Chapter 75

There is a comfort in exhaustion, for it gives you no opportunity to think. Ella was determined to do her bit as the nation fell ill, and far from being left to hide in my room, she included me. She devised a plan that kept us both working every single daylight hour and several dark ones as well. It ensured I dropped into bed too tired to even remove my boots.

Did she know that the long, quiet hours were the hardest for me to endure? Every night I plunged back into the war, relived the horrors over and over. I awoke exhausted, with my throat hoarse and scratchy from screaming in my sleep. The constant physical exertion of Ella?s new regimen drained my mind and I slept deeply and, for a short while, free of the clawing nightmares.

We rose early each day to undertake farm chores. For me, that meant helping Stewart catch up on four years of damaged fences, broken water troughs, fields in desperate need of ploughing and reseeding, and tracking down a small band of sheep that decided to g