Chapter Fourteen. A Mother’s Fear Returns

C HAPTER F OURTEEN

A Mother’s Fear Returns

I was in France.

Knee-deep in water and blood, stumbling through the flooded-out trench. Fetid liquid sloshed up over my boots and wet the knees of my woolen jodhpurs.

My frozen fingers dug into the earthen wall of the trench, desperately trying to keep balance.

Each step harder than the last.

They’d told me he was just ahead. I could make out his shape at the opening. The familiar slope of his shoulders as he ran from something unseen.

Death and piss.

Metal and gunpowder.

All the familiar scents blending with the sickeningly sweet remnants of gas on the air. My teeth chattered hard enough that I could scarcely breathe. Rats, fat from feasting on both the living and the dead, followed along behind me, looking for their next meal.

I’d left my ambulance back by the regimental aid post with a handful of wounded already loaded in the back. The regimental medical officer said the soldier was just ahead. He was waiting for me and would come for no one else. Stubborn bastard, but I’d expected no less of him.

I knew him.

Had always known him.

Kitted-up soldiers pushed against me like high tide. Flooding up and over the top, met by flashes and the rumble of gunfire.

A match strike.

A hiss.

Sticky hot blood rained down my face, filling my mouth with its metallic tang.

Where was he?

A high-pitched whistle of a shell sailed overhead, followed by a blast that took the ground out from beneath me, sending bodies flying. Yet I was pulled ahead on an invisible tether.

He needed me.

I had to keep going.

Crawling over a sea of bodies, the duckboards gave way at last, opening up into an angry crimson lake.

He was there. Just ahead.

The dark water was up to my waist now.

Cold. So cold. My body grew weak but I could almost touch him.

Ruan.

A knit hat was pulled low over his ears. He had his back to me yet I knew it was him. I’d know him in any age, any time.

He was mine.

A bright poppy-colored scarf was wrapped around his neck, stuffed into his mud-streaked uniform jacket. He turned to me as the sniper fire rang out from behind me. The scarf turned into a river of blood, seeping down his uniform front.

A second shot rang out, and he stumbled backward, arms pinwheeling as the poppies bloomed across his chest.

“Ruby!”

I struggled against the hands that held me back. I could save him. I knew I could, if only the bastard would let me go. Let me go to him.

This was Ruan. I’d only just found him again, and I couldn’t lose him. He couldn’t die—I wouldn’t let him.

And yet someone was pulling me away from his lifeless body.

Violent shivers racked me as I screamed. The sound piercing through the night.

“Ruby, wake up! Stop fighting me.”

Somewhere in my deepest consciousness I heard it. Heard him calling me home.

The warm low west country cadence pulling me back across the channel. Away from the trenches and gas and blood. Through the fog of my dreams, back to Britain. Back to him.

Dazed, I stared up into the night sky—the stars above no more than mere pinpricks and streaks of distant color, universes away. Ruan crouched, his arms bracketing me against the earth. He leaned down, cupping my face in his hands.

“Ruby, can you hear me? Gods…” He grabbed me hard, crushing me and my soaking-wet nightgown against his warmth.

“Of course, I can hear you. What’s wrong with you?” I rubbed my face, glancing around, pulling his hands from my cheeks.

Where the hell was I?

“I heard you calling me… I thought… Thought you found something. I went to your room…” I burrowed myself deeper into his embrace, greedily drinking in his heat. “Then I find you here, up to your waist in the water.”

Suddenly I knew without question where I was. I hadn’t walked in my sleep since I was a small child. I’d thought those days behind me. But if the stinging of my bare feet was any indication, they were back.

He ran his thumb across my cheek, voice thick with panic. “I thought I was going to lose you… I’ve only just found you and—” Something in his words echoed in my memory but I couldn’t quite recall why.

I reached up, holding his hand against my cheek and pressed my eyes shut, willing him to be able to hear me now, though I doubted he could—his own fear drowning out every other sentiment—and I didn’t have the heart to speak the words aloud.

I thought the return of my prescient nightmares had been the worst of my affliction, but this was beyond all that. Flashes of my girlhood came violently back. The fear in my mother’s eyes as she held me in her arms, rocking me at the edge of the pond. Words I’d long forgotten gained a foothold in my brain. “Not you too, my little Ruby. I won’t let them take you from me.” I was too young then to ask what she was afraid of—to even realize that the words might have some meaning beyond a frightened mother soothing her firstborn.

“You walk… in your dreams.” Ruan must have heard the memory.

My teeth chattered against his warm chest. “I haven’t in years… I thought it h-h-had stopped.”

“You ran into the bloody lake. I called your name but you didn’t hear me. You wouldn’t stop… Ruby… Gods… I called for you and you wouldn’t stop.” He held me tight enough my ribs might have cracked from the sheer force of him. Our hearts beating, for once, in almost perfect rhythm. Slow and steady.

“Let’s get you inside…”

A branch broke nearby and we both froze as whatever it was crunched across the frost-covered grass.

An animal?

Ruan shook his head.

Boots, then?

A nod.

How many?

He tapped my thigh twice and I squinted into the darkness, barely able to see the two shapes making their way to the bridge above where we sat nestled in the reeds. The pair moved quickly, keeping to the shadows as best they could.

We were safe, hidden amongst the overgrowth. Perhaps not an ideal spot during the day, but in the darkness, we might go unnoticed at least for a time.

Ruan tapped me again on my thigh, a gesture I believed meant we should sneak back to the castle. He stood quietly, pulling me to my feet, and the two of us crept out of the reeds and away from the two figures.

Hand in hand we walked through the halls until we reached my room. It was a weakness to depend on him, but there was something steady and reassuring about Ruan that called to me—reminding me of those Cornish rocks he loved so well.

He pressed the door open and ushered me inside before throwing another log onto the fire and turning on the faucet of the great claw-foot tub beneath the window. The pipes groaned and hissed as the basin filled with hot water.

Ruan hesitated before turning around to face me, jaw tight.

“We’ll warm you up. Then, Ruby… I’m afraid we need to talk.”