Water Song (Once Upon a Time (Simon Pulse)) Read online

  “Where would you go?” the wife asked.

  “Dunkirk.”

  “On foot?”

  Emma nodded.

  “It’s far,” the wife warned, “nearly twenty-five miles. And from there you might need to go farther to the port in Calais in order to cross the Strait of Dover, because I don’t know if boats are even leaving Dunkirk these days.”

  “I’ll manage,” Emma replied with more assurance than she actually felt.

  “There’s a better path right behind the stall. It’s narrower but safer and leads to another dirt path that will take you out to a country road,” the wife told her. “You can follow that all the way to the North Sea. My grandfather was a sailor and he said it was the fastest way to come back home.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Wait until my husband and I create a diversion, then go,” the wife added.

  Emma paid the woman for the soap and then wandered to the far corner of the stall. It wasn’t long before the wife stood in front of her stall scolding her husband in Flemish. The husband, acting equally enraged, shoved her, and his wife tumbled backward onto the ground. People nearby hurried over to console the wife but she jumped back up and lunged at her husband, wrapping her hands around his throat.

  Emma recognized the diversion—her chance to escape. Quickly ducking behind the stall, she walked briskly the two yards to the woods. Once inside the trees, she began to run.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Love Potion

  “Mam, I just can’t get my strength back,” Jack cried in frustration to the regal woman sitting beside him on the giant bent, twisted root at the foot of a towering cedar in the flooded forest. “Swimming in that cold well took all I’d gained out of me.”

  “It cost you dearly,” she agreed, holding her two palms up to him as though sensing his energy. “The spirit field around your body is very weak.”

  “I want to be completely well again!” he shouted, burying his face in his hands in despair. The long healing process was defeating him. He was used to being vigorous, strong, and fast. He didn’t recognize this injured body as his own. It angered him to be trapped inside of it.

  “You’ve been deeply hurt,” she sympathized, stroking his hair tenderly. “Your body has been ravaged with poison and your spirit has been wrung dry from seeing so much death and misery. The old healing ways can only do so much, especially when they are ministered in this dream time and in this manner.”

  Again she smeared the concoction of swamp mud and tree lichen across his eyes. He sighed at the wonderful coolness. His burning eyes hadn’t felt this soothing relief since the last time she did it.

  “Mam, I met a girl and I want her to think loving thoughts toward me. How can I make her love me, weak and wrecked as I am right now?”

  “Do you love her?”

  He hesitated. Did he? Really? Or was it simply pride? Did he want to know that she would see him as worthy of her love?

  He thought of her curled in the chair with the lamplight falling on her brown curls; how graceful and peaceful she looked then. He remembered how her eyes flashed when she was angry with him. He recalled her bravely helping him out of the well and the vulnerability he’d seen in her face the day they had fought over which of them was the more prejudiced.

  “I think I do love her,” he told his mother. “But what hope can I have of winning her as I am now, low as an injured swamp frog?”

  “You are no such thing,” she said with a note of irritation. “You are from a line of kings and queens taken from their lands; driven from their homes, but royal just the same. My great-great-grandmother was a princess of the Natchez people, her daughter was a revered medicine woman. Many bloods have mingled with those of your ancestors since that time; they have blended to make you the fine prince that you are.”

  “In my world I am no prince,” he scoffed.

  “There are princes of your world who are more common than any peasant,” she insisted. “You are a true prince of the spirit. And you have been taught the princely magic. Do not forget who you are.”

  As he gazed on her, she began to lose her vividness. He didn’t know if it was his eyesight or if she was leaving him. “How can I make her love me?” he asked, desperate to hear her words before she was gone.

  “Be always worthy of her love.”

  “But I am not strong as I once was,” he said despondently.

  “You have been taught the love potion,” she replied. “It’s locked in your memory, my darlin’ boy. It is there for you to find. But be cautious about using it. It is the stuff of trickery and deceit. Do not use it lightly.”

  Once again, time speeded up and the clouds raced past. In the next second he was staring up at the rich brocade of the bed’s canopy. Touching his eyes, he discovered that they had stopped burning though there was no longer any mud on them.

  His mother had taught him this intentional dreaming as a young boy. It felt so real that he was never sure if he had actually transported his soul somewhere or if it was, indeed, a dream.

  Back when his mother was alive, some people had claimed that they’d seen her in one place at noon and then others had sworn she’d been spotted miles away mere minutes later. Even after her death people continued to make the same claims. She was one of fifteen children, nine of them female. It was possible folks were seeing her sisters, Jack’s aunts—and, later, maybe they were even seeing one of his own five older sisters. He’d been raised in a world so ripe with superstition and magic that he could never be sure of what was real and was not.

  Gazing around the room, he realized that Emma had gone out. A plate of cabbage, potatoes, and sausage by his bed told him that Claudine had already been there with lunch. That’s when he remembered that it was their day to go to the market.

  A terrible dread washed over him like a case of cold chills. Something was not right.

  He felt her absence more keenly than he ever had when she was gone, as though she’d taken every last bit of her essence and energy out of the room and was now irrevocably and absolutely gone forever.

  The very idea of never seeing her again formed a cramp in the pit of his abdomen, and he curled in the bed feeling sick to his stomach. If he had been unsure before whether or not his love was genuine, he knew it now with complete certainty. Only true love lost would have the power to cause him this much pain.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Late-Night Visitors

  When Emma was about a quarter mile into the woods, she stopped to lean on a tree. Before this, she hadn’t dared to rest but now she felt safe enough. More than anything, she wanted a moment to tear open the letter the woman had handed her.

  My Dearest Rose and Emma,

  I pray this letter reaches you both, as I am sick with worry for your safety. I shall never forgive myself for allowing you to take such an ill-conceived journey. All I can say in my defense is that the estate has always seemed to exist in an isolated world of its own and it never seemed possible that the war would reach you there. I suppose I thought of it as enjoying the same protection that those of us in England experience, at least for the moment, although that too could end if the enemy gains control of the English Channel as they are so aggressively attempting to do.

  She looked up from the letter, tears filling her eyes. He didn’t know about her mother, then. Her letter never reached him.

  At least, judging from the tone of the letter, he didn’t think her mother had left him. He simply believed they were stuck here together due to the war. How she wished that were true.

  For the moment, though, my fondest wish is to have you both home safe with me, she continued reading. I have attempted to come get you myself but to no avail. The several boats I have attempted to hire have cancelled the trip due to German U-boat attacks in the channel. I have succeeded in contacting a Mr. Delmont Mayhew, an associate of mine residing in Dunkirk. I have written his address at the bottom of this letter. I exhort you to reach him in that town. I have paid hi
m handsomely to arrange your safe transport across the channel.

  How desperately I wish I could be there to comfort you. I hate to think of you both there trying to make sense of this seemingly senseless war. Keep in mind that one of the reasons we are at war now is because we must honor the promises we have made to our allies. It is an honorable thing to stand by your promises; one of the few ways we have left of knowing the right thing to do in a world that is rapidly giving way under the pressures of chaos.

  Emma put down the letter, her tears now falling freely in trails down her cheeks. It was as though her father were right there, speaking to her. How deeply she wanted to wrap her arms around him and sob. “But he’s not here. It’s only a letter,” she reminded herself as she wiped her eyes.

  Lifting the letter again, the word promise seemed to jump off the page at her.

  Her father’s words made her recall her promise to Jack. If he gave her the locket, she would be his true friend. She’d said the words I promise. The deal was nothing if not utterly clear.

  But the terms were not as obvious. She hadn’t delivered the so-called friendly kiss. What held her back was the fear that he was secretly laughing at her. She could easily picture him chuckling and saying he’d received better kisses from a skeeter hawk or one of his other colorful phrases. Everything was a joke to him.

  Still … she had promised to be his true friend and to kiss him, as a friend. But the truth was … she thought she knew what this new feeling toward him was.

  Possibly it was love, or something like it. She didn’t exactly know what this kind of love felt like. She’d thought she’d loved Lloyd, but she had always really known, deep down, that it had been just thrills and excitement, not really love.

  But if this thing she felt toward Jack was love … and she kissed him … and he made a joke of it …

  If that happened, she couldn’t bear it.

  But … she had promised to be his friend. Would a true friend leave him behind, thinking only of her own escape to Dunkirk?

  “Hey there, sug. I didn’t expect to see you again,” Jack greeted her casually from the bed when she came into the room that evening.

  “Oh? Why?” she asked, setting her net bag of foods down on the dresser.

  “Just had the feelin’ you were tired of being cooped up, that you might make a break for it.”

  “I did make a run for it, if you must know,” she revealed, “but it didn’t seem right to just leave you here all alone.”

  “It’s a free world—at least last time I looked, it was,” he commented breezily.

  His remark made her feel like a total fool. Here she’d given up her chance to escape because of her promise to him, and he couldn’t care less. Infuriated, she picked a hairbrush off the dresser and hurled it at him.

  “Hey!” he shouted, dodging the brush. “I am a wounded soldier in Her Majesty’s army, if you don’t mind!”

  “You’re not even that injured anymore,” she came back at him angrily. “Come to think of it, it’s time you took the chair and let me have the bed.”

  “As you wish, princess,” he said, getting off the bed.

  “Don’t start calling me that!”

  “That’s what you are, a spoiled princess, isn’t it?” he said as he moved to the chair.

  “I most certainly am not!”

  He just sat there smirking at her in that superior way that enraged her so. Why had she ever come back for this grinning idiot, let alone had the idea that she was in love with him?

  It was beyond imagining. Being shut up in this room with him was making her lose her mind!

  That evening she stretched out on her newly returned bed to read. She’d finished Pride and Prejudice and had moved on to Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. It was a story of ill-fated, turbulent romance taking place on the Scottish moors between Cathy, a young woman of means, and Heathcliff, the difficult and proud orphan her father had brought into the house. Her friends at the Hampshire School had told her it was a wonderfully tragic love story, but so far she’d just found Heathcliff to be annoying and arrogant.

  Jack sat in the chair with his legs slung over the arm, still reading Great Expectations.

  Slow reader, she observed, glancing over at him.

  In another half hour he was asleep in the chair, the book in his lap, his blanket piled on the floor below him.

  Watching him sleep, looking so boyishly vulnerable, caused some of her anger toward him to seep away. Maybe it was just his pride that made him act like he didn’t care. She’d been so focused on her own insecurity, her fear of ridicule, that she hadn’t considered he might harbor insecurities of his own. It was possible he had realized she might not come back and was only trying to cover up his feelings.

  With a sigh, she got out of bed, took the book from him, and replaced the blanket. She did these things warily, half expecting his arm to snap out as it had before, but he continued to sleep, muttering something about alligators and swamp mud before settling down again.

  After going into the bathroom to put on her long white nightgown and undoing the pins from her hair, she crawled into bed.

  Outside the window to her left came a familiar whistling sound. She turned toward it in time to see a bright flare out in the fields. A missile had gone off. In the distance she heard the deadly rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire. Another battle had begun.

  Pulling the pillow over her head, she shut her eyes tightly. Her nose and eyes tingled, making her expect to cry but no tears came. Maybe, she considered with some alarm, she had none left.

  Emma bolted to a sitting position there in the darkness of the bedroom.

  A horrible strangled sound, like someone being choked to death, had awakened her.

  “Jack!” she realized, throwing off her covers and stumbling to him in the dark. Out in the fields, an exploding shell lit up the room and she saw him thrashing in the big chair.

  “I’m coming! Hold on! I’m coming!” he shouted.

  She sagged with relief. It was a nightmare, no doubt set off by the battle outside.

  “Jack,” she said, reaching to shake him. His flailing arm knocked her to the floor. “Wake up!” she shouted, grabbing hold of his leg as it kicked out, nearly hitting her in the face. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  His eyes snapped open, wide with horror, larger than she’d ever seen them.

  “It’s okay! You’re safe,” she soothed him.

  She saw he still wasn’t sure where he was. His teeth chattered as a tremble ran through him. She settled on the arm of the chair and rubbed his shoulder. After a moment, he came fully awake and buried his face in his hands.

  “Do you want to talk about it,” she offered cautiously, “or would you rather not?”

  He looked up at her, opened his mouth to speak, but then hesitated.

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to protect me. I can take it,” she assured him softly, though she was not entirely sure this was true.

  “I dreamed I was back at the gas attack,” he began. “When the gas hit, there was a kid in the trench next to me, just fifteen years old. He lied about his age to enlist. I lost sight of him durin’ the attack. He was callin’ to me in the haze, but I couldn’t find him.”

  “It must have been horrible,” Emma murmured.

  “It was. I hope that kid made it out. If I hadn’t been able to hold my breath for so long, I don’t know if I would have made it out of there.”

  “You came a long way,” she commented.

  He nodded. “I just kept tryin’ to find trees and water to shield me from the gas.”

  “Did you really sign up simply to get the uniform?” she asked.

  “Naw,” he said with a grim laugh. “I was just messin’ with ya when I told ya that. I got swept up in the excitement of the whole thing. And I didn’t think it was right that America was stayin’ out of it. England is our ally, right? So you got to stick up for your friends. That’s the way I saw it, anyhow.”

  “Aw
fully idealistic,” she observed.

  “Could be,” he allowed. “Might just be awfully dumb.”

  “No,” she disagreed, “not dumb.”

  “I really thought you were going to make a run for it today,” he confided.

  “Why did you think that?”

  “I have feelin’s sometimes, premonitions, I suppose. My mam had ’em too. People came to her to have her predict things. She taught me to trust those feelin’s, but this time I was wrong, it appears.”

  “You were nearly right,” she confessed. “I was about a quarter mile into the woods, but I came back.”

  “I guess I’m not the only idealist,” he remarked seriously.

  The comment made her smile wistfully. “We’re some pair, eh?”

  “Yeah, you right about that,” he agreed, “a coupla real dopes.”

  Emma startled to waking. She’d fallen asleep still on the chair arm, her head resting against its back.

  A strip of brilliant hall light shone in from the door. Rough orders were barked in German as three soldiers were pushed into the room.

  Emma hurried to the dresser and turned on the lamp. Three soldiers stood before her. From their uniforms she saw one was French, one was Canadian, and the third, the youngest, was English.

  Jack had awakened and risen from the chair. “Hey, Kid,” he said cheerfully. “Nice of you to drop by. I was just talkin’ about you.”

  A look of happy amazement appeared on the young soldier’s thin, pale face. A bloody gash ran across his forehead. As he went to speak, he staggered backward, tumbling to the floor.

  Jack rushed to his side. “I’ll get a wet cloth from the bathroom,” Emma said, hurrying off to get it.

  “He just got out of the hospital where he’s been since after the gas attack,” the French soldier said in French. “We were sent to find out who was up here and we were caught. He fell over and hit his head on a rock when they fired at us. Luckily the bullet missed him.”