Temptation

The faint yellow gaslight caught the grains of white sand falling into her lap as Beatrice Clemens opened the envelope. Sand from half a world away. Carefully she collected the grains, placing them on the bedside table where they gleamed against the dark mahogany wood.

She treasured getting letters from her far-flung siblings, particularly from Teddy, doing his duty for Queen and Country in far off South Africa. Teddy described it as a harsh land, so hot and dry over the summer months that it was practically a desert. The ever-present sand worked its way into every item of clothing, adding its mite of discomfort to the irritation already caused by too much heat and insufficient water.

Her roommate, Lenora, looked over from where she was slumped in her armchair by the window. She had propped her feet up on a footstool and was wriggling her swollen ankles. The brightly patterned curtains were pulled, shutting out the night and enclosing them in the pallid yellow mist of artificial lamplight. “Is that really sand?”

“Yes, sand. All the way from the Transvaal in southern Africa.” How strange it was that her only brother, the baby of the family, and her favorite sister should both wind up in Africa. And how different their two lives were. Louisa lived in a world of love and beauty with her land-owning Moroccan husband, while Teddy endured a harsh life in the army at the other end of Africa, keeping an eye on the rebellious Boers.

Carefully unfolding his letter, she kept an eye out for more sand. The grains in her letter had most likely fallen out of his hair when he rumpled it as he wrote. The thought of it brought a wistful smile to her face. As a small boy, Teddy had always rumpled his hair whenever he was concentrating hard on something.

“What is his news?” Lenora had leaned over and was massaging her ankles. Her red hair was creeping out of her bun in messy tendrils and her uniform was a mess of wrinkles, and stained down the front from a spill.

Beatrice scanned the letter quickly. “They have been sent off into the interior, into some tiny settlement, where there’s nothing to do but look threatening while the Boers talk openly of rebellion. The camp sounds terribly dull. He writes that he misses the society they enjoyed in Pretoria.”

Lenora looked up from her feet. “I’d rather be a nurse than a soldier any day. Despite the sore ankles.” She gestured at their room, which, though small, was nicely furnished with knotted rugs on the floor, handsome mahogany furniture, and lace covers on the backs of the chairs. “Even though our days are long, at the end of them we can come back to home comforts, rather than being stuck in a camp out in the desert. And I
like
tending to the sick. They are always grateful that someone cares about them.”

The two of them had come off the end of a long shift on the wards at St. Thomas’s hospital—dressing wounds, spooning medicine into patients’ mouths, and tending to their personal hygiene. There was never enough time to sit down for more than a few minutes together, and Beatrice’s ankles were aching, too. Still, being a nurse was satisfying work and, like Lenora, she wouldn’t swap it for any other career. She’d wanted to be a nurse for as long as she could remember. “I must write back to him. He sounds like he needs a letter from home.”

She drew a chair up to the little writing desk and pulled out a sheet of paper. Though she loved her work, it wasn’t really anything to write about. She tickled the tip of her nose with the end of her pen and hummed a music hall ditty to herself to brighten her spirits.

Her work was just the same routine, day after day. She did what she could, but there was always more sickness and death to contend with. All she could do was alleviate the suffering of those for whom she cared, and help cure those who could be cured.

Lenora pulled the hairpins out of her hair one by one, and shook her dark red hair down over her shoulders. Thick and lustrous, it shone in the yellow gaslight like a river of fire. “You could tell him about nasty old Mr. Tomlinson turning purple in the face and dropping dead of an apoplexy right before our eyes. That gave me quite a start, I can tell you.”

Beatrice choked back a scandalized laugh. Neither of them had liked Mr. Tomlinson. He had always shouted at them rudely and pinched their bottoms when they made up his bed. “It’s hardly a fit subject for a letter. And I’m sure Teddy doesn’t want to be reminded about death. He must think about it quite often enough as it is. I know I would in his position.”

“You could tell him about the new doctor who just joined the staff.” Lenora’s voice was sly.

“Dr. Hyde?” Beatrice wrinkled her nose. The new doctor was quite handsome in a serious kind of way. More importantly, he was clearly hardworking and ambitious—just the steady, settled sort of man she had decided long ago that she would marry. She had been quite excited when just yesterday morning he had asked her to go walking in the park with him on Sunday.

But that wasn’t something she could write to her baby brother about. She hadn’t even told Lenora, and Lenora was not only her roommate but also her best friend. An invitation to go walking was hardly newsworthy, and it would probably come to nothing.

Lenora gave a dreamy sigh at the sound of his name. “Marlene told me he comes from a good family in the Midlands, and that his father is a very successful attorney. He could’ve bought a church living or a commission in the army or anything, but he chose to become a doctor. He wanted to spend his life healing the sick.” She sounded as though she was half in love with him already.

Ruthlessly Beatrice tuned out the sound of Lenora’s rhapsodies and turned to her letter. What she really wanted was to have her sister Louisa home again. It was a joy to have her visit every summer from her home in Morocco, but that seemed an age ago. Still, now that spring was upon them she would soon return, after a particularly lonesome and dreary autumn and winter. She had looked after Louisa for so long—it had been her sister’s weak lungs that had made her decide to become a nurse in the first place. Though she had scores of patients passing though her ward every week, without Louisa to care for, her life seemed somehow lacking.

An hour later, she put aside her pen, her letter to Teddy finished. Lenora had already clambered into bed and was snoring gently over her book.

With a sigh, Beatrice extinguished the lamp, flung off the shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders, and wandered downstairs to the communal parlor. A good fire and the pleasant company of the other lodgers in the house were what she wanted now. That, and a hot cup of cocoa to help her sleep.

Percival Carterton meandered through the hot streets of the small South African town with one of his acquaintance in his regiment, idly kicking the dirt with his boots. A dust cloud puffed up into the air with each step he took, drifting away slowly on an eddy of the still air, and then gradually fell back to the ground again. It was hot, and some of the dust rose high enough to stick to the thin sheen of sweat on his face and neck.

He pulled uncomfortably at the neck of his regimental jacket. The dark red fabric absorbed the heat of the sun, making him swelter in the summer heat. The white cork hat of his uniform at least kept the sun off his face, but it made his head itch.

They passed a couple of cherry-cheeked girls standing at the doorway to a modest house and Carterton smiled at them through force of habit. They were not pretty girls—their faces were broad and flat, their hair an indeterminate shade of brown under shapeless bonnets, and their figures well hidden under lumpish gowns of a drab gray color—but still they were female and thus worth a smile. Back home in England, where pretty girls were two a penny, he would not have given them a second glance, but here in the Transvaal he could not be so choosy.

The pair of them did not appreciate his courtesy. One of them muttered something dourly under her breath, a Boer curse, he had no doubt, and then spat after him into the roadway.

Charming manners the local girls had. Just charming.

He sighed and kicked the dust harder as he walked along. Life in the high veld of South Africa was interminably dull and dreary. The local Boers, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, hated them, resenting the law and order that the English and their soldiers were bringing to the land.

Even at the best of times the Boers were a sober bunch of people, more likely to pray than to party, and more concerned with sin than with socializing. They did not know how to let their hair down and enjoy themselves. Fun was a foreign concept. Everything about them was drab and gray: their faces, their lives, even the landscape that surrounded them. And they had no more manners or conversation than a stye full of pigs.

His companion, Edward Clemens, a young lad of barely eighteen, punched him lightly on the arm. “Don’t sigh after them. They’re only a couple of draggle-tails not worth bothering with. Any one of my sisters would be worth twenty of such sour-faced drabs.”

“Yes, but your sisters are not here, are they? Anyway, it’s not them. It’s this damn country,” Carterton replied moodily. “It’s too damn hot. It’s too damn dusty. And the girls, even the ugly ones, treat us like lepers. It’s enough to drive a man mad.”

“It’s not England, that’s for sure,” Clemens agreed. “It’s too sunny, for starters. Can you remember a day in England when it didn’t rain?”

“I wouldn’t mind a bit of honest English rain right about now to dampen down the dust.” He kicked a cloud of it into the air just to see the dust motes glitter in the sunshine. “If only we could get out of this godforsaken town and do something. Anything.”

They had passed through the dusty town to the outskirts. A bare, flat land stretched out in front of them, the odd small hillock the only feature to break the monotony. From here, the mildly undulating landscape looked as flat as a table top.

“If only we could get posted down south and fight the Zulus just to see a bit of action. Or be sent off to Afghanistan or India, or even to New Zealand to fight the Maoris. At least there would be the chance for a bit of glory. But to be forced to wait for weeks on end in the middle of nowhere, garrisoning a town that does not want to be garrisoned…” Carterton’s voice trailed off in despair.

“And all the girls looking as if they’d squashed their faces flat with their mother’s iron,” Clemens added for good measure.

In spite of his gloomy mood, Carterton felt the faint beginnings of a laugh twitch inside him. That was one of the things he liked most about young Clemens—the boy could laugh at anything. With renewed energy, he chose a likely looking piece of flat ground and paced off the length of a cricket pitch. He may have found himself in the wilds of South Africa, and wearing regimental colors of dark blue trimmed with scarlet rather than whites, but damn it, he could still play cricket.

At each end he pierced the dry earth with a stake to loosen it before driving the wickets deep into the ground, and balancing the bails carefully on top of them. God forbid that he should damage the wickets by smacking them into the sun-baked ground without loosening the hard soil first. Ronald Rimmer, the dolt, had cracked one of the wickets just last Sunday, and the rest of the regiment had damn near brained him for his carelessness. He’d been sent to Coventry for a week, with no one, not even the ancient laundress who did their weekly wash, speaking so much as a single word to him.

Clemens took the oiled cloths off the treasured regimental cricket bat made of the finest willow, and gave it a few practice swings. Other regiments might treasure their colors above all else, but in this regiment their cricket bat was their god.

He picked up the cricket ball, its red surface cracked and chipped with use, tossed it up in the air and caught it again, as the rest of the regiment slowly congregated at the spot he had marked out.

A few non-regimental spectators had gathered as well, to watch the one amusement that this town could provide. None of the dour-faced girls, Carterton noticed glumly, were among them. A couple of young lads watched the proceedings eagerly, swinging sticks at the ground as if they were practicing to bat.

A small dog yapped and ran over the pitch, raising one hind leg threateningly on the wickets. He lobbed a clod of dirt to chase it off before the wickets could be profaned.

The captain of the other team approached him in the middle of the wicket. “Winner bats first,” he called, as he tossed a coin high into the air.

“Tails,” Carterton called, as the coin spun in a glittering arc.

Tails it was. He strode up to the crease, bat in hand.

The bowler ran down the pitch and let the ball fly toward him.

He stepped forward, swung the bat, and connected with a loud thwack. The ball sped off across the veld, neatly slicing between a pair of fielders and bouncing away across the lumpy ground.

He started to sprint toward the other wicket, but was stopped by the umpire’s shout. “A four.”

He strolled back to the crease, smiling with grim satisfaction. Some of his anger at the dour-faced girls had dissipated at the force of the blow. There had been nothing special about those two girls to have them put him in such a temper—it was just that he was starving for female company and companionship.

While they had been stationed in England, there had been any number of pretty girls ready and willing to flirt with an unattached young officer in his regimentals. And if he had wanted something more, well, some of them had been equally ready to part with their favors for a few pretty words and the price of a pair of silk stockings.

Here on the veld there wasn’t a single pretty girl to flirt with, and no hope of buying even the plainest trull to warm his bed at night. He could not claim to be especially promiscuous, but he’d never gone so long before without a fuck. His balls ached just thinking about having a lusty young woman under him again, feeling her breasts in his hands and thrusting into her warm, welcoming pussy until he came with a rush.

Dammit, he’d give a week’s pay just to talk to a pretty young woman, and to have her smile at him in return. What wouldn’t he give to fuck one?

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