A Mistress for Major Bartlett (Brides of Waterloo)

She searched his face for evidence that he condemned her for being on the battlefield. She couldn’t find it. He just looked interested. Curious.

When was the last time anyone had wanted to know why she’d done anything? Been interested in hearing her side of things, rather than just passing judgement on her?

‘I went to the battlefield searching for Gideon,’ she said. ‘Or his body. Or some answers. That was what I told myself. But I suspect it was all lunacy, really. I just couldn’t believe he was dead. They wouldn’t tell me anything that would have convinced me. Not even when the funeral was to be, or where,’ she said, hitching her knee up on to the side of the bed so that she could look him full in the face. And judge his reaction. She took a deep breath.

‘And I was so sure that Gideon couldn’t have died without me knowing it, in my heart. Our nurse always used to say we were one soul, living in two bodies, you see. And we were so close, so very close, that I thought...I thought...’ She shook her head. ‘How could I have been so wrong? So foolish?’

He gripped her hand tightly. ‘You weren’t foolish at all.’

‘Oh, but I was. I realised it not long before those Hussars came charging along the road, scattering wreckage in their path. I felt just like Ben, who was howling with panic from under that broken wagon. Stuck there, with no idea where to go next. And then when that deserter tried to steal Castor—’ She shuddered.

‘You must have been terrified.’

‘No! That was just it. Not of him, at any rate. Only of losing the horse. Not for any sensible reason, either. But because he was the last present Gideon had given me. My last tangible link to him. He had another grey, to match, and we used to go riding out together. Cutting a dash, don’t you know? Golden-haired twins on matching horses. He even wanted me to have a riding habit made up in the same colour and style as his uniform, to heighten the effect. So that people would say we looked like the heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux.’

‘I saw you,’ he said.

‘Yes, so you did,’ she replied, remembering the day and him leaning up against the tree. ‘You winked at me.’

He wriggled uncomfortably, opening his mouth as though reaching for something to say. But there wasn’t anything she wanted to hear about that day. That time. The man he’d been then. So she plunged on hurriedly.

‘Anyway, I couldn’t bear losing Castor. So I went back to Brussels to find somewhere safe to hide him, in case the French really were about to overrun the town. I slept in the stable with him, because I was afraid to take my eyes off him. I’d only been under the wagon trying to untie Ben for a few moments, you see, and that was all it took for the deserter to get his reins in his hands. I never gave a thought to my own safety, or anything sensible. It was all about keeping some link, any link, to Gideon.’ She hung her head.

‘Even when I started to accept he really had...died...my head was still full of nonsense. When you just fell into my lap, I told myself that was the purpose for my being there. It made me feel better, for a while, to think that maybe some fate had directed me to you. That those feelings I had, that I simply had to come back to Brussels, were some kind of intuition, or something. That’s how foolish I’ve been...’

‘No. I won’t hear you say bad things about yourself.’

‘But I ran away from home. Worried my poor sister, who is in a fragile state of health. Angered her husband. Flouted Justin. All because I refused to accept the truth. Oh, how could I have gone about spouting all that nonsense about not sensing his spirit leaving the world? Madame le Brun must have thought I was deranged, turning up on her doorstep babbling the way I did.’

‘Sometimes,’ he said grimly, ‘when something bad happens and you don’t want to believe it, you get this shout inside. This great,

overwhelming No! It drowns out everything else. All common sense. Even when the evidence is right before your eyes you won’t see it. All you can hear, or say, or feel is that No.’

She stared at him in amazement. She’d half-expected him to roll his eyes, the way her older brother and sisters did whenever she mentioned her belief about her link to her twin. They always said she should have grown out of the tales her ‘ignorant, ill-educated and superstitious’ nurse had told her.

‘I’ve never held all that much regard for common sense,’ she told him. ‘Because,’ she added hesitantly, ‘nobody has ever been able to explain, for all their rational, cynical cleverness, how it was that I always knew when Gideon was about to get into a scrape. How I could always sense when he was on his way home. Or how, when he was home, we only had to look at each other to understand what the other was thinking.’

‘Really? That’s astonishing.’

He meant it, too, she could tell. He wasn’t humouring her, or even making fun of her, let alone trying to rob her of her beliefs.

‘Thank you for saying that, Tom, about the No.’ Even though everyone she knew insisted Tom was bad, what he’d just said had actually helped her untangle her muddled thoughts. Had helped her look upon her loss and confusion from a new perspective.

How was that possible, when he scarcely knew her?

‘You speak as though you have felt just like I did when they told me Gideon was dead. Almost impossible to believe, it was so bad. Did something like that happen to you?’

‘Yes,’ he said gruffly. ‘When my father died. I lost everything I thought I had. Everything I thought I was. And, even once the shout of No died down,’ he said, giving her a very speaking look, ‘I still didn’t know who I was. There was no going back, yet it took me a long time to forge a new path for myself. But you will get there,’ he assured her. ‘You are strong.’

He thought she was strong? Then he was the only man...no, the only person ever to think so.

‘And you are an adult. With a family to support you. Not a child who has no understanding of the way the world works.’

‘A child?’ He had lost everything when he’d been a child?

‘What happened to you, Tom? How have you ended up the way you are?’

‘The way I am?’ He stretched his lips into a cynical smile.