1
CHARING CROSS HOSPITAL
LONDON, ENGLAND
1 FEBRUARY 1918
A stranger stalking down the street shouldn’t make her hands tremble in anticipation. Arabelle Denler forced her breathing to calm, forced an easy smile to her lips for the soldier whose bandage she’d just changed, and stood with the old bandage balled up in her bowl. “Is there anything else you need, Captain?”
The thrashing of his head from side to side may have been the answer to her question. Or it may have been simple agony. Poor chap. He’d just arrived in Charing Cross Hospital yesterday after ordnance had stolen his entire left leg.
“Ara!” The stage whisper came from the hallway, where Eliza, one of the volunteer nurses, motioned her frantically.
He’d be stomping down the street any moment. Brooding and aloof and mysterious and so handsome that just looking at him could make one’s heart crack a bit.
She resisted the urge to dart out. Black Heart, as the papers had dubbed him, was of no concern to her. She had a fiancé. And more, she had a purpose. Right here, right now. Resting a hand on the captain’s shoulder, she closed her eyes and whispered a quiet prayer. Only after her amen did she move away, her pace no faster than it ever was. The fact that she didn’t stop at any other cots in the ward had nothing to do with the view out the window and everything to do with the fact that her shift was over and she needed to deliver these bloodied bandages to the laundry on her way out.
If the window facing Agar Street happened to be on the way to said laundry, that was pure coincidence.
And if she went into the little room where the nurses and volunteers took their brief breaks rather than directly to her destination, she could blame it on Eliza, who seized her by the arm and tugged her into the cupboard of a room with a giggle. “Hurry.”
Arabelle rolled her eyes, even as she knew it was more to cover the thumping of her own pulse than because she found their daily ritual silly. She slid the bowl of sullied bandages onto a table and quickly washed her hands before golden-haired Eliza pulled her over to the window.
“There!” Susan, a pretty girl of perhaps eighteen who had been volunteering here for only a half year, leaned into the windowsill until her cheek was pressed to the pane.
Arabelle tugged her back an inch. Gracious, but sometimes these girls made her feel ancient. She was only twenty-five, but she couldn’t recall ever acting so giddy simply because a man was walking down the street. “A bit of propriety, if you please, Sue. He could look up again, and you don’t want him to catch you staring.”
The girls had about fainted dead away last week when he’d glanced directly up at their window and sent them all a devil-may-care grin. As if he knew exactly what they were doing and the effect he had.
“What are you three doing?”
Arabelle turned to smile at another volunteer—who was usually gone long before this hour of the day. “Lily! What are you still doing here?”
Lilian Blackwell, her red-gold brows lifted, sauntered into the room. “I had to swap my hours today so I could help my mother with something this morning.” She drew even with them and peered out the window. “What’s going on out there?”
Eliza bumped Susan companionably on the shoulder. “She has no idea what she misses every day. He walks by, Lil. The fellow the papers have dubbed Black Heart. I declare, he must be the handsomest man in all England.”
Something odd flashed in Lily’s eyes. Recognition, perhaps. Ara tilted her head. “Do you know him? He’s working at Whitehall now it seems. With your father?”
Lily’s smile was vague. She backed away from the window. “I couldn’t say. Daddy works with so many chaps, you know. Though I can certainly assure you he isn’t one my mother has invited over to dine with us.”
Eliza and Susan’s laughter turned to playful shoving as they each jockeyed for prime position at the window.
“Need I separate you two?” Arabelle made a show of putting a hand on each of their arms and pushing them a few inches apart, positioning herself between them as a barrier.
Not so she had a better view out the window.
Oh, fiddlesticks. Who did she think she was fooling?
Lily had retreated to the door. “Well, I’d best hurry along. This odd schedule today has me all sorts of discombobulated. I’ll see you in the morning, Ara. Eliza, Sue, it was nice to actually work beside you today.”
A chime of farewells soon turned into excited exclamations of “There he is! He’s coming!”
Arabelle drew in a deep breath even as her eyes sought the familiar stride of Black Heart. He was stomping at a faster clip than usual down the street. No teasing grin would be shot up at them today—that was clear from the angry set of his jaw and the hands clenched into fists at his side.
His nickname was no great mystery. One had only to watch him for a few moments to see the resentment—some would call it hatred—that held him in its teeth. Arabelle’s fingers settled on the windowsill. She’d never met the man. But she knew him. Knew how the bitterness could eat at one, gnawing away until there was nothing left but sinew and bone, no heart to speak of.
Just looking at him took her back to those dark days. The days before Aunt Hettie, before the Braxtons, before the Lord had shown her how He’d always been by her side. When it was just her and a dead mother and a missing father and a village rector who hadn’t a clue what to do with a seething ten-year-old girl.
Father God, he wears his pain like a uniform. She watched Black Heart pound the pavement ever nearer to their window. But you can reach him, as you reached me. Touch his heart, Lord. Break it, if you must. Show him that you’re there, right there beside him.
She’d prayed nearly the same prayer every day for months. Every day he stalked by Charing Cross on his way home from the Old Admiralty Building, where he’d somehow ended up instead of in front of a firing squad. To hear the papers tell it, he’d killed his entire squadron—willfully. Five flying aces taken out in their prime by his jealousy and hateful nature, all because of an argument with one of the pilots.
He chose that moment to glance up. No smile upon his lips, not today. And who knew what he could really see behind the glass. But it felt as though he looked directly at her, straight into her eyes. As if with that glance he was challenging her daily prayer for him. God isn’t here, that look said. No one is.
But He was. And He would show him. She knew He would.
“I could bring a smile back to those lips,” Eliza said to the glass, a wistful look in her eyes.
“You? No, he needs someone young and fresh and hopeful to change him.” Susan grinned down at him, though he didn’t look up again.
Arabelle took a step backward. “I wouldn’t put any hope in changing a man, Sue. None of us can change anyone else—not unless they want to do it themselves.” But the Lord could. And from the first moment she’d spotted that angry pilot, she had the strangest feeling that He was chasing him.
“I meant inspire him to change.” Susan patted her hair, pinned just so under her white kerchief, as if Black Heart would be able to see it from the street.
“Are you girls wasting time at the window again?” The ward matron brought them all around with a start, her nearly permanent scowl etched into place between her brows. She leveled a finger at the lot of them. “Back to your posts, or I’ll have you all reassigned, and you’ll never be on this side of the building again.”