A Rose for Major Flint (Brides of Waterloo)

Chapter One

19th June 1815—the battlefield of Waterloo

The briar rose caught at her with grasping, thorny tentacles as she backed away. The pain was real, so this must all be real. The screaming inside her head made it difficult to think, but it hadn’t stopped, not since she had found Gerald. What was left of Gerald. He had seemed untouched until she had grasped his shoulder and turned him over.

The noise in her head hurt so much. She lifted her hands to try and clutch at it, squeeze it out, make it stop. Then she could think, then she would know what to do about…them. Her arms wouldn’t move. She looked down to the imprisoning briars, then up at what was coming towards her across the muddy, shell-ripped ruin of the spinney. This was real and this was hell and so those were demons. They laughed as they came, four of them, blood-soaked and mud-smeared, wild-eyed and ragged, baying like hounds on the hunt. She knew what they wanted, what they would do to her, even if she knew nothing else. Not her name, not how she had lived before this nightmare had begun, not how she had come to be here.

She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing happened. Go away. Help me, someone. Help me! Nothing. Only the sound of her heartbeat racing. Only the sound of their laughter and the words that made no sense as they hit her like fistfuls of slime.

And then he came. He pushed aside the shattered, wilting branches, strode through the mud and the nameless, stinking filth. The Devil himself. He was big and dirty, bare-headed, stubble-jawed, blood-soaked. He had a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other and a smile like death on his blackened face. He roared at the demons and they turned, snarling, towards him. He shot the first and came on, stepped over the body and waited, waited until they were on him and then…

She closed her eyes, stayed in the darkness with the screaming in her head, the screaming from the demons, the Devil’s roars. She would be next. She had sinned and this was hell.

*

‘Open your eyes. Look at me. You are safe, they have gone.’ Gone to a much worse place, the scum. Flint looked down at the pistol in his left hand and the blood-streaked sword in his right, thrust one into his belt and pushed the blade of the other into a tussock until most of the gore was gone. He sheathed the sword and tried again. ‘Open your eyes.’

The woman was tall and slim and her hair, where it was not wet and matted, was a dark brown. Rose petals had fallen from the briar that held her. They were fragile, pale pink, incongruously beautiful on the ripped, soaking fabric of her gown, the tangle of her hair. Long lashes fanned over white cheeks and her mouth was slightly open. He could hear her breath coming in short, desperate pants like a trapped animal in a snare. She had bitten her lips and the sight, amidst so much carnage, touched him despite his defences. Angered him.

‘Let’s get you untangled.’ Flint kept his voice calm, used the firm tone that would steady an injured man. The briars tore at his hands, added to the bruises and cuts, the little rips of pain reminding him he was alive. After three days of hell, who would have thought it?

When he got her free she just stood there, swaying. Flint touched the back of his hand to her cheek, leaving a smear of blood on the cold skin. She flinched but her eyes opened, wide and dark, the pupils so distended he could not see the true colour.

‘What is your name?’ She stared blankly. Shock, certainly, and perhaps she did not speak English. He tried French, Dutch, German. No response, not a flicker. ‘My name is Flint. Major Adam Flint. Are you hurt?’

They hadn’t raped her, he had been in time to stop that, at least. The sound of their laughter had brought him here at a run. He had heard that unmistakeable excitement too often when men had poured into a besieged, defeated city and found the women and the girls. Children. Sometimes you could be in time. Often, not. Badajoz…

Still she stood there, a breathing statue. She must be a camp follower, but he couldn’t leave her, not here. Her man, if he was still alive, would never find her, but others would. Flint put his arm around her, ignored the way her body shuddered at the touch, bent and swept the other arm under her knees to lift her against his chest. Pain stabbed from the sabre cut in his right side. The blood must have dried into his shirt and lifting her had ripped the wound open. He ignored it.

After a moment her arms slipped around his neck and she clung as he crossed the glade, stepped over the bodies. She was a reasonable armful, Flint thought as he found the track again and made for where he had left the men. Slim but not skinny, curved but not buxom. Feminine. Any other day he’d enjoy the feel of her against his body, but not now. Not here.

The men had sorted themselves out while he’d been away searching for that last missing private. Sergeant Hawkins looked up from the back of the ammunition wagon they had managed to patch back together that morning. ‘Any luck, Major?’ His right eyebrow—the left had been burned off in some half-forgotten skirmish when a gun had exploded—lifted as he saw Flint’s burden.

‘Jakes is dead.’ There was a chorus of muttered curses from the back of the cart. ‘I buried him.’ He’d rolled him into a shell hole and kicked earth on top of him, to be exact. Not a decent burial, even for an alley rat like Jakes, but it would keep the looters from his body.

‘We can all go then.’ Hawkins knew Flint would never leave a man alive on the field, even if it meant staying back himself until he’d exhausted all hope. ‘Get a shift on there, Hewitt! Get everyone stowed.’ He jerked his head towards the woman. ‘Not one of ours.’

‘No.’ Their camp followers were all safe back at Roosbos where they’d been stationed before the call to Quatre Bras, three days ago. Flint counted heads. ‘Thirteen.’ He’d lost the tally of the injured they’d sent back already, the dead they’d scratched graves for, but Hawkins had been jotting numbers down as they went. This was the lot.

‘Aye, thirteen including us, Major. She hurt?’

‘Don’t think so, I can’t see any wounds, but she’s not talking.’ In his arms she was as limp as a stunned hare. ‘Found her cornered by a pack of deserters back there.’

The one tattered eyebrow lifted in question. Hawkins knew what happened to lone women in the aftermath of battle. Flint shook his head. ‘No, I got there first.’

‘They won’t be troubling anyone else, then.’ Hawkins didn’t bother to ask how many constituted a pack, he’d seen Flint deal with scum like that before. ‘Wonder if she’ll scrub up any better than the last thing you picked up, Major.’

That had been Dog. Flint hoped the great shaggy beast had got out of this in one piece. Lord, but he must be tired if he was becoming sentimental.

‘I’d got ’em all packed in tight,’ Hawkins said. He shoved his shako back to scratch his thinning scalp. ‘Llewellyn and Hodge can walk. Where’ll we put her though?’

Flint went over and studied the cart. Two men leaned against it, one, with a rough bandage round his leg, sat on the shaft. Three men were laid out on the boards and the rest perched on the edge, fitting their feet and weapons in around the prostrate men as best they could. ‘Potts, you can ride well enough to manage one-handed. Get up on my horse, I’ll walk and we’ll squeeze this lass in your place.’

The man shuffled out awkwardly and jumped down, swearing under his breath as he jarred his wounded shoulder. The others moved up to make room and Flint swung the girl up on to the edge.

She turned her head, stared wide-eyed into the cart and then fastened her arms around his neck in a stranglehold. Where did anything so fragile and helpless get the strength?

‘I know they aren’t the prettiest sight you’ll ever see, but they’re good lads and they won’t hurt you.’ He tried again, but she clung like a burr, her breath panting in his ear. He could use force, but there was enough pain to wade through here without adding to it.

‘She looks terrified out of her wits, Major,’ one of the men said. ‘I don’t think it’s us, more like the blood an’ guts an’ all. We’ve done our best with Jimmy, but he’s no sight for a slip of a girl.’ He nodded towards one of the men on the floor, unconscious and, if there was any more mercy to spare for a scoundrel artilleryman, likely to die without waking up.

Flint reached into reserves of patience and kept his voice level. ‘Back you go, Potts, I’ll take her up in front of me.’ The sooner they got going, the more chance they had of getting everyone back alive. Except Jimmy. But at least he’d die with his mates round him. Randall’s Rogues didn’t leave their comrades behind—not if they were breathing, at any rate.