The Wife’s Story
Fiction (extract)
After Badajoz it was hard to find God again. The name that was once my home was now something else. Something without pity. Full of fire, smoke and death and broken people. Something that was evil had crept in. It was home no longer. There was no place where my heart could rest. No place where I could breath air, untainted by the heat of battle, the cries and blood of my kin, and hear the last breaths of the foreign invaders, French or British, they were all the same.
After Badajoz… I speak of the place as already in history books and now removed from my soul. Is that all it is now? The place has lost its meaning for me. After Badajoz… what is it now? It is no longer a full name. But a place held in time, held in April 1812, where it will never leave. It has become the past, present and future. There is no separation. The books will multiple, the memories of my people and the invading foreigners will speak their truth, yet many twisted into the lies of knaves , but no one will separate the two. Truth and lies will be together, as one story, one narrative. Meaning will be indivisible from falsehood. But the faces will remain. Oh, yes. Those of the living and the dead. They all flow though my dreams, like one huge river, that holds both James and I in its current. And like the faces it is endless. But I am a woman in a foreign land, too far from home. And James is a man…
