CHAPTER I
Having spent almost all of his twenty-five years in
England and therefore isolated from most of the
hostilities that had ravaged the rest of Europe since the
rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Alleyne Bedwyn,
third brother of the Duke of Bewcastle, had no personal
experience of pitched battles. But he had listened with
avid interest to the war stories sometimes told by his
elder brother, Lord Aidan Bedwyn, a recently retired
cavalry colonel, and had thought he could picture such a
scene.
He had been wrong.
He had imagined neatly deployed lines, the British and her
allies on this side, the enemy on that, flat land like the
playing fields of Eton between them. He had imagined
cavalry and infantry and artillery, all pristine and
picturesque in their various uniforms, moving about neatly
and logically, like the pieces on a chessboard. He had
imagined the rapid popping of gunfire, disturbing, but not
obliterating, the silence. He had imagined clarity of
vision, the ability to see all points of the battlefield
at all times, the ability to assess the progress of the
battle at every moment. He had imagined--if he had thought
of it at all--clean, clear air to breathe.
He had been wrong on all counts.
He was not himself a military man. Recently he had decided
that it was time he did something useful with his life and
had embarked upon a career as a diplomat. He had been
assigned to the embassy at the Hague under Sir Charles
Stuart. But Sir Charles and a number of his staff, Alleyne
included, had moved to Brussels while the Allied armies
under the Duke of Wellington's command gathered there in
response to a new threat from NapoleonBonaparte, who had
escaped from his exile on the island of Elba earlier in
the spring and was raising a formidable army in France
again. Now, today, the long-expected battle between the
two forces was being fought on a rolling, hilly stretch of
farmland south of the village of Waterloo. And Alleyne was
there in the thick of it. He had volunteered to carry a
letter from Sir Charles to Wellington and to bring back a
reply.
He was thankful that he had ridden out from Brussels
alone. He might have been unable to hide from any
companion the fact that he had never been even half so
frightened in his life.
The noise of the great guns was the worst. It went beyond
sound. It deafened his eardrums and pounded low in his
abdomen. Then there was all the smoke, which choked his
lungs and set his eyes to watering and made it virtually
impossible to see clearly more than a few yards in any
direction. There were horses and men milling about
everywhere in the mud caused by last night's torrential
rain, in what seemed like total confusion to Alleyne.
There were officers and sergeants bellowing out commands
and somehow making themselves heard. There was the acrid
smell of smoke and the added stench of what he assumed
must be blood and guts. Even through the smoke he could
see dead and wounded wherever he looked.
It was like a scene straight from hell.
This, he realized, was the reality of war.
The Duke of Wellington had a reputation for always being
in the place where the fighting was most fierce,
recklessly exposing himself to danger and somehow escaping
unscathed. Today was no exception. After asking at least a
dozen officers for information concerning his whereabouts,
Alleyne finally found his man on an open rise of land
looking down on the strategically placed farmhouse of La
Haye Sainte, which the French were fiercely attacking and
a troop of German soldiers was just as ferociously
defending. The duke could not have been more openly
exposed to enemy fire if he had tried. Alleyne delivered
his letter and then concentrated his attention upon
keeping his horse under control. He tried not even to
think of the danger to his person, but he was painfully
aware of the roar of cannonballs close by and the whistle
of musket balls. Terror seeped into his very bones.
He had to wait for Wellington to read the letter and then
dictate a reply to one of his aides. The wait seemed
interminable to Alleyne, who watched the battle for
control of the farm--whenever he could see it through the
billowing smoke of thousands of guns. He watched men die
and waited to die himself. And if he survived, he
wondered, would he ever hear again? Or be sane again?
Finally he had his letter, stowed it safely in an inner
pocket, and turned to leave. He had never been more
thankful for anything in his life.
How had Aidan tolerated this life for twelve years? By
what miracle had he survived to tell of it and to marry
Eve and settle to a life in rural England?
When he felt a sharp pain in his upper left thigh, Alleyne
thought at first that he had twisted awkwardly in the
saddle and pulled a muscle. But when he glanced down, he
saw the torn hole in his breeches and the blood spurting
from it and realized the truth almost as if he were a
spectator looking down dispassionately upon himself.
"By Jove," he said aloud, "I have been hit."
His voice sounded as if it came from a long way distant.
It was drowned out by the pounding of the guns and his
fuzzy-eared deafness and by the ringing sound within his
head, suddenly turned icy cold with the shock of knowing
that he had been shot.
It did not occur to him to stop or dismount or seek
medical attention. He could think only of getting away
from there, of returning without delay to Brussels and
safety. He had important things to do there. For the
moment he could not remember what any of those things
were, but he knew he could not afford to delay.
Besides, panic was clawing at his back.
He rode onward for a few minutes, until he felt more
confident of being out of harm's way. By that time his leg
was hurting like the very devil. Worse, he was still
bleeding copiously. He had nothing with which to bind the
wound except a large handkerchief. When he pulled it out
of his pocket he feared that it would not reach about his
thigh, but corner-to-corner it was longer than he had
estimated. With clammy, shaking hands he bound it tightly
above the tear in his breeches, wincing and nearly
fainting from the pain. The ball, he realized, must be
embedded in his thigh. Agony tore through him with every
pulse beat. He was dizzy with shock.
Thousands of men were wounded far worse than this, he told
himself sternly as he rode on--far worse. It would be
cowardly to dwell upon his own pain. He must force himself
to rise above it. Once he had reached Brussels, he would
complete his errand and then get a physician to dig out
the ball--perish the thought!--and patch him up. He would
survive--he hoped. So would his leg--he hoped.
Soon he was in the Forest of Soignes, riding a little to
the west side of the road in order to avoid all the heavy
traffic proceeding along it in both directions. He passed
numerous soldiers in the forest, a few of them dead, many
of them wounded like himself, a large number of them
deserters from the horror of the battlefront--or so he
suspected. He could hardly blame them.
As the shock gradually subsided, the pain grew steadily
worse, if that were possible. The bleeding, though
somewhat retarded by the tourniquet he had fashioned,
continued. He felt cold and light-headed. He had to get
back to Morgan.
Ah, yes, that was it!
Morgan, his younger sister--she was only eighteen years
old--was in Brussels, her chaperons having rashly waited
there too long instead of leaving with most of the other
English visitors who had flocked to the city during the
past couple of months. The Caddicks were now virtually
trapped in Brussels, since all vehicles had been
requisitioned by the army--and therefore so was Morgan.
But worse than that, they had allowed her out of the house
alone today of all days. When he had ridden out of
Brussels earlier, he had been startled to find her at the
Namur Gates with some other women, tending the wounded who
had already been straggling into the city.
He had told her he would return at the earliest possible
moment and see to it that she was taken back to safety,
preferably all the way home to England. He would beg
temporary leave from his post and take her himself. He
dared not think of what might happen to her if the French
won the victory today.
He had to get back to Morgan. He had promised Wulfric--his
eldest brother, the Duke of Bewcastle--that he would keep
an eye on her even though Wulf had entrusted her to the
care of the Earl and Countess of Caddick when she had
begged to be allowed to come to Brussels with their
daughter, Lady Rosamond Havelock, her friend. Good Lord,
she was little more than a child, and she was his sister.
Ah, yes, and he had to deliver his letter to Sir Charles
Stuart. He had almost forgotten the wretched letter. What
was so important, he wondered, that he had had to ride
into battle and out again merely to deliver a note and
bring back a reply? An invitation to dinner that evening?
It would not surprise him if it were something as trivial
as that. He was already having niggling doubts about his
chosen career. Perhaps he ought to have taken one of the
parliamentary seats that Wulf controlled--except that his
interest in politics was minimal. Sometimes his lack of
direction in life disturbed him. Even if a man had enough
personal wealth to carry him comfortably through life
without any exertion on his part, as he did, there ought
to be something that fired his blood and elevated his soul.
His leg felt like a balloon expanded to the point of
bursting. It also, paradoxically, felt as if it were stuck
full of knives and powered by a million pulse points. A
cold fog seemed to be swirling inside his head. The very
air he breathed was icy.
Morgan . . . He fixed her image in his mind--young,
vibrant, headstrong Morgan, his sister, the only one of
his five siblings who was younger than he. He had to get
back to her.
How much farther to Brussels? He had lost track of both
time and distance. He could still hear the guns. He was
still in the forest. The road was still to his right,
clogged with carts and wagons and people. Just a couple of
weeks ago he had attended a moonlit picnic hosted by the
Earl of Rosthorn here in the forest. It was almost
impossible to realize that it was the same place.
Rosthorn, whose reputation was far from savory, had
dallied with Morgan almost to the point of indiscretion on
that occasion and had provoked considerable gossip.
Alleyne gritted his teeth. He was not sure how much
farther he could go. He had not known it was possible to
feel such pain. He felt jarred by every step his horse
took. Yet he dared not dismount. He certainly would not be
able to walk alone. He called upon every reserve of
strength and willpower and rode onward. If he could just
reach Brussels . . .
But the forest floor was uneven, and his horse had
undoubtedly been as frightened as he by the dire
conditions of the battlefield and was now bewildered by
the dead weight of the unresponsive rider on its back. The
horse stumbled over a tree root and then reared in alarm.
It was nothing that under ordinary circumstances Alleyne
could not have controlled with ease. But these were not
ordinary circumstances. He toppled heavily backward.
Fortunately his boots came free of the stirrups as he did
so. But he was in no condition to employ any of the
defensive moves that might somehow have cushioned his
fall. He fell heavily and landed hard, his head bouncing
off that same offending tree root as he did so.
He was knocked instantly unconscious. Indeed, he was so
pale from the loss of blood and from the fall that anyone
coming upon him afterward would have assumed that he was
dead. It would not even have been a startling assumption.
The Forest of Soignes, even this far north of the
battlefield, was littered with the bodies of the dead.
His horse pawed the air once more and galloped away.
The quiet, seemingly respectable house on the Rue
d'Aremberg in Brussels that four English "ladies" had
rented two months before was in reality a brothel. Bridget
Clover, Flossie Streat, Geraldine Ness, and Phyllis Leavey
had come over together from London on the calculated--and
correct--assumption that business in Brussels would be
brisk until all the military madness had somehow been
resolved. And they were very close to achieving the
ambition that had brought them together in a working
partnership and fast friendship four years before. Their
goal, their dream, was to save enough of their earnings to
enable them to retire from their profession and purchase a
house somewhere in England that they would run jointly as
a respectable ladies' boarding house. They had had every
reason to expect that by the time they returned to England
they would be free women.
But their dream had just been shattered.
On the very day when the guns of war booming somewhere
south of the city proclaimed the fact that hostilities had
finally been engaged and a colossal battle was raging,
they had learned that all was lost in their personal
world, that all their hard-earned money was gone.
Stolen.
And it was all Rachel York's fault.
She had brought the news herself, coming back into the
city from the north instead of continuing on her way home
to England as almost all the other British visitors to
Brussels were doing. Even many of the local residents were
fleeing northward. But Rachel had returned. She had come
back to tell the ladies the terrible truth. But instead of
raining down recriminations upon her head, as she had
fully expected they would do, they had actually taken her
in, since she had nowhere else to go, and given her the
one spare bedchamber in the house as her own.
She was now the newest resident of the brothel.
The very thought of it might have horrified her just a
short while ago. Or it might just as easily have amused
her, since she had a healthy sense of humor. But right
now, at this moment, she felt too wretched to react in any
way at all to the simple fact that she was now living with
whores.
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