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to his sergeants. ‘Thank you again, Mitkhal. If any of us live to see the end of this war it will be because of your bravery and kindness. We won’t forget it.’

Chapter Five
    Military HQ, Basra
    June 1916
    Charles limped into his office, propped his stick in the corner behind his chair, and sat behind his desk. Ignoring the pile of files in his in tray he took a clean sheet of paper, opened his ink bottle and picked up a pen.
    Dear Maud,
    Please believe me, I’m not writing this note to you to begin yet another argument. I need to talk to you urgently about your son – and other matters. Please meet me. The Basra Club would probably be best. I can book a private room where we can have coffee or lunch and talk in privacy without risk of disturbance.
    I can’t leave things the way they are between us, so please can we meet within the next day or two? With the push upstream likely to start at any moment, I could be transferred out of Basra at short notice.
    I appreciate friendship between us is out of the question, but I hope we can manage civility, for Robin’s sake.
    Yours sincerely,
    Charles Reid
    Charles blotted what he’d written, folded the paper, and placed it in an envelope. He sealed it and wrote Maud’s name on the outside, then realised he didn’t know which bungalow Colonel Perry had been allocated. There were only two orderlies on duty at that time of day and he could hardly send one round knocking on doors in search of Maud.
    He left the envelope on top of his out tray and headed back to his quarters to bathe and change before picking up Kitty.
    Bungalow, British Military Quarters, Basra
    June 1916
    Maud Mason straightened the chairs in the dining room and checked the dining table. She’d moved into the officer’s bungalow her father had been allocated that morning, and had spent the day directing the servants to make the quarters as comfortable as possible given the limitations of the solid, inelegant military furniture. She’d taken her parents’ personal possessions from storage, polished the family silver, cleaned the Royal Doulton china, and arranged the framed photographs of family and friends on the sideboard. The new cook had concocted the colonel’s favourite curry to Maud’s stringent specifications, but if her father didn’t turn up soon, the meal and evening she’d planned would be spoiled.
    She paced through the French doors out on to the veranda. The sound of ribald songs resounded from the officers’ mess and the evening air was warm, too warm to linger outside. She returned to the dining room, slammed the French doors, and waved the servants back into the kitchen with a curt, ‘Keep the meal hot.’
    The air was oppressive, adding to her sense of foreboding. Maud poured herself a brandy and added ice from the bucket before carrying her glass into the drawing room. She placed it on a table next to a chair she’d earmarked as ‘hers’. Needing to do something, she walked down the corridor that led to the bedrooms and looked in on the nursery. Her six-month-old son, Robin, was asleep in his cot. The native nursemaid, who she’d brought from the mission to look after him, sat beside him in a chair angled in front of the window so she could watch the sunset.
    Maud closed the door. She checked her father’s room. His Indian orderly was unpacking the kit left in Basra when the Colonel had joined Townshend’s campaign.
    She went into her own bedroom and saw that the girl she’d engaged as her lady’s maid had hung her clothes away as ordered. Finding no fault with the maid’s work she opened the bureau and removed her account book. Whichever way she calculated the figures, she was hopelessly in debt with no prospect of receiving any income to repay what she owed for months.
    She had been granted an officer’s widow’s pension and an allowance for her child when she’d received