minutes. Instead she knew only that a man she had once hated had gone to these lengths for her, risked all to give her what she needed. The man cared enough, despite his faults, to put this chance her way. His cool hand, she thought. His tight carefulness on the ballroom floor. And she saw again his expression as she left him for the train and the war. She relived his despair when he held the knowledge of Rodric’s death and yet, when he could have had her in his hands, he had told her the truth, as he always did. The idea of Mr Northway, the bitterly truthful Mr Northway, crept into her through her own treacherous memories and the words of his letter. She felt hot and unsteady suddenly. He was seducing her in ink, and she was being seduced. A wave of contradictory feelings threatened to overwhelm her. What could she do to escape Mr Northway, when his hooks were planted inside her by her own hands?
She would write to Mary and Alice, yes, but what could she write to them that they would understand? The sudden death a musket shot could bring, the venomous oven of the swamp, the guilt of having a death hanging about her neck? How could she load these burdens onto her two sisters? They would not bear them. The colonel was right: the weight would break them. Tell them that she lived, yes; tell them that she fought for king and country, but how could she wound them with the truth?
But she had never hidden a thing from Mr Northway, as he had not from her. Of all people, he would understand. He would not flinch. He had known grimmer things than this. She did not need a priest for her confession, but a devil.
How strange that war has brought the two of us to this pass. She felt so close to him now, as she had never done when he was there right before her. How the war had remade her, remade them both, into two halves of a broken thing!
She would write to him. She would write to her sisters, something true but, yes, shying from the whole truth, but she would write honestly to him. He would keep her heart for her, until the war was done and she had need of it again.
That decision made, she folded the letter to slip into her jacket pocket, and one of the many weights she bore was gone from her. The bottled thoughts that sat so heavily on her stomach could now be poured out.
She returned to Belchere and told her to wait, for there would be a reply.
14
We are not the things we think we are, when we are tested.
We do not know how much we lean on others until those props are taken away. On our own feet at last, we are unsteady. I am grateful, therefore, that you have sent me this crutch, just as I began to fall.
Your martial adversary,
Emily.
Tubal cast himself down beside her, heedless of the mud on his jacket. His helmet was pushed back off his head until it hung between his shoulders from its strap. There was dirt on his face, but his expression was calmer than she ever remembered from home.
‘So,’ he said, his voice a mere undertone, half lost amid the water-sound. ‘Settling in all right?’
Emily, lying stretched along a moss bank with her feet in the water below, shifted slightly, trying for comfort. ‘It’s hard, Tubal,’ she said.
‘Hell, yes,’ he agreed. ‘So tell me about how it’s hard.’ Around them, the swamp covered a multitude of sins as eight squads of Stag Rampant, one hundred and sixty soldiers in all, eased into position, one by one.
‘I don’t mean this.’ Emily took a chance to look at him, rather than at their objective. ‘This is hard, but I expected it. I knew fighting, warring, was going to be like this, but . . .’
‘It’s the gaps in between,’ he finished for her, elbowing his way up the bank a little, keeping his musket just clear of the mud.
Emily thought of her letter, winging its way to Mr Northway even now: her kindred spirit, her adversary. Locked in conflict for so long, they shared some place between them that no other could touch. But he was not here. It could be tens of days before she heard from him, if at all. It was a dangerous game he was playing, after