Authors: Imperial Scandal
Teresa Grant (38 page)
Raoul got to his feet as well and regarded her for a moment. “If the battle goes our way”—his voice caught slightly on the word “our”
—
“if the day goes to the French, you should go to Antwerp. Wellington may have to fall back and let Napoleon have Brussels.”
—
“if the day goes to the French, you should go to Antwerp. Wellington may have to fall back and let Napoleon have Brussels.”
“That’s precisely what Malcolm said.” She gave the ghost of a smile that hurt her face.
“Sensible advice. It won’t be as bad in Brussels as the British fear, but you could find yourself detained. Depending upon what happens next, you may need to set sail for England.”
“Again, that’s what Malcolm said. He left me travel documents. David Mallinson and Simon Tanner are here. They’ll travel with us. I have Aline to see to as well and Cordelia Davenport.”
Raoul nodded. “Should you not be able to get out of Brussels for some reason, you can send word to me.”
She shook her head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
He scanned her face and gave a slow nod, understanding her meaning. She wouldn’t run any risk of Malcolm learning the truth about her work for the French. “I understand,” he said in a gentle voice. “Just remember it’s an option, in some unforeseen eventuality.”
A chill coursed through her. “You mean if Malcolm is killed.” She had always prided herself on thinking through every scenario, but this was something she hadn’t let herself contemplate. Would she go to England, an alien land and so long the enemy, and bring her son up as a British gentleman? Would she turn her back on everything and take Colin to France?
“I’m only letting you know you have options,” Raoul said.
“Even should the battle go to Napoleon, the British won’t give up easily.”
“No, but the alliance could fall apart. That’s what we have to hope for.”
A restored Napoleon. Malcolm would have to go back to Britain, at least for a time, but ultimately he could be sent to the French imperial court as a diplomat. She felt a crazy desire to laugh at the thought. If he survived. They’d been playing the same game for so long, it was difficult to imagine the rules changing so completely.
“Should I not come back, you can rely on Villon,” Raoul said in the same calm voice.
Her gaze flew to his face.
“Only thinking through every eventuality.” He touched his fingers to her cheek. “Take care of yourself,
querida
.”
querida
.”
42
“
C
ordelia.”
C
ordelia.”
Cordelia looked up from tying a bandage round the arm of a rifleman to see the broad shoulders and classical features of Lord Eglinton. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. He wore one of his beautifully cut coats, though his cravat looked to have been tied with unwonted haste and his dark hair was uncovered.
“Thank God,” Eglinton said. “I’ve been looking all over the city for you. I’ve managed to secure a carriage and pair. At the cost of six months’ income, but well worth it. I can convey you and Livia to Antwerp.”
Cordelia sat back on her heels and met Eglinton’s earnest gaze. They’d had a very agreeable liaison in Paris last summer that had stretched into the early autumn. “Thank you, Teddy. But I have no intention of leaving.”
“For God’s sake, Cordy.” Eglinton knelt opposite her, heedless of the effect of the dirty cobblestones on his biscuit-colored pantaloons. “I’m not asking anything of you. I just want you to be safe. Look round you. You can’t stay here.”
Cordelia knotted off the ends of the bandage and smiled at the rifleman, who was trying to pretend to be deaf. “I’m well able to take care of myself. I always have been.”
Eglinton shook his head. “You’re a madwoman.”
“But then you’ve always known that, haven’t you? Perhaps you’d help me get this gentleman to his billet before you leave?”
Eglinton half-carried the man to his billet and made one more effort to remonstrate with her. She kissed his cheek and gave him a quick hug, then knelt to peel back a matted makeshift dressing from the leg of a Belgian corporal. She was so focused on the tasks at hand that she scarcely noticed when the sky clouded over, save that the heat of the sun wasn’t quite so unbearable. Then she saw a bright flash and heard a rumble she at first thought was another cannonade. She felt a spatter of damp on the back of her neck and the next thing she knew the clouds let loose a torrent.
She was closing the eyes of a fair-haired boy with a gaping wound in his side when Suzanne ran up to her, soaking wet, her hair half tumbled from its pins and plastered to her face, the bloodstains on her cream-colored gown turned to spreading pink by the damp. “Come back to the Rue Ducale. I’ve just sent Aline home. David and Simon have filled the house with wounded, and we won’t be much good to anyone if we come down with pneumonia.”
Cordelia managed a shaky smile and tucked the letter the fair-haired boy had given her for his sweetheart into the bodice of her gown.
Suzanne opened the front door in the Rue Ducale without bothering to ring for Valentin. The smells of blood, sweat, and brandy filled the air. The black and white marble floor, pristine and gleaming this morning, was now lined with pallets on which lay wounded men. In addition to the chandelier, a variety of lamps and candles lent illumination against the stormy sky.
Livia was holding a flask of water up to a gray-haired man with a bandage round his head, while Robbie and Colin knelt on either side of a pale-faced man, propped up against pillows, who was creating a boat out of paper for them.
Blanca looked up from packing a Highland private’s chest wound with lint. “The children are less frightened when they know what’s happening.”
Livia capped the flask and ran over to Cordelia. “You got all wet. Blanca said you were taking care of hurt soldiers.”
Cordelia nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She knelt down and hugged her daughter, heedless of her damp and soiled gown. Livia wrapped her arms tight round her.
“Is my papa hurt?” Livia asked when Cordelia at last released her.
“Not the last we heard,” Cordelia said in a steady voice.
Livia nodded. “And Uncle Johnny?” She glanced at Robbie.
“The last we heard he was all right, too.”
“But they could both be dead, couldn’t they?” Livia said in a matter-of-fact voice, eyes wide and anxious.
“Darling—” Cordelia forced down every easy reassurance that sprang to her lips. She put her hands on Livia’s shoulders. “We don’t know. But as many men as have been wounded and killed, there are many more who are unhurt.”
Livia nodded again. “I said I hated the French, but Uncle Simon said there are lots of French soldiers who are hurt, too.”
Cordelia met Simon Tanner’s gaze. He had just emerged from the kitchen with a tray of hot broth. He gave a faint smile. “An excellent point,” she said. “War is quite beastly for everyone.”
Livia went to sit beside Colin and Robbie, who were sailing the paper boat in a river of the soldier’s blankets. David came in through the front door, his coat soaked, his hat gone, his hair streaming water. He carried an armful of lint and brandy and laudanum, which he relinquished to Blanca. Cordelia, Suzanne, and Simon met him by the base of the stairs.
“Is there any news?” Suzanne was the first to speak.
David nodded, eyes grave. “Apparently the Allied army is retreating.”
Cordelia sucked in her breath.
“They’d have to,” Suzanne said. “The Prussians had to fall back this morning, and Wellington needs to maintain communications with Blücher.”
“Yes,” David said, “I thought the same myself. But it seems to have renewed the panic in the city. I was stopped half a dozen times on my way back from the chemist’s and asked if I had horses to sell. And offered a more outrageous sum each time.”
“Rather a waste that you already have a fortune,” Simon murmured. He glanced round the group. “You’d all best get out of your wet clothes. We don’t have any spare hands to tend chills. I sent Aline up the moment she came in. I think we’ve used up most of the brandy and whisky cleaning wounds, but there’s still plenty of wine.”
Suzanne knocked on Cordelia’s door ten minutes or so later. “I thought you might need help with your gown. Your maid’s downstairs helping Blanca.”
“Thank you,” Cordelia said. She was reaching over her shoulders, struggling to do up the strings. She’d thought the Pomona green sarcenet was one of her easier dresses to put on, but her fingers wouldn’t seem to cooperate. “How did you manage?” she asked, as Suzanne stepped into the room in pomegranate crêpe over a white satin slip, her hair neatly pinned.
“Years of practice. And learning to order gowns that fasten easily. I haven’t always had a maid and Blanca’s often occupied elsewhere.” She did up Cordelia’s strings with deft fingers.
Cordelia picked up her silver-backed brush from the dressing table and dragged it through her hair. Or tried to. Her fingers were still shaking. She dropped down on the dressing table bench, hunched over. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“It’s often that way.” Suzanne perched on the edge of the bed. “The reality doesn’t sink in until one has the leisure to think. That’s kept me from going mad more than once.”
For all her composure, the looking glass showed that Suzanne’s eyes were filled with ghosts. Cordelia spun round on the dressing table bench. “What you must have been through—Even after today I can scarcely imagine it. I must seem a dreadful watering pot.”
“Today was enough to shake anyone. And I don’t think one ever grows wholly inured to it. At least I hope not. The first time I helped Geoffrey Blackwell I threw up all over the man he was trying to operate on.”
The stories Cordelia had heard about the war in the Peninsula, always something vague and distant, suddenly seemed so real they sent a chill through her. She knew little about Suzanne’s past, but she’d heard her family had died in the war. “You nursed the wounded in Spain.”
“Malcolm and I were following the army during the push across the frontier into France. I did what I could. One learns to cope. You would.”
“I don’t know. George didn’t think I could even cope in genteel poverty, and I have a horrible feeling he was right.”
“You’ve coped with scandal and being a social outcast.”
Cordelia turned back to the mirror and pulled her hair up with a sharp twist. “I didn’t have much choice.”
“Precisely.”
Cordelia reached for a handful of pins and jammed them haphazardly into her hair. “Self-preservation as much as anything else.”
“As I said.” Suzanne got to her feet and moved to the dressing table. She took the hairpins and arranged Cordelia’s hair with gentle fingers. “It’s harder, knowing one’s husband is out there, wondering if the same could be happening to him.”
Cordelia shuddered. “What a damnable time to realize it.”
“What?”
Cordelia drew in and released her breath. Her lungs hurt. “That I’d be utterly devastated if anything happened to Harry.”
Suzanne smoothed a wave of hair over Cordelia’s forehead. “It can rather sneak up on one.”
“What?”
“Loving one’s husband.”
Cordelia looked up at her friend with a dozen unvoiced questions about the Rannochs’ marriage.
Suzanne returned her gaze. “Malcolm’s and my marriage didn’t precisely have a conventional start.”
Cordelia studied her for a moment. “Mine did. There’s nothing more conventional than marrying for money.”
Suzanne dropped down on the dressing table bench beside her. “When I first met Colonel Davenport in the Peninsula it was clear that he was a difficult man to know. And bitterly unhappy. I didn’t understand why until I met you.”
“Because of how miserable I made him?”
“Because he was desperately in love with you.”
“Was.”
“That sort of feeling doesn’t go away. Not from what I’ve observed these past few days.”
Cordelia pushed herself to her feet. “I was caught up in the romance of the moment. All those tearful good-byes and the waltz playing for God’s sake. For a moment I turned into some sort of heroine. The same one who rose to the occasion today. When it’s over, I daresay I shall go back to being just as selfish and heedless as before.”
“I doubt it.” Suzanne got to her feet as well. “For one thing, I don’t think you were nearly so selfish or heedless as you make out.” She reached for the door handle and paused for a moment, her fingers curled round the polished brass. “And for another, I don’t think any of us is going to emerge from this unchanged.”
An hour or so later, attired in dry clothes, the children tucked into bed, the wounded settled as best as possible for the night, they sat down to a makeshift dinner in the dining room. Rain still pounded on the roof and spilled from the eaves.
“It’s going to be a damned muddy battlefield,” Simon murmured, refilling the glasses of Bordeaux.
Amazing how hungry she was now she had time to think of it. But then, Cordelia realized, she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. They were in the midst of devouring vegetable soup and bread when a commotion in the hall had them all on their feet with a celerity that belied their attempts at composure. They hurried into the hall to find Malcolm Rannoch standing between the rows of pallets, dripping water onto the marble tiles. Another man stood behind him. Harry.
Air flooded her lungs as though she’d been holding her breath for hours without realizing it.
Suzanne ran forward, took her husband’s hands, and lifted her face for his kiss. Cordelia remained where she was, because she didn’t have any right to do otherwise.
“Colonel Davenport.” Suzanne held out her hand. “I’m so glad to see you safe. You both must want to go upstairs and put on dry things. We have food in the dining room.”
Cordelia met Harry’s gaze as he moved to the stairs. He still wore his ball dress from the night before last, the once brilliant white pantaloons gray with mud, the coat and fringed sash crusted with dirt and blood. She wondered how much of it was his. She smiled, a little uncertain. He returned the smile, though his eyes were tired. His face was gray with exhaustion, and he moved stiffly.
The men came into the dining room ten minutes later, attired in dry clothes, Harry in garments borrowed from Malcolm. Suzanne introduced him to David and Simon, whom he had met years ago in Derbyshire.
As they all moved to the dining table, Cordelia touched her husband’s arm, unsure if it was an invasion. It had been one thing to kiss him in the heightened atmosphere of the ball. It was another now, with the cold, prosaic horror of battle all round them. Harry looked down at her for a moment, his gaze unreadable, then squeezed her fingers.
Suzanne served Malcolm and Harry Davenport, since the servants were all either tending the wounded or snatching much-needed rest. Both men took several bites in silence. At length, Davenport tossed down a deep draught of Bordeaux and said, “Wellington’s forces are bivouacked near Mont-Saint-Jean for the night.”
“They
have
retreated,” Aline said. “It must be more than ten miles.”
have
retreated,” Aline said. “It must be more than ten miles.”
“No help for it.” Davenport dipped his spoon into his soup. “The Prussians are at Wavre, and Wellington needs to keep the armies close.”
“He was right when he looked at the map in the Duke of Richmond’s study,” Malcolm said. “Mont-Saint-Jean is just south of Waterloo. It looks as though that’s where the fighting will be.”
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