties existed while his men were still fighting at the front.

While Harry West was still fighting.

“You’re getting distressed again,” his mother scolded, lips pursing. “You really must make an effort, darling. We all have to carry on.”

As if getting out of bed every day wasn’t aneffort. But he did as she asked and sat in the garden drinking tea and eating the seed cake he remembered from his childhood, making polite conversation with Miss Allen and her mother.

Olive, it transpired, was a painfully awkward young woman. Too tall to be elegant and possessing features more likely to be called strong than pretty, she seemed to fold in on herself as if attempting to hide in plain sight. Ash felt a distant pity for her, chafing as she clearly was beneath her formidable mother’s rule, but beyond that he had no real interest. He had no real interest in anything, these days.

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