It Begins with a Kiss (10 page)

For hours they struggled on, the late summer light guiding them. The rattle of rifle fire peppered the evening, and thick smoke rose here and there along the horizon. Olivia could see tents and lights to the east as they reached Mont St. Jean and turned west on the Nivelles Road.

“Close now, mum,” Sergeant Harper said, his head on a constant swivel, his finger never off the trigger as Grace maneuvered past another overturned cart. “See the smoke?”

How could he tell? There was smoke everywhere, blurring a fading sky. The sun had set and dusk was coming on, casting the scene in even greater shadow. Olivia squinted in the direction Harper pointed, and suddenly her heart fell away.

Oh, sweet Jesus, it couldn’t be real. How could anyone have survived? The fields of grain were gone. In their place was a carpet of the dead, bodies in red and blue and green, flowers blown over in a storm, lines of them, piles of them. The fading light glinted off swords and breastplates and guns, and hundreds of horses struggled in their death throes, some already bloating and twisted.

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

Olivia 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 to inform 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.