Slightly Sinful (3 page)

Bridget was in her thirties. She had once been hired as Rachel's nurse by the child's widowed father, and the two had quickly grown as fond of each other as if they were mother and daughter. But Rachel's father had lost everything at the card tables-something that had happened with disturbing regularity throughout his adult life-and had been forced to let Bridget go. It was only a month or so ago that the two women had met again, quite by chance, on a street in Brussels, and Rachel learned what had become of her beloved nurse. She had insisted upon renewing their acquaintance despite Bridget's misgivings.

Rachel suddenly surged to her feet without at all realizing that she was about to do so-or that she was about to say what she did.

"I am going too," she announced. "I am going with Geraldine and Flossie."

There was a chorus of comment as all attention turned her way. But she held up both hands, palms out.

"I am the one mainly responsible for losing your hard-earned money," she said. "No matter what you all say to the contrary to try to make me feel better, that is the plain truth. Besides, I have a grievance of my own against Mr. Crawley. He gulled me into admiring and respecting him and even agreeing to be his bride. He stole from my friends and he stole from me, and then he tried to lie to me, thinking, no doubt, that I was a total idiot instead of just foolish beyond belief. If we are to go after him, and if we need money to do it, then I am going to do my part to get some. I am going out there with Geraldine and Flossie to loot the bodies of the dead."

She could have wished then that she were still sitting. Her legs suddenly felt as if someone had removed every bone from them.

"Oh, no, my love," Bridget said, getting to her feet and taking a step in Rachel's direction.

"Leave her alone, Bridge," Geraldine said. "I have liked you from the first moment, Rache, because you are a regular person and not one of those high-and-mighty ladies who poke their noses at the sky and sniff the air when they pass us as if we carry around two-week-old dead dogs in our reticules. But now tonight I like you a whole lot more. You have spirit. Don't you take what he did to you lying down-to borrow an image."

"I do not intend to," Rachel said. "For the past year I have been a meek, mild-mannered lady's companion. I hated every moment of that year. If I had not, I surely would not have been so taken in by a smiling villain. Let us go now, without any more talk."

"Hurrah for Rachel," Flossie said.

As she led the way from the room in order to run upstairs to don warm, serviceable clothes, Rachel tried not even to think of what she was about to do.

I am going out there with Geraldine and Flossie to loot the bodies of the dead.

CHAPTER II

T HE ROAD SOUTH OF BRUSSELS LOOKED LIKE A scene from hell in the dusk of early dawn. It was clogged with carts and wagons and men trudging along on foot, some of them carrying biers or helping or dragging along a comrade. Almost all of them were wounded, some severely. They were streaming back from the battleground south of the village of Waterloo.

Rachel had never witnessed such sheer, unending horror.

It seemed to her at first that she and Flossie and Geraldine must be the only persons going in the opposite direction. But that was not so, of course. There were pedestrians, even vehicles, moving south. One of the latter, a wagon driven by a tattered soldier with a powder-blackened face, stopped to offer them a ride, and Flossie and Geraldine, acting convincingly the part of anxious wives, accepted.

Rachel did not. The bravado that had brought her out here was rapidly disintegrating. What was she doing? How could she even be thinking of profiting from all this misery?

"You go on," she told the other two. "There must be many wounded men in the forest. I'll look there. I'll look for Jack and Sam too," she added, raising her voice for the benefit of the wagon driver and anyone else who might be listening. "And you look for Harry for me farther south."

The lie and the deception made her feel dirty and sinful even though it was doubtful anyone was paying her any attention.

She turned off the crowded road to walk among the trees of the Forest of Soignés, though she did not go so far in that she would lose sight of the road and get lost. What on earth was she going to do now? she wondered. She could not continue with her plan, she was convinced. She could not possibly take so much as a handkerchief from a poor dead man's body. And even the thought of seeing one was enough to make the bile rise in her throat. Yet to go back empty-handed without at least trying would be selfish and cowardly. When Mr. Crawley had sat with the ladies in the sitting room on the Rue d'Aremberg and explained to them how potentially dangerous it was to keep a large sum of money with them in such volatile times and in a foreign city to boot, and had offered to take the money back to London with him and deposit it safely in a bank where he would arrange for it to earn some decent interest, she had sat beside him and smiled proudly over the fact that she had introduced them to such a kindly, considerate, compassionate man. Afterward she had thanked him. She had thought that for once in her life she had discovered a steady, upright, dependable man. She had almost imagined that she loved him.

Her hands curled into fists at her sides and she grit her teeth. But the reality of her surroundings soon cut through pointless reminiscences.

There must be thousands of wounded on all those carts and biers, she decided, averting her face from the road to her left. All that suffering and yet she had come out here to find the dead and search their bodies and rob them of any valuable that was portable and salable. She simply could not do it.

And then her stomach seemed to perform a complete somersault, leaving her feeling as if she were about to vomit as she set eyes upon the first of the dead bodies she had come to find.

He was lying huddled against the tall trunk of one of the trees, out of sight of the road, and he was very definitely dead. He was also quite naked. She felt her abdominal muscles contract again as she took a hesitant, reluctant step closer. But instead of vomiting, she giggled. She slapped a hand over her mouth, more horrified by her inappropriate response than she would have been if she had emptied the contents of her stomach onto the ground in full view of a thousand men. What was funny about the fact that there was nothing left to loot? Someone had found this one before her and had taken everything but the body itself. She could not have done it anyway. She knew it at that moment with absolute certainty. Even if he had been fully clothed and had a costly ring on each finger, a gold watch and chain and expensive fobs at his waist, a gold sword at his side, she could not have taken any of them.

It would have been robbery.

He was young, with hair that looked startlingly dark in contrast to the paleness of his skin. Nakedness was horribly pathetic under such circumstances, she thought. He was an insignificant bundle of dead humanity with a nasty-looking wound on his thigh and blood pooled beneath his head, suggesting that there was a ghastly wound out of sight there. He was someone's son, someone's brother, perhaps someone's husband, someone's father. His life had been precious to him and perhaps to dozens of other people.

The hand over her mouth began to shake. It felt cold and clammy.

"Help!" she called weakly in the direction of the road. She cleared her throat and called a little more firmly. "Help!"

Apart from a few incurious glances, no one took any notice of her. All were doubtless too preoccupied with their own suffering.

And then she dropped to one knee beside the dead man, intent upon she knew not what. Was she going to pray over him? Keep vigil over him? But did not even a dead stranger deserve some kind notice at his passing? He had been alive yesterday, with a history and hopes and dreams and concerns of his own. She reached out a trembling hand and set it lightly against the side of his face as if in benediction.

Poor man. Ah, poor man.

He was cold. But not entirely so. There was surely a thread of warmth beneath his skin. Rachel snatched back her hand and then lowered it gingerly again to his neck and the pulse point there.

There was a faint beating beneath her fingers.

He was still alive.

"Help!" she cried again, leaping to her feet and trying desperately to attract the notice of someone on the road. No one paid her any attention.

"He is alive!" she shrieked with all the power her lungs could muster. She was desperate for help. Perhaps his life could still be saved. But time must surely be running out for him. She yelled even more loudly, if that were possible. "And he is my husband. Please help me, somebody."

A gentleman on horseback-not a military man-turned his attention her way and she thought for a moment that he was going to ride to her assistance. But a great giant of a man-a sergeant-with a bloody bandage around his head and over one eye turned off the road instead and came lumbering toward her, calling out to her as he came.

"Coming, missus," he said. "How bad hurt is he?"

"I do not know. Very badly, I fear." She was sobbing aloud, Rachel realized, just as if the unconscious man really were someone dear to her. "Please help him. Oh, please help him."

R ACHEL HAD FOOLISHLY EXPECTED THAT ONCE THEY reached Brussels all would be well, that there would be a whole host of physicians and surgeons waiting to tend the wounds of just the group to which she had attached herself. She walked beside the wagon on which Sergeant William Strickland had somehow found space for the naked, unconscious man. Someone had produced a tattered piece of sacking with which to cover him partially, and Rachel had contributed her shawl for the same purpose. The sergeant trudged along at her side, introducing himself and explaining that he had lost an eye in the battle but that he would have returned to his regiment after being treated in a field hospital except that he had found that he was being discharged from the army, which apparently had no use for one-eyed sergeants. He had been paid up to date, his dismissal had been written into his pay book, and that was that.

"A lifetime of soldiering swilled down the gutter like so much sewage, so to speak," he said sadly. "But no matter. I'll come about. You have your man to worry about, missus, and don't need to listen to my woes. He will pull through, God willing."

When they did reach Brussels, of course, there was such a huge number of wounded and dying about the Namur Gates that the unconscious man, who could not speak for himself, might never have seen a surgeon if the sergeant had not exerted the authority to which he was no longer entitled and barked out a few orders to clear a path to one of the makeshift hospital tents. Rachel did not watch while a musket ball was dug out of the man's thigh-thank heaven he was unconscious, she thought, feeling faint at the very thought of what was happening to him. When she saw him again, both his leg and his head were heavily bandaged and he was wrapped in a coarse blanket. Sergeant Strickland had found a stretcher and two private soldiers, who loaded the man onto it.

Then the sergeant turned to her.

"The sawbones thinks your man has a chance if the fever don't get him and if the knock on his head didn't crack his skull," he told her bluntly. "Where to, missus?"

It was a question that had Rachel gaping back at him. Where to, indeed? Who was the wounded man, and where did he belong? There was no knowing until he regained consciousness. In the meantime, she had claimed him for herself. She had called him her husband in a desperate-and successful-attempt to attract someone's attention back there in the forest.

But where could she take him? The only home she had in Brussels was the brothel. And she was only a guest there-a totally dependent guest at that, since she had almost no money of her own with which to help pay the rent. Worse than that, she was very largely responsible for the fact that Bridget and the other three had lost almost all of their money too. How could she now take the wounded man there and ask the ladies to tend and feed him until they could find out where he belonged and arrange to have him taken there?

But what else could she do?

"You are in shock, missus," the sergeant said, taking her solicitously by the elbow. "Take a deep breath now and let it out slowly. At least he is alive. Thousands aren't."

"We live on the Rue d'Aremberg," she said, shaking her head as if to clear it. "Follow me, if you please."

She strode off in the direction of the brothel.

Phyllis was up to her elbows in bread dough-their servants had fled Brussels before the battle-and Bridget was preparing to entertain Mr. Hawkins. She came out of her room at the sound of the commotion at the front door, red hair tied in a loose topknot with pink ribbon in order to keep it off her face, cheeks aflame with rouge, one eye heavily painted with blue shadow and thick black lines above and below the lids, the other startlingly naked in contrast.

"Lord love us," Phyllis said, her eyes alighting on Sergeant Strickland, "a one-eyed giant and I am the only one available."

"Rachel is with him," Bridget pointed out. "My love, what is this? Did you run into trouble? She did not mean any harm, soldier. She was just-"

"Oh, Bridget, Phyllis," Rachel said all in a rush, "I was searching through the forest, and I came across this man on the stretcher here. I thought he was dead, but then I touched him and realized he was still alive, but he had been shot in the leg and had a horrible head wound. I called to all the men passing on the road, but no one took any notice until I cried that he was alive and was my husband. Then Sergeant Strickland came and helped me and carried the man to a wagon. And after we had arrived back in Brussels and a surgeon had tended him, the sergeant found these men with their stretcher and asked me where they could bring the wounded man. I could think of nowhere but here. I am so sorry. I-"