The flight to the London airport went very smoothly, and the car to take Phillip to Whitfield was there waiting for them when they arrived, and they saluted Phillip decorously with full military honors and he loved it. And then they whisked Sarah off to Chelsea Royal Hospital, to see the men they had just flown in from Germany the night before, at midnight. She prayed that one of them was indeed William.

There was only one man who was even a remote possibility. He was approximately William’s height, but they said he had weighed approximately one hundred and thirty or forty pounds, his hair was white, and he seemed a great deal older than the Duke of Whitfield. Sarah said nothing as they described it all to her on the way to the hospital, and she was frighteningly silent as they took her upstairs, past wards of critically ill men, and busy doctors and nurses. With what had just happened in Germany, they had their hands full. Men were being flown in as fast as they could bring them in, and doctors were being called in from all over England.

They had put the man they thought was William in a small room by himself. And an orderly was standing in the room with him, to monitor his breathing. There was a tube going up his nose, and a respirator, and there was a multitude of machines and devices hovering over him, including an oxygen tent, which concealed him.

The orderly pulled back the flap a little bit so she could see him better to identify him, and the men from the War Office stood back at a discreet distance. The hospital was still waiting for dental charts from Bomber Command so that they could make a positive identification. But Sarah didn’t need dental charts to identify this man. He was barely recognizable, he was so thin, and he looked like his own father, but as she stepped closer to the bed, she reached out and touched his cheek. He had returned to her from the dead, and he didn’t stir now, but there was not a shred of doubt in her mind. It was William. She turned and looked at them then, and the look on her face told them everything, as the tears poured down her cheeks and theirs too.

“Thank God …” Sir Alan whispered, echoing Sarah’s feelings. She stood rooted to the spot, unable to take her eyes from him as she touched his face, and his hands, and lifted his fingers to her lips and kissed them. His hands had a waxy look to them, as did his face, and she could see that he was hovering near death, but she knew that they would do everything to save him. The orderly dropped the flap on the oxygen tent again, and a moment later two doctors and three sisters came in, and began doing assorted things, and then the doctors asked her to leave the room, which she did, with a last look at him. It was a miracle. She had lost Lizzie … but now they had found William. Perhaps God wasn’t as unkind as she had feared for a while. And she asked the men from the War Office before they left if they would arrange for her to call William’s mother at Whitfield. They organized it at once from the office of the head of the hospital, and the dowager duchess gave a gasp of relief at the other end of the phone, and then gave in to tears, as did Sarah.

“Thank God … the poor boy … how is he?”

“Not very well, Mother, I’m afraid. But he’ll be better soon” She hoped she wasn’t lying to her, because she wanted to believe it. But he hadn’t survived this long in order to die now. She just simply wouldn’t let him.

The men from the War Office left then, and the head of the hospital came to speak to her about William’s condition. He didn’t waste any words and went straight to the point with a serious expression.

“We don’t know if your husband will live, Your Grace. He has gangrene in both legs, extensive internal wounds, and he’s been ill for a long time. Years possibly. He had compound fractures of both legs that never healed. He’s probably had infections in both legs since he fell. We can’t save his legs, and we may not be able to save his life. You have to know that.” She knew it, but she refused to accept it. Now that he was back, she absolutely refused to lose him.

“You have to save his legs. He didn’t come this far in order for you to lose them.”

“We have no choice, or very little in any case. His legs will be of no use to him now anyway, the muscles and nerves are far too damaged, he’ll have to be in a wheelchair.”

“Fine, but let him have his legs in that wheelchair.”

“Your Grace, I’m not sure you understand … it’s a delicate balance … the gangrene …” She assured him that she understood perfectly, but begged him to at least try to save William’s legs, and looking exasperated, he promised her that they would do what they could, but she had to be realistic.

There were four operations in the next two weeks, and William barely survived each of them, but he did, although he had never regained consciousness once since he was flown to London. The first two operations were on his legs, the third to his spine, and the last one to make internal repairs to injuries that eventually might have killed him. And none of the specialists who worked on him could understand how he had made it. He was wracked with infection and disease, malnourished in the extreme, bones had been broken and never healed, and there were visible signs of torture. He had suffered everything and he had lived … but barely.

By the third week they had done all they could, and now all they could do was wait, to see if he regained consciousness, or remained in a coma, or simply died. No one could say now, and Sarah sat with him day after day, holding his hand, talking to him, willing him back to life, until she almost looked worse than he did. She was desperately thin and pale, and her eyes were almost glazed as she sat beside him and nursed him. One of the sisters came in and saw her one day, and shook her head quietly, and then said to her, “He can’t hear you, Your Grace. Don’t exhaust yourself.” She had brought Sarah a cup of tea, and Sarah had accepted it gratefully, but she still insisted that William could hear her.

They tried one last surgery on his spleen at the end of July, and then once again they waited, and Sarah nursed and talked and encouraged and kissed his fingers, and watched him, never leaving his bedside for a moment. They had put a cot in his room for her, and she had borrowed some of the sisters’ uniforms, and she sat there day after day, without giving up hope for an instant. The only time she ever left William’s side at all was when the dowager duchess brought Phillip to the hospital, to see his mother in the waiting room. He wasn’t allowed to go upstairs to see William, and in truth he would have been afraid to. He had been told how very ill he was, and the fact was that to Phillip, William was a stranger. In the years he might have remembered him, the child had never seen him. But Sarah was happy to see the child, she missed him terribly, and he missed her, but she didn’t feel she could leave William.

It was the first of August when the head surgeon told her that she needed to get away, that they had become convinced that His Grace was never going to wake from his coma. He simply wasn’t going to wake up again. He might exist that way for years, or days, but if he had been going to wake, by then he would have, and she had to face it.

“How do you know he won’t suddenly come to, this afternoon?” she asked, sounding faintly hysterical to him. But all she knew was that they had managed to save his legs for him, and now they were going to give up and throw him away like so much garbage. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in five weeks, and she was not giving up on him now, no matter what they said, but the doctor insisted that they knew better.

“I’ve been a surgeon for nearly forty years,” he told her firmly, “and sometimes you have to know when to fight and when to give up. We fought … and we lost … you have to let him give up now.”

“He was a prisoner of war for three and a half years, is that what you call giving up?” she screamed. But she didn’t care who heard her. “He didn’t give up then, and I won’t give up now. Do you hear me?”

“Of course, Your Grace. I understand completely.” He left the room quietly and asked the matron if she might suggest a mild sedative to the Duchess of Whitfield, but she only rolled her eyes at him. The woman was possessed. She was obsessed with the idea of saving her husband.

“The poor man is almost gone. She ought to let him go in peace,” she said to the sister working beside her, and the other woman shook her head, too, but she had seen stranger things. They had had a man on one of the wards who’d revived recently, after nearly six months in a coma from a head wound he’d gotten in an air raid.

“You never know,” she said, and went back to check on Sarah and William. Sarah was sitting in the chair, speaking softly to him about Phillip, and his mother, and Whitfield, and the château, and she even vaguely mentioned Lizzie. She would have said anything if she’d thought it would work, but so far nothing had, and although she wouldn’t admit it to anyone, she was nearing the end of her rope. The sister put a gentle hand on her shoulder as she watched them, and then for an instant she thought she saw him stir, but she didn’t say anything. But Sarah had seen it, too, she sat very still, and then began talking to him again, asking if he would open his eyes to look at her just once … just one teeny tiny time … just to see if he liked the way her hair looked. She hadn’t seen herself in a mirror in over a month, and she could just imagine what she looked like, but she went on and on, kissing his hands and talking to him as the sister watched in fascination, and then slowly, his eyes fluttered open and he looked at her and smiled, and then closed them again as he nodded and she began to sob silently. They had done it … he had opened his eyes…. The sister was crying too, and she squeezed Sarah’s hand as she spoke to her patient.

“It’s very nice to see you awake, Your Grace, it’s about time too.” But he didn’t stir again for a little while, and then ever so slowly, he turned his head and looked straight at Sarah.

“It looks very nice,” he whispered hoarsely.

“What does?” She had no idea what he was talking about, but she had never been so happy in her life. She wanted to scream with relief and joy as she bent to kiss him.

“Your hair … wasn’t that what you asked me?” The nurse and Sarah laughed at him, and by the next day they had him sitting up and sipping soup and weak tea, and by the end of the week he was talking to all of them and slowly regaining his strength, although he looked like a ghost of his former self. But he was back. He was alive. That was all Sarah cared about. It was all she had lived for.

The War Office and the Home Office came to see him eventually, too, and when he was strong enough, he told them what had happened to him. It took several visits, and it defied belief. It made them all sick to hear what the Germans had done, and William wouldn’t let Sarah stay in the room when he told them. They had broken his legs again and again, left him in filth till they festered, tortured him with hot irons and electric prods. They had done everything short of killing him. But they had never figured out who he was, and he had never told them. He had been carrying a false passport, and false military papers when they dropped him in, and that was all they ever knew till the end. And he had never revealed his aborted mission.

He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism, but it was small consolation for losing the use of his legs. It depressed him at first to realize that he would never walk again, but Sarah had been right to fight for them, he was glad he still had them. He would have hated it if they’d amputated his legs.

They had both lost so much, and one afternoon, before he left the hospital, she told him about Lizzie, and they had both cried copiously as he listened.

“Oh, my darling … and I wasn’t there with you….”

“There was nothing you could have done. We didn’t have the medicines or the doctors…. We had nothing by then. The Americans were on their way, and the Germans were getting ready to leave, they had nothing left by then, and she wasn’t strong enough to survive. The commandant at the château was very good to us, he gave us everything he had … but she didn’t have the stamina….” She sobbed, and then looked up at her husband. “She was so sweet … she was such a lovely little girl….” Sarah could hardly speak as he held her. “I wish you could have known her….”

“I will one day,” he said through his own tears. “When we are all together again, in another place.” And in some ways, for both of them, it made Phillip doubly precious. But she still missed Lizzie terribly sometimes, especially when she saw a little girl who looked anything like her. She knew that there were other mothers who had lost their children during the war, but it was a pain that almost couldn’t be borne. She was grateful that now William was there to share it.