Chapter 9 The Sound of Sirens #2
I lay there in the dark, cold seeping into my bones, and let myself want something I had no right to want.
Sleep, when it finally came, was shallow and full of ghosts.
But for the first time in months, not all of them were accusing.
Some of them, impossibly, looked like hope.
I woke two hours later, drenched in sweat despite the cold, Danny's name still caught in my throat.
The room felt like a coffin. Walls too close, ceiling too low, air too thick with the smell of my own fear. I needed out. Needed to move, to run, to do something with this body that would not stop shaking.
I pulled on my boots and coat and slipped out into the night.
The grounds were quiet, snow muffling everything, the world reduced to shades of grey and white.
I started walking fast, then faster, then running, boots crunching through the frozen crust as I pushed myself toward exhaustion.
Past the huts, past the manor, past the lake where Art and I had sat under the stars.
Out the gates with a nod to the guard who knew better than to question where I was going at this hour.
The cold burned my lungs. Good. Pain meant alive. Pain meant present. Pain meant not trapped in the mud of Normandy with Danny's blood on my hands.
I ran until my legs screamed and my chest heaved and the panic had nowhere left to hide. Then I walked, breath coming in great white plumes, following the lane toward the village without any real destination in mind.
The Crown and Anchor materialised out of the darkness like a memory I had not known I was chasing.
I stopped outside, staring at the dim glow leaking around the blackout curtains. Art had come here. Had walked through that door into whatever waited on the other side. Had found something worth risking everything for.
Maybe I needed to understand what that was.
The main bar was nearly empty, just a few old men nursing pints in the corner. The barman looked up when I entered, assessed me with the quick efficiency of someone who had learned to read trouble.
“Kitchen's closed,” he said.
“Not here for food.” I approached the bar, keeping my voice low. “Looking for the back room. Someone told me there might be... entertainment. Tonight.”
The barman's expression did not change, but something shifted behind his eyes. “Someone told you, did they?”
“Friend of mine. Comes here sometimes.” I hesitated, then took the gamble. “Dark hair, talks too fast, probably knows more words than anyone needs to know.”
A flicker of recognition. “Pembroke's friend, are you?”
“Something like that.”
The barman studied me for a long moment. I held his gaze, letting him see whatever he needed to see. Finally, he nodded toward a door at the back of the room.
“Knock twice. Tell Margaret that Arthur's omi sent you.”
Arthur's omi. I did not know what that meant, but I filed it away and crossed to the door. Knocked twice. Waited.
The woman who answered was perhaps fifty, steel-grey hair, eyes that had seen everything twice.
“Yes?”
“Arthur's omi sent me.” The words felt strange in my mouth. “I am a friend. I think.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You think?”
“I am trying to understand some things. About him. About...” I gestured vaguely. “This.”
Something in her expression softened, just slightly. “First time in a place like this?”
“Yes.”
“You look like you have had a rough night, love.”
“You could say that.”
She studied me a moment longer, then stepped aside. “Come in, then. But if you cause trouble, I will have you out on your ear faster than you can blink. Understood?”
“Understood.”
The Crown and Anchor's back room was quieter tonight.
No show, no Madam Fortuna holding court on the makeshift stage.
Just clusters of people at small tables, candles burning low in mismatched holders, the gramophone in the corner playing something slow and French.
Smoke hung in the air like gauze, softening the edges of everything.
A few heads turned when I entered. Eyes taking my measure, cataloguing the uniform, the posture, the way I stood like I expected to be thrown out. Conversations didn't stop exactly, but they shifted. Quieted. The room drew in on itself like a creature sensing danger.
I understood that wariness. Had felt it myself in other contexts. The instinct that said: outsider. Threat. Be careful.
“Can I help you, soldier?”
The voice came from my left. A woman stood behind a small bar, polishing glasses with a cloth that had seen better days. Middle-aged, grey-streaked hair pinned up severely, face carefully blank.
“I'm looking for someone,” I said. “Madam Fortuna.”
Something flickered in her eyes. “Never heard of her.”
“I was here three nights ago. Watched her perform.” I held her gaze, trying to communicate something I didn't have words for. “I'm not here to cause trouble. I just need to talk to her.”
“Lots of people need lots of things. Doesn't mean they get them.”
“Please.” The word came out rougher than I intended. “I'm trying to understand something. About someone I care about. About myself, maybe.”
The woman studied me for a long moment. Then she set down her glass and cloth and jerked her head toward a door at the back.
“Wait in the corridor. I'll see if she's receiving visitors.”
The corridor was narrow and dark, lined with costume racks and prop boxes. I stood with my back against the wall, listening to the muffled sounds from the main room, the distant strains of the gramophone. My heart was beating too fast for standing still.
What was I doing here? What did I think I would find?
Answers, maybe. Or permission. Or just someone who could tell me that what I was feeling wasn't madness. Wasn't something broken inside me that needed fixing.
Footsteps on the stairs. I straightened.
Madam Fortuna descended into the corridor like royalty granting an audience.
Without the stage makeup and the elaborate gown, she looked different.
Older. Tired in a way that spoke of years, not hours.
She wore a simple dress now, dark blue, her wig replaced by close-cropped grey hair.
But her eyes were the same. Sharp. Knowing.
The eyes of someone who had seen too much and decided to keep seeing anyway.
“The soldier from the shadows,” she said. “I wondered if you'd come.”
“You remember me.”
“I remember everyone who watches my Arthur with that particular expression.” She gestured toward a door further down the corridor. “Come. We'll talk properly.”
Her dressing room was small but comfortable. Cluttered with the detritus of performance: wigs on stands, pots of makeup, costume pieces draped over a folding screen. She settled into a chair before a mirror and gestured for me to take the other, a wobbly thing that creaked when I sat.
“So,” she said, watching me in the mirror's reflection. “You've come seeking wisdom from the oracle. What troubles you, soldier?”
“I don't know how to start.”
“Then let me help.” She turned to face me directly, her gaze uncomfortably penetrating.
“You followed Arthur here. Watched him from the dark like a man afraid of what he might see in the light.
And now you've returned alone, which tells me you're trying to work something out. Something you can't ask him directly.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“You want to know what this is. What we are. What he is.” She tilted her head. “What you might be.”
The words hit like rifle shots, each one finding its mark.
“Yes,” I managed.
Madam Fortuna was quiet for a moment. Then she reached for a cigarette case on her vanity, took her time lighting one, and exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling.
“Do you know what it's like,” she said slowly, “to spend your entire life being told that what you are is wrong? Not what you do, mind you. What you are. The essential fact of your existence, treated as a crime.”
“I'm starting to.”
“Starting to.” She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. “That's honest, at least. Most men in your position lie to themselves for decades. Some manage it until they die. The truly unlucky ones get found out and discover just how little mercy the world has for people like us.”
She tapped ash into a small dish.
“I was arrested in 1923. Gross indecency. Spent six months in Pentonville. When I got out, I had nothing. No job, no family willing to claim me, no future that any decent person would recognise.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, but I could hear the old pain underneath.
“I thought about ending it. Most of us do, at some point.
The weight of being hated for something you can't change, something you didn't choose. It wears on you.”
“But you didn't.”
“No. I didn't.” She met my eyes. “Because I found others. People like me. People who understood. And I realised that survival itself was an act of rebellion. That every day we continued to exist, continued to love, continued to find moments of joy in the cracks of a world that wanted us dead, we were winning a war that had been waged against us for centuries.”
The gramophone in the main room had switched to something else. A woman's voice, singing in a language I didn't recognise. Mournful and beautiful.
“Arthur,” I said. “When he comes here. What does he...”
“What does he find?” Fortuna finished for me.
“The same thing we all find. A place to breathe.
A place where he doesn't have to pretend. Do you know how exhausting it is, soldier? The constant performance of normalcy? Watching every word, every gesture, every glance, making sure nothing slips through that might give you away?”
I thought about Art's careful control. The way he held himself apart. The tension that lived in his shoulders like a permanent resident.
“I'm beginning to.”