Sarah only nodded.
I'll do it because I have to. There's no going back now.
26
August 7,1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire
ON JULY THE 30TH, THE British had begun a major offensive at Ypres; like most of Britain, Reggie only got wind that something was afoot when the "regrets" began to come in. And he hadn't thought much of it at first, until today.
Today the post was full of them.
One or two officers canceling would have been a fluke—all of them at once meant a big push. When even the band canceled by the morning post (momentarily throwing his mother into a state of despair until Lady Virginia came to the rescue, promising a small orchestra made up entirely of women), he had known that there was something truly major going on.
He and his old college chums Steve and Geoff had a sort of unwritten code; by the afternoon post, when both of them sent brief notes referring to Caesar's campaigns in Gaul along with their apologies, he had all the information he needed. And far more than he wanted.
The Brigadier and his mother had tried to keep it from him, of course, but by late afternoon it had been in all the papers. He'd managed to keep himself together long enough to send a hasty telegram to Michael Dolbeare to recruit more RFC cadets to make up the difference, pledging to cover their train fare if need be, which considerably calmed his mother down about the holes in her guest list. That had been going through the motions, actually, because if he had thought about it, he might have lost his temper with her. How could she be in such a state over a mere absence of male guests, when across the Channel all hell was breaking loose? Bad enough that other people were being so callous, but this was his own mother.
And he'd been all right until just before dinner, until it hit him, until it really sank in. Then the shakes had started.
He kept himself together until he managed to reach the safe haven of his rooms. He even managed to pull his own curtains closed, and shut and lock the door. Then the fear got hold of him by the throat and shook him like a dog, sending him to his knees, making him crawl into the darkest corner of the room, where he shivered and wept and choked back moans of terror. He couldn't even put two ideas together into a whole; he didn't even know what he was afraid of. He only knew that this vast, insensate, and ravenous beast that was the war was loose, and it was going to devour the entire world and there was nothing he could do to stop it. ...
He had vaguely heard someone pacing outside his rooms, rattling the knob once or twice, but they left him alone, for which he was both grateful and felt betrayed at the same time. Grateful, because he could not bear anyone seeing him like this. Betrayed, because they were leaving him alone with this fear, this mind-killing, soul-shriveling fear—
And all he could do was huddle, and shake, as wave after wave of the terror engulfed him, then ebbed, only to return.
How long he was in there, he couldn't have told; only that some time after darkness fell, there was the sound of a key in the lock, and the unmistakable presence in the room of Lady Virginia.
She closed the door behind her; he heard the scratch of a match, and smelled the sharp sulfur as she lit candles.
"Reggie," she said, quite as calmly as if he was not huddled in a ball in the corner. "I am not Doctor Maya, but I am very old, and I have seen a very great deal in my time. And if you can manage to bring yourself here, I may be able to offer you some little comfort. I should come down there on the floor next to you, but my bones are not so young that they permit any such thing anymore."
Somehow, he managed to crawl out of that corner. Somehow he managed to get to her, and put his head on her knee like a spaniel, and croak out a few words. He wasn't even sure what he was saying, only that he was giving some shape to the fear that was devouring him alive.
"I cannot tell you that it will be all right, Reggie," she said gravely. "Because we both know that it will not. But if the Brigadier is correct, and I believe he is, then the enemy is as battle-weary and worn as we, and he has no flood of energetic Americans coming at last to help. It will not end soon—but it will end."
And she offered silence at the right moment, and a few more words of her own at the right moment, and slowly, he stopped shaking, the fear lost its grip on him, and the fog lifted from his mind until he could think again.
Only then did she call his man in, and he took his drugs and went into a mercifully dreamless sleep.
And they did not come for him in the night; he sensed no malign presence on the other side of his barrier of slumber, nor did he hear evil mutterings nor feel the suffocating weight on him of the darker creatures of Earth, trying to smother him in his sleep. It might have been the drugs, it might have been his new defenses, it might all have been due to Lady Virginia.
When he struggled up out of sleep late the next morning, it was with no sense of victory, though, and not even anything he could call hope. It was, if anything, a feeling that he might actually live through the despair. He still wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, but he felt as if he would, regardless of his current preferences.
It was the Brigadier who was with him the next time the fit took him, later that afternoon. They were outside, on the terrace, and his knees just gave out. The Brigadier got him to a seat, saying nothing, although he could not have missed how hard Reggie was shaking, nor the blank, dry-mouthed stare Reggie knew he must have. And the good old man stayed with him as he closed his eyes and fought the fear as best he could—which was about as effective as trying to fight the sea.
After the first wave ebbed a little, the Brigadier cleared his throat apologetically, and began talking, sounding a bit self-conscious, but determined, nevertheless.
He didn't actually talk to Reggie. Instead, he rambled on about commonplace things. He'd been down to Broom and met some of "the lads" at the Broom pub, and they were good fellows, to be sure. He thought there might be something in the manner of work he could put in the way of one or two of them that were at loose ends. It was a fine little village, and he'd also been to the estate village of Arrow, which was a credit to him and his mother. The estate manager wanted him to know that the crops were looking very good this year, and that someone wanted to bring in another gasworks, like the one that supplied Longacre and Broom, but this time on manor property. Filthy things, gasworks, but there was plenty of coal near here and that would mean there could be gas piped in to the village of Arrow as well, which might be worth the mess. Perhaps one of the clever RFC fellows could find a way to make a gasworks less filthy. "We have gas laid on," the Brigadier rumbled, "At my bungalow. Deuced convenient for cook. Thinking about electricity; they electrified my club in London last year, and it's better than gas. You ought to consider having the telephone brought up here, Reggie. Good for your mother; keep her connected to the rest of us. Have to go forward, my boy, can't live in the past, and if you try and stick in one spot the future will run over the top of you."
Not a word about the war, not a word about how he looked, and under the paralysis of fear that made his guts go to water, he knew he must look hellish. Not one word of reproach, though the poor old man must surely wonder—