Barely a Lady (4 page)

And there was screaming. Human. Equine. The awful, unearthly keening of the damned rising through the shattered trees and turning her insides to water.

“Christ preserve us,” Sergeant Harper whispered, and even he sounded shaken.

Already people with lanterns were bent over the fallen, and Olivia didn’t think they were all there to help. She wanted to leap down with her pistol and chase them off.

“There, I think, Sergeant,” Grace said suddenly, pointing, and all their attention was drawn to another column of lethargic smoke that lifted over the trees. “The western flank.”

Olivia saw it then too. A red brick wall. Shattered brick and white stucco farm buildings beyond, flames still licking at gaping windows. More bodies, piled along the walls, in among the splintered trees: alive, dead, torn apart like rag dolls. More smoke, blurring the outlines of the scene. Olivia swallowed hard and wiped her hands on her dress. How could they ever find Grace’s father? How could they even face such obscenity?

“Here, I think, Sean,” Grace said quietly as they reached the north wall of the compound. “By the gates.”

The carriage stopped, and Grace laid the reins across the sergeant’s legs.

“Let me look,” Harper said, taking her hand. “You stay.”

Grace patted him. “Nobody will notice women when a carriage and horses wait here.”

Olivia wasn’t so sure about that. Even so, Grace finally convinced Harper, and he handed Grace and Olivia down.

“We’ll stay in range,” Grace promised, and accepted one of the lanterns Harper passed down.

Much more slowly, Olivia followed suit. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t turn over one of those poor bodies. She couldn’t bear to surprise the stiff dead face of that great, mustachioed general and have to tell Grace.

At least the dusk was beginning to camouflage some of the worst. Taking one of the lanterns, Olivia followed Grace to the ragged wall.

The firing had stopped, and men had clustered by the arched wooden gate. Grace approached them and asked for her father. To a man, they shook their heads. The fighting had been too fierce, and the general had been stationed outside in the orchard.

Grace nodded and turned toward the trees. Olivia followed. She saw Grace turn over the first red- coated body and waited. Grace eased him back down, straightened, and moved on. Olivia squeezed her eyes closed a second, praying. Then she bent over her first body, and from then on focused on nothing but trying to identify a white mustache.

Night came on as they searched. A full moon rose, silvering the horrific scene. Her lantern bobbing erratically with her limp, Grace followed the eastern wall south, her movements quick and efficient. Not nearly as quick or efficient, Olivia followed. She didn’t know how much later it was when she first heard it.

“My lady.”

A man’s voice, like so many others. She wiped the soot off a young guardsman’s face and closed his staring eyes before easing him back over.

“Please, my lady.”

Olivia looked up, expecting to see a wounded soldier.

He was no wounded soldier.

Olivia blinked, sure there was smoke in her eyes. That she was just too tired. But when she opened her eyes again, he was still there, not five feet away. Chambers, Gervaise’s valet. And he was clad in the red coat of a guardsman, as if he belonged on this killing ground.

“Please, my lady,” he said to her, his severe face screwed up in something close to terror. “Help me.”

“What are you doing here?” she rasped, looking around.

Then she froze. Oh, God. If Chambers was here, where was Gervaise? She realized then how far she’d wandered. She was alone in the trees except for Chambers and the dead and the deepening night.

“It’s all right, my lady,” he said, as if hearing her. “He is not here.”

“Stop calling me that,” Olivia snapped. “I am Mrs. Olivia Grace.”

“You must help,” Chambers begged.

“Who must I help?” Olivia demanded. “You?”

“Him.”

“Gervaise?”

Chambers just shook his head. Olivia waited, wondering what the rest of the joke was, ready to tell him that no matter what, she had no intention of helping him. She had walked away from his world five years ago, been chased, like a thief with a purloined apple in her hand. She had closed that time away and had no intention of opening it back up again.

She turned to leave. Chambers was quicker, grabbing her by the wrist.

“Let me
go,
” she demanded, yanking back.

He ignored her. “I stole a horse and followed you here,” he said, inexorably pulling her into the trees. “I thank God it was here you were bound. I would have dragged you all the way across the battlefield if needed.”

She continued to struggle, even as he guided her over and around the dead who lay beneath the blasted trees.

“Let me
go,
” she demanded again. “I have to help my friend.”

“You have to help
me.
”

Her heart was beginning to stutter. This couldn’t be happening. She was dreaming. She’d fallen asleep in one of the tents, and now she was paying for her loss of control.

Chambers stopped. She almost slammed into his back. They had reached a stretch of woods where the bodies lay thick among the ruined fruit trees. The moonlight bathed them with a cold hand; the smell of cordite was sharp. Chambers grabbed the lantern from Olivia’s hand and went on his knees by one of the bodies.

“Look,” he commanded.

She looked. She stopped breathing. She was sure her heart had stopped beating.

It couldn’t be. It
couldn’t.
He was bloody, so bloody, with a ruined neck cloth tied around his upper arm and another around his leg. His hair was matted with the blood that covered his face and neck and chest. He was sitting, leaning against the tree as if he’d fallen asleep there after a prodigious drunk. His eyes, those beautiful blue-green eyes she’d once thought so honest and dear, were closed.

“Is he dead?”

For just a flash of an instant, the thought gave her vicious pleasure. It would serve him right, after what he’d done to her. But the feeling passed, just as it always did, and she was left with the grief that lived in its shadow.

“Not yet,” Chambers said, laying a hand against that bloody face. “Please help him, my lady. He needs you.”

“I think he’d disagree with you,” Olivia corrected him, unable to move, curling her hands against the compulsion to kneel. To take that battered body in her arms, where it belonged. To pummel at him for the pain he’d caused and then sob her heart out over him. “He threw me away, Chambers. He left me in no doubt as to what I meant to him. Nothing has changed.”

“He needs you,” the valet begged. “He can’t be discovered. Not like this.”

“Like what?” she demanded. “So he joined up. That’s very patriotic of him. Ask one of the other Guards to help.”

She squinted, suddenly uncertain. The Guards had defended this place in their bright red jackets and gleaming brass buttons. He was in blue. Only his stock and cuffs were red.

She’d seen those. Seen many of them, piled on the battlefield to the east. “What uniform is that?” she demanded, suddenly praying she was wrong. “I don’t recognize…”

But she did. She stopped. Stepped back. Of course she recognized it. She was surrounded by them, soldiers fallen in an attempt to take the château from the Guards.

French
soldiers.

John Phillip William Wyndham, scion of one of the oldest, most respected families in England, a belted earl, lay on an English battlefield clad in a French uniform.

Her husband was a traitor.

Chapter 3

O
livia jumped back. “Jesus!”

A French uniform. Dearest God in heaven.

She hadn’t seen Jack in five years. Not since that day he’d slammed the door on her and had his bailiff escort her from Wyndham Abbey.

Alongside her, Chambers was wringing his hands. “I don’t know what happened, my lady, and that’s the truth.”

Olivia couldn’t seem to move. Her friend was out there, still combing the dead for her father. Her enemy was back in Brussels waiting for another chance to attack. And she was standing in front of the man she’d once vowed to honor and obey, and he was dressed in a uniform that branded him a turncoat.

“Please, my lady,” Chambers begged. “He needs your help.”

“Again you mistake me, Chambers,” she said, still unable to take her eyes off her husband. “I am no longer anyone’s lady.” She pointed to the man who had once owned her heart. “He saw to that. You all did.”

Five years she’d survived without any help from him. Five long, terrible years, until she had decided that she was finally quit of him. Her hand went instinctively to her locket.

“As God is my witness,” Chambers said, “I have no idea how he got here. I got a message to meet him here. By the time I reached him, he was as you see.” Chambers motioned. “No one can find him like this.”

“Indeed?” Olivia asked. “And you think I should be the one to help him? Why? For the memory of Tristram?”

Tristram, sweet Tris, who had died out on that empty heath at dawn with no one but her to mourn him.

“I suggest you call Jack’s cousin Gervaise,” she said, only still upright by will alone. “After all, he is your new master.”

Chambers looked over at her. “Do you really think Mr. Gervaise is the person to help him right now?”

Olivia squeezed her eyes shut. She clenched her hands into her skirts to keep them still. Of course, Gervaise wouldn’t help. Gervaise wouldn’t waste a moment toinform the world—most regretfully, of course—that his cousin the earl had been caught in a treasonous position.

His mother was French, you know,
he’d say with a sad shake of his head. It would be enough to condemn Jack.

Her heart was thundering. Pain squeezed her temples, and she knew she was sweating. How could Chambers ask this of her?

But she had once loved Jack so. She’d thought it a miracle that he’d asked her to marry him: her, the daughter of a mere vicar who’d relied on Jack’s father for his livelihood. She had lived as Jack’s wife for eleven months and prayed for another three years that he would come to his senses and bring her home.

But she’d long since gotten over that idiocy. He wasn’t going to change his mind. He wasn’t going to beg for her return. He wasn’t going to ask her forgiveness. She had no reason to help him.

“You really don’t know how he got here?” she asked.

“The note he sent was the first I’d heard from him in two years.”

She nodded. She tried desperately to fan her outrage.

“What should we do?” Chambers asked, as if he’d already assumed her cooperation.

She couldn’t do this. She was already living on a thin edge. God only knew what could happen if she helped Jack.

It didn’t matter. She couldn’t walk away.

“Get him out of this bedamned uniform,” she snapped.

And suddenly she was on her knees, reaching out to touch Jack’s cheek. God, how was she ever going to survive this again?

She looked up to see Chambers just staring at her. Probably appalled at her language. She paid him no attention. Laying her fingers against Jack’s throat, she checked for a pulse.

Thready, yes, but regular. He was alive. “Strip one of the British dead of his jacket,” she ordered. Closing her eyes again, this time in a brief prayer for the sacrilege she was about to commit, she steeled herself to move. “I’ll undress Jack.”

Reaching out a trembling hand, she began to unbutton the bloodied brass buttons on Jack’s coat. The last time she had unbuttoned Jack’s coat, they’d been clawing at each other, too impatient to get their hands on each other to worry about popped buttons or ripped seams. He’d been insatiable for her. She’d been mesmerized by him.

It hadn’t been enough.

“Get a jacket from someone who suffered a bloody wound,” she instructed Chambers. “Nobody can question his appearance.”

At least she didn’t have to bother with the gray overalls. They were ubiquitous among both armies. But even the coat was a struggle. He was dead weight in her hands.

He was thinner. No matter what else she’d closed away, she had never forgotten his body. He was still as hard, his limbs long and elegant, his shoulders broad. Her hands itched to explore that beloved territory. But the well-tailored jacket hung from his once-broad chest, and his hips jutted.

She couldn’t think about that. Nor could she let herself dwell on the fact that this uniform could have been tailored specifically for the Jack he’d been twenty pounds ago.

“There was a dispatch bag on him,” Chambers whispered from a few feet away. “I put his personal things in it and hid it under him before I sought you out.”

Olivia unearthed the bag when she rolled Jack over. “Did you check its contents?”

“No. Wasn’t my business.”

Taking a second, she slung the bag over her shoulder beneath her apron. She’d go through it later, when she had time.

“My lady—”

“Don’t,” she snapped, her arms once again full with Jack’s painfully familiar weight. “I’m holding on to my position by my fingernails. One mention of the Countess of Gracechurch, and even the Duchess of Murther will have to show me the street. Now, that might appeal to you, but it won’t help Jack at all, will it?”

Chambers stopped a few feet away, a bloody, soot-stained Guards’ jacket and officer’s sash in his hands. He opened his mouth as if intent on answering. One look at her obviously made him reconsider.

“I’ll need help getting him back,” he said, handing over the clothing. “The horse is gone.”

She shook her head. “No. You can’t expect it of me.”

“Please,” Chambers said, and she heard his desperation.

She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed for strength. “Try and get him to the road. We’ll be passing by.”

Careful not to further injure him, they slipped his bloody arm into the sleeve and pulled the jacket closed. Olivia was sweating in earnest now. She had to wipe moisture from her eyes as she tied the crimson sash around Jack’s waist and shoved the betraying blue jacket away.

“I’m going back to help my friend now,” she said, climbing to her feet and rubbing her hands on her apron.

Chambers looked up from where he hovered over his former master. “Thank you… Mrs. Grace. I won’t forget it.”

Because she couldn’t help it, Olivia took one final look at Jack. Then, deliberately crushing a spasm of grief, she turned her back on them both and walked away.

Sergeant Harper was waiting around the corner by the north gate, the shotguns resting on his knees, his attention beyond the open gate into the château yard.

“I haven’t had any luck, Sergeant,” Olivia said, hoping he didn’t notice how badly her voice shook. “Have you seen Grace?”

“Yes’m,” he said, motioning with his head. “She went in there. Would you go to her? I got a bad feeling.”

Olivia nodded and walked through the broken, blasted gates into the north courtyard. There were more dead here. More bright red bundles piled in untidy hillocks, more broken hearts. There were others wandering about, blank-faced Guards checking for wounded or just stumbling toward rest. Olivia took a look around, but she didn’t see Grace anywhere among the remains of the outbuildings and great house.

“Grace? Where are you, dear?”

There was a moment of silence, the courtyard thick with smoke and the smell of carnage. Olivia thought she’d never see smoke again without returning to this place.

“I’m here,” Grace called from beyond the shattered house.

And Olivia knew. It was in the flat tone of Grace’s voice. Finality.

Ah, God. Poor thing.

Lifting her skirt away from the blood that puddled in the cobbles, Olivia walked past the still-burning buildings to find another littered courtyard. Grace was there, crouched in the shadow of a little stone chapel, her skirts pooled about her, the hem drenched in more blood. One of the red-coated bodies was in her arms.

She looked up, and Olivia saw the rivers of tears that had scoured away the smoke and grime from Grace’s cheeks. Her expression was calm, though, almost as if she’d finally played out a scene she’d anticipated a thousand times over.

“Oh, Grace,” Olivia said, crouching down beside her friend. “I’m so sorry.”

Grace lifted a small smile. “He knew I’d come. He waited to bid me good-bye,” she said, stroking that lined face that rested so peacefully in her arms. “He was supposed to be back at headquarters, you know. Wellington had detached him to Quartermaster Corps. He was just too old this time. But he wouldn’t allow his boys to face this without him.”

Olivia laid her hand atop Grace’s where it rested on her father’s blood-soaked chest. “Do I say he died as he wanted?”

Grace’s smile grew, and with it the bittersweet light in her eyes. “Indeed you do,” she said. “Thank you.”

Olivia wished she could give Grace the time she needed. The hour was getting late, though, and they had a long way to go.

“We need to get him back, dear. I think there are scavengers about.”

Grace’s attention sharpened, and she looked out toward the gates. “Oh, yes,” she said, giving her father a few final pats. “I should have thought of that. You aren’t safe here.”

“Shall I send the sergeant to you?”

“Would you?”

Olivia reached over to wipe the tears that scoured Grace’s cheeks. “I have the most curious urge to wield a shotgun. I think I’ll look quite fearsome, don’t you?”

When he saw Olivia walk out of the big gate, Sergeant Harper secured the reins and set down the guns. He’d known, of course.

“I’ll take over here, Sergeant,” Olivia said. “The general needs you.”

The little man’s eyes were suspiciously bright. “You sure you can manage, ma’am?”

Olivia took a second to stroke the noses of the restless horses. “Mine is not the difficult task, Sergeant. I’ll be fine.”

He nodded and hopped down. “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll be back in a flash, then.”

It was then, oddly, that Olivia finally noticed that the sergeant had only one leg. His left foot was made of wood, and it took him a minute to catch his balance on it. She waited until he marched into the courtyard to attend his general one last time, his limp only slight. Then she climbed up to take his place atop the coachman’s perch.

It was an excellent vantage point. Too excellent, Olivia realized. The unearthly light of the moon sapped the color from the carnage around her. She could no longer identify the uniforms. The dead had lost their identities. They were no longer friend or enemy, just thousands and thousands of boys who would never go home.

Please don’t let Jack be responsible for any of this,
she prayed into the darkness.
Don’t let me betray these fallen boys by helping him.

When Grace returned, it was with an honor guard of six of the surviving Guardsmen who gently carried the general’s body to the carriage, led by Sergeant Harper. Another officer guided a limping Grace by the elbow and was bent over her, talking. Grace nodded, her gaze never leaving the body of her father.

Olivia tightened the reins to calm the horses. Sergeant Harper opened the carriage door, and the men deposited their general inside. After bestowing parting kisses on each of the men, Grace followed. Sergeant Harper climbed up alongside Olivia, and she could see tear tracks on his homely face.

Ah, to have been mourned like that. To have a daughter with the courage to brave a battlefield to search for you. To have a line of battered, smoke-stained soldiers snap off a salute as your hearse door closed and a faithful friend to see you home.

“If you don’t mind, Sergeant,” Olivia said, “I’m not a very good whip. I am a deft hand with a weapon, though. My papa insisted we all be able to hunt. It was his obsession.”

His eyes glassy, the sergeant nodded and took the reins from her. Olivia settled on the seat and arranged the weapons more fully across her lap.

“I thank you, ma’am,” he said. “It’s a good thing you’re doing this day, all right.”

“Nonsense, Sergeant,” she said, shoving her straggling hair out of her face before she thumbed the triggers. “I was merely looking for a bit of adventure.”

With a small smile on his face, he clucked the horses.

They made it no farther than the edge of the orchard before Harper pulled them to a stop. A group of wounded blocked his way. In the center stood Chambers, a pistol in his hand and Jack at his feet. Olivia blinked, momentarily disoriented. For a fraction of a second, she’d forgotten. She saw Jack and felt her courage falter.

“We need a ride,” Chambers said quietly, as if he were indeed an officer who’d bled on this field with the rest. “I’d appreciate your help.”