by Louise Allen
‘He can try.’ And suddenly there was a knife in his hand, a slim, wicked, curving blade.
Hal edged forward, his own weapon up, en garde. He had pushed his pistol into his uniform sash and his eyes were locked with Stephano’s as the men faced each other, the glitter of lethal metal stained red by the light from the glowing brazier. Julia backed away, her skirts swinging, and something fluttered, the brazier flared up, and Stephano lunged.
As the sabre deflected the knife with a scream of steel on steel, she saw what had burned—the letter, her evidence. Gone. The writing stood out clearly on the blackened paper for a moment On my children’s souls… Then Hal lunged again and the wisp of ash whirled and fell apart.
There was shouting from the kitchen, banging on the door. Distracted, Julia glanced away. When she looked again, Stephano had a sword in one hand, the knife in the other. Whatever had made him so ill before had vanished and he was fighting with a vicious grace.
They seemed evenly matched. Julia thought of Hal’s wounds, barely healed, and prayed as the two men fought up and down the crowded workshop, sending jars crashing, stumbling against packing cases as they went. At the door the thudding got louder. And then another voice, one she did not recognize, was out there, barking orders. Suddenly, it all went quiet and she could hear the duellists’ breaths rasping as they sweated, lunged and parried in the centre of the room.
Stephano reached out with his left hand, seized one of the tall stools and swung it. Hal jumped back; it hit the brazier, and the whole thing toppled, spilling burning coals out across the floor at Julia’s feet. The kitchen door burst open bringing with it a rush of air. A sheet of flame shot up in front of her and she staggered back, unable to see a way through it.
‘Julia!’ Hal came through the flames, sabre in hand, his face smoke-blackened, his teeth bared. Like Lucifer from hell, she thought wildly. My fallen angel. He took hold of the bench, heaved it across the fire, picked her up and took her across the make shift bridge to safety.
‘Are you hurt?’ he demanded, looking down into her face with fierce intensity.
‘No, no Hal, I…’ Her voice broke as she began to cough. The smoke swirled around them.
‘Get your wife away,’ the voice she had heard giving orders shouted. ‘I’ll help them put out the fire.’
‘Let him burn,’ Hal snarled back.
‘He’s my brother in law,’ the other man retorted. Milden hall? So that is how Hal found me, Julia thought, struggling to try and stand. Hal simply tossed her over his shoulder and went through the door, pistol in hand. Julia twisted her head to try and see. The kitchen was full of servants, the Indian grasping a curving knife. As Hal passed, they ran for the workshop where Midge’s husband was yelling for water.
‘Are you hurt?’ Hal asked again as they emerged onto the street.
‘No. Hal, put me down.’ In reply he simply tossed her up in the air and she found herself perched on a saddle, her hands clutching wildly at a long grey mane. ‘Max! Hal,’ she pro tested as he swung up behind her, shifting her in his arms until she was sitting across his thighs. ‘You cannot ride back through the street with me like this.’
‘Watch me,’ he said. ‘Unless you want me to stop here and shake you until your teeth rattle?’
‘You are angry with me?’ she ventured, as Max made his way along Great Russell Street. With her face pressed against Hal’s uniform jacket and its painful rows of braid and buttons, she could not see his expression. But she could smell the smoke and sweat on him and feel his heart thudding against her cheek as the rate slowed back to normal. They were both safe. And behind them, with so many helpers, the fire would be out soon. She was not, thank God, responsible for Midge losing her half-brother.
‘Livid,’ Hal said tersely, then did not speak again. Julia closed her eyes, clung on and found she really did not care what sight they presented as the big grey charger trotted through the crowded streets, its smoke-stained rider clasping her safe in his arms.
‘Max is outside,’ Hal said to Wellow as he strode into the hall at Albemarle Street, Julia in his arms. ‘Have a groom take him round to the mews and send hot water up. And Wellow—’
‘Yes, Major?’ the butler said calmly.
‘There is no need to tell anyone that we have arrived home somewhat…dishevelled. I do not wish to be disturbed: have dinner sent up.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘Oh, and Wellow. Please send to my brother and ask him to come round and take over the night watch with my father.’
‘There is no need, Major. The staff have expressed a desire to assist. Felling and Langham will take the first part of the night, Mrs Hoby and I, the second. His lordship is resting quietly, I foresee no cause to expect alarms in the night.’
‘That is damned decent of you, Wellow.’
‘A privilege, Major. I will organise the hot water now.’
Hal swept upstairs, kicked open the door and dumped Julia unceremoniously in the middle of her bed. ‘Get un dressed.’
‘Why?’ she demanded. He was still blazing with anger, his eyes vividly blue as he faced her, his hands clenched.
‘Because when I have washed this soot off I am going to remind you who you are married to.’
‘Like some Turkish sultan dragging an unwilling slave back to the harem?’ She scram bled up until she was sitting, the better to glare at him as he started wrenching off his uniform.
‘You are unwilling?’ He paused, his fingers stilled on his sword belt.
‘I—’
There were sounds from the dressing room. Hal swore under his breath and went into the room, banging the door behind him. Julia sat where she was, staring rather blankly at the sabre in its scabbard leaning against the dressing table.
Hal remerged, shirt less, his hair wet, scrubbing at his face with a towel. ‘Now. Talk to me.’
‘I went because you cannot,’ she said, her hands knotted in the sheet as he stood there watching her. ‘I went to convince him that Wardale was innocent, and he believes it. I want help to find out who tried to kill you. But you arrived before I could talk to him about that, or your father, and the letter fell into the fire and is gone.
‘He kissed me,’ she said, talking doggedly on in the face of Hal’s lack of response. ‘He kissed me because he can no more help himself than a cat can stop teasing a mouse it has caught. He did not hurt me and he did not frighten me. I told Richards that if I had not come out in an hour, he was to go and fetch you.’
Hal turned his back and walked to the window. ‘I thought he had taken you. That he would…harm you. And then, I thought the fire…that you…Julia, have you any idea the hell it is, loving someone and knowing they are in danger? Perhaps dead? And feeling so powerless. I love you so much, and I saw his hands on you, saw the fire—’ He laughed, a short, harsh sound with no amusement in it.
For a moment, she hardly under stood the words or their meaning. Then, when he stayed with his hands braced against the window frame, head bowed, she climbed off the bed and walked to him, laying her hands, and then her cheek, against his naked back.
‘Yes, I know what it feels like,’ she said, schooling her voice so it would not shake. ‘I fell in love with a soldier and I saw him go to war. And then he did not come back and I thought he was dead. So I went to find him, and I watched over him, thinking he would die and that my love would not be enough to save him. Yes, it is hell, and I am sorry I put you through it.’
Under her palms, she felt the muscles tense, and then Hal turned, catching her by the shoulders so he could look down into her face. ‘You love me? I thought…I knew you wanted to marry someone and you liked me, perhaps wanted me—a little. But I knew you should not marry a man like me, a man with my past, my reputation. I wanted you to stay innocent, to find someone worthy of you. I knew I should go and never see you again. And then you were compromised—’
Hal closed his eyes, a man confessing. He was unable, she realized, to believe this would be
all right. ‘I felt guilty. I had what I wanted, what I desired, although I did not realize then that I loved you. I have never been in love before,’ he added ruefully, opening his eyes to smile at her. ‘The one thing I wanted and should not have and yet I was forced by honour to take it.’
‘I’ve loved you for so long. I realized at the Review,’ Julia said, putting up her hands to frame his face, rubbing with her thumb at a last smudge of soot on one sharp cheek bone. ‘And I love you now, with all my heart. And I like you very much, when you aren’t cross with me. And I want you all the time, cross or not. And I cannot imagine what I have ever done to be worthy of a husband like you.’
Hal’s mouth on hers was simply bliss, simply comfort and excitement and loving and friend ship and relief, all together, all at once. She cried a little, wriggling close into his embrace and he must have felt the tears, for he lifted his head and touched them away with gentle fingers.
‘Love me, Julia? Now?’
‘Yes. Yes please. Bread and butter loving so I can feel the weight of you and look up into your eyes.’
He laughed and lifted her and laid her on the bed, smoothing away her clothes with the expertise that had once so shamed him. He shed the remains of his uniform and came to lie over her, and she curled her legs around his narrow hips and felt him press intimately close, wanting her. ‘Yes,’ Julia murmured, her fingers tight on his shoulders. ‘Yes, now Hal.’
And he stroked smoothly into her as she sighed and arched up to take him, matching his rhythm, reading his eyes and listening to his voice as the words of love became gasps and he groaned and stroked higher and deeper into the yearning heat of her. The bliss began to ravel and build, and she read his in his face and in the tension of his body, and she matched him, urgent now until he went still, gasped for breath, surged one more time and she went with him, tumbling into the light.
Julia came to herself held tight in Hal’s arms. She wriggled until she could sit and look at him sprawled in elegant, indecent abandon amidst the wreckage of the bed clothes.
He put up a hand and stroked it down the side of her breast, making her shiver. Then the thing she had not been wanting to think about came and dug its claws into her heart, and she felt the chill touch the warmth of her happiness. ‘You were wearing your uniform when you came for me,’ she said.
‘Yes, I had been to Horse Guards.’
‘You have a posting then.’ I will be brave about this.
‘They said if go back in a month they will tell me.’
‘I see. We have a month together: that is more than I feared.’
‘You will not insist on following the drum?’
Julia reached out and brushed the still-damp hair back from his forehead. ‘No. It would worry you and distract you. You were right. I married a soldier, I must accept all that it means.’
‘You will not have to, my love.’ Hal caught the hand that was stroking his hair, pulled it to his mouth and kissed it. ‘I am selling out. I will breed horses in Buckinghamshire and we will buy a Town house so we can be frivolous and sociable when it suits us—and you must tell me how many bedrooms we must look for.’
‘For the children?’ she asked. Oh, my brave, wicked rake. You are going to make such a perfect father. And he was not leaving her. He wanted to stay of his own free will.
‘I had this daydream as I was riding down Whitehall,’ Hal said. ‘Max was looking over his stable door at a brood mare with a long-legged foal at her side, and I was watching my wife and my child playing in the long, soft spring grass. And I thought, that was what it would be to be happy.’
‘Oh.’ En chanted by the vision, Julia smiled down at him. ‘A baby for next spring? Hal, there is no time to lose.’
‘That is what I thought, my love,’ he agreed, serious except for the wicked sparkle in his eyes as he pulled her down and kissed her. ‘There is no time to lose—and all the time in the world for loving.’
Author’s Note
Much was written about Brussels in the months leading up to Waterloo by those who were there. I have relied heavily on these original accounts to under stand Julia’s life in the city and what it was like both there, and on the battlefield after June eighteenth.
I have taken liberties with a few dates and facts: the picnic in the Fôret de Soignes did take place, but rather earlier. There were numerous horse races, but not one on the day Hal won. As far as I know, no Brussels church had a stained-glass window with the fall of Lucifer.
But the words of Wellington and Lord Uxbridge are as I report them, the Duke of Brunswick did drop the young Prince of Ligne, Madame Catalani did sing at the Opera during June 1815. I used Captain Mercer’s memoirs extensively for the great cavalry review at Ninove.
Brussels has changed greatly since 1815, but the Parc is still there and families still picnic in the Fôret de Soignes. There are few traces now along the road to Mont St Jean of the brave men who marched along it, or relics of the terrible journey back to the city for those wounded. But the church in Waterloo still faces the inn where Wellington had his headquarters and the museum there pre serves the table where he wrote his orders and many other relics of all the armies.
Julia nursed Hal in a hovel, just as Lady de Lancey did her husband of only a few weeks, but with a much happier result. Magdalene de Lancey’s moving and tragic story is told by David Miller in Lady de Lancey at Waterloo. I also found his book The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball very useful. Amongst the memoirs of those present I used Cavalié Mercer’s Journal of the Waterloo Campaign; The Days of Battle or Quatre Bras and Waterloo by An English woman; The Capel Letters; John Scott’s Paris Re-Visited in 1815 by way of Brussels and Waterloo and The Letters of Spencer Maden.
Nick Foulkes’s Dancing Into Battle: a Social History of Waterloo is a highly readable account that brings together a wealth of these original documents.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7619-6
THE OFFICER AND THE PROPER LADY
Copyright © 2010 by Melanie Hilton
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