The Officer and the Proper Lady

by Louise Allen

  ‘Can you get that dead man out of here, George? And then bring my things from the gig and find some water for Max?’ A bulky shadow moved behind her.

  Dead man? Hal’s confused mind wrestled with why the body was important. ‘No, strip him first. I want everything he’s got on him and his pack,’ he managed to get out before his voice failed him.

  ‘But…very well. George, do that if it makes Major Carlow easier in his mind. I’ll get my things.’

  His eyes were closed again, but he caught a faint trace of her scent as she moved in the stuffy little room. And despite everything, he smiled as the dark took him again.

  With her supplies around her feet, Julia stood and looked at Hal’s sprawled body, trying to think coherently. Whoever had brought him from the battlefield had laid him down fully clothed on a thin spread of straw. The right side of his body from shoulder to knee was soaked in blood, dark now, his uniform stiff with it and covered in flies. Through ominous gashes in the fabric, she could see flesh.

  She had to get him onto something higher and softer, out of his uniform and clean. That would make him more comfortable and she could see the extent of his wounds.

  She began to drag straw bundles into a rough oblong, then covered the top with a deep mattress of hay. A blanket went over that, then a sheet. She rolled another blanket into a pillow and looked up to find George, his arms full of equipment.

  ‘I’ve buried him under some loose earth out the back,’ he said, dumping the things in a corner and going out again. He returned leading their horse and tied it up next to Max, then watered both animals. ‘This big ’un’s got some damage, but nothing serious,’ he said. ‘I’ll wash him off and put some salve on to keep the flies off him.’

  ‘Can you help me get Major Carlow onto this bed I’ve made first?’ Julia asked, pushing her hair out off her damp forehead. ‘I need to get him stripped off so I can see where he is wounded.’

  ‘Best get his uniform off first before we move him then. You go outside, Miss, while I do it.’

  ‘George, one un conscious naked man is probably the least shocking thing I will see today,’ Julia said, taking hold of the left boot and starting to ease it off cautiously in case of broken bones.

  ‘Right you are, then.’ He took hold of the other boot and pulled too.

  It took, Julia estimated, an hour to strip Hal. Below the knees, his legs were unmarked, protected by the boots. His face and left side were covered in bruises and minor cuts, but nothing serious. But a savage slash went down his right side, shallow across his chest, worse down the arm and ribs, sickeningly deep across his thigh.

  ‘What’s this?’ George lifted a shattered object from over Hal’s heart.

  ‘My notebook. The sword blow must have hit it, skidded off.’

  ‘Saved his life, I reckon,’ George muttered. ‘Looks like he’d just been attacked by this swords man when a shell or something landed, took him and that dead trooper off their horses—that’ll be the bruising and the smaller cuts. Just got to hope there’s no damage inside where we can’t see.’

  Julia stared at Hal’s sprawled body and told herself that fainting was optional and she did not choose to faint. It was all a matter of will power. The buzzing faded away and she swallowed. ‘We had better check his back, wash it before we lift him up.’

  She had dreamed about this body, she realized as George rolled Hal onto to his left side and she knelt to wipe the sweat, dirt and blood away. Fantasised about its lean strength, imagined running her hands over the elegant muscles of his back, wondered how this man’s skin would feel under her soft palms. Now, her only desire was to heal it. There were old scars, white against the lightly tanned skin and she found them reassuring. He had survived wounds before, he would again.

  ‘Take his legs then, Miss. I’ll keep him as flat as I can.’ George knelt down, pushed both arms under Hal’s shoulders and hips, waited until Julia took hold of his ankles and then lifted, while she swung his legs over onto the make shift bed.

  ‘Moving him has opened the wounds up.’ Julia worried, beginning to sponge Hal’s face and left side, leaving the worst until last.

  ‘That’ll need sewing,’ George said, opening his mysterious bag.

  ‘You can do it?’ Julia twisted round to see him pulling a thin, curved needle and some black thread out of a pouch.

  ‘Aye. Well, I can stitch up a horse. Can’t be much different, I reckon. But we’ll need to get it all clean. You leave bits of cloth in that and it’ll fester. They call me a fussy old devil in the stables, but I’ve seen and I take note: clean wounds, clean hands and things heal better.’ He squinted at the point of the needle. ‘Don’t know why. I use lots of brandy too, that helps.’ He produced a flask and a bottle, poured dark liquid out and dropped the needle and thread into it.

  Julia began to work on the wounds with the warm water he brought her, a good handful of salt dissolved in it.

  ‘Salt water helps too,’ George explained, leaving her to it and going across to see to Max. ‘Don’t know why that works either, but you take a horse with sores on its legs and walk it in the sea, it’ll heal faster than one you don’t.’

  It would be worse with a gunshot she realized, making herself look dispassionately at what she was doing. A shot would force fabric deep into the flesh, a slashing wound did not. She worked her way up to his chest, laying linen cloths over each clean part of his body as she finished it to keep the flies off. As she started to work on the cut and bruised contusion where the notebook had been, Hal opened his eyes, dark, almost black with pain.

  ‘Go away,’ he croaked. ‘Should be in Antwerp.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘We will make you better. Drink this.’ It was clean water from Madame’s big kettle mixed with brandy. She slid one arm under his head to raise him a little and held it to his lips, watching some faint colour come back into his face as he swallowed an entire horn beaker full.

  ‘Don’t want you. Go away.’

  I must not be hurt by his words, she told herself. He’s in pain, he doesn’t know what he is saying.

  ‘Julia.’ His eyes were fixed on her face now, clear and forceful. Hal knew exactly what he was saying, she realized. ‘Who knows you are here?’

  ‘Captain Grey, Rick Bredon, my landlady,’ she said, puzzled. ‘The baron helped me stay in Brussels.’

  ‘Rick and Will can keep their mouths shut. You can bribe the landlady. Go back to Brussels now, Julia. Go to the baron.’

  ‘We cannot move you yet,’ she said with more calm than she was feeling. ‘George is going to sew up your wounds and then you must rest. All I have is the gig, you see, and I don’t think we can move you in that yet, there isn’t enough room for you to lie down.’

  ‘Leave me,’ he said urgently. His right hand moved as though to take her wrist and he gasped at the sudden pain. ‘It is bad enough as it is, but you’ll be ruined if you spend the night here.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter!’

  ‘Yes it does! If you stay, I will have to marry you. If I live. And you cannot marry me.’

  She sat back on her heels, staring at him. ‘You will live,’ she said as though she could make it so by force of will. ‘You cannot give up. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, I hear you. You should not be here. It was…foolish. Wrong. I have no desire to marry. Not you.’ The vehemence of his words exhausted him.

  Julia sat dumbly looking at the gaunt bruised face, the thin white lips, the closed eyes, and she struggled not to give way to tears. Foolish? No desire to marry… Not you. Was he trying to drive her away with words as weapons? Perhaps he was. Hal Carlow did not know her very well, if that was so. ‘Unfortunately, Major Carlow, you are going to have to put up with me,’ she said flatly. ‘I cannot leave you here or you will die and I do not want that on my conscience. When George is finished with Max, he will start on you. Do you want some more brandy?’

  The bruised eyelids dragged open. ‘Max?’

  ‘He is all ri
ght, just some cuts,’ Julia reassured him, trying not to feel jealous of a horse. ‘Drink this,’ she added, putting the flask to his lips. He was going to need it. She only wished she could drain it dry herself.

  Somehow she got through the stitching without having to rush outside to be ill again, chiefly by telling herself that if Hal had to put up with it, then she certainly could. She suspected that her presence—snipping each knot for George, then bandaging behind his seemingly endless row of stitches—was preventing Hal from venting his feelings in bad language: she just wished he would let go and faint.

  When it was finished and she got shakily to her feet, Hal opened his eyes and looked at George. ‘Thank you.’

  The groom grunted, then grinned. ‘You’re easier than a horse, guv’nor: never tried to kick or bite once.’ He began to tidy up his things, leaving Julia alone at Hal’s side.

  ‘Who took my clothes off?’

  ‘We did, George and I. And don’t look like that: your naked buttocks are not the worst thing I have seen today, believe me.’ She had actually made him blush, she realized. ‘Oh for goodness sake!’

  ‘You aren’t going, are you?’ he said wearily. ‘You’ve been missing from home all day, you’ve been seen on the battlefield and now, unless you leave now, you’ll be found here, nursing me. What were you thinking about? There is no hope for it: we are going to have to get married, Julia.’

  ‘I refuse.’ Her hands were shaking. A bandage she was trying to roll up escaped from her trembling fingers and fell into the scattered hay. ‘I do not want to marry a man who doesn’t want me.’ She realized she had held onto the memory of that ballroom kiss believing, deep down, that he wanted to marry her. And now it seemed, she had been wrong.

  The look he gave her was long, hard and unwavering. ‘I never said I did not want you. I said it was wrong to marry you, but marry me you will. The lesser of two evils, perhaps. You have saved my life, Julia. Now you will take my name, whether you like it or not.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Julia saw the first glimmerings of light and gave a little sob of exhausted relief. Somehow they had got through the night. Hal’s pronouncement about marriage was almost the last coherent thing he said before slipping into a fever that had him tossing and muttering through the hours of darkness.

  She and George had taken turns to sit by Hal’s side, one bathing him with cool water while the other fetched fresh from the well behind the building. The water, by a miracle, seemed un tainted although the hot night air was foul.

  Now, at last, it was light; the phantoms that had hung over her shoulder all night gibbering their messages of despair had fled with the dawn. Hal was going to live, she was beginning to hope, not just to tell herself she must believe it. Now the restlessness of the night had calmed, he felt cooler when she touched his brow, laid her hand on his chest.

  And she must marry him, she had decided after wrestling all night with her conscience, her desires and plain common sense. She was compromised. If she had only herself to think about, then she would refuse him, should refuse him. But there were Mama and Phillip to think about. Must they suffer because she had so hopelessly misunderstood Hal’s true feelings? If she was ruined, then it would make their situation so much harder.

  And Hal’s strong sense of honour would be salved, she recognized that. Which had to be the real—the only—reason he was so in sis tent now. Whatever he said, he did not want her, she knew that. At least, he might want her at the most basic level that a man wanted a woman. But he did not love her. The kiss at the ball haunted her, like a book in a language she could not read. If only she was not so in experienced, if only she could under stand what that had meant to him.

  George had pulled the gig into the hovel and now sat with his back against the upright supporting the wide opening, legs out stretched, one hand on the stock of the musket while he snored.

  Julia dragged some hay into a heap by the side of Hal’s bed, spread a blanket on top of it and curled up, trying to resign herself to this mess. She was going to marry a man whom she loved, but all that would bring him to the altar was his sense of honour. She had trapped him by compromising herself, but she found it hard to believe he would rather be dead than married. She could try and run away from him, she supposed. But she knew him too well now to believe he would let her go. This was where her heart and her desires warred with her revulsion against trapping him, how ever un wit tingly.

  And what about Mama and Phillip? If she married Hal, she would be the daughter in law of an earl. Hal might be the second son, he might not have great personal wealth, but he had connections, those essential networks of patronage and influence that would shape her brother’s life and ensure her mother would always be secure and at the heart of respectable Society. Duty again: if she had cavilled at Smyth, she could hardly refuse such a match with all its advantages for the family she loved.

  As a marriage prospect, Hal was far superior to any of the men she had held out hopes for. And he knew it, knew she wanted to marry. At least, she thought bitterly, he could not believe she had manufactured this battle to entrap him. What would marriage to Hal be like? The bedroom would be exciting; she knew that already. But everyday, domestic life? It was like trying to imagine a panther in a sitting room.

  Her lids were closing, fight though she might to stay awake. When had she last slept? Julia tried to remember as the blissful darkness swept her away.

  ‘Quiet, you’ll waken them.’

  Julia knew the whispering voice, but she could not place it, nor why there was a man in her bed chamber. Nor why, as she shifted to get more comfortable, the bed was so lumpy.

  And then she heard Hal’s voice. ‘My God, I am glad to see you!’

  She sat up with a jerk to find Will Grey, his arm in a sling, standing in the doorway with George.

  ‘Not half as glad as I am to see you both,’ he said, grinning past her.

  Julia twisted round, her feet tangling in the blanket. Hal was still flat on his back, looking like death. But not, as he had yesterday, as if he might actually die. He was grinning back at Captain Grey. ‘Have you got any clothes for me?’

  ‘No, but I’ve got food. And I can go and get you clothes.’ He walked across and sat on the end of the make shift bed. ‘Good morning, Miss Tresilian. You have him, I see.’

  ‘He doesn’t need clothes: he is not getting up,’ she retorted, refusing to be drawn into an exchange of pleas an tries, trying not to flinch at the captain’s choice of words. ‘Food would be good, but a cart we can lay him out flat in would be better. And should you be riding about? What about your arm?’

  ‘Be careful,’ Hal warned. ‘She’ll set George on you with a needle and thread.’

  ‘I’ve already been stitched up, thank you very much,’ Will said with a grimace. ‘And I can ride one-handed. The question is, are you fit to be moved?’

  ‘Damn it, yes.’

  ‘Damn it, no!’ Julia scram bled to her feet. ‘He needs at least one more day and night before he is jolted over that road—if there’s any road left. I heard the wounded being taken back yesterday, they were in agony.’

  ‘True enough.’ Will Grey scratched his chin. ‘A horse litter would be best.’

  ‘We have two horses, if you and George can make a litter.’

  ‘And how do you propose to get back?’ Hal demanded. ‘Walk?’

  Julia glared at him. ‘If I have to. And stop talking, you are getting heated and your fever will get worse. Captain Grey, please come outside, you are over-exciting him.’

  ‘Will—’

  ‘In a minute. I think we have to accept that Miss Tresilian is in charge.’ Captain Grey followed her out. ‘He is going to be a terrible patient, you realize that? The last time he was badly injured, he refused to rest until our commanding officer said he was tired of Lieutenant Carlow falling flat on his face every time he stood up and ordered him to bed.’ He strolled away until they were well out of earshot of the hovel and leaned agains
t a battered apple tree. ‘How serious is it?’

  ‘I am no doctor.’ Julia bit her lip. ‘He was struck with a sabre over the heart, but it slid off something and sliced down through his ribs, his arm and his thigh. By some miracle, it missed any major blood vessels. We have got it clean and stitched up, and his fever is down this morning, although I don’t expect it will stay down if he will not rest. But there was a shell burst very close that knocked him off his horse: I don’t know if there are any internal injuries. He is in a lot of pain, I think, but he will not admit it.’

  ‘He will tell me how he feels if I make him promise to in return for getting him back to Brussels as soon as possible,’ Will said. ‘I think you are right, he should not be moved today. I will go and talk to him, then we can decide what is needed and I’ll ride back to Brussels and fetch it. You can ride pillion with me. Then I’ll come back and that groom and I can bring him back tomorrow if he’s up to it.’

  ‘I will not leave him,’ Julia said flatly. ‘I do not trust him an inch. He’ll be bullying poor George into letting him get up, the minute my back is turned.’

  Will gave her a quizzical look, but all he said was, ‘I’ll go and speak to him now.’

  Julia waited until he turned the corner of the shack, then ran to the other end, near where Hal’s bed was, and put her ear to the wall. The planks that made the structure were full of knot holes and cracks and she could hear clearly.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Bloody,’ Hal said his voice faint against the energy of Will Grey’s.

  ‘Internal injuries?’

  ‘No, don’t think so. I am not, so George informs me, passing blood. Hard to tell though, everything hurts. Ow! Stop that, damn it!’

  ‘Your toes all work,’ Grey said calmly. ‘And your foot bends. And you can make a fist with your right hand to punch me with, even if you can’t raise that arm. I don’t think you’ve cut any tendons. It is muscle damage and you’ve got to keep the weight off that leg until it heals properly or you’ll be lame. So now, will you stop trying to move about and do as Miss Tresilian tells you?’