A Mistress for Major Bartlett (Brides of Waterloo)

I must not faint. I must not faint.

‘Are you al

l 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

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.