A Mistress For Major Bartlett

What if she tried to think of this as a sickroom, rather than her own bedroom, though? And of Major Bartlett as just a wounded soldier, rather than a naked and dangerous rake? Her patient, in fact. Yes—yes, that was better. She wasn’t, primarily, a woman who’d been forbidden to so much as speak to him, but his nurse.

It made it possible for her to knock on the door, at any rate. And, when a gruff voice told her she could come in, Sarah found that she could look across at the Major with equanimity—well, almost with equanimity. Because he wasn’t lying in her bed. He was in his sickbed. All she had to do was carry on in this vein and she’d soon be able to convince herself she wasn’t a sheltered young lady who regarded all single men as potential predators, but a nurse, as well.

A nurse, moreover, who’d promised, when his men had begged for her help, that she would do her best.

In her absence, Madame had fetched water and towels. And the men had put them to good use, to judge from the mounds of bloodied cloths on the floor.

‘He ain’t so bad as he looked,’ said the First Rogue. ‘A lot of bruising and cuts to his back where the wall fell on him, but nothing broken, not even his head.’

‘Really ’as got nine lives, ’as the Tom C—’ The Second Rogue broke off mid-speech, but Sarah knew perfectly well what he’d been about to say.

Well, well. Perhaps he hadn’t only gained that nickname because of his nocturnal habits. Perhaps a good deal of it was down to him having more than his fair share of luck, too.

‘Sooner we can get it sewn up the better,’ put in the First Rogue hastily, as though determined to fix her attention on the man’s injuries, rather than his reputation. ‘Cut right down to the bone, he is.’

They were looking at her expectantly.

Oh, yes. They’d said that she ought to do the sewing, hadn’t they?

‘I...’ She pressed one hand to her chest. In spite of the lecture she’d given herself, about proving how capable she was, now that it came to it, her heart was fluttering in alarm. At this point, Mama would fully expect her to have a fit of the vapours, if she hadn’t already done so because there was a naked man in her room.

‘You can do it, miss,’ said the Second Rogue. ‘Far better than us clumsy b... Uh—’ he floundered ‘—blighters.’

‘I don’t know how,’ she admitted, though she was ashamed to sound so useless.

‘We’ll direct you. And hold the Major still, in case he comes round.’

Yes. Yes they would need to do that. The pain of having his head sewn back together might well rouse him from his stupor. After all, hadn’t he roused once before, when the looters had been tearing off his shirt?

‘I can’t...’

‘Yes, you can, miss.’

She smiled ruefully at the man. ‘I was going to say I can’t go on thinking of you as Rogue One and Rogue Two, like characters in a play. You must have names? I am Lady Sarah.’ She held out her hand to Rogue One. ‘How do you do?’

He took her proffered hand and shook it. ‘Dawkins, Lady Sarah.’

‘Cooper,’ said the other with a nod, though rather than shaking her hand, he pressed a pair of scissors into it. ‘You need to start by trimming his hair back as short as you can get it, round the sabre cut,’ he said.

‘S-sabre cut?’

‘Cavalry sabre, I reckon,’ said Cooper. ‘Only thing that would knock him out and slice the scalp near clean off like that, all in one go.’

I will not be sick. I will not be sick.

‘Do you think he would prefer it,’ she said brightly, in a desperate attempt to turn the conversation in a less grisly direction, ‘if I cut it short all over? Only he will look so very odd, shorn in patches, when the bandages come off, won’t he?’

‘Time enough for that when he’s better, miss.’

Yes, but keeping up a conversation was still a good idea. She was less likely to either faint, or be sick, if she could keep at least a part of her mind off the grisly task she was having to perform.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, ruthlessly snipping away the matted curls. Lord, but it seemed like a crime to hack away at such lovely hair. Not that it looked lovely any more. She felt a pang at a sudden memory of how glorious it had looked, with the sunlight glinting on it, that day in the Allée Verte. She’d never imagined a day would come when she’d be running her fingers through it. Not for any reason.

‘We can ask him how he wants it done when he’s better, can’t we? Perhaps get a barber in to do something that will disguise this hideous crop I’m giving him.’

She laughed a little hysterically. Then swallowed.

‘It is amazing what a professional coiffeuse can do, you know.’ Snip. ‘Even with hair like mine.’ Snip, snip. ‘It is completely straight, normally. It takes hours of fussing, from a terribly expensive woman, with her special lotions and a hot iron, before Mama considers me fit to venture out of doors. And it takes such a long time to prepare me for a ball that I have gained the reputation for being dreadfully vain.’

She must sound it, too, prattling on about styling her hair, at a time like this. Except that with her mind full of hairdressers, and ballrooms, somehow it was easier to cope with the grim reality of what she was doing.

‘Reckon that’ll do now, miss,’ said Cooper, gently removing the scissors from her fingers and handing her a needle and thread.

‘Th-thank you.’ She was sure her face must be white as milk. Her lips had gone numb. And her hands were trembling.

Could she actually puncture human flesh with this needle? She shut her eyes. If only she could keep them shut until it was over.

Or if only Harriet were here. For Harriet—who’d had the benefit of an expensive education—would simply snatch the needle from her hand with an impatient shake of her head and say she’d better take charge, since everyone knew Sarah was far too scatterbrained to nurse a sick man.

But Harriet wasn’t here. And backing out of the task was unacceptable. She’d just be proving she was as weak and cowardly as everyone expected her to be.

Everyone except Gideon. You show ’em, she could almost hear him saying. Show ’em all what you’re made of.

‘Al...Always victorious,’ she muttered, under her breath. ‘That’s our family motto,’ she explained to the men, when she opened her eyes and saw them looking at her dubiously. She’d chanted it to herself all the way from Antwerp, the day before, to stop herself from turning back. Had whispered it, like a prayer, when she’d been cowering in the stable with her horse, to give herself heart.

‘Motto of our unit, too,’ grunted Cooper.

‘Of course, of course it is,’ she said, taking a deep breath and setting the first stitch. ‘Justin—that is Lord Randall, your colonel—he took the words from our family coat of arms, didn’t he? From the Latin, which is Semper Laurifer. Sounds like laurel, doesn’t it? And we do have laurel leaves on our family coat of arms. I suppose whoever took that motto did so for the play on words. Laurel. Laurifer. After a long-ago battle. Because there have always been soldiers in our family. And I dare say plenty of earlier Latymor ladies have had to stitch up wounds. I can almost feel them looking over my shoulder now, encouraging me to keep up the family tradition.’

She was babbling. In a very high-pitched voice. But somehow, reciting family history, whilst imagining the coat of arms and all her doughty ancestors, helped to take her mind off the hideous mess into which her fingers were delving.

‘G-Gideon told me that in the case of your unit, Justin, I mean Lord Randall, said you could use whatever means necessary to ensure you always won. Which sounds rather ruthless, even for him. I found it very hard to believe the things he said my stuffy, autocratic big brother got up to during the Peninsula campaign. But Gideon was so full of admiration for the sheer cheek of the way he went behind enemy lines, blowing things up, smashing things down and generally causing mayhem.’

‘Confounding the French, the Colonel called it,’ said Dawkins.

‘And that’s how you got the name of Randall’s Rogues,’ she said, glancing at the unconscious Major’s face. He’d been with Justin, doing all those things that had made Gideon green with envy. ‘I know it is far more fashionable to belong to a cavalry regiment like mine,’ he’d grumbled, ‘but what I wouldn’t give to have command of a troop like Justin’s. That’s the kind of officer I want to be. One who can take the refuse from half-a-dozen other regiments and forge them into something unique.’

He might not have wanted this man to get anywhere near her, but Gideon had admired him, in a way. He was just the kind of officer Gideon had wished he could have been.

‘Not much longer now, miss,’ said Dawkins kindly, as her gaze lingered on the Major’s face, reluctant to return to the ghastly wound she was supposed to be tending. ‘You’re doing a grand job.’

‘Yes,’ she said with a shudder. Then took a deep breath. ‘I’ve decided,’ she said, getting back to work, ‘that if the men in my family can go about claiming they can do whatever they like to make sure they come out victorious, because of a couple of words engraved on the coat of arms, then so can I. From now on, I will be Always Victorious. In this case—’ she swallowed as she set yet another stitch ‘—I will do my best for this poor wretch. If, for example, I am going to be sick, I will do so after I’ve finished patching his scalp back together.’

‘That you will, miss,’ Dawkins agreed.

Though miraculously, and to her immense relief, she wasn’t sick at all. True, she did stagger away from the bed and sink weakly on to a chair while the men slathered a paste that smelled as if it consisted mostly of comfrey, on to the seam she’d just sewn.

She wished she had some brandy. Not that she’d ever drunk any, but people said it steadied the nerves. And she certainly needed it. Needed something...