of death. He did all he could for those around us, but without any instruments or medication, there wasn’t much he could do. Then one night we heard gunshots from the shore. Shouts, metal clanging, horses neighing. The English had arrived, and there was a battle just beyond us. We sat there, hopeful, and when we heard footsteps above us, the first joy we had felt in months intruded as we thought that they had boarded in order to free us.”
He was silent for a moment and Hannah said nothing, sensing that he was no longer in the room, but instead back in that prison, reliving the tale.
“We were wrong. It was the French. Just a few of them, but they had arrived to make sure we would never be freed. Started killing us off, shooting us one by one. The man – the doctor? He was shot and fell right on top of me. They never knew I was there, and when they left, I was the only one still alive.”
Hannah swallowed hard, a heavy weight filling her stomach at the thought of him lying there beneath the body of another, of being surrounded by death and able to do nothing but wait for his own end or discovery.
“The English finally boarded, but it was too late – for everyone but me. I spent another year in an infirmary. Falton was in the bed beside me.”
He finally turned around, his face haunted, his one good eye boring into her as despair filled it. The scarred side of his face stood out in the glow of the wall sconce from the right side of the room.
“This explains the nightmares.”
“You know about them?”
She nodded, and he looked even more pained.
“Why, Hannah?” he asked, his voice pleading, haunted. “Why was I spared when the rest of them – good men, like the doctor, who had people who loved him waiting for him – were taken?”
Hannah finally moved, crossing the room slowly, carefully, so that she wouldn’t scare him, as though he was an injured animal waiting for her.
“I don’t know,” she said softly when she finally reached him. “I wish I did. I wish I knew why there are such atrocities in the world. But the truth is, Edmund, no one knows. The only thing that is certain is that you must live the life you were given. Live it well, for all of those men who never came home. That physician, he wouldn’t want you to spend the rest of your life as though you were as dead as he is, would he?”
Edmund said nothing, though his eyes were tortured as he stared at her.
“I don’t know, Hannah,” he muttered, “I really don’t.”
For a moment, she wondered if he was going to come to her, to allow her to comfort him and hold him as she longed to. But instead he took a step back, and then another, until he was nearly at the staircase. He took one long, final look at her.
“Goodnight, Hannah.”
Edmund woke the next morning with the feeling that the house was closing in on him. He had to get out, to assume some sort of physical activity, or he thought he would truly go mad.
He didn’t see Hannah, didn’t tell her where he was going. He knew she wanted a tour of the ruins, but he didn’t have it within him to see her again. He had told her far more than he’d meant to last night. He couldn’t remember making a conscious decision to share any of it with her, but he needed her to understand just why he could never be the man she wanted him to be.
The nightmare had come again, as it always did when he revisited the hell he had existed in for far longer than one should. He could feel the effects of a short, restless sleep this morning.
Edmund considered saddling his horse for a ride, but decided instead to go round to the back and split wood for the fires. The physicality of it would certainly allow him to expend all of the pent-up frustration within him following his conversation with Hannah last night.
He had just carried over a thick branch, setting it down as he hefted the ax once more, when a scream split the air. The ax swung down, splitting the log, before Edmund tossed it to the side and took off at a run, his heart beating faster than if he had sprinted across a field. The