Page 51 of The Forgotten Boy

“You didn’t think to alert an adult?”

“Adults don’t see him. Adults don’t see anything they don’t want to.”

Diana acknowledged the cynical accuracy of his statement. “That is too often true.”

“I’m not making it up,” he said defiantly. “I didn’t dream it, or imagine it. I could feel him and the whole strangeness of things.” He paused. “I don’t know how to explain, miss, but it was like I was part here and part there.”

Chills ran in waves down Diana’s arms and spine. Most of her was in whatever moment of terror she’d been possessed by. Frantically, she counted the horsemen and searched for the identifying banner. She cleared her throat and banished the unsettling memory from the solar. “I don’t think you’re dreaming or imagining, or lying,” she assured Jasper. “But you must promise me that you will keep me in your confidence. No more heroic endeavors without asking for help. Is that clear?”

After Jasper promised, she went into her office and made meticulous notes in her case diary. She read three or four medical journals and a month’s worth of British public health updates. She also spent long periods simply staring into space. The clock seemed to stall and then lurch ahead until finally it was time for lunch.

She had just entered the vast dining hall, sounds from a small group of students echoing. Standing at the head table, wearing dark gray and with her hands clasped before her like a Renaissance saint, Clarissa swept the students and adults with her gaze across the room before announcing: “At eleven minutes past eleven o’clock this morning French time, an armistice signed by Germany and the Allied leaders took effect. The war is over.”

In endless ways over the last four years Diana had thought about this moment. She’d imagined cheering or crying or both, hugging people and giving thanks to God. Now that it was here—

Diana fled. She couldn’t even bring herself to go to her room for a coat—she just grabbed one hanging from a hook in the scullery and headed for the moor. There, she walked and walked and walked, afraid to stop for fear of what might catch up with her if she did.

She couldn’t walk forever. When Diana realized she’d reached Hadrian’s Wall, she looked for a good open spot from which to survey the expanse of nothing. She found a flat-topped rock halfway up a climbing path and, overheated from exertion, shrugged herself out of the oversized—what was it she had actually grabbed? She studied the caped shoulders and waxed cotton, the flannel lining—

“It’s a stalking coat, for hunting.”

Of course Joshua had followed her. Diana snapped, “Aren’t you supposed to be on your way to the church service with the boys?”

“I told Miss Somersby I would prefer to be excused from that duty. Mrs. McCann agreed to go in my stead.”

“Why?”

He just looked at her. “I imagine for the same reason you bolted from the dining hall and didn’t stop for three miles.”

“I thought … I thought all of this would be simpler. I thought, The war will end and it will all be over at last. Instead, I just feel …”

He dropped next to her, and bent his good leg as a prop for his arms. “Unmoored,” Joshua offered. “Rudderless. Cast adrift.”

“Exactly. As long as there was war, there were so few decisions to be made.” Diana found herself leaning into him, searching his eyes as though they would have the answer. “So what do we do now?”

He blew out a sharp breath and said fiercely, “We say to hell with guilt. We say that we can remember the dead without making ourselves one of them.” He put a hand to her cheek, his fingers tangled in her hair. “We live, Diana. We live in every way we can.”

They moved together at the same moment and met in a kiss that exploded through her. She had never been so swept away by reckless desire and she didn’t care; there was no one to watch them, nothing to stop them.

Except the damp cold and rocky ground of Northumberland. Even with her borrowed coat spread on the ground, it soon became clear that they couldn’t move without courting disaster. Not to mention that they were brazenly exposed halfway up the hillside.

Laughing, Joshua finally said, “I think we’d have to be much younger to find this romantic. We’re not sixteen years old and hiding from our parents. We both have perfectly good beds available to us.”

“In the school,” she reminded him.

“Which, at this moment, is empty of everyone except Clarissa and Beth Willis.”

“And Jasper, who’s lying across the corridor from my bedroom with a broken leg.”

“My corridor is empty.” He leaned over her and brushed his lips along her throat.

It drew a soft sigh from her, but she was afraid of … she didn’t know what.

Joshua knew her better than she did. “You needn’t worry that the moment will pass before we reach the house, Diana. I didn’t kiss you just because we were in the open air and the war is over. I didn’t start wanting you today, and I won’t stop wanting you in the time it takes us to walk back.”

He got himself standing and drew her up after. Then, his mouth against her cheek, he whispered, “I will never stop wanting you.”

Wise Joshua, because Diana discovered on the walk back to Havencross that there was something to be said about a purposeful delay to a desired experience. With each mile her anticipation increased until, by the time they entered his bedroom and he pulled her to him, all she wanted was to lose herself in whatever followed.

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