Slightly Tempted (43 page)

The end of his long and difficult rainbow.

Bewcastle had written to him the very day he had received Marianne's letter. His own had been brief and to the point, but in it he had assured Gervase that he was satisfied with her explanation and recognized that he had completely misinterpreted what he saw nine years before. He had also mentioned the brooch, which he genuinely could not remember picking off the floor and setting down on a table before leaving the room, though he must have done so since Marianne had admitted that it was never stolen.

The rainbow's end was sweet indeed-and dazzling in the rush of joy it brought him as they turned together, he and Morgan, to face the rector.

"Dearly beloved . . ." he began.

And then, almost before Gervase could begin to appreciate exactly what it was that was happening, before he could begin to concentrate, the same voice was declaring that they were man and wife together.

Her smile was dazzling.

His, he felt, was all mingled with tears. They had come so close, the two of them, to not making it through.

They signed the register, walked out of church together, past a sea of smiling faces, and emerged into sunshine and cheers and a rain of flower petals hurled by Bedwyns and his own brothers-in-law and a couple of his nieces. They drove back to Lindsey Hall in an open carriage, gaudy ribbons and old boots trailing and bouncing behind, holding hands tightly, gazing like moonstruck idiots into each other's eyes, and indulging in a long, warm kiss as soon as the village was out of sight behind them.

"Happy?" he asked her.

"Happy." She smiled back at him. "The past month seemed endless."

They had been apart for that long. She had returned to Lindsey Hall two days after the ball to prepare for her wedding and arrange for the banns to be called. He had stayed at Windrush. He had come here only yesterday. He had stayed, with his family, at Alvesley Park a few miles away, at the invitation of the Earl and Countess of Redfield and of Viscount Ravensberg, his son, and Ravensberg's wife.

"Years long," he agreed. "The longest separation we are going to have to endure for the rest of our lives, I swear to you,chérie . There were no consequences of our night of sin?" He grinned at her and waggled his eyebrows as he remembered their night of passion outside the grotto.

But she was gazing gravely back at him, her eyes large and beautiful.

"I do believe there were," she said.

"What?"He grapsed her free hand and squeezed both tightly. "Therewere ?"

She smiled softly. Her cheeks were flushed. If she had looked beautiful in his eyes before, there were no words to describe her now.

They were indecorously close to the house. Only a large, circular flower garden with a great fountain at its center stood between their moving carriage and the terrace outside the front doors. And as bad luck would have it, there was someone standing outside the doors-a lone gentleman. Fleetingly Gervase wondered whether he was someone who had not been invited to the wedding or someone who had left the church early and ridden neck-or-nothing back to the house.

But truth to tell, at that moment he would not have cared if every servant and gardener and groom in Bewcastle's employ was lined up on the terrace to greet their arrival. He was a newly married man, and he had just discovered that he was to be a father.

"Chérie," he said, lowering his head to hers."Mon amour. Ma femme."

"I am so happy, Gervase," she said, "that I cannot even find words."

"You do not need to," he assured her, feathering kisses against her lips. "There is sometimes a better way of communicating than with words,chérie. "

And he proceeded to show her, wrapping his arms about her and kissing her thoroughly while her arms came about his neck.

The lone gentleman on the terrace watched the carriage-obviously a wedding conveyance-circle about the fountain and approach the doors, the bride and groom lost to propriety and to the very world itself in each other's arms.

Follow the passionate and spirited adventures of the Bedwyn family in Mary Balogh's dazzling novels . . .

SLIGHTLYMARRIED

Aidan's story

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SLIGHTLYWICKED

Rannulf's story

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SLIGHTLYSCANDALOUS

Freyja's story

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Plus, read on for previews of the upcoming Bedwyn family stories . . .

SLIGHTLYSINFUL

Alleyne's story

May 2004

and the glorious hardcover series finale

SLIGHTLYDANGEROUS

Wulfric's story

June 2004

SLIGHTLY SINFUL

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On Sale May 2004

THE ROAD SOUTH OFBRUSSELS LOOKED LIKE Ascene 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 shedoing ? How could she even bethinking 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 ofseeing 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 had offered to take the money back to London with him and deposit it safely in a bank, 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 gritted 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.

Itwould 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."

RACHEL HAD FOOLISHLY EXPECTED THAT ONCE THEYreached 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 theydid 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 and cleared 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 bier and two private soldiers, who loaded the man onto it.