by Jane Feather
She raised a hand and lightly traced the shape of his mouth. “So stern,” she murmured, her smile broadening. “Relax, I'm offering only pleasure. Remember how wonderful it was by the river, think how we could have times like that whenever we wanted them.”
“Harlot! You'd sell yourself-”
“No,” Tamsyn, interrupted, the seductive gleam leaving her eyes. I’m not selling myself. The only thing I’m selling is information that your commander in chief would dearly like to buy. I was offering you compensation, that's all.”
“Compensation for dancing attendance on the bastard brat of a murdering robber!”
“Oh!” Tamsyn exclaimed, rendered momentarily speechless. “You have all the chivalry of a wood louse!
In all honesty and… and desirous affection, I suggest we make love and you-l.”
“Desirous affection!” He gave a short crack of disbelieving laughter. “Where the hell did you dredge up an expression like that? And what kind of gull do you think I am to fall for such a line?”
“It's true,” she insisted fiercely.
Julian stood very still for a minute. His gaze ran slowly down the lean, tensile frame in front of him. She was thrumming with energy and indignation, and something else. That determination and purpose he'd felt the first moment he'd touched her. She was fully prepared to use her body to persuade him to do what she wanted. Well, it was time La Violette learned that not everyone could be molded to her purpose.
“Desirous affection, eh?” he mused, his hands on his belt buckle. “Prove it to me, Violette.” He unfastened the buckle and swung free the heavy belt weighted with his sword, placing it on the table beneath the window. “What are you waiting for?” He glanced at Tamsyn, who still stood in the middle of the room. “Take your clothes off.”
Somehow this was not going according to plan. It seemed as if it was, and yet something was amiss. However, having started on this course, Tamsyn felt compelled to continue. She kicked off her boots and undressed swiftly, tossing her clothes to the floor.
The colonel stood naked, feet apart, hands resting on his hips when she turned back to him. “I'm eager to see this demonstration of desirous affection,” he drawled. “But I should warn you that I have very little time, so I hope your harlot's tricks are effective.”
Tamsyn quivered and her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I believe you'll find them so, milord colonel,” she said, stepping up to him.
Something warned him just in time, and he spun sideways as she brought her knee up in a vicious jab to his groin. “Fieral” he bellowed, his nostrils flaring. His thigh throbbed where her knee had made savagely jarring contact, and he felt sick at the thought of what would have happened if it had met its intended target.
“You dare to insult me in such fashion!” she yelled back, rubbing her knee where it had made bruising contact with his hard-muscled thigh. “Get out of here! I wouldn't touch you if you were the last man on earth.”
“Oh, wouldn't you? And just what happened to desirous affection?” He swooped on her, catching her around the waist, carrying her to the bed. “That died pretty quickly, didn't it?”
Tamsyn was aware of his vitally aroused body as he dropped her onto the coverlet. Obviously, the man liked a good fight… annoyingly, in the circumstances, so did she. Her body was tingling where his skin touched her, and there was a whirling excitement in the pit of her belly.
He leaned over her, pushing a knee between her thighs, and there was a predatory hunger in the bright blue eyes. “Or did it?” he demanded, nudging her thighs apart.
“The affection part did,” Tamsyn declared, moistening suddenly dry lips. His hand had found her now. His eyes never left her face as he played on her as if she were a lute string, plucking and stroking until she sang beneath his touch. When her little whimpering cries of ecstasy filled the small room, he slid his hands beneath her bottom and lifted her to meet him as he drove deep within her body while it still pulsated with her pleasure.
Satisfaction glittered in his eyes now as he moved above her, still watching her face with rapt intensity. He ran a finger over her lips, and she could taste the musky fragrance of her own body. He smiled. She smiled back, moving easily with his rhythm, as the deep, warm joy began to fill her belly and flow like honey in her veins. It was hard to imagine that a few short minutes before, they'd been fighting like a pair of mongrel curs.
His eyes glowed and he lowered his mouth to hers, the speed of his movements increasing as his tongue plunged and danced with hers and their cries of pleasure became as entangled as their bodies and the sweet liquid flow of arousal.
Tamsyn fluttered down to earth, a fragile leaf dropped finally by the airborne currents of ecstasy. She stroked Julian's back, where sweat glistened in the morning sunlight, feeling her own sweat gathering between her breasts, crushed by his weight.
Reluctantly, he moved away from her, his breath still ragged as he dropped onto the narrow cot beside her. Then he pushed himself into a sitting position, swinging his legs over the side, turning to look at her as she lay on her back. He passed a hand over her belly in a gesture that was as much farewell as acknowledgment of shared joy, then heaved himself to his feet.
Tamsyn lay and watched him dress in silence. If that demonstration of naked desire and its delicious fulfilment had altered his determination to deny her his assistance, he gave no sign. He buckled on his sword belt and came back to the cot, bending to kiss her, a light, friendly farewell.
“Take care of yourself,” he said. “Give Gabriel my regards when he comes to fetch you.”
The door closed, and she heard his booted feet hurrying down the wooden stairs as if he couldn't get away fast enough.
Colonel, Lord Julian St. Simon was proving to be more resistant than she'd expected. Tamsyn got off the bed and went to the window, watching him stride up the street. Next time she saw him, the battle for Badajos would be over. It was neither reasonable nor feasible to renew her attack until then.
Always assuming he was alive in the morning.
Chapter Eight
IT BEGAN AT TEN O'CLOCK THAT NIGHT.
Tamsyn had ridden out of Elvas in the late afternoon.
She rode through the army encampment, noticing the air of low-key excitement as men, fortified by an extra ration of grog, gathered in groups, checking their equipment, exchanging anecdotes of past campaigns. A few looked up as she passed, but their attention was taken more by Cesar than by the Arab's rider.
Tamsyn wondered where Julian could be in this tent city. The senior officers' tents were easily identified by their size, and she rode past several, hearing voices within raised in laughter, the sound of crockery and glass chinking as Wellington's officers dined together in the hours before the battle.
It didn't occur to her to attempt to find St. Simon; he would need all his concentration for the night to come. Her solitary reconnaissance was as much for something to do as anything else. She'd been brought up in a warrior encampment, knew the apprehension and the excitement before an engagement, and it was impossible for her to stay in Elvas, a useless spectator, watching and waiting.
With dusk came an eerie silence as the daytime gunfire and shelling tailed off. The atmosphere in the camp changed. Officers appeared from their tents, orders were given in low, crisp tones, and men began to move in groups toward the trenches. The night was dark, heavy clouds obscuring the moon.
Tamsyn rode outside the camp to a small hill, where she sat her horse and waited. Sentry lights wavered on the ramparts of Badajos, but apart from that it was still and dark across the plain, no indication of the army of men creeping through the trenches to drop their ladders into the ditches before the breaches in the city walls, or of the storming parties massed behind them.
But the French would know they were coming.
Their own intelligence network would have told them to expect the assault even if they didn't know the time or the configuration. But they would be ready to defend the breaches, holding their
breath in the same silence as their attackers.
The fine hairs on the back of her neck lifted, and Cesar shifted his hooves and whinnied softly.
Then the dreadful waiting silence was broken by a thundering war cry as the cheering British troops rushed through the outer ditches to reach the walls. Mortars roared in response from the ramparts, and the night was split with gunfire and exploding shells.
Tamsyn closed her eyes involuntarily as the noise became hideous, every pause in the firing filled with piercing screams, and the clarion calls of the bugles repeatedly sounding the advance. A violent light flashed across her eyelids, and she opened her eyes to see two brilliant fireballs flaming against the sky as they were shot from the ramparts to fall to the ground half a mile away, where they continued to blaze, illuminating the ghastly scene.
In the burning light Tamsyn discerned a group of men sheltered from the gunfire behind a small mound but still within range of the shells. The unmistakable figure of the Duke of Wellington stood out in the light thrown from a torch held by an officer beside him.
She urged the reluctant Cesar forward and joined the outskirts of the group, where men stood by their horses in alert readiness but at a discreet distance from the commander in chief, who was writing orders in the light of the torch. The screams of the wounded were clearer here, mingling with the long, drawn-out groans of the dying. Again and again the bugles signaled the advance, and the men hurled themselves up the ladders, to face the deadly resistance of the defenders, who hurled firebombs and barrels of gunpowder with short fuses into the ditches below, where they exploded, casting up burning bodies in a ghastly fountain of death.
Men rode up on lathered horses with information for the commander in chief from the thick of the fighting. The message was always one of failure. Every attempt was being beaten back; the troops were exhausted, decimated, their officers slaughtered like flies as the defenders hurled them back from the summit of the ladders. Wellington's face was white granite in the flickering torchlight as he received the stream of desperate communications, but he seemed to Tamsyn to be unflustered, writing more orders calmly, speaking in collected tones to his staff gathered close around him.
Then the bugle calls changed, and she recognized the note of recall. Over and over it sounded, but she could neither see nor hear any diminution in the savage conflict. The earth continued to throw up flame and burning bodies, whose hideous screams warred with the bellowing of the guns and the exploding mines. It was impossible to imagine anyone emerging alive from that inferno, and she stood by her nervous horse in a kind of numbed trance of horror, wondering why men would do this, would engage in such wholesale slaughter just to take over an insignificant heap of bricks and mortar.
But coherent reasoning wasn't possible, and her thoughts and emotions finally centered on the name of Julian St. Simon, repeating itself over and over again in her head like the refrain of a song that wouldn't be banished. He became the focus of the conflagration, the only reality her mind could grasp, but she couldn't manage to speculate where he was, whether he was alive, or whether he was lying somewhere under a heap of bodies, screaming in his agony, suffocating in the blood of others, or whether he was now only a cold, pale lump of bleeding clay.
It was half past eleven, an hour and a half after the murderous mayhem had begun, when an officer galloped ventre a terre through the group, his horse foam flecked around the bit, his flanks lathered.
Wellington turned as the horse came to a heaving, panting halt beside him. The exchange was short, but it was clear to the bystanders that something had changed.
“Gentlemen, General Picton's taken the castle.”
Lord March turned from the duke's side to make the announcement. “He's withdrawn troops from the trenches to enable him to maintain his position. We should have the city secured shortly.”
So they were in… or a toehold, at least. Tamsyn mounted her horse amid the murmured jubilation and rode slowly down toward the city walls. They were in, but at what horrendous cost. The bodies were piled high, the screams and groans as loud as ever. For the wounded and dying, Picton's success came too late. She rode along the walls, heedless of the firing that still continued along the ramparts. The ladders, warm and slippery with blood, still stood against the breaches, littered with severed limbs and tangled corpses.
Had Julian St. Simon survived? It seemed impossible to imagine anyone still living. But even as she thought this, a great cry of triumph went up from within the city walls, and a bugle sounded an exuberant note of victory. The city of Badajos had finally fallen to the besiegers.
Cesar threw up his head and pawed the earth frantically at the smell of blood and this new sound. Tamsyn steadied him and he stood still, obedient to his Mameluke training, but he was quivering with fright, nostrils flared, lips drawn back from the bit.
“All right,” she said softly. “Let's get out of here.”
She turned him away from the city, intending to leave him in Elvas and return on foot, but she hadn't gone more than a few yards when a man in the green tunic of a rifleman hailed her.
Tamsyn drew rein as the man, pouring blood from a shattered jaw, stumbled over to her. He was trying to hold his jaw together with one hand, while he gestured frantically into the darkness behind him.
Tamsyn dismounted swiftly, tearing off the bandanna she wore around her neck. She was used to wounded men and didn't flinch from offering what assistance she could. The fact that she swooned dead away at the sight of her own blood was a mortifying secret that only Gabriel knew.
She bound up the man's jaw with deft, sensitive fingers. “Mount my horse and I'll take you to the rear.”
The rifleman shook his head, gesturing again behind him, his eyes as eloquent as his mouth was dumb. She stepped into the darkness and almost tripped over a man groaning in the wet mud. Blood pumped from a gaping wound in his thigh, and he was using both hands to hold the severed flesh together as if it would stanch the flow.
“Me mate,” he whispered. “Get 'im to the 'ospital. 'E's got a chance. I'm done fer.”
“He's not going to leave you,” she said softly, bending over him. “I'll use your belt as a tourniquet, and if you can get onto Cesar, we'll have you with the surgeons in no time.”
She worked fast, aware even as she did so that the man's chances of survival were slim. His face was already assuming the ashen cast of a man who looked upon the grave. But his friend wouldn't leave him, and she understood the power of such loyalties.
With almost superhuman strength his friend lifted him into his arms and somehow onto Cesar's back.
“Mount behind him so you can hold him steady,” Tamsyn instructed, stroking Cesar's damp neck.
The rifleman hauled himself up into the high-backed, cushioned saddle. The expression in his eyes said clearly that he didn't much relish his position atop this restless white steed, but he took a firm hold of his comrade as Tamsyn began to lead the horse toward the rear.
The way was now thronged with limbers and drays bringing the wounded off the field now that the enfilading fire from the ramparts had ceased. People glanced curiously at the small figure, androgynous in the darkness, trudging along beside the magnificent beast and its wounded riders, but everyone was too occupied to do more than stare in passing.
There was chaos at the hospital tents, where torches swung from poles casting flickering light on the bloody work below. Tamsyn grabbed the sleeve of a passing orderly.
“I've two wounded men here. Can you take them?” He stared at her, distracted, for a minute, then said, “Put 'em down there. We'll get to 'em when we can.”
“One of them needs immediate attention,” Tamsyn insisted, her eyes flashing. “I didn't bring him off the field for him to die in the mud within reach of a surgeon.”
“What's going on here?” A man in the blood streaked apron of a surgeon paused beside them as he was hurrying along the stretchers, giving orders for the disposition of their occupants.
“I've two men in need of immediate attention,” Tamsyn declared. “And this dolt told me to leave them to die in the mud.”
The surgeon blinked and stared in astonishment.
“And just who might you be?”
“The commander in chief knows who l am,” she said smartly. “And I'm a friend-a close friend-of Colonel, Lord St. Simon of the Sixth. And while I'm bandying words with this village idiot, other men are dying out there because I'm not bringing them in!” She gestured to the hapless orderly with an expression of acute disgust and snapped, “Help them down.”
The surgeon examined the two men as they came off Cesar. “One walking wounded,” he pronounced. “Take him to the second tent.”
The rifleman with the bandaged jaw shook his head, pain flaring in his eyes and indicated his comrade with the same urgency he'd shown Tamsyn before.
“All right, I'll see to him,” the surgeon said with a hint of impatience. “I can't promise much, but that leg will have to come off… Hey, you there, bring that stretcher.” He hailed two orderlies, running past at the double.
They stopped and came over, lifting the wounded man onto the stretcher. Only when he saw his friend carried inside to the faint hope to be found in the butchery of the tents did the other rifleman go off with the orderly, sticking his hand out to Tamsyn in mute gratitude before he did so.
“Looks like we have work to do, Cesar,” Tamsyn said swinging into the saddle. “I know you'll hate it, but we can't stand around twiddling our thumbs.”
She rode back toward the city, looking for wounded who could manage this awkward but speedy form of transportation.
Within the city walls Julian St. Simon, miraculously unscathed but blackened from head to toe from gunfire, stood in the central square and took stock. He'd been at the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo three months before and, horrendous though that had been, it had been nothing compared to this April night.
