A Mistress for Major Bartlett Read online

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, ruthlessly snipping away the matted curls. Lord, but it seemed like a crime to hack away at such lovely hair. Not that it looked lovely any more. She felt a pang at a sudden memory of how glorious it had looked, with the sunlight glinting on it, that day in the Allée Verte. She’d never imagined a day would come when she’d be running her fingers through it. Not for any reason.

  ‘We can ask him how he wants it done when he’s better, can’t we? Perhaps get a barber in to do something that will disguise this hideous crop I’m giving him.’

  She laughed a little hysterically. Then swallowed.

  ‘It is amazing what a professional coiffeuse can do, you know.’ Snip. ‘Even with hair like mine.’ Snip, snip. ‘It is completely straight, normally. It takes hours of fussing, from a terribly expensive woman, with her special lotions and a hot iron, before Mama considers me fit to venture out of doors. And it takes such a long time to prepare me for a ball that I have gained the reputation for being dreadfully vain.’

  She must sound it, too, prattling on about styling her hair, at a time like this. Except that with her mind full of hairdressers, and ballrooms, somehow it was easier to cope with the grim reality of what she was doing.

  ‘Reckon that’ll do now, miss,’ said Cooper, gently removing the scissors from her fingers and handing her a needle and thread.

  ‘Th-thank you.’ She was sure her face must be white as milk. Her lips had gone numb. And her hands were trembling.

  Could she actually puncture human flesh with this needle? She shut her eyes. If only she could keep them shut until it was over.

  Or if only Harriet were here. For Harriet—who’d had the benefit of an expensive education—would simply snatch the needle from her hand with an impatient shake of her head and say she’d better take charge, since everyone knew Sarah was far too scatterbrained to nurse a sick man.

  But Harriet wasn’t here. And backing out of the task was unacceptable. She’d just be proving she was as weak and cowardly as everyone expected her to be.

  Everyone except Gideon. You show ’em, she could almost hear him saying. Show ’em all what you’re made of.

  ‘Al...Always victorious,’ she muttered, under her breath. ‘That’s our family motto,’ she explained to the men, when she opened her eyes and saw them looking at her dubiously. She’d chanted it to herself all the way from Antwerp, the day before, to stop herself from turning back. Had whispered it, like a prayer, when she’d been cowering in the stable with her horse, to give herself heart.

  ‘Motto of our unit, too,’ grunted Cooper.

  ‘Of course, of course it is,’ she said, taking a deep breath and setting the first stitch. ‘Justin—that is Lord Randall, your colonel—he took the words from our family coat of arms, didn’t he? From the Latin, which is Semper Laurifer. Sounds like laurel, doesn’t it? And we do have laurel leaves on our family coat of arms. I suppose whoever took that motto did so for the play on words. Laurel. Laurifer. After a long-ago battle. Because there have always been soldiers in our family. And I dare say plenty of earlier Latymor ladies have had to stitch up wounds. I can almost feel them looking over my shoulder now, encouraging me to keep up the family tradition.’

  She was babbling. In a very high-pitched voice. But somehow, reciting family history, whilst imagining the coat of arms and all her doughty ancestors, helped to take her mind off the hideous mess into which her fingers were delving.

  ‘G-Gideon told me that in the case of your unit, Justin, I mean Lord Randall, said you could use whatever means necessary to ensure you always won. Which sounds rather ruthless, even for him. I found it very hard to believe the things he said my stuffy, autocratic big brother got up to during the Peninsula campaign. But Gideon was so full of admiration for the sheer cheek of the way he went behind enemy lines, blowing things up, smashing things down and generally causing mayhem.’

  ‘Confounding the French, the Colonel called it,’ said Dawkins.

  ‘And that’s how you got the name of Randall’s Rogues,’ she said, glancing at the unconscious Major’s face. He’d been with Justin, doing all those things that had made Gideon green with envy. ‘I know it is far more fashionable to belong to a cavalry regiment like mine,’ he’d grumbled, ‘but what I wouldn’t give to have command of a troop like Justin’s. That’s the kind of officer I want to be. One who can take the refuse from half-a-dozen other regiments and forge them into something unique.’

  He might not have wanted this man to get anywhere near her, but Gideon had admired him, in a way. He was just the kind of officer Gideon had wished he could have been.

  ‘Not much longer now, miss,’ said Dawkins kindly, as her gaze lingered on the Major’s face, reluctant to return to the ghastly wound she was supposed to be tending. ‘You’re doing a grand job.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a shudder. Then took a deep breath. ‘I’ve decided,’ she said, getting back to work, ‘that if the men in my family can go about claiming they can do whatever they like to make sure they come out victorious, because of a couple of words engraved on the coat of arms, then so can I. From now on, I will be Always Victorious. In this case—’ she swallowed as she set yet another stitch ‘—I will do my best for this poor wretch. If, for example, I am going to be sick, I will do so after I’ve finished patching his scalp back together.’

  ‘That you will, miss,’ Dawkins agreed.

  Though miraculously, and to her immense relief, she wasn’t sick at all. True, she did stagger away from the bed and sink weakly on to a chair while the men slathered a paste that smelled as if it consisted mostly of comfrey, on to the seam she’d just sewn.

  She wished she had some brandy. Not that she’d ever drunk any, but people said it steadied the nerves. And she certainly needed it. Needed something...

  ‘We’ll go and fetch the Major’s traps now, miss,’ said Dawkins as soon as they’d finished covering her handiwork with bandages.

  ‘What?’ And leave her here, all alone, in sole charge of a man who looked as though he was at death’s door?

  ‘You won’t be long, will you?’

  ‘No, but—’ They exchanged another of their speaking looks. Oh, lord, what news were they going to break to her this time?

  ‘We’ll be back with his things in no time at all, miss. But we can’t stay after that. We have to report back.’

  Her heart sank. When they said they’d help her, she’d thought they meant until he was fully recovered. But they had only spoken of lifting him and cleaning him up, hadn’t they? And they weren’t civilians who could come and go as they pleased. If they didn’t report to someone in authority, they would run the risk of being treated as deserters.

  ‘Yes. Of course you do.’

  ‘Nothing to do for him now but nursing, anyhow. You can do that as well as anyone. Better, probably.’

  She leapt to her feet. ‘No. I mean...I have never nursed anyone. Ever. I am not trying to back out of it, it’s just that I won’t really know what to do,’ she cried, twisting her hands together to hide the fact they were shaking. ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Whatever he needs to make him comfortable.’

  ‘You’ve got meadowsweet to make a tea to help bring down the fever, if you can get him to drink it.’

  ‘Fever?’

  ‘He’s been lying outside in the muck, with an open wound all night, miss. Course he’s going to have a fever.’

  Oh, dear heaven.

  ‘Bathe him with warm water, if that don’t work.’

  ‘And if he starts shivering, cover him up again,’ said Dawkins with a shrug, as though there was nothing to it.

  For the first time in her life—she swallowed—she was going to have to cope, on her own, without the aid of a maid, or a footman, or anyone.

  But hadn’t she always complained that nobody trus
ted her do anything for herself? Now she had the chance to prove her worth, was she going to witter and wring her hands, and wail that she couldn’t do it?

  She was not. She was going to pull herself together and get on with it.

  ‘Give him the medicine,’ she repeated, albeit rather tremulously, ‘bathe him if he gets too hot, cover him if he gets too cold. Anything else?’

  ‘Landlady will have a man about the house to help when he needs to relieve himself, I dare say.’

  Yes. Of course she would. There were a number of servants flitting about the place. She wouldn’t be all alone.

  ‘And we’ll tell the company surgeon where the Major is, so he can come and have a look.’

  ‘Oh.’ That would be a relief.

  ‘But don’t think he’ll do anything you couldn’t do yourself, miss,’ said Dawkins.

  ‘And don’t let him tell you the Major should be in a hospital,’ said Cooper vehemently. ‘They won’t look after him proper there.’

  Coming from Cooper, that was quite a compliment. He’d been eyeing her askance every time she felt faint. His hostility had actually braced her, once or twice, just as much as Dawkins’s kindness and encouragement had. Because every time Cooper looked as though he expected her to fail, it made her more determined to prove she wouldn’t.

  And now, to hear him say he trusted her to give the Major better care than he’d get in a hospital, made something in her swell and blossom.

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ she vowed. ‘I won’t let him down.’

  With a parting nod, the men left.

  ‘Oh, goodness gracious,’ she said, sinking on to the chair again. ‘Whatever have I let myself in for?’

  Chapter Four

  The guns had ceased. The battle was over, then. Won or lost. Leaving the field to the dead and dying. And the crows.

  Flocks of them. Tearing at his back. His head. They’d go for his eyes if they could get at them.

  No! He flung his arm up to protect his eyes. And felt considerable surprise that he could move it. Hadn’t been able to move at all before. They’d buried him. Tons of rock, tumbling down, crushing him so he could scarcely breathe, let alone fend off the crows.

  Who had dug him out of his grave? He hadn’t been able to save himself. He’d tried. Strained with all his might. He’d broken out into a sweat, that was all, and dragged blackness back round him in a smothering cloak.

  But he’d be safer under the earth. Crows wouldn’t be able to get their claws into him any more. Or their beaks.

  ‘Put me back in the ground,’ he begged.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ came a rather exasperated-sounding voice.

  ‘But I’m dead.’ Wasn’t he? Above the ringing in his ears he’d heard the other damned souls all round him, begging for mercy. Begging for water.

  Because it was so hot on the edge of the abyss.

  Or was it powder caking his mouth, his nostrils, so that everything stank of sulphur?

  ‘Is it crows, then, not demons?’ He’d thought they were wraiths, sliding silently between the other corpses scattered round him. But he’d seen knives flashing, silencing the groans. Sometimes they’d looked just like battlefield looters, not Satan’s minions.

  But whoever, or whatever it had been before, they’d got their claws deep into what was left of him now.

  ‘There are no crows in here,’ came the voice again. ‘No demons, either. Only me. And Ben.’

  Something cool glided across his brow.

  He reached up and grabbed hold of what turned out to be a hand. A human hand. Small, and soft, and trembling slightly.

  ‘Don’t let them take me. Deserve it. Hell. But please...’ He didn’t know why he was begging. Nobody could save him. He’d begged before, for mercy, just like all the others. Or would have done if he’d been able to make a sound. He’d understood then that he wasn’t even going to be permitted one final appeal. He’d had to stay pinned there, reflecting on every sin he’d committed, remembering every man he’d killed, every act of wanton destruction he’d engineered.

  ‘Nobody’s going to take you. I won’t let them.’

  The voice had a face, this time. The face of an angel. Though—he knew her. She was...she was...

  His head hurt too much to think. Only knew he’d seen her before.

  That’s right—for a moment, just one, the power of speech had returned. And he’d begged her to save him. It had something to do with the darkness ebbing and hearing the sound of birdsong, and working out that he couldn’t be dead yet, because birds didn’t sing in hell, and that if he wasn’t dead, then there was still hope. And though there had been all those great black creatures clawing at him, tearing at his clothes, he’d found the strength to make one last, desperate stand.

  And she’d been there. She’d driven them away. Told them to leave him be. And they’d gone, the whole flock of them. Flapping away on their great ugly wings. And he’d fallen into her arms...

  Hazy, what came next. She’d carried him away, somehow, from the mud and the stench. Pillowed on cushions of velvet, soft as feathers.

  Was she an angel, then? There seemed no other logical reason to account for it. Beautiful women didn’t suddenly materialise on battlefields and carry dying men away. Which meant he’d been right in the first place.

  He was dead.

  ‘Did you fly?’ How else could she have carried him here? Besides, she was an angel, wasn’t she? Angels had wings. Only hers weren’t black, like the crows. But blue. Palest blue, like sky after the rain had washed it clean.

  ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ the angel sobbed.

  ‘Why are you weeping? I’m not worth it.’

  ‘I’m not weeping.’ The angel sniffed.

  ‘If I’m dead, why does it still hurt so much?’ he groaned. ‘Look, they know my soul belongs to their master. That’s why they’re clawing at me. Perhaps you should just let me go. No need to cry, then.’

  ‘No! And it’s not claws. It’s your wounds. Here, try to drink some more of this. It will help with the pain.’

  Her arm was under his neck, lifting his head. And she pressed a cup to his lips.

  More? She’d given him a drink before?

  Ah, yes. He did remember wishing someone would give him something to drink. The thirst had been worse than the pain, in that other place. He’d understood that bit in the bible, then, about the rich man begging Lazarus to dip even one finger in water and cool his tongue. And known, too, that like the rich man he deserved his torment. He’d earned his place in hell.

  But his throat was no longer raw. His tongue wasn’t stuck to the roof of his mouth. And he could speak.

  So she must have given him water, before. Couldn’t have been anyone else. Nobody else gave a damn.

  ‘I was so thirsty.’ And now he was tired. Too tired to drink any more. Or speak. Or even think.

  * * *

  It was the longest night of Sarah’s life. He’d been lying there quietly enough until the Rogues left her on her own with him. But from the moment the door shut on them, it seemed to her, he hadn’t given her a moment’s peace.

  Not that it was his fault, poor wretch. He couldn’t help starting to come out of his deep swoon. Or being thirsty, or hot, or uncomfortable. Only it was such a tremendous responsibility, caring for someone as ill as that. It was almost impossible to get more than a sip or two of the meadowsweet tea between his lips. And sponging him down didn’t seem to help for more than a minute or two. And then only at first. As the night wore on, his fever mounted and he started muttering all sorts of peculiar, disjointed things about hell, and demons, and thrashing about in the bed, as though trying to dig his way out from under some crushing weight.

  And it was downright scary when he started speaking to her in that clear, lucid
voice, in such a bizarrely confused manner.

  The only thing that calmed him was to answer him as though he was making sense. To assure him that he wasn’t already in hell, whether he deserved it or not. And to promise she wasn’t going to let him die.

  She would have promised him anything if only he would lie quietly and let her sleep. She was so tired. She’d hardly slept the night before, in the stable, she’d been so scared. Nor the night before that, she’d been in such a state over the report of Gideon’s death.

  Yet, when Madame le Brun came in to ask how her brother was getting on, and if she wanted to take a short break, she found she was unable to leave him for long.

  She was glad to have a meal, for she hadn’t eaten a thing all day. And she did feel better for a wash and a change of clothes. But once she’d seen to her immediate needs, she couldn’t rest for worrying about the Major.

  Not that she must think of him as the Major, she decided, as she went to take Madame le Brun’s place at his bedside. If he really had been her brother, she would have thought of him as... What was his first name? They called him Tom Cat, so the chances were it was Tom. Well, that was what she must call him, for now. The truth would come out soon enough. The truth about his real identity. And his real name if it wasn’t Tom. And it wasn’t as if it would make any difference to him what she called him, the state he was in tonight.

  His eyes flicked open, yet again.

  ‘It’s so hot. Are you sure...?’

  ‘Quite sure. This isn’t hell. It’s Brussels,’ she said, dipping the cloth in a basin of tepid water on the bedside table, then smoothing it over his face, his neck and his chest. Though it didn’t seem to be doing much good. His skin felt hotter than ever.

  ‘But you are my guardian angel, aren’t you?’ he said hopefully. Then groaned and shook his head.

  ‘Can’t be. Wretches like me don’t deserve guardian angels.’

  ‘Everyone has a guardian angel,’ she put in hastily. ‘Whether they deserve one or not.’

  And if that were true, then she was exactly the sort of guardian angel someone as sinful as Tom probably would get. The sort who wasn’t sure what she was doing. And who was terrified of the responsibility. The sort who simply didn’t measure up. Second-best.