Carla Kelly

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SIGNET REGENCY ROMANCE

The Wedding Journey

Carla Kelly

InterMix Books, New York

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not have any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

THE WEDDING JOURNEY

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Signet Books edition / December 2002

InterMix eBook edition / January 2013

Copyright © 2002 by Carla Kelly.

Excerpt from
Libby’s London Merchant
copyright © 1991 by Carla Kelly.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-101-57891-9

INTERMIX

InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group

and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

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INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON

This book is lovingly dedicated to the surgeons
in Wellington’s Marching Hospitals
and
Edward J. “Bud” Hagan, MD (1916-2008)
Combat Surgeon, U.S. Navy, with the
First Marine Division, South Pacific 1943-45.

“One must always get over heavy ground as lightly as possible.”

—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Libby’s London Merchant

About the Author

Prologue

C
aptain Jesse Cameron Randall, assistant surgeon of Marching Hospital Number Eight, was no lover of paperwork, but he had no trouble declining an invitation from his brother officers to drink up the dead ration that always signaled the beginning of a retreat. Even using the argument that the bottles would be an encumbrance, it struck him as unseemly to polish off the liquor and wine belonging to officers who had died during the campaign. Somehow, toasting “Glorious War” and then downing the booze of dead men smacked of more hypocrisy than he cared to tote about.

Besides, everyone would be required to give a toast. Yes, he was shy, but more than that, his quiet toast of “Do no harm,” had dampened other such gatherings.
Do no harm
. Eight years ago in 1804, with another company of practitioners, he had recited the Hippocratic Oath in the cathedral adjacent to the University of Milan. It was his own toast to death, and after all these years, he had drunk his fill of it. He preferred to stay under Number Eight’s canvas and finish his reports.

Thinking of hypocrisy, he smiled to himself, and knew he was the biggest hypocrite in Wellington’s Peninsular army. Paperwork be damned; he wanted to keep Nell Mason in view. Elinore Ophelia Mason, to be accurate, he amended, a grandiose name for the compact young lady preparing a plaster at the other end of the tent. He loved her. Even the occasional glance in her direction was balm in Gilead, here on the outskirts of boring, disgusting, irritating Burgos. He knew it was love; he never doubted it.

Rain had thundered down for three days now, dratted
rain. Somewhere in normally parched Spain, he was certain there were farmers lighting candles in gratitude. He took no pleasure in it, not after a frantic camp follower had rushed into Number Eight yesterday, carrying her toddler, blue and suffocated from falling in the mud and unable to right herself. He had tried for an hour to resuscitate the little one, long after the chief surgeon, Major Sheffield, gave his shoulder a shake. He hated the mud.

The only bright spot in the whole, dismal affair was his relief that Nell didn’t see him fail. Her own mother was ill with camp fever. By the time she learned of the incident from Dan O’Leary, chief hospital steward, the baby had already been taken to the dead tent. She had cried anyway.

Jess put down his dip pen. Rain had first called his attention to Nell Mason seven years ago in Canada, his first posting with the division. In autumn on a rainy day much like this one, he had watched two children digging in the mud by their tent. Tired from duty in the fever tent, it had taken him awhile to realize that they were trying to spade out a trench around the family tent to keep the rain out.

Major Sheffield had come over to stand beside him, and swore. “Blast and damn! Why can’t Bertie Mason look after his own?” In a moment he had summoned two privates from Number Eight to dig the trench. The boy was frankly embarrassed and ducked his head. The girl gathered her soaking cloak around her and picked her way to stand beside Sheffield, inclining her head toward him for a small moment and then hurrying away.

“You wait, now,” Sheffield had told him as they removed their cloaks later in their tent. “Tomorrow there will be a little something just inside the tent.”

Sure enough, when he had opened the tent flap in the morning, he stared down at a blue bead, which he handed to Sheffield. With a smile, the chief surgeon took out a strand of similar beads from an inside pocket, unknotted the string, and added it. “She is scrupulous about paying for help,” he had said, then held up the little necklace to the light. “When I feel all puffed up, I like to pull this out and think about the widow’s mite. Help’um when you can, lad. No one else will.”

That was his introduction to the Masons and endless camp gossip about Bertram and Audrey Mason, two sillies
with no more income than a captain of foot, who lived precariously one step ahead of their creditors. In that hypocrisy peculiar to the officer corps, he had watched officers’ wives ignore Audrey Mason, and admonish their children not to play with Will or Nell.

Even now, eight years and a continent later, he remembered when the blue beads ran out. He had left the butt end of a roast, crispy-cooked, outside the Masons’ tent, something hardly worth mentioning. In the morning, Nell had come to Number Eight in tears, brushing past him to stand before his superior, who knelt beside her.

“I have no more beads, sir,” she had whispered to Sheffield while Jesse eavesdropped shamelessly.

The starkness of that memory made him pick up the pen again to continue the death report. Then he put it down, not sure, even after eight years, which was the lesser of two evils. In his own youth, or ignorance, he had almost told the Chief to give her back the beads, so the game could begin again. A closer look told him volumes about the character of the little girl standing so close to Sheffield. The matter was deeply real to her. The realization of just how much the Mason children needed the surgeons’ little favors came like a slap.

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