The Spy's Reward (22 page)

Abigail had not suspected that anything was wrong until dinnertime. At this time of year, sunset (and therefore the Sabbath meal) was quite late. As a result it had been nine o'clock before Abigail and Fanny realized that Diana was not in the house, and even then, since it was still light out, they were not very concerned at first. Rosie was summoned; she had not seen Diana since just after luncheon. Perhaps she had gone for a walk.

Abigail questioned the other servants. If Diana had gone walking, she had gone unaccompanied. None of the servants reported being asked to escort her. No one had seen her leave. No invitations had arrived; no callers had stopped in after lunch.

“She has stayed late at a friend's house and has forgotten to send word,” Fanny suggested. She was beginning to sound anxious.

Abigail turned to the maid. “Rosie, did you see anything odd when you looked in her room just now?”

“It was a bit untidy,” Rosie said hesitatingly. “And her wardrobe was open.”

Untidy might not mean much, given Diana's habits. Until an exasperated Abigail had limited her daughter to one round of maid service every morning, the staff had sometimes felt compelled to clean her bedchamber and parlor every few hours. The open wardrobe was another story, however. She ran up the two flights to Diana's suite with her heart pounding against her ribs like a giant mallet.

She could tell at once that the chaos had an urgent quality to it very different from Diana's usual carelessness. It was not as easy as it had been in France to determine what was missing—her daughter had a very ample wardrobe—but after a preliminary inventory it became clear that Diana had not simply ventured out for a walk. In addition to the dress she had been wearing two others were gone; she had also taken half boots, two pairs of slippers, and a nightgown. All her chemises and pairs of drawers remained, however—incontrovertible proof that Diana herself had done the packing. Wherever she had gone, she would not have any clean linens when she got there.

Abigail sank down onto the bed and put her head in her hands. “Couldn't she even leave a note?” she asked, despairing.

The practical Fanny was looking at the scraps of paper in Diana's grate to see if the note had been discarded by mistake. She did not find a letter, but she did find a packing list in Diana's handwriting:
new bonnet, two prs shoes, ostrich fan, nightclths, pink muslin, perhps yellow, shawl, gloves, jwlry.
This last prompted Rosie to search Diana's trinket box, which proved to be virtually empty. Diana's father had been very generous; Abigail realized unhappily that her daughter was probably carrying enough money in jewels to run away to the other side of the world, if she chose.

By this time it was almost ten o'clock. Abigail went back downstairs and sent out the footman to make enquiries in the neighborhood. Then she paced back and forth in the front hall until he returned. He had very little to report. The kitchen maid at Number Fifteen
might
have seen a young lady carrying a bandbox walking briskly west just after noon. But she could not be sure.

Abigail sent him out again, this time accompanied by the coachman, with instructions to proceed towards Cornhill and see if they could find any traces of her. They left with a list of possibilities that would have daunted a Bow Street runner: taverns, hackney stands, stagecoach inns, shipping agents, and jewelers. The last was Fanny's suggestion; presumably Diana would need to sell some of her treasures to obtain cash.

The letter arrived at half-past ten, delivered by a postboy. Her first reaction was relief to have news—any news. Then she read the letter more carefully.

Abigail closed her eyes. Not content with the fifteen hundred soldiers who had escorted them to Grenoble, Diana was now headed, alone and unprotected, for a city that currently housed eighty thousand soldiers. She opened her eyes just in time to see the postboy collecting his fee from Fanny and heading for the door. “Wait!” she cried, hurrying after him. She asked the poor messenger so many questions so quickly that he began to look dizzy, but a pint of ale and a few coins remedied her error. After that she let Fanny ask the questions.

His name was Will and he was a postboy at the Crown and Eagle, on the Dover road. The message had been given him by a young lady at about six this evening. Fanny asked him what the young lady looked like; he gave an accurate (and very admiring) description of Diana. Was she traveling alone? He couldn't say; the coffee room at the inn had been very crowded. Did she look unhappy, or frightened? (This was Abigail's question.) No indeed, she had been very cheerful and had told him her mother would pay him very well for the message. Abigail more than fulfilled this prophecy and then, reluctantly, let the person who had seen her daughter last leave the house.

Nothing Fanny said could convince her that some immediate action was not necessary. Yes, the runaway had an eight hours' start; that made it all the more imperative to leave at once. Yes, Diana might send a second letter with more information. Fanny would please forward it on to her at once, for Fanny, of course, must stay at home in case Diana returned. There was no point urging Abigail to rest or to wait for morning; Diana was in danger every minute Abigail delayed. Her daughter's idea of a chaperone was likely some woman she met on the stagecoach who was not even going to Brussels, and the idea of Diana alone in a foreign city on the brink of war was insupportable.

Fanny tried one last time. Surely Abigail was not planning to travel by herself to Belgium? That was as foolish as what Diana had done. What would she do when she arrived? How would she find Anthony Roth—the only clue to Diana's location in Brussels—among the thousands of soldiers assembled there?

That was when Abigail had realized that there was someone who could help her, someone who knew how to travel quickly at night, someone who could find one soldier—or one runaway girl—in a foreign city. Her coachman and footman had not yet returned, but it was less than a mile to the Roths's house. She had run up to her room, snatched her pelisse and bonnet, and paused only to tell the horrified Rosie where she was going before running back downstairs and out into the night.

 

 

Fifteen minutes later she was at the door of the Roths's town house, trembling and out of breath. The servant who admitted her surveyed her very dubiously before agreeing to fetch Mr. Meyer. Some part of her knew that she should have sent a messenger rather than coming herself, should have at least brought a maid. She did not care. The only thing she wanted was to be in Brussels as quickly as possible.

She heard a murmur of voices; heard quick footsteps coming into the hall; saw a tall, familiar figure, blurred through a film of unshed tears. She started to explain why she was there, but her sentences were broken and disjointed; she could barely speak without choking. And then two strong arms were around her; her head was resting on something reassuringly solid and warm; a deep voice was repeating her name gently, telling her that everything would be all right.

For years she had been the responsible one, had been careful and sensible, always calm and correct, as if she could prove by her behavior that she was not as fragile and uncertain as she felt inside. Now she was tired of pretending. She let him hold her. She let the tears fall. She let herself imagine that she was not alone.

24

Henrietta Woodley was clearly suspicious of her daughter's friend, and Diana, in all fairness, could hardly blame her. Diana had been afraid to attempt an extended letter in her mother's handwriting, so the forged reply to the Woodleys invitation was almost insulting in its brevity. The tale of the broken carriage pole, which she used to justify her arrival at the Woodley's in a hackney cab—and her lack of a portmanteau—had not stretched to explain why no maid or footman had accompanied her across London. And the small bag she had brought with her horrified the practical Mrs. Woodley by its contents or, rather, lack of contents. Diana had assured her hostess that her trunk would find them at Dover, but to her secret relief Martha had been ordered to provide a spare set of linens “just in case” Diana's own luggage failed to appear.

If there had been more time for questions, Diana's brittle network of lies might have collapsed then and there, but fortunately for Diana there was no time. Within an hour of her arrival, the Woodleys had set out for Dover in two coaches; they had made only the briefest of halts on the road and instead of staying overnight at the port, as Diana had expected, they had embarked at once to take advantage of favorable wind and tide. By then it was so late that everyone had retired immediately to their cabins and attempted to sleep. As a result, Mrs. Woodley was not able to act on her suspicions until the following morning, as the ship was coming into port.

When Martha appeared, looking rather nervous, and stammered that her mother wanted to see Diana in her cabin, Diana did feel a twinge of anxiety. She told herself firmly that it would be far too much trouble now for Mrs. Woodley to send her home, that the worst she could expect was a scolding. So she stepped into the adjacent cabin, hoping her fears were unjustified but resolved to take her chastisement meekly if necessary. A little voice at the back of her head was warning her that what she had done was far more serious than a schoolgirl prank, and that this would be no ordinary scolding. She tried to ignore that voice.

Mrs. Woodley was seated on her berth, frowning down at a letter. Diana had an uneasy feeling that she recognized it.

“Good morning, ma'am,” she said. “Martha said you wished to see me?”

“There is one,” muttered Mrs. Woodley, peering at the letter. She looked up. “Miss Roth, how do you spell ‘obliged'?”

Flustered, Diana did her best to produce the correct spelling. She was not sure if the word had one
d
or two. Evidently it had only one, because Mrs. Woodley winced when she inserted one after the
i
. “I cannot think how I came to insult your mother so dreadfully,” was Mrs. Woodley's comment as Diana fell silent. She held up the forged letter. “I had met her several times, and I was still prepared to believe that she was both discourteous and illiterate. She did not write this, did she?”

Diana dropped her eyes. The enormity of what she had done was becoming clearer every moment.

“Does she even know you are here? Did you leave her a note?”

“I sent her a letter from the inn yesterday,” Diana said in a small voice.

“Have you any notion of what she must have suffered when she found you gone?”

No response was expected, but Diana for some reason found herself remembering the old days—they were not so very long ago—when she had been allowed to see her mother only twice a year. In particular she was remembering the tight, frozen look on her mother's face whenever it was time to say good-bye.

Mrs. Woodley sighed. “I should have trusted my own judgment more. Do you know what I thought when I first met you?”

Diana bit her lip. “No.”

“I thought you were too pretty for your own good, and I was right. You are not much used to hearing the word ‘no,' are you? You wanted to come to Brussels, and your mother said no, and so you have made me and my daughter accomplices in fraud.”

“She didn't say no,” said Diana fiercely. She blinked back tears. “I did not ask her, because I
knew
she would never agree. She hates soldiers and she hates war and after what happened in France she hates them even more, and she doesn't care that Anthony enlisted and I was not even able to say good-bye.”

“So that part, at least, was not a lie,” Mrs. Woodley said. “There is actually an Anthony.”

“He is a private.” Her voice wobbled only very slightly. “In an infantry regiment.”

The older woman looked at her sternly and held up the forged letter. “Did Martha know about this?”

“No! No!” Diana willed her to believe it. “I swear it!”

“Well, that is something, at any rate.” She sighed and put it down. “I must send you home, of course, and it will be very inconvenient. We have only the two servants with us. I suppose we will have to hire someone in Ostend to escort you back. Or perhaps one of the wives I know from the regiment will be traveling home.”

Diana was stunned. “You are going to send me home?” she said, half-disbelieving. It had never occurred to her that Martha's mother would share most of Abigail's views on proper behavior. Diana had thought that her mother was unusually strict. She was beginning to understand that the opposite was true: her father had been unusually permissive.

“Of course.” Mrs. Woodley looked stern. “Apart from my obligation to return you to your family as quickly as possible, I do not care to have you keep company with my daughter and my niece.”

As painful as the thought of her mother's anxiety had been, this was even more painful. Guilt was familiar to Diana. Shame was not.

“For the moment,” Mrs. Woodley went on, “I am afraid I must lock you in my cabin. We are just coming into Ostend now, and I cannot take the chance that you would run off and find the Belgian version of a hackney cab. I will return as soon as I can discover what arrangements can be made for you.”

Diana wanted to object, to argue, to promise to behave, to beg for a reprieve. But before she could say anything, Mrs. Woodley had gone. She heard the lock protest as it was forced home, and then, to add to her humiliation, Mrs. Woodley's voice giving orders to a seaman that no one was to let Miss Hart out of her cabin for any reason whatsoever until she returned.

She sat in the cabin for what seemed like hours. At first she got up eagerly whenever she heard footsteps or voices, but after a while she realized that on a small packet like this one she would hear every sailor or passenger who walked anywhere nearby. As the ship was warped in to the dock, those noises were added to the confusion. She gave up and lay down on the bed, feeling wretched. Somehow her own picture of this voyage as a heroic adventure was impossible to recapture after Mrs. Woodley's pointed questions. Indeed, her own conscience was asking her other, equally disturbing questions about her penchant for excitement and her willingness to stoop to practices such as forgery.

When the door was finally unlocked, she struggled up onto her feet. It was Mrs. Woodley, followed by a rather frightened-looking Martha.

“It appears that we will not be able to send you home,” said Martha's mother. Her face was taut. “Our forces met the French yesterday afternoon near Brussels, and the British civilians in the city, as civilians are wont to do, are panicking and spreading rumors of disaster. Consequently the docks are swarming with foolish people clamoring to be taken off at once. It is simply not possible to get you safe passage on a boat at the moment.”

Diana, who did not share her mother's distrust of the military, saw no contradiction at all in the notion that it was safer to proceed towards a battlefield than to travel home with hysterical Londoners who were fleeing in terror.

Mrs. Woodley looked at her daughter. “Martha has engaged to be personally responsible for your good behavior until I can return you to your mother. That means that consequences for your actions will fall not only on you, but on her.”

Diana looked at her friend. “Thank you,” she said faintly.

“You will write a letter to your mother right now, to be sent with the captain of this packet. You will explain to her that Martha and I were not aware of the true situation. You will give her our address in Brussels and will tell her that unless I hear from her I will send you home as soon as I can find a safe means of doing so.”

Diana nodded.

“Do you have any questions?”

Yes, she had a question. A very urgent question. “Please—forgive me if I sound ignorant. But you said our forces met the French. Does that mean that they fought?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Woodley, her expression almost kindly. “Not all of our men, of course. Just a few regiments.”

“Do you know which regiments were there? Were any of the soldiers killed?” She strained to remember the suddenly elusive, all-important number. “Anthony—Mr. Roth—is in the 44th Foot.”

“I am afraid that division was involved, yes,” said the older woman gently. “And there were quite a few casualties on both sides.”

Diana had seen the word “casualties” in the newspapers. It had seemed very impersonal and abstract until now. She swallowed. “I am very good at nursing,” she offered. “Truly. And I know how to set bones, if they are only broken a little.”

“Do you?” Mrs. Woodley looked at her thoughtfully. “In that case I may not be in such a hurry to send you home after all.”

 

 

Under a gray, threatening sky the remnants of the second battalion of the 44th Foot were huddled around a small fire making tea. It seemed very strange to Anthony that they should be having tea, as though this were an ordinary morning. A few miles away eight thousand corpses were lying scattered around a little rural crossroads, and the men here could not really explain why they were alive while their comrades were dead.

Yesterday afternoon Anthony had finally understood the purpose of drills. Drills were boring and exhausting; battle was boring and exhausting and terrifying. If you had drilled enough, the similarities (boredom and exhaustion) outweighed the differences (terror) and when the sergeant screamed “fix bayonets!” you moved quickly enough so that the charging enemy met a wall of blades instead of a helpless man with an unloaded musket. Anthony had not drilled enough. He knew that it was sheer luck that he was not dead.

“Here,” said a freckled soldier, handing him a tin mug. He took it gratefully. It tasted foul, but it was hot, and it was liquid. Since yesterday afternoon he had been constantly, fiercely thirsty. Between the smoke and the sun and the residue of gunpowder in his mouth, Anthony had thought at times that he would be willing to kill simply for a drink of water.

“That was your first battle, wasn't it?” the other man asked, watching Anthony drink.

“Yes.” Anthony handed back the empty mug. “And you?”

“My tenth. I've been in since '09. Been wounded twice.”

“What did you think of yesterday?” Anthony asked cautiously.

He himself had absolutely no idea why they had fought at that particular place. The crossroads seemed to him a perfectly ordinary one, indistinguishable from countless others they had passed on their hurried march to relieve the Dutch forces. When they had arrived, things had become even more incomprehensible. So far as he could tell, his company had done nothing but stand there and get shot at by French cannon. Occasionally some French infantry would attack; then they were allowed to shoot back. Even more occasionally, the French cavalry would attack. That was a break in the monotony: everyone would scramble into a tightly packed square facing out. The horses would shy away from the wall of bayonets, the 44th would send a volley of musket fire after them, and the excitement was over until the next cavalry charge. But most of the time they stood there in the smoke and waited for cannon balls to smash into their ranks.

Evidently the battle had not made much sense even to the veterans; his companion spat in disgust and then growled: “It was a bloody mess, that was what it was. Half a division wiped out, and then we abandon the damned crossroads anyway and come north.”

As the morning wore on, the phrase “bloody mess” seemed to be the general consensus about Quatre Bras. The supply wagons had never caught up to the troops. So there was no food, no spare gear, and, most importantly, no grog. When the dark clouds finally split open and disgorged a brutal, soaking rain, the men began complaining even more bitterly. Why were they marching out in the open, when in the nearby woods they could at least find some shelter? Where were the supplies? Where, for that matter, was the rest of their division? They continued north, going more and more slowly as the roads and fields turned to mud. In places it was ankle-deep, and several men had to stop and retrieve boots that had been sucked off their feet. Eventually the rain slowed to a drizzle, but the mud persisted.

In the middle of the afternoon, a rider in the blue coat of a staff officer pulled up to the weary troop. He was met with catcalls. “Where are the damn wagons?” several men yelled. “Where are our mates?”

He ignored them and addressed the nearest officer. “Lieutenant Tomkins?”

“No, sir. I'm Willoughby. Tomkins was killed yesterday.”

“Sorry to hear it.” The rider looked grim. “Do you still have a trooper named Roth? Or was he killed as well?”

“He's here, sir.” Willoughby turned and bellowed “Roth! ”—then blushed furiously when he saw Anthony standing a few feet away.

The man danced his horse sideways so that he was facing Anthony. “You're the one who speaks German?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you ride? Nothing fancy, we're not recruiting you for the cavalry.”

Anthony hesitated. “Yes, sir.”