That, more than anything, disturbed Kieran. To see the bodies of his fallen comrades—his brothers in the trenches—lined up like sandbags.
Christ, they needed supplies, and soon. He had always been of strong mind and body, yet even he was wavering in the belief that they might be saved.
Three feet away from him, he heard the call of death, the familiar rattle of breaths through fluid-filled lungs. Hastings would be going home tonight. His leg wound had festered, the poison spreading to his blood. His body raged with fever and his mind raved with madness. The army surgeon had given up on him, refusing to use their limited medical supplies on a patient who would only succumb. They each had taken turns staying with him, holding their fellow soldier throughout the night, praying that his end would come swiftly. But it had not come quick enough, in Kieran’s opinion.
Death hovered over them like an ominous cloud, and Kieran found himself wondering more and more when it would come to claim him.
“O’Leary,” someone whispered. “You’re a good Catholic, give Hastings his rites, man. He’s going.”
There was a shuffling of bodies, the murmured litany of prayers, followed by the haunting rattle of Hastings’s last breath.
With Hastings gone, there was more dead among them than living.
“It’ll be dark soon,” said the youngest among them as he looked up at the twilight sky that was marked with a full, silver moon that hung heavily in the sky.
“’Tis the winter solstice,” Kieran replied, thinking back to his Celtic upbringing and his favorite childhood story. “The priestess will protect us, just as she saved her soldier all those centuries ago. Tonight she watches over us, guarding us well.”
“Aye, she will,” the young man named Drummond replied. “I’ve been thinking of home, and the solstice gathering in my village in Dunkirk. There will be feasting and drinking, and bonfires high enough to light the sky for miles around. And lasses. The most bonnie lasses you’ve ever laid eyes on—with dancing eyes and mouths cherry red from the cold, that they’ll let you warm up with yours. Bonnie lasses,” he whispered brokenly.
“Next solstice you will be there, Drummond, with two lasses,” Kieran teased.
“I don’t know.” Kieran could hear the trembling, the terror in the seventeen-year-old’s voice. “They’ll be firing at us soon. The gunshots always start once the moon reaches above that bank of trees.”
Kieran reached for the boy and put his arm around his neck. “Stay by my side and do as I say. If the priestess canna keep you alive tonight, then I will.”
Drummond nodded and looked away, but not before Kieran saw the shimmer in his eyes. The boy was right, ’twas twilight, and soon he and his commanding officer would leave the trench to lay the copper wire for the desperately needed landline. The telegraph was their only means of winning ground in the stalemate they had been in with the Cossacks for weeks.
Correspondence was desperately needed to alert the advancing cavalry that the area had not yet been secured. If the Hussars were to arrive before the area had been cleared of the enemy, it would be disastrous.
“Goddamn British army,” Macintosh muttered. “Send us out here in the dead of winter with nothing more than a thin coat. Fucking rations are frozen—even the goddamn rats have frozen in the mud. I might have thought of eating one of the blessed things if we had a fire to cook it on.”
“Aye,” someone answered him. “And when we leave this godforsaken place, I’m going to kill as many Cossacks as I can and strip them bare. At least the czar has seen to properly outfitting his army. And then, when I have draped myself in furs and blankets, I’ll take their vodka and fill me belly full of it.”
“Anyone got a light?” came a disembodied voice.
“No light,” came the lieutenant’s deep voice. “Damn Cossacks are out. Can you not hear them?”
“Aye, I hear the bastards,” Macintosh muttered, “laughing and singing, drinking their vodka. At least their bodies are warm, and their stomachs are full of fire from drink.”
“Quit your bellyaching, Macintosh,” the lieutenant commanded. “The supply wagon will be here within a few days.”
“We’ll be frozen before then.”
“You’ll be dead from my bullet if you don’t watch it.”
Macintosh shut his mouth. Lieutenant Pembrooke was not a man to be argued with. Funny, since Kieran, upon first meeting his senior officer, had thought the fair-haired second son of an aristocrat too young and too prissy to lead a company of unruly ragtag soldiers from the wilds of Ireland, Scotland and northern England. With Celtic superstitions and hard-hewn minds and bodies like their warrior ancestors, the last thing he and the others had wanted was a foppish, effeminate Englishman running the show.
Yet David Pembrooke had held his own against them, earning their admiration, and, more important, their loyalty. There was nothing Kieran would not do for his lieutenant—nothing.
Lieutenant Pembrooke was the furthest thing from effeminate, or foppish. Kieran had seen that firsthand when the lieutenant had led a charge against the Russians, cutting them down with his sword as if they were nothing more than wheat chaff.
“You’ve got about an hour before the firing starts, spend it as you will, men,” Pembrooke commanded.
“Think any of those Gypsy whores the Cossacks drag with them from camp to camp would be inclined to come to our trench?” Macintosh asked with a wicked lilt in his Scottish accent.
Pembrooke laughed and shifted against the snow-covered side of the trench. “Save your energy, my friend, for the battle ahead. The spoils of war will soon be awarded. Use your hand if need be, but do not count on the Gypsies this night.”
“I canna feel my damn hand,” Macintosh grumbled, “or I would.”
“O’Halloran, sing us a tune,” the lieutenant commanded of the Irishman with the deep baritone voice.
“It’s the solstice, sir. I would sing something to celebrate it and appease the priestess who will watch over us this night.”
“I am aware it is the solstice. My wife, she always liked to celebrate it. It was her favorite time of year,” Pembrooke murmured. A distant sound to his voice muffled his words. “She told me the story of this priestess you speak of. Sinead.” He whispered his wife’s name as he tilted his face to the sky and closed his eyes. The sound was full of longing and reverence, and Kieran pressed his eyes shut, shutting out the heartache he heard in his officer’s voice. Hearing that love, that longing, killed him.
“I can still see her sitting by the fire, her hair draped over her shoulder, a smile on her lips. The sort each woman has when she tells a story of star-crossed lovers, a smile that is at once sad, yet wistful.” Pembrooke shook his head, as if trying to dispel the memory. “I wonder what she is doing now? At this very moment in time. I can see her walking to the standing stones that lie amongst an oak grove at the edge of the village, the snow gently falling around her as the light from the bonfires shines radiantly on her red hair. Perhaps,” he murmured, “we are both looking up into the night sky and seeing the exact same star. Perhaps she is remembering sharing the story of her Druid priestess, wondering if I remember it. Perhaps she is beckoning her priestess now to watch over us.”
“To Mrs. Pembrooke, then,” O’Halloran said. “May the priestess hear her prayers.” Quietly, the Irishman began the first bars of a traditional Irish winter tune, “The Wexford Carol,” and Kieran settled against the snow-covered mud wall of the trench to await the night’s work.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, Kieran withdrew his last cheroot and lit it with his cold, fumbling fingers. When the end glowed red, he inhaled a long draw of it, then reached into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and retrieved the wrinkled and faded picture of the woman who kept him alive in this hell.
She had become his sole reason for living. Her face. Her letters. The dreams of her. The fantasies of them together. Even now he thought of warming himself in her inviting body—stealing her heat, her heart�
�for himself.
The woman looked out at him, her skin pale and pure. His filthy, blackened fingers traced over her porcelain skin that reminded him how dirty he was to feel this way, to think these thoughts—to crave the sexual urges of his body.
If you were mine…
Mentally, he composed a love letter to her while he held the glowing end of his smoke to the picture, lighting the woman’s face as he stared at her, his thumb continually tracing the outline of her stunningly beautiful face in a fruitless search for a physical connection with her.
My darling, I look at this picture of you every day, wishing somehow that you might magically appear before me. I have every line, every curve of your beautiful face memorized. The tilt of your head, the shape of your mouth.
I dream of the way your lips will part beneath mine, the taste of you. The reception of your warm embrace when I at last arrive back home, on English soil, tired and broken. I dream of that night, that homecoming.
If only he could write to her of such things. If only she were his. There would be no homecoming for him, no love from her arms, for she belonged to someone else. Someone worthier than him, a gruff soldier who had never known what it was like to touch the softness of a woman such as her. He knew physical lust, but never passion. Yet he ached for it, the beauty of a shared joining of bodies in love.
He dreamed of what it would be like to feel himself slide inside her core. To feel her hands traversing his shoulders and back, the feel of her nails digging into his backside as he drove into her relentlessly.
He heard the sound of her cries, felt her release as he held her within his arms. He would make it good for her, would take her to new heights, show her the pleasures he could give.
If only you were mine, I could show you everything…
The light from his spent cheroot flickered, dying, casting dark shadows over her face, rendering her expression melancholy and sad as her image wavered and began to fade into darkness.
Don’t leave me…
Desperately he tilted the picture up closer to the end of the cheroot, savoring the light until it sputtered and smoked, finally dying away.
Bereft, he clutched the picture in his palm and closed his eyes, bringing to life the image of her in his mind. She was lying on a bed, naked, her red hair splayed out on the pillow, her fingers in her sex, which was wet and glistening, slick with desire. In his mind, he saw her reading his letter, relishing his most secret thoughts, thoughts he could never speak aloud, in a letter he could never send. Only in his wild imaginings could he pretend that they corresponded, for his letters to her were always only ever in his mind, never to be shared with the woman he desired. With her own hand, she brought herself to climax, and he watched her, mesmerized by the arch of her back, the way her mouth parted, the sound of his name whispered in her throaty moan.
“Kieran…”
It was at these moments, when the urge to live was all but consuming. It was her…her picture, the thoughts of her that gave him purpose. The thought of coming home to her, broken in mind and spirit. The dream of having her heal him with her body and passion, as only a woman could. It could never be, yet he refused to think of that, lest his desire to continue abandon him.
Until that day, he must love her from afar. Must ravish her in the privacy of his mind. Except, those private fantasies no longer satiated him as they once did, but left him aching, restless.
“’Tis time, Thompson,” Pembrooke murmured beside him. “This will be our last chance to reach the telegraph wagon and send the message to the Hussars. Have you the copper wire ready?”
“I have, sir,” he said, shoving the picture in his coat pocket.
“What have you got there?” Pembrooke asked.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Have you got yourself a sweetheart back home?”
“No, sir.”
A heavy hand came upon his shoulder. “A blessing, that. For one cannot help but think of what-if when one has left a woman alone.”
“You speak of your wife, sir?” he asked, his voice thick.
“I have had a letter from her. She has been moved from my family’s home to a small cottage in the village. I know of the cottage. It is not suitable for livestock, let alone my wife. But my mother, you see, could not wait to evict my wife from the family estate. She never warmed to the thought of me marrying her and now that I am away, she seeks to make life miserable for my wife. It’s retribution, you see, for me marrying a woman of low birth and no fortune.”
“From her letters to us, sir, Mrs. Pembrooke seems the sort of woman any man’s mother would wish for him to marry. She is very eloquent in her writings, and her concern for our welfare, of which she writes so often, is testament to her worth. I do not think many commanding officers’ wives write their soldiers. Money and a name mean very little when there is no substance to go along with it.”
“My wife is the kindest of souls. I do not deserve her, but I could not bear to let her go to another. Even though I knew I was leaving for war, I still married her—I wanted her that much.”
Kieran swallowed hard and rose unsteadily to his feet. Pembrooke was already making his way to the rough-hewn stairs that would lead them out of the seven-foot trench. As he followed his officer, Kieran could not help thinking of the woman whose picture he kept so close to his heart.
He got down on his belly and snaked his way over the snow-laden field, carefully unrolling the copper wire that led to the wagon with the magnetic telegraph. As he did so, the image of the woman’s smiling face flashed in his mind, soon replaced by a strange vision of a woman in a cloak, her hands raised, as if in warning.
“Shh,” he suddenly hissed. Pembrooke, who was on his belly just in front of Kieran, stopped and looked back over his shoulder.
“What is it?”
“I heard something.”
“What? Cossacks?”
“No, a flap of some kind.”
“A bird, most likely. Let’s move onward and get this done quickly.”
Reluctantly, Kieran agreed. Something was not right. His instincts heightened, Kieran continued to unroll the wire as he listened and watched. It was unusually quiet here, in the space between the two opposing camps, in the land that belonged to neither them nor their enemies. No-man’s-land. A place that was desolate and burned from bullets and fire.
“A moment, sir,” he whispered. “I’m out of wire.”
Reaching into his pocket, Kieran retrieved the metal grippers needed to fuse Pembrooke’s wire with his. His hands, still poorly functioning in the freezing temperatures, fumbled, and he looked back over his shoulder to see if the handle of the tool was caught on the torn bit of wool on his pocket. It was then that he saw the flashing of white. He thought perhaps he had imagined it, but then he saw it again. A short flash, followed by a second longer flash. Dot. Dash.
Oh, fuck!
“It’s a trap,” he hissed, reaching for Pembrooke’s ankle, pulling him back.
“Good God, Thompson, what the devil—”
“It’s an ambush! The fucking Russians are here, they’ve surrounded the trench and they’re using Morse code to signal their reinforcements.”
“What—”
The first barrage of bullets rained down over their heads. Reaching beside him for his gun, Kieran shot blindly into the night, shooting anything and everything.
“Retreat!” Pembrooke roared. But it was too late. The other soldiers heard the firing and were crawling out of the trench, returning the gunfire in a blind fury, dropping like rag dolls as the Russian snipers fired at them from their vantage on the hill above no-man’s-land. Red flashes volleyed back and forth across the field as Kieran tried to make his way back to the trench. He was nearly there when he heard the bloodcurdling roar.
He turned just in time to see Pembrooke fall to his knees, clutching his gut. Not thinking, Kieran ran the short distance to his commanding officer and hauled him up over his shoulder, carrying him back to the trench am
idst the torrent of enemy fire.
Pembrooke was bleeding. Kieran could feel the warmth of blood on his neck, trickling down the collar of his thin coat. He heard it in the gurgling that rasped against his shoulder.
“A light!” he called, jumping down into the trench, landing on his knees with Pembrooke on his back. “Get the field surgeon,” he roared breathlessly as he slid Pembrooke to the wet, packed mud of the trench floor.
“Get out of this trench,” Pembrooke choked on a mouthful of frothing blood. “For God’s sake, man, the Russians will burn you alive in it. That’s an order, Thompson.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Kieran snapped, ripping open Pembrooke’s overcoat and officer’s jacket. The gold braid was thick and cold, stiff in his groping fingers. Finally, giving up, he reached for his gun and used the bayonet to cut through the braid. When he parted the jacket, Pembrooke’s vitals spilled out in a gush of blood and tissue.
“Jesus Christ!” What the hell was he to do with this?
Suddenly a light was thrust in front of him. He looked up to see the army surgeon holding a lantern in the darkness. He gazed at Pembrooke’s face, and then at the wound.
“Better find the ordinary. There’s nothing to be done here.”
“You will fix him,” Kieran ordered the old doctor. “Or you will feel this bayonet in your gullet.”
“Thompson,” Pembrooke murmured, his voice gurgling with blood and the sounds of death. “It’s no good.”
Kieran leaned over his officer and put his ear to the man’s mouth, trying to hear, when the picture fluttered out of his pocket and landed on Pembrooke’s chest.
He gazed at it and smiled. “I thought I had lost it,” he said, reaching for the picture. “Here, come closer with that light,” Pembrooke commanded the surgeon.
“She is so lovely,” Pembrooke gasped as he focused on the image of the woman. “It pains me that I will never see her again.”
“Do not speak such things,” Kieran demanded.
“You think her beautiful, don’t you, Thompson?”
Winter’s Desire Page 13