The Soldier's Dark Secret

She picked up a handful of the soft sand and watched as it trickled through her fingers. Guilt. An emotion with which she had become very familiar, thanks in a way to Jack himself. He had known from the beginning how inextricably mixed were suicide and guilt. His desire to save her from that guilt was, she saw now, her thoughts racing, one of the reasons he had been so eager to help her from the first. But why must Jack’s guilt be any different from hers?

And then there was the problem of Maman and the guilt which drove her to spurn her daughter’s love, and to reject her parents. Lord and Lady Wilmslow thought their daughter was dead. Who had told them this? Could it have been Maman? Ridiculous. Yet Jack had seemed certain only yesterday that Maman was hiding here in Cassis.

Questions and more questions and yet more, whirling around her head like a sandstorm. But there, at the centre, like the sun, was her love for Jack. Only an hour or so ago, she’d knelt at her mother’s grave and told her that she loved her. All those years she had been forced to suppress her feelings.

‘Not again,’ Celeste said decidedly. ‘Never again. Even if it is hopeless. Even if this terrible, dark secret of his stops him ever accepting it. I’m going to tell him before he leaves me for ever. After we come to the end of this other dark secret of Maman’s— however that might end. Then I will tell him.

‘I will tell you, Jack Trestain, that I love you, whether you want to hear it or not,’ Celeste shouted at the now cloudless sky. Throwing off her clothes, and plunging into the bay, gasping as the water stung her Parisian-pale skin, she struck out strongly into the waves.

* * *

He retched violently, spilling his guts like a raw recruit, in a nearby ditch. Spasm after spasm shook him until he had to clutch at the scorched trunk of a splintered tree to support himself. Shivering, shaking, he had no idea how long the young girl had been looming over him. She raised her hand and pointed the pistol at his head. In her other hand, clutched to her chest, was a bundle of rags. Her eyes were vacant. Jack waited, certain that this was his last moment. The girl turned the gun. So slowly, yet he did not comprehend what she was doing until he heard the sharp crack.

Jack sat up, gazing dazedly around him, the sweat cooling quickly on his naked skin. The room was freezing. The blanket in which they had slept was knotted around his legs. There was no sign of Celeste. In the scullery, he cranked the pump of the huge sink. Only then, as he ducked his head under the icy water, did he realise what he’d dreamt. The girl. The gun. Her face. His feeling of utter inertia. Just as he’d described it to Celeste, but never before had he dreamt it.

Pulling on his crumpled clothes, he checked his watch and was astonished to discover it was past ten. Outside, the sun was making an attempt to part the clouds. He lit the fire, filled the kettle with water and set it on the hook which hung from the chimney, having decided, after one look at the complicated stove, that it was beyond him. There were coffee beans in a box in the larder. They smelled dusty, but he ground them anyway. Still no sign of Celeste, but her cloak was gone from the hook at the front door. He remembered now that she had been intent on visiting her mother’s grave.

He could not decide whether it was progress or not, this extension to his dream. A direct result of his conversation with Celeste last night, that was certain.

You are so very set on sparing me the guilt that you are so very determined to keep to yourself. Are the cases really so very different? Were they?

The coffee tasted as dusty as it had smelled, but he drank two cups and ate some of last night’s stale bread. He had always assumed himself at fault. He had never once questioned that. Yet he had from the beginning seen Celeste’s case in completely the opposite way. Was he wrong?

‘Wishful thinking,’ he muttered, ‘and you know bloody well why, Trestain.’