Wait for Me. Caroline Leech

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СКАЧАТЬ then the boy turned toward them and Lorna could see a high cheekbone and strong jawline. All right, perhaps he was more a man, but still …

      Then he faced them full-on, and Lorna’s irritation was instantly extinguished, her shock catching her throat.

      Half the boy’s face was gone.

      No, that wasn’t quite right. His face was there, but from his left temple to his chin, across his cheek and down the left side of his throat, the pale skin had been burned away, leaving raw red scarring, tight and shiny. The flesh was puckered into the knotted remnants of an earlobe, and his left eye was stretched out of shape, round elongating to oval.

      Lorna was horrified. What had happened? What had done that to him? She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but not that. And then an awful thought struck her. Had this terrible damage been inflicted by a British soldier like John Jo? Lorna felt sick at the thought, but still she could not look away.

      “Christ Almighty!” her father muttered.

      Then the sergeant walked in front of her, and the spell was broken.

      “Don’t look so scared, love, he won’t bite.” He seemed to find her discomfort amusing. “Well, not until he knows you better. Ain’t he a horrible sight?”

      Lorna glanced again toward the prisoner. Had he heard that?

      The sergeant chuckled.

      “Don’t worry, love, he doesn’t speak a word of the King’s English. None of ’em do.” He gestured to the German. “Doo haff nine English, eh, Fritz?”

      Was that even German?

      The prisoner stood straight and still. His expression—or as much of it as she could interpret from the undamaged side of his face—was impassive. A mask. Perhaps the driver was right, and he hadn’t understood the insult.

      As the sergeant gave them a mock salute and clambered back into the truck, Lorna struggled to remember what she had been saying before that awful scarred face had forced everything else from her mind.

      As the army truck reversed across the farmyard, Lorna forced herself to look at the soldier again. He was glowering—maybe—the undamaged side of his forehead creased into a frown, but really, what expression could she ever hope to read there?

      The rumble of the truck faded into the morning chill, and Lorna’s father rubbed his hand over his face. For all his gruffness and bad temper with Nellie, he suddenly looked very weary. Had he been as shocked as Lorna?

      Her father walked to where the German waited. “I’m John Anderson and this is my farm,” he said, slower and louder than necessary. “I have two boys of my own away at the war, so you’ll work in their place.”

      The prisoner appeared to be listening politely, even if he couldn’t understand the words. He did, however, give Lorna’s father a curt nod.

      “You don’t need to bow to me, son, just do your work. Oh, and this is my daughter,” Lorna’s father said as he saw she was still standing behind him, “who should be in an exam room right now.”

      But Lorna barely heard what he said. The German was looking at her, and Lorna shivered. His eyes were steel gray, glinting silver, hard and cold and angry.

      Then his gaze fell to her school uniform and woolen stockings, her milk-and-muck-spattered shoes. The right, undamaged side of his face rose in a sneer.

      Or was it a smile?

      No, definitely a sneer.

      He looked up again at Lorna and gave her one of those curt nods. Then, without another look in her direction, he followed her father, leaving Lorna alone in the yard.

      The rooster crowed again, as if it were already time for—

      School! The bloody exam! Lorna was late and Mrs. Murray would kill her. As she grabbed her coat and schoolbag from beside the gate, she scraped her knuckles on the wall and had to suck at the graze to stop it bleeding as she took off running toward the shortcut past the church. The path would be muddy, but her shoes couldn’t get much filthier than they were already.

      As she ran, Lorna resolved to forget about the German for now, to forget that her dad had invited the enemy onto their farm, into their home. But still, there was the way the German had looked at the mess on her shoes, his burned face, his angry eyes, and his distorted smile—no, his sneer—and somehow that made her run all the faster.

       Two

       BIG NEWS! Need to talk later.

      Lorna waited while the ink dried on the scrap torn from the back of her exercise book, then slid it across the desk and under the page her best friend, Iris Robertson, was doodling her latest dress design on. The calculus paper hadn’t been anywhere near as hard as Lorna had expected, and she and Iris had both finished it with plenty of time to spare. Now she was bored.

      Iris glanced at the note and moved to slip it into her cardigan sleeve. Before it was hidden, however, long fingers reached out and took it from her hand, making Lorna and Iris both jump. Mrs. Murray stood over them, fanning herself with the note, then gave her head a quick shake of disapproval and returned to the front of the classroom.

      Lorna had another twenty minutes of staring out at the heavy cloud that seemed to smother the high classroom windows before Mrs. Murray called an end to the examination. The teacher squeezed between the tightly packed desks to collect the exam papers into two piles—calculus from the older students like Lorna, and algebra from the younger ones. It had been close to chaos when the two classes had merged after Mrs. Duffy had run off to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force the year before, but Mrs. Murray’s rod of iron had soon brought an almost military discipline to the room.

      As Mrs. Murray passed by Lorna’s desk, picking up the papers, she paused.

      “Would you join me in the hallway please, Lorna?” she said. “I need a quiet word with you.”

      Damn! It was only a note. It wasn’t like she’d been cheating.

      Lorna exchanged glances with Iris before reluctantly pushing back her chair and walking slowly to the front of the classroom. Esther Bell snorted loudly as Lorna passed her, but Lorna paid no attention. Esther got told off more than Lorna ever did, anyway, and it was because of people like Esther that Lorna was counting down the days until she graduated from school. Only then would she be spared the trial of seeing Esther each day.

      “Class! Get out your English notebooks and start on the assignment on the blackboard,” Mrs. Murray ordered as she opened her desk drawer and took out some papers. “We’ll break for lunch at noon, as usual. In the meantime, I do not, I repeat, do not want to hear one peep from in here.”

      She walked into the hallway, holding the door open for Lorna to follow.

      Lorna glanced back at Iris, but she was gazing at William Urquhart with that ridiculous look on her face.

      Lorna pulled the door closed behind her and faced her teacher. “Look, Mrs. СКАЧАТЬ