The Captain's Forbidden Miss. Margaret McPhee
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in the eye. All of the fear was crowding in around her, pressing down on her, choking her. If the French had captured Hartmann and Meyer, all hope was gone. Her father’s message would never reach Wellington. It had all been in vain. All of today. All of the sacrifice.
‘I am not privy to my father’s orders.’ Her gaze held his, refusing to look away, angry disbelief vying with grief and misery and wretchedness.
A terrible desolation swept through her. The tremble had progressed so that her legs were shaking in earnest now, and the cold sweat of fear prickled beneath her arms. She thought again of what it would mean if the French truly had captured her father’s messengers. A fresh wave of hopelessness swept over her at the thought, and as the moisture welled in her eyes she squeezed them shut to prevent the tears that threatened to fall. Yet, all of her effort was not enough. To her mortification, a single tear escaped to roll down her cheek. She snatched it away, praying that Dammartin had not noticed, and opened her eyes to stare her defiance.
‘Are you crying, mademoiselle?’ And she thought she could hear the undertone of mockery in his words. He looked at her with his dark eyes and harsh, inscrutable expression.
She glared at him. ‘I will tell you nothing, nothing,’ she cried. ‘You may do what you will.’
‘Mademoiselle, you have not yet begun to realise the possibilities of what I may do to you.’ He leaned his face down close to hers. ‘And when you do realise, then you will tell me everything that I want to know.’
Her heart ceased to beat, her lungs did not breathe as she looked up into the dark promise in his eyes.
His hand was around her arm, and he pulled her forwards and began to guide her towards the door.
‘No!’ She struggled against him, panicked at where he might be taking her and felt him grab her other arm, forcing her round to look at him once more.
‘Mademoiselle Mallington,’ he said harshly. ‘The hour grows late and the ice forms in the air. If I leave you here, without warmth, without food or water, it is likely that you will be dead by morning.’
‘Why would you care?’ she demanded.
He paused and then spoke with slow deliberation, ‘Because you have not yet answered my questions.’
Josie shivered. She did not know if he was lying about Hartmann and Meyer, but she did know that despite all of her fear and despair she had no wish to die. She ceased her struggle and let him lead her out of the cellar and up the creaking staircase into the heart of the little cottage.
The room into which he took her was small and spartan, its floor clean but littered with makeshift blanket beds and army baggage. A fire was roaring in the fireplace at which a small, grizzled man in a French sergeant’s uniform was toasting bread and brewing coffee. His small, black eyes registered no surprise at her appearance.
‘Capitaine,’ the man uttered, and gave a nod in Dammartin’s direction.
She sat down warily on the edge of the blanket that Dammartin indicated, trying to clear the fog of exhaustion from her brain, trying to remain alert for the first hint of a trap. There was nothing.
The small sergeant placed some toasted bread and raisins and a cup of coffee on the floor by her side before he and Dammartin busied themselves with their own bread. Josie looked at the food set before her. The smell of the toasted bread coaxed a hunger in her stomach that had not been there before. Slowly, without casting a single glance in the Frenchmen’s direction, she ate the bread and drank the coffee. And all the while she was aware of every move that the enemy made and the quiet words that they spoke to one another, thinking that she could not understand.
The logs on the fire cracked and gradually the room grew warm and no matter how hard she fought against it, Josie felt the exhaustion of all that had happened that day begin to claim her. She struggled, forcing her eyes open, forcing herself to stay upright, to stay aware of Captain Dammartin until, at last, she could fight it no more, and the French Captain faded as she succumbed to the black nothingness of sleep.
It was late and yet Pierre Dammartin sat by the fire, despite the fatigue that pulled upon his muscles and stung at his eyes. His gaze wandered from the flicker of the dying flames to the silhouette of the girl lying close by. The blanket rose and fell with the small, rhythmic movement of her breath. Mallington’s daughter. Just the thought of who she was brought back all of the bitterness and anger that her father’s death ought to have destroyed.
Sergeant Lamont sucked at his long clay pipe and nodded in the girl’s direction. ‘Did you get what you wanted from her?’
What had he wanted? To know why Mallington had been up here, the details of his men, of his messengers; her realisation that her defiance was useless, that she could not hide the truth from him. ‘Unfortunately, my friend, Mademoiselle Mallington proved most unhelpful.’
Lamont’s gaze darted in Dammartin’s direction, his brow rising in surprise. ‘You were gentle with her, then?’
The firelight flickered, casting shadows across Dammartin’s face, highlighting his scar and emphasising the strong, harsh line of his jaw. ‘Not particularly.’
‘Pierre.’ Lamont gave a sigh and shook his head.
‘Did you really think that she would be in such a hurry to spill the answers we seek? The woman faced us alone with a rifle to defend her father.’
‘She is just a girl, Pierre. She must have been afraid.’
‘She was frightened, for all she tried to hide it.’
‘Yet still she told you nothing?’
‘The girl has courage, I will give her that.’
Lamont sucked harder on his pipe and nodded.
Dammartin thought of the girl’s single teardrop and the tremble of her lips. Tears and emotion were ever a woman’s weapons, he thought dismissively, but even as he thought it, he knew that was not the case with Mademoiselle Mallington. Given half a chance she would have taken a rifle and shot him through the heart, and that knowledge wrung from him a grudging respect.
‘Do you mean to question her again tomorrow?’
‘Yes. I suspect that she knows more than she is telling.’
Lamont frowned. ‘Interrogating women goes against the grain.’
‘We must make an exception for Mademoiselle Mallington.’
‘Pierre…’ admonished the Sergeant.
Dammartin passed Lamont his hip flask of brandy. ‘What the hell am I going to do with her, Claude?’
‘I do not know,’ Lamont shrugged. ‘That Mallington entrusted her to you makes me wonder as to the old man’s mind. Why else would he give his daughter over to the son of the man that he murdered?’
‘To appease his own conscience, leaving her to face the revenge from which he himself fled?’ Dammartin’s eyes glittered darkly as he received the flask back from Lamont and took a swig. He sat there for a while longer, mulling over all that happened that day, and when finally he slept, the sleep was troubled and dark.
Dammartin slept late, not wakening until the light of morning had dawned, and with a mood that had not improved. Disgruntlement sat upon him as a mantle even though he had reached a decision on what to do with the girl. He rolled over, feeling the chill of the morning air, and cast an eye over at Mademoiselle Mallington. Her blanket lay empty upon the floor. Josephine Mallington was gone.
‘Merde!’ he swore, and threw aside the thickness of his great coat that had covered him the whole night through. Then he was up and over there, touching his fingers to the blanket, feeling its coldness. Mademoiselle Mallington had not just vacated it, then.
He opened the door from the room, stepped over the two sentries who were dozing.
They blinked and scrabbled to their feet, saluting