Chapter 7
Chapter 7
The house was a solid slab of darkness in the indigo dusk as they barrelled down the hill, stumbling over tussocks of grass. After the noise and life of the fair the park seemed eerily still, and it was all too easy to believe that Samuel’s ghost might be flitting through the trees as they skirted the woods by the temple. To Susan’s ears, every rustle of leaves, every fox bark and sheep call turned into the sound of his lost soul wandering, and she stayed close to Thomas (though what he could do to protect her from restless spirits she couldn’t rightly say).
Eliza stamped along in front of her, white blouse bobbing palely in the gloom, bad temper stirring the air in her wake. She’d been in a mood since the weather turned, and Susan had pointed out that she should have worn a coat (which was true; there was no need for Eliza to bite her head off). In fact, she’d had a right face on her even before that, ever since Jem Arden had announced he was heading back. Getting soaked had only put the tin lid on it.
When she reached the bottom of the slope, Susan saw her turn and look over her shoulder, to where Joseph trailed miserably behind. He’d eaten an entire quarter of liquorice and a helping of pigs’ trotters and been sick when he got off the gallopers. On the walk home he’d slowed everyone down.
‘Hurry up, for pity’s sake. We’re almost an hour late. She’s going to kill us.’
Thomas flashed a swift grin at Susan. ‘That’d be why we saw that owl this morning.’
‘She’ll understand,’ Abigail said breathlessly. ‘It’s not our fault Joseph was taken bad.’
‘We should have left earlier,’ Eliza snapped.
They all fell silent as they walked round to the stable yard, preparing for apologies and admonishment and a lengthy lecture on trust and timekeeping. The yard was in darkness too (the outdoor staff, not being tied to Mr Goddard’s strict door-locking curfew, wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours at least); but as they passed through the yawning mouth of the archway, the kitchen window spilled light onto the cobbles.
‘Here goes…’ Thomas muttered by the back door.
They filed into the passage, heads bowed. The light of the oil lamp seemed very bright after the dark outside. It made Thomas’s copper hair gleam more brightly and showed up the greenish pallor of Joseph’s face, the shadows circling his eyes. Susan had expected either Mr Goddard or Mrs Furniss to be waiting; to appear with that look—disappointment mixed with chilly disdain—that left you no doubt that you were for it (at least Mrs Gatley came straight out with it), but the corridor was empty. Following Thomas, she and Abigail exchanged a puzzled look.
Jem Arden was sitting at the table in the servants’ hall, his shirtsleeves rolled up and a book open on the table in front of him, an empty teacup at his elbow. He got up when they came in. It was funny, Susan thought; they’d all been at Coldwell longer than he had, but there was something about him that made it seem like he was in charge. Like he had more authority than Thomas even, though he was first footman.
‘Mrs Furniss asked me to let you know that a telegram came this afternoon from Whittam Park,’ he said gravely. ‘I’m afraid it brought bad news about Sir Henry. It seems he died, very suddenly and unexpectedly, while staying with Lady Etchingham. We don’t know any more than that for the moment.’
Susan’s stomach swooped like it had on the swingboats earlier. She felt the beat of the owl’s wings inside her head and its shadow seemed to fall across the lamplit room.
In the housekeeper’s parlour Kate sat up late over her books and her ledger, making lists and writing letters: to Lady Etchingham’s housekeeper, extending her sympathy (she could imagine the disruption to the Whittam Park household), to Jay’s on Regent Street (‘The Mourning Warehouse’) to order armbands and black cotton gloves for the male servants and a bolt of black crepe to cover Coldwell’s numerous mirrors, and to Mrs Bryant in Portman Square to solicit the older woman’s advice on how to run a house in mourning.
She herself had little close personal experience of death. She’d had a brother once, but was too young to remember the loss of the child who had embodied the best of her parents’ hopes and ambitions, much less the etiquette surrounding his burial and mourning. Her parents, as far as she knew, were still alive, although they had been as good as dead to her for the last ten years, on account of their rigid belief that she must remain lying in the bed she had so rashly made for herself.
There was no ceremony and no ritual to mark a bereavement of that kind. Just silence, and absence, and bitterness.
It was after midnight when she went through to the little panelled chamber that opened off her parlour and got stiffly into bed. Mrs Walton, her elderly predecessor, had moved her bedroom down here from the maids’ attic when the stairs became too arduous for her to manage. Mostly Kate was happy with the arrangement—in winter, it was warmer in the passages near to the kitchen, and in the summer, the stone flags and lack of sunlight kept her room cool. But tonight, the confined space made her feel trapped. Its wood-panelled walls were like the inside of a coffin.
The day behind her seemed to have been stretched out of all recognisable shape; it felt like a week since she had departed for Hatherford, and the fair. As she lay in the dark, a procession of images flickered through her head, like the jerky moving-picture reel she had seen at a travelling fair on Clifton Down one summer. When she finally slipped into uneasy sleep it was to find herself walking through a crowd of stiff-limbed figures in mourning black who turned to stare at her with accusing eyes that said, That’s her.
She woke suddenly, disorientated and damp with sweat.
Her shadow lurched across the panelled wall as she struck a match and held it to the candle, driving back the darkness. Gradually her heart slowed and the blood beat more gently in her ears, but the feeling of disquiet persisted: a primitive instinct for danger which wouldn’t be dismissed.
She got up, wincing at the cold of the floor, and took her candle out into the parlour. Before she had reached the door a faint noise stopped her in her tracks: a high-pitched creak, familiar and unmistakable. The noise made by the hinges of the green baize door at the top of the basement stairs.
Her pulse rocketed again, but after a moment’s hesitation, she covered the remaining distance to the door and opened it softly. Out in the passageway the candle flame dipped and guttered in an invisible breath of air. She moved silently, holding the candle high in front of her, though it was difficult to see anything beyond its circle of light. Her blood felt hot and stinging in her veins. The light crept ahead of her into the kitchen passage and licked at the feet of a figure on the stairs.
She glimpsed it for a second only before the panicked jolt of her hand made the candle splutter and go out.
‘It’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about.’
Jem Arden’s voice came from the shadows, steady and low. She heard him come down the last few stairs and could see the white of his shirt, though the rest of him was lost to the darkness.
‘What are you doing down here?’
‘I swapped places with Joseph. He was done in when they came back, and not feeling well, so I said he could have my bed. Just as well. I heard something upstairs and thought I should check.’
They were whispering. Mr Goddard’s bedroom was beyond the butler’s pantry at the far end of the kitchen passage; but even so, the lateness of the hour, the stillness of the house, the darkness—as velvet soft and quiet as a cat’s paw—made their voices so low they were little more than a breath.
‘Was someone there?’
She remembered what Lady Etchingham’s maid had said about the break-ins, and suddenly had that old, unwelcome sensation of being watched. Her eyes darted around, probing the shadows.
‘I don’t know. I’ve checked all the main rooms and can’t see anything amiss. I can’t get into the library though.’
Sleep-slowed thoughts tumbled over each other in her mind. The disquiet from the dream still lingered, along with the irrational fear that it might have been more than a dream. A premonition. Her husband and tormentor had slipped out of the past and finally found her, as he’d said he would. He was here, at Coldwell.
You made a promise, don’t forget. To honour and obey, till death do us part. I never go back on my word, and I expect the same from other people, Katherine. No one breaks a promise to me and gets away with it.
She shook her head, trying to dispel the demons. Alec Ross was miles away, in Bristol. There was no way he could have discovered her, much less broken into the house in the middle of the night to reclaim her. She was being ridiculous. Hysterical and unhinged, like he’d always said she was.
Jem Arden touched her arm, just lightly, and his hand was warm through the thin cotton of her nightgown. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry to have caused you alarm. Go back to bed. I’ll have a proper look around outside, just to make sure, but it was probably only the wind. It’s quite safe, I promise.’
After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded and did as he said. It was a relief to return to her room, knowing that he was there and had taken charge. His presence—his certainty—reassured her, and as she got back into bed her mind was easier.
This time her sleep was undisturbed by dreams.
Sir Henry Hyde returned to Coldwell on a bright May morning in a black carriage with the blinds pulled down, drawn by four black horses. Word of his death had spread; and although he couldn’t be said to be a popular figure in the locality, the roadside by the gate lodge was lined with people—tenant farmers and villagers—drawn by old custom, superstition, and curiosity. They fell silent, pulling off their caps and bowing their heads as the carriage rattled past.
Inside the house it was as dark as an endless winter’s evening, with the blinds drawn and the mirrors draped in black. Mr Goddard, stooped and stricken, made his usual ponderous circuit of the Coldwell clocks, but instead of winding them, he silenced their ticking and circled the hands back to the time of Sir Henry’s passing (or the time that it had been discovered, the old man having slipped away quietly at some point between his bedtime brandy and morning tea).
Mrs Bryant had sent a lengthy reply to Kate’s letter, though its erratic spelling and complete lack of punctuation made her instructions difficult to understand. Fortunately, it transpired that Susan was a mine of information when it came to the rituals of mourning. On her authority, the few photographs of the deceased had been laid face downwards and his portrait in the dining room covered, though it turned out her expertise didn’t make her any less jittery about having a corpse in the house.
Sir Henry’s open coffin was carried up to the bedroom he had so recently occupied and laid in the centre of his vast four-poster. As the family arrived for the funeral—along with Miss Addison and Sir Henry’s land agent, physician, and solicitor—Kate found herself once more in the position of managing a house party, but one for which she’d had no chance to prepare. In the kitchen, Mrs Gatley stomped around, muttering darkly about the impossibility of producing a succession of lunches and five-course dinners at a moment’s notice, and with only the chime of the clock in the stable yard to help her with timings. She didn’t quite come out and say that Sir Henry might have had the decency to die with a bit more warning, but it was clear the thought was in her mind.
The day before the funeral chairs were placed around the bed in Sir Henry’s room, for the family to gather and pay their final respects. For the most part, they remained empty; Sir Henry’s nearest and dearest passed dutifully through the room but didn’t linger. However, custom dictated that someone must sit with the body throughout the night before the burial. Mr Goddard (who, it seemed, was the only one who felt any genuine grief at the old man’s passing) went up to take his turn as soon as his presence in the dining room was no longer required. He maintained his private vigil with the man he had served for thirty-two years, until midnight, when Thomas and Jem took over.
‘Rather you than me,’ said Abigail with a shudder, as they emerged from the footmen’s wardrobe dressed in their formal livery. Thomas’s face was as white as his shirtfront, making his freckles stand out like a sprinkling of nutmeg on a milk pudding.
‘The dead can’t hurt you,’ Jem said grimly, slipping a small pewter flask into his inside pocket. ‘But they’re really boring company. It’s going to be a very long night.’
He knew it would happen.
Jem had shared the attic bedroom with Thomas for long enough to have been able to predict, with absolute certainty, that he would effectively be conducting most of this nocturnal vigil alone.
Thomas was blessed with a childlike ability to be able to drop off within seconds and slumber peacefully through just about anything, including Walter Cox’s warthog snoring. In his case, the word wake was tinged with heavy irony. Within a couple of hours Thomas’s head had fallen back against the wall, and he was breathing softly, mouth open.
The brandy had played its part, of course. Jem gave the flask an experimental shake: Thomas had been so keen to take the edge off his unease that he must have downed three-quarters of it. As Jem had predicted.
He unscrewed the cap and took a swig of what remained.
Thomas was positioned on the other side of the bed, on a chair by the door. Jem got up and went tentatively over, circling the flask in front of Thomas’s blank face. When his eyelids didn’t flicker, Jem let out a long breath, and, treading softly, went to the heavy mahogany cabinet by the window.
Candles burned low on each side of the bed, but their meagre light didn’t reach the shelves behind the glass. He reached to pick one up, and the movement caused the flame to waver, so that it seemed almost like, inside the coffin, the old man’s waxy face had twitched. Jem’s heart faltered.
He was more nervous than he thought.
Only because this was the kind of chance he’d been waiting for, he told himself. A golden opportunity to look for personal papers, photographs, letters—anything that might reveal information about Viscount Frensham’s visit to Coldwell in November 1902. And this time he wasn’t going to let anything distract him, as it had on the night of the fair when he’d swapped beds with Joseph.
He hadn’t realised Mrs Furniss would wake so easily, or that she would be so shaken by the excuse he’d invented for creeping through the upstairs rooms of the sleeping house. He hadn’t been prepared for how guilty he would feel about lying to her; guilty and ashamed and faintly grubby. Nor had he known that glimpse of her before the candle blew out—in her nightgown, with her hair coming loose around her face—would stay with him as vividly and disturb him as much.
He could have asked her for the key to the library—she would almost certainly have given it to him, along with a cast-iron excuse for going in there, but in that moment his conscience had got the better of him. He’d regretted it afterwards.
Now was his chance to make up for it.
He moved the candle along the cabinet’s shelves, so the flame illuminated the yellow spines of Wisden’s cricketing almanacks, books about native Indian birds, fly-fishing, and dog breeds, as well as several small blue cloth-bound volumes that looked like prayer books. They jostled for space alongside a delicate bird’s skull, a piece of rock, and an ivory statuette of an Indian god.
Jem’s eyes swept over them without interest. Putting the candle down on the small ledge in front of the glass doors, he opened one of the drawers and was confronted with folded silk handkerchiefs, a leather collar box, and a tray of shirt studs. In the drawer below he found striped nightshirts, and was about to shut it again when he noticed more of the little blue volumes he had thought were prayer books tucked against the side of the drawer.
No one needed that many prayer books.
He pushed the nightshirts aside. Bringing the candle closer, he took one of the books out and flipped it open. The pages were densely covered in a spidery scrawl, smudged and splotched in places, almost impossible to read. However, at the top of each page was a printed date.
Diaries .
Jem’s fingers were trembling as he turned the brittle pages to the beginning. He’d hardly dared hope to hit the jackpot so easily. On the reverse side of the marbled flyleaf Sir Henry had written the year: 1897. Holding the book next to the candle Jem attempted to read the first page.
January 1st. Rain all day. Blasted gout giving me bother. Staff on poor form after last night’s servants’ ball—vexing. Telegraphed back to R., refusing request for funds. V unsatisfactory. Wish he would come home and face responsibilities here instead of gadding about India. C. very low about the whole affair. Poor show.
It took a long time to decipher the crabbed writing, and hardly repaid the effort; Henry Hyde wasn’t much of a diarist. Jem assumed R. must be Randolph and C. his mother (Constance? Clarissa?). He flicked through the book, trying to pick out more mentions of R., but Hyde seemed to be more preoccupied with his gout ( Confounded pain in my foot… Had Seymour out again —wish to God he could do something for me… Quack suggests the spa baths at Harrogate for my gout…) and the weather, which he recorded in monotonous detail.
Jem slid the book back into its slot and removed one four volumes along. The date was underlined with a sweeping stroke on the endpaper.
1902
The year of the last entry in the Coldwell visitors’ book. The year after Jem had moved to Hampshire and Jack had taken his place. The year that Viscount Frensham had taken up residence for the winter at Ward Abbey, one of his father’s smaller estates in Norfolk, and Jack had been amongst the servants to go with him.
The year he had disappeared.
The window was open and (at the advice of the undertaker) the room was cool, but Jem could feel sweat on his upper lip, his forehead. He opened the book randomly, skimming the entry for 18 May: Easterly wind. Cold. Indigestion very bad, leg swollen. Saw no one but Goddard. Miss the old girl.
His wife’s death at some point in the intervening volumes must have provided some variation in Hyde’s daily observations, but Jem didn’t have time to look. He turned a wedge of pages, and his eye caught on an entry in August: Sir Henry had received a letter from Randolph, saying that he was returning to England, setting sail from Bombay the following week. No explanation, but one imagines a tight spot of some sort—finances or females. Etchingham may have heard word. Perhaps just as well his mother is not here to see it.
Spots danced before Jem’s eyes. He looked up from the book and took a breath—in and out. The stopped clock gave him no clue as to the time, but light was beginning to seep beneath the edges of the blind; the house would soon be waking up. His hand was shaking properly as he flicked through the pages.
A noise.
Alarm ricocheted through his body as he listened and heard the creak of floorboards beneath the thick carpet of the corridor. He shoved the book back into the drawer, ramming it shut, and by the time the door handle moved, he was beside the window, leaning back against the folded shutter, as if he was just stretching his legs and getting some air.
Hyde’s valet slipped into the room like fog. Beneath his slicked-back hair his high forehead creased as he saw Jem at the window. He looked down at Thomas, slumped in the chair at his side. His eyes moved to the cabinet. Following his gaze, Jem saw that the drawer was open a fraction, the cuff of a nightshirt trapped in it.
‘Everything all right?’
Henderson’s tone was bland, but he looked at Jem with unconcealed dislike.
Jem nodded. It felt like there was a boulder in his throat. ‘Just needed some air.’
It was plausible enough. The window was open but the sickly-sweet smell of death pervaded the room. Henderson stared at him, his expression obscured by his beard. Then, without advancing into the room, he gave Thomas’s shoulder a shove, jolting him back to consciousness.
‘Eh?’ Thomas blinked, sitting bolt upright and looking wildly around. Seeing Henderson, he rubbed a hand over his face as his ears turned pink. ‘Sorry. What time is it?’
‘Time for you to do your job and show some respect,’ Henderson said coldly. ‘Your friend here has been keeping watch on his own.’ He opened the door, adding, almost under his breath, ‘Though some might say he’s the one who needs watching.’
Thomas, sitting upright, rubbed his palms down his thighs, as if readying himself for action of some sort. ‘Right, then.’
With a last look at the drawer, and the fold of white cotton caught in it, Henderson left. As he closed the door behind him, a current of air tugged at the candle flame so it cast a brief glow of warmth over Sir Henry Hyde’s cold flesh in its nest of blue satin.
When the undertaker had brought the corpse up, the jaw had been tied beneath the chin. The bandage had since been removed, but the old man’s lips remained clamped, sealing in the family’s secrets.
I don’t blame Henderson for not trusting me. He was quite right.
I lied to you that night, after the fair—there was no intruder. I was used to making up excuses for being where I shouldn’t—I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t always get away with it, of course. I was framed for theft when I was found in Frensham’s house. I served six months with hard labour and was only sorry that I’d got caught.
It was the first time the dishonesty bothered me—that night at Coldwell. I vowed that I wouldn’t put you in that position again. But one lie all too easily leads to another, and my life is littered with promises I failed to keep.
I never got the chance to tell you the truth.
July 1st 1916
France
It’s not supposed to be like this.
As they come out of the trench, they have to step over the bodies of their own men. The blue day has blackened. Smoke enfolds them. The grass is long and still wet with dew and the undulating field erupts in front of him in plumes of earth. Blinded by smoke, he trips over men and stumbles into craters.
Walk, don’t run.
Joseph looks back, the whites of his eyes wild, his whole face a terrified question. What do we—?
The man to his right is thrown backwards in a convulsion of bullets, a shower of scarlet. Joseph flinches wildly, his mouth stretching and gaping. Jem catches hold of his arm and yanks him back.
Stay behind me and keep going.
That’s what they have been ordered to do. That’s what they are here for. The Big Push. They have left their streets, their homes, their sweethearts to cross this field—now, today. They have spent six months stabbing sacks with bayonets and drilling squares for this. It’s all part of a plan.
But it’s not supposed to be like this.
His mind shrinks, so there is only room for the same refrain. He feels the guns now, rather than hearing them. All he hears is the sound of his own heaving breath and those words.
ITSNOTSUPPOSEDTOBELIKETHIS.
They were told it would be easy. The German artillery would have been destroyed by the bombardment, they said. Eight days of heavy shelling. There would be no one left in the enemy trenches—not even the rats. That’s what they were told.
He goes on. Walking not running. Stepping over bodies in the grass.
He feels as if he’s looking through a tunnel. Or that he’s wearing blinkers, like a dray horse. He hears the thud of men being hit, the whistle of bullets; he feels the rush of air as they pass him. He is braced—balanced between calm acceptance and utter disbelief—certain that at any moment he will be hit.
His hand goes to his heart, the pocket where the letter is, and he keeps walking, into the rain of fire.
Brighton
The hospital is in two houses on Lewes Crescent, one of the town’s grander addresses. She walks there, along the seafront, where it is business as usual despite the rumble of guns from across the Channel. There are still deckchairs around the bandstand and people strolling on the pier, though many of the men are in khaki uniforms or hospital blues and the women are in groups together with mothers, friends, and sisters instead of husbands, sweethearts, and sons.
From the street, the hospital still looks much like an imposing residence (white stucco behind black-painted railings, steps scrubbed clean), though its door stands open and there are two army ambulances parked outside. As she approaches, Sister Pinkney appears ahead of two orderlies carrying a stretcher, which they load carefully into the back of the ambu lance. Jumping down from the vehicle’s back step, one of the orderlies—a man called Corporal Maloney, who seems to believe that flirting with the VADs is part of his job description—notices her and gives her a wink.
‘Morning, Miss Simmons,’ he says, once Sister Pinkney is safely back inside. ‘Lovely day for it.’
She suspects she’s supposed to ask for what, but she doesn’t want to encourage him. She’s more lowly than the VADs, and older, so he probably thinks she should be flattered by his attention. He couldn’t be more mistaken.
The elegant circular hallway looks much as it must have done before the war, except a large desk piled with manila folders and papers has been placed in front of the empty fireplace, and there are several stretchers stacked beneath the staircase that sweeps upwards round the walls. Instead of potpourri and polish, the air smells strongly of carbolic and Lysol, and beneath that, of something rotting. Usually, she arrives in the quiet spell after lunch, when the doctors have completed their rounds; when dressings have been changed, treatments administered, and patients washed and shaved; but today she immediately senses a shift of atmosphere. Up on the galleried landing two nurses manoeuvre a mattress, and she hears the clang of trollies and the muted bark of orders from distant rooms. She hesitates at the foot of the stairs, waiting to let a VAD come hurrying down before making her way up.
Matron’s desk is on the landing, beneath a vast portrait of a woman with a tiny waist, swathed in white muslin and whimsically clasping a posy of violets. (Her rosebud-lipped simper is starkly at odds with Matron’s basilisk glare: Matron is a woman who does not suffer fools.) Today Matron is not at her desk.
Going hesitantly through to Hawke Ward, the former drawing room at the front of the house, she finds most of the beds are empty, stripped of their linen. Two VADs are vigorously scrubbing the exposed rubber sheets, talking in low, disgruntled voices, which stop abruptly as she walks in.
‘Oh, it’s only you,’ says one of them—a girl called Nurse Williams, who comes from the Welsh valleys and whose lilting, singsong voice is breathy with relief. ‘I thought you were Sister Pinkney. Or Matron.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘We’ve been told to prepare for a big rush of wounded,’ says the other VAD, dragging the back of her wrist across her forehead. ‘The last of the convalescent cases have just gone and we’ve got to get ready for men straight from the front. There’s something big going on—you can hear it, can’t you?’
It is not just her cut-glass accent that advertises her well-to-do background, but everything about her, from her delicate hands and peaches-and-cream complexion (reddened now, with heat and exertion) to her air of schoolgirl earnestness. ‘Sister Pinkney’s in a frightful bait. She gave me such a dressing-down for putting kisses when I signed sweet Private Findlay’s autograph book. It’s supposed to be my afternoon off and I was going to a show at the Hippodrome, but now we’ve got all these beds to make up…’
‘Let me help.’
‘Oh—that’s kind,’ Nurse Williams says hastily, shooting the other girl a look. ‘But Sister Pinkney’s ever so exacting about how it’s done. It’s part of the training, see—how to fold the sheet and do the corners, just so…’
‘I was in service, before the war, in a big house.’ She smiles gravely. ‘If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to make beds.’
‘Oh, how marvellous! You’re an angel sent from heaven.’ The peaches-and-cream girl beams. ‘I’m Millicent, by the way—Nurse Frankland, here.’ She rolls her eyes slightly. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Simmons,’ she says. ‘Eliza Simmons.’
France
He knows the exact moment it happens, almost as if he sees it unfold in the second before impact. He hears Joseph’s high, anguished cry and turns in time to see the bright blossom of red on his thigh as he jerks and crumples.
It’s instinct that throws him back, arms outstretched to catch him. Joseph is clutching his leg and blood is oozing through his fingers. He is making rapid, keening sobs.
Jem—Jem—
It’s all right, it’s all right.
He is kneeling in the grass. Everything is muffled and slow, like being underwater. He wrestles his pack from his back to find the field dressing kit. Joseph’s helmet has rolled off and his hair is blond against the churned-up earth. Jem looks around, but there is nothing to see except smoke and mud, until a figure looms, mad-eyed, revolver raised.
On your feet, man! Forward! FORWARD!
It is what they have been ordered to do. It is part of a plan. Walk don’t run. Don’t stop for the injured. Keep going.
The barrel of the gun glints dully as the smoke shifts around them. He can choose whether to be shot by a British bullet, or live a few minutes more to be got by a German one. The outcome will be the same, but he’d rather Joseph doesn’t see it.
I’ll come back , he roars, prying Joseph’s fingers from his sleeve. I’ll come back for you, I promise.
Jesus Christ, it’s not supposed to be like this.