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"Lost track of time, mostly." Corporal Henry Wood shrugged, a gesture made more dramatic by his misshapen body. "But every now and then I'd find a scrap of newspaper with a date on it, and I'd judge its age and reckon when the next would fall. If I was in a devil's mood I'd sing a carol as loud as I could. Got a beating for it, but what's one more?"
The bartender of the Musket and Shot eyed us both while he waited at the spigot; but our decidedly un-jolly demeanour put him at ease, for he knew from past experience how troublesome we two were when we were cheered. The barmaid leaned on her broom rather than sweeping with it. We had the tavern to ourselves, which suited all of us just fine.
I contemplated the darkness before me before raising it for a swig. "In 1880 I spent Christmas day in my hotel room, having lost every coin I had to a glass of gin and a dice game the night before. I'd found a potato in the gutter and toasted slices of it over my candle. I was contemplating starting a new profession in Hyde Park if things didn't look up soon." I wouldn't have been the first destitute soldier to turn male prostitute upon returning home.
Wood grinned, a hideous rictus in his brown seamed face. "Yeh, we're not ones for taking the coward's way out, ever. March through it all. March. Keep marching. Do what you have to, to keep marching."
I laughed with no humour in it. That was the truth. When this year of Our Lord 1891 had begun I'd been happily married and enjoyed the friendship of the best and wisest man I'd ever known. Reichenbach in May and influenza in November had left me a solitary man. I had not been of sound mind when I fled London after Mary's funeral, but a wounded soldier had known where to go for sanctuary. I had been sharing quarters with Wood in Aldershot for over a month now, and was beginning to lift my head a little. Marching. Just marching through everything.
I was extremely grateful that Wood, after decades of captivity in a foreign land, had never regained the habit of observing Christmas. My black moods were not met with ivy green and holly red, and my grief was not countered by enjoinders to be merry and put sorrow away. The closest I'd come to acknowledging the day was to pay for all our rounds.
"All right, Captain." Wood stood and indicated the dart board. "Let's see if you're drunk enough to let me beat you. And back home after – these poor sods want us gone so they can close up and eat a goose or something. We don't have gutter potatoes tonight. It'll have to be curry and rice."
I rose. Something inside me was a little less heavy and bleak. "I'm never too drunk not to beat you, Corporal."