And after they were wed, the major placed a rather indecent and demanding kiss on his new wife’s lips, and to the chaplain’s embarrassment, the lady appeared to welcome her husband’s lusty embrace with the same enthusiasm.
The chaplain left the tent, wiping his glasses, and wondering if perhaps he should have paid more attention to his brother’s latest letter. A vicar in Surrey, he had spent two pages decrying the growing immorality of society. If Mrs. Danvers’s wanton display was indicative of the current mores back home, he may well just consider remaining in the army.
* * *
The hours after Olivia’s wedding sped by in a whirl of activity. Robert had to report immediately to duty, since all hands were going to be needed to take the city. Wellington had confided to the couple that the battle would begin that night.
The weather had confounded most of the English seige efforts, so the trenches and lines were not what Wellington had hoped they would be, but if they continued working, they would only give the French the advantage of getting reinforcements there in time.
It was now or never.
Aquiles helped Olivia pitch a tent and settle their things into the cramped quarters. Not that Olivia had much other than her battered valise. By the time they had gotten everything organized and their stores from the quartermaster, it was nearly dark, and Robert returned to make a hasty good bye.
“I’m going to have Aquiles take you to where the other wives are waiting,” he told her. “They are positioned far from the action, and you will be well out of harm.”
Olivia clung to him, barely listening. She couldn’t stand the idea of him leaving her so soon.
He must have sensed her fears, for he cradled her even tighter. “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”
Rising on her toes, she offered him her lips one more time, and they kissed hard and fast, as if sealing his vow with the sudden urgency that seemed to be surrounding them.
Robert took one last look at her and then turned and left. Olivia stood her ground and watched his tall, proud form until he had disappeared into the growing darkness.
“Come along, missus,” Aquiles said, leading her in a direction that took her with each step further and further from her heart.
She found the other soldiers’ wives a mixed lot. They milled around fires and sat on boxes, some sewing, some tending children, others pacing nervously about tugging at stray locks of their hair or worrying a handkerchief.
When the first cannon belched its terror toward the besieged city, a number of the women began to cry.
As the guns continued to blaze to life across the lines, Olivia felt nothing but useless . . . and helpless.
One woman in particular started wailing as if she had been shot herself.
“Oh, shut yer trap,” a rough looking woman said to the distraught lady. “If your man dies, it’s not like there aren’t ten more only too willing to take his place.” She plucked a pipe from her coat, filled the bowl with tobacco and lit it from one of the fires. After a long puff, she glanced up at Olivia. “And who are you?”
“Mrs. Danvers,” Olivia said. “I just married Major Danvers. Today.”
“Harumph,” the woman muttered. “Been married myself. Four times. Right now, most people just call me Martha. First battle?”
Olivia nodded.
“Thought so. Got that scared look about you. Well, settle in, Mrs. Danvers. My Johnny said this was going to take some time.” Martha rose and nodded at the crate she’d been sitting on. She gathered up a bundle of rags and cloths, hoisting them onto her sturdy shoulder, and started back toward the main camp.
“Where are you going?” Olivia asked. She had thought they were supposed to stay behind the camp.
“Canna ya hear those guns, Mrs. Danvers?” The lady puffed once again on her pipe. “Those sounds mean the men are getting shot at. The lucky ones die, but the unlucky ones, well, they either bleed to death on the field or they get hauled back to the surgeon’s tent.” A couple of other women, hardy, rough looking souls, rose to join Martha. “Those poor souls who make it to the surgeon’s will be needin’ tending. And we do what we can.” She turned again to leave.
“Can I help?”
Martha glanced over her shoulder, assessing Olivia’s worthiness with an experienced and weary eye. “You ever seen someone who’s been shot, Mrs. Danvers?”
Olivia swallowed. “Yes.”
The woman didn’t appear all that convinced.
“I know a thing or two about medical matters,” Olivia insisted. She opened her valise and began pulling out what remained of her powders. “I even have some things that may help.” She held out the packets to Martha.
Taking one of them, Martha took a practiced sniff, and then eyed her again, as if she couldn’t quite reconcile the idea of a rosy-cheeked bride experienced in tending war wounds.
But finally she tossed her head toward the camp. “Come on with ye, if ye think ye got the stomach for it. More hands make for lighter work, me mother always said. And from the sounds of it, we’ll have plenty to go around.”
* * *
Martha hadn’t been exaggerating when she had told Olivia there would be plenty of work. The surgeon’s tent was overflowing with injured men by the time they arrived, and soon the ground around the medical tent was littered in a sea of wounded men.
Hours into the fight, Olivia was helping Martha tend to a batch of newly arrived men when one in particular caught her eye.
Jemmy.
Her heart caught in her throat. Dear God, he was like a brother to her, and she’d all but forgotten that he too would be out in that mayhem. She rushed to his side.
His leg was covered in blood and twisted at an odd angle. His eyes were closed, and his breathing seemed labored and pained.
Martha took one practiced glance at the boy and shook her head.
“He
is not
going to die,” Olivia told her, ripping at the shreds of Jemmy’s pant leg to reveal where a piece of shrapnel was still imbedded in his flesh. Her stomach rose with a rolling clench, but she bit back the bile threatening to spill forth.
She owed Lady Finch too much to let the woman’s only child die.
“Ya know him?” Martha asked.
Olivia nodded.
“Yer husband.”
“No. A good friend.”
Martha shrugged. “Well, that’s gotta come out,” she said, pointing at the piece of metal. “And it will need to be burned to close off the bleedin’. Then we’ll have to set the leg, ’cause it looks like it’s broke.” She glanced over at the surgeon’s tent. “Go fetch a hot iron. Don’t let them see you do it, just get it quick like.”
Olivia nodded and did as Martha instructed her. The surgeon’s tent and his meager staff were in such chaos they didn’t notice her come and go.
When she got back, Jemmy’s eyes were open. “Glad to see you, oh fair Queen Mab.”
“He’s feverish,” Martha muttered.
“No, that’s just what he calls me,” Olivia said.
The woman just glanced heavenward, as if to say it took all kinds.
“Olivia, your husband—he was right beside me when the mine exploded. Demmed Frogs got enough powder up there to blow us all to hell.”
Her heart caught in her throat.
Robert? Hurt?
“Did you see him, Jemmy? Did you see what happened to Robert?”
He shook his head. “We were with the Fourth Division. Near the walls. I saw him go down, but if he was hurt, I don’t know.”
Just then Martha nodded to one of the other women, a sturdy-looking thing capable of lifting an ox, who was ambling by with a bucket in either hand. “Hold him,” Martha ordered.
The woman set down her load and pinned Jemmy to the ground.
“Olivia?” he called out, his eyes growing wild.
“Be still,” she told him. “She can help you.”
Martha went right to work. Holding onto his leg, she yanked the metal shard out in one quick pull.
Jemmy howled in pain, but Martha ignored him. She continued her rough ministrations, during which, much to Olivia’s relief, Jemmy passed out, his body falling back, limp and spent.
“What have you got left of those powders?” Martha asked, the bleeding now stopped and the leg set firmly in place.
Olivia dug into her pocket and pulled out the packet she’d used on Robert. Martha poured the contents onto the wound. “Bind it tight with the cleanest cloths you can find, then get him out of here before the surgeon sees our handiwork. He doesn’t appreciate the fact that my patients outlive his.”
The woman who’d held Jemmy down, hoisted him up in her arms as if he were no more than a child.
Olivia led her to the tent she and Aquiles had pitched earlier. “Can you stay with him?” she asked the other woman.
“You going after your man—the one he was talking about?”
Olivia nodded.
The woman shook her head. “You’ll learn soon enough. If you don’t get yer arse shot in the meantime. Well, if you gotta go, stay in the trenches, keep your head down and don’t get in the way.” Then she settled next to Jemmy, looking over at the unconscious boy with something akin to motherly concern. “He looks like a dear, brave laddie.”
“He is,” Olivia said, and left Jemmy, wondering if she would ever see him alive again.
The fighting was more fierce than even Robert could have imagined. Wellington had assigned him to lend the Fourth Division a hand and also to help lead the first parties that breached the walls into the city, since he had been to Badajoz on numerous occasions in his time spent behind enemy lines.
He had no idea how long they had been fighting, but it seemed they weren’t making any headway in taking the high walls. Then suddenly the French seemed to back down from their position, their fire fading down to a few token shots, as if they had been called back to protect another portion of the city.
But something about the entire thing didn’t seem right. Unease prickled at his neck as the captain in charge ordered his men forward over the open space between them and the walls.
Something wasn’t right. But still he moved forward, charging with the men, when in the distance behind him he heard his name being called.
He turned around, and to his shock he saw Olivia scrambling through the trenches, turning over the dead and the wounded, as if she were looking for someone.
“Robert!” she cried out. “Robert, where are you?”
“Dammit, get back,” he shouted at her.
Her head came up, and her gaze met his, relief in her every feature. “I thought you were lost.”
“Just get back,” he yelled.
But she couldn’t hear him and knelt down beside a wounded man to start giving him aid. Damn her, she was going to get her fool head shot off.
Then he heard it. The sizzle of fuses. His gaze darted around his feet, and he realized the entire area was mined with powder. And the lines led directly to Olivia.
There was no time to warn her or warn his fellow soldiers, for suddenly the night erupted into a hell of flames, and the earth belched and exploded beneath them.
The last thing he saw before he was pitched head first into darkness was the sight of Olivia being tossed in the air like a broken doll.
His wife, his love. The woman he had vowed that very morning to love, honor and protect was lost in an upheaval of death.
O
livia awoke in a small room, curtains drawn over the single window casting the entire chamber in shadows. If it was day or night, she couldn’t tell. Nothing smelled familiar, for the room had a smoky, dry air to it. And in the distance she thought she heard gunfire and loud, angry voices, but there was a buzzing din in her ears that made it muffled and hard to discern.
She reached up to her aching temple and found a cool cloth over her forehead, while the hand she’d raised was bandaged. Her fingers moved stiffly under the wrappings, and her skin seemed raw and afire.
She’d been burned, she guessed. But how?
For the life of her, she couldn’t fathom where she was or how she’d gotten there. She couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten hurt. Struggling to get up, she found her entire body ached, and when she glanced down at her arms and legs, she found them covered in cuts and bruises. It was as if she’d been trampled by the very hounds of hell.
Unable to get out of bed, she tried to call out to someone, for obviously someone was caring for her, but the words refused to come out of her parched throat and sounded more like the tired croaking of a toad.
Then in the shadows something stirred. At first he seemed to rise out of the darkness into a towering figure of fierce proportions, and she sank into the mattress to hide herself.
That is, until her caretaker spoke. “You’re awake. That’s good. I feared you might never come to.”
The voice! She knew this man. Her memory started to flash with confusing images.
He bent over something, and then suddenly a light flared to life. When he turned, he held a candle in his hand. “Let me see about getting you some water.”
The shock of dark hair, the green eyes, the strong jaw and bearing. They were all so familiar, so intimately familiar.
“Robert,” she managed to whisper.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said, putting a cup of tepid water to her lips. “You remember me. I’m glad to see that.”
The water helped, soothing the worst of the burning in her throat. “Where are we? What happened?”
“Shh,” he told her, taking the cloth off her head and dipping it into a basin. He wrung it out slowly and then gently replaced it on her brow. “You were hurt. In the fighting. You should never have been there.”
For a moment, only the briefest flash, she thought she saw something odd in his gaze. A wildness, a madness that she had never seen before. Not even when he’d been gone with fever.
Then she started to remember more. She’d gone to find him in the darkness and the blazing fury of the battle. And when she had found him there had been a great gulf between them as Robert fought his way toward the walls. He’d turned and spotted her, yelling something at her, but she couldn’t hear his words through the bedlam of battle.
And then the night had erupted into a blaze of fire.