by Louise Allen
‘Water, ma’am, that’ll be the most welcome,’ the man advised her, handing back the flask.
‘Then that’s what I will do.’ Julia found a niche with a statue in it, incongruously elegant over looking the bloody scene. She sat her hat on its head, stuffed basket and cloak behind it, rolled up her sleeves and went to find the kitchens.
It was raining and almost dark when she stumbled out again at last. She had done all she could for the day, now she needed to wash, eat, snatch some sleep before she returned in the morning. The rain lashed down as she toiled up the hill and she tried not to think what it must be like out there in the darkness knowing that tomorrow you were going into battle.
Hal pulled his heavy felted cloak right over his head and leaned against Max’s front legs. Above him, the big horse shifted, cocked up a hoof and, resigned to the rain, settled again under the scant shelter of a spindly tree. Hal reached up to make sure he had loosened the girth and that the other cloak was still over the saddle and Max’s dappled rear quarters as a loud squelching announced that someone was rash enough to be moving about in the downpour.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Trooper ’arris, sir.’
Ah yes, the man who had taken over from Godfrey at the races. Godfrey was still off sick with pains in his guts and constant vomiting. Hal wondered if the man would rather be here or on his sick bed. He knew which bed he would like to be in. A fantasy of Julia, slim and curved and pale against the dark green silk bed cover his imagination conjured up sent flickering heat into his loins and he groaned.
What on earth had prompted him to speak as he had? Hal rubbed cold hands across his face. He must have been out of his mind. And he had hurt her too. She was growing fond of him, perhaps even, if that half-spoken word in the carriage had been what he suspected, thought herself in love with him.
She had every right to expect an honourable proposal, and she was too innocent to under stand why he could not, must not, offer marriage to a virtuous, well-brought-up young woman. She deserved someone of sub stance, of moral worth. Someone with a future.
It was not as though she came from the sort of aristocratic back ground where even the daughters were well aware of the rackety lives their fathers and brothers lived.
He had no business indulging those half-under stood urges towards stability and family at her expense. Look at him now! Half drowned in a sodden field and likely to come back tomorrow wounded, if he came back at all. What sort of husband would he make if he lived—leaving aside his character, reputation and general un suitability?
So it had been right to tell her, bluntly, even if it left her hating him. But it hadn’t. The memory of her innocent mouth under his, her instinctive, sensual, unawakened response filled him with a kind of humble gratitude.
Was she thinking of him? He thought she would be, safely tucked away in Antwerp. That last kiss that had turned his brain and his will power into jelly, was not given lightly.
Of course, if he was killed tomorrow, she was safe from him, he thought ruefully. And if he wasn’t, he would just have to make certain he never saw her again. She would think he was having second thoughts about her if he did, think he was going back on his word.
Hell. Hal scrubbed at his cold face again. Did it matter what she thought of him, so long as she did not make a mistake she would regret for the rest of her life?
That was a plan: be killed or be a bastard. Now all he had to do was get through tomorrow. God, he was itching to get into action. The frustration of that long, hard ride only to arrive after dark with orders to help cover the retreat, was intense.
Max shifted, his neck snaking out to bite something. ‘Hey!’ Hal twisted round to see what he was attacking.
‘Sorry, sir. I must have got too close.’ It was Harris again. ‘Big bugger isn’t he? Nasty teeth.’
‘Yes.’ Hal closed his eyes, ‘He’s as good as an armed bodyguard.’
The rain lashed down.
‘They’ve broken! The Old Guard has broken!’
The cry ran along the front of the Allied lines from the right flank to where the Light Dragoons fretted in reserve on the counter-slope of the left flank. Since eleven that morning when the first attack began at Hougoumont, the Dragoons had waited, their only occupation dodging fire, rallying faltering units ahead of them and making occasional forays to hold the extreme end of the line.
Now it was past seven in the evening. Hal had a hole through the top of his shako, a slight wound where a spent bullet had hit his right upper arm, and a burning sense of frustration. ‘Damn it, Will,’ he said to Captain Grey, who was standing beside him. ‘When the hell is Vandeleur going to let us go?’
‘Any minute now.’ Will grinned and gestured at the rider galloping flat out from Wellington’s position.
‘Mount up,’ Hal yelled, swinging into the saddle. ‘Form line!’
There was cheering all around him as he steadied Max. Vandeleur was indicating a mass of French cavalry in front of a battery of artillery that was still holding firm. The objective was clear: take the guns.
The next few minutes were bloody, fast and deadly. The French cavalry steadied, formed up and discharged a hail of carbine fire before turning, as though on parade, and cantering to the rear through the guns. Out of the corner of his eye, Hal saw Will slump over his pommel. He reined Max back, pulled his friend straight in the saddle and turned his horse’s head to the rear, sending it on its way with a slap on the rump. It was all he could do for him.
As he lowered his sabre and charged the nearest gun, he saw Trooper Harris beside him on an ugly roan, teeth bared, sabre ready. Together they charged through either side of the gun, slashing and stabbing until the gun crew fell or fled.
For a moment, they were alone on the far side of the artillery line in a swirling fog of smoke. Hal grinned at Trooper Harris and the man grinned back before he turned his horse hard into Max and drove his sabre straight at Hal’s heart.
The blow took his breath with the shock and the pain, then the blade hit something, skidded, dragged down, slashing his ribs, his arm, his hip, his thigh. Reeling in the saddle, stunned by the direction of the attack, Hal tried to parry with his own weapon. Then the world exploded. He was conscious of falling, of a great roar in his ears, of pain almost every where and of Harris falling too. Then everything went black.
Julia, weary to her bones, sat at the foot of the stairs in the Hôtel de Flandres and wept out of sheer relief. The first word of victory had come at midnight. By dawn on the nineteenth, an exhausted city knew they were safe, that Napoleon had been defeated and the Allies were triumphant.
After a day of constant cannon fire and of rumours, each worse than the one before, it seemed impossible that it was over. Despite files of French prisoners trailing through the town and the sight of captured Eagles, the news had been constantly bad, and as late as ten that night, word was that the Prussians had not yet got through to join up with Welling ton.
Some Light Dragoon officers had come in, none of them seriously wounded, none of them with any firm news of Hal except that he had been all right when they had last seen him. Knowing that a bullet could have hit him seconds after that, the news was not particularly comforting.
She must have dozed a little, despite the noise, for the next thing she knew, was someone calling her name. Blinking, Julia straightened up, stiff from huddling on the cold marble against the carved balustrade.
‘Miss Tresilian!’
‘Captain Grey.’ She got to her feet and hurried to where he was standing, sup ported by an equally battered-looking comrade. ‘You are wounded?’ There was dried blood on his jacket and his arm was in a sling.
He grimaced. ‘In and out. I’ll live.’ He looked as though he wished he had not said that.
For a long moment Julia stared at him before she could find the courage and the words. ‘Where is Hal?’
‘He didn’t come back from the charge.’
The blood seemed to have drained t
o her toes. Julia heard a high-pitched buzz. Doggedly she fought the faintness, hung on until she could ask, ‘Is he dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ Will Grey said and she blessed him for his honesty. She could not have coped with easy lies.
‘Where?’ she asked, surprised to find her voice steady.
‘We were far out on the left flank, east of the Charleroi road. We charged the French guns on the ridge: I last saw him as we hit the bottom of the valley.’ He put out his left hand and caught hers. ‘Why do you ask?’
Why? He expected her to leave Hal on the battlefield to die of his wounds or, if he was dead already, to abandon him to scavengers and an unmarked grave? Hal was her man, just like the wounded officer had said the day before. That last kiss at the duchess’s ball had told her that he wanted her, even if he did not love her. Now he needed her. Whether he accepted it or not, he was her man.
‘Because I am going to go and find him, of course,’ she said as though explaining something very obvious to a child. ‘And bring him back.’
Chapter Fourteen
The air was hot, humid and it stank of putrefaction, buzzed with flies. Three miles after they had passed through the battlements and out towards Ixcelles, Julia got down from the gig and was violently sick, then she doggedly climbed up to her seat again and, despite George’s pleas to turn back, made him drive on.
The early morning sunlight filtered prettily through the leaves of the beech trees as if mocking the people beneath it. It played over the carcases of dead horses, the scattered human bodies, the pools of foul water. Progress was pain fully slow: the road with its dips and summits was clogged with broken-down carts and abandoned kit, and they constantly had to stop for the wounded making their painful way back to Brussels.
‘Don’t look, Miss,’ George kept saying as she craned to stare at every blue jacket she saw.
‘I’ve got to,’ she insisted. The light, the need to see, was why she had not set out last night. Instead, she had forced herself to eat, then to doze restlessly before getting up before dawn to pack everything she thought she might possibly need into the gig. George had stuffed a battered holdall in too, muttering that it had some ‘handy stuff’ in it.
They were deep into the forest of Soignes now. It seemed a dream, that idyllic picnic in the woods. Or perhaps this was the dream: a waking night mare. The village of Waterloo, where Will Grey said some of the wounded officers had been taken, was nine miles from Brussels, the battlefield another mile or so on from that. They passed hamlets of low cottages with names of wounded officers chalked on the doors. Julia got down and checked them all, but saw none she recognized.
The gig lurched on along the deeply rutted way. It must be torment for the wounded on the unsprung wagons. If Hal was badly hurt, she had no idea if they would be able to get him back in the gig. She set her jaw against the jolting and tried to sit up straight. She was going to get him back, whatever it took. Alive or dead—or she would not be able to live with herself.
At last they made it to Waterloo village. The straggling street was lined with small houses and white washed cottages, all dominated by the small, domed church standing high over the deep trench of the road. Neat signs, very different from the chalk scrawls they had been passing, showed where officers had been billeted the night before the battle, and then there were the scrawled names again: Gordon, Picton, de Lancey.
‘So many senior officers,’ she murmured as she read them.
‘Don’t lead from the back, our generals,’ George observed. ‘He’s not here, is he?’
‘No.’ Julia closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘We’re going to have to get to the battlefield.’
She would have night mares about this for the rest of her life, she realized as the gig crested the incline up to the hamlet of Mont St Jean and the ground opened up before her. It was a scene from Dante’s Inferno. There were bodies every where, heaped and singly. There were parts of bodies. There were dead horses and pitiful wounded ones, wandering amongst the men who staggered and crawled towards the Brussels road and some hope of safety and relief from their thirst and pain.
Groups of people were walking slowly among the carnage, stooping, turning over bodies. People like her, she realized, seeing a weeping woman.
‘Bloody looters,’ George muttered, and she saw that not all were seeking loved ones or trying to give aid.
‘Where to start?’ Julia forced herself to concentrate. If she let herself be swallowed up in the sheer horror of this, she would stumble around in this charnel house until she collapsed exhausted. ‘Captain Grey said they were on the left flank.’ George turned the horse onto a lane, and they both looked out to their right where the ground sloped down in muddy confusion to a slight valley and then up the other side to a low ridge where men could be seen dragging guns away.
‘Miss Tresilian!’ A figure in a filthy, tattered uniform was limping towards them. Once that jacket had been scarlet and gold. Julia struggled to recall where she had seen the officer before, then remembered: with Hal after Lady Conynham’s party.
‘Mr…Bredon? Rick?’ She recalled the eager smile, the enthusiasm for battle. Now he looked as though he had walked through Hades. ‘Are you injured?’ She scrabbled in the basket at her feet and found a water flask and the brandy. ‘Here.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ He took a long draft of the water then a gulp of the spirits and grinned, his teeth white in his dirty face. ‘God, that’s better. What are you doing here? It isn’t fit for a lady.’
‘Looking for Major Carlow. Have you seen him?’
‘Yes.’ The smile faded and he stood looking up at her, his face bleak.
‘He is dead?’ Somehow the question came out quite steadily, even though there was a lump in her throat and she had gone quite cold. ‘No.’ Oh, thank God. ‘At least, he wasn’t when we found him last night. We took him back to a hovel in Mont St Jean. Took three of us just to get him away from that damned horse of his. We took him and the trooper he was all tangled up with. The horse followed, trying to bite us, the bu—wretched creature. There was no medical help, not there then. We chalked his name up. But frankly, ma’am, I don’t think he will have made it through the night. I’m damned sorry.’
‘I looked, I didn’t see…his name.’ Her breathing was all over the place. Julia found she could hardly articulate now.
‘Not the cottages on the road—they were all full. Go behind, on the right. Just a hovel, really.’ He pointed. ‘Ma’am.’ He caught the bridle and held the horse. ‘You’ve got to be prepared. If he’s alive now, I don’t think he’ll last much longer; and it isn’t pretty.’
‘No,’ Julia said, swallowing the tears. ‘I don’t expect it is. Thank you, Rick. I hope you get home safe, soon.’
Hal wondered, with some impatience, how much longer it was going to take to die. He had not realized that there could be this much pain. His body was not doing the decent thing and giving up, that was for sure. He couldn’t even manage to faint, which would have helped.
He turned his head on the lumpy straw they had dumped him on and found that he was staring into the open eyes of Trooper Harris. Oh well, perhaps the man would finish the job he had started before that shell landed right on top of them.
‘Why?’ he croaked.
The other man grinned, a ghastly rictus of pain and black humour. ‘Money was good.’
‘That damn Gypsy, Hebden.’ Hal’s eyes wanted to close but now he fought to stay conscious.
‘Nah.’ Harris must be in a worse state than he was from that shell. Hal wondered if he had taken the full blast, ironically sheltering his intended victim. The man was grey under the blood, his lips white. ‘Don’t know any Gypsy. This was a gent. Hundred guineas: fifty then, fifty when he got the news you were dead. All for sticking a knife in your ribs and wrapping you up in some damn rope.’ He gave a grunt of amusement that made him gasp. His eyes rolled back and he lost consciousness.
‘Wake up, damn you!’ Hal swore
at him until one muddy-brown eye dragged open. ‘What do you mean, a gent?’
‘A real one, sounded like you, but older. I think. Supercilious bastard. Not that I saw him, just that one glimpse of his eyes when the light caught them. Eyes like death…’ His voice trailed off into a rattling cough.
Hal lay watching the dead man, his mind sluggishly trying to make some sense of what he had said. Not Hebden-Beshaley—the half-Gypsy gem dealer was just two years Hal’s senior. And even when he was speaking with care, there was still that lilt to his voice, unlike Hal’s upper-class drawl. But the rope—that must be another damned silken rope, Hebden’s calling card, the reference to the rope that peers were hanged with.
Got to get up. Got to warn Marcus. He tried to move something, anything—and the pain hit him like a hammer blow, leaving him gagging, the sweat soaking his body. Had he lost a leg? An arm? He tried to raise his head to look, but couldn’t. He heard a horse give a sudden, sharp neigh: Max? No, he must be dead. The place he was in was growing dark now, and he sensed the darkness was within him, not the room.
Goodbye, Julia. So this is it then. This is dying…
‘Hal! Hal, open your eyes! Hal, darling, please!’
And this is Heaven. That was fast, he thought hazily. Didn’t think I’d deserve Heaven. And what’s Julia doing here? Or perhaps all angels sound like Julia. But something was wrong.
‘Why the hell is it still hurting?’ he asked querulously.
‘Because you are wounded. Lie still.’
As opposed to what? he wondered. Saddling up for a review? ‘No option,’ he managed. ‘Can’t move.’
‘Can you open your eyes?’
It was Julia, he realized, dragging the lids apart and trying to focus on the intent face looking down into his. ‘No!’
‘Don’t be silly, you’ve got them open.’ She was crying, he realized. Smiling and crying.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he managed. ‘Go away.’ But she was not listening to him.
