The Sergeant's Lady

by Susanna Fraser

  They found the Rifles camped in an olive grove on the other side of the village that was the army’s headquarters for the night. When they arrived, a group of soldiers crowded around to admire the baby. Will left them and went ahead to seek shaded shelter. Men were scattered about, dozing beneath trees, cleaning equipment, mending shirts—the usual activities of a regiment at rest. Some had rigged tents from their blankets, but most would sleep under the stars. In June it was no hardship.

  As Will scouted out the ground, he heard his captain call his name. Will spotted Captain Matheson seated in a camp chair beside a folding table just outside his tent, along with the company’s newest officer. Lieutenant Montmorency had been with the regiment for less than a fortnight and had yet to get his first taste of battle.

  Will strolled over and saluted both officers. Captain Matheson, a slightly built blond man with a deceptively mild face, indicated a third chair. “Please sit down, Atkins. And have some coffee.”

  In his restless mood Will had no desire to sit and sip coffee. So he took the chair with a sigh, stretching out his legs as best he could.

  “Pour the sergeant some coffee, Lieutenant,” Matheson said.

  Montmorency blinked and frowned, as if he resented being asked to perform even so small a service for an enlisted man. But he had been ordered to serve coffee as surely as Will had been ordered to drink it, so he silently poured the steaming brew from a tin pot into a tin mug and passed it to Will.

  He thanked him politely and took a careful sip. It was strong. Though Captain Matheson was not a wealthy man, he could afford the little luxuries that made an officer’s life more comfortable. He owned a spacious tent, this table and these chairs, a fine horse—and enough coffee that he needn’t brew it weak.

  Montmorency, however, seemed hardly richer than Will himself. He hadn’t joined the regiment laden with expensive, impractical gear; he had only a small tent, and he marched on foot like the men.

  Captain Matheson cleared his throat. “The birth went well, I trust?”

  Will nodded and took another sip of his coffee. “Yes, sir. A healthy girl.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it. Perhaps you’ll become a man-midwife when this war is over.”

  Will grinned. “William Atkins, Accoucheur. Has a ring to it.”

  “Accoucheur.” Montmorency corrected his pronunciation. Apparently the “ch” sounded like a “sh.”

  Will glanced at Matheson, whose eyes had narrowed, but he didn’t need the captain to defend him from a young puppy of a lieutenant. “That’s the worst of being a reading man, sir,” he said easily. “You learn words without ever hearing them said, and sometimes you guess wrong.”

  “You’re a reading man, Sergeant?” The lieutenant’s calf-brown eyes widened.

  “All our NCO’s can read, Lieutenant. You should know that by now.” Captain Matheson leaned back in his chair, rebuke no longer concealed.

  Montmorency flushed. “I remember, sir. But being able to read and being a reading man aren’t quite the same, are they?”

  “Fair enough,” the captain allowed. “But Atkins here is as well-read as many an officer. More so than some I could name.”

  “Maybe in English, sir,” Will said. “It’s not as though I know Greek or Latin, or more French than it takes to accept their surrender.”

  “Atkins is a man of many talents,” Matheson said. “To which he must now add midwifery.”

  Will smiled as he swallowed more of the coffee, which had at last cooled enough not to scald his tongue. “I wouldn’t say that, sir. I had help—two ladies of the Sixteenth and their servants. I daresay you know them, since they’re both Scottish. Mrs. Arrington and Mrs. Gordon.”

  Captain Matheson laughed. “I know them, aye, but you haven’t quite got the right of it, Sergeant. Helen Gordon is an Englishwoman who had the wisdom to marry a Scotsman, while Anna Arrington is a Highlander who was foolish enough to marry an Englishman. No offense meant to the present company, of course.” His blue eyes twinkled as he inclined his head to his English companions.

  “The Englishman she married is a fool, that much is certain,” Will said.

  “Ah, so you met Captain Arrington as well, then.”

  “I did.” If Lieutenant Montmorency had not been there, Will would’ve said, I had that displeasure, but he kept his tone as neutral as he could as he briefly described Arrington’s attempt to ride down Mrs. Arrington and Juana, and the actions Will had taken to protect them.

  Captain Matheson listened coolly, then turned to the young lieutenant. “What do you think, Montmorency?”

  The lieutenant’s eyes widened as if he would have preferred to avoid the question, but he answered readily enough. “Why, that all were in the wrong. The other captain should not have offered injury to women, but that cannot justify insubordination.”

  “Can it not? If you came upon a senior officer about to commit murder, would it be insubordinate to prevent him?”

  “I—I suppose not.”

  “Exactly. You did well, Sergeant, and if he comes to me, I’ll tell him what I think of a man who’d seek to have another man flogged for protecting women. In any case, you’ll be many miles beyond his reach soon enough.”

  “Sir?” Will had heard nothing about any pending movements of the army that would separate the Ninety-Fifth from the Sixteenth.

  “Convoy duty, I’m sorry to say,” Captain Matheson said. “There’s a wounded convoy leaving for Lisbon in about a week, and the company is to escort it. I won’t be going—I’ve been detached to General Craufurd’s staff until you return. O’Brian will be in command. It’s tedious work, but it should prove a valuable opportunity for you, Montmorency. Look to O’Brian and the sergeants, and you’ll learn how to go on.”

  “Yes, sir,” Montmorency said.

  Will hid a sigh. Convoy duty was a bore and would be the more so with a new officer to train. But perhaps once he was halfway to Lisbon, he would accept that he could do nothing for Mrs. Arrington and stop worrying over her fate.

  “And, Atkins,” the captain said, “I was hoping you could execute a few commissions for me in Lisbon.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Captain Matheson leaned down to reach into a satchel at his feet. He pulled out a slim volume and offered it to Will. “Perhaps this will relieve the tedium of the journey.”

  Will took it and opened it to the title page. “Shakespeare’s sonnets,” he read. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I thought I should lend you something edifying to make up for that last book.”

  Will grinned. He and Captain Matheson were as good friends as their disparity in rank allowed, largely because of their shared interest in books, any books, no matter how high or low their subject matter. “On the contrary, sir,” he said, “I found Aristotle’s Master-Piece most educational.”

  Montmorency frowned. “Aristotle? But I thought you didn’t know Greek.”

  “Oh, it’s in English, sir.” Will kept his face sober, though he was just petty enough to enjoy the lad’s ignorance after the “accoucheur” matter.

  “And if Aristotle had anything to do with its contents, I’ll eat my hat,” Captain Matheson added dryly. At Montmorency’s continued bafflement he offered a brief explanation. “’Tis a manual containing, among other things, advice on the most intimate matters between man and woman.”

  “Some of which is even sound,” Will added. “Though I have my doubts that an adulterous woman could hide the evidence of her crimes by thinking of her husband’s face and form at the critical moment, to make any offspring conceived look like the husband instead of the lover.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Matheson agreed. “And if the lady in question wanted to think of her husband at such moments, why, she wouldn’t make a cuckold of him, would she?”

  Will and the captain chuckled while Montmorency smiled thinly. That lad was much too serious. If he was to survive in the army, he needed to learn to have a proper laugh.

 
“You should go to your mess, Atkins,” the captain said. “Bailey shot a hare and gave it to the sergeants in Juana’s honor. You won’t want to miss your share.”

  He set down his half-finished coffee. “No indeed. That will be a feast.”

  ***

  George Montmorency found himself, yet again, alone. After Atkins had left, Captain Matheson had dismissed George as well. Now he wandered around the edge of the olive grove avoiding contact with anyone until dinner at the officers’ mess. He wished he were home. He had never wanted an army career, and at two-and-twenty he felt absurdly old to begin one. Many of his fellow junior lieutenants and ensigns were mere boys. And if the choice of regiment had been his own, he never would have selected the Rifles. They were respected for their daring on the battlefield, but George would have preferred a more genteel regiment. Yet he needed to rise quickly for the sake of his mother and sisters. And the easiest way to do that was to join a regiment that saw a great deal of the fighting and hope one was lucky enough to fill a vacancy made by combat rather than create one.

  Deciding he should wear a fresh shirt for dinner, George crawled into his tent. He frowned to discover he had only one clean shirt left. Normally he took his laundry to Juana Martínez, but that was impossible with her just that day delivered of a child. How long did it take women of her sort to recover? Perhaps a woman who had given birth along the roadside and then made it to camp before sundown needed no respite from her usual tasks. He would ask Lieutenant O’Brian at dinner.

  George wished the Rifles had been assigned a place in the village that formed the center of the army’s encampment. Then the officers would’ve been billeted in a house. He hated sleeping in this shabby tent, hardly better than the soldiers’ makeshift shelters, but he could not afford a better tent or a horse. He alone of Third Company’s officers had to march alongside the men. Even rough-hewn, barely genteel Lieutenant O’Brian had a sturdy little Spanish horse.

  But George must endure to save Mama and his dear sisters from poverty and degradation. He wished any path other than the army had been open to him. It wasn’t that he feared combat. He heartily disliked campaign life, marching through dust and heat, sleeping in the open air and being forced to sip coffee with a man who would have been beneath his notice in England.

  ***

  Dan appeared at Will’s elbow before he could find the sergeants’ mess on his own.

  “Where’s Juana?” Will asked.

  “Under the best shade tree in the camp, being treated like a queen. I came to find you. Bailey gave us a hare.”

  “Captain Matheson mentioned it.”

  They began walking. “Speaking of captains,” Dan said. “Did you tell him about Captain Arrington?”

  “I did, and he said I did exactly right.”

  “Of course, but did you need to be so…flashy about it?”

  Will clenched his hand into a fist. “What was I to do? Let him ride Juana down?”

  “Were you protecting Juana or Mrs. Arrington?”

  “Both of them,” Will admitted.

  “You had no business stepping between a man and his wife.”

  Dan was right. The law gave a husband such absolute power over his wife that Will had no more right to prevent Captain Arrington from dragging his wife away than he would’ve had to countermand an officer’s orders. But as a man who had been brought up from the cradle to respect and honor women, Will had only contempt for men who ordered their wives about like slaves.

  “He doesn’t deserve her,” Will said.

  “Maybe not, but it’s still no business of yours.”

  “He doesn’t deserve her,” Will repeated. “If I had a wife like her, I’d—”

  “You’d what? Worship at her feet?”

  He ignored his friend’s sarcasm. “No. But I’d be sure to give her the consideration she deserved, and every day I’d let her know how much I valued her.”

  “I’m sure you would, Will. I’m sure you would.”

  ***

  The village where the army had stopped for the night was too small to house the entire force, but the Sixteenth had managed to commandeer a decent shopkeeper’s cottage for its officers’ billet. Those officers who were unmarried or whose wives didn’t follow the drum were piled in several to a room, sharing beds or preparing to sleep wrapped in blankets on the floor, but Anna and Sebastian had been given a small garret bedroom to themselves.

  He was seated on the narrow bed, waiting for her when she arrived. It was a tiny, spartan room, with no furniture but the bed, an olive-wood chest, their own small traveling trunks, and a rickety washstand with a chipped porcelain ewer atop it. When Sebastian stood, his head almost brushed the ceiling, and he seemed to swell to fill the entire space. Anna looked at him and the bed they would share with loathing, but she squared her shoulders and stepped across the threshold.

  “Good evening, Sebastian,” she said coolly. “Lieutenant-Colonel Kent invited us to dine with him in half an hour’s time, so I must change my dress.”

  “You must never again defy me as you did today, madam.” Each syllable cut like the lash of a whip. “I will not have it.”

  This wasn’t quite the Sebastian whom Anna had endured for the past two years. That man had been cold, distant, only occasionally overt in his anger. The new Sebastian frightened her, but she was so tired of trying to please a man who could not be appeased, so she pushed her fear aside and embraced her anger.

  “Will you not?” She tipped her head back to meet his cold, pale eyes. “I fear you are doomed to disappointment, for if I see someone in need of my help, I must do all in my power to aid them.”

  “The common rabble of the army do not need your help.”

  “Unless you propose to fight a war with nothing but officers,” she said, “the common rabble, as you call them, are necessary to the campaign and therefore, even aside from the demands of humanity itself, they are worthy of our attention.”

  “Perhaps. But their whores are not.”

  “She is not a whore! And even if she was, if a woman had no choice but to enter such a state, she would still be deserving of compassion.”

  “Of course you would have sympathy with whores, madam.”

  “I have never played you false, Sebastian, as you ought well to know by now.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Anna gritted her teeth. This was the old argument, their oldest, and it was useless to fight it again, so she changed her tack. “Helen helped deliver the baby, too, and Alec thinks she did right.”

  “If your cousin chooses to allow his wife to help birth some Spanish whore’s mongrel whelp, that is his affair, but you shall comport yourself respectably in the future.”

  Mongrel whelp? He called that beautiful baby she’d cradled in her arms today a mongrel whelp?

  “Damn you,” she said, swept up in a current of anger stronger than she had ever experienced. “I’m glad I’m barren, since the world is thereby spared any more of your misbegotten spawn.”

  Sebastian turned bright red. “Bitch.” Lightning-fast, his right hand flew up and he slapped her hard across the face.

  Anna staggered backward under the force of the blow and stumbled into the washstand. The ewer fell to the floor and shattered in a noisy crash. Water splashed the hem of her dress and broken pieces crunched beneath her booted feet as Sebastian seized her by the shoulders and shoved her against the wall.

  Alec appeared in the doorway.

  “Arrington, get out,” he said.

  “This isn’t your concern,” Sebastian spat, digging his fingers harder into Anna’s shoulders.

  “My cousin will always be my concern.”

  “A cousin is far less to a woman than her husband.”

  “That depends upon the husband. I am also your commanding officer, and your behavior while we are guests in someone’s home is indubitably my concern,” Alec added with a pointed glance at the porcelain shards scattered across the floor. “So you will leave this hous
e until you are prepared to comport yourself as a gentleman within it.”

  Sebastian’s face still blazed red with fury, but he was not one to disobey a direct order. He unclenched his hands from Anna’s shoulders and stalked from the room without another word.

  Anna’s knees wobbled and her eyes burned, but she would not let herself weep or faint. She took a deep breath and tried to speak, but no words came out.

  Alec hurried to her side. “Are you badly hurt, lass?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing!”

  He lifted a hand as if to touch her sore cheek, and Anna turned her face aside.

  “What are we to do with you?” Alec asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You’ve nothing to apologize for. I rue the day you met Arrington, that’s all.”

  “So do I,” she said. “So do I.”

  “Come along, lass. You won’t stay here tonight. You’ll sleep with Helen and the children, and I’ll guard the door.”

  “Surely that isn’t necessary,” she said, though she obediently followed him out of the room and down the corridor to the slightly larger chamber where he and Helen were quartered.

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  An anxious Helen awaited them at the door, and Anna was obliged to submit to her embrace and to accept a cool, damp cloth to press against her stinging cheek. “Where are the children?” She strove for normalcy.

  “María took them downstairs to have a bath, so they didn’t hear any of that, thank God.”

  “But everyone else did,” Anna said gloomily.

  “Not exactly what was said, but we couldn’t help hearing that you were quarreling.”