Read Chapter 24: The Return

The British forward trench stank of cordite, mud, and the particular sour smell of men who had not washed in weeks. Élise did not care. She knelt in the dugout entrance, hands wrapped around a tin cup of tea that shook despite her best efforts, and watched the gray dawn creep over the wire.

James stood twenty yards away, ringed by officers. A major with a handlebar mustache clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him. Another shook his hand. Even the stretcher-bearers, who usually treated surgeons with grudging tolerance at best, nodded at him with something like respect. The man who had walked into Germany and walked out with a prisoner of war—that was the story being told, growing taller with each retelling.

Élise sipped her tea. It was mostly chicory and tasted of nothing.

"He's a bloody marvel, your man," said a voice beside her. A young lieutenant she did not know had squatted down, rifle across his knees. "Went in alone, didn't he? Straight through their wire." He shook his head in admiration. "They'll give him a medal for that. Maybe the VC."

"Perhaps," Élise said. The word came out flat.

The lieutenant looked at her more closely, his eyes catching the German field dressing still wrapped around her forearm where a shard of shell casing had clipped her during the escape. "You're the nurse he brought back, then."

"I am."

His expression shifted. Not hostile, exactly. Curious. Weighing. "Must have been hell, back there with the Hun."

Élise did not answer. She had no words for what had been hell and what had not. Dr. Hans Vogel had been courteous. Precise. He had trusted her with his instruments, his wounded. He had let her go.

The lieutenant seemed to take her silence for trauma and nodded sagely, moving off. Élise let him go.

She was still sitting there when a runner came down the trench, mud-splashed and breathless. He spoke to the major, who turned and pointed toward the dugout. Toward her.

Élise stood. Her knees complained. She had not slept properly in three days.

"Moreau? Élise Moreau?" The runner was young, with a spotty chin and the eager look of a boy who had not yet killed anyone. "You're wanted at the advanced dressing post. Medical officer's asking for you by name."

James had turned at the commotion. Their eyes met across the trench. He moved toward her, but the major caught his arm, steering him back toward the command dugout. James shook the man off with a word Élise could not hear, then strode toward her anyway.

"I'll come with you," he said.

"You are needed here." She said it quietly, without accusation. It was simply true. His men were wounded. His hospital was awaiting him further back, with Prudence's departure and the reorganization creating a gap only he could fill.

James's jaw tightened. "I'm not letting you out of my sight again."

"James." She reached out and touched his sleeve, feeling the damp wool. "I will be at a dressing post, behind your lines, with your army all around me. I will be safe."

He looked at her for a long moment. In his eyes she saw the asylum walls he had confessed to her, the same walls she carried in herself. "If you're not back by nightfall," he said, "I'm coming for you. And this time, no court-martial will stop me."

She almost smiled. "I know."

The dressing post was three miles back, a ruined barn with sandbagged walls and a roof that had been patched with corrugated iron. Two orderlies worked over a man with a shattered femur. A third sat against the wall, face gray, cradling a bandaged arm.

The medical officer was older than Élise expected, a tired-looking captain with spectacles and the unmistakable German accent of a man who had spent years in Berlin clinics before the war made him an enemy.

Dr. Hans Vogel looked up as she entered. He was still wearing the same field-gray uniform, but now with a British captain's insignia hastily pinned to his collar. The effect was jarring, like a wolf dressed as a sheepdog.

"Ah," he said. "Fräulein Moreau. Or should I say, Nurse Moreau? I confess I do not know which name you prefer."

Élise froze. The orderlies did not look up. The wounded man moaned.

"I—" she started.

"Please." Vogel gestured to a stool beside him. His surgical tray was laid out with instruments she recognized from their shared work at the German field hospital. "Sit. We have much to discuss, and very little time to discuss it."

She sat. Her hands were trembling again. She pressed them flat against her thighs.

Vogel continued working as he spoke, opening a wound that had been packed with gauze, irrigating it with boiled water. "You are wondering who I am. It is a reasonable question." He glanced at her. "I am Hauptmann—Captain—Hans Vogel, formerly of the Imperial German Medical Corps. Currently on loan to the British Expeditionary Force's intelligence section. A rather unusual arrangement, but war makes for strange bedfellows, does it not?"

"Intelligence," Élise repeated. Her voice sounded small.

"Indeed. I have spent two years in occupied France and Belgium, collecting information, treating German wounded for cover, and identifying individuals who might prove useful to the Allied cause." He paused, eyes on his work. "You were one such individual, Nurse Moreau. Though I confess, when I first saw you, I thought you were merely another captured nurse. It was only when your brother's photograph fell from your pocket—careless of you, by the way—that I recognized the family resemblance."

Élise's blood went cold. "My brother."

"Pierre Moreau. Yes." Vogel set down his forceps. "He is alive, Nurse Moreau. He is a prisoner of war at a camp near Düsseldorf. I saw him there myself six months ago, when I was rotated through that sector. I did not speak to him—I could not, without compromising my position—but I recognized him from his file." He paused. "Your father's son has his father's face."

The words hung in the air. Élise's father. Disgraced. Disowned. A surgeon who had been accused of stealing morphine from his own hospital, who had fled to Paris and left his children to face the shame alone. But Pierre had not fled. Pierre had enlisted under a false name, burning with the need to prove the family honor, and she had not heard from him in nine months.

"He is alive," she repeated.

"He is alive, and as far as I know, he remains well. The camp is not comfortable—it is a prison, after all—but he is not being mistreated. The Germans have an interest in keeping their prisoner-of-war camps functioning properly, particularly as the war grinds on. He will survive there."

Élise did not realize she was crying until a tear splashed onto her hand. She wiped it away roughly. "Thank you."

Vogel nodded. "Do not thank me yet. I must also tell you that I have been debriefed on your activities while in my care—your capture, your forced service, your escape." He looked at her over his spectacles. "I have confirmed to your commanding officers that you acted under duress, that you did not willingly cooperate with the enemy beyond what was necessary for survival, and that you provided invaluable intelligence during your captivity."

"The coordinates," she said. "The artillery positions. You knew I would send them."

"I hoped you would." A thin smile crossed his lips. "You are your father's daughter in more ways than one. Whatever they say about him, he taught you well. A surgeon's eye. A surgeon's hands." His gaze dropped to her fingers, still pressed against her thighs. "Though I noticed a tremor. You should have that looked at."

Élise pulled her hands into her lap, out of sight. "It is nothing. Fatigue."

"Of course." Vogel did not argue, but his eyes told her he did not believe her. He turned back to his patient. "You are free to go, Nurse Moreau. You have been cleared. The military bureaucracy will take some time to catch up with reality, but you are no longer a suspect."

She stood, her legs unsteady. Her head was full of Düsseldorf. Pierre, alive, behind wire. Pierre, who had enlisted to prove their father wrong, who had sent her one letter from training camp and then silence.

She had almost stopped hoping. She had told herself he was dead, had grieved him, had buried him in her heart alongside her father and everything else the war had stolen.

And he was alive.

She found James at the edge of the dressing post, arguing with a sergeant about transport. He broke off the moment he saw her face.

"Élise? What happened? Who was that—"

"James." Her voice cracked. She took hold of his arms, gripping the rough wool of his tunic. "Pierre is alive. He is alive, James. In a camp in Düsseldorf. My brother is alive."

James's face went through several emotions in quick succession—confusion, surprise, then a fierce, protective joy that made him look ten years younger. "Your brother. The one you thought—"

"Yes." She was crying openly now, no shame in it. "He is a prisoner of war. He is alive."

James pulled her into his arms. She buried her face against his chest, smelling wool and tobacco and the faint copper note of blood that never fully washed out of his clothes, and she wept.

When she finally pulled back, he kept his hands on her shoulders. His voice was low. "Where is this camp?"

"Düsseldorf."

"Then we'll find him." He said it without hesitation, with the same certainty he had used when he walked through German wire to find her. "Whatever it takes, Élise. We will find your brother and we will bring him home."

She opened her mouth to argue—the impossibility of it, the absurdity, a British surgeon and a French nurse walking into Germany a second time—but the words died in her throat.

Looking at James's face, she knew he meant it.

And she knew that nothing would stop him.