She had had sexual relations with her husband, although admittedly not often, but she had never experienced personal pleasure in their coupling. She’d always had the feeling that Martin, too, despite achieving his release, had not found the act particularly pleasurable. But this she’d put down to the fact they were living in her parents’ house, making love furtively and silently in the dark as if it were something shameful.

Amelia blamed herself for everything, including her infertility, but most of all she blamed herself for that night. That night when she’d realised that her sexual inadequacy had, in effect, ruined her husband’s life.

And now here she was behaving like a bitch on heat, offering herself to a man she barely knew. What had aroused in her this terrible lust? Little wonder Samuel Robinson had fled into the night.

What in heaven’s name is wrong with me, she agonised.

On the drive back to camp, Samuel was feeling equally mortified. His behaviour had been shockingly inappropriate.

Inappropriate? What a very kind word, he chastised himself, disgraceful would be more fitting. Amelia Sanderson is a married woman. She’s lonely, she’s vulnerable. She must surely feel betrayed, preyed upon by a man she’d presumed was a friend.

But she misunderstood me, he told himself desperately, I wasn’t preying upon her at all, I wasn’t trying to seduce her …

His self-justification didn’t quite ring true, however. He did find Amelia Sanderson attractive, and the comfort he’d offered could most certainly have been interpreted as a sexual invitation, particularly to a lonely and vulnerable woman. He wondered how he’d ever be able to make amends.

Samuel didn’t much like himself at that moment. Tonight, a night when he’d simply wanted to escape the hideousness that surrounded him, had become a night that was only serving to compound his woes.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wednesday. Only five days since the closure of their club, but every single one of those days had seen a radical increase in tension among the troops of Companies A and C of the 96th Battalion. To the men it seemed that each new day their work grew harder, and each new day they became ever-more keenly aware there was no reward in sight, that their lives were no more than an endless existence of exhausting and thankless drudgery. Admittedly, the promise of four crates of hard liquor that now awaited them at the end of the work day acted as a salve of sorts, but tempers were nonetheless simmering closer to boiling point.