Vermillion (The Hundred Days Series Book 1) (27 page)

“Are you all right?” Kate shouted.
Her voice comprised the first distinguishable words, and that was helped along
by reading her lips.

He shook his head, meaning 'yes' but
working to cast off the pounding between his temples. “Are
you
?”

“You're bleeding!” She was already
reaching for his face, for the hot pinpricks beginning to trickle toward his
chin.

“Just scratches.” Matthew bounced
up, landing on his feet. He hauled Kate behind him with a fistful of sleeves,
slinging her toward the camp. “To your post, Miss Foster!”

Kate raised her bag in both fists,
shaking it. “I have supplies! I could-”

“Absolutely not! Go – that is an
order!” He jammed a finger back toward the garrison. He didn't wait to see if
she obeyed, stumbling in a crouch behind the breastwork. Making for his horse,
Matthew hunched reflexively at a second deathly scream coming in from the
distance.

*          *          *

Another volley rocked the lowlands,
and only seconds later, two wagons in the French supply train blazed up,
devilishly illuminating a small battery on a hill.

“Well, that is helpful,” Matthew
said to no one, alone at the command post outside the gate. They had been at it
for two hours, taunting the French who returned the favor, toeing an invisible
line on the field. Each side was trying to get a good look at his opponent's
hand, and Matthew had decided he'd seen all he needed on the most recent French
advance.

Snapping open his lens and examining
the ridge, he watched the cascade of flint sparks, a row of British muskets
throwing lead ball through the trees ahead. Gray powder smoke glowed almost
supernaturally from the blaze behind. French infantry returned fire, and a row
of his own men fell like dominoes. A vein in his temple throbbed harder.

A rider tore in from the right – Ty
moving like hell on horseback. He wheeled, drawing up the reins, and held out
dispatches.

Matthew stared at them for a moment.
“Where the devil is McKinnon?” Delivering intelligence was his aide's
responsibility.

Ty waved them out farther, shouting
over the bark of nine-pounders. “Pinned down on the left!”

He snatched the papers. “I count
three hundred. Another fifty moving up with artillery behind the ridge.”

“Four hundred, if our prisoners are
to be believed. All French regulars.”

Matthew scowled over the scrawled
notes. “Sounds right. Do we know who commands this rabble? Hilliers?”

Ty's chestnut mare paced at a volley
erupting behind them, and he glanced at the sound. “The prisoners say Colonel
Baptiste, but I wager it's a bluff.”

Matthew nodded, skimming McKinnon's
neat handwriting. “As do I. He's moved his men three times through that opening
in the trees.” He jammed a finger at a break in the copse almost directly
ahead. “Baptiste would know better than that, wear us down a good bit first.
Whoever he is, he won't get ahead of our guns from that position.”

Ty raised his hat, snapping it in a
quick side-to-side, signaling something to a gun crew. “Hilliers lacks his
nuance, but he's got bollocks.”

He grunted in return, watching two
lines of infantry reforming behind the battery. “His frontal assault could be a
test of our strength, head-to-head. He could just as easily be humbugging me
while he slips around our flank.”

“Move up the artillery?” asked Ty.

He swept in a hand. “Move it up. And
I want the rifles on their heels, giving cover every moment, for guns and
infantry. When they reach the halfway,” Matthew cut the field with his thumb,
“one sound volley from your men. Infantry pushes forward, rifles push behind.
Cavalry at the rear and waiting.” He stuffed one of the letters into his
pocket. “Bring the smoke. Get me the top of that ridge before dawn.”

Ty snapped a smart salute. “Yes,
sir.”

“This,” he waved the second
dispatch, “says Marshall Ney has over-extended by sending his Frenchmen here.
He's trying to recall the bastards, but their commander, whoever he is, is
declining
the order.” Ney was famous for his bravery, Napoleon's most trusted general,
pragmatic but not overcautious. Whomever he had sent to the crossroads would
have hell to pay for ignoring the order to pull back. But the man was confident
enough of victory to take a risk and defer punishment. Matthew studied the
valley with a grim squint. That confidence was the man's second mistake.

Ty wrestled with his reins, stilling
his mount's anxious pacing. “Ney won't stand for it.”

Howitzers thundered, kicking up
waves of dirt and obscuring Matthew's view of the fallout. “Oh, he'll bring his
dog to heel all right. Let's see how many bites we can take from his hide till
then.” He stuck out his arm and Ty grasped his hand with determined pressure.
“Get me the other side of the hill, Major. I shall see you there.”

“Aye, sir!”

Matthew trotted Bremen out and back
from the command post, cathartic pacing for horse and rider. “By God, form them
up, Greene!” he barked. Then, under his breath, “What are you about, Tyler?
It's a gun carriage, not a post coach.” He muttered to himself at every turn,
wondering again why he had ever left the field for a command position. Nothing
frayed his nerves so much as nail-biting behind the front lines.

They passed a painstaking half-hour,
while French guns concentrated on his left staggered his men. They very nearly
broke through, but Major Burrell's artillery did all that was asked and more.
The men moved under sound cover across the flattest, deadliest piece of the
field, Colonel McAuley's battalion pressing forward from that point all alone.

Captain Westcott's deep monotone
called the charge, and his company dashed forward first, racing for the
embankment. Silent for long minutes, the French battery was abandoned as her
men spilled over the hill's lip and down onto Westcott's advancing line, now
almost shoulder to shoulder with Greene's company of veterans. Matthew could
feel, at the way the ground jarred the moment opposing lines clashed, that it
would be a victory of inches. The most painful sort.

He bore the clank of bayonets, the
rally cries and wounded screams, the general din of slaughter until he could
bear no more. Spurring Bremen hard, he raced the field, revealed only by the
dying light of a handful of kindled wagons, and darted between the wounded and
the shell pits to reach his men. Lieutenant Carlton was nowhere to be seen, and
his men struggled to regroup on the left, falling in with Westcott, courage
flagging at the beating they took from the enemy above.

Matthew weaved between the lines,
jerking up his hat and waving high. “Pound at them, men! Show them we can pound
the longest!”

A cheer went up, rising through the
grunts and clatter of musket stocks, carried by the smoke shrouding the deadly
embrace of red and blue. “No cheering, lads!” He raised his arm at the far
embankment. “Push through!”

He wheeled Bremen, drew his pistol
and fired a signal into the air. Thunder from the cavalry's hoof beats reached
his ears almost immediately over the fray, in such perfect discipline that he
nearly cheered with the others. Drawing blade from scabbard with the sharp tang
of fine steel, he threw himself in with the horse company. They pushed forward
as one, thrusting, slashing, withdrawing blades to the gritty sound of bone
against metal. Night air pierced his nostrils, sharp with sulfur and the copper
stench of blood tinged horribly sweet with urine and vomit. Bremen pushed
through small islands of men, his own and Hillier's, some down to using bare
hands in an effort at self-preservation. Fingers and bayonets and rifle butts
dragged at his legs, striking, piercing the meat of his thighs. In the heat of
battle, the wounds drew Matthew's attention with the same urgency of a buzzing
fly.

“
Recule! Recule
!”

He had known the French cry for
retreat was at hand. They had lost too much ground, punched gaps in their lines
impossible to plug with so few bodies. But in the thick of the skirmish, knee
deep in the enemy, he had begun to feel it would never come. He raised his
saber, swinging it ahead under Westcott's eagle eye. “Your men, and the horse
company! Drive them on, and not a man left standing if you can help it!”

The charge of Westcott's mount was
his reply. “Get after them, you blue-backs! Run 'em through!” Herding his men
to the plateau, Westcott ran just ahead of Greene, who never needed orders to
cut down a retreat. Matthew knocked Bremen, urging him up the sandy embankment,
getting his first half-decent view of the enemy's position. He would not turn
around and look behind just yet. The butcher's bill would come soon enough.

“What did you ask of me?” croaked a
voice from somewhere beneath him. Matthew squinted in the semi-darkness,
searching it out.

“Not even dawn yet.” Ty raised a
hand from where he lay beneath his horse, now a sprawled carcass pinning him to
the field, laughing until the sound became a ragged cough.

“Sod it all.” Matthew slid from
Bremen, catching a boot in the stirrup and nearly eating a mouthful of churned
soil in his hurry to reach the major. He buried knees in the damp earth,
wrestling open Ty's coat. “God man, are you wounded?”

Ty's arms flailed. “Webb, there's a
goddamn horse crushing me!”

“Well, are you going to
die
or not?” He buried his worry for Ty in the sharp retort. Matthew grabbed the
pommel of the saddle, wedging an arm beneath the animal's neck and prying
almost ineffectually at a whole ton of uncooperative horse meat. Ty groaned,
strained and finally rolled free. He lay panting against the dirt, while
Matthew crawled to his side, beginning at Ty's hairline and patting downward.
“Your bloody head isn't blown off, so we're doing well enough.”

A wince at the left shoulder, a
rough groan at a misshapen left rib. “My leg is fucking throbbing!”

“And no wonder, man. You're shot.”
The thigh of Tyler's gray trousers was stained black, saturated with blood well
below the knee. A thumb-sized hole punched through the wool fabric at the
outside of his thigh. Surgery and infection were a whole other matter, but
Matthew offered up thanks that, at least in the moment, Ty's wound did not seem
fatal.

Tyler wrested himself onto elbows,
squinting to get a better look at a wound he had no earthly hope of actually
seeing. “By God, I am!”

There
was
a lot of bleeding,
a good bit more than he'd first estimated. A small measure of panic rose in him
at Ty's worsening condition. Matthew started to rip at the leg of Ty's pants,
then considered dumping him on Bremen and starting back.

As his exhausted brain sorted
through options, something Kate had told him weeks earlier surfaced in the
chaos, and Matthew began to work at his cravat, untangling the knots with
exhausted fingers.

Ty groaned again. “Give me a drink
already, for the love of Job!”

“You know I can't.” Matthew pulled
the yard of linen free of his neck, threading it under Ty's upper leg. He may
have indulged in a sip or two since Kate's insistence, but he was hardly wading
into the stream just yet.

“Only goddamn officer in
three
armies who doesn't have a flask. You should face court martial.” Ty panted hard
as Matthew doubled the cloth over itself. “Should drum you out of the –” This
time he cried out in earnest as Matthew cinched the tourniquet with all the
pressure he could manage. “
Ahh!
Out of the... bloody army.”

There was so much blood, wet on his
palms and already soaking the linen. Matthew swallowed genuine panic in his
throat. He forced a grin. “Keep at that sort of loose talk and we can sit our
court martial hearings
together
. Up you go.”

Before Ty could protest, or even
absorb what was coming, Matthew tossed the major onto his shoulder and staggered
the few paces to Bremen. He dumped Ty unceremoniously over the saddle, where he
hollered, thrashed his long frame, and finally stilled. “I'm going to be fitted
for a peg leg, and have to wear one of those honor sashes that make a man look
like a rat catcher.” He giggled, then sniffled as though he were crying. Blood
loss was starting to make him delirious.

Matthew buried more fear in a stern
rebuke. “Be quiet, for God's sake, and hold on however you can.”

Try tried to look up, then fell limp
over Bremen's back. “Where the devil are you taking me?”

Easing his horse forward, gently as
he could, Matthew sighed. “To Miss Foster, before I wring your damned neck.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The wagon rattled off, the ominous
clatter of its suspension fading into the semi-darkness until it was
indistinguishable from the shouts and moans around her. Porter and Flannigan
had deposited their gruesome cargo and were off for another haul. Kate had
developed an aversion to the cart's lumbering approach, unconsciously aware
that it signaled a fresh load of near-dead men.

Her orderlies, Taylor and Jackson,
God bless them, were staunch allies. Yarding bodies onto the table or
supporting them in the chair, one braced and one supplied her instruments while
she tended her macabre duties.

Jabbing an index finger into her
ear, Kate worked the cotton wool in deeper. Blood never bothered her, except
the mineral stench now and then. The grate of the saw, she'd always reasoned,
was just one more sensation. It was the
sound;
not of hacking or the wet
song of the blade through flesh, but of the men. Groans and the occasional
scream filled the yard around the hospital, punctuated by the stubborn gunfire
of an enemy retreat. Wild cries of victory jarred her nerves while she worked, no
matter how much she expected the sound.

But it was the
begging
which
nearly broke her. A man in such mindless agony that he would wail to have a
limb cut off. Kate stuffed her other ear, shaking her head to loosen the
terrible thought, and palmed her knife.

Taylor was responsible for triage
and for noting each man on either the casualty or fatality list as they were
treated. She could not write them down; her hands were unfit now for any task
but cutting. Blood-caked and half numb, her finger could not manage a quill.
Not that she could place each man's name by now, anyway. Kate had taught
herself not to look at their faces. They were a shattered tibia, an elbow laced
together by nothing but strings of cartilage. They were faceless, nameless
medical problems. That was how she managed.

Taylor limped a half-conscious man
to the nicked seat of her heavy wooden chair, slick with blood in a spectrum of
reds from nearly a hundred men before him. He threaded the soldier's arms into
battered leather restraints while Jackson raised a mangled leg so Kate could
loop a tourniquet above the knee. She cranked the thumb screw. At some point
the effort had stopped hurting, the pad of her thumb losing feeling several
patients back. Cup in hand, Taylor helped the trembling man – a boy really,
hardly old enough to boast hair on his face – gulp down the grog. He dabbed at
the soldier's chin with a sleeve as grimacing lips let some of the liquor
escape.

Giving a sharp tug on the leather
strap to check her work, she brought the knife in close, extending her index
finger to probe her target.

The boy grunted, nostrils flaring as
he arched up from the seat, wild-eyed. Kate prodded insistently around the torn
flesh of what was once a knee cap, a strangled animal cry reaching through the
muffle of her ear plugs. Satisfied she knew her path, she wrapped the knife
handle with greater resolve. “Take a deep breath for me; we'll get through this
quick.”

The long, square blade bit hungrily
into the remaining strings of meat and sinew. She guided it with a practiced
hand between the fragments, burying its teeth into the joint. Thrashing,
bucking against the chair, the poor boy struggled against her efforts, mouth
gaping in a silent scream.

She braced a hand on his thigh above
the tourniquet, bore down and rotated the knife around his leg, digging hard at
the tendon. Blood lubricated any resistance, then coated her fingers and began
to work against her grip. She jerked a hand at Jackson, who swished
ineffectually with a near-drenched rag over the handle.

Her patient twisted away at the
waist, face pressed so hard into Taylor's forearm that Kate wondered the boy
could breath. No part of him touched the chair above the hips. The hot sweat of
terror had turned clammy beneath her hand on his leg. The gray shadow passing
over the boy's face warned she would have to work quickly. He was going into
shock.

A final pull and she had dug her
trench all the way around his knee. She tossed the knife to the tabletop in
favor of a saw, now going to work in earnest. Horribly, she thought, this was
the easy part. The only factor now was how much her bicep trembled, how fast
her efforts could eat the bone. Getting on her knees for leverage, Kate wrapped
the ivory handle in a two-handed grip. Nearly forty eager, gritty passes later
the dead weight fell free, tossed atop an already stinking burn-pile of
mutilated limbs.

Jackson pulled a dense,
spatula-shaped iron from a nearby brazier, smacking it on the bleeding stump.
The boy flailed his arm inside the restraints like a broken-winged bird,
despite Taylor's efforts. He was too hoarse and winded for any sound to pass
between his gaping lips. Kate breathed through her mouth against the sickly
sweet aroma, observing Jackson's progress and pointing out spots to be
cauterized while she unwound a length of bandage. The chair rocked up onto two
legs, and for a moment Kate was sure the boy would dump himself to the floor.
Jackson tossed the iron back into the flames just in time.

The moment he finished, she began to
wrap. Thin and loose; no sense wasting bandage that would be changed soon
enough. Or soiled by a dead patient, which was a guarantee nearly half the
time.

By now the soldier was limp, slung
deep in his seat. Kate imagined he was in just as much pain as when he had been
dragged in, but having fallen from the crescendo of agony made it bearable.

Taylor and Jackson lifted the poor
soul, wrestling him onto a canvas litter and shuffling him out. He would go to
recover under an awning hastily erected in the formation yard, and the next
brutalized soldier would take his place. Would it be Matthew this time? She had
steeled herself with each new patient, dreading the possibility. Flanagan
thought the general responsible for carting Major Burrell back to camp, but
MacAuley's aide-de-camp was certain Matthew had pushed over the ridge, swearing
that hide nor hair had been seen of him since the retreat.

There was no comfort, finding him
absent under her knife. He might easily be in the surgery tent next door,
bleeding out from a flesh wound. Or lying in the field, fit only for the
undertaker's spade. She braced palms on the sticky table-top, gasping against a
surge of panic. Bile churned up, burning her throat. Kate ground fingertips to
her tired eyes, trying in vain to push the tears back inside. He was not here,
a voice reasoned, and that was something. Kate told herself to be calm.

Alexander stuck a head inside,
causing her to jump and tip a lantern atop the table. He had unloaded each
wagon with Gill before taking up post in the surgery next door, stitching
together anyone she did not need to cut apart. Kate pulled the wad of cotton
from one ear.

“Miss, Major Burrell is set arights.
Flesh wound to the thigh is all. Couple ribs split, from the horse.”

Kate grunted. She tried to feel relief,
and somewhere inside registered happiness that Ty would keep his leg, but it
was merely a footnote. She was incapable of making more of the news.

Jackson tapped at Gill's shoulder,
pushing past into the silent room. “Three or four left miss, but they're a
hopeless case,” Jackson explained. “I'd stake my own life on it.” It was a
tough skill to possess, knowing a man was dead while he was still alive.
Usually they were artillery wounds, and she had seen scores of those tonight.
She could see the weight of those life-and-death decisions pinching up
Jackson's long face.

Kate nodded, eyes drifting
listlessly over the room. “If no one else has need of the butcher, you and
Taylor begin on the fatality list. Walk the yard and write down all you can
identify. Find help if you come across a stranger.” Soldiers could recognize a
man's face and never know his name. Identifying the dead was as much an effort
of brotherhood as fighting a battle. And often, it took longer.

The two men swished their hands in a
bucket stained with too much red to have been of any real help. Jackson
gathered the lists and Taylor stuffed two pencils into his weathered apron,
following his partner out.

Gill leaned farther inside, jabbing
a thumb towards the tent next door. “We have a handful yet to go in the
surgery, miss. I'm back to it.”

She barely nodded. “Let me know when
you've finished. It's nearly time to start rounds for the first patients.”

“Yes, miss.” Gill trotted away,
leaving her alone.

She should look in on Ty, but guilt
would not let her go. It was always this way, after an engagement. She should
stay, wait, comb the dying for one last, salvageable soul. Her heart denied the
pattern her head knew all too well. Porter came again and again with the wagon,
and at the outset each arrival brought
wounded
men, not men waiting to
die. Each body in the cart was a workable injury, even if he did not survive.
At some point the wounded he gathered became a fifty-fifty split of beyond
hope. Eventually, such as right now, Porter was out scavenging the field in a
desperate, mostly fruitless search for patients who in all probability would
not last the journey back to camp.

She hefted a washtub, sliding it to
the foot of the table, and poured in some hot water from a cast iron kettle she
took from over the brazier. Unwrapping a narrow leather thong, Kate opened the
mouth of a leather pouch and dumped dried witch elm into the tub, watching
crumbling yellow blossoms soften and reanimate. They bobbed to the surface and
she inhaled the woody, medicinal scent. The odor was a sad comfort, announcing
to Kate's senseless fingers and trembling arms that their trial was over. After
the herb steeped a minute or two, she swept the table with one hand, raking the
knives, saws, ball pliers and tourniquet-clasps into the wash.

Porter and Flanagan had not
returned, and Kate at last gave herself permission to check on Ty.

The sky was fading from blue into
silver when she ducked through the battered wooden doorway. She had not been
prepared for that. Though she should have realized it would be nearing morning,
in the surgery there was no true passage of time. Everything transpired in
five-minute increments, cutting, sawing, searing. Somehow the promise of
daylight in an hour or so made what happened inside the hospital, even a few
minutes earlier, feel abstract.

The command post was a frenzy of
activity. Kate could barely make out the motion of figures in the lamplight,
aides hunched and scribbling, reading through communiques that were likely
obsolete already. Majors and corporals traded information about wounded or
prisoners, what to do with captured guns. Kate knew that some would be
double-shot to deprive the enemy of future use, but others were added to the
inventory. Kate realized she could probably act out the exchanges as a
one-woman play, she had heard it all so many times before.

For the first time, she was weary.
Weary of the garrison, the war, the bloody cycle. Three years earlier, she had
come to Europe expecting to stay a year. The battles were beginning to take
their toll.

A figure detached itself from the
commotion as she approached. At first she assumed it was a courier, probably
off to appraise the field marshal of their victory, and paid little attention.
When he mounted, though, the breadth of his shoulders, his shape and
straight-backed command of the saddle gave away the rider's identity.

Relief nearly buckled her knees.
Kate wondered again at how Matthew's welfare, more than anyone else's, had
stood paramount in her thoughts. Too tired to explore her feelings more than
that, she simply acknowledged them, then offered a silent prayer of thanks that
he had returned unharmed.

She stopped in her path, weighing
the distance to the major's tent and the main gate, and realized there was
never any question where to go. Kate did not want to cheer or be cheered. She
wanted to be with someone who hurt.

*          *          *

Bremen tread gently over the field,
choosing his steps carefully as though even he was aware of the gravity.
Seventy-two dead, two-hundred and four men wounded. Both were rough estimates,
too early to take them as fact. He was bound to lose more of them, today or the
next.

Matthew picked between a wagon axle
and its shattered deck. Its purple-faced driver stared eternally to the
heavens, a scream slackened by death frozen to his lips. Tattered strips of
uniform hinted at the cannon shot which had claimed nearly half his mangled
torso where it protruded above the twisted corpse of his horse.

Some of the dead he recognized,
others were strangers. They were all his men. He removed his hat and pressed it
to his chest. His finger slipped into a musket-ball hole above the brim that he
had not realized was there. He dared a laugh, wondering at Fate's strange
designs. Two inches lower and he would be lying out here too.

Further out, contorted bodies clad
in Britannia red and Empire blue littered the trampled grass. The charred
remnants of gun carriages and supply trains curled smoke into the morning fog,
its damp holding the stench of black powder and putrefaction. Matthew felt it
penetrate his clothes, his skin, and shivered.

A predawn glow caught the movement
of five French soldiers scurrying inside a copse, a hundred yards to his right.
One shouldered a musket, aiming for him with a posture that was too frightened
to truly consider pulling the trigger. There was an exchange among the party,
and Matthew guessed when he did not move to draw his pistol, they found him
less of a threat. He had no intention of firing on them; everyone was entitled
at least to their dead.