An excerpt from my future novel

An excerpt from my future novel, Contrition

Wartime London swirled with misty fog, grim and surreal, ghastly, a place for the dead and near dead to nestle in dark corners and shadows.   The city was what it looked like: a sepulcher town of ghosts and spirits, a haunted place.   A bleak, desolate place, devoid of vigor and covered from corner to corner with a torpor of the dead, newly dead and dead in spirit for time unmeasured.  Those not dead and haunting the city were ambulatory and horribly disabled.  Nearly all the men in the streets carried with them limbs maimed like those of ill-used toy soldiers and those who weren’t maimed seemed chastened and empty-eyed.  An unnatural amount of young women were dressed in black, heavy-lidded with blood-shot eyes, and by this stage in the war, in the late summer of 1918, the whole city seemed to be suffering from severe melancholia and exhaustion.   Everyone would simply whisper to no one in particular how much they needed an end to it.  All of it.  Universally, the people of every major European city wanted it to stop, but the politicians and generals were too stubborn and proud to yield to reason.  The allies would accept an Armistice but the central powers were not yet ready to give it to them for fear of being over-run by the communists, another threat entirely.  The communists were threatening to overtake the people in the cities of Central and Eastern Europe, and overall the conditions were ripening for anarchy.  Often it was the grinding indecision of the leaders that held everyone in such a purgatorial limbo.  So Hyrum, until he could use his cane, had stayed in his ward where a shell-shocked captain with unsteady hands and incessant twitches for open eyes awarded him a Purple Heart and a promotion to the three stripes of Sergeant, and no one in the ward, after this little ceremony, wanted to befriend him or even look him directly in the eyes.

One day he was sitting alone at the bar in a pub and his glance caught the eye of a dark-haired lass of Celtic blood with clear skin and a light spray of freckles smattered under her eyes clear and sky blue.   She smiled, and he smiled back, and then he noticed she was dressed in black with a black veil.   He approached her and asked if he could sit and when she assented he expressed sorrow for her loss, which she dismissed with a slight gesture.   “It was at the beginning of the war,” she said.  “1914 that I lost my Harry and I plan on being in black and taking no beau till I’m reunited with Harry in the afterlife.  So, my yank friend, if you are looking for some female companionship I suggest you run along and find some tart from Piccadilly or some such place, for my heart belongs to one man, and he is gone to our Lord.”

“I wouldn’t presume,” Hyrum said, and he meant it.   He was basically shy with women and now that he was sitting with her he couldn’t figure out what had possessed him to do such a brash thing as take the seat next to her.  He liked her eyes, though, they were kind and welcoming.  But she had made it clear all interactions were neutral, romance-wise.  

“You sure about that, Yank?  You better be.  I have three tough brothers in Ireland come back from the war if you try anything funny.”

He raised up his hands and smiled.  “I wouldn’t think of it.  I just wanted somebody to talk to.”

“Why not your Yank friends?”

“They are all going home.  The ones who aren’t dead.  Most of them are.  Dead, that is. I’m going back to the front soon.”

She seemed genuinely concerned.  “Poor dear.”

“My name is Hyrum, Hyrum Fratelli.  What’s yours?”

“Fratelli is Italian, right?  But what kind of name is Hyrum?”

“I’m a Mormon, and it is a first name traditional with our religion.”

“What’s a Mormon?  I think I’ve heard of them.  Don’t drink or smoke?”

Hyrum held up his ginger ale.  “That’s right.  Or that’s part of it. We’re an American Christian church and we follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and heed the warnings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.  We started in America but we are spreading out all over the world, including here in England.”

They talked for a while about the Mormon Church and then the woman said, “I have to be going.  I’m meeting a friend cross town.”

“But I never caught your name.”

She extended her hand.  “Fiona.  Fiona Lyons.”