“A wall caved in, and a hunk of it fell on top of Tommy. We’re trying to move it.” Sweat poured off Remy.
“The flames are about to engulf the wall,” Rick said.
“Fuck, yeah. We see it, but we gotta get him free. Add your muscle to it,” Remy said. “Push it.”
Rick exerted every ounce of strength he had while fire surged all around them, thickening the smoke, and the three men slowly lifted the wall. “Hold it! I’ll get him!”
Rick ducked under the slab squinting past the sweat and smoke until he clapped his eyes on the guy slumped lifeless on the floor. Rick’s chest constricted as if someone had reached down his throat and squeezed the air out of his lungs. Memories of his gunnery sergeant ripped to shreds from an IED haunted him at that moment, but he banked those memories with a hard mental shove, and his training merged with his survival instinct.
Flames flickered, closer and faster…
Rick scraped off the rubble to free Tommy, then lifted him in a fireman’s carry across his shoulders. He took a second to square up his muscles and center of gravity to adjust to the additional weight before turning to move out.
“Hurry,” Pete yelled. “The fire’s reaching the ceiling.”
“Got him.” Rick ducked out from under the wall with Tommy, and Pete and Remy dropped it.
Pete wiped the sweat off his face. “We can’t go out the way we came in. It’s blocked.”
“Upstairs. We’ll go up and go down the porch steps.” Remy reached for Tommy. “Let me carry him.”
“No! I’ve got him.”
“Fuck it. You’ve still got stitches in your leg.”
“Time for ’em to come out. I’m not letting him go.” Rick coiled his muscles so hard they stung as he climbed the stairs to the second floor, each step more painful than the last. Between the exertion and smoke, he struggled to breathe, and his muscles cramped.
Five more steps…
Four…
Three…
He sent up a prayer that the exits would be clear upstairs.
Two…
One…
With his eyes watering and lungs burning, he finally reached the landing.
“Now doan be a stubborn fuck,” Remy said. “Give him to me. Whatever you had to prove, you did. I’ll carry him the rest of the way.”
Remy took Tommy and carried him down the steps to the backyard. Rick hung back a moment to let his muscles cool down.
Then he looked around the room to see what he could carry out. He grabbed Sophia and Penny’s bags, along with his and Pete’s, and a stack of maps. Another one was on the floor near the general’s chair. Rick grabbed that one, too. No one would be coming back here to work.
He followed the same path Remy and Pete took out of the house, but before he hit the ground, a furious blue-haired woman launched herself against his chest and latched anaconda arms around his neck. He dropped the bags and hugged her back.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she hissed.
He chuckled. “What? Rescue a friend?”
“No.” She dropped her arms and glared up at him. “Don’t leave me out of the rescue. At least then I’d know you were okay.”
He chuckled again and picked up the bags he dropped. “Come on. Let’s see how Tommy’s doing.”
Remy laid Tommy on the ground, and Sophia was sniffling in Pete’s arms. “My God, I was terrified.”
“I’m okay, and we got Tommy out.” Pete kissed her.
She brushed debris off his shoulders. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“Not even a scratch.” He kissed her again.
“Looks like Tommy’s got a broken arm,” Remy said, “and some first-degree burns, plus smoke inhalation, but that’s all. He’s lucky as shit. I’ll check him out to see if he has any other injuries.”
Tommy rolled over, coughing.
“Take it easy,” Remy said.
“Thought I was a goner. Thanks for what ya did.”
“Can you fix his arm?” Rick asked.
Remy sat on the grass next to Tommy to check out his injuries. “I might have to. The docs are all treating the wounded. I’ll stabilize his arm, clean up his burns, then take him back to the city. We’ll go to the Fontenots’. What are you going to do?”
“I’ve got to go back to the battlefield,” Rick said. “The general needs to know about the fire.”
Sophia continued holding onto Pete for dear, sweet life. She wasn’t ready for any full-bodied separation yet. “I was so scared.”
“Shit, sweetheart. I was too, but we got him.”
“Tell me again you’re not hurt,” she said.
He broke the hug and took a step back to show her, spreading his arms. “Do you see anything wrong with me?”
“You’re covered with black soot, and your jacket is ripped. Turn around.” She twirled her finger, and Pete turned in a circle. “Okay, I don’t see anything wrong.”
Pete looked in the direction of the canal. “The fighting seems to have stopped. At least I don’t hear the big guns.”
“When you get your breath back, and if it’s safe, will you take me over there?” she asked.
He shook his head. “That battlefield will be a hundred times worse than what you saw last time. You sure you want to go? I’ll take pictures, and you can look at those.”
“I have to see the real thing, so my gut will connect with my brain,” she said. “Do I want to see it? No. But to do justice to the inhumanity, I have to go there.”
“I’ll go get our horses, but you’ll have to hang back until I make sure it’s safe.”
“I’ll go with you,” Penny said. “I lost my horse. Maybe he ran back to the barn.”
“How could you misplace a thousand-pound animal?” Pete asked.
“I didn’t. He lost me.”
“Wait, Penny,” Rick said. “Before you go off, Remy needs to check you out.”
She turned and put her hands on her hips, her titanium-reinforced demeanor firmly back in place. “Remy, I fell off my horse, landed in the mud, and was out for a few minutes. But I’m fine now, except for a bit of a headache and a twitch at my hip. Since we don’t have an MRI to locate bruises on my brain, there’s not a damn thing you can do. So let it go.”
Rick kept his voice low but firm, stepping into Penny’s field of vision. “Humor me, babe.”
“First, cut the babe talk. Second, let me find a horse, and then Remy can use his penlight thingamajig to look in my eyes.” She gave Rick a brash, brows-up stare, then turned back to Pete. “Let’s go, Parrino.”
Pete shot Rick a glance over his shoulder and shrugged. Rick lifted his chin in acknowledgment, and Pete and Penny rushed off to the barn. Pete had his hands full with Sophia. He wasn’t about to challenge Penny too.
While Remy treated Tommy’s burns and wrapped his arm, Rick sat down in the grass next to Sophia and described the beginning of the battle—the fog, the drums and bagpipes, the fear-contorted faces—and while she sketched, he added more details until he’d given her a sense of what happened.
“If I paint this,” she said, “the American troops will be on one side of the fog, the British on the other, waiting to be cut down—”
“—with a mighty scythe,” Rick said. “I’ll share a quote with you later that will describe what happened out there.” He glanced up to see Penny and Pete leading five horses. “Remy,” Rick called, “watch Penny walk. She’s favoring her right side. Her injury is more than a twitch.”
“She probably has bruising and muscle strain from the fall. Bring her back to town later. I’ll check her out more thoroughly then, and give her a massage. It will help that muscle soreness. I should do your legs, too, and check the stitches in your arm and leg.”
“If you’re scheduling massages, sign me up,” Sophia said.
“You guys ready?” Penny asked.
“Remy’s offered to do massages later. You up for one? I am,” Sophia said.
Penny’s jaw dropped. “Se
riously? You’d do that, Remy? Oh, my God. That would be awesome. I’ll even let you listen to my lungs with that other thingamajig.”
Sophia slung her crossbody bag over her shoulder and headed toward her horse. “He does deep tissue massages, and it hurts like…well, it hurts, but you’ll feel so much better.”
“I’m not a masochist, but I think deep tissue massages are better than sex.”
Rick slapped his hands across his chest and flopped back on the grass. “Fuck! I can’t compete with Remy’s hands.”
Penny gave him a teasing kick in the side. “Get up, O’Grady. We’ve got work to do. I want to get back in time to take Remy up on his offer.”
Rick climbed to his feet, groaning, not so much because of the stiffness, but because Remy would have his hands all over her before Rick got the call to move up to the majors.
Sometimes life just sucked.
And he knew better than to ask Remy afterward about her skin or ink or cute dimples at the base of her spine. Remy was the epitome of discretion. So was Rick. Just ask anybody. They’d tell you Rick was the most discreet Irishman you’d ever want to meet.
“Let’s help Tommy into the saddle,” Rick grumbled.
Remy loaded his equipment and mounted up. “Get back before dark and bring Philippe. Rhona will be relieved if everyone is there for dinner.”
“We’ll be there,” Rick promised. Then, turning to Penny, he asked, “Why’d the British bombard this house?”
“They must believe Jackson’s artillery supplies are here. I don’t remember ever hearing that. If I had, I wouldn’t have let the others stay anywhere near this house.”
“That fire was just too close. We could have lost Tommy for sure.” Rick took a deep breath, and it burned like a son of a bitch. It was time to get all of them the hell out.
As they rode back to the canal, Rick turned in the saddle and took a long look at the mansion. The fire was out, and the left side of the house had been shored up. He wasn’t a structural engineer, but maybe Major Latour, Jackson’s engineer, could check out the house and determine how sound it was. The general still needed a place to stay for several more days.
“When do the British finally give up and go home?” Rick asked.
“Evacuation day is the nineteenth,” Penny said. “Until then, Jackson won’t abandon the Rodriguez Canal.”
He spun back to look at her drawn, pale face. The telltale dark circles were the best indicator of how exhausted she was. He wanted to take her back to the city himself, so he could personally see to it that she had a long soak in a hot bath, followed by a deep tissue massage (against his better judgment), and then twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“And I guess if the general’s here, you’ll be here,” he said.
“Probably, unless everybody votes to go home.”
“We know what Rhona wants. She won’t miss the victory ball.” He moaned with a smile in his voice. “But if everybody else wants to go home, we might be able to talk her out of staying.”
“We can’t do that. The ball is as important to her as the battle was to Philippe.”
“Then I guess we’re staying. So if you’re out here with the general, I’ll be out here with you.”
And he’d have to table his dirty thoughts and raging hard-on until they were back in Napa with a bottle of wine, a little “Misty,” and hours alone to explore…possibilities.
50
New Orleans (1815)—Penny
Rick and Penny spurred their mounts and trotted over to the battlefield to make sure it was safe for Soph to be there, then Rick rode back to collect her and Pete.
While she waited, Penny scanned the battlefield, breathing the smoky, coppery air that hurt her worn-out lungs. Bringing Soph to the canal wasn’t smart. Not because it was unsafe, but because the Chalmette Plain was a sea of blood.
The sight of hundreds of dead and wounded soldiers would haunt even the most hardened warriors. The bitter, burnt stench and the acrid smell of gun smoke had seeped into her skin and memory and would most certainly have a starring role in her nightmares.
A deep tissue massage would help settle her mind and ease the soreness from the fall, but she didn’t think she could tolerate a man’s hands on her skin right now. Rick’s hug was more life-affirming than anything else. The thought of more intense touching made her heart pound hard and fast enough to rattle her ribs.
She still had flashes of terror when her mind went, uninvited and unwelcome, to that night in the brothel and the aftermath. And even now, just thinking about it rammed more and more tension into her muscles while she struggled for each shallow breath. She swiped at her irritated eyes, but couldn’t get rid of what she saw in her mind—the grotesque image of the ogre.
As she looked up, she saw his face in the mobs of crows darkening the sky and swooping down to pick at the remains of the dead.
The battlefield, as far as she could see, was an ocean of blood and red uniforms obscuring the stubble of last year’s sugarcane crop. Dead soldiers lay in heaps, with bodies crumpled at odd angles or shredded into dismembered limbs and raw flesh. Some had no heads, and others were missing arms and legs. And among the dead lay the wounded, moaning and crying out for help while rats feasted on the flesh and dark splotches of dried blood, and wolves ran in from the swamp and vanished among the mounds of chewed-up earth.
But they weren’t all dead or wounded on Chalmette Plain. Some had dropped and rolled at the first bursts of gunfire. And now that it was safe enough, they leapt up and ran for the British line.
Soph rode up beside her, reined in, opened her journal, and quickly sketched what she saw. “I can identify the lines of attack by the array of the dead. The worst carnage is near the center, but there are other bands near the levee and by the swamp.”
Soph hung just enough toughness in her tone to make her cold acceptance almost believable, but Penny had been around the artist enough to know there wasn’t a cold bone in her body.
“I don’t get it,” Penny said. “Doesn’t what happened out there bother you?”
“Oh, it bothers me, makes me sick at my stomach, and triggers horrible memories of what happened at the Bastille. I’ll cry in Pete’s arms tonight. But right now I have to sketch the truth, and I can’t do that unless I see it. I can’t deny the anguish it causes me. I’m just holding off expressing it.”
“That takes guts,” Penny said.
“Or maybe stupidity. But when I paint this scene, I’ll work through my trauma. If that makes any sense.”
“It does, I guess.”
Sophia sketched a dead British soldier, his rifle still in his hands. “It looks like Jackson’s marksmen were just too much for the British.”
“They had a good plan until their attack on the west bank failed.” Penny sighed. “Come on. Let’s find the general. With the outcome no longer in doubt, the enemy will request a cease-fire so they can bury their dead.”
They found the general and the rest of his staff near the center of the Rodriguez Canal. “This request for a cease-fire is signed by General Lambert. I’ve never heard of him,” Jackson said. “Who is he?”
“General Lambert is the only one in the chain of command still standing,” Penny said. But what she didn’t say was that three generals (Pakenham, Major Generals Gibbs and Keane), seven colonels, seventy-five officers—seventeen hundred and eighty-one officers and soldiers—fell within the first few minutes of the battle.
“I’ll agree to a six-hour suspension of hostilities, and a truce line marked by that row of hedge grass.” The general pointed. “Establish the line three hundred yards in front of our breastworks, and if any British soldier crosses it, shoot him.” Jackson then responded to the request in writing and ordered it delivered to the British messenger.
“In six hours, decisions will have to be made about what comes next,” Penny said.
Jackson looked out across the battlefield. “I want the complete destruction of the enemy.”
&nb
sp; “But General,” Mr. Livingston said, “what do you want more? You’ve gained your objective. You saved New Orleans, and the British have left the field.”
“There’d be considerable risk in attacking a defeated army,” Rick said. “They’ll have little to lose by fighting to the death.”
“Rick’s right, General,” Penny said. “We had very few casualties today. But if this war continues, the number of dead and wounded will increase. The British are realists. After the losses they suffered today, they’ll want to evacuate as quickly as possible.”
“We have six hours to decide.” The general dismounted. “Let’s walk. I want to talk to my men.”
Rick, Penny, Pete, and Sophia walked the length of the American line with Jackson and the rest of the staff. The general stopped at each command and addressed the men and their officers, offering words of praise and gratitude.
Standing next to Soph, Penny looked over her shoulder and watched her sketch a relaxed version of the general—the proud victor.
Then a bugle playing the haunting melody of “Setting the Watch” rang out across the field. Her head shot up, and she searched for the bugler.
“General, look,” Mr. Livingston said. “About halfway up the oak tree out on the plain. There’s a redcoat bugler.”
Penny grabbed her spyglass from her saddlebag and looked out toward where Livingston was pointing. “He’s just a kid, General.”
“Go get him down,” Jackson ordered.
Penny swung back up in the saddle.
“I’ll go with you,” Rick said.
They spurred their horses, leapt across the canal, and rode straight to the tree, passing heaps of dead and moaning men. The bugler continued to blare his horn, his bright blue eyes watching her as she neared the tree.
She didn’t want to panic him and risk a fall. “Hey, aren’t you tired of hanging out on that branch? Why don’t you come on down?”
He continued to blow on his bugle, slanting a suspicious look at her.
Rick dismounted and stood under the branch, hands on his hips. “It’s time to come down, lad. You’ve served your country well, but your fight’s over for today. Come on down before you fall.”
The Topaz Brooch Page 57