Audrey, Sigmund, and Parsley.

Periette was a quiet town, a soporific village caught in the crossfire between a French and German regiment some months ago and soundly destroyed. Those locals who’d refused to move on—or simply had nowhere to go—scuttled from building to building, reminding Audrey of scavenging rats along the trenches.

They brought them wine, bread and cheese sometimes. Sigmund would translate the happy, jovial French as she accepted baskets of scarce delicacies. A farmer’s wife had once given her fine ribbons. She’d laced them through her hair as her husband fetched a precious bale of hay to give the horses. And as the wife’s deft fingers worked away, Audrey watched Sigmund, Albie, Sandhur and a hardened farmer chat in broken French and Anglaise about the merit of old farmer’s remedies, and how they far eclipsed any fancy newfangled veterinary science. She’d worn the ribbons in her hair that night as they’d drank themselves into a stupor over a fine meal of bread and cheese.

The couple were dead by the following week.

… It was the usual story whenever they bunkered down in anything that might house a cluster of horses alongside a troop of exhausted veterinarians. Desolate barns could be fashioned into makeshift veterinary hospitals, stables could be reworked into emergency surgeries, and thus death turned into life. She’d watch as Sigmund Fletcher worked miracles; followed his hands and instructions to the letter. “Could make a decent vet out of you yet, Lieutenant,” he’d jokingly say, sleeves rolled to his elbows and slathered in blood. Perhaps. But she didn’t possess the spark of life that Sig obviously did.

Part of The Sharpshooter & The Vet series.