Had her parents really thought the Great War wouldn’t touch them; that she and her mother could safely visit their family estate in Belgium? How shortsighted that decision now seemed; though back in early September of 1914, her father had been certain all the fighting would be concentrated on the Russian border—the Eastern Front—and Belgium’s neutrality would be respected.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
The insectlike buzz of the plane grew louder. Surely they weren’t going to bombard the village of Ypres again. What could possibly be left there that hadn’t already been blasted into rubble?
Lately she drifted from one empty day to another here in the huge, rambling estate with only old Claudine and Willem, the manor’s caretaker couple, there to help her. Thank god they’d stayed on. If they’d left, Emma knew she wouldn’t have been able to cope at all.
She’d been stuck there for nearly seven months, since last September. The seventeenth-century manor house sat right on the line between the Allied French, English, Dutch, Canadian, and Belgian troops and the enemy, the Austrians and Germans. Both sides had dug in to filthy trenches on either side of the fighting. She was right on what had come to be known as the Western Front of the Great War.
The mansion sat on several miles of elevated cliff known as The Ridge. It gave her a perfect view of the trench-torn fields below. It was just like her to be stuck in the thick of things, right smack in the middle of trouble. Only, unlike the schoolgirl mischief she’d gotten into back at the Hampshire School, this was a mess to end all messes—a disaster on a worldwide scale. Some people said it was the end of the world.
It felt like the end of the world.
She and her mother should have gone home right away, but then a week later, the German hydrogen vessels, the zeppelins, flew over England and dropped missiles. No one had expected that!
Her father sent a telegram saying it might be better to stay where they were for the moment. But they’d waited too long. Now a fight had begun to control the North Sea, and the English Channel wasn’t safe to cross. The Germans had declared any vessel in those waters fair game for attack. Besides that, she couldn’t get past enemy lines in the north.
If only her mother were still there with her.
Rose Winthrop had been too near a missile that exploded in Ypres during an assault on the medieval city. They’d been in a restaurant having lunch. The owner pulled the shutters closed and barricaded the door when the attack began, but the blast tore open the entire front of the restaurant. Emma had desperately mopped blood from her mother’s brow and watched the once vibrant eyes grow dull as she slipped away.
It infuriated her to think that people thought her mother had run off, had abandoned her father. It was awful! Why didn’t her father set the ugly rumors straight? Hadn’t he told people that she had been killed?
It suddenly struck her that maybe he didn’t know! Her mother had been buried outside of Ypres. Emma had written her father a letter, telling him what had happened; but maybe he’d never gotten it. She hadn’t received a letter back from him in all this time. She’d assumed it was because they couldn’t get letters across the enemy lines. It had never occurred to her until that moment that her letter to him had not made it to London.
A knot twisted in her stomach. Did her father think she and her mother had abandoned him? Was that why no one had come to get her?
In the beginning, right after her mother’s death, she’d spent every day expecting her father to show up, to console her, to take her home. But he never came. No one came. She hadn’t known what to think of this but she’d imagined every possible scenario: her father getting the news and dropping dead of a heart attack; England being attacked and her father taken prisoner; her father being killed in another missile attack. Her imagination spun out endless reasons why he had not come. Most likely, he couldn’t get through to her just as she couldn’t get to him, but it still didn’t stop her from imagining the worst.
This letter from Lloyd meant that her father was alive but not telling anyone that her mother was dead, leaving them to think that she—and Emma— had run off and left him. Was it truly what he thought had happened? If so, how could he think that of them? Her mother would never do that—her loving, good mother—never!
Thinking of her mother made Emma’s eyes well with tears. It was so senseless! So stupid! Her mother had died for no reason! Her mother had always been the one she could count on to understand her feelings; the one ready with a hug and comforting words. It was her mother to whom she’d always confided. How she missed talking with her.
And though her mother would have been her first choice, it would have been a pleasure to have anyone at all to talk to these days! Willem and Claudine only spoke Flemish. And, although the sounds of Flemish were a bit like French—and somewhat like Dutch, which was likewise akin, in some ways, to German—she found it nearly impossible to communicate with the couple. Many Belgians spoke German, French, or English. Emma was fluent in all three, having excelled in language at school. Her own mother had been able to speak German and Dutch, being raised as a girl here in the manor. But with Claudine and Willem, it was Flemish or nothing, and so it was nothing.
The rattle of the first round of shelling drew Emma’s thoughts back to the planes. Two more fighter planes had joined them, their red and white cross insignias just barely visible from her window.
Her hands flew to her ears, covering them against a sudden deafening blast. The nearest field erupted in white light, shot through with dirt and debris. Even from up here on The Ridge, back a safe distance from the fighting, her window rattled slightly with the impact. The shells were raining down fast now. It always began with a whistle, like ascending fireworks, and then the jarring, bone-rattling explosion. Though she’d heard it before, she could never get used to it.
Staring hard, she tried to see into the trenches out there in the fields. She couldn’t detect movement in the long ditches dug into the dirt, but that didn’t mean soldiers weren’t there, hunkered against the dirt walls, gripping their machine guns, hand grenades, and pistols; waiting, tensely white-knuckled, for the other side to stand and advance first, foolishly exposing itself to their gunfire.
Another shell hit the ground, spraying up more blinding light and deadly debris.
Emma turned away from the window, her face tight with the effort of keeping tears at bay. How much longer could this madness continue?
So many people had died already. Her mother’s death loomed larger than all the others to her, but she knew that every death was monumental to someone; every soldier a friend, boyfriend, husband, father, brother, or son. Every civilian and soldier killed was someone’s dear one and an irreplaceable loss to that person. And yet the killing went on and on. The death tolls reported in the papers were staggering.
Madness! she thought again. If she heard one more shell fall she might lose her mind altogether.
She crossed the large master bedroom that had once been used by her parents. She’d moved into it because her own bedroom had a leak when it rained and it had been a rainy spring.
The four curved posts of her parents’ mahogany bed nearly reached the top of the ceiling. A maroon-colored brocade cloth was draped from post to post. The matching bedcover lay rumpled across the unmade bed.
Emma crawled into it, kicking aside the knotted sheet before pulling her legs into a fetal crouch. Her tears flowed freely now into her pillow, until she had sobbed her way into the relief of sleep.
She dreamed she was having tea with the girls in her dormitory. They sat downstairs in the school’s parlor, so happy to be back in the familiar safety of the school once again, back among friends. They were gossiping about someone. She heard their words but couldn’t make sense of them. “Who are you talking about?” she asked.
“Don’t you know?” asked a girl named Theresa. “It’s that Rose Winthrop. She ran away from her husband and then she abandoned her daughter in Europe somewhere—just dumped her
and ran off with some man.”
“She did not!” Emma objected angrily.
Theresa and the others giggled knowingly. “Yes, she did, silly. Everyone in England knows about it,” a second girl named Augusta insisted. “Mr. Winthrop has disowned the mother and the daughter, both. He wants nothing to do with either one of them. He has forgotten them entirely and has begun a new family.”
“He has not!” Emma screamed, red-faced with humiliation and outrage. “Stop saying that! Stop it!”
She sat straight up in bed, wide awake once again and realizing she’d shouted out loud.
The rapid staccato of machine gun fire now filled the blank spaces between the bombings from above. But something new was happening, something she had never seen before. She noticed it the moment she gazed toward the window.
Swinging her legs out of bed, she returned to the window for a closer look.
Out in the fields, a sickly, greenish-yellow vapor came rising up from the ground. It was like no color she’d ever seen before.
What was it?
The ghostly mist seemed strangely evil and filled Emma with an icy dread.
For a moment, both the bombing and the machine gun fire ceased. Her ears adjusted to the sudden silence and she became aware of another sound.
She wasn’t certain ... but ...
She thought she heard a voice ... no.
It was many voices.
And they were screaming.
About the Author
SUZANNE WEYN is the author of more than a hundred novels for children and young adults and has had her work featured on the New York Times bestseller list. Her other novels in the Once upon a Time series include Water Song and The Night Dance. Suzanne lives in upstate New York. Visit her at SuzanneWeynBooks.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Prologue
Chapter One A Brave New World
Chapter Two The Crimson Thread
Chapter Three The Fighting O’Malleys
Chapter Four Rick Miller from Wales
Chapter Five The Police Close In
Chapter Six Fired!
Chapter Seven Balancing Act
Chapter Eight In the Grand House
Chapter Nine Crisis
Chapter Ten James Wellington, The Prince of Industry
Chapter Eleven The Secret Room
Chapter Twelve Da’s Wild Boast
Chapter Thirteen Spinning Straw into Gold
Chapter Fourteen Angry Words
Chapter Fifteen A Strange Presence Outside the Window
Chapter Sixteen Atlanta
Chapter Seventeen A New Life
Chapter Eighteen A Revealing Conversation
Chapter Nineteen The Last Straw
Chapter Twenty A Confrontation
Chapter Twenty-One Cast Out
Chapter Twenty-Two Trouble
Chapter Twenty-Three The Real Name
Chapter Twenty-Four Searching for Eileen
Epilogue
Water Song
Prologue Belgium, April 1915
Chapter One The Glowing Green Sky
About the Author
Suzanne Weyn, The Crimson Thread (Once Upon a Time)
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