The Telegram
There was an austere beauty in the fading light of the December afternoon, which suited her mood. Glints of weak sun shimmered through the stained-glass windows, lighting the white altar cloth and the wooden choir stalls.
Connie’s hand slipped, again, to her pocket. The telegram had been burning a hole there since the gap-toothed post-office girl had knocked on the door of Blackthorn House at two o’clock that afternoon. But she would not read it, not yet. She knew it was foolish – the words would not alter – but she wanted a few precious minutes more of not knowing. For though she had spent months preparing for the worst, striking bargains with a god she no longer believed in, it would be too cruel if her husband had survived the years of the war, only to fall in the first days of the peace.
Skin, blood and bone.
Kitchener’s Army, they’d called them in those early days. Connie had stood watching the men march out from the barracks and down the Broyle Road to the railway station. Singing, some of
