The Officer and the Proper Lady (16 page)

It would. Of course it would, he realized, staring up into the cob webbed gloom of the roof overhead. In all the years he had been fighting he had known the anxiety his family had suffered, their fears. But it had not occurred to him what anguish it would be to hear the details of the horrors of the battlefield and to know he had died there, perhaps lingering for days.

‘Thank you,' he said at last, realizing it was not possible to say any more without shaming himself with tears. He had been angry with her for risking her safety and her reputation. She did not deserve that. She deserved that he do what he could now to protect her, and do it with good grace.

‘I will marry you,' Julia said abruptly. ‘You are right, I must, I see that.' The relief he felt must have shown on his face for she added, ‘Then you are not angry with me any longer?' He could hear a tremulous smile in her voice.

‘I am relieved. I will do my best to make you a good husband, Julia.' She bit her lip and looked away, so he hesitated over the softer words he had thought she might expect. Then the moment was gone as foot steps approached the hut.

‘Here's the coffee.' She got to her feet with what he had to assume was relief at the interruption.

‘I've found some planks,' George said, putting down the mug close enough to Hal for the aroma to have his mouth watering. They could have extracted any kind of confession, he realized, just by torturing him with the threat to take it away. ‘Reckon I can push them under the pillow and wedge them up and you'll be able to sit up a bit.'

It hurt, but he bit his lip and kept quiet. The relief of being able to lie back and look around, not at the roof, was worth every pang. Hal took the mug in his left hand and drank, almost moaning with pleasure as the strong, hot liquid slid down. It felt as though it was replacing all the blood he had lost with liquid fire.

When he stopped drinking and paid attention to what the others were doing, he found they were in elegantly tackling fried bacon wedged between slices of bread. The smell of the hot savoury fat floated across the hut, overcoming even the coffee. ‘Is there any more of that bacon?'

Julia smiled, ‘Oh thank goodness, you have an appetite after all. You must be recovering.'

Hal smiled back, realizing how good it was to see her looking happy again. ‘I hate to cast down your spirits, but frying bacon would make a dead soldier walk.'

After the food, he lay there, realizing just how bad he had been feeling before Julia had found him and what a miracle she and the groom had wrought between them. It would take time, but unless an infection took hold, he was going to survive this, with all his limbs intact.

Alive, intact and committed to marry the woman he wanted above all others. Why then did he feel like hell? Guilt, he supposed. In the middle of horror, Julia had behaved with courage, resource and intelligence, and it was his fault she had had to. Now she would find herself married to a man who had no idea what to do with a well-bred virgin, let alone a wife, and who was mired in a feud he only half under stood.

He scrubbed his left hand over his face, shocked at the growth of beard. How long since he had shaved? Four days?

‘George, can you shave me?'

‘Aye, Major. I'll go and heat some water.'

‘Enough for a wash,' Julia called after the groom. ‘Not that you aren't clean enough already,' she commented, turning back. ‘We've been sponging you all night to keep the fever down.'

‘We?' Hal tried to sit up, realized he couldn't and fell back with a curse. ‘You have?' Then he remembered: she had un dressed him as well.

‘Shocking, isn't it,' Julia said, shaking out a linen towel. ‘Just imagine, I've seen a naked man. Heaps of bodies, and bits of men and disembowelled horses—not shocking at all. But a naked man, and one I'm going to marry! In truth, I am ready to sink, just thinking about it.' The corner of her mouth was twitching in an effort not to smile.

Hal tried to decide whether he was more shocked or offended. He had, he admitted, expected the sight of his body to have had rather more effect on a sheltered virgin than mere amusement. Perhaps it would make things easier when they did, finally, go to bed together. When—
if
—he ever worked out how to make love to a virgin; all he was used to was women of very considerable experience.

But now was definitely the time to change the subject.

 

Food, coffee, a shave and the ability to sit up and watch what was going on had wrought wonders, Julia decided, studying Hal's face from the shadows while George put away his shaving tackle. Hal was young, fit, tough—he would heal well, even though she doubted it would be fast enough for his impatient spirit.

She did love him so much: his courage and his humour
and his kindness. And his beauty. She blushed a little, thinking about that, then smiled at the recollection of his shocked reaction to the realization that she had seen him naked. Bless him, like a poacher turned game keeper, he was becoming positively prudish where she was concerned.

Did he secretly hate the idea of their marrying so very much? Now that the fever had gone, he was guarding his tongue and she knew she would not hear the truth, even if she asked him directly.

‘W
ill you bring me the things George stripped off that trooper, please?'

Julia jumped, brought out of her reverie by the un conscious note of command in Hal's voice. He might have remembered to say
please
but he was back to being an officer.

Julia scooped them up from the back of the hovel and brought them to his bedside.

‘Can you show me everything?' he asked. ‘And check pockets, seams, linings.'

‘What for?' Julia sat down on a milking stool she had found and picked up the jacket, trying to ignore the stains.

‘I don't know.' Hal fell silent, obviously weighing something up in his mind. Julia began to feel along the seams, flexing the stiffened plackets and probing the padding. ‘He tried to kill me,' Hal said suddenly, making her drop the garment.

‘What, here in the hut? He was looting?'

‘No, on the battlefield. He tried to get to me the night before the battle, I think, but Max went for him. I thought he'd just got too close. Then, we charged the guns. Will was hurt.'
Hal paused, obviously reliving it in his mind. ‘Their cavalry ran, we got to a gun, and he turned—I thought he was going to say something, but he struck straight for my heart. I don't know why the blow didn't kill me. It was deflected off something, I felt the pain down my arm, my leg—and then there was a God-awful noise—a shell I suppose, blew us both up. I assume they picked us up together and dumped us in here.'

‘This is why he didn't kill you.' Julia picked up the shattered mother-of-pearl cover of her notebook. ‘You had it over your heart.'

‘Then you saved my life twice,' Hal said, and his eyes were dark as they rested on the ruined book. ‘Keep that somewhere safe.'

Julia tucked it into her pocket and picked up the jacket again. ‘But why would a British trooper want to kill you?'

‘He was paid to. He told me just before he died.' Hal took swallow of a fresh mug of coffee. ‘Good money too. I was flattered.'

‘Who?' Lurid visions of outraged husbands ran through Julia's mind. Or Major Fellowes. Then she remembered. ‘Hebden?'

‘That was my guess. But the description didn't fit.' He lay back, his head turned to watch what she was doing.

The jacket revealed no secrets, nor did the overall trousers, the shirt or the leather stock. Julia tossed each aside, then picked up a boot.

‘Try the heels.' It took some prising with his pocket knife, but the heels came away at last, revealing a hiding place in each, full of gold coins. ‘I think I've earned those,' Hal commented as Julia put them care fully aside. ‘What about his pack? There will be a rope somewhere.'

The pack contained nothing of any interest, except a rope coiled at the bottom, just as Hal had predicted. Julia pulled it out, and it slithered un pleasantly in her hands.

‘Ugh.' She dropped it on the bed, and Hal picked it up left-handed, running the multicoloured length through his fingers. ‘It feels alive.'

‘Silk,' he said. ‘It is what they hang peers with.'

‘But you aren't a peer,' Julia said, puzzled.

‘No, but the man who killed Hebden's father was.' She waited, biting her lip, while Hal frowned into space.

‘I had better tell you everything,' he said at length. ‘You are marrying into a family in the midst of a mystery—a dangerous and probably scandalous one.'

She listened while he spoke, trying to keep the characters straight in her mind, separate the old history from the present events. ‘So Stephen Hebden the jewel merchant is also a half-Romany called Stephano Beshaley who blames not just the family of the man who was hanged for his father's murder—your sister in law and her sister and brother—but also the Carlows, because he thinks your father did nothing to prevent the crime. He is also bitter about his father's legitimate connections because he was thrown out of the family home and sent away to an orphanage.'

Hal nodded. So she had got that straight. ‘And for some reason he decided last year to begin attacking these people he hates so much.'

‘Yes. He's a couple of years older than I am. I knew him as a child, a little. I wonder if it is because he is approaching the age his own father was when he died that it is obsessing him now.'

‘That is hardly a good enough reason to try and kill people.'

‘Yes, but this is the first attempt at something lethal. Up to now he seems to have wanted to bring scandal and disgrace, not death.'

‘You have another enemy?' Julia ventured, folding her hands tightly in her lap to prevent herself smoothing back
the lock of unruly hair that kept falling across his brow. She wanted to touch him all the time: it was disconcerting and left her oddly breath less and distracted.

‘A good many,' he admitted with a grin. ‘But none of them with Hebden's calling card.' The rope lay like a dead snake across his thighs. ‘And there's something else. Rumours are beginning to spread about the circumstances surrounding the murder. People are wondering why my father was so adamant that his best friend was guilty. Because if he were not, then the spy escaped undetected.'

‘They say that your father was the spy?' she asked, too surprised to be tactful.

‘No-one is saying it out loud. But it can be made to fit. If he was, then he had disposed of the two men who were about to unmask him.'

‘Do you believe it?' she asked, shocked at Hal's dispassionate tone.

‘No, of course not. But he isn't helping. He won't talk about it. Pages are missing from his diaries and he won't say what they contained. He's a stubborn devil.'

 

There is something in the way he speaks of his father,
she thought, watching the long lashes come down to hide the thoughts in Hal's expressive eyes.
He doesn't hate him, or dislike him—but there is a wariness, a distance
.
Perhaps Hal is the black sheep of the family.

‘And why are the rumours spreading now?' Julia asked. ‘Is Hebden in such a position that he could start them amongst such influential people?'

Before Hal could reply, George put his head round the door of the hovel. ‘Someone's coming.'

They were so tucked away that the activity on the main road and in the village was hardly audible most of the time. Julia shivered: if they had not seen Rick Bredon, she would
never have found Hal. If she had not fled from Thomas Smyth at the party, she would never have met Bredon. If Hal had not taken her back in the carriage, she would not have given him her notebook and that sabre-thrust would have pierced his chest. On such chances lives hung.

‘Good morning, Miss Tresilian. Carlow, I have brought you a shirt and some loose trousers,' Captain Grey announced, striding into the hovel, a mass of white cloth flapping over his arm. ‘And I've got a cart and a horse with four legs—and that, my friend was harder than taking a French gun, believe me.'

‘I do.' Hal grinned back at him, then they both looked pointedly at Julia.

‘Yes?' She stared back, then realized. ‘Oh, yes. You get dressed, I'll just go and do something outside.'
Honestly, the pair of them will have had their clothes off in front of more women than I have had hot dinners and yet Hal won't risk me catching sight of an inch of flesh!
‘We need to pack up, George.'

Julia spread straw and then hay, then threw over blankets until the floor of the old farm cart was as soft and cushioned as she could make it, then busied herself collecting up their things while Will Grey and George brought Hal out on a make shift stretcher. She didn't think he was going to enjoy that and he would probably swear more com fort ably if she wasn't in sight. As it was, her vocabulary was considerably enriched.
He must be feeling better,
she thought, smiling.
Yesterday he hardly had the strength to curse.

The scene, as their little procession made its way out to what had been the main road from Brussels to Charleroi, was in some ways more orderly, and in others, more shocking, than it had been on the day after the battle.

Broken-down carts, dead horses, splintered trees had all been dragged to the side so that traffic could lurch up and
down the deeply rutted road. Every where she looked, there were freshly turned heaps of earth, some of them scarcely covering the bodies that lay beneath. In the distance, great fires burned, giving off oily smoke; Julia could only be thankful the light breeze took the smell of it away from them. The stagnant pools of foul liquid by the roadside were bad enough.

Will Grey drove the cart, George and Julia followed in the gig and Max walked beside the cart with no need to hitch his reins to it. From time to time he poked his big head over the side and blew slobbery breaths at Hal, who only laughed and rubbed the hairy nose pushing anxiously at his cheek.

Julia lost track of time as they moved slowly on, having to turn off the road into the trees from time to time to avoid a deeply mired stretch or to allow faster-moving vehicles through. They were still finding men alive, Julia saw, thankful that those hideous, greedy pyres were not taking everything.

The clocks were striking four when they finally turned into the court yard in Place de Leuvan. Hal's eyes had been closed for miles and Will had kept turning in his seat to check on him. But as they came to a halt in the shadowed yard, he woke and took a deep breath.

‘Coffee, wood smoke, food cooking and nothing, thank God, rotting,' he said. ‘Julia—'

‘Julia! You wicked, wicked child!' Mrs Tresilian almost tumbled out of the kitchen door, her cap awry, her face flushed. ‘Madame has told me what you have been doing! You're ruined, ruined…'

‘Mrs Tresilian.' Hal's voice cut through her words with their rising note of hysteria. ‘We have not been introduced. I am Hal Carlow, second son of the Earl of Narborough.' Julia saw her mother go very still at the magic word,
Earl.
‘Miss
Tresilian has done me the honour to accept my proposal of marriage. I trust you have no objection.'

 

For a moment Hal thought Mrs Tresilian had fainted. His future mother in law's face simply vanished. Then he realized she had sat down on the step and burst into tears. Julia scram bled from the gig, sent him a rueful smile and ran to calm her mother.

‘Mama, it is quite all right, I am safe. Are you and Phillip all right? We must go in; Major Carlow is wounded and we have to get him to bed right away.'

‘Where?' Mrs Tresilian demanded, rising into sight again, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. ‘Oh my goodness, of all the things…'

‘In my bedroom, Mama,' Julia said firmly. ‘And I will sleep with you. Captain Grey, I will make up the bed, if you and George can bring Major Carlow in a few moments. The first floor—Madame will show you the way. Come, Mama.'

In the silence that followed their disappearance, Will began to let down the sides of the cart. ‘Masterly,' he observed. ‘By the time Miss Tresilian has waved the smelling salts about and repeated your father's title a few more times, her mother is going to be killing the fatted calf for you.'

A voice from somewhere at the foot of the cart piped up, ‘Is he dead?'

‘No,' Hal retorted. ‘I'm not, young Phillip. Just a bit battered.'

‘Oh, good. Did you kill any French with your sabre? Has it got blood on it?'

‘Yes and no, and will you take Max into the stable for me? I've got to go upstairs and I need George to help me.' Will raised startled eyebrows, but Hal added, ‘Go, Max. Friend,' and the horse turned and plodded away. ‘The boy's been up
on him, Max will remember his scent,' he reassured Will who had been on the receiving end of Max's teeth before now. ‘And I don't want to give him a vocabulary of military oaths or his mother will add that to the list of sins my pa rent age has to counterbalance.'

Getting upstairs tried both the other men's ingenuity and strength and his own endurance. Hal felt decidedly wan by the time they staggered through the door into a simple bed chamber with sprigged wall pa per and a narrow white bed next to the window. His bearers laid him down onto the clean, yielding softness, and he realized that his nostrils were full of the scent of Julia. The sensation of coming home to somewhere familiar and safe washed through him, leaving him calm and strangely light headed, as though he were floating.

Perhaps marriage would be like this, he thought vaguely.

‘He must be exhausted,' he heard Julia murmur, and a cool hand stroked the hair back from his forehead. ‘Try and sleep, Hal.' The hand stroked down to his cheek, and eyes closed, he turned his face into it and sighed as sound and sensation slipped away, leaving only the hazy awareness of her presence as he slept.

 

‘Mama, please do not fuss. I really do not need a chaperone in my fiancé's bed chamber, especially when he is this weak.' That was Julia, Hal realized, surfacing slowly from sleep, wondering what the faint agitated clucking sound was. There had been no chickens in the hovel.

‘Oh I suppose not. But it all seems so
sudden,
dear.' Oh yes, Mrs Tresilian, and this was Julia's bedroom and he was in her bed—alone unfortunately. ‘He is such a…a
physical
looking young man,' Mrs Tresilian continued.

Hal converted a laugh into a cough and opened his eyes to find both women regarding him. His future mother in law had the expression of someone finding an exotic, and probably
dangerous, animal in the room; Julia was pink in the cheeks and appeared to be suppressing a smile. Mothers in law were an aspect of marriage he had not considered.

‘Good morning. How are you feeling?' Julia enquired, obviously intent on ignoring her mother's embarrassing observation. ‘Shall I send George up with your break fast?'

‘Thank you, yes. I feel much better. Good morning, Mrs Tresilian. Perhaps, ma'am, it would be possible for us to discuss the situation a little later?' It seemed he had slept for more than twelve hours and he was, provided he did not try and move, feeling a sight better for it.