Читать книгу The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night - Brendan Graham - Страница 20

Jared Prudhomme raised his hand to the winged headdress which Louisa wore.

‘I am afraid to remove it.’

‘As am I,’ she said simply.

Reverentially, the boy raised the starched white edifice above Louisa’s forehead. If he had been expecting her hair to fall, covering her face – it did not. She was cropped more closely than a boy. He touched her cheek. Her eyes never left his for a moment, as if nothing had been revealed. In the far distance, the odd shot loosed by an edgy picket punctured the night. In the near distance she heard a horse.

Tomorrow, she knew, he would return to it. Be out there in some bare, unsheltering plain, or in some fiery copse. Or moving through some ripening wheat field, his golden head … She shivered at the thought. Already he had some fixed premonition regarding tomorrow. She had seen it before in men. Invariably they were right, the death prophecy fulfilling itself. But its foretelling allowed them to prepare. Write the last letter; leave some memento; make final amends with their Maker. The grizzled older campaigners took it all in their stride. They had all ‘seen the elephant’ before. Death, to them was as inevitable as the sun rising. But he was just a boy – a golden boy – and a boy in love.

‘You are more beautiful …’ he began.

‘Sshh!’ she said. ‘Nothing is required.’

When she left him, returned past the silent, growing mounds of limbs, she crossed herself for the limbless and un-whole who, inside the rickety hospital, awaited her.

She considered her solemn vow of chastity not to have been broken.