The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance
the ankle. You can’t imagine the greedy, sucking noises it made as I staggered across that stable yard, foot by foot, while the drizzle struck my helmet in metallic pings and the shells screamed and popped at some worryingly unknown distance. The front-line trenches were supposed to be miles away, but you couldn’t tell that to your ears, or to your heart that crashed every time those screaming whistles pierced the air in twos and threes, inhuman and relentless, followed by those acoustic crumps that meant someone had just gotten hell. Shellfire had a way of sounding as if it was going to drop directly on the crown of your head, every time.
I was making for the stretcher party, not the barn. I don’t know why. I think I just wanted to help, right that second, after so many weeks and months of preparation. Like the rest of us American volunteers, I was simply dying for a real live patient. Two men carried the wounded soldier, who was covered by a blanket and nothing else, and my God, how I wondered that he hadn’t fallen off the canvas altogether as the stretcher-bearers staggered through the mud, drunken and exhausted. The rain dripped from their helmets. “Need a hand?” I called out, and their heads jerked hopefully upward at the sound of my voice.
“Jesus,” the first one swore, “who the devil are you?”
“I’m from the American Red Cross,” I said. “I was sent out to bring patients to a hospital nearby. They said you were overloaded.”
“You’re a driver?”
Of the two, the second man looked the worst, whey-faced and vertiginous, as if the next step might kill him. I leapt across a puddle and reached for the handles of the stretcher. “Yes,” I said. “What have we got?”
The man was too tired—or else too astonished—to dispute the stretcher with me. He fell away, rubbing his blistered palms against his trousers, and I took the load in my own hands. It was lighter than I expected, a strange living weight, like a child instead of a man. The wounded soldier’s face was pale and wet; I couldn’t tell where he was hit, beneath the blanket.
“Right leg,” said the second man. “Sent back straightaway for amputation.”
“Can they amputate here?”
“Got no choice, have they?”
The soldier moved his head and groaned. Still wore his helmet, slipped to one side, covering his ear and part of his jaw while his face and young brow remained exposed to the drizzle. His pack lay next to him on the stretcher, shielded by the gray blanket.
“Almost there,” I told him, and his startled eyelids swooped open and his eyes met mine, very briefly, before a patch of mud sent me wallowing for balance.
“Blimey,” he said, blinking, “am I dead already?”
“You ain’t dead, mate,” the second man said. “It’s the American Red Cross, innit.”
“Blimey.” The soldier closed his eyes. “God bless America.”
Ahead of us a door swung open on the face of the barn, and a man’s shoulders appeared in silhouette against the electric light within. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “I told the last party we haven’t got room!”
“Well, they ain’t told us back up the line, sir,” the first man said.
“We can’t bloody well take him!”
“He needs the leg off, sir, on the double.”
The other man pounded his fist against the side of the doorway. He took a step toward us, into the soggy remains of the daylight. Stopped, frowned. He wore a dilapidated khaki tunic, officer’s stripes. The rain struck his bare head. “Who the devil’s this?”
“The American Red Cross, sir,” said the first man.
“How in the hell did she get here?”
I nodded toward the Model T. “I drove, sir.”
“You drove that? From where?”
“From Marieux, sir. We’ve set up a private hospital there, only we weren’t getting any patients, so I went back to Paris and found a Model T from the American Ambulance—” The stretcher handle slipped in my wet right hand.
“Never mind.” The doctor stepped forward and yanked the stretcher handles from my fingers. “Carry on, for God’s sake. Get the poor sod out of the rain. Now!”
He had the kind of manner you couldn’t refuse, the kind of resolve you couldn’t just turn. I think I admired him right then, whether or not I realized it. I couldn’t help it. After all, I was used to a strong masculine will. His authority seemed natural and just, derived from the consent of those governed. I scampered like a damned puppy at his heels. Followed him into the barn, refusing to be shunted. “We’ve got plenty of beds at the hospital,” I said. “I can take three stretchers or six sitting in the ambulance.”
“I don’t know this hospital of yours.”
“We’re fully staffed, sir. Eight nurses, two doctors. Both experienced surgeons. You said you’re full.”
“All Americans, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
We ducked through the doorway of the barn, into a shower of electric light that stung my eyes. Around us stretched a ward of perhaps fifty beds, all of them occupied; a number of cots seemed to have been put up along the walls, staffed by a thin swarm of orderlies and a few nursing sisters in gray dresses and white pinafores. The smell of disinfectant saturated the damp air, swirling with the primeval odors of blood and earth. And not just any earth: this was the mud of France, battlefield mud, in which living things had died and decayed, and even now—years later—the stench still rots in the cavities of my nose like the memory of death. There is not enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse that smell.
The doctor didn’t pause. I don’t think he even heard me, any more than he would have heard an actual puppy scampering at his heels. He called out commands to a series of orderlies—Prepare the theater, Pass the word for Captain Winston—and only when he handed off the stretcher to the men assisting in the operating theater did he turn and fix his full attention upon me, like the next item on a long list of daily tasks, to be checked off and disposed of.
But the funny thing was—the really momentous thing, when I look back on the entire episode, trying to pinpoint this or that instant that might have constituted a turning point, a point of flexion at which my life might have taken an entirely different course—the funny thing was that his expression then changed. Transformed, like a man engaged in an obsessive quest, who had just parted a final pair of jungle branches and made the discovery for which he’d longed all his life.
His face, as I later learned, had that natural capability for transformation.
Where I had expected sternness, and frowns, and orders crossly delivered, I received something else. A smile, quite gentle. A movement of eyebrows that suggested understanding, and a little wonder. A bit of crinkling around a pair of eyes that had to be called hazel, though they tended, in certain light, toward green; surely that signified admiration?
My face turned warm.
“Miss—?”
“Fortescue.”
“Miss Fortescue. You’re the only evacuation ambulance to get through the roads today, did you know that? Either from the dressing station or the railway depot. How the devil did you do it?”
“I—I just drove, sir. Pushed her out when she got stuck.”
He drove a hand through his hair, which was sparkling with gray and cropped short, so that the bones of his face thrust out with additional clout. I thought he looked as if he came from the countryside, from some sort of vast outdoors; there was something a little rough-hewn about his cheeks and jaw, blunt, like a gamekeeper or else a poacher, although his creased skin was pale and sunless. His fingers, by contrast, contained all the delicate, tensile strength of a surgeon. I thought he must be exotically old,