could I even think it? Jenna was younger than Alice, a mere girl who had known little more than domestic service. How could Emily consider sending the poor creature to some distant war far beyond the world she knew, with a gun in her hands and no real understanding in her head.
‘We will not send Jenna,’ she declared with finality. Inside, she wanted to cry because of the load she was taking on her own shoulders. How much more prepared was she than Jenna would be? But still she spoke, and her voice barely betrayed the fear inside. ‘I think we all know who must go, now, to obey the King.’
‘Oh, no, Emily—’ Mary started.
‘Who else? Better me than Alice, and I will not have it said that the Marshwics send servants in their stead. We have always served the King, our family. We should be proud. I should be proud.’
‘There must be another way.’
‘No,’ Emily said. ‘No other way. First Tubal, then Rodric. Let us hope the war has had its fill once it’s got me. We have little enough left to give.’
*
Those women thus to be drafted from Chalcaster and its surroundings were to be sent to Gravenfield Barracks, thirty miles south along the railway line, for training to last forty days. So the next notice in the marketplace explained, and the eyes that had read it were dry now. The weeping was done, the decisions made.
A recruiting sergeant brought out of retirement had made his way from house to house throughout Chalcaster, and then by carriage between the outlying farmhouses and the estates of the countryside, and at every stop his list of names grew. When he came to Grammaine they were ready for him, and gave him bread and wine, and put brave faces on. Emily would be glad to go, she said. She would be happy to serve, as her ancestors had served.
He had a long, mournful face with a drooping moustache and, when he nodded, it seemed that he was seeing the worst he could imagine become real. At how many doors had he been an unwelcome guest? What scenes had he witnessed in carrying out his duty? What mothers had he parted from their children, sisters from sisters?
The list of the conscripts was posted in the marketplace, later, just in case any second thoughts were stealing about in the Chalcaster streets.
After the sergeant had been and gone, Emily’s dreams changed character, darkening into nightmares that tormented her. In those dreams, or most of them, she was running through Deerlings House, through room after room of cracked armour and rusting swords. Behind her, almost in arm’s reach, came the Denlanders. In her dream, they were just faceless grey shapes. She had no flesh to give them, but they had lusts, still. They called after her in whispering voices, entreating her, commanding her. They pursued her through the distorted rooms, chasing just exactly as fast as she fled them. The more she tried to find the ballroom and the King, the dimmer and smaller those chambers became. If she did not wake soon after that, she knew that she would find herself in the strangling garden with the futile angels, and so she forced herself awake each time the dream assaulted her, only to lie cold and alone in the small hours of the night.
One night, when she turned, at bay before the gate of the angels’ garden, it was not the host of faceless Denlanders that pursued her at all. Instead, Mr Northway stood there in front of her with his bleak little smile and his pale hand outstretched to offer her a dance, and she knew he was Death, and let him take her.
During the days those dreams overshadowed, she was listless, feeling each one fade into the next as the sands ran through the hourglass. Soon there would be none left.
The next night it was not through Deerlings that her nightmare rode, but to a place that she had never seen before.
The sun was like a glowing rivet in a bronze sky, and all about her was desolation and waste, a dusty, barren place of scrub and dry gullies, with canyon walls rising on either side.
‘Where can this be?’ she asked her dream and, beside her, Lord Deerling said, ‘This is my home now. This is the Couchant front.’ He had a musket in his hands, and his savages were with him, their owl-eyes glowing. Lord Deerling had the mad, staring eyes