‘Oh, Marie.’ She felt a shuddering grief overtake her. ‘God damn you, Marie!’ As sobs forced their way from within her battered ribs, she hugged herself to suppress them, recalling in her mind’s eye poor Marie Angelline’s face as she had last seen it: so full of courage and fire, so gallant, so proud.
27
I am picked apart.
Each day, some new scrap of me is pecked out. I am losing those things that make me human.
Take me away from this place before it devours me, piece by piece.
But, of course, you cannot come here, and I cannot leave.
‘Here, Lieutenant.’ How faint the voice that finally answered her across the field. The cries of the other wounded nearly drowned it, as their comrades manhandled them back towards the barricade, but Emily caught it, like the voice of a ghost.
‘Marie?’
‘Emily . . . I’m here . . .’
She crawled over the bodies – the red-jacketed ones, the soldiers who had died in Pordevere’s desperate flanking attack. ‘Marie, I can’t see you,’ she rasped, her voice raw from all the shouting. ‘Please, help me find you.’
‘Here,’ came a voice almost from beneath her, and she looked down upon Marie Angelline. The woman’s jacket and breeches were slick with blood. There was a shot wound below her collarbone, and the sweep of a hatchet had laid open her leg. Her left hand was crooked awkwardly about the hilt of a knife that was still buried deep in her side.
‘Emily . . .’ she said, her great voice shrunk to a shadow of itself. ‘Emily . . .’
‘I’ll get you back. We’ll get Doctor Carling’s wife to . . .’ To what? And how many of the wounded will there be?
‘I fought . . .’ Marie said. ‘You have never seen such fighting. The crowds would have loved it. Always . . . I was always good with a sword . . . but there are so few parts for a woman that allow you to . . .’
‘Please, Marie, save your strength.’ Emily braced herself for the effort and called to the nearest soldiers. ‘Hey, you over there! Stretcher here, now!’ The last word turned into a racking cough that set every tendon on fire.
‘Tell John . . .’
‘Tell him yourself. I swear to you, you’ll have the chance,’ Emily replied. Marie’s hand was weakly on her arm, her bloodied lips curving into a smile.
‘Tell him I was magnificent,’ she said. ‘Tell him I love him, please.’
‘You can tell him. He’d want to hear it from you,’ Emily insisted. Two soldiers reached her, still flinching from an imagined new attack from the darkness. Mallen’s scouts were out, keeping an eye on the treeline.
‘Get her up,’ Emily told the stretcher-bearers. ‘For God’s sake, be gentle.’ She saw that they were looking as battered and haggard as she felt.
They lifted free the dead who were lying across Marie and put their hands upon her. With nothing more than their eyes, they counted three together and then lifted her, in one lurching movement, onto the stretcher. She gritted her teeth about a gasp of pain, but her hand was momentarily strong as a vice on Emily’s arm.
When they carried her back towards the camp, while the rest of the wounded were found and fetched, Emily stayed slumped on the ground amongst the dead, trying to find the strength to follow them.
*
The headquarters hut seemed so empty now, and those that survived were not the people they had once been. Emily had looked at her own face in Tubal’s shaving mirror that morning, and seen it colourful with bruises that rivalled Mallen’s tattoos. Her hair had been matted with blood where the grenade shrapnel had dented her helm, and blood from her cut lip had smeared her chin with a red beard. Even after she had washed it and washed and washed it again, the face in the mirror looked more like the faces of those lying cold and still out on the battlefield than that of any living thing. She walked stiffly every muscle aching, and her right palm was raw where the hilts of a succession of sabres had rubbed the skin off it.
Looking around the table, she could only think that she had got off lightly. Last night she had seen the Denlanders blow gaps in their defences, and now those gaps were mirrored among the commanding officers of the army. The colonel, dead. Justin Lascari, dead. Captain Pordevere, for