by Violet
“Put me down, damn you!” Tamsyn snarled, the blood pounding in her lolling head. It was ludicrous that he should be able to carry her in such a fashion, with neither her feet nor her hands touching the ground. No man had ever before taken advantage of her diminutive stature, and the murderous rage already devouring her blazed to new heights.
“No, I will not, you little fool,” Julian declared, his own anger as hot as Tamsyn’s. “What the devil do you think you’re doing here … meddling in this inferno? It’s no business of yours. If I’d had a grain of sense, I should have left you to them.”
Tamsyn sunk her teeth into his calf.
Julian’s yell could be heard three streets away. “Bloody savage!” He swung her upward, changing hands on her body as if she were a caber he was going to toss at the Highland games, then swung her around his neck, grasping her wrists in one hand, her ankles in another, so that she dangled like a hunter’s kill.
Tamsyn’s language was enough to turn the air blue as he strode out of the square with her, but Julian ignored her. He was too filled with anger and disgust at what was going on in Badajos to give a thought to Tamsyn’s outrage at this cavalier treatment. He couldn’t imagine what could have brought her into the city except sheer stupidity … unless she was intending to take advantage of chaos and do her own looting.
“God’s grace, Julian, what have you got there?” Frank’s startled voice arrested him as he passed a small courtyard, its metal gates hanging from their hinges.
Julian turned into the courtyard where a fountain bubbled incongruously in the midst of destruction. The girl Tamsyn had rescued was cowering behind Frank, her eyes stark with terror in her ashen face.
“This is Violette,” Julian stated grimly, bending his neck and lifting Tamsyn bodily off his shoulders, setting her on her feet. The girl ran forward with a cry, flinging her arms around Tamsyn, pouring forth a voluble stream of gratitude, her tongue at last loosened.
Julian followed the gist of the tumbling words and finally understood what Tamsyn had been doing in the square. He hadn’t connected the fleeing girl to Violette’s presence. Thankful that he hadn’t expressed his sour supposition that she’d been after her own plunder, he was about to apologize for his roughness when she turned on him.
“You … you’re no better than that scum … that filthy, murdering, raping rabble!” she declared, spitting the words at him as if they were snake’s venom. “How dare you treat me like that? You’re a blackguard, a piece of gutter-born—”
“Hold your tongue, you!” Julian roared, forgetting all inclination to make peace under this tirade. “If I hadn’t come on the scene, mi muchacha, you’d be lying on the cobbles offered up for whoever chose to take a turn.”
“Filthy, loathsome swine,” she said, her voice suddenly low and trembling. To his astonishment Julian saw a gutter of tears in the violet eyes, her face twisted into a mask of grief.
“Soldiers,” she said in the same voice. “Stinking gutter sweepings, every one of them. Barbarians, worse than animals.” Her hand swept around the courtyard in an all-encompassing gesture. “Animals don’t behave like this. They don’t treat their own kind like pieces of insensate trash to be …” She fell abruptly silent as tears clogged her voice. She turned away toward the broken gates, her hand pushing at the air as if she would hold off her stunned audience.
Frank stared in complete bewilderment; the girl shrank against him again. Julian, with a muttered execration, shook himself free of the mesmerizing trance of Tamsyn’s violent, impassioned speech and ran after her.
“Tamsyn!”
“Leave me alone!” She turned her head aside, pushing him away as he came up to her.
A silver tear glistened on her cheek, making rills in the dirt as it trickled down to the corner of her mouth. Her tongue darted, licked up the tear, but it was followed by another and another.
Julian forgot the accusations she’d hurled at his head. He forgot how much he disliked the brigand in her. He forgot how angry she made him almost every time they came into contact. He was aware only of the power of her distress. He noticed for the first time the blood on her clothes.
“Come,” he said softly. “It’s time we left this place. There’s nothing anyone can do here until they’re surfeited.” He laid a hand on her shoulder to direct her toward the walls of the city.
“Leave me alone!” she repeated, but with less conviction.
Julian shook his head. “I’ll carry you if I must, Violette.”
“Espadachín,” she threw at him, but the tears were flowing fast now, and she brushed her arm across her eyes, smudging the grime on her cheeks so she looked like a chimney sweep. But she didn’t resist him this time when he put his hand at her waist and ushered her down the street.
“You rescued the girl,” he said, trying to offer her some comfort.
“One among so many!” she shot back. “They’re raping nuns, desecrating the churches, spitting men on their bayonets. I’ve seen it before.” The last sentence was so low, he had to bend his head to hear it, but the intensity of her pain could be heard as clearly as a clarion call.
Outside the city, fatigue parties of Portuguese soldiers were digging pits for the dead, the bodies piled on carts, waiting to be consigned to the earth as soon as the pits were deep enough.
“You’re all as bad as each other,” Tamsyn suddenly renewed her attack. “What possible justification can there be for this? Such slaughter … mindless slaughter.”
“Ask Napoleon,” Julian said dryly. “Ask Philippon. If he’d surrendered the city when it was clear defense was no longer viable, thousands of lives would have been saved. It isn’t just us, Violette.”
“I didn’t say it was,” she retorted. “It’s soldiers. Brutal, bestial—”
“It’s war. It makes beasts of men,” he interrupted. “But what of your father? He made war for the sake of gold … no principle, no—”
“Don’t you dare talk of my father, Englishman!” She spun round on him, and her knife was in her hand, her eyes, still brilliant with tears, now glittered with fury. “What would you know of a man like El Baron? You puny, weak-minded English soldier!” She spat the last word as if it was the ultimate insult.
“And don’t you dare threaten me, Violette.” Julian grabbed her wrist, twisting until her fingers opened around the handle of the knife and it fell to the ground. “I’m sick to death of being savaged by you.” He pushed her away from him so abruptly that she stumbled to her knees. “I wash my hands of you. Go where you please, just get out of my sight.” He spun on his heel and marched, seething, toward the encampment. But after a few yards his pace slowed. Reluctantly, he glanced over his shoulder.
Tamsyn remained on her knees on the ground, her head bowed, tears falling into the mud where she knelt. She seemed unaware of his departure. For the first time since it had happened, she was reliving in every detail the massacre of Pueblo de St. Pedro. Always before, she’d allowed herself to remember only her father’s death-defying fight, her mother lying peacefully in the shadows. But now she saw the rest of it. The murdered babies, the raped women, the tortured men as the flames of the burning village leaped into the sky. And she and Gabriel, two against several hundred, had watched it all from the hilltop, helpless to do anything. And afterward, three days later, when the savages had left the burned buildings and the massacred inhabitants, taking with them what plunder they could find, they had gone down to the village and buried Cecile and the baron and dug a pit for the others, just like the pits being dug here, because the two of them alone couldn’t dig enough graves for every one of the dead.
“Come along, you can’t stay here.” Julian’s voice was gentle as he bent over her. He lifted her up, and she turned her head into his shoulder. He felt her body shaking with her sobs. He carried her to his own tent, told Dobbin brusquely to make himself scarce, and went inside, closing and tying the tent flap behind them.
“Tell me about it,” he said quietly.
Chapter Nine
JULIAN WALKED THROUGH THE ENCAMPMENT TOWARD THE hospital tents. There were many of his own men to be found there, and a visit from their colonel would do something to raise their spirits, although little for his own. Those of his men not being shoveled into the grave pits or lying mutilated in the hospitals were indulging in the depths of depravity in Badajos. Restoring them to the keen, good-hearted, spirited fighting men that he knew them to be would take the gallows and the triangles—grim work, but Wellington would order it done with the same ruthless pragmatism as he’d permitted their excesses.
“Colonel St. Simon, isn’t it?”
He was startled from his morose reverie as he ducked into the first tent. A surgeon brandishing a butcher’s knife looked up from the trestle table where a man lay strapped and unconscious, his right leg bared to the knee where jagged bone stuck through the skin.
“Yes.” Julian paused politely. He didn’t think he knew the surgeon.
“Forgive me … I came across a most unusual young woman last night, said she was a friend … a close friend of yours.” The surgeon wiped his damp forehead with his sleeve, “She was most insistent I give her wounded my immediate attention … very persuasive with it. Said the Peer would know who she was.”
“La Violette,” Julian said almost to himself. “What exactly was she doing?”
“Bringing men in from the field on a magnificent white charger … never seen a horse like it.” The surgeon bent again to his patient, who had stirred and groaned. “Forgive me, he’s coming round. I need to get this leg off before he does.”
Julian nodded and walked away, closing his ears to the scrunch of knife through bone. So Tamsyn had spent the night bringing in the wounded on that fidgety Cesar. Offering such aid didn’t quite match with her outspoken hatred for all soldiers, but it didn’t surprise him that she’d had some part in last night’s ghastly proceedings; he was beginning to wonder why she hadn’t been with Picton’s men scaling the walls of the castle.
He’d learned much in the hour he’d spent with her in his tent. She’d talked in a low voice through her tears, but with perfect coherence. She’d told him of the horror of Pueblo de St. Pedro, and he’d had no difficulty imagining it. He too had seen such things.
But now Colonel, Lord Julian St. Simon was troubled. La Violette had taken on different contours. He was beginning to see complexities where before he’d seen only the opportunistic, gloriously sensual brigand … one whose seductive wiles he must resist with every fiber. Now he saw a young woman left alone in the world by the horrific murder of her beloved parents. A young woman who had lost all the framework of the only existence she’d known, cast upon a world at war to make her future as she could.
It was a disturbing picture, not least because beneath it he still saw the other Tamsyn. He still believed she’d been playing on Wellington’s known susceptibilities with her pathetic story, and yet he knew in his bones that she had been manipulating no heartstrings in his tent when she’d painted the unvarnished picture for him.
He didn’t know what to make of any of it. He stopped by a stretcher where a private from his brigade lay breathing raggedly through his mouth, his face smothered in bloodstained bandages.
“The surgeon says you’ll be on your way to Lisbon in the morning, Carter,” Julian said. “Out of it for good.”
“I’ll not be sorry, sir,” the swathed face said. “But I’ve lost me nose, sir. What’ll the missus say?”
“She’ll be glad to have you back with two legs and two arms,” Julian said, touching his shoulder and moving on, aware of how inadequate such reassurance was, and yet it was all he had.
Tamsyn, lying in a hip bath of steaming water in her room in Elvas, was trying to decide whether her emotional collapse had done her any good with Julian St. Simon. She hadn’t planned it, but it had happened, and it just might be turned to good purpose.
The colonel had clearly been moved by her story. He’d been gentle and comforting, ordering his servant to make tea when her tale was told and her tears had finally dried. He’d sat with his arm around her on the narrow cot, saying nothing because there was nothing to say. She’d been more grateful for his silence than anything else. It took a sensitive man to resist the temptation to wade in with clumsy words of comfort that would only trivialize her pain.
Later he’d walked her back to Elvas and left her at her lodgings.
Thoughtfully, Tamsyn soaped her legs, grimacing at the filthy scum forming on the surface of the water. She’d need a jug of clean water to wash off the soap.
As if in answer to the thought, Senhora Braganza came puffing up the stairs with a copper jug of fresh water. Tamsyn thanked her and stood up in the tub. The senhora poured the hot stream over her hair and body, and Tamsyn shuddered with pleasure as the dirt flowed from her body.
Her own shirt and underclothes had been laundered by the senhora, but they were beginning to show serious signs of wear, and her britches were almost beyond help. She needed new clothes, and the shops in Elvas were plentifully stocked, but she had no money until Gabriel returned. Of course, once Gabriel returned, she wouldn’t need to buy clothes, since he’d be bringing all her possessions as well as the treasure—her inheritance from her father that had been well hidden from his murderers.
Perhaps Colonel St. Simon could be induced to make her a small loan. It would give her an excuse to go in search of him again.
She dressed in her threadbare garments. The senhora hadn’t been able to get the bloodstains out of her britches, but they blended with all the other stains accumulated in the two weeks that she’d been wearing them. At least her skin and hair were clean.
Tamsyn examined herself in the spotted glass that served as a mirror. Not too bad, considering. She felt purged in some way, as if by exposing herself to the horrors of Badajos, she’d lanced a festering boil. And somewhere inside her lurked a warm flicker of pleasure and relief that Julian St. Simon had survived the horrors of the assault.
She sniffed hungrily at the rich aromas coming from the kitchen and ran downstairs.
The senhora had prepared a hearty soup of cabbage, potatoes, and spicy sausage and watched with satisfied nods as her lodger consumed two large bowls and several thick hunks of crusty bread. Then, feeling ready for anything, Tamsyn went to fetch Cesar and rode out to the encampment in search of the colonel.
But as it happened, while Tamsyn was in the encampment, the colonel was in Wellington’s headquarters, obeying an urgent summons that had taken him from his hospital visiting back into Elvas.
It was clear to Julian that the commander in chief was in a strange mood. His satisfaction in his victory was tainted by the loss of so many thousands of his best men, and his ruthless decision to give the survivors the run of Badajos did little to comfort him for that loss. Like St. Simon, he believed that if he’d made an example of the garrison at Ciudad Rodrigo in January, the garrison at Badajos would have yielded in a timely fashion and spared both sides indescribable agony. But public opinion would not have supported the uncivilized slaughter of a surrendered garrison, though it would turn a blind eye to the hideous sack and rape of the now-defenseless town.
“Julian, this business of La Violette.” He came straight to the point as the colonel entered. “Have you thought any more about it?”
“There’s hardly been time,” Julian pointed out. “But my answer must be the same, sir. I can’t possibly agree to such a thing.”
Wellington frowned and began to pace the room, hands clasped at his back. “We need her information, Julian. I’m going to drive the French out of Spain this summer and march into France by autumn. I need to know about those passes, and I need to have more freedom of movement where the partisans are concerned. Violette can make that possible.”
“I don’t deny it.” Julian was beginning to feel he had a desperate rear-guard action on his hands. “But I also believe she’ll sell the information for something other than my soul,” he ad
ded caustically.
“Oh, come now, man, don’t exaggerate!” the duke chided. “Six months of your time, that’s all.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Forgive me for saying so—she must feel she has some grounds for believing you might agree to such a proposal.”
“She has no grounds,” Julian stated flatly. “No claims on me whatsoever.”
“I see.” Wellington scratched his nose. “Well, she is a most unusual young woman.”
“A manipulative, thieving mercenary,” the colonel declared as flatly as before. “I will not be a party to her games. I’ll lay odds, if you offer sufficient money, she’ll spill her guts without blinking an eye.”
“Possibly, but I doubt it.… Claret?” The duke strolled to the decanters on the table.
“Thank you.” Julian waited, knowing the battle was far from won. He took the glass offered him with a nod of thanks.
“I doubt it,” the duke continued as if there’d been no break in the conversation. “I have the unmistakable conviction that she knows her price and won’t budge. She wants only one thing … and, Lord in heaven, I can’t fault her for it. The poor little creature’s all alone in the world; she can’t be more than nineteen. What kind of a future is there for her here with neither friends nor family?”
Julian sipped his wine and didn’t reply, remembering the girl’s anguish and desolation. Despite that, he was convinced that “poor little creature” was not an accurate description of the orphaned daughter of El Baron and his English mate.
“I’m sure she’ll be able to locate her mother’s family,” the duke continued pensively. “But it would be better for her to present a more orthodox appearance. More convincing … more appealing, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps,” Julian agreed dryly, not giving an inch.
