Slightly Sinful

by Mary Balogh

  “It’s probably too little to tie in a knot, though, Floss,” Phyllis said. Plump and pretty and placid, her brown hair always neatly styled, her clothes always plain and unremarkable, Phyllis looked the least like Rachel’s image of a whore. And ever practical, she had just come back into the sitting room with a large tray of tea and cakes. “Anyway, he will have spent all our money long before we find him.”

  “All the more reason,” Geraldine said, “to mash up every bone in his body. Revenge can be sweet for its own sake, Phyll.”

  “How ever are we going to find him, though?” Bridget asked, pushing the fingers of one hand through her red tresses.

  “We will write letters, you and I, Bridge,” Flossie said, “to all the sisterhood who can read. We know sisters in London and Brighton and Bath and Harrogate and a few other places, don’t we? We will put out the word, and we will find him. But we are going to need money to chase after him with.” She sighed and stopped pacing for a moment.

  “All we need to do, then, is think of a way to get rich quick,” Geraldine said, sawing the air again with one arm. “Any ideas, anyone? Is there some nabob we can rob?”

  They all began naming various gentlemen, presumably their clients, who were or had been staying in Brussels. Rachel recognized a few of the names. But the ladies were not serious. They paused after naming a dozen or so and snickered merrily—a relief to them, no doubt, after the terrible realization today that all their savings were gone, stolen by a rogue masquerading as a clergyman.

  Flossie plopped herself down on the settee and picked up one of the cakes from the plate. “Actually there may be a way,” she said, “though we would have to act quickly. And it would not be robbing exactly. A person cannot rob the dead, can she? They have no further use for their things.”

  “Lord love us, Floss,” Phyllis said, sinking down beside her, a cup and saucer in her hands, “whatever are you thinking of? I am not going about raiding any churchyards, if that is what you have on your mind. The very idea! Can you picture the four of us, shovels over our shoulders—”

  “The dead from the battle, I am talking about,” Flossie explained, while all the rest of them looked at her, arrested, and Rachel hugged her shawl more tightly about her. “Loads of people will be doing it. Hordes of them are already out there, I would wager, pretending to look for loved ones but really looking for loot instead. It is an easy thing for women to do. All we would need is a pathetic, slightly frantic look and a man’s name on our lips. We would have to get out there soon, though, if we were to have a chance of finding anything of any value. We could make back everything we have lost if we were lucky—and diligent.”

  Rachel could hear teeth chattering, realized they were her own, and clamped them firmly together. Raiding the dead—it sounded lurid. It sounded like the stuff of nightmares.

  “I don’t know, Floss,” Bridget said doubtfully. “It doesn’t seem right. But you aren’t serious anyway, are you?”

  “Why not?” Geraldine asked, both hands raised expansively. “As Floss said, it wouldn’t be exactly robbing, would it?”

  “And we wouldn’t be hurting anyone,” Flossie said. “They are already dead.”

  “Oh, goodness.” Rachel set both palms against her cheeks and held them there. “I am the one who should be finding a solution. This is all my fault.”

  Everyone’s attention swung her way.

  “It is not, my love,” Bridget assured her. “It most certainly is not. If it is anyone’s fault, it is mine for allowing you to notice me and for letting you come inside this house. I must have had rocks in my head.”

  “It was not your fault, Rache,” Geraldine agreed. “It was our fault. We four have oceans more experience with men than you do. I thought I could pick out a rogue from a mile away with one eye shut. But I was taken in by that handsome villain just as surely as you were.”

  “So was I,” Flossie added. “I had kept a firm grip about the purse strings for four years until he came along with his sweet talk of loving and honoring us because we shared the same profession as that Magdalene woman, and Jesus loved her. I would slap myself about the head if it would do any good. I gave him our savings to take back to England to deposit safely in a bank. I let him take the money—I even thanked him for taking it—and now it is all gone. It was my fault more than anyone’s.”

  “Not so, Floss,” Phyllis said. “We all agreed to it. That’s what we have always done—planned together, worked together, made decisions together.”

  “But I introduced him to you,” Rachel said with a sigh. “I was so proud of him for not shunning you. I brought him here. I betrayed you all.”

  “Nonsense, Rache,” Geraldine said briskly. “You lost everything you had to him too, didn’t you, the same as we did? And you had the courage to come back and tell us about it when as far as you knew we might have bitten your head off.”

  “We are wasting time with this pointless talk about who is to blame,” Flossie said, “when we all know who is to blame. If we don’t decide to get out fast to where the fighting was, there will be nothing left for us.”

  “I for one am going, Floss, even if I have to go alone,” Geraldine said. “There will be rich pickings out there, I don’t doubt, and I mean to have some of them. I mean to have money to go after that blackest of black-hearted villains with.”

  No one seemed to consider the fact that if they could acquire a great deal of money in such a way they might simply use it to replace their loss and restore their dream and forget about the Reverend Nigel Crawley, who might be anywhere on the globe at that moment or within the next few days or weeks. But sometimes outrage and the need for revenge could take precedence even over dreams.

  “I have a client coming tomorrow afternoon—or this afternoon, I suppose I mean,” Bridget said, crossing her arms beneath her bosom and hunching her shoulders. “Young Hawkins. I couldn’t go out for more than a little while, and so it would not be worth my going at all, would it?”

  Her voice was shaking slightly, Rachel noticed.

  “And I won’t go even though I don’t have Bridget’s excuse,” Phyllis said, looking apologetic as she set down her cup and saucer. “I’m sorry, but I would fall into a dead faint at the first sight of blood, and then I would be useless. And I would have nightmares for the rest of my life and wake you all up every night with my screams. I probably will anyway at the very thought of it. I’ll stay and answer the door to any callers while Bridget’s working.”

  “Working!” Flossie said with a groan. “Unless we do something about our situation, we are going to be working until we are old and decrepit, Phyll.”

  “I already am that,” Bridget said.

  “No, you aren’t, Bridge,” Flossie told her firmly. “You are in your prime. Lots of the young bucks still come to you from choice rather than to any of the rest of us, especially the virgins.”

  “Because I remind them of their mothers,” Bridget said.

  “With those tresses, Bridge?” Geraldine said with an inelegant snort. “I think not.”

  “I don’t make them nervous or afraid of being failures,” Bridget explained. “I make it all right for them to be less than perfect their first few times. What man ever is perfect for a good long while, after all? And most never are.”

  Despite herself, Rachel could feel herself blushing.

  “You and I will go, then, Gerry,” Flossie said, getting to her feet. “I am not in the least afraid of a few dead bodies. Nor am I afraid of nightmares. Let’s go and make our fortune and then let’s make that Crawley fellow sorry his father ever looked at his mother with lust in his eye.”

  “I would go too,” Bridget said. “But young Hawkins insisted upon coming today. He wants me to teach him how to impress his bride when he marries in the autumn.”

  Bridget was in her thirties. She had once been hired as Rachel’s nurse by the child’s widowed father, and the two had quickly grown as fond of each other as if they were mother and daughter.
But Rachel’s father had lost everything at the card tables—something that had happened with disturbing regularity throughout his adult life—and had been forced to let Bridget go. It was only a month or so ago that the two women had met again, quite by chance, on a street in Brussels, and Rachel learned what had become of her beloved nurse. She had insisted upon renewing their acquaintance despite Bridget’s misgivings.

  Rachel suddenly surged to her feet without at all realizing that she was about to do so—or that she was about to say what she did.

  “I am going too,” she announced. “I am going with Geraldine and Flossie.”

  There was a chorus of comment as all attention turned her way. But she held up both hands, palms out.

  “I am the one mainly responsible for losing your hard-earned money,” she said. “No matter what you all say to the contrary to try to make me feel better, that is the plain truth. Besides, I have a grievance of my own against Mr. Crawley. He gulled me into admiring and respecting him and even agreeing to be his bride. He stole from my friends and he stole from me, and then he tried to lie to me, thinking, no doubt, that I was a total idiot instead of just foolish beyond belief. If we are to go after him, and if we need money to do it, then I am going to do my part to get some. I am going out there with Geraldine and Flossie to loot the bodies of the dead.”

  She could have wished then that she were still sitting. Her legs suddenly felt as if someone had removed every bone from them.

  “Oh, no, my love,” Bridget said, getting to her feet and taking a step in Rachel’s direction.

  “Leave her alone, Bridge,” Geraldine said. “I have liked you from the first moment, Rache, because you are a regular person and not one of those high-and-mighty ladies who poke their noses at the sky and sniff the air when they pass us as if we carry around two-week-old dead dogs in our reticules. But now tonight I like you a whole lot more. You have spirit. Don’t you take what he did to you lying down—to borrow an image.”

  “I do not intend to,” Rachel said. “For the past year I have been a meek, mild-mannered lady’s companion. I hated every moment of that year. If I had not, I surely would not have been so taken in by a smiling villain. Let us go now, without any more talk.”

  “Hurrah for Rachel,” Flossie said.

  As she led the way from the room in order to run upstairs to don warm, serviceable clothes, Rachel tried not even to think of what she was about to do.

  I am going out there with Geraldine and Flossie to loot the bodies of the dead.

  CHAPTER II

  THE ROAD SOUTH OF BRUSSELS LOOKED LIKE A scene from hell in the dusk of early dawn. It was clogged with carts and wagons and men trudging along on foot, some of them carrying biers or helping or dragging along a comrade. Almost all of them were wounded, some severely. They were streaming back from the battleground south of the village of Waterloo.

  Rachel had never witnessed such sheer, unending horror.

  It seemed to her at first that she and Flossie and Geraldine must be the only persons going in the opposite direction. But that was not so, of course. There were pedestrians, even vehicles, moving south. One of the latter, a wagon driven by a tattered soldier with a powder-blackened face, stopped to offer them a ride, and Flossie and Geraldine, acting convincingly the part of anxious wives, accepted.

  Rachel did not. The bravado that had brought her out here was rapidly disintegrating. What was she doing? How could she even be thinking of profiting from all this misery?

  “You go on,” she told the other two. “There must be many wounded men in the forest. I’ll look there. I’ll look for Jack and Sam too,” she added, raising her voice for the benefit of the wagon driver and anyone else who might be listening. “And you look for Harry for me farther south.”

  The lie and the deception made her feel dirty and sinful even though it was doubtful anyone was paying her any attention.

  She turned off the crowded road to walk among the trees of the Forest of Soignés, though she did not go so far in that she would lose sight of the road and get lost. What on earth was she going to do now? she wondered. She could not continue with her plan, she was convinced. She could not possibly take so much as a handkerchief from a poor dead man’s body. And even the thought of seeing one was enough to make the bile rise in her throat. Yet to go back empty-handed without at least trying would be selfish and cowardly. When Mr. Crawley had sat with the ladies in the sitting room on the Rue d’Aremberg and explained to them how potentially dangerous it was to keep a large sum of money with them in such volatile times and in a foreign city to boot, and had offered to take the money back to London with him and deposit it safely in a bank where he would arrange for it to earn some decent interest, she had sat beside him and smiled proudly over the fact that she had introduced them to such a kindly, considerate, compassionate man. Afterward she had thanked him. She had thought that for once in her life she had discovered a steady, upright, dependable man. She had almost imagined that she loved him.

  Her hands curled into fists at her sides and she grit her teeth. But the reality of her surroundings soon cut through pointless reminiscences.

  There must be thousands of wounded on all those carts and biers, she decided, averting her face from the road to her left. All that suffering and yet she had come out here to find the dead and search their bodies and rob them of any valuable that was portable and salable. She simply could not do it.

  And then her stomach seemed to perform a complete somersault, leaving her feeling as if she were about to vomit as she set eyes upon the first of the dead bodies she had come to find.

  He was lying huddled against the tall trunk of one of the trees, out of sight of the road, and he was very definitely dead. He was also quite naked. She felt her abdominal muscles contract again as she took a hesitant, reluctant step closer. But instead of vomiting, she giggled. She slapped a hand over her mouth, more horrified by her inappropriate response than she would have been if she had emptied the contents of her stomach onto the ground in full view of a thousand men. What was funny about the fact that there was nothing left to loot? Someone had found this one before her and had taken everything but the body itself. She could not have done it anyway. She knew it at that moment with absolute certainty. Even if he had been fully clothed and had a costly ring on each finger, a gold watch and chain and expensive fobs at his waist, a gold sword at his side, she could not have taken any of them.

  It would have been robbery.

  He was young, with hair that looked startlingly dark in contrast to the paleness of his skin. Nakedness was horribly pathetic under such circumstances, she thought. He was an insignificant bundle of dead humanity with a nasty-looking wound on his thigh and blood pooled beneath his head, suggesting that there was a ghastly wound out of sight there. He was someone’s son, someone’s brother, perhaps someone’s husband, someone’s father. His life had been precious to him and perhaps to dozens of other people.

  The hand over her mouth began to shake. It felt cold and clammy.

  “Help!” she called weakly in the direction of the road. She cleared her throat and called a little more firmly. “Help!”

  Apart from a few incurious glances, no one took any notice of her. All were doubtless too preoccupied with their own suffering.

  And then she dropped to one knee beside the dead man, intent upon she knew not what. Was she going to pray over him? Keep vigil over him? But did not even a dead stranger deserve some kind notice at his passing? He had been alive yesterday, with a history and hopes and dreams and concerns of his own. She reached out a trembling hand and set it lightly against the side of his face as if in benediction.

  Poor man. Ah, poor man.

  He was cold. But not entirely so. There was surely a thread of warmth beneath his skin. Rachel snatched back her hand and then lowered it gingerly again to his neck and the pulse point there.

  There was a faint beating beneath her fingers.

  He was still alive.

  “H
elp!” she cried again, leaping to her feet and trying desperately to attract the notice of someone on the road. No one paid her any attention.

  “He is alive!” she shrieked with all the power her lungs could muster. She was desperate for help. Perhaps his life could still be saved. But time must surely be running out for him. She yelled even more loudly, if that were possible. “And he is my husband. Please help me, somebody.”

  A gentleman on horseback—not a military man—turned his attention her way and she thought for a moment that he was going to ride to her assistance. But a great giant of a man—a sergeant—with a bloody bandage around his head and over one eye turned off the road instead and came lumbering toward her, calling out to her as he came.

  “Coming, missus,” he said. “How bad hurt is he?”

  “I do not know. Very badly, I fear.” She was sobbing aloud, Rachel realized, just as if the unconscious man really were someone dear to her. “Please help him. Oh, please help him.”

  RACHEL HAD FOOLISHLY EXPECTED THAT ONCE THEY reached Brussels all would be well, that there would be a whole host of physicians and surgeons waiting to tend the wounds of just the group to which she had attached herself. She walked beside the wagon on which Sergeant William Strickland had somehow found space for the naked, unconscious man. Someone had produced a tattered piece of sacking with which to cover him partially, and Rachel had contributed her shawl for the same purpose. The sergeant trudged along at her side, introducing himself and explaining that he had lost an eye in the battle but that he would have returned to his regiment after being treated in a field hospital except that he had found that he was being discharged from the army, which apparently had no use for one-eyed sergeants. He had been paid up to date, his dismissal had been written into his pay book, and that was that.

  “A lifetime of soldiering swilled down the gutter like so much sewage, so to speak,” he said sadly. “But no matter. I’ll come about. You have your man to worry about, missus, and don’t need to listen to my woes. He will pull through, God willing.”