The winter of 1856 lay heavy upon London. Snow clung stubbornly to the rooftops of narrow terraced houses, gathering in crooked heaps along gutters and ledges. The streets were painted in shades of soot and ice, where carriage wheels churned the frozen mud into black slush. The gas lamps, dim halos of gold behind the swirling mist, did little to banish the gloom of the Industrial city. And yet, in the midst of this bleak season, within a modest home tucked between the endless rows of brick dwellings in Whitechapel, two people clung to each other as though the world outside did not exist.
Thomas Whitaker, only twenty-two years of age, pressed his lips against his wife's hair, breathing in the faint scent of lavender she always carried with her. She trembled in his arms, her fingers tightening in the folds of his uniform coat. They had been married but a week, the memory of the vows they had spoken in the candlelit chapel still burning vividly in his mind. He had thought—foolishly perhaps—that their new life together would begin with peace, with laughter, with warmth. Instead, it began with the Queen's summons and the drums of war.
"I will come back," he whispered, though the words scraped against his throat. He tried to sound certain, tried to steady the fear that lurked beneath his skin.
Mary's brown eyes, wide and glistening, lifted to his. She had seen the notices nailed to wooden boards along the streets, had read the lists of names of those who would never return. Her heart had filled with dread long before Thomas's own had. "Promise me," she begged softly, her voice cracking. "Promise me you'll come back to me, no matter what this war takes from you."
Thomas swallowed hard. He wanted to promise her the world, but all he had was himself—a boy from Whitechapel who could wield a musket and little else. And so he pressed her trembling hand to his chest, just above his beating heart. "I swear it, Mary. I swear I will see you again."
She buried her face against him, and for a moment the world outside—the smoke, the snow, the clamor of London—disappeared. But then the bugle sounded in the distance, shrill and merciless, echoing through the frozen streets.
Thomas kissed her once more, longer than he should have, and then he pulled away before his resolve could break. He turned from her, and though his boots crunched against the snow and carried him farther from the doorway, his heart stayed behind. Mary's figure blurred in the swirling flakes, and then she was gone from sight, leaving Thomas to march into the night, swallowed by the city, by duty, by fate.