The Winter Sea

They did not have far to walk before they reached the house—a stone-built, square-walled building huddled close against its neighbors, with its windows standing open to the warming air of spring.

‘He may be sleeping,’ warned the colonel as they entered, so Sophia kept behind him as he knocked upon the door to the front room. There was a brief word of reply, which she could barely hear, and then the colonel swung the door full open, motioning that she should step inside.

The room was dim, the curtains only partly drawn as though the daylight was not wanted here.

The man they’d come to see was up and standing at the window with his back to them, so that Sophia only saw his squared stance and his shoulders and the brown hair fastened back above the collar of his shirt. He wore no coat, just breeks and boots, and in the fine white shirt he stood there still and pale and like a ghost, the only thing of light in that dull room.

He spoke again, not looking round, his voice grown hoarser from the illness. ‘Did ye see her? Was she well?’

‘She will be now,’ the colonel gently said, and stepping back retreated to the entry hall and closed the door behind him.

Sophia could not move from where she stood. Could not believe it.

Then he turned, a ghost no longer, but a breathing man. A living man, whose shadowed eyes grew brighter in the grip of hard emotion as he left the window and in two strides crossed to fold her in his arms, his touch as careful as it had been on their wedding night, as fierce as it had been at their last parting.

Still she could not move or speak, not even when he took her face in both his hands and brushed away her tears and drew a ragged breath himself, and in a voice she had not thought to hear again he said, ‘I told ye I’d come back to ye.’

And then his mouth came down on hers and for a long time after that there were no words at all.

XXIII

THE VILLAGE OF MALPLAQUET stood at the border of Flanders and France, with deep woods to the north and the south. On September 11th, the morning of battle, the French had been firmly dug into those woods and were waiting for first light, and for the attack of the massed Allied forces—the English and Germans and Dutch fighting now with the great Duke of Marlborough.

Dawn had come, and brought a dense mist rolling from the fields into the wood to make grey phantoms of the men who crouched there, waiting, weary from a lack of rations and a night of little sleep. The Allied armies used that mist to hide their movements; when it cleared they started firing, and a short while after that they gave the signal and began the fight in earnest, throwing everything they had against the wood.

It seemed to Moray there were four of them for every one of his own men. The air hung thick with smoke and screams and cannon-fire, the edges of the wood were set ablaze by the artillery, and men on both sides fell beneath the fury of the guns and flashing swords.

He fell himself at midday. The cut across his leg came first, and brought him to his knees so that he scarcely felt the pistol shot that tore him near his heart and knocked him down to lie in leaves and mud among the dying and the dead. He could not move. The pain within his chest was so consuming he could only breathe by concentrating, and although he willed his arms to find the strength to lift him, drag him, anything, they would not answer.

He could hear the sounds of struggle moving past him, leaving him behind—the clash of men and steel, the raw-voiced yells and rush of feet and sound of branches splintering, and further off the thunder on the ground that shook the forest as the cavalry advance of countless horses and their saber-wielding riders started down upon the battlefield beyond.

And some time after that there came a silence that to Moray was more horrible than any sound of war, because it was not truly silence. In the dimness of the shattered wood, where smoke yet rolled across the trampled undergrowth and mingled with the smells of fire and blood, he heard the moans and anguished praying of the fallen. Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms—the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.

To his left there lay a boy who had been dead before he fell and was released from fear and suffering, but on the ground to Moray’s right a soldier in the colors of the Royal Irish regiment was trying now without success to roll upon his side, his grey face sweating with the effort.

Moray told him, low, ‘Keep still.’

The words burned fire within his chest, but somehow he found strength to roll his head to meet the stranger’s wide, uncomprehending eyes.

‘Keep still,’ he said again. ‘Ye’ll bleed to death, and no one will be coming yet awhile.’

He saw the man’s eyes calm, and gain their sense again. A man his own age, and a soldier like himself, for all that they were enemies. It was a trick of fate, thought Moray looking at their uniforms, that they had faced each other on opposing sides—his own brigade was Irish also, though it served the French king and King James, and not Queen Anne.

The stranger lay his head back with a sigh. ‘’Twas useless trying, anyway. I’ve no more feeling in my legs. Are they yet there?’

Impassive, Moray angled his own gaze towards the blood-soaked ground beneath the other’s boots, and answered, ‘Aye.’

The man’s eyes closed a moment, either from the pain or in relief, and then he opened them again as if determined not to drift. ‘You are a Scotsman, like myself. Why do you fight for France?’

There was a pause. Moray was not inclined to talk, but he himself could feel the deadly lure of drowsiness, and knew the conversation would help keep him conscious. Help him stay alive. He said, ‘I fight for James.’