The Captain and the Cavalry Trooper

by Catherine Curzon

  Thorne went on with his search. Then, in an inside pocket of Jack’s tunic, just below the holes left by the shrapnel, he found a neatly quartered sheet of vellum, dark with Jack’s blood.

  Thorne’s heart thudded in his chest, a pulse leaping under the bandage on his leg.

  The dried blood cracked as he opened it.

  For R.B.T.

  He walks in beauty, like the night

  Under distant, unknown skies.

  I saw a gleam; eternal light,

  Twined with the darkness in his eyes.

  Though no more before my sight,

  My heart to his forever cries.

  For what was said, in rage and fear,

  Can time undo, draw back the flood?

  And now that night again draws near,

  I hear his voice sing through my blood.

  Held in arms no longer there,

  A ghost, a memory: I once was loved.

  Then the tears came flooding from his eyes, coursing down over his face in hot, agonizing streams.

  Once loved…

  Still loved, forever loved.

  How could I have done this to my gypsy?

  There was a hand on his shoulder. The rustling of the starched uniform could only signal the presence of matron.

  “Captain Thorne, am I to understand from this burst of emotion that you should like one of my morphine lozenges after all? It will pain you now, but wounds do heal. Even though this one’ll leave a scar. Anyway, I came to find you because the surgeon wanted you to know that Trooper Woodvine is out of theater. He’s very weak, and there’s a long road ahead of him until he’ll be back on his feet, and you must be prepared for— But I hope that with time and with care…”

  And love.

  “I don’t care about my—” He folded the paper and placed it in his muddied breast pocket. “Can I see him?”

  Matron prefaced her reply with a long sniff.

  “It is somewhat unusual. And we are rather busy. However—I’m willing to make an exception. I like to see an officer care about his boys.”

  She patted his arm and strode away. A tired-looking nurse approached her, pointing toward the yard where the ambulances were arriving. Matron turned for a moment, indicating the captain on the bench, then she was walking toward the ambulances, parting the hubbub of orderlies and stretcher-bearers, nurses and medics like the prow of a ship cutting through the waves. The nurse pulled her cloak around her against the cold wind. She glanced at Captain Thorne, hiding a yawn behind her hand, and headed to the wards.

  Thorne had no hope of looking his usual pristine self, covered in mud, one boot torn, his tie missing, but it didn’t matter. None of it did because Jack was alive and they would be together, just the two of them and Apollo, on the farm.

  The nurse returned. Her sleepless eyes were ringed with dark circles as she met Thorne’s gaze.

  “I’m very sorry, sir… I spoke to the patient on the ward, the one brought from your trench. He…he’s very cantankerous. He refuses to see you. He wanted me to tell you, exactly, his sentiments. He said— ‘Send the bastard away.’ I explained you had waited, but he would have none of it. I’m sorry, sir, I apologize—I must get on.”

  Her cloak huddled ever more tightly around her, she hurried away to meet the ambulances.

  “Thank you,” Thorne called, because politeness dictated that he should. Then he turned from the bench, from the patients and the hospital, and went to collect Tsarina.

  Perhaps they might still let him go over the top. His heart had stopped already, after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “How long have I been here?”

  The young nurse brushed Jack’s long fringe out of his eyes.

  “Two days.”

  “Have I been asleep?”

  “On and off.”

  “Did—did anyone come to see me?”

  She put the thermometer under his tongue.

  “No. Were you expecting some boys from your company?”

  Jack couldn’t speak with the thermometer in his mouth. He shook his head.

  The nurse guided him to lean forward against her arm so that she could beat his pillows. Her hand was near the site of his wound and he winced. She let him lie back and he closed his eyes.

  Maybe it was better to be asleep.

  But what had passed while he was awake and asleep had merged into a foggy morass. He had memories, but whether they had happened in reality or only in his mind he didn’t know. He saw the trench again, heard the song about the gypsy, saw Robert. The music stopped and a great sensation of pain overwhelmed him. There had been an explosion, and there was Apollo, moving through the smoke. And there was Robert—but he must have imagined that, because what he remembered could not have been real.

  Robert, carrying him on his back while he crawled through the mud. And Jack’s mother, calling to him, Come home, Jack, it’s nearly dusk. The song playing again then, or at least a version of it. Reaching for what was already lost. Reaching for his lover.

  In the ward, Jack had heard voices he recognized, other lads from the chateau who had gone over the top that day. Captain Thorne’s name was mentioned. Captain Thorne had been injured. But he wasn’t at the hospital—Jack had asked the nurse. And that could only mean one thing.

  Captain Robert Brereton Thorne, the honorable, the noble, was dead.

  Because if he had been alive, he would have been here. He would have sat by Jack’s bed, just as he had at the chateau, and nursed him and cared for him.

  And—how perverse—it was better to think that Thorne was dead than that he no longer loved him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  England

  1918

  The shadows were long when Jack awoke. It must’ve been late afternoon. The train had slowed down to take the last curve before the station. He always woke up here if he nodded off. Not long now. Home soon.

  Jack had been given a spare, ill-fitting uniform at the base hospital, once he was recovered enough to get on his feet. He’d asked what had become of the original, but he was told that someone had mislaid it at the Clearing Station.

  “Venbrook Halt!”

  Jack dropped the window and stuck his head out of the carriage, waving his cap as the train pulled in. There were few people on the platform, and he was watching for his father. But he was nowhere to be seen.

  Jack hopped off, dragging his luggage after him. In the few months since…since that terrible day, his wound had almost healed, but he couldn’t swing his bags up onto his damaged shoulder. There was one lump of shrapnel that they hadn’t been able to remove.

  “Hello there, Jack Woodvine!” The station master came up to him, his watch chain shiny across his waistcoat. “We read about you in the newspaper. What a brave lad we have!”

  “Oh, thank you, but I’m not brave, I’m really not. Is—is my father here?”

  The station master scratched his head.

  “Nope, that he’s not, but Morris is out the front with the wagon.”

  Jack walked through the station to greet his old friend.

  “Mr. Jack!”

  Morris, smelling of whisky and the cowshed, creaked off the wagon to greet him.

  “Look at you, what a fine boy you are, eh?”

  On their way from the station, winding through the spring lanes, Morris told Jack about the comings and goings of the countryside. Names and faces Jack had almost forgotten, so alien had they been to the life he had lived in the year since he had last seen home, returned to his mind. Not very much had changed.

  But he had. He must have been kidnapped by fairies and lived a year in only an afternoon.

  “And Dad—where’s Dad? I thought he’d collect me from the station?”

  “He’s busy, Mr. Jack.”

  That was all Morris would say.

  The first stars were showing in the sky as the wagon finally rolled into the yard. The old stone farmhouse was like a familiar, friendly face, and Jack dashed
away a tear.

  ‘You and me and Apollo could live on the farm.’

  Well, he wouldn’t want Jack now, would he? An invalid with a piece of lead near his heart.

  Because Jack had discovered that Captain Thorne wasn’t dead after all. Not long after arriving at the base hospital, another lad from their company had been there and told him some heroic tale about Thorne’s long horse ride with his leg ripped apart.

  Jack had nearly written a letter then. Had begged ink and paper and pen from an orderly. Had sat outside, despite the cold day, but couldn’t write the first word.

  And everything had come back to him, and he had cried so hard, and had been so incapable of describing to anyone what hurt him so, that a doctor had knocked him out with the contents of a large metal syringe. The doctor must have thought it was something he’d seen in the trenches, like all the others.

  Jack dropped his bags in the kitchen. He could smell eucalyptus and cloves. He went into the parlor, the large old room with its beams and its chimney with the arms of some old Woodvine in the plaster, and there he saw his father.

  Jack fell at his feet and pressed his face into his lap. Each breath was a struggle, and the prematurely old man touched Jack’s hair as if he wasn’t sure he was real.

  “It’s me, Dad, I’m home now… I came home.”

  “I waited,” John whispered. “I knew my lad would get home.”

  They sat very still for some moments, the fire in the large grate falling in on its glowing heart.

  “Dad…why didn’t you tell me you were ill again?”

  “And give you something else to fret over, son?” He stroked Jack’s hair as he had when he was a little boy. “I had Mrs. Byatt to look out for me, I’ve done all right.”

  “Dad—if I’d known… How have you managed with the farm?”

  I would’ve come home when Captain Thorne sent me. I would’ve come gladly and…

  What was done was done.

  “Me and Morris and the boys, we’ve been doing this since you was a nipper.” His father gave a gentle smile. “We’re not falling apart just yet!”

  “You’re ill. You shouldn’t be wearing yourself out. Let me take over the running of the farm. Please—I need to.”

  “You’ve just come home, son,” John whispered. “Let’s not worry about that now. You get yourself settled and I’ll get the tea brewing.”

  “If you’re sure you can manage? I wouldn’t—”

  There was no telling his father otherwise once he had an idea in his head.

  Jack collected his bags and went to his room. Up the old wooden stairs, along the corridor, to his large bedroom at the end of the house. Even though it was late, there was still enough light when he opened the curtains to see the view along the valley. It was peaceful and still.

  He tipped the contents of his bags out on the bed. A notebook of poems, a pencil stub in a metal holder, an assortment of clothes that didn’t really seem to be his. From the notebook he took out a piece of paper that he had almost got the creases out of—a drawing given to him, he knew now, as a tribute to their love. A love he had scorned and destroyed.

  He sat on the bed and gazed at the valley. For a moment he imagined what he would do if, just around that corner, there was a figure on a horse. His captain, his lover, come to claim him.

  He looked through his records. At the top of the pile was Antonia Sheridan’s rendition of The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy. It wouldn’t hurt, would it, just once more?

  He cranked the gramophone into life and there she was, the woman he had daydreamed about, the woman he had once hoped would be his mother. He curled up on his bed, the embroidered shawl from Chateau de Desgravier wrapped around his shoulders. It still carried with it the scent of his lover, a smudge of his pomade on the rich cloth.

  Chapter Thirty

  What use was a soldier without a war?

  What use was a man without a profession?

  Captain Robert Thorne didn’t feel much like a captain anymore. He didn’t feel much like anything at all, just a shell, empty and hollow with a void where his heart had once resided. He had sat down to write to Jack so many times, yet each time the words wouldn’t come, each time he thought of Jack’s words at the hospital, of the despair in his eyes when they parted.

  ‘Send the bastard away.’

  And he had been sent away, far away, home to England to a desk job that didn’t exist, a desk job that seemed to consist of doing nothing at all. He no longer had a purpose—he was a leftover from a war that was nearing its end and no one in Whitehall had any use for him now. Of course they applauded him. Medals that rained down for valor and gallantry, for courage under fire, and they said, ‘You’ve done your bit, you’ve earned some time in Blighty.’

  Then, this morning, had come the telegram. It was a telegram that some men dreamed of, offering him his freedom, should he wish it. A position at Sandhurst was his too, but the decision was his to make. The army and a life that was regimented, training other young lads to go to hell, or life on civvy street, a hero of the war who would never need to scream at a soldier again. What a wonder it would be to take the latter choice, not alone but with Jack Woodvine safe in his arms, wrapped in that soft shawl, their kisses mingling for the rest of their lives.

  ‘Send the bastard away.’

  And he had gone away, gone back to the trench and found himself sent back to the hospital. Back and forth, bewildered, lost and heartbroken.

  It might have been yesterday, every evening bringing that dream of his beautiful gypsy, the kisses, the long, loving nights and the last, terrible day when Jack had looked at him as though he were a monster.

  Here in the sun-dappled grounds of a Sussex mansion where Viscount and Lady Brereton spent their carefree weekends, Thorne settled to sit on the grass. Beside him Apollo grazed, the wound in his shoulder long since knitted. The great horse hardly moved as his master leaned against his leg and tore open the letter that had arrived that morning. He barely blinked as he read the contents with a sense of disbelief and, somewhere in his soul, hope.

  My dear old Thorne,

  How goes it all in your pomaded life, lad?

  Well. Though it gives me no pleasure to admit, you were proven quite right. My Blighty one turned out to be a very big one indeed, and they took my bally leg for my sins. Mrs. Marsh believes that the best cure for a lost leg is a trip to take the coastal air, and though one remains unconvinced that the Welsh air is likely to regrow a limb, one knows better than to upset Mrs. M.

  And this brings me to my true reason for writing.

  You and I were not close, my boy, but I didn’t do right by you when they put me in the old hospital. You had the grace to visit and I told them to send you away, which was no way to treat a chap who I’ve since discovered knows HRH.

  So I do apologize for that. And finally, I have a little favor to ask of you, you fine fellow. Tsarina has never settled since she returned home and I seem to remember that your young friend had a knack for the tricky ones. I’ve no doubt that you and your chum (he was in my hospital ward—quite the coincidence!) are still firm friends and if you would like to take Tsarina and see if she might be happier with your old nag, I’d be happy to let her go for a good price.

  Do give your lordly pals a nod from me, and let them know that I do look quite the chap in ermine.

  Your good friend,

  Cap Edmund Marsh (Rt)

  “Meu querido!”

  Thorne was too busy reading Edmund Marsh’s letter to hear his mother for a moment, and when he did he folded the paper, reeling from what it contained. Only then did he offer a brief wave as Apollo lifted his head to watch Antonia Thorne approach.

  She switched easily from Portuguese to English. “Darling, don’t sit on the lawn like that. You’ll get a chill.”

  “I survived the war, Ma, I don’t think a little bit of dew is going to finish me off.” What had become of that captain he had once been, he wondered? The fearsome bark and the
cracking whip, now reduced to hiding from the world in his mother and father’s stately bolthole.

  “That’s what your Uncle Afonso said, and he ended up with terrible piles.”

  She pressed her lips to the top of his head.

  “Don’t fuss.” He smiled, though, because for the first time, Edmund Marsh had given him something to smile about. Maybe.

  But so much time had passed, and he had broken Jack’s heart, and he loved Jack as much now as he ever had. It was a love, a regret, an agony, that would torture him to his grave.

  “How would you feel about having a major for a son?” Thorne tested the sound of it in his head. The Honorable Major Robert Brereton Thorne. It sounded old, fusty, like the men who smoked pipes in his father’s club and reminisced about the days in the east. “They’ve offered me a position at Sandhurst.”

  He leaned back, palms flat on the grass, and peered up at his mother. She looked down at him through dark eyes, along her aquiline nose, and blinked.

  “Or I can chance myself in the real world, whatever that is. Though I’m not sure I’d do all that well out there.”

  Yet perhaps he had inherited some of her talent for the stage, because he was doing a damn good job of playing the part of a man whose heart hadn’t been dashed in a dugout somewhere on the Western Front.

  “I will be proud of you whatever you do, my Roberto, but you must ensure that it makes you happy.” She leaned over her son, her arms about his shoulders. Her long chiffon scarf slipped from her neck and she laughed as it draped over him. “My poor boy…you have been so sad since you came back, but…who is that letter from? You’re smiling. In your eyes, my son, if not your lips.”

  The bangles on her wrist clicked and jangled as she reached for his letter. He snatched it away and she laughed again.

  “Do you have a querida after all… So secretive over the years, my handsome boy will have a wife? Is she beautiful—say she is.”

  “I knew a very beautiful someone once. A gypsy.” He swallowed hard, trying not to meet her gaze, but it was impossible. It always had been. “And I thought my beautiful gypsy had come to hate me and I’ve just found out that I was wrong. And it’s too late, Ma. I’ll go the rest of my life never knowing—”