Chapter 9
Arms held her close.
Light hadn’t yet reached far enough above the horizon, in the dimness just before dawn, to do more than add texture to the darkness.
Safety . . . Security . . .
Except Jamie was dead these sixteen months. The realization brought her all the way awake.
She grasped then whose arms these were. Strangely, the recognition brought no fear. Rather, she was at first perplexed.
The nightmares.
They’d found her anyway, despite the happy memories as she drifted to sleep.
The intense nightmares came relentlessly some nights, gripping her even on waking, her throat raw and body rigid.
Last night it had been so. Now she half remembered calm hands and the blanket tucked around her.
At some point Nathaniel stayed, offering her the comfort of his strength.
Perhaps it was then she’d finally slept deeply.
She was curled on her side. Some part of Nathaniel’s face—his cheek?
—just touched the top of her head. Her back was against his chest, although she determined that a layer of blanket separated them: her beneath it and him outside.
Even with fabric between them, she felt his chest’s slow, steady expansion. He was asleep.
More awake now, she was aware of his breath against her hair and the way his knees were bent to fit against the crook of her own.
One arm was curved out and above her face.
His other was draped over her blanket-covered midsection, although there was nothing in how he held her that suggested he had designs on her person.
Chill air touched her exposed face, although she was warm within her solitary blanket.
In the gathering dawn and without tilting her head at all, she could just make out the shape of the hand beside her face.
It couldn’t have been comfortable for him to sleep with his arm extended.
It bore evidence of a certain respect for her sensibilities, if one set aside the not inconsiderable intimacy of having slept together in the same bed.
Beneath his outward austerity lay a core of integrity around which all else cleaved.
Despite the confusion of waking thus, his arms were comforting. He was comforting, for all his outward sternness. It came to her that he would fiercely guard anyone who held his loyalty.
Perhaps she was unwise to trust him, having known him so briefly and under such peculiar circumstances.
But how badly she had missed the solace found in giving oneself over to trust. And it had been so long since she’d been held, for comfort or love or anything else.
She closed her eyes tightly against the onslaught of emotion.
She could have alerted him immediately that she’d woken; she could have pulled away from him. She did neither.
His fingers were curved loosely, long and lean, relaxed in sleep.
The back of his hand had a thin white scar across it.
A blade of some sort? This, his right hand, was the one that had fired his rifle.
Perhaps wielded a sabre as an officer; she did not know the practices of the officers in the Rifles.
His hand was the extension of the deadly weapon into which he’d been forged—and that he was still. But she remembered now too: fingers gently smoothing her hair off her face and tucking it behind her ear, his voice soothing her into more restful sleep. Comforting her.
Her mind whispered suddenly that Nathaniel was here, now, alive and warm against her.
Disconcerting, the sudden intense yearning for the other sort of comfort that could be found, waking in a man’s arms. If she were to turn onto her other side to face him, her mouth would nearly touch his throat.
What would he do if she rolled over? They’d kissed yesterday.
That sound he’d made when their tongues touched . . .
She released the thought as quickly as it had formed, but something of the memory, of latent potential, tingled still in her veins.
Evidently Nathaniel was not a man who slept deeply, although she’d held very still.
The fingers in her line of vision flexed and lost their ease.
His legs behind her knees straightened a fraction, and he shifted their weight away, although he did not remove the arm at her waist. His cheek no longer touched her hair, but his head remained on the pillow behind her.
“It’s dawn,” he remarked. “You’ve slept a few hours, then.” His voice was edged by sleep; its intimate roughness raised a frisson on her nape.
“Deeply, even.” Her own voice was likewise scratchy. “I . . .” How awkward suddenly, with him awake. “Thank you,” she managed. “I surely disturbed your rest. I am sorry for it.”
“Do you often have those dreams?”
She had to clear her throat. “Frequently, at first. After Waterloo, and the first few months after, while I remained among the wounded. And then the dreams came less often, and then but rarely. Until this autumn. Now . . .” At confiding that much, nightmare images rolled back in. They were never far away.
He might now have released her and moved away. She was grateful he did not. It grounded her, the arm across her waist and his steady breathing behind her. She breathed in through her mouth, out through her nose, and tried to force down the pictures in her mind.
“Men on campaign sometimes have nightmares,” he said when her breathing steadied.
“Did you have nightmares?” she asked. “Men in hospital did. After Waterloo.”
“I had troubled dreams sometimes—when I was not purely worn out, that is, which was not often—but nothing enduring. Some of my brothers-in-arms dreamt more harshly, as you did last night. Given all we saw and did, it’s a wonder that we did not all have such dreams. I cannot guess why some are spared it while others suffer. Women too, who follow men to war.”
It was perhaps the longest run of words she’d heard Nathaniel speak.
She closed her eyes briefly. “I pride myself that my mind is rational on most topics despite real and pressing concerns while I’m awake. But I do not know how to stop the dreams coming. I’m sometimes tempted to avoid sleep, but that is of course no practical solution.”
“You dreamt of your sister the other night. Was it so last night?”
“No. Last night it was mainly of Jamie. Although Lucy was there too. Some nights they are separate, but the most terrible of the dreams are when both are jointly just beyond my ken.” She took a deep breath, holding it until she was forced to release it.
Nathaniel’s hand at her waist briefly tightened. “It might rob the dream of some of its power to speak it aloud,” he offered.
After Waterloo, she’d sat at many bedsides in place of mother, sister, wife, sweetheart. So many times she had gripped a man’s hand—little more than a boy’s, often—as he unburdened himself of that which haunted him.
“Yes.” Another wave of images threatened to engulf her.
“Some of the horrific atrocities I witnessed in Portugal— It was a living nightmare, marching through those villages, seeing the carnage inflicted upon residents as the French withdrew. Nothing you say will discomfit me.”
She fixed her eyes on his hand where it was loosely curled beside her face. “I’m on the field of combat, after Waterloo. Only in these dreams, that is. I never saw it for myself, not in truth. I know it cannot compare to reality.”
“It will not inconvenience me, even so.”
“It was not possible to avoid hearing the details in the weeks after. Last night . . . Oh, many times I’ve been there.” Breath in, breath out. “Among the injured, the dying, the heaps of those already dead. The accounts of Quatre Bras and Waterloo were quite colorful.”
Nathaniel’s forearm around her tightened slightly.
“But in my dreams, somewhere there, if only I can find them, are Jamie and Lucy, still living. I know this with certainty. Why Lucy should be there is not . . . logical. She was in London last June, still safe and nowhere near Flanders. But in my dream . . .”
Nathaniel’s hand moved from her waist to spread on her side, fingers fanned gently across her ribs.
“I never can find them though. Not Jamie nor Lucy either, although I delve through the piles of bodies and call for them until I have no voice remaining. My skirts are soaked. Soaked with blood until I cannot take a single step forward, weighed down. There is a ceaseless creeping tide of it, and I am near to drowning in it. So much blood everywhere, and I cannot move an inch to free myself. There are no survivors now, no one healthy and hale on the whole of the field apart from myself.” Her voice faltered. “Myself alone.”
“Does it never vary?”
“That one? Never, although it is but one of the dreams.” She swallowed hard. “The worst of them, I’d say.”
Nathaniel’s thumb stroked gently over her ribs, back and forth. Mentally she tracked it, the movement a lifeline to the present, until she was able to continue.
“I never visited it, the site of the battle. I couldn’t bear to go, even months later. One of Jamie’s friends offered to take me before we returned to England. For . . . closure. But I could not. I suppose I was a . . .” Her voice broke around the great lump in her throat. “A coward,” she finished.
Nathaniel brought his chin down against her hair.
She’d never talked about the days around Jamie’s death, not to Maman and Da, although they had asked. Not to well-meaning friends who had come to call. Nathaniel would listen; the offer was not made lightly. His solid, reassuring presence conveyed it as clearly as his words had.