The Soldier's Dark Secret

He looked quite taken aback. ‘Irrespective of the veracity of that statement, you would admit it is a philosophy which makes finding your missing person or whatever the hell it is rather problematic.’

‘I told you, I was merely speculating.’

‘And I told you, I don’t believe you,’ Jack said, his tone conciliatory. ‘Look, it’s obviously important to you, whatever it is. It’s clear you need help, and I assure you, you can rely on my discretion.’

All of which was most likely true, but it was such a big step to take. Celeste wrapped her arms around herself. What should she do?

‘If it’s difficult for you to tell me, imagine yourself faced with a complete stranger.’

‘Why are you so keen to— Of what possible interest is it to you?’ Celeste cursed under her breath and jumped to her feet. ‘You wish to know? Vraiment? Very well then, I will tell the truth and shame the devil. I have come to England to find out why my mother killed herself! Are you happy now?’

Jack’s face was a picture of shock. Celeste, even more shocked than he at her impulsive admission, sucked in great breaths of air.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said after a brief silence. ‘Celeste, I’m so very sorry.’

He reached out, as if he would put his arms around her. For a brief moment, she was tempted to accept the comfort of his embrace, and that shocked her almost as much as her blurting out the shameful truth to a man she barely knew. She pushed him away, rather too roughly, though she was beyond caring about that. Then suddenly quite drained, she sank on to the bench beside him.

* * *

Suicide. Jack could think of no subject more guaranteed to engage his attention and his sympathy. He clenched his fists. He would try his damnedest to help this woman. That would, at least, be something.

Beside him Celeste was pale, angry and on the verge of tears, though she seemed absolutely determined not to cry. She was looking at him very warily too, most likely already resenting him for forcing her to blurt out something so private and shocking.

‘You can trust me,’ Jack said once more. ‘If I am able to help you, I will.’

‘Why would you?’ she demanded baldly. ‘You’re virtually a stranger.’

He pondered how to answer this without arousing her suspicions. It had cost her a good deal to ask for help, which made him wonder that someone so beautiful and so attractive and so talented should be so bereft of confidantes. ‘A stranger with too much time on his hands, and not enough to occupy his mind,’ he said, which had the benefit of being true. ‘A stranger who has had some experience in such matters,’ he added, which was, tragically, also true.

‘What experience? Jack? I said what experience?’

He realised some time had elapsed since Celeste had posed the question. He dragged his mind back, with some relief, to the present and managed a dismissive shrug, as if he had been merely assembling his thoughts. ‘When a man is battle-weary, an extreme melancholy can make him think death offers the only release. No one can persuade him that the melancholy will eventually pass. In extreme cases, the man becomes so desperate as to take matters into his own hands as your mother did. Soldiers are trained not to show their feelings, and very often in such cases, the outcome is totally unexpected and, to those left behind, wholly inexplicable. Like you, they are left with unanswered questions.’

‘And how do these bereaved families set about gaining answers?’

They didn’t, was the honest answer, in most cases. Jack could no more explain it than the poor unfortunates who took their own lives could. All he could offer was platitudes. He looked at Celeste, no longer distrustful but hanging on his words, the faintest trace of hope flickering in her eyes. He could not bear to douse it with a cold bucket of truth. If he could somehow help her, if he could find the answers for her that he had been unable to provide for others, then perhaps it would help atone. A little. Even a little atonement was better than none. ‘Perhaps it would help,’ he prevaricated, ‘if you could tell me the circumstances of your mother’s death first. It must have come as a terrible shock.’

‘We were not close.’ Perhaps recognising the defensive note in her voice, Celeste made a helpless gesture. ‘I live in Paris. My mother lived in Cassis, in the south. I received her letter in January this year. She was already— It was already— I—my mother was already dead. Drowned. She drowned herself.’

Celeste blinked rapidly. Though he could not see, for they were obscured by her smock, Jack was willing to bet that her hands were painfully clasped. Yet there was a defiant tilt to her head, as if she was daring herself to submit to whatever emotions ensnared her in their grasp.

As a soldier, he was well versed in the art of managing grief. An iron will and rigid self-control had vital roles to play in combat. In battle, you put the living before the dead. It was why other soldiers got so uproariously drunk afterwards. It was why they sought out brothels and taverns, to laugh and to lose themselves, because they could not cry, but they could counter death with a lust for life, and they could later blame their tears on an excess of gin.

But Celeste was not a soldier, and the dead woman was her mother, not a comrade. Though like a soldier, she seemed determined not to crack under the strain. Instinctively, he knew any attempt to comfort her would not be welcome. Jack sat up, putting a little distance between them. ‘This letter— You said her letter? Do you mean...?’

‘Yes, my mother wrote to me to inform me she was about to commit suicide. It was, in essence, a letter from beyond the grave.’

Unable to stop himself, Jack reached for her hands. As he had suspected, they were tightly clasped. He covered them with his own. She stiffened, but made no attempt to repel him. He felt a sharp pang of sympathy. It was not just grief she was holding on so tightly to, but a hefty dose of guilt. Anger at her mother’s act shook him. He bit back the words of blame, knowing full well they were irrational and undeserved, and unlikely to cause Celeste anything but pain. ‘Dear God. I am so sorry.’

‘There is no need. It was a shock. I admit it was a shock, but once I had recovered from that, I read the letter in the hope that it would at least provide some sort of explanation for what, to me, was an incomprehensible act.’ Now she did pull her hands free. ‘Mais non,nothing so straightforward from my mother. I should have known better than to have expected her to change the habits of a lifetime. It was more of a riddle than an explanation, sent in the full knowledge that by the time I received it, she would not be available to help solve it.’

Her anger simmered, the heat of it palpable. ‘Celeste, she would not have been thinking rationally. To take such drastic action, she must have been very desperate,’ Jack said, knowing the words were utterly inadequate, though none the less true.

‘I don’t doubt that. Though not desperate enough to ask for my help.’ Her lip quivered. The tension in her shoulders, the gaze fixed on her lap, made it clear that sympathy was the last thing she desired, but the raw pain was there, hidden under a mask of bitterness and anger. ‘That letter...’ She stopped to take a calming breath. ‘It is not only that there is no explanation. That letter raises a list of questions I wouldn’t even have known to ask.’

Questions. Such cases always raised more questions than answers. Answers which were so rarely found and which allowed guilt to flourish amid the uncertainty. Jack had written countless letters to the loved ones of his men who died in battle, emphasising the glory, and the valour and painlessness of death. Lies, all lies, but beneath the glossing over of reality lay one inalienable truth. They had died doing their duty for their country. Their death had a purpose.

The others, though, the families of those thankfully rare cases where death had been self-inflicted, they had no such truths to console them for what he had once, God forgive him, thought the most heinous of crimes. He searched for Celeste’s hands once more, gripping them tightly. ‘This letter, it’s a great deal more than most have in such circumstances. Will you tell me what she said, and then I will be able to see how I might be able to help you?’

She considered it, looking at him earnestly, but eventually shook her head. ‘Not yet. I can’t.’ She slipped from his grasp, getting to her feet with an apologetic look. ‘I appreciate you sharing your experience of what is a painful and delicate subject. And for being so careful of my feelings. I do not discount your offer to help—it is most generous, but I must consider it carefully. The emotions involved are intensely private. Do you understand?’

Much as he wished to, he resisted the temptation to press her, because he did understand that, only too well. Jack got wearily to his feet. ‘I have no other demands on my time or my services, so please take as much time as you need.’

* * *

Following a sleepless night, Celeste felt wrung out like one of her painting rags after washing. In the end, she had decided to trust Jack. She could not imagine having the conversation they’d had yesterday with a complete stranger, and she could not expect that a complete stranger would have demonstrated the tact or level of understanding Jack had of such matters.

It was not really such a leap of faith when she laid it out logically like that, to trust him. But it was not logic which ultimately convinced her. It was only after he had left her, when she had recovered from the dull ache precipitated by speaking of her mother’s death, that she realised how difficult it must have been for him to talk so sensitively on such a delicate matter. Soldiers were men of war. Soldiers were tough, and brave and bold. English soldiers were famous for their courage and their staunchness in the face of adversity. They did not cry. They did not fear. They most certainly did not have a conscience. Or so she’d thought. Assumed, she corrected herself, because until she met Jack, Celeste thought shamefully, she hadn’t actually thought about it much at all.

She remembered the reports in the newspapers after Waterloo. Death on the battlefield was neither clean nor quick. It was no wonder that the men who fought suffered from—what was it Jack had called it?—an extreme melancholy after witnessing all that horror and suffering. Was Jack suffering from that too? There had been moments yesterday when she thought he spoke from personal experience. But then he did, she reminded herself, thinking of the letters he’d mentioned having to write. The point was he understood and that was why she could trust him.

‘May I come in?’

As if she had summoned him, the man himself stood in the doorway of Celeste’s temporary studio. Dressed in a pair of tight-fitting pantaloons which showed off his long legs to good effect, and a coat which enhanced his broad shoulders, his cravat was neatly tied, and his jaw freshly shaved.

‘You look very—handsomely dressed,’ Celeste said, taken by surprise once more by the force of the attraction she felt for him. The clothes of an English gentleman not only accentuated his muscular physique, but they also, somehow, accentuated the fact that the man wearing them was not always a gentleman. In fact he was just a little bit dangerous. And, yes, a trifle intimidating too.

‘Which is a polite way of saying I look a lot less shoddy than normal,’ Jack said, closing the door behind him. ‘You, if I may say so, look as ravishing as usual. And believe me, I have seen my fair share of beauties. A perk of the job, working on Wellington’s staff.’

‘So his reputation, the French press did not exaggerate it?’

‘I doubt it possible.’

Celeste smiled, but the sight of the letter sitting where she had lain it in preparation made it a forced affair. She picked it up, but despite her resolve, found herself surprisingly reluctant to hand it over. ‘Are you still— Your offer to help, is it still open?’

‘Of course. I want very much to—’

‘Only I would not wish to presume,’ Celeste interrupted, ‘and it occurred to me that perhaps you offered only because you felt a little sorry for me.’

‘No. I understand what you are experiencing, that is all, and I wish to prevent you from— Is that the letter?’ Jack said, holding out his hand.

‘Yes.’ Celeste still kept a firm grip on it. ‘I don’t know what people commonly write in such missives...’

‘Most do not write anything,’ Jack said, ‘as far as I am aware. Or they merely reassure their families that they love them.’

‘Well, in that one regard my mother has followed the custom,’ Celeste said acerbically, ‘though it is the one thing I know for certain to be a lie.’ A brief silence met this remark. She flushed, annoyed at having betrayed herself. ‘It is more of a puzzle than it is a confession,’ she said, gazing down at the letter again. ‘I admit it has me baffled. What we need is someone to make sense of it—what on earth have I said to amuse you?’

‘Not amused, so much as taken aback, I am sorry,’ Jack said, his expression once more serious. ‘It’s just that solving puzzles is—was—my stock in trade. I have a certain reputation as an expert in acrostics. My brother would be shocked at your ignorance, for he mistakenly delights in my minor fame.’ He took her hand. ‘Celeste, I was Wellington’s code-breaker.’