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Tired. I am so tired. I hurt all over. Can't rest. Can't sleep. Every time I take a breath I can't stop coughing – and every time I cough I feel a stab in the side. I haven't felt this bad since the three months I spent in Hell, and all that pain was spiritual and mental only.
Fire licks around my outsides. How I wish it were due to it being a lovely hot July day in the Aquitaine, but I do not smell the grapes. Is this fever? I always took longer to recuperate from illness because of the war. Now, pain and fire surround me as if I am a heretic in a church square, unable to cry out.
"John."
The illness makes me hallucinate. Did I spend a night stuffed in a dungeon's oubliette, freezing and beaten, or was it only a nightmare?
"John."
"John."
Through the pain, two voices. One growing fainter. One growing stronger. One a woman. One a man. Both, infinitely dear to me.
"Oh my dear John."
"Oh my dear John."
Such warmth from the first and such fear in the second. Grief fills me at both voices, old grief. I lost them both. And regained one. I think. I cannot think.
The pain is less if I go nearer the woman's voice, the voice growing stronger, away from the faint voice of the man.
I smell lily of the valley.
I know who she is. I know why I am here. And I know why the faint man's voice now carries the edge of grief. I can almost see her; her voice is real, her scent is here, and peace beckons.
Tears roll down my face that I did not shed when I was beaten. I had refused to shed tears for him in Switzerland, and my eyes were burnt dry by the time she died. He returned, went with me to France, and gave them back to me, held me as I wept at last for my lost wife.
My lost wife.
Mary.
I am at the knife-edge, then. I have been here before, tossing in a Peshawar hospital while typhus tried to take what a bullet could not. I'd been younger then, stronger, and had fought to return; there'd been no one on this side of the door to call me back. I am older, weaker, ill, broken. But now another calls me back.
"Jean. Mon cher epoux."
John, my dear husband.
The pledge he'd made me in a French vineyard, the sun hot on our pagan-bare skin as we'd wed between the rows of Bordeaux grapevines, surrounded by the heavy syrupy smell. My second spouse, in all but the eyes of the law.
Sherlock.
Tears for both of them now. If I turn back she vanishes like Eurydice and I lose her a second time. And back lies pain and sleeplessness and fever gnawing at my cracked bones. I am so tired.
The redolence of lily of the valley and Bordeaux grapevines wreathe me. She loves and she waits. He loves and he pleads. I love and I am at the threshold.
But my decision is made, for it is the same decision I have made a score of times before. I feel her smile. How familiar it must be to her, for me to part ways with her and go off with him once again.
When I had lost them both I walked through the world as if in a trance, walking only to keep walking. I will not leave him to walk in that grey fog, alone – not while I can prevent it.
And again her voice, the one I had heard the day I had finally kissed him: He is waiting, darling. Go to him.
A smart man obeys his clever wife.
Sleeplessness, heat, pain – a subcontinental soldier fears none of these things.
I about-face and march into the fire.