Chapter Forty-five
In the end, I sent Ellis home to his mother. I didn’t want to attend the funeral, and suspected I wouldn’t be welcome anyway.
Two days after Hank flew off with Ellis’s body, Angus slipped into my room and my bed. He lay beside me, balanced on an elbow, stroking the hair away from my throat. He fingered the neck of my nightgown.
“Take that off…”
When I lay back down, he leaned over and whispered directly into my ear. “I want to marry you, mo chridhe. To make this official just as soon as we can.”
He planted tiny kisses on my neck, working his way down. When he was almost at my collarbone, he took a small piece of my flesh between his teeth. I gasped, and every hair on my body stood on end.
“That’s assuming you’ll even have such a rough dog as myself,” he said, continuing his descent. He kissed his way to my left breast and ran his tongue over my nipple. It tightened into a little raspberry.
He raised his head. “Although I suppose I didn’t phrase it exactly as a question, that last comment of mine does require an answer…”
“But of course!” I said. “I want to be Mrs. Grant as soon as…oh!”
His mouth was once again on the move.
“Actually,” he said between kisses, “you’ll be the Much Honored Madeline Grant, Lady of Craig Gairbh.”
The thing he did next left me unable to respond at all—at least, not with words.
—
We decided to wait a few weeks for the sake of propriety, but for all intents and purposes we were married from that moment on. Angus spent every night in my bed, although he slipped downstairs before dawn so as not to offend Anna’s sensibilities.
The news from the Front made it clear that the war in Europe couldn’t last much longer. City after city either surrendered or was liberated, and the Germans were driven ever deeper into their own territory. They were surrounded on all sides. They had also run out of men to recruit. They began drafting boys as young as ten from the Hitler Youth, and reenlisting any soldier who had only lost his leg below the knee.
From there, it all fell like dominoes, beginning with a hit close to home. President Roosevelt died on April 12, and Harry S. Truman became the 33rd President of the United States.
Three days later, British forces liberated a complex of concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and, according to an article in The Inverness Courier, found “thousands of starving men, women, and children, naked bodies lying four feet high stretching a distance of 80 yards by a width of 30 yards, cannibalism rife, disease and unspeakable cruelty rampant.” General Eisenhower implored members of the British House of Commons to come see “the agony of crucified humanity” for themselves, because “no words can convey the horror.”
On April 16, the same day the Russians began yet another massive offensive, a desperate Adolf Hitler issued his “Last Stand,” in which he ordered troops to arrest immediately any officer or soldier who gave orders to retreat, regardless of rank, and if necessary to execute them, because even if they were in German uniform, they were probably drawing Russian pay. He told his forces, “In this hour the entire German nation looks to you, my soldiers in the East, and only hopes that by your fanaticism, by your arms, and by your leadership, the Bolshevik onslaught is drowned in a bloodbath.”
Twelve days later, Mussolini and his mistress were executed by firing squad after trying to escape to Switzerland. Their bodies were then hung upside down on meat hooks in the Piazzale Loreto. A woman approached and cried, “Five shots for my five assassinated sons!” before pumping another five bullets into Mussolini’s already-battered corpse.
The next day, April 29, American forces liberated Dachau, the first of the German concentration camps to be erected, and among the last to be liberated. Upon their approach, the Americans encountered thirty coal cars filled with decomposing bodies. Within the camp, they found approximately thirty thousand emaciated survivors, who continued to die at the rate of several hundred a day, because their systems were too weak to take nourishment.
On April 30, the Russians took Berlin and raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. Deep in their bunker, with the battle raging above them, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun poisoned themselves and their dogs, after which Hitler shot himself in the head.
—
We huddled around the radio that night, every one of us breathing through our mouths. It was almost too much to believe. At long last—after more devastation and cruelty and callous disregard for human life than any of us could have possibly dreamed up—the hostilities appeared to be over. They were, in fact, although it wasn’t made official for another week, when all remaining German forces surrendered unconditionally.
When Victory Day was finally declared, the collective jubilation became chaos. People ripped down their Blackout curtains and set them on fire in the streets, sirens blared and church bells rang, victory parades turned into wild impromptu parties, people whooped and danced and sang, strangers made love in bushes off to the side of the road, bonfires raged, and bagpipes called out triumphantly from every hill the whole night through.
At ten the next morning, Angus and I got married. The day after that, Anna and Willie did the same.