Midnight in Your Arms Read Free Page B

passed since the war ended, yet Alaric still dreamed of the Crimea. It was his constant ghost, that distant, nebulous peninsula where so many of his friends had died, mostly of disease, more than a few of gunshot or bayonet wounds. Alaric himself had earned a lamed leg to accompany the experience, and for what profit? None that he had ever been able to discern. He had left part of himself behind on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and part of that dark and unfathomable water had come back with him, replacing some part of him that had once been essential. No one remarked much on the change, not after so many years. But they knew he was not the same man and never would be.
    Alaric sat before the fire in his bedchamber, allowing its warmth to dry his freshly bathed skin and hair as he sipped moodily at his pre-dinner aperitif. It was in moments like these, the silent torture of reflection before he took part in yet another meaningless daily ritual, that his memories of war were strongest. He remembered what it was like to eat then, the ravenous hunger that overtook him when he was a soldier and his meals were scanty. Why had they seemed like such banquets? What was it about rations shared with comrades who would not see the light of dawn that made the food taste so much like ambrosia, while the meals he shared with those nearest and dearest to him often took on the flavor of ashes? Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that none of them had ever truly been hungry. They ate for pleasure, and yet would never know the brutal sensuality of eating a meal likely to be their last.
    Alaric poured another glass. He drank whiskey greedily enough. He better endured the company of civilians when he had a few drams in him.
    They thought they understood war, his friends and relations who had stayed at home, eagerly devouring every word in the press, goggling at all of the photographs plastered across the pages of The Times . No war had ever been so accurately documented in every gruesome particular. No citizenry had ever been so close to a war while remaining comfortably at home, playing the pianoforte in their parlors, smoking and sipping brandy in their drawing rooms after partaking of plentiful dinners, and laughing raucously over billiards while Alaric and his friends were shot to pieces for no reason whatsoever. Parts of them froze and fell off into the bleakness of the Russian winter while less patriotic (and perhaps less idiotic) Englishmen nodded off during church, exasperating their wives into fresh throes of domestic despair. Alaric had never been so cold in his life as he was when he was eighteen, practically a boy soldier. He had never been fully warm since, no matter how the fires of Stonecross Hall blazed and the chandeliers glittered. They were nothing but marsh-lights toward which he wandered, without ever finding their warmth. They taunted him, and still he stumbled after them in the dark.
    His dreams were not all gruesome. Many of them were beautiful, full of a peculiar purple light: dawn breaking over the drifted snow, the sun pulling threads of light from the trees and weaving from them fairy stories. In his dreams, he walked between the snow-blanketed bodies of the dead and felt a peace he did not feel in his waking hours. When he dreamed, for one thing, he did not limp. He was as whole as he had been as a child, and just as quick. It was true that the limp was far less pronounced than it had been when he first came home, an invalid, full of fever and rage. He could even dance a quadrille now, if he so chose—but he rarely did. He had quite lost his taste for it now that he spent his life dancing around and between the outstretched arms of the dead, begging for a partner to drag them from their listlessness. He was afraid of how willing he was to oblige them.
    He knew it was past time he recovered and moved on with his life. It was more than time that he should be married, a father to the children who would inherit Stonecross