The Ravishing of Lady Jane Ware rb-10
Page 40
Full realization of the past then flooded back to Roger and he asked anxiously, 'Have you seen aught of an English girl? She was wearing men's clothes. We parted up on the cliff, a few miles east of the town.'
It was the lady who replied. 'Yes. You have no need to be concerned for her. She now lies in bed in the next room. It was she who took my husband and others back the way she had come, to find and bring you in. By the time they returned she was near overcome with exhaustion and distraught with anxiety. I'd not have wagered a penny herring that we'd succeed in reviving you, but I told her I was confident we could; so she was persuaded by me to imbibe a sleeping draught. When you have finished this wine, I am going to prescribe one for you, too.'
It was daylight when Roger was roused by a soft kiss on his lips. Mary, clad in a dressing gown much too large for her, was smiling down at him. Quickly she told him how he had been rescued.
'After you had sent me off on my own,' she said, 'I suddenly had a feeling that 'twas not really your intent to try to get to Riga. My belief was confirmed by looking at the bits of honey and marzipan you had made me take. I felt certain you had given all we had left to me. You had already become so weak that, without sustenance of any kind, I doubt if you could have walked another ten miles, let alone muster the strength to break into a house and rob a larder. I was much of a mind to turn back. But I realised you were giving your life for me, so I decided that I ought to accept it and do my utmost to save yours as well.
'On the outskirts of the town I met a peddler and enquired of him the whereabouts of the town hall. He kindly took me there, and I asked if there was an English family living in the town. Good people there gave me hot soup and drove me in a sleigh here, to Mr. and Mrs. Colgin. To them I told the truth about you; that, although wearing a French uniform, you were an English gentleman in disguise. A party was quickly assembled and we went out with lanterns to search for you. In the dark I don't think we should ever have found you, but we saw a most strange light, like a will-o'-the-wisp, and we walked in that direction to find out what it could be. As we approached, it vanished, but below where it had been hovering was your body.'
Roger felt certain that the light must have been an emanation from Georgina's spirit, and that by the strange psychic link between them she had saved him yet again. But he could not spoil Mary's belief that she alone had been responsible on this occasion; and, indeed, his guardian angel could not have caused his half frozen body to be recovered and revived. Taking her hand, he squeezed it and said:
'My splendid Mary. 'Twas stupid in me not to have thought of sending you ahead of me, into a town earlier. But until we had been reduced to such desperate straits I would have been loath to allow you to face the dangers of the road alone. As long, too, as we were in the heart of Russia, we could scarce expect to come upon any English people who could believe me to be their countryman and give me their protection. It is to your courage and good sense that I owe my life.'
She shook her head. 'But, my love, 'tis to you that I owe mine. It was your willingness to die, so that I might live that saved us both.'
An hour later a doctor, who had been sent for to examine Mary's eye, arrived. Roger knew nothing of this until Mr. Colgin came in to tell him the result. Whether she would regain the sight of the injured eye was very dubious, but it was just possible. If so, that would be due to the fact that ever since she had sustained the injury she had kept a bandage over it, and no attempt had been made to remove the great scab that had formed in the socket above the eyeball. The doctor had eased off the congealed mass of dried blood and tissue and at once put on a new bandage, which was not to be taken off for a week or more, except for brief intervals in a darkened room.
For three days they remained, recruiting their strength, with the hospitable Golgins. By the end of that time, when removing the bandage, Mary could distinguish the flame of a candle; but the doctor would not encourage her to believe that the sight of the eye would ever be fully restored.
Now that they had recovered from their terrible ordeal Roger hired a sledge to take them in to Riga. On Boxing Day they crossed the Baltic to Stockholm. Bernadotte was in residence at the Castle. He received them most kindly and from him they learned the fate of the Grand Army.
Far out on the Eastern flank Schwarzenberg had retreated across the frontier of his own country, having lost comparatively few of his men. To the west, the bulk of Macdonald's corps had escaped down the Baltic coast, and out in that direction St. Cyr had also got most of his troops away. But the whole of the rest of the army had piled up at Borisov on the Berezina.
That it had not been totally destroyed was due to four things: Kutuzov, cautious as ever, had ignored the Czar's order to launch an all out offensive; he was content to let the weather continue to do its worst and drive the enemy out of Russia. The Generals under him were hypnotized by Napoleon's unique reputation and, fearing to fall into a trap, had failed to press home their individual attacks. The Emperor's genius for waging war was no myth; his energy and initiative returned to him; within the limits that were possible he handled magnificently such units as were still capable of putting up a resistance. The tireless energy, the skill and the valour with which, with his rearguard, Ney held the Cossack hordes at bay.
But the bridges for the crossing of the Berezina were hopelessly inadequate. Only a few thousand could cross each hour, while tens of thousands remained massed and waiting to do so on the eastern bank. Platoff, Maloradovitch, Tchitchagov, Wittgenstein and Tormasov had all closed in from different directions. For three days and nights their hundreds of guns shelled the helpless host, sending it stampeding on to the ice of the river, which broke under their weight. Sergeant Gobbett had not exaggerated in his account of the ghastly scenes that had been enacted there. On the banks of the Berezina and in its icy waters Napoleon left thirty-two thousand dead.
By December 2nd the Grand Army had been reduced to eight thousand eight hundred effectives. There was no longer any talk of wintering behind the Berezina. The only hope left to the survivors was that the Russians would not pursue them across the Niemen into Poland. On the 3rd Napoleon prepared the world for his defeat by issuing the 29th Bulletin. In it, he blamed the loss of his army on the early commencement of the Russian winter. After admitting that the greater part of the greatest army ever assembled was dead, the Bulletin ended with a statement the cynicism of which can rarely, if ever, have been surpassed, 'The Emperor's health has never been better.'
Shortly afterwards he received news from Paris that small group of conspirators, led by a General Malet had sought to take advantage of his absence to launch a coup d'etat. He used this as an excuse to leave the remnant of his army. On December 5th, he assembled those of his senior Generals who were available at Smorgoni and told them that he was returning to Paris to raise another army. Then he drove off in his sleigh, leaving Murat in command.
As the leader of a cavalry charge, the King of Naples had no equal, but he had no stomach for the task with which he had been entrusted. Without even appointing a successor, he made off as swiftly as he could for Poland. Realising the utter hopelessness of further attempts to stem the Russian tide, Davout, Eugene and Mortier went with him.
Brave Oudinot managed to keep a thousand or so men together, and Ney continued to perform prodigies with his rearguard. With him remained old Lefebvre, whose washerwoman wife had once laundered Lieutenant Bonaparte's small clothes for nothing and who, for old times' sake, the Emperor had made a Marshal and Duke of Danzig. In the retreat he displayed all the finest qualities of the courageous Sergeant Major he once had been, and above which rank he was never qualified to be promoted.
From the Berezina the rabble fell back on Vilna. When it left the ruined city the Grand Army numbered only four thousand three hundred men. By then everything that the French had managed to drag with them, the last guns, baggage and trophies, had been lost. The suffering of the men was beyond description. At times the temperature fell to forty-five below ze
ro. From Vilna twelve thousand boy conscripts, most of whom had only just left their schools, came out to reinforce the army; within four days nine out of every ten of them were dead.
On December 14th a starved, freezing remnant reached the Niemen at Kovno. Of all the vast host that had crossed it in June, only one thousand of the Old Guard and Ney's rearguard, which numbered fewer than that,' remained disciplined units. Up to the bitter end the Russians continued to attack, but they had received orders from Alexander that they were not to invade Poland. During those desperate weeks Ney's deeds had won for him immortality. Musket in hand, he was the last man of the once Grande Armee to cross the bridge at Kovno to the safety of Polish soil.
During the campaign one hundred and fifty thousand reinforcements had reached the Grand Army, so the total number of men who took part in it was in the neighborhood of six hundred and fifty thousand. Only thirty thousand survivors succeeded one way or another, in reaching Poland. Of these only the corps on the flanks escaped the holocaust and only some ten thousand had made the journey to Moscow and back. To the dead must be added about one hundred thousand camp-followers. Horses to the number of one hundred and sixty thousand had been lost and over one thousand guns. It was the greatest military disaster in history.
When Bernadotte had given these particulars, acquired through his intelligence service, to Roger and Mary, he told them that the Swedish army would be ready to take the field in the spring, and would join with the Austrians and Prussians in a final campaign to crush the monster murderer. He then invited them to stay as long as they liked in Stockholm and promised, when they wished, to send them safely home.
Next day Roger took Mary into the city, to buy her suitable clothes, and an outfit for himself. In the Castle they had naturally been given separate rooms, and he observed the proprieties by not going into hers until the morning of the fourth day of their stay.
He then went in to her carrying an enormous cardboard box, put it on the bed and told her to open it. Packed in layers of tissue paper, it contained a magnificent wedding dress, which he had secretly ordered after the dressmaker had measured her. Mary had been sitting up in bed, a pink eye shade now covering her injured eye. At the sight of the dress she could not contain her delight, and kissed him fondly, as he said:
'Although you are a widow, I should like you to wear this today.'
For all their lives his relationship with Georgina would remain a thing apart; but he had no doubt whatever that she would be happy for him, and during the past four months he had come to love Mary very dearly. She had no dowry, no relations who moved in high society, was no great beauty; but she had courage, steadfastness and gaiety. He knew that she would make him a wonderful wife.
Later that morning, New Year's Day of 1813, when they met in the chapel of the Castle, Roger caught his breath with surprise and delight when he saw that Mary was no longer wearing pink eye shade. The only remaining sign of her injury was a white scar severing her left eyebrow, and she assured him that her sight was improving every day.
With the Swedish Royal Family as witnesses, they were married by a Lutheran pastor, and the Prince Royal of Sweden gave the divinely happy bride away.
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