‘No, don’t think so. I am not, so George informs me, passing blood. Hard to tell though, everything hurts. Ow! Stop that, damn it!’
‘Your toes all work,’ Grey said calmly. ‘And your foot bends. And you can make a fist with your right hand to punch me with, even if you can’t raise that arm. I don’t think you’ve cut any tendons. It is muscle damage and you’ve got to keep the weight off that leg until it heals properly or you’ll be lame. So now, will you stop trying to move about and do as Miss Tresilian tells you?’
‘Will you please take her away?’ Hal sounded desperate, Julia thought, her stomach a tight knot of misery.
‘No. For a start, I am not hauling a kicking and screaming female all the way back to Brussels; and secondly, I believe her when she says you aren’t to be trusted. While you’ve got no trousers and her in the room, you’ll stay put until I come back.’
He was silent for a moment, then added, ‘You know, I really thought you were going to propose to her.’
‘I told you why not. At the Richmonds’ affair I made a right balls-up of it, trying to explain why I wasn’t going to. Must have been mad. God, I am so angry with her I could put her across my knee. I will do, if I ever get well enough. And now I must marry her, she’s too compromised for me not to—Will, what the devil will I do with a wife?’
Julia got to her feet and half ran down the path that led through what must once have been a tidy vegetable plot. She scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes and blinked hard until the nearest apple tree came back into focus. That would teach her to eaves drop. Between them, they had compromised them selves and each other, and marriage, she supposed, was inevitable.
‘Are you all right?’
Julia turned to find Captain Grey looking grim.
‘No, not really,’ she admitted. ‘But there’s nothing to be done about it. Are you leaving now?’
He nodded. ‘I’ll bring him clothes and I’ll steal a cart if I have to and be back tomorrow. You’ll make a good soldier’s wife, Miss Tresilian.’
‘Thank you.’ Praise indeed: it was just a pity she was not marrying a soldier who wanted her. ‘Take care of that arm, Captain Grey.’
Hal was lying with his eyes closed when she went back in, but he opened them at the sound of her soft foot steps.
‘Break fast?’ she asked.
Hal grimaced. ‘Not hungry. Coffee—now, that I could drink.’
‘I’ll go and make some,’ George said from the back of the hovel, where he was tending the horses. ‘And I’ll cook something. You need to eat, Miss Julia.’
‘Yes, you should.’ Hal turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘She needs more rest, begging your pardon, sir.’ George stopped in the doorway and frowned at Hal. ‘Miss Julia was down nursing the wounded at that hotel of yours for two days, getting hardly any sleep and then coming down here yesterday—that made her sick to the stomach on top of everything else.’
‘What? Nursing for two days?’ Hal looked from George’s retreating back to Julia’s set face. There were dark shadows under her eyes, her hair was escaping from its tight braids and she was pale with fatigue, not just, as he had assumed, the shock of seeing the battlefield. ‘What the devil was your mother thinking of?’
‘I gave her no choice. The baron has taken her and Phillip to Antwerp and I told him that if he did not help me to stay I would run away and get back to Brussels. The carriage was moving before she realized what I was doing.’
‘And where have you been staying?’ he demanded. This was Julia, obedient, well-behaved, sheltered Julia, defying her mother, conniving with the baron, running away…
‘At our lodgings.’ She began to move about the room, picking things up, moving basins. ‘Madame has stayed and George moved into the stables with the horse and gig the baron left us.’
‘But nursing?’ Ladies did not do such things, not in public.
‘They started taking the wounded back to where they had been billeted, after the hospitals filled up,’ she explained. ‘I knew where you and Captain Grey had lodged, and, I guessed, probably some of the other officers I had met at the Opera. So I went there and did what I could.’
Hal closed his eyes. He knew exactly what that would have been like. He knew the smells, the sights, the shock she would have been exposed to. But why? Why had she stayed when she could have got safe away?
His conscience told him: he had spoken of death, of not coming back. He had made her confront the reality of battle, and she, with the comfortable fictions of glory and flag-waving stripped away, had decided to do what she could against that tidal wave of horror. But for the wounded in general? Or for him? ‘And you worked there for two days?’
‘I went home at night. It was only sensible to sleep and eat and wash. I would be no use to anyone if I exhausted myself.’
‘No,’ he agreed, unable to think of anything else to say. Would any young woman of her back ground, finding themselves in the same position, do what she had done? Honoria would, he suspected, if she was helping people she knew. But Verity would just crumple in the face of that much pain and squalor. And he had been comparing Julia with his younger sister. It seemed he had missed the steel in her backbone.
Julia sat down and began to check over her basket of bandages. ‘And then Captain Grey arrived and told me you were missing.’
‘So you came for me. Why, Julia?’ Had his fears been realized? Had he let her tumble into love with him? Must he have that on his conscience as well?