Vermillion (The Hundred Days Series Book 1)

by Baird Wells

  “Certainly not.” Matthew took her other hand, thumbs gently rubbing across Kate's knuckles. “You are entitled to all the bitterness you feel.”

  “I am, I know that now. I also offer myself up as a caution against vindictiveness. Perhaps he was truly, absolutely sorry, or maybe he simply wanted an opportunity to offer excuses for what he had done. Because of my pride, I will always wonder and I will never know. My hubris tasted sweet as any sin, until it was inside me. Now, it's a poison I have to live with.”

  “That is not you, Kate. I have seen too much to believe it for a moment,” said Matthew.

  She nodded weakly. He was not convinced she believed his reassurance. “And what of Lizzie? Did you make peace with her?”

  Kate nodded. “In a letter. I could hardly bear to say anything to her face, and we will never be friends again. I saw her on our way through town to dine with William's family, the last time I was home. She is married to the parson of a small village north of Albany, and her boy looks exactly like Patrick in miniature.”

  She stopped there, slumping a little farther as though she were empty, and Matthew decided after a few beats that nothing else was coming. In the silence, he realized how much he ached – for Kate having to suffer her memories, and for himself too. There was a pulped sensation behind his ribs, at recalling his own misery. “I am sorry I pressed the story from you.”

  For the first time, Kate returned the pressure of his hands. “You were wise, when you said time does not heal all wounds equally. I still hurt, much more than I have admitted across the years, but I'm better for having shared it with you.”

  He opened his mouth to comfort her, and froze. The scream of a shell arcing overhead prickled the hair at the back of his neck. Grabbing Kate by the apron strap, Matthew jerked her to the dirt and lay half over her. There was pressure, air snapped from his lungs. His spine seared at the concussion, teeth jarring. Dust billowed into his nose, ears buzzing so that the orders shouted around them were just deep noises against one another. Splinters bit deep into his cheek and jaw. A collective roar rolled over the men like a wave, a primitive battle cry unique to British soldiers that never failed to make him shiver. It was the sound of men hungry for blood. Kate wriggled beneath him, pressing him back with an elbow.

  “Are you all right?” Kate shouted. Her voice comprised the first distinguishable words, and that was helped along by reading her lips.

  He shook his head, meaning 'yes' but working to cast off the pounding between his temples. “Are you?”

  “You're bleeding!” She was already reaching for his face, for the hot pinpricks beginning to trickle toward his chin.

  “Just scratches.” Matthew bounced up, landing on his feet. He hauled Kate behind him with a fistful of sleeves, slinging her toward the camp. “To your post, Miss Foster!”

  Kate raised her bag in both fists, shaking it. “I have supplies! I could-”

  “Absolutely not! Go – that is an order!” He jammed a finger back toward the garrison. He didn't wait to see if she obeyed, stumbling in a crouch behind the breastwork. Making for his horse, Matthew hunched reflexively at a second deathly scream coming in from the distance.

  * * *

  Another volley rocked the lowlands, and only seconds later, two wagons in the French supply train blazed up, devilishly illuminating a small battery on a hill.

  “Well, that is helpful,” Matthew said to no one, alone at the command post outside the gate. They had been at it for two hours, taunting the French who returned the favor, toeing an invisible line on the field. Each side was trying to get a good look at his opponent's hand, and Matthew had decided he'd seen all he needed on the most recent French advance.

  Snapping open his lens and examining the ridge, he watched the cascade of flint sparks, a row of British muskets throwing lead ball through the trees ahead. Gray powder smoke glowed almost supernaturally from the blaze behind. French infantry returned fire, and a row of his own men fell like dominoes. A vein in his temple throbbed harder.

  A rider tore in from the right – Ty moving like hell on horseback. He wheeled, drawing up the reins, and held out dispatches.

  Matthew stared at them for a moment. “Where the devil is McKinnon?” Delivering intelligence was his aide's responsibility.

  Ty waved them out farther, shouting over the bark of nine-pounders. “Pinned down on the left!”

  He snatched the papers. “I count three hundred. Another fifty moving up with artillery behind the ridge.”

  “Four hundred, if our prisoners are to be believed. All French regulars.”

  Matthew scowled over the scrawled notes. “Sounds right. Do we know who commands this rabble? Hilliers?”

  Ty's chestnut mare paced at a volley erupting behind them, and he glanced at the sound. “The prisoners say Colonel Baptiste, but I wager it's a bluff.”

  Matthew nodded, skimming McKinnon's neat handwriting. “As do I. He's moved his men three times through that opening in the trees.” He jammed a finger at a break in the copse almost directly ahead. “Baptiste would know better than that, wear us down a good bit first. Whoever he is, he won't get ahead of our guns from that position.”

  Ty raised his hat, snapping it in a quick side-to-side, signaling something to a gun crew. “Hilliers lacks his nuance, but he's got bollocks.”

  He grunted in return, watching two lines of infantry reforming behind the battery. “His frontal assault could be a test of our strength, head-to-head. He could just as easily be humbugging me while he slips around our flank.”

  “Move up the artillery?” asked Ty.

  He swept in a hand. “Move it up. And I want the rifles on their heels, giving cover every moment, for guns and infantry. When they reach the halfway,” Matthew cut the field with his thumb, “one sound volley from your men. Infantry pushes forward, rifles push behind. Cavalry at the rear and waiting.” He stuffed one of the letters into his pocket. “Bring the smoke. Get me the top of that ridge before dawn.”

  Ty snapped a smart salute. “Yes, sir.”

  “This,” he waved the second dispatch, “says Marshall Ney has over-extended by sending his Frenchmen here. He's trying to recall the bastards, but their commander, whoever he is, is declining the order.” Ney was famous for his bravery, Napoleon's most trusted general, pragmatic but not overcautious. Whomever he had sent to the crossroads would have hell to pay for ignoring the order to pull back. But the man was confident enough of victory to take a risk and defer punishment. Matthew studied the valley with a grim squint. That confidence was the man's second mistake.

  Ty wrestled with his reins, stilling his mount's anxious pacing. “Ney won't stand for it.”

  Howitzers thundered, kicking up waves of dirt and obscuring Matthew's view of the fallout. “Oh, he'll bring his dog to heel all right. Let's see how many bites we can take from his hide till then.” He stuck out his arm and Ty grasped his hand with determined pressure. “Get me the other side of the hill, Major. I shall see you there.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  Matthew trotted Bremen out and back from the command post, cathartic pacing for horse and rider. “By God, form them up, Greene!” he barked. Then, under his breath, “What are you about, Tyler? It's a gun carriage, not a post coach.” He muttered to himself at every turn, wondering again why he had ever left the field for a command position. Nothing frayed his nerves so much as nail-biting behind the front lines.

  They passed a painstaking half-hour, while French guns concentrated on his left staggered his men. They very nearly broke through, but Major Burrell's artillery did all that was asked and more. The men moved under sound cover across the flattest, deadliest piece of the field, Colonel McAuley's battalion pressing forward from that point all alone.

  Captain Westcott's deep monotone called the charge, and his company dashed forward first, racing for the embankment. Silent for long minutes, the French battery was abandoned as her men spilled over the hill's lip and down onto Westcott's advancing line, now alm
ost shoulder to shoulder with Greene's company of veterans. Matthew could feel, at the way the ground jarred the moment opposing lines clashed, that it would be a victory of inches. The most painful sort.

  He bore the clank of bayonets, the rally cries and wounded screams, the general din of slaughter until he could bear no more. Spurring Bremen hard, he raced the field, revealed only by the dying light of a handful of kindled wagons, and darted between the wounded and the shell pits to reach his men. Lieutenant Carlton was nowhere to be seen, and his men struggled to regroup on the left, falling in with Westcott, courage flagging at the beating they took from the enemy above.

  Matthew weaved between the lines, jerking up his hat and waving high. “Pound at them, men! Show them we can pound the longest!”

  A cheer went up, rising through the grunts and clatter of musket stocks, carried by the smoke shrouding the deadly embrace of red and blue. “No cheering, lads!” He raised his arm at the far embankment. “Push through!”

  He wheeled Bremen, drew his pistol and fired a signal into the air. Thunder from the cavalry's hoof beats reached his ears almost immediately over the fray, in such perfect discipline that he nearly cheered with the others. Drawing blade from scabbard with the sharp tang of fine steel, he threw himself in with the horse company. They pushed forward as one, thrusting, slashing, withdrawing blades to the gritty sound of bone against metal. Night air pierced his nostrils, sharp with sulfur and the copper stench of blood tinged horribly sweet with urine and vomit. Bremen pushed through small islands of men, his own and Hillier's, some down to using bare hands in an effort at self-preservation. Fingers and bayonets and rifle butts dragged at his legs, striking, piercing the meat of his thighs. In the heat of battle, the wounds drew Matthew's attention with the same urgency of a buzzing fly.

  “Recule! Recule!”

  He had known the French cry for retreat was at hand. They had lost too much ground, punched gaps in their lines impossible to plug with so few bodies. But in the thick of the skirmish, knee deep in the enemy, he had begun to feel it would never come. He raised his saber, swinging it ahead under Westcott's eagle eye. “Your men, and the horse company! Drive them on, and not a man left standing if you can help it!”

  The charge of Westcott's mount was his reply. “Get after them, you blue-backs! Run 'em through!” Herding his men to the plateau, Westcott ran just ahead of Greene, who never needed orders to cut down a retreat. Matthew knocked Bremen, urging him up the sandy embankment, getting his first half-decent view of the enemy's position. He would not turn around and look behind just yet. The butcher's bill would come soon enough.

  “What did you ask of me?” croaked a voice from somewhere beneath him. Matthew squinted in the semi-darkness, searching it out.

  “Not even dawn yet.” Ty raised a hand from where he lay beneath his horse, now a sprawled carcass pinning him to the field, laughing until the sound became a ragged cough.

  “Sod it all.” Matthew slid from Bremen, catching a boot in the stirrup and nearly eating a mouthful of churned soil in his hurry to reach the major. He buried knees in the damp earth, wrestling open Ty's coat. “God man, are you wounded?”

  Ty's arms flailed. “Webb, there's a goddamn horse crushing me!”

  “Well, are you going to die or not?” He buried his worry for Ty in the sharp retort. Matthew grabbed the pommel of the saddle, wedging an arm beneath the animal's neck and prying almost ineffectually at a whole ton of uncooperative horse meat. Ty groaned, strained and finally rolled free. He lay panting against the dirt, while Matthew crawled to his side, beginning at Ty's hairline and patting downward. “Your bloody head isn't blown off, so we're doing well enough.”

  A wince at the left shoulder, a rough groan at a misshapen left rib. “My leg is fucking throbbing!”

  “And no wonder, man. You're shot.” The thigh of Tyler's gray trousers was stained black, saturated with blood well below the knee. A thumb-sized hole punched through the wool fabric at the outside of his thigh. Surgery and infection were a whole other matter, but Matthew offered up thanks that, at least in the moment, Ty's wound did not seem fatal.

  Tyler wrested himself onto elbows, squinting to get a better look at a wound he had no earthly hope of actually seeing. “By God, I am!”

  There was a lot of bleeding, a good bit more than he'd first estimated. A small measure of panic rose in him at Ty's worsening condition. Matthew started to rip at the leg of Ty's pants, then considered dumping him on Bremen and starting back.

  As his exhausted brain sorted through options, something Kate had told him weeks earlier surfaced in the chaos, and Matthew began to work at his cravat, untangling the knots with exhausted fingers.

  Ty groaned again. “Give me a drink already, for the love of Job!”

  “You know I can't.” Matthew pulled the yard of linen free of his neck, threading it under Ty's upper leg. He may have indulged in a sip or two since Kate's insistence, but he was hardly wading into the stream just yet.

  “Only goddamn officer in three armies who doesn't have a flask. You should face court martial.” Ty panted hard as Matthew doubled the cloth over itself. “Should drum you out of the –” This time he cried out in earnest as Matthew cinched the tourniquet with all the pressure he could manage. “Ahh! Out of the... bloody army.”

  There was so much blood, wet on his palms and already soaking the linen. Matthew swallowed genuine panic in his throat. He forced a grin. “Keep at that sort of loose talk and we can sit our court martial hearings together. Up you go.”

  Before Ty could protest, or even absorb what was coming, Matthew tossed the major onto his shoulder and staggered the few paces to Bremen. He dumped Ty unceremoniously over the saddle, where he hollered, thrashed his long frame, and finally stilled. “I'm going to be fitted for a peg leg, and have to wear one of those honor sashes that make a man look like a rat catcher.” He giggled, then sniffled as though he were crying. Blood loss was starting to make him delirious.

  Matthew buried more fear in a stern rebuke. “Be quiet, for God's sake, and hold on however you can.”

  Try tried to look up, then fell limp over Bremen's back. “Where the devil are you taking me?”

  Easing his horse forward, gently as he could, Matthew sighed. “To Miss Foster, before I wring your damned neck.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The wagon rattled off, the ominous clatter of its suspension fading into the semi-darkness until it was indistinguishable from the shouts and moans around her. Porter and Flannigan had deposited their gruesome cargo and were off for another haul. Kate had developed an aversion to the cart's lumbering approach, unconsciously aware that it signaled a fresh load of near-dead men.

  Her orderlies, Taylor and Jackson, God bless them, were staunch allies. Yarding bodies onto the table or supporting them in the chair, one braced and one supplied her instruments while she tended her macabre duties.

  Jabbing an index finger into her ear, Kate worked the cotton wool in deeper. Blood never bothered her, except the mineral stench now and then. The grate of the saw, she'd always reasoned, was just one more sensation. It was the sound; not of hacking or the wet song of the blade through flesh, but of the men. Groans and the occasional scream filled the yard around the hospital, punctuated by the stubborn gunfire of an enemy retreat. Wild cries of victory jarred her nerves while she worked, no matter how much she expected the sound.

  But it was the begging which nearly broke her. A man in such mindless agony that he would wail to have a limb cut off. Kate stuffed her other ear, shaking her head to loosen the terrible thought, and palmed her knife.

  Taylor was responsible for triage and for noting each man on either the casualty or fatality list as they were treated. She could not write them down; her hands were unfit now for any task but cutting. Blood-caked and half numb, her finger could not manage a quill. Not that she could place each man's name by now, anyway. Kate had taught herself not to look at their faces. They were a shattered tibia, an elbow laced
together by nothing but strings of cartilage. They were faceless, nameless medical problems. That was how she managed.

  Taylor limped a half-conscious man to the nicked seat of her heavy wooden chair, slick with blood in a spectrum of reds from nearly a hundred men before him. He threaded the soldier's arms into battered leather restraints while Jackson raised a mangled leg so Kate could loop a tourniquet above the knee. She cranked the thumb screw. At some point the effort had stopped hurting, the pad of her thumb losing feeling several patients back. Cup in hand, Taylor helped the trembling man – a boy really, hardly old enough to boast hair on his face – gulp down the grog. He dabbed at the soldier's chin with a sleeve as grimacing lips let some of the liquor escape.

  Giving a sharp tug on the leather strap to check her work, she brought the knife in close, extending her index finger to probe her target.

  The boy grunted, nostrils flaring as he arched up from the seat, wild-eyed. Kate prodded insistently around the torn flesh of what was once a knee cap, a strangled animal cry reaching through the muffle of her ear plugs. Satisfied she knew her path, she wrapped the knife handle with greater resolve. “Take a deep breath for me; we'll get through this quick.”

  The long, square blade bit hungrily into the remaining strings of meat and sinew. She guided it with a practiced hand between the fragments, burying its teeth into the joint. Thrashing, bucking against the chair, the poor boy struggled against her efforts, mouth gaping in a silent scream.

  She braced a hand on his thigh above the tourniquet, bore down and rotated the knife around his leg, digging hard at the tendon. Blood lubricated any resistance, then coated her fingers and began to work against her grip. She jerked a hand at Jackson, who swished ineffectually with a near-drenched rag over the handle.