I Never Thought I'd See You Again: A Novelists Inc. Anthology (46 page)

He lay on his back, the upper half of his face wrapped in bandages slightly stained at the edges. A faint odor of decay reached her and she hesitated, despising herself a good deal. She went forward to count his pulse. His right hand was cut as though with many shards of glass but not burnt. He jerked when she touched him. “Who’s that?”

His voice was half-choked but the accent was pure Oxford. “I’m emblazoned across the owd f c just the V.A.D. You’re not supposed to be awake yet.”

“Breaking the rules, am I?” He spoke lightly but she felt the tension of pain in the trembling of his hand.

“I’ll have to report you. Wenderly will be here in a moment with your morphia.”

“I hate that ruddy stuff; makes me feel like I’m drowning in cotton wool. Where are you from?” he asked with a strange urgency.

“Kent.”

“I thought so.” His accent blurred. “I’m from Tenterden.”

“Oh.” Would he know her name if she said it? How far had the story spread? What did it matter now, after all? “My name’s Kendall, Julia Kendall. I’m from Mounts Hill House, near Cranbrook.”

“Only seven miles away and yet we meet here.”

“This might as well be the end of the world for me. I never went above five miles from my home in my life, not ’til the war.”

His pulse was surprisingly slow for a man in pain. She tried to put his hand back on the coverlet only to find him holding on to hers. “It’s good to hear the old accent again, Julia Kendall. Will you come and talk to me some more?”

“Yes. Yes, I will.”

And she did. More often than she should, she slipped behind the white curtains, sometimes just holding his hand if he were asleep, but timing her visits so that Charles would wake to the sound of her voice. She talked about the hills and hedges, how her late mother didn’t care for horses but never minded a pony or a dog, about climbing the fruit trees after apples, and the hours spent playing with her sister and brother. “Nick could always spin a tale. Nell and I were his pirate crew, his Crusaders, his Cavaliers.”

“Were you never damsels in distress?”

“I played Sister Ann while Nell was always Bluebeard’s latest bride.”

“Nick was Bluebeard?”

“Never, but always the brother come to rescue her, just in time for tea. How I used to gobble it all down, always starving for my tea and cakes. He called me greedy-guts and with cause. I was always a roly-poly.”

“Did Nick join the Army?”

“No.” Her voice slowed, victim to some constraint. “No, the last we heard he was in Rhodesia.”

Charles placed his hand over hers, feeling for the bones in her wrist. “Doesn’t feel plump to me.”

Julia breathed a little faster. “Well, the catering here isn’t exactly Simpson’s in the Strand.”

“I don’t suppose it is. Tell me . . .tell me about the best day you ever had.”

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

“No,” he lied.

“The best day?” she repeated. There had been so many bad days that the good ones were a little harder to recall. “I don’t know if it was the best, butqed”d would you like to hear about the time we mistook the junior M.P. from Ashford for a burglar?”

Charles guessed that the adored older brother had blotted his copybook in some way. A vague memory came to him, some whispered scandal about a county bank. Everyone knew the son had done it though the father took the bxt-alilame before succumbing to a stgn:justify" ai

Shirley Parenteau grew up on the northern Oregon coast where her mother wrote newspaper features and her logging father enjoyed tall tales. After years of writing outdoor magazine articles, Shirley turned to children’s books, then to women he sou19;s fiction with novels sold nd of a voice,