A Mistress For Major Bartlett. ANNIE BURROWS
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of finding Colonel Randall, since he’s not where we all thought he was.’
‘Aye, for the colonel’s own sister to turn up here, right now...it must mean his luck is still holding,’ said another.
Mary only shook her head, closing her eyes for a moment as if summoning patience.
‘I think you would be better returning to Antwerp,’ Mary said to her. ‘You are in no fit state to come with us.’
‘I have been looking for Gideon and I will not, cannot, give up my search,’ Sarah replied, struggling to control her emotions now. ‘I cannot go back until I know what has happened to my brothers.’
Mary sighed, clearly reluctant. ‘Oh, very well, I suppose you had better come with us, then. But try not,’ she snapped as she mounted up, ‘to get in the way.’
Get in the way? How dare she assume...?
But then, of course, Mary only saw what everyone else did when they looked at Sarah: a spoiled, empty-headed society miss. For which she had only herself to blame. She’d taken such pains to appear to be the model of decorum, always doing exactly as her parents or guardians told her without demur and observing every rule of etiquette. She’d even overheard Lord Blanchards remark that he couldn’t understand how a woman with Gussie’s strength of mind could possibly be related to such an insipid girl.
‘Here,’ said Mary, producing a large, scented handkerchief from her pocket. Then gave her a little lecture about why she might need it.
‘Thank you,’ Sarah replied, pasting on a polite social smile to disguise her true feelings. Mary might say Sarah would need to hold a scented hanky to her nose for her own sake. But was she also hinting that everyone could tell Sarah hadn’t stopped to bathe that morning? She’d thought the odour of dog and horse were disguising her own stale sweat pretty well, but perhaps that dainty little nose was more efficient than it looked.
It was some consolation that Ben, who’d been so delighted to see the men at first, didn’t stay with them when they mounted up, but came back to her and loped along beside her own horse.
Of course, that probably had more to do with the scent of sausage still lingering round her saddlebags, but at least he appeared to prefer her to the others.
* * *
Even though it was early in the morning, the road from the Namur gate was already crowded with wounded men struggling back to Brussels for treatment. And little groups, like hers, going searching for loved ones.
The closer they got to the scene of the previous day’s battle, the more gruesome the sights became.
Not to mention the smells. Some of it was gunpowder. But underlying it was something far worse. Something which made her jolly grateful Mary had thought to drench a couple of handkerchiefs in scent and share one with her. Though at the same time, Mary’s foresight only made her even more aware of her own shortcomings.
‘Steady, there,’ she crooned, over and over again, patting Castor’s neck when she needed to urge him past a pile of what she’d identified, from the briefest of glances, as bodies, both horse and human. Although the words were almost as much for herself, as her horse.
She tried not to let her eyes linger on what lay beside the roads. It put her in mind of a butcher’s shop. So many men, reduced to so many cuts of meat...
A dog ran across the road in front of their little party, a long trail of what looked like sausages dangling from its jaws.
She clenched her teeth against a sudden surge of nausea. Sweat prickled across her top lip. Ben, who’d been darting from one side of the road to the other, in an agitated manner, lifted his head and watched the other dog as it ran down a fork in the road ahead.
Sarah closed her eyes, just for a minute, breathing deeply to try to clear her head which had started spinning alarmingly.
I must not faint. I must not faint.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ One of the Rogues had noticed her lag behind. Sarah forced her eyes open, to see that the rest of the party had reached the fork in the road. Oh, lord, she hoped they weren’t going to have to go past the place where the scavenger dog had taken its obscene booty. Thank goodness she hadn’t taken any breakfast, or she would be bringing it straight back up.
She couldn’t go that way. She wouldn’t go that way!
‘No, not that way!’ She raised her arm and pointed to the other fork in the road. ‘We must go that way,’ she said, in as steady a voice as she could muster, considering her whole body was shaking.
‘Begging yer pardon, miss, but down along there is where Colonel Randall ought to be, if he’s anywhere,’ said the soldier, pointing the other way.
Mary had turned in her saddle and wore the look she’d seen on so many faces during her life. The look that told her she was an exasperating ninnyhammer.
‘You said yourself,’ Sarah replied haughtily, ‘that you’ve already looked where you thought he ought to be and couldn’t find him.’
At that moment Ben, who’d been running back and forth with his nose to the ground, suddenly let out a bark and ran a few paces down the road she’d just indicated. Then turned and looked over his shoulder as if to ask why they weren’t following him.
‘Even Ben thinks we ought to go that way,’ she insisted.
And though they hadn’t wanted to listen to her, they all seemed to have complete faith in Ben’s instincts. To a man, they turned and followed him.
Leaving Mary no choice but to do so, too.
Sarah’s stomach lurched again. Only this time it was from guilt. What if she was leading them in the wrong direction, simply because there didn’t seem to be so many gruesome sights this way?
Mary was right to despise her. She wasn’t strong and brave. Or even sensible. She should have just admitted that the sights and smells were proving too much for her. Except that, to admit to such weakness, in front of Mary and those men...
She didn’t just have the Latymor nose. She had the wretched Latymor pride, too. That made her go to any lengths rather than admit she might have made a mistake.
Not that it had done her much good. For things were no better on this road, than they had looked on the one the scavenging dog had taken. The bright colours of uniforms lay stacked in heaps where the men who wore them had fallen, smeared now with mud and blood, and worse.
And there were pieces of uniforms, too, containing severed limbs. And bodies without heads. And horses screaming. And men groaning.
And Sarah’s head was spinning.
And her heart was growing heavier and heavier.
Because she was finally seeing what war really meant. Men didn’t die from neat little bullet wounds. Their bodies were smashed to pulp, torn asunder.
Oh, lord—if this had been what happened to Gideon, no wonder they hadn’t sent his body to Antwerp. Justin might be overbearing, but it was always in a protective way. He wouldn’t have wanted her, or Gussie, who was in such a delicate condition, to be subjected to the sight of Gideon, reduced to...to...that.
Just as it finally hit her that it might be true, that Gideon might really be dead, one of the men gave out a great cry.
She looked up, to see Ben go bounding across a field to a sort of tumbledown building, round which even more bodies were stacked than by the side of the road.
‘He’s found him! The blessed dog’s only gone and found him,’ cried one of the men. And they all went charging up to the ruin.
She heard somebody say charnel house.