Read Chapter 17: Ward of the Fallen

The hospital smelled of iodine, blood, and the damp wool of a hundred coats. Maggie stood at the admission desk with her hands pressed flat against the counter to keep them from shaking, her voice cracking on Thomas’s name for the third time before a weary nurse finally took pity.

“Elliott. Thomas Elliott. Bomb disposal unit. He was brought in—” Maggie’s throat closed. *Pulled from the rubble.* She couldn’t say it. The image of him grey-faced on the stretcher, the gurney wheels screaming over concrete, was carved behind her eyes.

The nurse consulted a ledger. “Operating theatre’s still busy with him, but they’ll move him to Ward C once he’s stitched. You family?”

“I’m his—” Maggie stopped. She had no word for what she was. Not a wife. Not a sister. Nothing on paper. “I’m the one he’ll want to see.”

The nurse’s face softened by a degree. “Sit down, love. I’ll tell the sister you’re waiting.”

Maggie sat on a hard wooden bench in a corridor that smelled of carbolic soap and boiled cabbage. She sat for an hour. Then two. The blueprints in her coat pocket crackled every time she shifted—the cottage on paper with its neat little kitchen and the window where roses were supposed to climb—and she pressed her hand against the fold of it like a pressure bandage.

Around her, the wounded came and went. A boy with his arm in a sling who couldn’t stop laughing, hysterical and hollow. An old woman with a bandaged scalp who wept quietly into her neighbour’s shoulder. Maggie watched the double doors at the end of the corridor with the intensity of a woman reading scripture.

At half past four, a doctor in a bloodstained apron came through the doors and asked for her by name.

She stood too fast. The world tilted. “Is he—?”

“He’s alive.” The doctor pulled off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Touch and go there for a bit. Shrapnel in the leg, fractured tibia, and a concussion that’ll have him eating his meals through a straw for a week if he’s not careful. But the skull’s intact, and the leg will mend. He’s young and stubborn. That counts for a lot.”

Maggie’s knees nearly gave out. She gripped the back of the bench. “Can I see him?”

“He’s not awake yet. He will be, in a few hours, maybe tomorrow. We’ve got him in a bed by the window. Visitor rules are strict, but under the circumstances—” The doctor glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ll give you ten minutes. Don’t touch the dressing on his head.”

Ward C was a long, low-ceilinged room with two rows of iron-frame beds, each one occupied. The air was thick with the soft moans of men, the hiss of a paraffin heater, the occasional sharp cry of a nightmare. Maggie moved between the beds with her arms tight to her sides, trying not to look, until she reached the last bed on the left.

Thomas lay flat on his back. His face was the colour of old paper, split by a black bruise that ran from his temple down to his jaw. A thick bandage wrapped his head, and his left leg was suspended in a cradle of ropes and splints, heavy and still beneath the grey blanket. One hand lay on top of the sheet, motionless, the fingers slightly curled.

Maggie lowered herself into the hard wooden chair beside the bed. She took his hand—carefully, as if it were made of glass—and pressed it to her cheek. It was cold.

“You idiot,” she whispered. “You absolute idiot. You promised me you’d be careful.”

He didn’t move. His chest rose and fell with a shallow, even rhythm. A nurse came by and checked his pulse, then touched Maggie’s shoulder—five minutes left, the gesture said—and moved on.

Maggie sat in the silence and listened to the rattle of his breath. She counted the freckles she could still see on the uncovered half of his face, the ones that scattered across his nose like a handful of grains. She remembered the first time she had kissed him, one night in the shelter when the bombs were falling so close she thought the ceiling would come in, and he had cupped her face with these same cold hands and told her the war couldn’t touch them if they didn’t let it.

A lie, it turned out. A beautiful, heartbreaking lie.

The nurse came back and tapped her watch. Maggie squeezed Thomas’s hand once, gently, and set it back on the sheet. She stood, bent down, and pressed her lips to the unbandaged part of his forehead.

“I’ll be back at visiting hours,” she said. “You stay here. Don’t you dare go anywhere.”

She turned to go. She had reached the foot of the bed when she heard it—a thin, scraped sound, like a voice dragged over gravel.

“Maggie.”

She spun around. His eyes were open. Barely. The left one was swollen nearly shut, but the right one found her, blurry and unfocused, and held on with desperate effort.

“Thomas.” She was back at the bedside before she’d finished saying his name, taking his hand again. “Don’t try to talk. You’re hurt.”

“Asked the doctor,” he said, each word a grind. “How bad.”

“It’s not bad. You’re going to be fine.”

“He said—” Thomas’s chest hitched. A cough rattled in his throat, and his face screwed up in pain. “He said I’m lucky to be alive. He used the word *lucky*.” A weak, broken laugh escaped him. “I had a schoolmate who used to say luck was just God’s way of keeping score.”

Maggie laughed, and it came out as a sob. “You’re babbling. You’re supposed to be resting.”

“Can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes I see it. The look on your face when the stretcher went past.” He tried to move his hand, and she tightened her grip. “I could see it, even through the blood. You looked like a woman watching her whole world fall down.”

“It did fall down,” she said. “Every wall. Every ceiling. Every brick.”

“Then let me build it back up.” His breathing was shallow, effortful. The nurse appeared at the corner of the bed, frowning, but Thomas lifted his good hand off the sheet and made a weak shooing motion. “Five more minutes. Please.”

The nurse hesitated. Then she retreated.

Thomas’s eyes found Maggie’s again. The right one was glassy with pain and exhaustion, but there was something else in it. Something stubborn and bright.

“I was going to do this properly,” he said. “On a nice day. With a ring. Not like this.”

“Do what properly?”

“Ask you.” He swallowed. His throat worked hard around the words. “I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, but I wanted to wait until the war was over. Until I could give you something better than a promise made in a bomb crater. But I nearly died today, Maggie. I was in the rubble and all I could think, the only thing in my head, was that I never asked you. I never told the world.”

His hand tightened on hers with surprising strength. His eyes—two waterline surfaces trembling with the effort of focus—fixed on her face.

“Marry me.”

Maggie’s world stopped. The sound of the ward faded behind a rushing in her ears. “Thomas, you’re concussed. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. I’ve known since the night you told me about the Canada plan and I walked away and felt like I’d left half of myself on that street corner. I’ve known since you wrote me that letter and I read it six times on the lorry ride to the docks. I’ve known since the moment I woke up in that rubble and couldn’t feel my left side and my first thought was that I’d never get to see what you look like at thirty-five.” His voice cracked. “Marry me, Maggie. Not someday. Not after the war. Now. Say yes now, so that if I don’t make it through the next one, at least I’ll have died knowing you were mine.”

Tears were streaming down her face. Maggie didn’t wipe them away. The blueprint in her pocket was pressing a crease into her ribs, the twenty-two pounds in her coat a weight against the fabric, and none of it mattered. None of it had ever mattered compared to this.

“Yes,” she said.

His breath caught. “You’re not saying that because I’m bleeding.”

“I’m saying it because I love you.” She leaned in until her forehead almost touched his lip. “I’m saying it because I’ve been carrying a cottage in paper in my pocket for weeks, and all the time, it wasn’t the cottage I wanted. It was the man standing in the doorway of it.”

The smile that broke across his face was lopsided and weak and the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“Good,” he whispered. His eyes fluttered. “Because I’m not asking again. That was my one good crack at it.”

“You won’t need to ask again.” She pressed another kiss to his forehead.

His hand relaxed in hers, and within moments, his breathing deepened into sleep. Maggie stayed where she was. She stayed through the changing of shifts, through the nurse’s pointed looks, through the slow grey dusk that settled over the ward like a blanket thin with use. She held his hand and watched the rise and fall of his chest, and for the first time since the bomb had fallen, the knot of fear in her stomach loosened by a quarter of an inch.

The war would still be there in the morning. The solicitor, her father, the Canada papers—all waiting, coiled. But this room, this moment, this fragile breathing man who had asked her to be his wife with the taste of dust still in his mouth—this was real.

She would tell him everything when he woke. About the money. About the solicitor. About her mother’s quiet support and her father’s ruin. She would lay it all at his feet and trust that the man who had proposed from a hospital bed with a broken leg and a concussion could face any of it with her.

And in the quiet of the ward, with his warm hand wrapped in both of hers, Maggie let herself imagine that someday—maybe soon—she would sign her name Margaret Elliott above a threshold of her own.