LITMIR.BIZ

      We arrived back in Belgium in the early hours, and I fell into bed with deep gratitude. The travelling, the cold and the tension had all gradually chipped away at me, and I still felt a low ache in my belly but I couldn’t tell if it was a physical pain or the emptiness of losing the baby. Frances had been appalled at the way I’d embraced the blame, and she denied any possibility that I deserved it, but I felt the truth wrap itself around my heart and it was a hard truth to forget.

      Late in the morning I managed to spend ten minutes with Oliver before he was marched out, dressed in civilian clothes and looking so very young it made me want to run after him and hold him while we both cried. But I remembered Jack’s words, and instead gave him the strongest smile I could muster, then returned to my hotel and collapsed into bed once more. I remained there all day, drifting in and out of a fitful sleep filled with fever-dreams, and during my lucid, waking moments, I told myself over and over again that Will was alive, that Oli was safe, and that Archie would be too. What more could any of us hope for?

      In the early evening I rose, much recovered, to have a shallow, lukewarm bath, and to find something for dinner. The big guns were quiet tonight, and it wasn’t until I went outside after my meal that I heard the light cracking of rifles. I tried to shut them out, to reduce them to the same background noise as they had been before, but the image of Will in that hospital bed wouldn’t leave me. It seemed madness, after all the pain and injury I’d seen, that any one person could bring the horror home to me so completely, but he had. And now all I could think about was Archie out there in no man’s land. What if that rifle shot had been the very one that signalled the end of his life? Or that one? A life was being taken for almost every single one. Why not his?

      My hands trembled as I drew on my gloves against the evening chill, and I was concentrating on smoothing them over my fingers, so it wasn’t until he spoke my name that I saw him. He was covered in mud, his hat shoved under his arm, and there was a smudge of blood across his forehead, but he was smiling, and he was whole.

      ‘Been playing in the dirt again?’ I asked, trying to hide the surge of joy that cramped my insides.

      ‘Aye. Lost our football and we had to go over and ask Jerry could we please have it back.’

      I lost the battle, and laughed out loud, hearing my voice shaking in the evening air. ‘I take it you’ve seen Jack?’

      ‘I have. He told me about Oliver,’ Archie said, and took a step towards me. He was looking at me oddly, and I couldn’t work out what he was thinking. Then he reached out and gently lifted my hat off my head and dropped it to the ground, along with his own. Seizing my face in his two hands, he looked at me with a fierce, intense expression and then, finally, our lips touched, igniting a flare that shot through me from crown to toe. I heard my own gasp, and then his groan, and the touch grew firmer, his lips parting, and his tongue flickering along my teeth.

      For what seemed like hours we remained locked together, my heart thundering, my hands finding their way into the thick hair at the back of his head and curling into the warmth there, and it took a while for me to realise I was pressing against him with my whole body. My gloved fingers caressed the back of his neck, and I could feel his thumbs brushing first my cheeks, and then my temples, before the kiss broke and he drew my head against his chest, holding me there as if there was a chance I might try to draw away.

      ‘Oh, bloody hell, Kitty,’ he murmured. ‘What have I done?’

      ‘You’ve come back safe,’ I tried to say, but the tears were choking the words off in my throat, because the kiss had awakened everything I had been trying so hard to suppress. And it was too late.

      I did draw back then, and wiped my eyes with my still-wrinkled gloves, belatedly feeling my face flame at the way I’d behaved. ‘I’m glad you’ve come back,’ I stammered. ‘But I’m sorry for…’ I waved a vague hand, unable to find the words to excuse my overeager response. My family would be mortified.

      He straightened away from me. ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘Strange, how we react to danger. I’ve been over, and made it back before, but this time it felt…I don’t know, like I had more to lose.’

      I wanted to ask what, but no matter what he answered it would be wrong; to hear what I’d hoped to hear would hurt more than anything else.

      ‘Well,’ I said instead, ‘it’s understandable that we should have felt…’ Again I couldn’t find the words, but I went on. ‘I mean, it’s been a terrifying time. For all of us.’

      ‘Aye.’ His voice lost that confused, longing tone, and became brisk. ‘Uncle Jack has asked me if I’d bring you back to England. But I can’t get away.’

      ‘No, of course.’ I cleared my throat. ‘That’s… I wouldn’t expect it.’

      ‘I didn’t want you to think we’re abandoning you.’

      ‘Don’t worry. Really.’

      ‘I’ll arrange for a driver to take you to the ferry. I’ll try and get some leave once Will’s able to return.’

      ‘That’ll be nice.’

      ‘Aye.’

      ‘So, then,’ I said, at the same time as he said, ‘Right.’ We looked at each other and smiled, a little hesitantly, but the smiles were real.

      ‘I’ll write,’ he said, holding out his hand, then bent to pick up my hat and handed it to me. ‘Sorry about this.’

      I pushed away the thundering memory of how it had felt when he’d taken it off me, and took it, then looked back down at the ground, where his own cap still lay. ‘Don’t you want that?’

      He picked it up, and gave it a pointless dusting-off, smearing the mud across the flat crown. He shrugged and grinned. ‘Ah well, could be worse.’

      ‘Archie?’ He raised an eyebrow, and my voice was soft. ‘Come back safe next time, too.’

      ‘Nae bother,’ he said, exaggerating his own accent, and this time the kiss was as chaste and brotherly as they had been all my life. ‘Don’t work too hard; you’re not up to it yet.’

      And he turned away, leaving me standing in the street with the memory of our first and last kiss tingling on my lips.