Page 75 of The Soldier
St. Just stopped, unable to read further as he recalled all the laughing boys he’d seen fall to their deaths. Nearly a month he’d had these letters in his possession, and he could barely get through three paragraphs. Ever since Emmie’s innocent comment about forgetting his mother, the letters had been burning a hole in his awareness. Like an addict who knows there’s a pipe of opium inside a drawer, he’d held the letters in his hands countless times, letting hope and fear and loss and so much more reverberate through him.
His mother had worried for him, she had remembered him, she had kept him in her prayers, and never, ever stopped thinking of him. If only three paragraphs told him that much, how could he bear to go through seven years of letters? Because he knew he had to, somehow, he had to find the strength—the courage—to read every word.
“Are you all right?” Val cocked his head where he stood in the library doorway. “You are pale beneath your plebeian tan, and… You’re not all right.” He closed the door behind him and locked it. “Talk to me, Dev.” He came over to the desk, no doubt seeing correspondence laid there and more in his brother’s hands. “Is it bad news? Did the old bugger finally shuffle off this mortal coil?”
St. Just managed a swallow and a shake of his head.
“So then what is it?” Val asked softly. But St. Just was staring a hole in the window, and the letters in his hands were shaking with some elemental exertion of will he could not have named to save his life. Carefully, Val extracted the folded paper from St. Just’s hands. He’d see it was a woman’s hand and that the paper was yellowed and frail with the passage of time.
While St. Just ordered himself to rise and move, to say something, to escape the grip of the emotions choking him, Val studied a letter at some length.
“You haven’t seen these before,” Val said, sidling closer and putting the letter far to the side. St. Just shook his head and began to blink, his throat working with the effort of expelling words.
“Oh, child.” Val slid his hips along the desk and rested his hands on St. Just’s shoulders. “I am so sorry.”
“Val?” It was little more than whisper.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I remember,” St. Just got out as he wrapped his arms around Val’s waist and held on. “I remember petting the horses… With her…”
They wept, as soldiers often do, in absolute soul-wrenching silence.
***
They sneaked out through the kitchen like a pair of truants, Val grabbing a bottle to slip in with the sandwiches, and a book to keep the sun off his face. For most of a long, lazy afternoon, they read Kathleen’s letters to each other, sometimes falling silent for long moments before resuming. When the stack was complete and reverently folded and put aside, they lay on their blanket watching clouds laze across a brilliant blue sky.
“Feel all better?” Val asked, taking a pull from the bottle and passing it to the brother on whose stomach his head was pillowed.
“I want my mother.” St. Just’s hand drifted over his brother’s hair. “You’d be surprised, young Valentine, how many dying men call for their mothers. Not their priest, not their wives of twenty years, not their God, not their firstborn. They want their mothers.”
“I had a kind of grudging admiration for old Boney before.” Val laced his fingers on his stomach. “Thought he was a determined rascal, valiant little prick, and all that. But hearing you…” Val closed his eyes. “Loving you, I have to hate that little bastard with everything in me. Why didn’t you come home, Dev?” The question echoed through the fears of an adolescent boy who’d seen two of his brothers ride off to war and only one come home.
“Riding dispatch, you think the orders you’ve stuck in your shirt are the ones that will turn the tide of some battle or see the enemy’s magazine blown up. When you’re on the battlefield, you charge in and disrupt the infantry lines, get under cannon range, and tear into their forces; then the real fighting can begin. You think you’re necessary.”
“You were necessary,” Val said, accepting the bottle. “But you were necessary to us, too, Dev.”
“You weren’t going to die without me,” St. Just countered, but his hand brushed over Val’s temple again. “You were safe and sound back in merry old England, which was exactly where I needed you to be.”
“I thought about joining up. Her Grace cried, and that was that. His Grace forbid it, and I caved. Some soldier I’d make. Her Grace said I lack the ability to defer to my betters.”
“Because you have none, but you mustn’t speak ill of Her Grace, or I will have to thash… thrash you.”
“Here’s to Her Grace.” Val held up the bottle. “She loves you best, you know.”
“Oh, shut up.” St. Just chuckled, the mirth making his stomach bounce under Val’s head. “You take this business of being the baby too seriously.”
“You were a pathetic little orphan,” Val went on. “Women are suckers for pathetic orphans. Trust me on this. Every time you slipped up and called her Mother or Mama, she nearly left the room in tears. But you slipped up less and less.”
“Perfect little soldier,” St. Just murmured. “This is why one needs nosy little brothers, who remark one’s maturation more carefully than one does himself.” He paused and sorted through his last profundity. “I’d forgotten about calling her Mother. I thought she left the room because she didn’t want me to be embarrassed.”
“Are you embarrassed now?” Val twisted his head to peer up at his brother’s chin. “She loved you to distraction and still does. She was the one who jumped on this earldom when Westhaven mentioned it; then he got all excited, and Anna chimed in… you were doomed.”
“It’s not so bad, being doomed. Read the one about the trip to the park again.”
Val fished through the letters, and with his brother absently petting his hair, he reread the second-to-last letter Kathleen had written. From his strategic location on St. Just’s stomach, he knew his brother was weeping again, but it was a soft, untroubled kind of weeping—just an expression of honest sadness.
“Want to hear it again?” Val asked as he passed the bottle back up, then a clean handkerchief.
