Water Song (Once Upon a Time (Simon Pulse)) Page 9

  Jack lifted the boy’s jacket to reveal that his shirt was soaked in blood. “It didn’t miss him entirely,” he replied in French.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Louisiana Magic

  Emma awoke the next morning, curled in the chair. After washing the boy’s wounds as best they could, they’d laid him in the bed. The two other soldiers stretched out on blankets to sleep on the rug.

  Jack had also slept on the floor, but he wasn’t there now. The door to the bathroom stood ajar, and she craned her neck for signs of movement but all was silent inside.

  Dressing quickly in the bathroom, she returned. The Canadian and French soldiers both sat with their backs against the wall. Claudine had come in with five plates and a serving bowl of oatmeal with no accompanying milk.

  The German guard who had come in with Claudine barked for her to put the tray down and leave the room. She cast an apologetic look at Emma, but there was clearly nothing she could do. Before this they had been getting the same meals as the soldiers but now apparently they were to be fed prisoner’s rations.

  “The soldier on the bed is injured,” Emma told the guard in German.

  “I will tell the colonel,” he replied as he left with Claudine.

  A few moments later, Colonel Schiller arrived. “He’s been shot,” Emma told him.

  “I am aware. I shot him myself,” the colonel replied.

  “He needs help.”

  Colonel Schiller glanced at the other two soldiers and then turned back to Emma. “We tended to your husband because he is not the enemy. We do not owe this soldier anything. If he dies, he dies.”

  The Canadian soldier swore at him, but it only made the colonel laugh. “Spies take their chances and deserve what they get,” he remarked. “Speaking of which, we shall have a talk later about your recent trip to the market.” He gazed around the room. “Where is your husband?”

  No handy story came to her lips this time. She hadn’t the slightest idea where he had gone or how he had done it. It was as though he had just vanished!

  “Your husband?” Colonel Schiller pressed.

  The air filled with tension as she again failed to answer. With darting eyes she looked to the soldiers for aid. Had they seen where he’d gone? With the smallest of movements, they shook their heads and lifted their eyebrows, indicating that they couldn’t help.

  “Ya, you right. That faucet knob is stuck tight, honey pie,” Jack said, stepping out of the bathroom as if they’d been engaged all along in a dialogue regarding the plumbing. “I can’t turn it either.”

  Emma forced herself to be bright. “See? I told you, dear.”

  With an annoyed cough, Colonel Schiller left. Emma immediately rushed to Jack. “Where were you?”

  Without answering, he returned to the bathroom and took her net grocery bag from the linen closet, handing it to her. It contained milk and a hunk of cheese, a small round loaf of bread. The things she’d brought back from the market were already gone. These were new. Had he made a trip all the way to the market to replace them? How would that have been possible? “Where did you get these things?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Louisiana magic.”

  “No, really?” She insisted on knowing, following him into the bedroom.

  “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to,” he said.

  “Tell me,” she demanded.

  “Claudine left the back door to the kitchen open,” he revealed in a reluctant whisper as he lifted a small bundle tied in cloth from the string bag.

  “What’s that?” she asked, coming alongside him.

  As he untied the bundle a foul stench poured out of it. It reminded Emma of a dead animal decaying. “Oh! Awful!” she cried, recoiling. “What is it?”

  “It’s exactly the magic that Kid, here, needs.” Jack inhaled as though it were an apple pie baking, closing his eyes with delight. “Mud, lichen, and, best of all …” Reaching into the bag he pulled out something brown and shriveled. “Bat wing,” he said, crushing it into powder over the bag’s opening. “There’s all sorts of good minerals and healing aids in there.”

  “You can’t be serious!” Emma cried.

  “I most certainly am serious. Do you know what a prize this is, a wonderful piece of luck? I found the poor little fella lying on the ground. My mam believed bat saliva could prevent a stroke or a heart attack. She read to me about a fella named Pliny in ancient Rome who believed that if you put bat blood under a woman’s pillow at night, she’d wake up and be in love with you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Emma maintained.

  “Is it? Mam met a man from Trinidad who swore drinking bat’s blood could make you invisible.”

  “Ugh! How nauseating,” Emma said with an expression of disgust.

  He smiled at her repugnance over the bat.

  “Where is the rest of the bat?” she asked.

  Ignoring the question, he poured the mixture he’d made onto one of the plates and wet it with some of the milk he’d brought in. Taking scissors off the dresser, he went to sit beside the boy sleeping in the bed and snipped off a half inch of his blond bangs.

  “I think you’ve gone mad,” Emma commented as he sprinkled the hair into the brown, reeking concoction he now cupped in his palm. She looked to the other two soldiers for confirmation of this, but they simply shrugged as they poured milk on their oatmeal.

  “Wake up, Kid,” Jack said, shaking the boy gently. “Doctor Magic is here to fix you up. Soon you’ll be right as rain.”

  Almost as if his words had brought it on, thunder clouds abruptly dimmed the light. Raindrops splashed against the windows. Jack laughed, delighted. “It’s what I’m sayin’—right as rain!”

  The next day, the British and Canadian soldiers were taken to a separate room. Emma guessed it was her old bedroom by the direction and distance of the footsteps and the closing door. Colonel Schiller allowed Kid to stay in the room with Emma and Jack probably because they were taking care of him so well.

  Astoundingly well, Emma thought with amazement as she sat in the big chair one afternoon with her copy of Wuthering Heights in her lap. Jack’s disgusting salve applied over Kid’s wound had stopped the bleeding entirely. By the next morning the injury was no more than a raised, twisting, red mark.

  “It don’t even hurt, Jack,” Kid said now, sitting up in bed and gazing at Jack with awe and gratitude.

  “Lucky thing the bullet passed right through you,” Jack noted as he sat on a hard-backed chair and watched the rainstorm continue to pound the windows.

  “I’m sure glad I came upon you here,” Kid told him. “Most of the guys in the fields don’t run into doctors as good as you. I sure was lucky.”

  Jack smiled before turning his attention back to the rain-soaked window. Emma turned in the big chair and put down Wuthering Heights to observe him; he watched the rain as if entranced by it. What was he thinking about? Surely he was crazy as a loon.

  “How are you doing this?” Emma asked him once Kid had fallen off for a nap. “How did you learn all this … I don’t know what to call it … folk medicine?”

  “My mam was the queen of healin’ magic in our parish and she taught me all she knew,” he replied.

  “How are you getting out of here?” she asked.

  “More magic.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Maybe I’m drinkin’ bat’s blood and turnin’ invisible.”

  “Stop! I thought we were going to be friends,” she reminded him. “Friends don’t keep secrets.”

  “Sometimes they do,” he disagreed. “Some secrets are too powerful to share—or too dangerous.”

  “I don’t know if we can be friends if you feel that way,” she said.

  “Fine by me, sug. Truth be told, it’s not only your friendship that I wanted. If I can’t have your love, I can live without your friendship. Who needs it?”

  “You are so arrogant!” Emma shouted at him, and then lowered her voice to a fierce whisper in
deference to Kid’s need to sleep. “You want me to love you? Right now, I don’t even like you! I was only trying to abide by my promise, which I made only to get my locket back. Do you think I could love a superstitious fool who believes in all this nonsense magic?”

  “You would love me if I wanted you to,” he came back at her angrily. “Don’t you think I learned to make love potions? There are more methods than the one Pliny the old Roman knew. There are hundreds of different kinds, and my mam taught them all to me.”

  Emma looked at him, stunned. She didn’t believe him—yet she’d seen firsthand how his potion had healed Kid.

  Could he really make her love him if she didn’t want to? Did she believe he had that power?

  Suddenly, she was unsure. “You wouldn’t do that,” she said uncertainly.

  “No,” he agreed, his anger seeming to drain away. He turned back to the window, once again staring out into the rain. “I wouldn’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Kid

  Claudine came in to collect the plates. Emma was in the bathroom washing up, preparing to go to the market. Kid lay asleep on the bed. “Do you have it ready?” she asked Jack, speaking French.

  “One second,” he replied in French, checking back and forth between the numbers he’d written on his pad and the open copy of Oliver Twist on his lap. “How do you spell the name of the chlorine gas they use now? Is it with a k or a c?”

  She didn’t know, so he spelled chlorine as best he could on his pad before looking on the printed pages for the corresponding numbers he required. When translated, his sentence would read: They are replacing the kloreen gas with a much worse one called mustard gas. They are also trying to make a gas that will eat through the rubber on the gas masks. Emma had heard two guards discussing this one day when she happened to be standing just on the other side of the door. She’d told Jack, and now Claudine would carry this information to her friend the butcher, who would pass it on from there.

  The bathroom door began to open as Jack hastily thrust the coded paper at Claudine. “You look nice, sug,” he told Emma as she entered the room dressed to go to the market.

  “Thanks,” she grunted.

  “Is your friend the colonel expecting you to bring him back some big Allied secret today?”

  She sighed miserably. “I don’t know what to tell him! If I hear anything useful to him I’m certainly not going to reveal it. It’s not easy to keep coming up with useless facts.”

  “Tell him George the Fifth and Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm are all first cousins,” he suggested lightly. This fact always astounded him, that the leaders of England, Russia, and Germany were all grandchildren of England’s Queen Victoria. “Tell Colonel Schiller that the royal brats have all kissed and made up, so everyone gets to go home.”

  She smiled wanly. “If it were only that simple,” she said. “I really need something to tell him, though.”

  “Kid told me he heard in the trenches that Turkey is talking about joining Germany and Austria,” he suggested. He figured that if Kid had heard it, the Germans knew it too, but it might sound convincing to the colonel.

  She considered this and nodded. “Thanks. That might work. I’ll say I overheard two shoppers talking about it.”

  “Good luck,” he said as she left with Claudine, “and see if you can bring back some good cheese.”

  “You two aren’t really married, are you?” Kid asked. He was awake and looking out at Jack from beneath the covers. “I heard that colonel say you were.”

  “It’s only a cover story,” Jack replied from across the room. “Emma figured that if they didn’t know I was a Brit soldier, they would be nicer to me. Since I talk American, she hoped they might believe it, and they did.”

  He smiled at the memory of that day as he walked toward Kid. “You should have seen her givin’ it to them, all high and mighty British, tellin’ them this was her place and she’d go where she pleased. You’d have thought she was the queen herself. You’ve got to admit that it was quick thinkin’ on her part, the whole husband story. It saved my bacon, that much’s certain.”

  “But you two love each other a lot, don’t you?” Kid said. “I can see it.”

  “Naw, she don’t love me,” Jack disagreed brusquely. “Listen, Kid, I’ve been wantin’ to tell you: I’m sorry I lost track of you that day during the gas attack.”

  “It’s okay,” Kid replied. “Everybody was running in all directions, and nobody could see a thing. Wasn’t it bad luck, both of us being there and not even with our own battalion.”

  “Rotten luck,” Jack agreed.

  “Fifteen thousand soldiers were gassed, British and French troops both. Two thousand soldiers were killed by the Germans that day,” Kid told him. “Some soldiers just coughed themselves to death right where they stood.”

  “Then I suppose we were a little lucky, after all,” Jack suggested. “At least we’re alive and in one piece.”

  “I guess so,” Kid agreed. “And, do you know what? The Germans didn’t even gain that much ground from the attack. They didn’t really understand what they’d done, so they didn’t rush in to grab the land.”

  “It’s a crazy war,” Jack commented.

  “But you and Emma might have never met if it wasn’t for the war,” Kid pointed out. “So maybe some good came out of it, after all.”

  “I told you, she don’t love me,” Jack insisted.

  “I don’t know,” Kid replied. “I think you’re wrong.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A Night of Horror

  Emma noticed that Kid’s vivid blue eyes brightened every day as he grew stronger. “I knew right away you and Jack weren’t married. He certainly would have told me if he had a wife as pretty as you,” he said one day as she helped feed him the chicken broth Claudine had brought in.

  “Thanks, Kid. What’s your real name, by the way?”

  “You don’t want to know. It’s too horrible.”

  “What is it?”

  Kid wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Wendell,” he whispered. “I hate it.”

  “I think it has character,” Emma complimented him.

  “At school they used to call me Wendy to just to make me mad. Call me Kid. Everybody calls me that. I like it much better, although I don’t know if it’ll still be a good name when I’m an old duffer.” He laughed roughly. “If I’m so lucky as to get to be an old bloke.”

  “Why did you enlist so young, Kid?” she asked.

  “The lure of steady meals and a love of adventure,” he replied, smiling.

  It sounded to her as though he’d been asked this many times before and this was his practiced reply. “Fair enough,” she said. “You were in the gas attack?”

  “Oh, it was awful,” he told her. “If Jack hadn’t given me his big handkerchief to put over my face, it would have been even worse. He could have used it himself, but he gave it to me. That’s the sort he is. I heard him calling to me through that horrible cloud, but we couldn’t find each other again.”

  “Are the gas attacks still going on?” she asked.

  “Yes, but we’ve got gas masks now, and that’s a help.”

  “Does the enemy know you’ve got them?”

  “I ’spose so. They’ve got them too.”

  “Do you mean we’re also using poison gas now?” It horrified her to think that the Allies would stoop to using something so inhumane.

  “We must be using it. I’ve seen the enemy troops wearing the masks in battle.”

  “It’s all too awful,” she said with a shudder.

  “It’s not the adventure I thought it would be, that’s for certain. Far from it,” Kid agreed. “I’ve seen things that will give me the frights for the rest of my days, though I may not have too many of those, the way things are going.”

  “Don’t say that,” she chided him gently. “This will be over soon and we can all go home. We just have to hang on until then.”

  He laughed darkly
at that. “Yeah, well, hanging on will be the trick of it, won’t it?”

  “Where do you suppose Jack is?” Emma wondered. “I can’t imagine how he simply disappears as he does.”

  “He’s got magic,” Kid stated as if it was a well-known fact. “In the trenches he’d be there, and then be gone, then be back again with a deck of cards or something to eat. He said his mum was a sort of magic maker back in his home and that he was heir apparent, the magic prince, or some such thing.”

  “He’s told me as much,” Emma said. “But do you believe it?”

  “It’s the only explanation that makes sense,” Kid replied. “Who knows what goes on over in America?”

  “I don’t believe all Americans are as peculiar as Jack is,” Emma stated firmly.

  Kid grinned, amused at her lofty manner. “Even though you’re not really married, you two are sweet for each other, aren’t you?”

  “Why would you say that?” Emma cried, alarmed by his words.

  “I can tell by the way you are together,” he said. “I have four older sisters. When one of them got all snappish and bossy with a fella, the way you are with Jack, it always meant she had a special liking for him. And, of course, anyone can see the way Jack looks at you.”

  “I snap at him because I find him incredibly annoying,” Emma insisted.

  “So you may think, but I only know what I’ve seen. First comes the bickering and snapping and then romance follows. I’ve never experienced it myself, of course. To me it’s all still very mysterious.”

  “What’s mysterious?” Jack asked as he stepped into the room from the bathroom, soaked and rubbing his head with a towel.

  “Where have you been?” Emma demanded.

  He held up her bulging net bag. “Got lots of good supplies. This rain brings out the bugs, and the ground gets so soaked that the worms have to come to the surface for air. It’s easy pickin’s when it rains this hard.”

  “Bugs? Worms? What are you doing?” Emma asked.

  “I need this stuff,” he said, tossing the bag into a drawer of the dresser and taking out a dry pair of Emma’s father’s pants and a shirt.