Bridge of ash, p.1
Bridge of Ash, page 1
part #4 of The Charismatics Series
Bridge of Ash
THE LONDON CHARISMATICS
BOOK THREE
Jacquelyn Benson
VAUGHAN WOODS PUBLISHING
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents described here are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons—living or dead—is coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Jacquelyn Benson
Cover design by Sara Argue of Sara Argue Design
Cover copyright © 2021 by Vaughan Woods Publishing
Typeset in Minion Pro, ALS Script, and Tensentype JiaLi ShuSong GB18030 by Cathie Plante
All rights reserved. The scanning, uploading, photocopying and distribution of this book without permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from this book for purposes other than reviews, please fill out the contact form at JacquelynBenson.com.
First edition: December 2021
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2021917321
ISBN: 978-1-7345599-6-5
Published by Vaughan Woods Publishing
PO Box 882
Exeter, New Hampshire 03833 U.S.A.
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Content warnings for Bridge of Ash:
Contains alcohol consumption, references to attempted sexual assault, a child in danger, murder, blood, graphic injuries, war, gun violence, physical fights, moderate sexual content, bombing, and depictions of surgery.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
The London Charismatics Series
The Smoke Hunter
Acknowledgments
About the Author
“It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”
Winston S. Churchill
ONE
Monday, December 14, 1914
Ten-thirty in the morning
The Hampshire Coast
THE SLATE WATERS OF the Portsmouth Estuary churned outside the train’s window as it wound across the grassy coast of Hampshire. The sky was pale as snow, the chill wind stirring up little caps of foam on the dark water.
It was a mid-morning run to the city, but even for that quieter hour, the train car was oddly uncrowded. The young men were disproportionately missing. Since the outbreak of the war last August, so many of them had enlisted and were now packed into hastily expanded barracks across the country.
Or they were already gone, shipped off to Europe from which it seemed very few ever returned intact.
Lily sat on the bench with a wicker hamper at her feet. She was dressed for the cold in a wool skirt, jacket, boots, and a coat. Her walking stick was conspicuously absent. The polished yew staff meant far more to her than an accessory or physical aid. Lily felt oddly naked without it, but carrying the hamper required both of her hands.
The countryside glided past the other side of the glass, pastures giving way to little farmhouses or the occasional punctuation mark of a village. The tracks ran no more than two miles from the sea, and Lily could smell the briny tang of the water even through the ever-present veil of coal smoke.
She had been in Hampshire for a week, staying with Strangford at his sister’s country house on the coast. It should have been something out of a dream—a sprawling, cozy manor stuffed with garlands and candles, filled with people who laughed and fought and chatted every hour of the day. Lily had never experienced that before, and for many years had been convinced she never would.
She was far from comfortable with the reality of it. It was like visiting a foreign country, one where she was unsure of her ability to speak the language. At any moment, those around her would recognize that she didn’t belong.
Going on this errand to Portsmouth had been a relief. It was easier to sit alone on the wooden bench of the local train, staring out the window at the dull procession of fields and houses until it threatened to lull her to sleep.
The tracks turned, and the tumbling hedgerows and white clusters of sheep gave way to a broad green expanse of mingled grass, mud, and water. They had reached the marshes.
Lily’s pulse thickened, the world around her slowing. The wool of her skirt scratched softly at the palms of her hands.
As she looked out over that endless sprawl of soft land and shallow streams, unease crawled over her flesh. It reminded her of somewhere else—somewhere she had been before. For a moment, that strange twilit place felt ever so close. It whispered at the back of her neck, tugging for her to return.
A release of breath, a step sideways through the veil, and she would slip from the train to the soft rustling grass. There would be a path, a pale cord twining her toward the place where she must go. She would be free of all of it—the doubt, the longing, the pitched energy of desire.
The train moved past the gnarled shadow of an old oak. A raven perched on the stripped branches. It cawed harshly at her, a rebuke like a slap across her face. The sound anchored her to the wooden bench and the clatter of iron wheels, lifelines she clung to until the marsh ended, broken by a cluster of row houses and a post office.
The tracks turned inland again, following a course through shorn wheat fields and grazing cattle. The elderly gentleman across from her turned the pages of his newspaper, the mother beside him quietly scolding the toddler in her lap.
Lily clenched her hands and forced herself to breathe—drawing air in, then forcing it out again. She was shaking.
She had been changed by what happened to her last August—the fall into the cool water of the canal, the liquid fire that burned through her air-starved lungs.
The place she had gone afterward until Strangford dragged her back to life.
She still did not understand the whole of it—the uncomfortable new powers, the way certain places seemed to shift in opacity, blurring into somewhere else. The person she would have looked to for answers to those questions was gone.
It was another ten minutes before Lily felt safe again.
Hefting the hamper, Lily stepped out of Fratton Station in Portsmouth, emerging into the cool, sea-scented December day. A few hackneys waited at the curb, but Lily moved past them. Her destination was not far.
The city was close-packed with terraced brick houses and shops. The masts of ships in the harbor were visible here and there over the rooftops. The more modern shapes of the vessels in the great Navy yard were hidden from view, lying further to the south.
Lily’s arms were strong from her training in kali, the martial school of self-defense she practiced with her walking stick, but the hamper was starting to make them ache.
Recruitment posters were plastered to the walls of the shops that lined the road. Some of them were faded with the weather, peeling at the edges. Flags hung in the windows, and a strand of ragged bunting crisscrossed overhead, relics of the celebrations that had broken out when war was first declared months before.
She passed another relic of the war, a bakery with a German name. Its windows were nailed over with plywood, and smoke stains marked the bricks above. The shop must be the victim of one of the anti-German riots that had peppered the country, targeting businesses with names like Gertz and Schmidt even if the families who owned them had been in England for generations.
At the newsstand on the corner, the latest war casualty list was pinned to the boards, columns of names marching down the page in tiny black print.
Lily moved past, shifting the weight of the hamper in her arms.
A group of sailors from the Navy yard strolled up the pavement, their bold voices mingling with the cough of lorry engines and the clop of hooves. One of them, who could not have been more than eighteen, looked over at her and flashed a charming smile.
“Want me to carry that for you, love?” he offered, jogging back to her, his tone blatantly flirtatious.
“Thank you, but no,” Lily answered coolly.
His companions laughed as she moved on, pounding his shoulders as the boy returned to them.
A formation of the new seaplanes buzzed overhead as she reached the school. Of course, the grand brick building was not currently functioning as a place of learning. The twin flags of the empire and the British Army hung from the upper floor, flapping a bit in the crisp breeze off the harbor. It was a hospital, one of many that had sprouted up like mushrooms in the southern counties since the outbreak of the war.
They were direly needed. The beds were filled almost as fast as the Army could build them.
The whole country had been similarly transformed. New bases sprung up from the ground seemingly overnight and were filled with recruits who drilled in sheep pastures with wooden rifles. Uniforms and guns couldn’t be made fast enough to supply them, but it didn’t matter. They had to be trained. The more experienced soldiers who had been shipped to Belgium were already returning, packed into overcrowded hospital ships—or not. The war was a thresher, crushing through bushels of men.
She hefted her hamper over the step and entered the lobby.
It still looked like a school, with rugby trophies in a case by the wall and the scent of chalk dust in the air. A pair of nurses strode purposefully by in their crisp white uniforms, and a young woman dressed in her Sunday clothes hugged an older man in a wheelchair, tears running silently down her cheeks.
Her father, Lily guessed as she approached the desk.
The soldier behind it hung up a telephone. The wires were strung along the ceiling, falling in makeshift arcs from the water pipes.
“I’m here to see Dr. Gardner, please,” Lily said politely as the sergeant turned to her. “I mean Captain Gardner,” she abruptly corrected herself.
“St. Andrew’s Building,” he replied impatiently. “Next one down.”
He jerked his thumb to the left as the phone rang again, then turned to answer it, clearly done with her.
“Fifth Southern General,” he barked into the receiver.
Lily pushed back outside, then shifted quickly out of the way as a pair of orderlies hurried past, carrying a bandaged man on a stretcher. He was missing an arm. An ambulance was parked at the curb, the vehicle rather obviously a requisitioned milk lorry that had been quickly painted gray. She could see the rows of beds bolted to the inside. Save for the one the orderlies had just emptied, they were all full of ragged men in dirty uniforms and blood-stained gauze.
She slipped quickly past, turning in the direction the desk sergeant had indicated. The St. Andrew’s Building was marked by a small plaque on the wall by a pretty blue door.
The halls were bright, still lined with bulletin boards punctuated by tacks that would have held school notices a few months before. Big windows looked into what had once been classrooms. They were wards now, packed with beds holding men with burned faces, flat sheets where limbs had once been. Another ward echoed with coughs. A man vomited into a basin as she passed.
Lily stepped aside to make way for a gurney wheeled along by a bored-looking attendant. The body on the metal slab was covered in a sheet.
She waited until it had gone, her hands cold, then stopped a passing nurse whose uniform apron was splashed with a dark stain.
“Captain Gardner?” she asked as the woman frowned at her, clearly intent on a more important purpose.
“He stepped out,” the nurse snapped in reply.
“Do you know where he might have gone?” Lily pressed, a little desperate.
The woman slid a quick glare over her, taking in her civilian clothes, bobbed auburn hair, and the hamper in her hand. Her eyes flashed with quick disapproval.
“Try the chapel,” she bit out and moved on.
The chapel had not yet been touched by the war. The vestibule was cool and quiet. A rack by the door was stuffed with the requisite pamphlets on the dangers of drink. A small lost-and-found box held a pair of bright green gloves and a knit shawl.
Lily hesitated at the door to the nave. She knew it was foolish of her. Dr. Gardner was her friend. It shouldn’t matter that she hadn’t seen him since the day they put Robert Ash’s coffin in the ground.
She steeled herself and pushed inside.
The door opened silently on well-oiled hinges. As Lily stepped through, her boots tapping softly on the slates of the floor, she heard the low gasp of someone crying. The sound pinned her at the threshold. The hamper pulled at her arms, and her shoulders began to ache. She shifted to adjust the burden, the movement making a small sound that seemed louder in the stillness of the church.
“Don’t mind me. I’m just finishing up.”
The voice came from the front pew. It was deep and familiar if a little ragged at the edges.
The nave was dim and quiet. Light streamed softly through the stained glass window above the altar, painting patches of muted color across the high, arched ceiling.
“It’s me,” she finally announced, her voice echoing uncomfortably through the empty air.
“Ah,” Gardner replied. “In that case, you can join me while I keep at it.”
She made her way quietly up the aisle and sat down beside him on the hard, polished surface of the pew. She set the hamper down on the floor, her arms sighing with relief.
The doctor was in uniform. It was the first time Lily had seen him like that. The khaki wool fit his broad shoulders well, and yet something about it still felt off, as though she had caught him playing in a pantomime. Gardner was a middle-aged physician with a gentle empathy that belied his substantial size and crooked nose, which Lily was fairly certain had once been broken. Despite the insignia on his shoulders, he was not a warrior.
The Ulsterman cradled a photograph in his big hands. It was an image of two little girls, stained with something ruddy at the corner. Lily guessed their age at about four. One was smiling, her hair a little blurred with motion as though she had been unable to hold completely still while the image was taken.
“Twins,” Gardner said, answering a question Lily had not spoken aloud. “I just sent their father on to the morgue. Got the better of me for a moment. I came in here so that the nurses didn’t need to keep watching me sob like a wet handkerchief in the chair next to the poor lad’s bed.”
With an uncomfortable jolt, Lily realized she knew exactly how Gardner must have looked in that moment—because she had seen it before.
Ten months earlier on the floor of Strangford’s study, the bitter, woodsy taste of the Wine of Jurema on her tongue. The visions had taken her like a whirlwind, spinning her through things she had no desire to know before they finally gave her what she was looking for.
Gardner’s body had been bowed by grief beside an empty hospital bed. In the vision, he had been in one of the wards at St. Bart’s in London, the hospital where Gardner then worked, but Lily knew that her foresight was far from literal. Her mind showed her a hospital she was familiar with because she couldn’t yet have imagined the one she currently sat in.
A chill crawled up her arms that had nothing to do with the December cold. The spill of premonitions she had inflicted on herself that night had been far from pleasant, and this was now the second of them to come to fruition.
The first to come to pass had been a fleeting glimpse of James Cairncross locking the door to The Refuge, the place which had become more of a home to her than anywhere else Lily had ever known—a building which now stood shuttered and hollow at the edge of Bedford Square.
She did not like to think of the other things she had foreseen—of Sam standing in a whirlwind of ravens or Strangford shouting at her to run as the ground tore itself apart around them, his uniform obliterated in an avalanche of mud and splintered wood.
She reminded herself she had nothing to fear from that last one anymore. Strangford had lost his eye in August, a sacrifice that disqualified him for service even if the government did pass the threatened draft she knew was being whispered about in the halls of Parliament.
The fact should have reassured her, but her unease lingered. Lily’s visions weren’t usually so easily thwarted.
She thought of the hall of wounded men that lay just outside the quiet of the church. The war was merciless, devouring arms and legs and souls without a blink of remorse. Sam was relatively safe from it, stationed at an airfield some distance from the front thanks to his mechanical skills. And Strangford was here. But for so many others . . .
Her gaze fell to the photograph in Gardner’s hand again. He was still staring at it, his eyes rimmed with red.
“I knew he was dying.”
His words had the feel of a confession, startling her out of her dark reverie. Lily stayed silent, listening, unsure of how to respond.
“There was a bacterial infection inflaming the tissues of his heart,” he went on relentlessly. “I could feel it.”
