Under the Moon: Chapter 1
A barrage of thunder rolled down the lake and echoed menacingly in Ria’s head. Startled out of the eerie twilight of nightmares, she was momentarily alarmed, but then realized she was safely at her beloved island home. It was only rain that clattered sharply on the cedar shingles overhead. Not lethal metal fragments from exploding bombs.
The hellish war was over, although it brutalized her dreams and was etched into her flesh.
They’d been at the summer cottage on Wyndwood for almost three weeks, but she wasn’t yet accustomed to waking in her grandmother’s old room rather than the girls’ dorm she had shared with her cousins for the first eighteen years of her life. Unlike her cousin Phoebe, she didn’t see or fear the ghost of Grandmother, and in fact, took some comfort from the vestiges of Augusta’s life - even the chaise lounge where Grandmother had rested while Ria had been required to read to her as punishment for some misdemeanor. Sadly she recalled that they hadn’t progressed far in the last book, Dickens’ Bleak House, when Augusta had mysteriously fallen off a cliff to her death, that momentous summer of 1914.
Ria had been afraid that either mad Phoebe or ambitious Jack, their destitute, newfound cousin, had been responsible, but had dismissed both suspicions as ludicrous. Augusta had been tottery and stubborn, and should long ago have stopped walking the dangerously narrow path. Ria had been shocked to discover that her uncle Albert had dynamited that cliff face to protect Phoebe from a lunatic notion that she could fly from the ledge or be coerced by the menacing voices in her head to jump. A new path was now sandwiched between the sheer wall of granite and the lake where the murderous, ancient boulders lurked just beneath the surface. “Tumbling Rocks”, Phoebe had christened the spot, and so her nearby family cottage had acquired that moniker.
Another blast of lightning was closer this time, and Ria rolled over to snuggle against Chas, thankful, as she was every morning, that he was beside her. But there was a moment of panic when she realized he wasn’t. She sat up, trying to distinguish shapes that were just beginning to crystallize out of the smothering darkness.
The next brilliant flash of light caught and held him frozen for an instant before he melted again into obscurity. Ria slipped silently out of bed and joined him on their private screened porch. Because of the heat, they had left the French doors open and neither had bothered with night attire.
She slid her arm around him, glorying in his warmth and the smoothness of his firm muscles. “Are you in pain?” she asked as he embraced her. He was still recovering from the surgery that had fused his bullet-shattered knee. In a cast for four months, he had been out of it for only a few weeks. If this procedure didn’t work, then there was no alternative but amputation.
“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her. It certainly wasn’t like the pre-operative agony that had sometimes driven him to suicidal thoughts. The orthopaedic surgeon had said that there might be some nerve pain for a while, and that another surgery could probably fix it if it didn’t subside. The doctor was confident that the fusion of the tibia and femur had been successful. But Chas now had to accustom himself to being a cripple, with his left leg an inch shorter and flexed at a slight angle to make sitting easier. But never again able to bend or straighten, much as his will might wish it.
They both tensed as a blinding flash split the darkness. “I once liked storms. Before the war,” Ria said. “Perhaps I can understand why Phoebe is terrified of them.” And always hid under the grand piano, shrieking, her head buried in her arms. Ria wondered if Phoebe’s fear had mellowed at all in the four years that Ria had been away.
While the lightning stabbed some of the nearby islands, it also skittered across the dolorous clouds with a continuous growl, punctuated by more violent expletives. The constant flashing reminded them of the distant explosions in France - the millions of shells that both sides had hurled at each other with such ferocity.
How often Chas had flown over and through that bombardment! Ria clung tightly to him, recalling the paralyzing fear that had often gripped her, thankful that he had survived when so many of their friends hadn’t.
She cared not a whit that he was disfigured, only that he might be relieved of pain. They sometimes jested about their battle honours - Ria’s piratical scar across her forehead, a jagged one from knee to ankle, and a deeper wound in her left shoulder; Chas assaulted by bullets in each limb. The arm and shoulder wounds he had sustained last spring would heal in time, the doctors told him, although an old thigh wound from 1915 still troubled him occasionally. They rarely spoke about his burns.
“I expect the storm will wake the children,” Ria said as it grumbled relentlessly.
“Let’s hope they run to Johanna and not to us,” Chas replied with a laugh. “We’re not exactly dressed for company.”
“Charlie and his bear will likely cuddle up with Johanna, and Sophie and Ace will climb into bed with Alice,” Ria said with a smile as she thought of their adopted family.
For a moment, the remembrance that their stillborn son, Reggie, lay alone in a windswept grave on the far distant Irish coast caused Ria such a sharp pain that she choked on a sob. His red granite headstone read, “Reggie Wyndham Thornton, beloved infant son of Victoria and Chas. Innocent victim of the Lusitania.”
It was aboard that ill-fated ship that Ria had befriended Alice, then a child of thirteen. And it was Alice who had insisted that Ria was still alive when the sailors had pulled her seemingly lifeless body from the sea. So when Alice was orphaned because of the Spanish flu, Ria and Chas had convinced her English grandparents to allow them to become her legal guardians. Having grown up in Ottawa, and not really knowing her British relatives, Alice had been delighted to become part of her dearest friends’ family.
“You’re shivering,” Chas said. “Are you cold, my darling?”
“No,” Ria replied. The rain had not driven away the oppressive heat. Like her shell-shocked cousin Max, she started trembling when something triggered memories best forgotten.
Chas understood only too well. “You need some distraction,” he said suggestively as he took her hand and led her back to bed. “I’ll just make certain the door is locked.”
Under the Moon continues for another 412 pages.
Copyright © Gabriele Wills 2020 All Rights Reserved
The hellish war was over, although it brutalized her dreams and was etched into her flesh.
They’d been at the summer cottage on Wyndwood for almost three weeks, but she wasn’t yet accustomed to waking in her grandmother’s old room rather than the girls’ dorm she had shared with her cousins for the first eighteen years of her life. Unlike her cousin Phoebe, she didn’t see or fear the ghost of Grandmother, and in fact, took some comfort from the vestiges of Augusta’s life - even the chaise lounge where Grandmother had rested while Ria had been required to read to her as punishment for some misdemeanor. Sadly she recalled that they hadn’t progressed far in the last book, Dickens’ Bleak House, when Augusta had mysteriously fallen off a cliff to her death, that momentous summer of 1914.
Ria had been afraid that either mad Phoebe or ambitious Jack, their destitute, newfound cousin, had been responsible, but had dismissed both suspicions as ludicrous. Augusta had been tottery and stubborn, and should long ago have stopped walking the dangerously narrow path. Ria had been shocked to discover that her uncle Albert had dynamited that cliff face to protect Phoebe from a lunatic notion that she could fly from the ledge or be coerced by the menacing voices in her head to jump. A new path was now sandwiched between the sheer wall of granite and the lake where the murderous, ancient boulders lurked just beneath the surface. “Tumbling Rocks”, Phoebe had christened the spot, and so her nearby family cottage had acquired that moniker.
Another blast of lightning was closer this time, and Ria rolled over to snuggle against Chas, thankful, as she was every morning, that he was beside her. But there was a moment of panic when she realized he wasn’t. She sat up, trying to distinguish shapes that were just beginning to crystallize out of the smothering darkness.
The next brilliant flash of light caught and held him frozen for an instant before he melted again into obscurity. Ria slipped silently out of bed and joined him on their private screened porch. Because of the heat, they had left the French doors open and neither had bothered with night attire.
She slid her arm around him, glorying in his warmth and the smoothness of his firm muscles. “Are you in pain?” she asked as he embraced her. He was still recovering from the surgery that had fused his bullet-shattered knee. In a cast for four months, he had been out of it for only a few weeks. If this procedure didn’t work, then there was no alternative but amputation.
“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her. It certainly wasn’t like the pre-operative agony that had sometimes driven him to suicidal thoughts. The orthopaedic surgeon had said that there might be some nerve pain for a while, and that another surgery could probably fix it if it didn’t subside. The doctor was confident that the fusion of the tibia and femur had been successful. But Chas now had to accustom himself to being a cripple, with his left leg an inch shorter and flexed at a slight angle to make sitting easier. But never again able to bend or straighten, much as his will might wish it.
They both tensed as a blinding flash split the darkness. “I once liked storms. Before the war,” Ria said. “Perhaps I can understand why Phoebe is terrified of them.” And always hid under the grand piano, shrieking, her head buried in her arms. Ria wondered if Phoebe’s fear had mellowed at all in the four years that Ria had been away.
While the lightning stabbed some of the nearby islands, it also skittered across the dolorous clouds with a continuous growl, punctuated by more violent expletives. The constant flashing reminded them of the distant explosions in France - the millions of shells that both sides had hurled at each other with such ferocity.
How often Chas had flown over and through that bombardment! Ria clung tightly to him, recalling the paralyzing fear that had often gripped her, thankful that he had survived when so many of their friends hadn’t.
She cared not a whit that he was disfigured, only that he might be relieved of pain. They sometimes jested about their battle honours - Ria’s piratical scar across her forehead, a jagged one from knee to ankle, and a deeper wound in her left shoulder; Chas assaulted by bullets in each limb. The arm and shoulder wounds he had sustained last spring would heal in time, the doctors told him, although an old thigh wound from 1915 still troubled him occasionally. They rarely spoke about his burns.
“I expect the storm will wake the children,” Ria said as it grumbled relentlessly.
“Let’s hope they run to Johanna and not to us,” Chas replied with a laugh. “We’re not exactly dressed for company.”
“Charlie and his bear will likely cuddle up with Johanna, and Sophie and Ace will climb into bed with Alice,” Ria said with a smile as she thought of their adopted family.
For a moment, the remembrance that their stillborn son, Reggie, lay alone in a windswept grave on the far distant Irish coast caused Ria such a sharp pain that she choked on a sob. His red granite headstone read, “Reggie Wyndham Thornton, beloved infant son of Victoria and Chas. Innocent victim of the Lusitania.”
It was aboard that ill-fated ship that Ria had befriended Alice, then a child of thirteen. And it was Alice who had insisted that Ria was still alive when the sailors had pulled her seemingly lifeless body from the sea. So when Alice was orphaned because of the Spanish flu, Ria and Chas had convinced her English grandparents to allow them to become her legal guardians. Having grown up in Ottawa, and not really knowing her British relatives, Alice had been delighted to become part of her dearest friends’ family.
“You’re shivering,” Chas said. “Are you cold, my darling?”
“No,” Ria replied. The rain had not driven away the oppressive heat. Like her shell-shocked cousin Max, she started trembling when something triggered memories best forgotten.
Chas understood only too well. “You need some distraction,” he said suggestively as he took her hand and led her back to bed. “I’ll just make certain the door is locked.”
Under the Moon continues for another 412 pages.
Copyright © Gabriele Wills 2020 All Rights Reserved