Slightly Sinful

by Mary Balogh

  When they did reach Brussels, of course, there was such a huge number of wounded and dying about the Namur Gates that the unconscious man, who could not speak for himself, might never have seen a surgeon if the sergeant had not exerted the authority to which he was no longer entitled and barked out a few orders to clear a path to one of the makeshift hospital tents. Rachel did not watch while a musket ball was dug out of the man’s thigh—thank heaven he was unconscious, she thought, feeling faint at the very thought of what was happening to him. When she saw him again, both his leg and his head were heavily bandaged and he was wrapped in a coarse blanket. Sergeant Strickland had found a stretcher and two private soldiers, who loaded the man onto it.

  Then the sergeant turned to her.

  “The sawbones thinks your man has a chance if the fever don’t get him and if the knock on his head didn’t crack his skull,” he told her bluntly. “Where to, missus?”

  It was a question that had Rachel gaping back at him. Where to, indeed? Who was the wounded man, and where did he belong? There was no knowing until he regained consciousness. In the meantime, she had claimed him for herself. She had called him her husband in a desperate—and successful—attempt to attract someone’s attention back there in the forest.

  But where could she take him? The only home she had in Brussels was the brothel. And she was only a guest there—a totally dependent guest at that, since she had almost no money of her own with which to help pay the rent. Worse than that, she was very largely responsible for the fact that Bridget and the other three had lost almost all of their money too. How could she now take the wounded man there and ask the ladies to tend and feed him until they could find out where he belonged and arrange to have him taken there?

  But what else could she do?

  “You are in shock, missus,” the sergeant said, taking her solicitously by the elbow. “Take a deep breath now and let it out slowly. At least he is alive. Thousands aren’t.”

  “We live on the Rue d’Aremberg,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Follow me, if you please.”

  She strode off in the direction of the brothel.

  Phyllis was up to her elbows in bread dough—their servants had fled Brussels before the battle—and Bridget was preparing to entertain Mr. Hawkins. She came out of her room at the sound of the commotion at the front door, red hair tied in a loose topknot with pink ribbon in order to keep it off her face, cheeks aflame with rouge, one eye heavily painted with blue shadow and thick black lines above and below the lids, the other startlingly naked in contrast.

  “Lord love us,” Phyllis said, her eyes alighting on Sergeant Strickland, “a one-eyed giant and I am the only one available.”

  “Rachel is with him,” Bridget pointed out. “My love, what is this? Did you run into trouble? She did not mean any harm, soldier. She was just—”

  “Oh, Bridget, Phyllis,” Rachel said all in a rush, “I was searching through the forest, and I came across this man on the stretcher here. I thought he was dead, but then I touched him and realized he was still alive, but he had been shot in the leg and had a horrible head wound. I called to all the men passing on the road, but no one took any notice until I cried that he was alive and was my husband. Then Sergeant Strickland came and helped me and carried the man to a wagon. And after we had arrived back in Brussels and a surgeon had tended him, the sergeant found these men with their stretcher and asked me where they could bring the wounded man. I could think of nowhere but here. I am so sorry. I—”

  “He is not your man, missus?” Sergeant Strickland asked, eyeing Bridget with suspicious fascination.

  The two private soldiers were leering and grinning.

  “Did you find anything on him?” Bridget asked, looking at Rachel from her grotesquely mismatched eyes.

  “Nothing.” Rachel felt horribly guilty then. Not only had she not collected any loot, but she had also burdened her friends with another mouth to feed—if he ever regained consciousness to eat, that was. “He had been stripped.”

  “Of everything?” Bridget stepped closer to the stretcher and lifted one corner of the blanket. “Oh, my.”

  “You look as if you are about to pass out yourself, Sergeant,” Phyllis said, wiping floury hands on her large apron.

  He had lost an eye. For the first time Rachel looked closely at him, ashamed that she had virtually ignored his plight in her anxiety over the other man. He was indeed looking pasty.

  “That is not blood on your bandage by any chance, is it?” Phyllis asked. “If it is, I am about to faint.”

  “Where are we to put ’im, Sarge?” one of the private soldiers asked.

  “You did the right thing, Rachel, my love,” Bridget said. “Now where shall we put him, poor man? He looks more than half dead.”

  Apart from a few small attic rooms designed for servants, there were no spare bedchambers—Rachel had been given the last one just the day before.

  “My room,” she said. “We will put him in there, and I shall sleep in the attic.”

  The private soldiers carried the stretcher upstairs while Rachel led the way to her room to fold back the bedcovers so that the wounded man could be lifted straight onto the bed she had never yet slept on herself. She could hear Phyllis behind her in the hallway.

  “If you don’t have anywhere else to go, Sergeant,” she was saying, “and I daresay you do not, we will put you to bed in one of the attic rooms. I’ll make you some tea and some broth. No, you must not argue. You look dead on your feet. Just don’t ever ask me to change that bandage. That’s all I ask.”

  “What exactly is this place?” Rachel heard the sergeant ask. “Is it by any chance—”

  “Lord love us,” Phyllis said. “You must be more than half blind if you have to ask that question. Of course it is.”

  ONCE SERGEANT STRICKLAND GAVE IN TO PHYLLIS’S insistence that he lie down and allow himself to be nursed, he became really very ill indeed, with a crashing headache and a mounting fever. Despite his feeble protests, Phyllis and Rachel went up and down stairs to him several times for the rest of the day, as did Bridget after her appointment with Mr. Hawkins was over.

  It surprised Rachel to realize that she felt nothing at all—no shock, no embarrassment, no revulsion—to know that she was sharing a house with a whore who was in the very act of plying her trade. There were more important things to think about.

  She spent most of the afternoon and evening in her own room, seated at the bedside of the unknown man, whose identity she might never know, she realized. He had shown no flicker of returning consciousness since the first moment she saw him. He was deathly pale—almost as white as the bandage in which his head was swathed and the large nightshirt that Bridget had found for him and that she and Phyllis had dressed him in after shooing Rachel from the room. That fact would have amused Rachel if she had been in the mood to feel amused. She was the one who had found him naked, yet her old nurse now thought that her modesty needed preserving.

  A few times Rachel felt the pulse in his neck to assure herself that he still lived.

  Flossie and Geraldine returned early in the evening—empty-handed.

  “We went all the way to the village of Waterloo and out beyond it to where the battle was fought yesterday,” Flossie told them when they all gathered in the sitting room, which was set up for cards later in the evening—this was a working night, Rachel gathered. “You can’t imagine the sight, Bridge. Poor Phyll would have been in a dead faint from the first moment.”

  “There were plentiful pickings out there,” Geraldine said. “We could have been as rich as Croesus by now if we had not run into a couple of greedy women. The very first dead body we came across was that of a young officer who couldn’t have been a day over seventeen, could he, Floss? And he was being stripped of all his precious finery by two women who had all the tender sensibilities of two blocks of wood. I gave them the length of my tongue, I can tell you.”

  “She made the air turn blue,” Flossie
said admiringly. “Then one of the women made the mistake of sneering. I punched her senseless. Look, Bridge, my knuckles are still red. It will be days before I have the hands of a lady again. And one of my precious nails broke off. Now I’ll have to cut the others to match. I hate having short nails.”

  “I sat guard over the boy,” Geraldine told them, “while Floss went in search of a burial party that would treat him with the proper respect. Poor lamb. I shed more than one tear over him, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “After that,” Flossie explained rather sheepishly, “we didn’t have the heart to raid any of the other bodies, did we, Gerry? We couldn’t help remembering that all those men had mothers.”

  “I like you both the better for it,” Phyllis assured them.

  “So do I,” Bridget said. “I didn’t say so at the time, but I was glad young Hawkins was coming this afternoon and I had an excuse not to go out myself. It didn’t seem right somehow. I would rather end up in the poorhouse than make my fortune off the deaths of brave boys.”

  “We will have to discover another way,” Geraldine said. “There is no chance that I am going to get philosophical about this, Bridge, and return meekly to earning my living on my back for another ten years or so. I may have to do it, of course, but only after finding that man and giving him what for. Then I won’t find the whoring so bad even if we don’t recover a penny of our money. But how did you do, Rache? Did you find anything?”

  They both looked at her hopefully.

  “No treasures, I am afraid,” she said with a grimace. “Only liabilities.”

  “Rachel came across a wounded, unconscious man in the forest,” Phyllis explained, “and brought him home with her. He was naked.”

  “That must have been a thrill,” Flossie said, looking interested. “Was it, Rachel? Was he worth looking at?”

  “He certainly was that, Floss,” Phyllis said, “especially in the part that matters most. Very impressive. He is up in Rachel’s bed, still unconscious.”

  “There is a sergeant up in the attic too,” Bridget said. “He helped Rachel bring the other man here, but he was half dead himself. He lost an eye in the battle. We put him to bed.”

  “And so now, since yesterday morning,” Rachel said, “you have acquired three more mouths to feed, all courtesy of me. But if your young officer had been alive, would you have been able to leave him there to die any more than I could with this man?”

  “We would be fighting over whose bed we were going to put him in—Flossie’s or mine,” Geraldine said. “Don’t feel bad, Rache. We’ll find a way to run that villain to earth and get our money back—yours too. In the meantime we get to play the part of merciful angels. I fancy it.”

  “We had better go look the patients over, Gerry, while we have time,” Flossie said, getting to her feet. “We are going to have to get ready for work soon. We still have to earn our daily bread.”

  They all discussed the mystery of the unconscious man’s identity as they stood about his bed a few minutes later, gazing down at him. There was no knowing who he was, of course. But they all agreed that he was probably a gentleman—an officer. For one thing, it appeared that he must have had a horse. The cut and lump on his head suggested that he had done more than slip and fall as he walked through the forest. The wounds were more consistent with a fall from horseback. Then there were the facts, pointed out by Flossie, that his hands were not callused and his fingernails were well manicured. His body showed no sign of abuse either, apart from the recent wounds—there were no whip marks on his back, Bridget reported, to suggest that he was a private soldier. His dark hair was short and fashionably cut, Rachel could recall even though it was now almost completely covered by the bandage. He had a prominent nose—an aristocratic nose, according to Geraldine, though that in itself was inconclusive evidence of his social status.

  Rachel sat up with him all night though there was nothing to do but gaze at him and occasionally feel his cheeks and his forehead for telltale signs of fever and his neck for the beat of his pulse—and listen to the sounds of merriment from downstairs and later to different sounds from the other bedchambers.

  This time they did cause Rachel discomfort. But she could feel no moral superiority over her friends and no disapproval of the way in which they had chosen to earn their living—if they had had any choice in the matter. Not for a moment had they blamed her for what had happened, though they had ranted and raved against Mr. Crawley, with whom she had left Brussels a few days before. They were housing and feeding her with the little money that was left them and would continue to do so, she did not doubt, with the money they were now earning and the money they would earn in the nights and days to come.

  In the meanwhile, she was living the life of an idle lady and was doing nothing to contribute.

  Perhaps she ought to put that matter right, she thought.

  It was a prospect upon which she did not care to dwell, though there was very little to distract her during that night of vigil except the man on the bed. She imagined that he must be rather handsome under more normal circumstances. She tried to picture him with his eyes open and color and animation in his face and the bandage gone from his head. She tried to imagine what he would say, what he would tell her about himself.

  She did make a few trips up to the attic to make sure that Sergeant Strickland did not need anything, but each time he was sleeping.

  How very unpredictable life was, she thought. After a precarious childhood and girlhood with a father who constantly gambled and was more often than not only half a step ahead of his creditors, and after taking a position as companion to Lady Flatley following his death, a dreary existence to say the least, she had thought just a few days ago that finally she had found security and possible happiness as the bride of a man worthy of her utmost respect and loyalty, even affection. Yet now here she was, as single as the day she was born and living in a brothel, watching over an anonymous wounded man, and wondering whatever was to happen to her.

  She yawned and dozed in her chair.

  CHAPTER III

  ALLEYNE BECAME AWARE OF PAIN AND TRIED to escape from it by sinking back into the blessed darkness of oblivion. But it was not to be ignored. Indeed, there was so much of it that he could not even analyze its source clearly, except that a great deal of it seemed to be concentrated in his head. It seemed to him not so much that he was in pain as that he was pain. There was light beyond his closed eyelids, turning them uncomfortably orange. There was too much light. He turned his head to escape from it, and pain shot at him like a bullet entering his brain and shattering into a thousand shards of metal. Only some blind instinct of self-preservation stopped him from screaming and making matters even worse.

  “He is coming around,” a voice said. A female voice.

  “Should I fetch some burnt feathers, do you think, Bridge, and hold them under his nose?” another female voice asked.

  “No,” the first voice replied. “We don’t want to jolt him awake, Phyll. He is going to have a giant of a headache as it is.”

  There was nothing future about it, Alleyne thought. And a giant would look like a pygmy if it were to stand beside his headache.

  “Is he going to live, then?” a third female voice asked. “All last night and today I have expected him to die. He is as pale as the pillow. Even his lips are white.”

  “Only time will tell, Rache,” a fourth voice, husky and sultry, said. “He must have lost a lot of blood with that head wound. They are always the worst for bleeding. It is amazing he survived at all.”

  “Less talk about blood, if you please, Gerry,” one of them said.

  He was close to death? Alleyne thought in some surprise. Even now he was in danger of dying? Were they really talking about him?

  He opened his eyes.

  The room was flooded with light painful enough to make him wince and then squint. The space above his head was rimmed by four heads bent over him and examining him closely. Hovering closest to him,
a foot or so above him, was a heavily painted face, the lips and cheeks brightly rouged, the eyes outlined with some black substance that also made the eyelashes spiky, the eyelids shaded sky blue. It was the face of a woman trying to appear ten years younger than she was and failing dismally. The face was framed with elaborate curls of burnished copper highlighted with dashes of scarlet and orange.

  He moved his gaze to another woman, a Latin beauty vivid in emerald green silk, her black hair swept into lavish swirls, her eyes black and bold in a handsome face made more alluring with subtly applied cosmetics. She wore an old-fashioned black patch in the shape of a heart to the right side of her mouth. Beside her was a smaller, voluptuously shaped woman with a heart-shaped face surrounded by luxurious masses of short blond ringlets. She gazed frankly back at him from large, pure-blue eyes enhanced slightly with paint. The fourth face, plump and pretty and also sporting cosmetics, was rimmed by shining light brown hair. He was half aware that someone else was standing at the foot of his bed, holding onto the bedpost, but he dared not move his head to bring her into focus. Besides, he had seen enough to have been able to draw a startling conclusion.

  “I have died and gone to heaven,” he muttered, closing his eyes again. “And heaven is a brothel. Or is it really a cruel hell since, sadly, I seem to find myself incapable of taking advantage of my good fortune?”

  The sound of appreciative feminine laughter was such excruciating agony that he retreated thankfully into unconsciousness again.

  THEY HAD BEEN RIGHT—HE REALLY WAS A GENTLEMAN, Rachel thought as she sat by the unknown man’s bedside again during the night, having slept for much of the day at Bridget’s insistence before helping in the kitchen and then assisting Geraldine in changing Sergeant Strickland’s bandages. It had not been for the squeamish, that task. The sergeant kept wanting to get up, but as Geraldine had explained to him, he was not with his men now, able to get his way over every little thing by barking and blustering. He had five women to deal with, and they were far more formidable than a company of soldiers. The sergeant had lain meekly—and probably gratefully—back on his pillows.