by Mary Balogh
She fell asleep before she could answer her own question.
GERVASE CALLED AT MRS. CLARK’S AFTER AN EARLY breakfast with the intention of escorting Lady Morgan Bedwyn back to the Caddick house on the Rue de Bellevue. He had, however, missed her by ten minutes. He spent the rest of the morning doing his best to help organize the huge influx of wounded from the battlefield south of Waterloo. The number of casualties was truly staggering, yet he realized he was seeing only those who had been removed from the battle site. There must be thousands more still out there.
He called at Lord Caddick’s house at noon and sent in his card.
“It was good of you to come, Rosthorn,” the earl said, coming into the hall in person to shake hands with his visitor, “especially when all must be chaos out in the streets and it is safer to remain indoors. My son is doing as well as can be expected, you will be pleased to know. His leg has been set and his other wounds treated. We have hopes that he will make a full recovery as soon as we have him home in England.”
“You are leaving soon, sir?” Gervase asked. The very best thing for Lady Morgan Bedwyn was to be taken out of such an insalubrious environment. Yet he realized that he would miss her—strange thought.
“We will make an early start in the morning,” the earl told him.
But at that moment Lady Morgan herself came hurrying into the hall. She was looking somewhat pale, but her hair had been freshly brushed and coiled, and she wore a clean dress.
“Lord Rosthorn,” she asked as he bowed to her, “have you heard anything of my brother?”
To his shame he had scarcely given a thought this morning to Lord Alleyne Bedwyn, who could, he supposed, look after himself.
“I am afraid not,” he said.
Some of the light went out of her eyes.
“I daresay,” she said, “he was so busy with yesterday’s emergencies that he forgot he was supposed to be coming to take me away from here. He would have known after the victory that I am safe here in Brussels, anyway, and that there is now no great hurry to leave.”
“I would not say that, Lady Morgan,” Caddick told her. “Lady Caddick is afraid that if our own physician does not see Gordon’s leg within the week and ascertain that it has been properly set and splinted, he will limp for the rest of his life after all.”
Gervase kept his eyes on Lady Morgan and saw her frown slightly.
“Permit me,” he said, “to find Sir Charles Stuart and ask news of Lord Alleyne from him. I will bring word back here to you as soon as possible in order to relieve your anxiety.”
“How very kind of you,” she said. “But would you please bring that word to Mrs. Clark’s? I must return there immediately. I slept longer than I intended.”
“Return?” Caddick sounded genuinely shocked. “To Mrs. Clark’s, Lady Morgan? When she has twenty wounded men occupying her house? That is not a proper environment for a lady.”
“Or for anyone else, my lord,” she agreed. “But those men are suffering as Lord Gordon is suffering, except that they are without the ministrations of a fond mother and sister and father. Yesterday they fought as fiercely and as bravely as Lord Gordon did. Someone must tend them.”
“But not Lady Morgan Bedwyn,” he said. “It is unfitting. Besides, we will be leaving early tomorrow, and you will need to rest today.”
“I have rested this morning, my lord,” she assured him briskly. “I will do what I can today at Mrs. Clark’s and then return tonight in order to be ready to travel tomorrow.”
“But the streets are unsafe,” the earl protested.
“They are not, sir,” Gervase assured him. “But if it will relieve your mind, I will undertake to escort Lady Morgan and her maid to Mrs. Clark’s myself and bring them back here this evening.”
She looked gratefully at him and left quickly to fetch her bonnet while Caddick blustered with indecision, muttering about his wife’s being still asleep in her chamber.
Five minutes later they were out on the street, the two of them, her maid a decent distance behind them.
“You have seen Lord Gordon?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “He was sleeping when I arrived home,” she explained. “He had a restless morning but was sleeping again when I awoke. I will see him this evening.”
He wondered how much she cared for the boy. Her feelings during the Richmond ball had been confused and in tumult. Perhaps knowing him wounded had aroused her affections for him. She looked up at him with that characteristic direct glance of hers and appeared to guess his thoughts.
“Captain Lord Gordon is just one of thousands of wounded,” she said. “He has a loving family, a houseful of servants, and a quiet, luxurious home to contribute to his comfort. I am needed more elsewhere.”
“You do not pine for a sight of him?” he asked with a smile.
She frowned. “He was talking about me last night,” she said, “and wanting to see me. He is wounded, though not half as desperately as most of the men at Mrs. Clark’s, I daresay, and so I must not say anything to upset him unduly if I can avoid it. But I must, of course, see him.” She sighed. “I suppose I should have made my sentiments clear long ago. But I was staying with his parents and his sister.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, patting her hand, “you will be starting your journey home. You will be back with your family and will be able to tell young Gordon to go to the devil if you wish.”
“And what will you do when you leave here?” she asked him. “Are you still banished?”
He laughed softly. “My father is dead, chérie,” he said, “and my mother has begged me to return home. Perhaps I will oblige her before the summer is over.”
“Do you have only your mother?” she asked him.
“I have a married brother,” he told her, “who is vicar of the church at home in Kent. And two sisters, both married and living away from home. And a second cousin, my father’s former ward, who still lives at Windrush Grange with my mother.”
“I am pleased for you,” she said. “Family is very important. I do not know what I would do without mine. I love them all very dearly.”
“Including the Duke of Bewcastle?” he asked. “It is said that he is a humorless tyrant.”
She visibly bristled. “Both those words are unkind,” she said, “and do not capture the essence of Wulfric at all. He does not know how to laugh, it is true. But he has had the weight of many responsibilities on his shoulders since he succeeded to the title at the age of seventeen—younger than I am now. He takes his duties very seriously and rules those in his care or employ with firm discipline.”
“Including you, chérie?” he asked.
“Oh, we Bedwyns are made of stern stuff,” she said. “We are not awed by Wulfric, though we all respect him. And love him.”
It was hard to imagine anyone loving Bewcastle—though he himself had once admired him and aspired to be one of his small inner circle of friends.
They had reached Mrs. Clark’s house by that time, and it was immediately apparent from the open doors and general bustling air that new wounded were being moved in.
Gervase took one of Lady Morgan’s hands in both of his and raised it to his lips.
“I will bring you word of Lord Alleyne within the hour,” he told her. “Do not wear yourself quite to a thread, chérie.”
She turned away and ran lightly up the steps.
When, he wondered, looking after her, had she become in his eyes a person in her own right and not just the sister of the Duke of Bewcastle? Yesterday? And that person was someone he liked and even admired. Even the age difference between them no longer seemed so huge. She was a woman of principle and compassion—compassion without sentimentality.
He felt more ashamed than ever of his earlier dealings with her. And yet without those he would not even have met her and got to know her, would he?
THE ONLY WORD GERVASE WAS ABLE TO BRING AT the end of the hour was that Lord Alleyne Bedwyn had not reported back to Sir Charles Stua
rt yesterday—a serious omission, given the fact that he was to have brought an immediate reply to the important letter he had undertaken to deliver.
Neither had he reported back this morning.
The rest of the embassy staff appeared half annoyed, half concerned—but not concerned enough, it seemed, to have initiated any active inquiries. Gervase announced his decision to take a ride down through the forest as far as Waterloo to see what he could discover of the whereabouts of the missing man.
“Is it possible,” he asked before he left, “that Lord Alleyne Bedwyn rode off with the troops last evening in the direction of Paris?”
But he received only blank stares and questions instead of answers. Why would an embassy official do such a thing? For what purpose? On whose authority? He was not, after all, attached to any embassy in Paris.
Lady Morgan was a great deal more than half concerned when Gervase reported back to her at Mrs. Clark’s house.
“He has still not returned?” she asked. “Wherever can he be?”
He could see fear in her widened eyes. Her already-pale face lost even more color.
“All was confusion south of Brussels yesterday,” he said, taking her by the elbow and stepping outside the house with her, “and doubtless still is today. Something important has delayed him, you may be sure.”
“But he is not a free agent as you are—or as I am,” she said, frowning. “He had business to attend to, and no doubt he was expected to hurry back here for further orders. Alleyne would not neglect his duty.”
He did not tell her about the reply Bedwyn had been expected to bring back.
“I am going to take a ride out there,” he said. “I’ll see what I can discover and come right back to you. All will be well with him. He is not, after all, a military man and was not engaged in the battle.”
But he had ridden close to the fighting. He had had a message for Wellington, and Wellington was notorious for being always in the very thick of battle. Gervase could see from the look in Lady Morgan’s eyes that she knew this too and had drawn no comfort at all from his words. He drew her against him without forethought, wrapping his arms about her as if he could protect her from all the world’s ills.
“I’ll find him,” he said. “I’ll find him and bring him to you.”
She tipped back her head and gazed into his eyes without speaking, and he lowered his head and set his lips to her forehead, regardless of the presence of a number of pedestrians who were out on the street. He cupped her face in both hands and smiled at her.
“Courage, chérie,” he said.
But it was a rash promise he had made—if indeed he had promised. The horror of the scenes he saw as he rode south through the forest where less than two weeks before he had entertained dozens of guests to a moonlit picnic was too vast for words, or even for thoughts. The road was clogged with traffic, most of it heading north—and much of it bearing yet more wounded. The abandoned bodies of the dead were strewn everywhere, no burial detail having yet come this far north. Many of the bodies had been stripped naked by fellow soldiers looking for uniforms less threadbare than their own or by local people intent upon finding some loot to compensate them for all they had lost in yesterday’s hell.
Even as Gervase stopped for perhaps the dozenth time to ask about Lord Alleyne Bedwyn, one woman was kneeling beside one of the naked bodies a short distance away in the forest and looking up to call for help.
“He is alive!” she cried. “And he is my husband. Please help me, somebody.”
Even as Gervase hesitated a sergeant with a bandage around his head and over one eye detached himself from a group trudging along the road and called good-naturedly to her.
“Coming, missus,” he said. “How bad hurt is he?”
Gervase did not wait to watch the development of this one small happily-ever-after—if the woman’s husband survived, that was. But the incident served to remind him that he was not by any means the only one out on this road or on the battlefield itself today searching for a missing person. There were dozens—perhaps hundreds—of others, many of them women, searching desperately among the dead and wounded for the familiar figure of a loved one.
He rode all the way to Waterloo and beyond—onto the surprisingly small area where such a ferocious battle had been fought the day before. There was still the acrid smell of smoke on the air, mingled with the harsher stenches of blood and death. People were hurrying about here through churned mud and trampled crops with a great sense of urgency—burial details were already hard at their grizzly work.
Gervase wandered about, both on horseback and on foot, asking continually—in vain—if anyone knew and had seen Lord Alleyne Bedwyn. He looked down into the faces of a thousand dead, it seemed, but none was the one he looked for and dreaded seeing. In the end, with the advent of another day’s dusk not far off, he had to give up his search and return to Brussels.
Perhaps, he thought hopefully, he had somehow missed Bedwyn on the road and he had been back in Brussels for several hours. Or perhaps he had been in the city since yesterday. Perhaps he had spent the night with a woman, forgetting both the message he was to have delivered to Sir Charles and his promise to find his sister and take her out of Brussels to safety. Perhaps . . .
And perhaps Lord Alleyne Bedwyn was dead somewhere between Brussels and the far edge of that battlefield. If that were so, he would never be found now, especially if his body had been stripped. It was possible that he had already been buried in some mass grave.
He would just have to hope that there was some other explanation, Gervase decided.
Lady Morgan had not yet returned to the Rue de Bellevue, he discovered when he called there. Neither had Lord Alleyne Bedwyn been there. Gervase left, assuring a somewhat agitated and annoyed earl that he would escort her home within the next hour.
WITH TWENTY-FOUR WOUNDED MEN IN THE HOUSE, a number of them amputees who were suffering the raging fever that so often followed surgical procedures, Morgan had had scarcely a moment for thought all afternoon and evening. When she did have a moment, she found it amazing that she was actually doing this—and doing it without flinching.
She was a Bedwyn, it was true, and the Bedwyns prided themselves upon being tough and intrepid. But even so, she was only eighteen years old. This time last year—this time six months ago—she had been at Lindsey Hall in Hampshire, carefully sheltered from all harm and from all that was ungenteel, under the close chaperonage of Miss Cowper, her governess and companion for the last several years. It was only in February that Miss Cowper had moved away to live with a newly widowed sister, taking with her a generous pension from Wulfric.
Morgan wondered what Wulfric would have to say when he knew how she had spent yesterday and today—and last night. Not one of the men at Mrs. Clark’s was even an officer. There were two sergeants and three corporals among them. All the rest were privates, men whose coarse accents proclaimed their lowly origins.
It simply did not matter, she had discovered. They all needed her. She felt as far removed from the schoolroom and her aristocratic world as it was possible to be.
Mrs. Hodgins touched her on the shoulder as she held a cool cloth to the cheeks of a man who was delirious with fever.
“I’ll do that,” she said. “You take a break for a few minutes, my love. You have not stopped for hours. That gentleman is here who brought the news about Major Clark last night. He wants to speak with you.”
“The Earl of Rosthorn?”
Morgan stood up and gingerly stretched her back. It was only at that moment that she remembered what errand he had undertaken earlier in the afternoon. And it was only then that she realized Alleyne still had not come. She hurried into the crowded hall, pulled her shawl from a hook there, and joined Lord Rosthorn, who was waiting outside on the steps.
She drew a deep breath of fresh air, realizing as she did so how very unfresh the air was indoors. At the same moment she became aware of her untidy, blood-streaked appearance. But it di
d not matter. None of it mattered. She turned an anxious face to his.
“Alleyne?” she asked.
He shook his head slightly. “I have been unable to find him,” he told her, “even though I rode all the way to Waterloo and beyond—out to where the fighting was yesterday, in fact. But you cannot imagine all the confusion out there, all the people and conveyances milling about and crowding the roads. It would have been a miracle if I had found him.”
She looked closely at him in the darkness.
“Lord Rosthorn,” she said, “you know better than to talk to me in that tone of voice.”
“What tone?” he asked.
“That deliberately hearty and cheerful one,” she replied. “As if I were a child.”
He looked steadily and gravely back at her for a few moments.
“Chérie,” he said softly at last, “what would you have me say?”
“Simply that you could not find him,” she said.
“I could not.”
She closed her eyes and drew a slow breath. Her knees were feeling as if they had turned to the consistency of jelly. She fought panic and hysteria.
Where was Alleyne?
“He was delayed in Antwerp when you expected him to come and take you home a few days ago,” Lord Rosthorn said, taking her firmly by the elbow and drawing her down to sit beside him on the doorstep. “You told me so. I suppose you worried about him then, did you not?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“But he came,” he said. “Doubtless it will happen again. Who knows what could delay a man yesterday? And today. Tomorrow he will come and be surprised that you worried so much today.”
Her hand, she realized suddenly, was firmly in his clasp. His fingers were laced with hers.
“Do you believe that?” she asked him.
“I believe it is a possibility,” he said.
Alleyne could not be dead, she thought. He simply could not. There could not be a world without Alleyne in it—or without any of her brothers or her sister, for that matter. It was a thought she had had over and over again as a girl, whenever her worries over Aidan had threatened to overwhelm her. And she had always been right. There had always been a new letter from him to prove that he still lived. And then one glorious day last year he had ridden up the driveway to Lindsey Hall without any warning and she had flown down from the schoolroom—without either Wulfric’s permission or Miss Cowper’s—and hurtled into his arms.
