Firelight
Ribbons of words unravel in the smoky air; words from her letters are flame pinpricks. He fights, spills blood; and she is a world and a hundred battles away. He writes to her by firelight, winding his way to his solitary room above the drafty stable where she writes to him; where she tiptoes up the ladder and makes his bed. Why, he wonders, and almost hears her whisper, tucked into a creased, many-times-folded letter
So you can sleep tight, Ben…
By some unwritten bond of theirs, he knows what she means, even if he never knows what it is to sleep tight anymore. Firelight burns his eyes as he dashes ink across the page, writing of ardent soldiers, of all the horizons in all their sights, even as men breathe last breaths. And of such things, he doesn't want her to know(but she does, she does), because she flares all around him, brighter than the fire, and he wants to keep her in that purifying light, because if she were anything else, he might just go mad.
He never did tell her how she saved him one night, when he'd bundled himself up; apart from the company, eyes seeing nothing. It was his first; there'd been a struggling, thrashing life in his hands, and then when horrid-red rivulets trickled through his fingers, there'd been none at all, and he'd been deadened all the day, with no one daring to speak to 'the youngster'. They knew what the first was like, they let the firelight burn the horror clean through, but it seemed to burning him alive
There, he'd taken out his only lifeline, it formed themselves into words, into her, it was so very much of her, that he cried himself delirious, blurring her crooked script with his tears.
And these days, ever so now-and-then, old fellows, both brash and polite, ask him, now, young Benjamin, whose favor is it that you wear so close to your heart,?
And his muddied hands twirl themselves into Felicity's ragged handkerchief as he answers simply. There's a little girl in Williamsburg, praying, waiting for me to come back
And if he hid behind silence then, he hides behind these words now. He knows she's far so much more than a little girl to him. Dear Lissie, he ponders the words for a moment, and continues in rough, black script, because she's more than a slender slip of a redhaired girl. She is springtime, copper pennies, and half-finished handkerchiefs with lace trailing at the seams, and with that, she tells him she is his to stay. He is warmed, and touches the soft cloth to his lips, barely thinking of what it means.
So you can keep me close…and with a bit more spirit…so I can keep you, Ben, when you come back.
Dear Ben…
He reads her letter by firelight even as the still-smarting wounds plague him all night. He smiles, because she knows him, because she's not a little girl any longer, because she is…has always been…
…Always…Faithfully yours, Felicity.
She is stronger than battles, now she wages war in his chest when it hits him, what she is to him, what she's always been to him; and whatever that might be, he knows he is hers. She will take him through this with a glow in his bloodstained face,. For the sun on his face every morning, for her light blazing as he fights one more day, and if (when) he gets to the end of it all, she will be there.