A Mistress For Major Bartlett

She clenched her teeth against a sudden surge of nausea. Sweat prickled across her top lip. Ben, who’d been darting from one side of the road to the other, in an agitated manner, lifted his head and watched the other dog as it ran down a fork in the road ahead.

Sarah closed her eyes, just for a minute, breathing deeply to try to clear her head which had started spinning alarmingly.

I must not faint. I must not faint.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ One of the Rogues had noticed her lag behind. Sarah forced her eyes open, to see that the rest of the party had reached the fork in the road. Oh, lord, she hoped they weren’t going to have to go past the place where the scavenger dog had taken its obscene booty. Thank goodness she hadn’t taken any breakfast, or she would be bringing it straight back up.

She couldn’t go that way. She wouldn’t go that way!

‘No, not that way!’ She raised her arm and pointed to the other fork in the road. ‘We must go that way,’ she said, in as steady a voice as she could muster, considering her whole body was shaking.

‘Begging yer pardon, miss, but down along there is where Colonel Randall ought to be, if he’s anywhere,’ said the soldier, pointing the other way.

Mary had turned in her saddle and wore the look she’d seen on so many faces during her life. The look that told her she was an exasperating ninnyhammer.

‘You said yourself,’ Sarah replied haughtily, ‘that you’ve already looked where you thought he ought to be and couldn’t find him.’

At that moment Ben, who’d been running back and forth with his nose to the ground, suddenly let out a bark and ran a few paces down the road she’d just indicated. Then turned and looked over his shoulder as if to ask why they weren’t following him.

‘Even Ben thinks we ought to go that way,’ she insisted.

And though they hadn’t wanted to listen to her, they all seemed to have complete faith in Ben’s instincts. To a man, they turned and followed him.

Leaving Mary no choice but to do so, too.

Sarah’s stomach lurched again. Only this time it was from guilt. What if she was leading them in the wrong direction, simply because there didn’t seem to be so many gruesome sights this way?

Mary was right to despise her. She wasn’t strong and brave. Or even sensible. She should have just admitted that the sights and smells were proving too much for her. Except that, to admit to such weakness, in front of Mary and those men...

She didn’t just have the Latymor nose. She had the wretched Latymor pride, too. That made her go to any lengths rather than admit she might have made a mistake.

Not that it had done her much good. For things were no better on this road, than they had looked on the one the scavenging dog had taken. The bright colours of uniforms lay stacked in heaps where the men who wore them had fallen, smeared now with mud and blood, and worse.

And there were pieces of uniforms, too, containing severed limbs. And bodies without heads. And horses screaming. And men groaning.

And Sarah’s head was spinning.

And her heart was growing heavier and heavier.

Because she was finally seeing what war really meant. Men didn’t die from neat little bullet wounds. Their bodies were smashed to pulp, torn asunder.

Oh, lord—if this had been what happened to Gideon, no wonder they hadn’t sent his body to Antwerp. Justin might be overbearing, but it was always in a protective way. He wouldn’t have wanted her, or Gussie, who was in such a delicate condition, to be subjected to the sight of Gideon, reduced to...to...that.

Just as it finally hit her that it might be true, that Gideon might really be dead, one of the men gave out a great cry.

She looked up, to see Ben go bounding across a field to a sort of tumbledown building, round which even more bodies were stacked than by the side of the road.

‘He’s found him! The blessed dog’s only gone and found him,’ cried one of the men. And they all went charging up to the ruin.

Chapter Two (#ulink_7c04073e-5374-5e94-905b-b8f2b9acf099)

She heard somebody say charnel house.

Sarah’s stomach lurched. She drew Castor to a halt as Ben scrabbled at the door of the barn until he found his way in.

‘Justin is in there,’ she cried in an agony of certainty. In the charnel house. Which meant he was dead. ‘I know he is.’

‘We shall see,’ said Mary calmly, dismounting.

Sarah slid from her own horse, her legs shaking so much she had to cling to the pommel to stay upright.

‘Here,’ said Mary, thrusting her reins into her hands. ‘You stay here and...and guard the horses while I go and see.’

Then, in a rather kinder tone, added, ‘It might not even be him.’

But Sarah knew it was. Ben had scented...something. He’d ignored heaps and heaps of dead bodies. The dog wouldn’t have barked so excitedly for no good reason.

And the Rogues hadn’t come out yet, either.

It was her brother in there. In there, where Mary was going, her face composed, her demeanour determined and brave.

While the prospect of seeing Justin, her strong, forceful brother, lying lifeless—perhaps even torn to bits like so many of the poor wretches she’d seen scattered in heaps along the roads...

And then any pretence she was guarding the horses fled as blackness swirled round the edges of her vision. Eddied up from the depths of her, too, as the extent of her uselessness hit her. What point had there been in snatching up that bag of medical supplies when she’d fled Antwerp? Bridget, her old nursemaid, had told her she would need it. And Bridget had a way of seeing things. So yesterday, she’d imagined she was riding to Gideon’s rescue, armed with the very herbs that he needed. But the truth was that Gideon was beyond anyone’s help. And that she was so overset by the thought of seeing any of her brothers chopped and hacked about that she would have been no more use to Gideon than a...than a...

Actually, she would have been of no help to Gideon at all. Just as she wasn’t being of any help to Justin.

They were right about her—those people who wrote her off as a weak, empty-headed nuisance. All she’d done by coming here was create problems for everyone else. Gussie and Blanchards would be worried sick about her, and even though she’d promised Mary she wouldn’t get in the way— Sarah groaned. She was growing more and more certain that she was either going to faint dead away, or cast up her accounts.

Well, she wasn’t going to do it in front of Justin’s men. Only a couple had stayed in the barn with Mary. The rest had come outside again, probably, she suspected, to keep an eye on their rather suspiciously magnificent horses.

There was a half-collapsed wall to her left, which would shield her from view if she was going to be sick. Which would conceal the evidence from the stalwart Mary, too, when she eventually came out.

If her legs would carry her that far...

They did. But only just. The effort of clambering over the lowest, most broken-down portion of the wall proved too much for both Lady Sarah’s legs, and her stomach, which both gave way at the same time. She hadn’t even gained the privacy she’d sought, either, because there was a group of peasant women busily ferreting amongst the rubble so they could rob the men who’d been partially buried under it.

They paused for a moment, but only a moment. With mocking, hard eyes, they dismissed her as being no threat as she retched fruitlessly, then calmly went back to stripping the corpse they’d just exhumed.

Or what had appeared to be a corpse. For suddenly, as the women turned him to ease the removal of his shirt, the man let out a great bellow, which both startled and scattered them.

Sarah gasped as he uttered a string of profanities. Not because of the words themselves, but because they were in English. His jacket, the one they’d just torn from his back, was blue, so she’d assumed he was French. But not only was he English, but his voice was cultured, his swearing fluent.

He was an officer.

And he was trying to get to his feet, though his face and shoulders were cloaked in blood.

Instinctively, she got to her feet, too, though with what aim she wasn’t sure.