“Sounds like you were damned rational about dying.”
She shook her head. “These thoughts were but momentary grains of insight, falling through my fingers. I understood what I had to do, and I did it.” She peered at him through the shadows. “You’ve been to war. It’s much the same, is it not?”
His exhalation came from deep within his chest, and he lifted his hands to grasp the headboard behind him. He was shadows and sleekness.
“It’s a dawning horror. We’re fed stories of valor, and the great good we perform for our grateful nation. I’d hold it with both hands, that heroism, praying for it when all around was carnage.” Bitterness laced his voice. “I wanted to run.”
“Yet you did not. You stayed, and fought.”
He snorted. “Because I was a dolt.”
“Not a dolt. Courageous.”
In a blur of moment, he rose quickly from the bed. She had the impression of long, hewn limbs, and then he threw on a robe. A tinder hissed, then light flared as he lit a candle. His eyes were glacial in the flickering light.
“I’ll show you proof of my courage.” He strode from the chamber.
Even had she not been tethered to him, she would have followed. She floated from the bed and went after him, into the shadow-strewn house. At the end of the corridor, she glimpsed the silk of his robe. He stalked the house like a hunter, silent and intent, the candle he carried casting transitory light.
She trailed him as he pushed open a door at the end of the passageway and went inside. In her solitary haunting in the depths of night, she had made a cursory examination of this chamber—it seemed to serve no other purpose beside superfluity. This house, with its many rooms, far surpassed even the most luxurious villa. Wealth, it seemed, always strove to be impressive, regardless of the era.
Bram stared up at a large gilt-framed painting upon the wall, and she joined him in his contemplation. Holding the candle up, the painted surface of the canvas gleamed, revealing the artist’s minute brushstrokes. She had seen the painting but not paid it much attention, the chamber too dim for anything but the most perfunctory study. Now both she and Bram looked at it.
A dark-haired youth stared back at them. He wore a uniform of scarlet, white and gold, a polished gorget at his throat. A scarlet sash crossed his narrow chest—he hadn’t yet broadened into a man. The youth leaned against a column, one hand on his hip, the other holding a braid-trimmed hat. Unlike some of the other somber portraits she had seen in these modern homes, in this painting, the sitter smiled. So much pride and excitement in that smile, so much eagerness for the world and its chances for glory, a certainty that the glory would be his; it made the nonexistent heart in her chest ache.
“Behold, Madam Ghost,” Bram said, his voice cold and cutting as a shard of ice. “I call this
She continued to stare at this other Bram, this inchoate form. He held himself with such confidence, assured that whatever he desired would be his. His eyes were bright and clear, looking into a future of gallantry and daring, a boy dreaming of tomorrow. He had seen nothing of the world. Not yet.
No scar marred his throat. He was unmarked.
“Not folly,” she said. “Hope.”
“Ridiculous hopes. Other younger sons went into the military, and in that, I was no different. But I was singular in that I truly believed I’d do some good. I didn’t want to spend my military career doing useless drills and showing off my uniform in town. When they told us we’d be going to the Colonies to defend our people, I was
“You did. I have seen it. Those people on the frontier, you defended their homes. There are scores of lives you saved.”
He made a dismissive wave with his free hand. “Token gestures. Nothing could keep pace with the spill of blood.”
“All of it meant something.”
Turning to her, his mouth twisted in a sneer. “Ned Davies would argue otherwise.”
“Ned . . . ?”
“He’s here.” He tapped his forehead.
Memories began to engulf her, swirling around her in a misty vortex. The chamber receded, fading, transforming into a muddy hill. The scent of gunpowder hung thick in the air, as did the groans of dying men and horses. Atop the hill stood a military fortress, its walls made of felled trees as though hastily constructed. Part of the walls had been blasted away. The yard within the fortress held more wounded men and bodies.
Outside the fortress, soldiers in red picked their way through the fallen.
“Find all the wounded,” said a blood and smoke-streaked Bram to the soldiers. “Bring them to the surgeon.”
“He looks fair gone.” One soldier lifted the shoulders of a man upon the ground, his head lolling back to reveal an ugly wound in his shoulder. If he lived, the injured soldier would of a certain lose his arm.
“Does he breathe?” Bram demanded.
The soldier bent close to the wounded man. “Aye, sir.”
“Then there’s a chance for him. Get him to Dr. Balfour.”
After signaling for some assistance, the soldier and one of his comrades bore the wounded man away, toward the fortress. Bram continued to move through the bent and contorted shapes of fallen men, his face ashen, lips pressed tight. Yet he appeared familiar with the aftermath of battle and the sight of the dead. He waved away clouds of flies from the face of a dead boy holding a drum.
“What of this one, sir?”
Bram turned at Sergeant Davies’s question. Bram outranked the Cornishman, not only in rank but station. Back in England, they would have had little to do with one another, Bram being the second son of a baron, Davies being the fifth son of a farmer, yet in the strange methods of war, they had become unlikely friends. They told one another stories of home and laughed raucously at remembered childhood exploits. He’d had no idea that a farmer’s boy could be just as reckless and foolish as a baron’s supplementary heir.
The other officers did not care for Bram’s fraternization with an enlisted man, but it seemed even war could not dim his insistence for doing whatever he damn well wanted.
Now Davies stood over a fallen French soldier, the enemy moaning weakly. One of his legs was nothing but tatters, taken off inelegantly by cannon fire.
The battle had been a rough one, with losses heavy on both sides. Bram had witnessed many of his brothers in arms killed, including men with families, and men who weren’t men, but boys who hadn’t grown a single whisker or been between the thighs of a woman. These were the fellow soldiers who, only the day before, talked longingly of their mother’s elderberry preserves, or cleaned their muskets and whistled. Now they were carcasses.
“The Frenchman goes to Dr. Balfour, too,” said Bram.
Davies looked hesitant. “You sure? I saw ’im gut Fitzhugh with a bayonet. Just tore ’im open, innards spilling out. Made me lose my tea and hardtack, it did.”
A wave of nausea threatened Bram’s struggle for composure. Evisceration was no way to die, slow and brutal. “We won’t leave him out here to be picked at by crows.” He’d seen too many men, still breathing, torn apart by scavengers.
Davies shrugged. “You’re the officer.”
The sergeant bent down to pick up the wounded enemy soldier. As he did, the Frenchman lifted his hand. He held a pistol. And aimed it at Davies’s face.
“Davies!” Bram shouted. He ran toward them.
Too late. The French soldier pulled the trigger. A flash and bang, and the pistol fired directly between an astonished Davies’s eyes. Most of his face blew apart.
Bram was there in an instant, his sword drawn and ready to run the Frenchman through. But the soldier denied him the pleasure, toppling back to the mud, dead.
Davies also lay in the mud, his arms outflung, his one remaining eye staring at the cloud-smeared sky. What was left of his face held a look of almost comic surprise. As other soldiers came running, Bram sank down to the sodden earth and could not look away from the fallen Davies, burning the image into his mind and heart.
