A Mistress for Major Bartlett Read online

  It was one small thing, one practical thing she could do to stem the tide of death that had swept Gideon from her. Gritting her teeth and consigning her gown to perdition, she wrapped her arms round Major Bartlett’s neck and held his bloodied head as tight as she could.

  Chapter Three

  The scene that greeted her when they reached the makeshift hospital was one of chaos.

  She clambered out of the wagon, and went to the driver’s seat to speak to the Rogues.

  ‘This is awful,’ she said, indicating the men with terrible injuries who were lying groaning all over the ground, flies buzzing round open wounds.

  ‘Aye, well it’s like this, miss,’ said the First Rogue. ‘Surgeons are too busy hacking off the arms and legs of the poor b-blighters they think they can save to bother with the ones who lie still and quiet, like our Major. They put those to the back of the queue. And by the time they get round to them, well, mostly there’s no need for them to try anything any more.’

  ‘We can’t leave the Major here,’ she said, appalled. ‘Do you know of some other hospital we can take him to? A proper, civilian hospital? Where he can get the treatment he needs?’

  The First Rogue scratched his chin. ‘Hospitals in town are all full as they can hold. Saw them laying the wounded out in the park and all along the sides of the streets, too. And that was before we come out ’ere. Gawd alone knows what it’ll be like by now.’

  ‘Well, what about taking him back to his lodgings, then? His man could help, couldn’t he?’ Justin’s own body servant, Robbins, was always tending Justin when he was wounded. Gideon had told her so.

  ‘His man’s used up,’ said the Second Rogue brusquely.

  She’d heard Justin apply that term to the butcher’s bill after a battle. He didn’t speak of his troops dying, but of being used up.

  ‘What are we to do with him, then?’ It never occurred to her, not for one moment, to simply mount Castor, ride away and leave him. In some weird way, it felt that if she just left the Major’s fate in the hands of providence, it would be tantamount to submitting to the horrid inevitability of death itself.

  Which would somehow dishonour Gideon’s memory.

  ‘You’ve got all those medical supplies in yer bags,’ said Rogue Two.

  ‘How...how did you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘Had a look.’

  He’d gone through her saddlebags, while she’d been climbing over the wall, and throwing stones at the looters? Or had it been later, when she was washing her hands in the stream?

  ‘I didn’t take nothing,’ he protested.

  ‘Look, it’s plain as a pikestaff you’ve been sent here to save our Major,’ said Rogue One. ‘If you nurse him, there’s a chance he’ll pull through.’

  ‘Me? But...’ She thought of the wounds covering his body, not to mention the huge tear across his scalp.

  Then she saw their faces harden. Take on a tinge of disappointment. Of disapproval.

  Of course, they wouldn’t believe she didn’t feel capable of nursing their Major. They had no idea how inadequate she felt. They would just think she was too high and mighty to lower herself to their level.

  ‘I suppose I could try,’ she explained. ‘I mean, the little I might be able to do is bound to be better than nothing, isn’t it?’

  ‘I took a gander when we put ’im in the wagon,’ said Rogue Two. ‘His skull ain’t broke. A lady like you could stitch him up as nice as any doctor. And then it’ll just be nursing he needs.’

  ‘Plenty of drink,’ said Rogue One. ‘Get all his wounds clean.’

  ‘We’ll help you with that. Lifting him and turning him and such.’

  They made it sound so simple.

  They made it sound as though she was perfectly capable of taking charge of a severely wounded man.

  Her heart started hammering in her chest.

  Perhaps she really could do it. After all, they’d said they’d help her. And now she came to think of it, hadn’t she already done much, much more than anyone would ever have thought possible? She’d reached Brussels unaccompanied when everyone else was fleeing the place. She’d rescued the snarling, snapping Ben from the teetering wreckage of a baggage cart. She’d ignored the Hussars and made her own judgement about whether the French were about to overrun Brussels, and been right. She’d even stood up to those women who’d been trying to murder poor Major Bartlett. And that after riding across a battlefield without totally fainting away.

  And she could sew.

  And even though she’d never nursed anyone in her life, she had listened most attentively to every word of Bridget’s advice, because she’d believed she was going to be nursing Gideon. Marigold was for cleansing wounds to stop them from putrefying. Comfrey was for healing cuts. And apparently she could make a sort of tea from the dried meadowsweet flowers, which was less bitter and nasty than willow bark and almost as effective at reducing fever.

  Poor Gideon wouldn’t need any of that, now. He was beyond anyone’s help.

  But this man had fallen, literally, into her lap.

  Had begged her to save him.

  And there was nobody else to do it. He had nobody.

  Just as she had nobody.

  Well, she thought, firming her lips, he might not know it, but he had her.

  ‘Very well, then,’ she said, clambering back into the wagon. ‘I will do my best. We’ll take him to my lodgings.’

  She’d already begun to prove, at least to herself, that she wasn’t that fragile girl whose only hope, so her entire family believed, was in finding some man to marry her and look after her.

  This was her chance to prove to them, too, that she didn’t need anyone to look after her. On the contrary!

  With her head held high, she gave the Rogues her direction, then knelt down to cushion the Major’s head against her breasts once more for the remainder of the journey.

  * * *

  Pretty soon they were drawing up outside a house on the Rue de Regence, unloading the Major by means of the stretcher with which the cart was equipped and banging on the door for entry.

  ‘Oh, my lady,’ cried Madame le Brun. ‘You found him then? You found your brother?’

  The men holding the stretcher glanced at her, then looked straight ahead, their faces wiped clean of expression.

  Sarah blinked.

  The night before, when she’d turned up frightened, and bedraggled, clutching Castor’s reins for dear life, she’d told Madame le Brun how she’d run away from Antwerp to search for her twin, because she’d heard a rumour he’d been killed, but refused to believe it. She’d explained that she’d returned to her former lodgings because she hadn’t known where else to spend the night, with the outcome of the battle currently raging still being so uncertain. The house where Lord Blanchards had rented rooms when Brussels had been the centre of a sort of cosmopolitan social whirl might not have been in the most fashionable quarter of town, but it was well kept and respectable. And Madame le Brun had been a very motherly sort of landlady.

  It would be terrible to lie to her. Sarah hated people who told lies and she avoided telling them herself. Yet there was a difference, she’d always found, in letting people assume whatever they liked. Particularly if the absolute truth would cause too much awkwardness.

  ‘He is very gravely wounded,’ she therefore told Madame le Brun, neatly sidestepping the issue of his identity altogether.

  ‘I shall be nursing him myself, so it will be best to put him in my room. The room I had when I was here before.’ She smiled vaguely in Madame’s direction, but spoke to the men. ‘Careful how you get him up the stairs.’

  At that moment Ben provided a welcome diversion by attempting to follow them inside.

  ‘Oh, no. This I cannot have,’ shrieked Madame le Brun, ma
king shooing motions at the dog, who’d acquired an extra layer of mud since the last time she’d seen him. ‘The stables! The stables is the place for the animals.’

  Ben took exception to anyone trying to get between him and the three members of his adopted pack who were already mounting the stairs. He bared his teeth at the landlady, and growled.

  In the ensuing fracas, the Rogues manoeuvred the stretcher up the stairs and into Sarah’s old room. And no more questions were asked about the wounded man’s identity. By the time the landlady, the dog and Sarah caught up, in a welter of snapping teeth and loudly voiced recriminations, the Rogues had got their Major on to her bed.

  ‘Madame,’ said Sarah, ‘we can settle the question of what to do with the dog, who as you can see is very devoted to his master, later, can we not? What we really need, right now, is plenty of fresh linen, and hot water, and towels.’

  Even though she hadn’t actually ever nursed anyone before, it was obvious that the first thing they needed to do was get the poor man cleaned up.

  ‘Oh, le pauvre,’ said Madame le Brun, crossing herself as she caught her first proper sight of the Major’s battered and semi-clothed body. ‘Fresh sheets, yes, and water and towels, too. Of course. Though the dog...’

  ‘Yes, yes, I promise you I will deal with the dog, too. He won’t be any bother. But please...’ Sarah allowed her eyes to fill with tears as she indicated Major Bartlett’s body.

  ‘Very well, my lady. Though I cannot think it is right for an animal so dirty to be in the room with one so badly hurt...’

  ‘The dog it was as found him,’ put in the First Rogue.

  ‘Yes, we owe Ben a great deal,’ said Sarah.

  Madame le Brun grumbled about the invasion of her property by such a large, fierce and dirty dog, but she did so on her way out the door.

  Sarah could hardly believe she’d won that battle. Why, only the night before, she’d cowered in the stables because Madame wouldn’t let the dog in the house, and Sarah had been afraid that someone trying to escape Brussels before the French forces arrived might try to steal her horse. She’d been too timid to do more than wheedle a blanket and some paper and ink from Madame. Today she’d got the dog and a wounded officer right into her very bedroom.

  It was a heady feeling.

  Which lasted only as long as it took for her to notice that the Rogues were intent on stripping the Major of his clothes. They’d already pulled off his one remaining boot. Ben pounced on it and bore it off to the hearthrug, from which vantage point he could keep an eye on proceedings while having a good chew.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to fetch those medical supplies, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the First Rogue suggested gruffly, pausing in the act of undoing the Major’s breeches. ‘While we start getting him cleaned up a bit.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I shall do that,’ she said in a voice that sounded rather high-pitched to her own ears. She turned away swiftly and scurried out of the room, thoroughly relieved the man had offered her a good excuse for making herself scarce.

  She pressed her hands to her hot cheeks once she’d shut the bedroom door behind her. Her legs were shaking a bit, but she wasn’t going to succumb to a fit of the vapours just because she’d almost seen a man have his breeches removed.

  She forced her legs to carry her to the head of the stairs and made her rather wobbly way down. She was going to have to get used to a lot more than glimpses of a man’s, well, manliness in the days to come, if she was going to be of any use.

  In fact, she was going to have to breach practically every rule by which she’d lived. She’d always taken such pains to keep her reputation spotless that she’d never been without a chaperon, not even when visiting the ladies’ retiring room at a ball. She could scarcely believe she’d just encouraged two hardened criminals to install the regiment’s most notorious rake in her bedroom—nay, her very bed.

  Where he was currently being stripped naked.

  Oh, lord, what would people think? Actually, she knew very well what they would think. What they would say, if they found out.

  Right, then. She squared her shoulders as she marched across the yard to the stables. She’d better think of some way of preventing anyone finding out what she was doing, or they’d all be up in arms.

  At least all the gossipy society people she knew from London had fled Brussels. She’d seen many of the most inquisitive in Antwerp. Even if any of them had remained, Madame le Brun thought Major Bartlett was actually her brother, so she couldn’t let anything slip.

  And as for Justin... She chewed on the inside of her lower lip, as it occurred to her he might still be in that tumbledown barn, too gravely ill to move, let alone worry about what his flighty little sister was getting up to. Actually, he might have no idea she’d returned to Brussels, if he was still unconscious. Not that she wanted him to remain unconscious.

  She bowed her head and uttered a silent, but heartfelt, prayer. And immediately felt a deep assurance that Justin couldn’t be in more capable hands. Moreover, even when he began to recover, Mary wasn’t likely to mention anything that might hamper his recovery.

  She retrieved the medicine pouch, then made her way back to the house, feeling sorrier than ever for poor Major Bartlett. Having to rely on such as her. Nobody, not by the wildest stretch of imagination, would ever describe her as capable.

  A crushing sense of inadequacy made her pause outside her bedroom door. For on the other side of it lay an immense set of challenges. All wrapped up in the naked, helpless body of a wounded soldier.

  She pressed her forehead to the door. She’d already decided she wasn’t going to be one of those people who thought propriety was more important than a man’s very survival. But even so, it wasn’t easy to calmly walk into a room that contained two rough soldiers and a naked man.

  What if she tried to think of this as a sickroom, rather than her own bedroom, though? And of Major Bartlett as just a wounded soldier, rather than a naked and dangerous rake? Her patient, in fact. Yes—yes, that was better. She wasn’t, primarily, a woman who’d been forbidden to so much as speak to him, but his nurse.

  It made it possible for her to knock on the door, at any rate. And, when a gruff voice told her she could come in, Sarah found that she could look across at the Major with equanimity—well, almost with equanimity. Because he wasn’t lying in her bed. He was in his sickbed. All she had to do was carry on in this vein and she’d soon be able to convince herself she wasn’t a sheltered young lady who regarded all single men as potential predators, but a nurse, as well.

  A nurse, moreover, who’d promised, when his men had begged for her help, that she would do her best.

  In her absence, Madame had fetched water and towels. And the men had put them to good use, to judge from the mounds of bloodied cloths on the floor.

  ‘He ain’t so bad as he looked,’ said the First Rogue. ‘A lot of bruising and cuts to his back where the wall fell on him, but nothing broken, not even his head.’

  ‘Really ’as got nine lives, ’as the Tom C—’ The Second Rogue broke off mid-speech, but Sarah knew perfectly well what he’d been about to say.

  Well, well. Perhaps he hadn’t only gained that nickname because of his nocturnal habits. Perhaps a good deal of it was down to him having more than his fair share of luck, too.

  ‘Sooner we can get it sewn up the better,’ put in the First Rogue hastily, as though determined to fix her attention on the man’s injuries, rather than his reputation. ‘Cut right down to the bone, he is.’

  They were looking at her expectantly.

  Oh, yes. They’d said that she ought to do the sewing, hadn’t they?

  ‘I...’ She pressed one hand to her chest. In spite of the lecture she’d given herself, about proving how capable she was, now that it came to it, her heart was fluttering in alarm. At this point, Mama would fully expe
ct her to have a fit of the vapours, if she hadn’t already done so because there was a naked man in her room.

  ‘You can do it, miss,’ said the Second Rogue. ‘Far better than us clumsy b... Uh—’ he floundered ‘—blighters.’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ she admitted, though she was ashamed to sound so useless.

  ‘We’ll direct you. And hold the Major still, in case he comes round.’

  Yes. Yes they would need to do that. The pain of having his head sewn back together might well rouse him from his stupor. After all, hadn’t he roused once before, when the looters had been tearing off his shirt?

  ‘I can’t...’

  ‘Yes, you can, miss.’

  She smiled ruefully at the man. ‘I was going to say I can’t go on thinking of you as Rogue One and Rogue Two, like characters in a play. You must have names? I am Lady Sarah.’ She held out her hand to Rogue One. ‘How do you do?’

  He took her proffered hand and shook it. ‘Dawkins, Lady Sarah.’

  ‘Cooper,’ said the other with a nod, though rather than shaking her hand, he pressed a pair of scissors into it. ‘You need to start by trimming his hair back as short as you can get it, round the sabre cut,’ he said.

  ‘S-sabre cut?’

  ‘Cavalry sabre, I reckon,’ said Cooper. ‘Only thing that would knock him out and slice the scalp near clean off like that, all in one go.’

  I will not be sick. I will not be sick.

  ‘Do you think he would prefer it,’ she said brightly, in a desperate attempt to turn the conversation in a less grisly direction, ‘if I cut it short all over? Only he will look so very odd, shorn in patches, when the bandages come off, won’t he?’

  ‘Time enough for that when he’s better, miss.’

  Yes, but keeping up a conversation was still a good idea. She was less likely to either faint, or be sick, if she could keep at least a part of her mind off the grisly task she was having to perform.