Saving Her Mysterious Soldier
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Bronwyn Scott
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HarlequinPrologue
We’re going home. The words drew Edward to the surface of his fever dreams, towards the pain that awaited him upon waking. It was not a journey he cared to make often but he did it to hear the mellifluous alto tones that heralded the return of his angel. He would be hard-pressed to classify her as an angel of mercy. Not when she scolded him when he resisted his medicine and crossly cajoled him into eating his food when he’d prefer to starve himself into oblivion or badgered him into living when he’d prefer to do otherwise. But she was an angel, nonetheless. His angel.
He’d come to depend on the touch of her cool hand on his brow, the competent fingers that soothed the burns on his chest with aloe and kneaded the wrecked muscle of his thigh where the Minie ball had pierced it. Those hands, that voice, were the sum of his world. That and the pain. Those had become his constants the moment the Minie ball had hit him, shattering his leg, shattering his memories.
If there’d been life before that moment, he didn’t know what it was or who he’d been in it. He only knew who he was now: Edward, she called him, and he was to call her Thea. His angel. Edward and Thea, the only two people in his little world of hands and voices.
‘Major Lithgow is arranging everything. We leave tomorrow,’ his angel explained as she massaged his ruined leg, strong fingers digging into the tissue. ‘We’ll take a ship to Marseilles, then go overland to Boulogne and sail to England from there. It’s the route I took upon arrival here in the autumn. We will take it slowly, you needn’t worry. The nursing corps did the journey in two weeks coming out, but I think Major Lithgow has arranged for us to do it in three. There will be a chance for you to rest between stages.’
She was giving him plans and details, rebuilding his world by offering him things to remember in that no-nonsense tone of hers that dared him to summon his own seldom used voice to disagree with her. It made him feel less alone and more connected; it made dying harder. His angel was counting on him, fighting for him whether he wanted her to or not. ‘I will be with you every step of the journey,’ she assured him.
He found his voice, raspy and unused; so little these days was worth the effort it took to speak, but she was. He would find his voice for her. ‘They can spare you?’ He knew they couldn’t, not for the effort of sending one man home. His angel ran this ward. She was everywhere. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open to watch her, his ears strained for the sound of her stride, fast and staccato, to hear her voice as she gave orders.
‘Florence needs me in England. She absolutely insists that I am more valuable to her there than I am here.’ Her reply was brisk, almost as if she were trying to convince herself it was true. She moved around the bed to his other leg, massaging it even though it had not been wounded. Massaging kept his muscle healthy, she’d told him. He didn’t care what the reason was. He liked her touch. It made her the tiniest bit more human, not a dream that would disappear. ‘The Sanitary Movement needs me to make the case in England now that the war’s mismanagement has made the Movement’s platform about health and hygiene of paramount importance. I am to share first-hand, through letter writing and lobbying the papers, the experience we’re having here with those in London who have influence, although I dare say I can write letters from here. Florence insists it’s not the same as being in England, where I might be available to give talks if needed.’
He heard the reluctance in her voice. She didn’t want to leave, although it was beyond him why anyone would choose to stay here. This was a place where men came to die, which made it all the more fantastical that he was being allowed to leave. People had been expecting him to die for months now, all except his angel.
‘Why am I coming?’
‘Because England will do you good.’ She gave him a smile, still trying to reassure them both the return home was for the best.
Because if he stayed here without her, he would die.
His angel understood it was the force of her will that had kept him here this long. She let another smile gloss over that fact. ‘When we get home, you’ll get well; we’ll make your leg strong again. When it is, we’ll walk in summer meadows beneath blue skies, we’ll pick strawberries from the fields and feast on their sweetness until our hands are sticky from their juice.’
She was a poet with her words and the picture she painted of strawberry meadows and blue skies sounded like heaven, smelled like it too, a place so far removed from the stinking hell of pain and fever he currently lived in. He managed a grunt. She was teasing him, of course, dangling a carrot in front of him so that he didn’t decide to die tonight. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to die. What man did? It was just that he wasn’t sure he wanted to live. What was there to look forward to in this misery where he found himself? A man whose world was defined by his pain. A man who had no notion of who he was or where he was from, only what his angel told him.
She pressed a cool kiss to his brow. ‘Sleep well, Edward. I’ll see you in the morning.’
He managed the same one word reply he gave her each night. ‘Maybe.’ He breathed her in, all clean herbs and lavender, a moment of escape from the foul smells of the hospital. In that brief space, he was sure he felt her smile against his brow. One more day, he thought as he sank back into the fever and the nightmares that waited, his strength spent. For that smile he’d give her one more day.
