The Secret of Salvation
a Warhorse AU
mood board by @mel-loves-all 💙
from an upcoming chapter of The Secret of Salvation
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“You shake me to my foundations, Fan. You make me believe in fate—when I had always said that we make our own. But how can I not believe in it now? That of all the places in the world you might have come, you made your way to London—as impossible as it seems, you made your way to my city—and by some lucky, blessed twist of fate, I found you on the stage despite how determined I had been to do anything but be in attendance that night.
In light of these facts, and by the way it feels that my heart seems to beat your name in every conscious moment, I find that I must accept the inescapable conclusion: that you are meant for me, Fannie Delilah Moore, just as I am meant for you…”
At long last, Fannie had fallen asleep, one of Jamie’s old letters clasped to her breast. She’d been ill for days; plagued with uneasy dreams in which she searched for him through fallow fields where only dried out husks remained of the wheat and rye which had once flourished there, and through lanes of blighted apple trees which had shed their rotten fruit upon gnarled roots thrust up through the soil below. In those dreams, she called to him continually while the acrid smoke of battle choked her, roughening her voice while stinging her eyes. Her waking self knew--as did all of London--that the War was not going well. So that her vivid imagination dwelled on this and her worry for her Jamie followed her into restless slumber.
She hadn’t received a letter from him since the first week of September, and it had been dated ten days earlier. Though he couldn’t reveal details of his location or of the coming maneuvers, he had assured her that he and his regiment were safely bivouacked in France, and chomping at the bit to meet and then sweep through the ranks of the Huns. Jamie had predicted a devastating defeat for the Germans overall, and then had reminded her he would be home before the first snow coated the cobblestones of London. And come that day, he would claim her as his before his family and friends, and that he’d have her for wife by Christmas Day.
