Read Chapter 16: Interludes

The stream ran low between mossy stones, its water brown from the churned earth upstream but moving clean where it crossed the shallows. Élise sat on a flat rock, her boots off, toes in the current, and watched James roll his sleeve past his elbow. The bandage on his forearm was fresh, white against the weathered skin above it.

“You should not be walking on that arm,” she said.

“It’s a walk. Not a march.” He lowered himself beside her with a grunt. “And you should be resting, not sitting in cold water.”

“I am resting. This is rest.” She lifted her foot and flicked water at him. It caught his cheek, and he blinked, then gave her a look of such theatrical offense that she laughed—a sound she had not made in weeks, and it surprised her to hear it.

He wiped his face with his good hand. “That’s how you treat a wounded officer?”

“That is how I treat a stubborn doctor who follows me when I ask for solitude.”

“You didn’t ask. You slipped away.”

“And yet you found me.”

He was quiet a moment. The stream murmured. Somewhere beyond the tree line, the muted percussion of distant artillery rolled like summer thunder—far enough to ignore, close enough to remember.

“I’d find you anywhere,” he said.

She looked down at the water, at the pale shapes of her feet shifting in the current. The words sat between them, heavier than he’d meant them, or lighter—she couldn’t tell. That was the trouble with James. He gave her everything and nothing all at once, in the same sentence.

“Teach me something,” she said.

“What?”

“English. A word I do not know. Something you would say—when you are not here.”

He considered. His eyes moved over the stream, the bank, the sagging line of the horizon. Then he said, slowly, “*I would walk through fire to find you.*”

She repeated it, her accent flattening the vowels. “*I would walk through fire to find you.*”

“Good enough for a French girl.”

“Now I teach you.” She thought. “*Je veux te montrer la mer.*”

“Meaning?”

“Guess.”

He frowned, turning the syllables over. “You want to show me—the sea?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “Someday. After this. I will take you to Normandy. There is a cove near my village that my mother showed me. The water is green in the morning, and the cliffs are white like chalk. We will walk down the path and there will be no mud, no rats, no guns. Only the sea.”

He watched her as she spoke, and she felt the weight of his gaze like a hand on her skin. His good hand came to rest on the rock beside her, not touching her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his palm through the air.

“You really believe that?” he asked. “You see a future that clearly?”

The artillery thumped again, closer now, or maybe just louder against the quiet between them. She didn’t look away from his face. “If I do not see it, I will not survive this. So yes. I see it. Green water, white cliffs. You, without this uniform. Me, without this apron.” She reached out and took his hand, threading her fingers through his. “That is what I see.”

He was still for a long moment. Then his thumb moved across her knuckles, slow and steady, and she felt the tremor in it—the thing he held back, the thing he would not say.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Your hand.”

He looked down at their joined fingers. “That’s not shaking. That’s holding on.”

She leaned into him, and his arm came around her—the wounded one, and she felt him wince before he masked it. She shifted, tried to pull away, but he held her tighter.

“Let it hurt,” he said. “I don’t care.”

They sat that way until the light failed, until the stream turned from grey to black and the artillery fell silent, as if the world itself had grown tired of its violence. He helped her to her feet, handed her her boots, and they walked back to the hospital tents through the dark, his unhurt hand at the small of her back, guiding her around the worst of the mud.

At the flap of her tent, he stopped. The lamp inside cast a weak glow across his face, picking out the lines around his eyes, the new grey in his hair that hadn’t been there a month ago.

“Élise,” he said.

She turned.

He stepped forward and kissed her.

It was not tentative. It was a man who had spent months learning the mathematics of distance and loss, who had carried his feelings like a wound he could not dress, who had finally stopped measuring the cost. His mouth was warm and certain against hers, and she rose onto her toes to meet him, her hands finding the lapels of his coat, gripping the rough wool as if the ground might disappear beneath her.

When he drew back, his breathing was unsteady. His eyes were dark, and she saw something in them that she had not seen before—not caution, not calculation. Hunger. And beneath that, fear.

“I’m not going to be steady,” he said quietly. “Around you. With you. I want you to know that.”

“I do not need you steady.”

“You might. When this is over. When the war is done and we have to be ordinary people. I don’t know if I know how to be that.”

She touched his face. “Then we will learn together. I also do not know.”

He kissed her again, softer this time, and she felt the tension leave his shoulders, a surrender she had not witnessed from him before. Then he pulled away, pressed his forehead to hers, and let out a breath.

“I should let you sleep.”

“You should.”

Neither of them moved.

The bugle came with the dawn, thin and sharp, cutting through the grey light like a blade through frost. Élise woke on her cot, still in her clothes, her boots beside her where she’d kicked them off an hour before. Her lips still remembered the pressure of his.

She heard the running feet, the shouted orders. She was out of the tent before she had fully woken, and she saw James already at the command post, his tunic half-buttoned, his hair uncombed, reading a dispatch with a face that had gone the color of chalk.

He looked up. She crossed the mud to him.

“What is it?”

He read the orders aloud, his voice flat. “The 5th Army is repositioning. Verdun. We’re to move forward by nightfall.” He folded the paper, and his hand was shaking now. “Élise. Verdun is a fortress. If the Germans are committing to it—“ He stopped.

“Then there is no time to waste.” She said it gently. “We pack. We move. We do what we do.”

He stared at her a moment, then laughed—a dry, broken sound. “You’re not afraid.”

“I am terrified,” she said. “I am always terrified. But I am also here. And so are you.” She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “We agreed. Live in the moment. We have tonight. Tomorrow we will have tomorrow.”

He reached for her hand, squeezed it once, then let go. “We move at dusk. Tell Whitcombe to inventory the morphine. I’ll check the wheel bearings on the wagons.”

He walked past her toward the supply tent, and she watched him go, the uneven set of his shoulders beneath the wounded arm, the soldier’s gait he’d learned to wear like a second skin. She pressed her hand to her chest, where his kiss still burned, and then she went to find Prudence.

Behind her, on the table in the command tent, the dispatch lay open. The single word at its head was printed in block capitals, and she had seen it now, had heard the weight of it in James’s voice.

*VERDUN.*

The name of a city. The name of a furnace. She did not look back at it.

She had work to do.