The Promise of Steel

by Lilith Duvalier

  Evernight Publishing

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2013 Lilith Duvalier

  ISBN: 978-1-77130-444-3

  Cover Artist: Sour Cherry Designs

  Editor: JS Cook

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  Firstly, I would like to thank Gertrude Littlefinger for helping me get the you-know-what out of the you-know-where before you-know-who gained power. The world would be a scarier place without you. And Coco Versailles—your hat at the suffragette march was a humdinger! What you accomplish with ribbons down your back inspires us all. Effie Metcalf-for all the sticky jams you’ve helped me out of. And of course-Mildred “Two-Bits” Mercant for running the short grift and always avoiding the hoosegow.

  THE PROMISE OF STEEL

  The Promise Series

  Lilith Duvalier

  Copyright © 2013

  Harriet knew that she was lucky.

  She had seen the stone-faced men in their olive green uniforms come to her neighbor’s front doors. She had seen the women left sobbing in their wakes.

  Her dear friend Winnie had received news of her husband’s death early in the war. He’d been killed years ago. Back when people had thought their brave lads would all be home in time for Christmas.

  It had seemed impossible at the time, unfair even. Not even a body to bury. Winnie looking so young in her black dress.

  But more awful news had come home from the front. More tears had been shed over empty graves.

  Winnie had become a nurse and now she told terribly resigned stories about the men under her care. Men whose wives had left them behind. Men so wrapped up in the nightmares that plagued them they didn’t notice the people around them. Men with holes in their faces.Men with holes in their minds.

  But her Joshua had come home to her.

  He had only lost his right leg.

  He had only lost his smile.

  Harriet was lucky.

  ****

  Joshua sat on the porch of Harriet’s sister’s oceanside cottage, squinting into the sunlight. Hewas enjoying the sunshine and the quiet, but felt like his happiness just wasn’t evident enough. He knew he had lost the innocent, easy joy he used to have, and he wanted so badly to be able to show Harriet that part of himself again. To make her feel like she was healing him. He wanted to make her happy again. She had worked very hard to plan for this holiday, because she thought that it would help him.

  Ever since he had come home from the hospital, he’dfelt as though all of Harriet’s smiles had been strained. Her laughter had all been hushed. Neither was insincere, but both were forced. It saddened him.

  Before he had left for The Great War, the two of them had been deliriously happy together. Storybook happy. A few times, before they had been married, even scandalously happy. Harriet, with her peach pink cheeks and her copper hair, had been a passionate, fiery beauty with less than proper concern for her virtue and with absolute faith that he wouldn’t “ruin” her and then leave her.

  Because her parents were trusting people who had been out quite often of an evening, Joshua had enjoyed ample opportunity to prove his devotion to her before rings were ever exchanged. Never in her bedroom, because of the family’s servants, but twice in the carriage house, and on one memorable occasion, in a rather thick cluster of bushes in the park.

  The memory of those times together had been a balm forhis soul while he had been away at war. Harriet’s smile. Her laugh. The way she pursed her lips so tight they turned white when she was annoyed with him. The smell of her hair, of her skin, especially after they had been… exerting themselves, when she had a thin patina of sweat over her, and the smell of her perfume had turned thick and warm. The weight of her in his arms.The sound of her panting in his ear. They hadn’t been together like that in so long. She would kiss him and he just… couldn’t. Couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t let himself be undressed and expose his injury. Couldn’t face the fact that didn’t feel like that man she had fallen in love with.

  Just couldn’t.

  He watched a few seagulls cavorting in the sky and tried to ignore the fact that his foot itched. It was more or less a constant annoyance, particularly as it was impossible to scratch. The foot had rotted away in a trench in France. The hospital had disposed of the leg. Sometimes he imagined those two pieces of himself trying to find each other. Scouring the barren, Gatling gun-riddled earth in search of each other.

  The Epic Love Story of Leg and Foot.

  He didn’t tell Harriet about that.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it? The birdsong?” Harriet’s voice, as soft as it was, startled him out of his thoughts. She was standing in the doorway to the cottage, wearing a light peach dress that made her hair redder and her eyes bluer.

  “Yes,” he replied. He gave her a brittle smile. “I’m glad to be away from the city for a while. I’m finding the country air very wholesome.”

  Harriet’s smile grew stronger. The sun caught in her hair as she stepped out of the cottage and walked toward him. The elaborate set of her hairstyle made it look almost like a halo around her head.

  “I am so glad to hear you say that, Joshua.” She settled down on the wicker bench next to him. “I was hoping that the two of us and John and Agnes could venture down to the beach today. Take a picnic and maybe pick up a few sea shells for the mantle back at home?”

  Joshua gulped and shifted what was left of his leg. It had healed, finally. The stump. He had been fitted for a tin replacement that strapped around his hip. It was shaped just like his old leg. There was even a little joint, much like a door hinge, which made it swing where the knee would have been. He was getting better on it. He did still hobble, but he could move around the house without his crutches. It squeaked in the damp, which he found irritating most of the time, but amusing on his better days.

  “That sounds lovely, dear.”

  Harriet beamed and kissed his cheek.

  He was getting better.

  *****

  The sound of the waves gently lapping the shore was soothing and the air was fresh. Harriet had not been able to persuade him to put on the bathing costume that she had brought for him. He could not stomach the thought of his partial leg on display in that manner. Harriet, her sister, and her brother-in-law had all changed at the cottage.

  The walk down to the ocean was taxing, but not exhausting. When the others hung around him as though he needed to be supervised Joshua shooed them all off into the water and watched them splash and play. Harriet’s laugh was loud and her bathing costume, a revealing, but hardly enticing garment, hung loosely around her, so unlike her restrictive dresses which had taken a turn toward the matronly in the last few months.

  She looked happy and free spirited. Joshua wished that he could be those things for her again, but right now, it was so hard to concentrate on the present. So hard to remember where he was and who he was with. He felt like he was constantly struggling just to be normal, it was toomuch to ask for him to be carefree as well.

  The others played in the water. He watched. Enjoyed the feeling of the sun on his skin and the smell of the salty air. Harriet dried off and the two of them walked up and down the beach together for a while collecting shells. Joshua particularly tried to find ones with hues of pink, her
favorite color. After an hour or so of giddy laughter and splashing water, the ladies wanted to be out of the sun. They stuck umbrellas into the sand and rolled out a blanket. They had brought along a picnic, consisting of simple sandwiches. For desert there werestrawberries, which Agnes and Harriet had picked from the patch behind the cottage, with fresh cream that had been kept on ice.

  Agnes told jokes and Joshua laughed along. He let Harriet feed him a couple of strawberries. As it turned out, John had some rather excellent American pipe tobacco. The two of them went down along the beach to enjoy it, so as not to disturb their wives with the smoke.

  Joshua was feeling almost normal, despite the fact that the sand made it difficult for him to walk and hewas relying very heavily on his crutch, which made every step a reminder that he was somewhat less than whole.

  “So good to have you and Harriet out to visit,” John said, holding the delicious smoke over his tongue before huffing it out. It made it look a bit like his overlarge mustache was on fire. Joshua might have been persuaded to laugh at him, but that’s when he heard the screaming.

  Heart going from complacent to pounding in a span of seconds, he jumped, spun, saw the source.

  It was only a couple of children. The older had pushed down the younger. The younger, wailing, had knocked down the older from his prone position and now they were both sitting in the sand, screaming for their mother.

  “Yes, yes. It’s wonderful to be out of the grime of London for a little while,” Joshua sighed. He pulled his jacket more tightly around himself, despite the warmth of the sun. The fabric pulling around him made him feel safer. More held together. Usually it helped him fight off the images that haunted him in his sleep. His compatriots split opened by shells and shrapnel. Intestines falling out of their middles like snakes. Stomachs burst open like rotten fruit. Their hearts, still beating, spilled out into the dirt like an overturned tin of tomatoes. The pain, shooting up his own middle as ifhe had been struck by lightning and was splitting like a bratwurst cracking in the heat of a fire.His friend Olson trying to push his ripped body back together for a hysterical moment before the light had faded from his eyes.

  With the children still screaming it was difficult to make the memories in his head stop, no matter how tightly he pulled his jacket.

  “Cold, Joshua?” John asked. His face looked the same way that Harriet’s did sometimes,concern bubbling underneath his carefully blank, helpful expression.

  Joshua cleared his throat. “Just a tad,” he said. He wasn’t. The air was warm, the sun was warmer, but there was no other explanation he could offer. He could hardly explain that children’s play made him think about his guts spilling out into the sand.

  “Shall we head back?”

  Joshua nodded, resisting the urge to place his hands over his ears to block out the sound of the children still screaming.

  He didn’t feel better as the sound fell away. The feeling he had been getting from a pleasant day out with his family, like he had climbed out of a hole, was suddenly gone. Now he felt as though he had crested the lip of that hole only to be pushed right back down to the bottom. It was a feeling he found much too commonplace these days.

  Harriet and Agnes packed up the picnic quickly, not saying a word about the suddenness with which everyone suddenly seemed to want to leave. Harriet tucked her hand into his as they walked back to the cottage, and everyone kept their pace deliberately slow so as not to leave him working too hard to keep up. He didn’t point it out, he just marched beside his wife. Very suddenly, he needed to rest.

  ****

  The cottage wasn’t large. Certainly not in comparison to their home in the city, and particularly not when they were sharing it with another couple. But it had a warmth and a coziness that had been lacking from their home in the city ever since it had become the site of Joshua’s convalescence.

  He was sleeping now. Something on the beach had upset him. He slept when something upset him.

  “Shall I go check on him?” Agnes asked Harriet quietly as the two of them finished washing up the picnic things. “You look tired as well. You are more than welcome to rest upstairs. John will be out on the porch with his book after the day on the beach.”

  Harriet shook her head and set her hand over her sister’s. “I’m alright. I’ll just pop in to see if he’s sleeping well.”

  Agnes opened her mouth to speak, but closed it. Harriet chose not to ask her what she was about to say. Just as people were very diffident around Joshua, so they were around her, as though they were afraid of reminding her that her husband was still recovering. He was a strong man. He had been injured. He had been damaged, but she had total confidence that he would be well again. She knew that not everyone around her was quite as confident.

  Harriet went to the small bedroom she and Joshua were sharing. It had a view of the sea. Salt-flavored air came in through the window. The walls were a light cream color. The only furniture was a large feather bed with a pretty beech headboard, and a small night table made of the same white wood. It was simple and clean.

  Joshua’s tin leg was tucked underneath the bedframe. He hated to lie down with it on. He complained about the straps and how it felt so alien as it rested against his real leg. She knew the fit was imperfect, it could leave bruises sometimes. When he did take it off he was always hiding it away somewhere, as though if no one ever saw it they would forget all about it.

  Her husband was breathing softly, peacefully, lying on his side with one arm tucked under his head. His other hand gripped the pillow loosely, as though he had been in the process of adjusting it, but had simply drifted off to sleep.

  Harriet settled herself on the bed next to him. He looked much more like himself like this. The soft curl of his chestnut hair looked much like it always had. The slight ruddiness to his cheeks made him look like a schoolboy, though he was nearly twenty-five now. Harriet ran her fingertips gently over his sleeping face. He smiled in his sleep and she echoed it, hoping he was having pleasant dreams.

  It was strange, but this moment reminded her just how much she still missed him. She had been nursing him, talking with him, playing cards with him for months. There had been times when, of necessity, they had been practically joined at the hip, like Siamese twins in some circus, but she still missed him.

  She brushed his hair from his face. He sighed and she felt her throat tighten. She glanced at the closed door. She was being silly, now. She was a married woman. She could be with her husband behind closed doors. The Lord knew she had been much less married that time in her father’s carriage house.

  It was so hard to miss a man that you saw everyday.

  Harriet cast another glance at the door, andlay down next to Joshua, carefully lining her body up to his so that she was looking into his sleeping face. She laid her hand over his waist. He felt warm, but thin, the jut of his hipboneevident through his trousers. His breathing was steady. She moved her hand up tohis shoulder, smoothing her palm over his arm. He was so closed off these days. And worse, he seemed to recognize it, try to fight it off and then chastise himself when he couldn’t. But you weren’t supposed to talk about it. They were all supposed to come home, hang up their uniforms neatly and go about their normal lives with horrors in their heads.

  She wished Joshua would talk to her.

  She reached for his hand, where it lay against his stomach and lifted it carefully. He stirred a little as she moved his sleep-limp arm toward herself, butcalmed as she laid his hand to her own waist.

  They hadn’t even lain together like this in so long. Not since the first weeks of his return where she had stayed so close to him in bed to assure herself that he truly was returned to her.

  She could feel the weight of his hand through her corset and her light summer dress, but not his warmth. Harriet had hoped that this small, stolen intimacy would slake her desire to be him like they used to be, but the half touch, the expression on his face, relaxed and happy because of a dream and nothing more, was only se
rving to exacerbate her want.

  She moved closer to him, wishing that they could be as naked and happy as Adam and Eve in the garden before the storm had come.

  She lifted her face, watching Joshua for a moment. Clean shaven and asleep he looked like the boy she had always loved. His peace touched her, and before she could stop herself, she pressed a kiss to his lightly parted lips.

  They were soft and warm and familiar. When she kissed him again, his eyes opened. Harriet pulled back in alarm, only a few millimeters. She said nothing, just watched his pupils widen and narrow slightly in the fields of green that surrounded them. The skin around his eyes wrinkled and Harriet felt his lips curve against hers.

  “This is my very favorite dream,” he said quietly. A pang shot through her heart at his words, but caused by joy or pain, she couldn’t tell. She kissed him again and he returned it now, sloppy and open and clearly still mostly asleep.

  He dreamed of her, but did not touch her? How was she supposed to feel about that? She fell into the kiss now like a woman walking into the desert may fall into an oasis, or simply a mirage of one.

  She shivered as Joshua’s fingers speared into her hair. His arms tightened around her, one quick squeeze before he stilled and pulled back from the kiss.

  “You’re softer, usually,” he said groggily. He shook his head.

  “I’m in my corset,” she whispered.

  Joshua’s body went rigid besideher and she realized, belatedly, that he had only just now fully awakened.

  “Oh,” he cleared his throat again, his formerly pliant body tight and uncomfortable. “Umm… Harriet, I—”

  She placed her hand on his cheek and shushed him. “Joshua,” she said quietly. “Please?”

  He gulped, but nodded. She brought her lips to his again, kissing him slowly and carefully, but invitingly.

  It had been so long. They had not been together as man and wife since before he left for the army. Her heart was racing with her desire for him, hands shaking, body trembling as she tried to hold herself back from enveloping him with her passion because he was still recuperating. He was still careful. Skittish.