Submitted by Firestarter
My Dearest Patrick,
The crowds still illuminate the streets with displays of iridescent
flag-waving and conviviality after your recent triumph. It sends a
shimmer of pride down my weak spine as I think of what you and your
brave companions did for this country, and indeed, for the whole of
the continent. Lying in my bed has allowed my mind to wonder, and I
have oft-thought of you and your indisputably courageous deeds,
pondering what passed through your mind.
As you stood defiantly on that windswept ridge, in your dirty red
tunic and muddy blue-grey trousers, clinging onto your pistol and
sabre, holding your belgic shako lazily at your side, and gazed with
fearful eyes into the mass of blue soldiers, did you ever wonder, my
dearest, how destiny can change everything? If the Honourable Lord
Admiral Nelson hadn't dismembered the joint Franco-Spanish fleet off
Cape Trafalgar a full decade ago, would you still be speaking that
cursory dialect and grimacing in your exertions to read interminable
numbers of literature? No, my sweet, the tricolours would have glided
into London, and I'd have watched in withdrawn fury as the most
gracious King George knelt to an upstart peasant. And did you ever
wonder, as you lit more powder and emitted more smoke, why it ever had
reached this conclusion? Had those juvenile, cavorting officers
stationed on Elba not let their voluptuousness take hold, forsaking
their oath and allowing him to escape, would thousands of men have
died on that ungodly ridge?
Oh Patrick, sometimes my faith in our holy Lord lies on a thin
knife-edge, dipping regularly into chasms of incomprehension, and
wounding me terribly. Fate is all that guides me now, through the
burning headaches and the constant, incessant fevers. Sometimes I
imagine you were born in France; and you had hurtled up that ridge
into the waiting barrels and bayonets, and ended up just another lost
little boy in the feculent fields of Belgium. The tribulation is
killing me. Those people beneath my window, they don't fathom the
inclination of the world and its harebrained leaders who sit by and
send young generations to fruitless battlefields to die in a torrent
of smoke; they just drink unhindered on the strongest ale and
celebrate a phyrric victory. I do not wish to lessen your efforts, my
husband, for I know they would have been beyond the call of duty – but
even you cannot see what I see, the cracks in civilisation, the
exacerbating grasp of the devil, taking this malevolent world in his
crooked, bleeding hand and destroying it without a whim. Waterloo is
but another forgetful chapter in the build up to apocalypse.
As much as you paid them, my dear, the doctors have given me but a
week. By the time you've completed this letter, I'll be lying
quiescently in an unmarked grave. I must go, for the bugles of
omnipotent destiny are calling me.
Yours forever,
Elizabeth.
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