Blood and Ice

CHAPTER THREE

1889

Green… deep, gleaming emerald green.

That was what she dreamt of.

The green of the grass in the Yorkshire pastures.

The green of the leaves on a sunny day in Regent's Park.

The green baize of the billiards table at the club in Pall Mall. (Women were prohibited from going upstairs, but Sinclair had found a way to sneak her past the porter and up the back service stairs.)

The green waters of the Bosporus…

So long as she could immerse herself in the green, she was content. She could remember the scent of the fields where she grew up

… the damp grass, as it lay flat in the summer breeze, the cows standing white and black against it… the rolling green hills at dusk, the sun gleaming like her fathers gold pocket watch…

She could feel the texture of the leaves, smooth and even and waxy, as she passed through the city park on her midday break from the hospital. It was only for half an hour, but in that time-and if the wind was blowing back toward the Thames-she could take a breath of fresh air, air that had no trace of blood or morphine or ether in it. Sometimes she would tuck leaves and sweet-smelling flowers in the pockets of her uniform before going back into the wards…

The green of the sea… she had never been at sea until leaving for Turkey. She had always imagined it to be blue, or perhaps gray-it had appeared so in every picture she had ever seen-but staring down from the deck, into the churning wake, she had been surprised by its greenish cast, like the dull patina on the statues at the Royal Museum (Sinclair had taken her there, shortly before his regiment departed)…

But there the reverie ended… as they all did, eventually… and a cold hand settled upon her heart. She had to struggle, once again, to fold herself into the green, to wrap herself in a bower of her own imagining… to warm the icy hand that had stolen beneath her clothes and frozen the very marrow in her bones. A thousand times she had come this way, and a thousand times more, she feared, she would have to come again, before she could awaken… before she could be released from whatever strange dream this was that still ensnared her…