A/N: This is the chapter that earned this story its T-rating.
Because the war took more lives than the ones of those who died in the trenches.
Chapter 4
After Joe´s death the farm felt even more alien to her. She had hired a farmhand to help with the chores she couldn´t possible accomplish on her own and out of a sense of duty she took care of everything else herself. But her heart wasn´t in it. She had never really wanted to return to the life of a farmer´s wife. It had been the reason she had gone into service in the first place.
In the evenings, when all the work was done, apart from her knitting or sewing, she sat down in what had been Joe´s armchair and reflected on the dramatic turn her life had taken.
The wounds on her body began to heal slowly, the bruises on her wrists, back and insides of her tights fading slowly. Moving around became more easy and slowly but surely her strength returned. She knew she would always have the scars. Faded marks on her body, proof of what had happened. She didn´t care about it. It was nothing compared to the emotional scars she had acquired once that dreadful message had been delivered on that fateful day.
Being in the army already, Peter, Joe´s son, had been among the first to be drafted to fight in the war. He had also been among the first that fell as the war turned out to be more gruesome, more devastating than anyone had thought possible.
Joe had taken the news of the death of his only son badly. She couldn´t blame him for it. Peter had been the only living reminder of his life as it should have been. Withy Ivy and possibly even more children. Not this cold farce of a marriage they found themselves in. Peter had been his son, his pride, his joy. And now he was gone, slaughtered in a meaningless war, buried namelessly and unceremoniously in an unmarked grave, a sea dividing them.
She had tried to be there for him, tried to comfort him, tried ease his burden in any way that she could. But in the end she had only been able to take his anger, his fury, his drunken hazes and his fists.
A few months after Peter´s death he had sought his refugee to the bottle to ease his suffering. At first he claimed it helped him sleep. She should have put a stop to it then, she really should have. But she knew how insomnia plagued him, how the nightmares tormented him, so she had let it pass. Soon his nightcap had turned into evenings at the pub and from then it had deteriorated. She´d found empty or half-empty bottles everywhere. In the barn, in his workplace, even stuffed in a kitchen cupboard.
The day she had confronted him about them had been the first day he had raised his hand to her. The blown to her jaw had been so severe and so unexpected that she had staggered back, incapable of reacting in any other way then whimpering in pain. She should have put a stop to it then, she really should have. She should have left, but she didn´t. Instead she tried to be a better wife, tried to keep him away from the temptations of alcohol, hiding her bruises as she went along.
She couldn´t manage. His visits to the pub became a daily occurrence and he always returned, heavily intoxicated, seething with anger, ready to take it out on her.
She found that she could deal with his blows, deal with his kicking, but that she was no match to his words, to his slurred, cutting insults. He accused her of being cold and frigid. He said she was arrogant and haughtily, thinking herself far above him. He found ways to degrade her, just to get even with her.
And her sense of guilt increased with every verbal attack. She had regretted every single day of her marriage to him, long before he turned to liquor. She had not kept her vow to him to forsake all others, for in her mind she had remained faithful to the one man she had ever truly loved. And without knowing about it, Joe had known.
Eventually his pain had become unbearable to him. She had been the one to find him, dangling from a robe in the barn. She had slid against the wall, wrapping her arms around her raised knees, crying with unrestrained sobs for the miserable mess their marriage had turned into, for his pain and for the undeniable sense of relief she felt, knowing that he would never lay his hands on her again.
Her regret had never been so bitter. She had never felt more shattered.