The Wild Rose (70 page)

EPILOGUE
Kenya, September 1919

Willa watched them, Seamie and James, as they ran through the grass, trying to get aloft a kite that they’d made out of newspaper.

She was sitting on the porch of a bungalow. The house was about twenty years old and had lovely, mature gardens. There were roses planted around the porch, and they were in full bloom now.

“Wild roses,” said Arthur Wayland, the man who’d sold it to them. “Clipped from a hedgerow and brought all the way from England. They were my wife’s favorites and she couldn’t bear to leave them behind. They’ve done marvelously well here.”

They’d just bought the bungalow, and two hundred acres of land that went with it, last week. Mr. Wayland was returning home to England after forty years in Africa. His wife had died. His two sons were in London. It was time to go back.

Willa had fallen in love with the house immediately. It faced west, giving them the most spectacular view of Kilimanjaro. They had been happy to move in and finally put their bags down. They’d spent months in ships, trains, hotels, and tents.

As she watched Seamie and James, Willa noticed that Seamie was moving slowly. The scars from his burns still troubled him sometimes. They ached. Willa’s leg still hurt, too. In fact, it was why she was sitting down now instead of joining in the kite-flying. She was still getting used to the new prosthesis she’d bought right before they’d left England. The lightness and range of motion was better than anything she’d had before, but she’d had to adjust her gait, and she’d had to put up with soreness and chafing. Prosthesis manufacturers had made vast improvements to the artificial legs and arms they made. They’d had to. Thousands of men had come home from the front missing limbs. They needed to be able to work. To walk. To hold their children.

We’re all scarred, all three of us. We’re all damaged, Willa thought as she massaged her knee. Some of the wounds were on the outside. Some of them went a lot deeper. There were days when James still wept for his mother. And there were nights when he still woke up screaming that bad men were coming to get him.

Seamie, too, had his dark days. The aftermath of Billy Madden’s visit to Binsey had been very hard on him. He’d had to come to terms with Jennie’s lies, and why she’d told them. He was angry at times, he said, but mostly he felt deeply sad—sad that he’d failed Jennie. Sad that she’d been so desperate to hold on to his love that she’d deceived him, passing another woman’s child off as her own. Sad that Josie Meadows had suffered for that deception at the hands of Billy Madden.

Willa had her doubts and fears, too—some of them were so strong, they sometimes made her want to reach for a syringe again, but she didn’t. She had doubted that they could ever make a go of it—she and Seamie. She was afraid that too much had happened, that they would always be haunted by the mistakes of the past, that their love would always be a destructive one.

After Max had driven away, she had gone inside the cottage and collapsed in a chair. The constable arrived a few minutes later with Mr. Wallace and James. Seamie had explained to them what had happened, using the story Max cooked up. After he’d thanked both men and said good-bye to them, he put James to bed. Albie stoked the fire, made a platter of cheeses, pickles, ham, and bread, and got out the bottle of brandy.

They’d drunk the brandy, eaten the meal, talked for hours, and then they’d all fallen asleep—Albie in an armchair, Willa in another one, and Seamie on the settee. They had not been together like that for years, since they were teenagers. In the morning they’d decided they would tell Joe and Fiona what had happened, and Sid and India, but no one else. Telling anyone else, including the police, would only hurt James. Seamie would tell his son the truth. One day. When he was much older.

The next morning, Albie offered to take Willa back to Cambridge with him.

Seamie answered for her. “No,” he said. “Stay, Willa. Please.”

“Are you sure?” she’d asked him. He’d been through so much—he and James both—she thought they would want time to themselves. She loved him and she wanted to be with him, but she had no idea if he felt the same way—not with all that had happened.

“Please,” he’d said again. And so she’d stayed.

They had talked—not of their feelings for each other, not of Jennie or Max or things long past, but of their more recent lives. Seamie told her about the prisoner-of-war camp, and how a part of him had very much wanted not to come back to England after the war. He told her he didn’t know what his next step would be. What he would do with himself. Or how he would raise James. Willa told him of her life in Paris, and her photographs, and said she would have to go back eventually, for she found it impossible to be in London.

They were weary and shaken by what had happened, and what had almost happened. They lived quietly—just going for walks with James, or to the village market. Going for rides into the countryside or for lunch at the King’s Head. Cooking breakfast. Reading. Playing games with James.

Seamie did not touch her or kiss her, and she understood. He was grieving. He was angry. He was tortured by guilt. She did not touch him, either, for fear of being turned away.

A week passed, and a month, and Willa realized she did not know what to do. She didn’t know whether to stay or go. She wanted to know Seamie’s feelings, but was afraid to ask. For once in her life, she was afraid. It was better not to know, to live in hope, than to know for sure that he no longer felt for her what she felt for him. That he no longer loved her.

And then, one night, he suddenly answered her questions.

“I don’t want this,” he said abruptly, while they were sitting by the fire.

Willa’s heart sank. She thought he meant her. Them. She had hoped they might have a chance, but then again, how could they? There was so much hurt between them. So much sorrow. She was not surprised, but she was devastated.

She was also wrong.

“I don’t want to be here in Binsey anymore,” he said. “I can’t bear it. I’ve tried to like it. For James’s sake. Because he likes the country. And for yours, because you don’t like London. But I don’t. In fact, I hate it here. I hate this cottage. There are too many ghosts in it. I don’t want to be in England anymore. I want to go back to where it all went wrong and put it right. I want to make a new start. With you and James. In Africa.”

Willa was speechless.

“You think it’s a bad idea,” Seamie said, his disappointment evident on his face.

“No, I don’t. In fact, I think it’s a wonderful idea. How soon can we go?”

“As soon as you marry me.”

“Seamie, I—”

“Say yes, Willa. Say yes right now or go back to Paris,” he said, with an ache in his voice. “If you’re going to walk away again, do it now. Before James loves you as much as I do. I can take the blow. He can’t. He’s been through too much.”

“Yes,” Willa said.

Seamie looked at her long and hard. Then he grabbed her hand, pulled her out of her chair, and led her to his bedroom. They made love there, in the darkness, fell asleep, and woke up together in the soft light of morning.

Seamie drove to Oxford the next morning. He put Willa on a train there so that she could return to Paris, for just a few days, to pack her belongings and have them sent to her mother’s house. Then he went to a jeweler’s and bought two gold rings. They were married in London at Willa’s childhood home three weeks later. Albie gave her away. Mrs. Alden arranged a lovely breakfast for them. Fiona and Joe came. Charlie, who was talking again now, and Katie, who’d just graduated from Oxford and was preparing to stand as the Labour candidate for Southwark, and all the rest of their children were there, too.

The day after their wedding, Seamie and Willa walked up the gangplank of a steamer bound for East Africa, with James between them. They hired porters in Mombasa, as they had years ago, and took a long, leisurely trip from there, introducing James to Africa. They’d decided to settle here, in Kenya, near Kilimanjaro.

Willa finished rubbing her knee now. The pain had diminished. She knew that it would go away completely as time went by, as her body adjusted fully to the new leg. She stood now, shading her eyes, smiling at her husband, and at James. He was not her son, not yet. Perhaps one day. If he wanted to be. For now, he called her Willa and she called him James, and both of them were happy with that.

Willa put her full weight on her leg, stepped down off the porch, and walked toward Seamie and James. Her stride was easier and smoother than it had been since she’d lost her real leg. It was good, the new leg—so good that she thought that one day she might even be able to climb again. Not the Mawenzi peak, not this time—the Uhuru peak. She might be able to manage that one. It was a bit of a doddle, that climb. But that was all right.

Once, long ago, she had wanted to be bold. To be daring and brave. To be the first.

Now she just wanted to be.

She wanted to be still at night, to look up and admire the stars without asking them which way to go. She wanted to walk slowly over the veldt and through the jungle, not hurrying to make camp, but stopping to rest, to gaze at a herd of antelope, to call back to the beautiful birds who called to her. She wanted to watch, delighted, as little James marveled at an African sunset, watched a cheetah run, or made friends with a Masai boy just his age.

She wanted to sit by the fire at night with Seamie. Talking sometimes, and sometimes just listening silently and with wonder to the wild African night.

They had torn themselves apart, she and Seamie. Years ago. Here in Africa. And then in 1914, the world had torn itself apart. Now they, and the world, would put themselves back together. Slowly, with pain, regret, and with hope, they would find the way forward.

She didn’t know how, exactly. She had no map. No answers. No guarantees.

All she had was this day.

This impossible mountain rising before her.

This sun and this sky.

This man and this child.

This terrible, wonderful love.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Rose stories never would have been written had I not, many years ago, stumbled across a four-volume survey of working-class Victorian London by Henry Mayhew titled
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Many other books helped me re-create the London and New York of my novels, various other locales, and the people in them. A bibliography for the entire Rose series follows.

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