The boy explained in halting English that the bedclothes had been taken away and burned in case of infection, and completely clean linen had been put on both bed and patient. Le capitaine’s uniform had been put in a bag and taken to a Turkish woman who would clean and mend it to Madame’s satisfaction. His own duties were to feed and attend the patient.
Content that everything possible was being done for Hugo, Victoria collected her few belongings and, with Letty’s help, took them along to the other room. They had a quiet meal there, waiting for a further report from the doctor. When he tapped on the door it was to inform them that the fever was mounting, and it might be as well for Madame to remain by her husband’s side during the night She did not feel disposed to correct the medical man’s error, and Letty just smiled with understanding when her friend took a shawl and prepared for her vigil.
“Pray for him, Letty, as I shall for Jack,” Victoria said swiftly before departing.
The fever brought sweat glistening on his brow and heat to his body. Already, he was turning his head on the pillow in some torment of spirit, and, as the night began in earnest, his restlessness increased and wild muttering betrayed the onset of delirium.
Soon after midnight he fought to cool himself by throwing off the bedclothes, and Victoria jumped from the rocking chair to fetch a bowl of water and towels. Ordering the boy to hold the patient down, she doused Hugo with cool water to keep his temperature from rising. This much experience she had had in the sickroom at Aunt Almeira’s when her cousins had been feverish.
For an hour or more they both worked, holding him down when he tried to throw himself from side to side, keeping the blankets over his burning body and wringing out towels to lay across his forehead. Shortly before dawn the fever broke, and Hugo lay quietly, as if he had never been the struggling maniac they had watched all night. Victoria leaned wearily against the bedpost and breathed a prayer of thanks while the lad straightened up the room.
It was already growing faintly light when she made to leave. The Turkish boy gave a small bow and said, “Many thank-yous, Madame!”
She smiled wearily. “And many to you, young man.”
He stared at the door after she had gone, wondering at the strangeness of this English lady.
*
When Hugo awoke it was to a new world of warmth, comfort and diminution of pain. He lay looking at strange yellow flickerings on a white sky. Were the guns still firing? No, he had come away from that valley. Could it be the light from campfires dancing on the hospital tent? This ceiling was not sloping; it was too warm and pleasant here for a tent. Of course, it had blown away while he lay beneath it, and the wild drenching night had been all around him, the shrieks of the wind mingling with the moans of his companions who were left to lie on blankets in the mud.
Somnolence brought his eyelids down again, but the sounds about him continued to feed the guessing game in his head. There was a rhythmic squeaking of timbers such as he heard on ships, but this bed was too steady and his stomach was making no protest. A small groan broke from him as the nightmare of that last voyage returned. An eternity of retching, agony and degradation in putrid semidarkness that ended on a beach covered in ice. The wind had bitten into his body like sharp knives, and the sky had been stormy-dark, but it had been a complete release and he had wanted to be left there forever. He remembered it vividly now — the sharp stones beneath his head digging into his skull, the blessed smell of fresh air and salt spray, the women moving around with shawls tightly wrapped across them…the women! He had seen Victoria there.
His eyes flew open as her name burst from him. He knew she had really been there that time — not another in the parade of ghosts that had passed before his eyes for so long.
“Victoria?”
By some miracle she was beside him, looking down as she had on that beach. This time she wore a dress of some bronze shimmering material, and her cheeks had the color of life in them.
“Hush, my dearest,” she told him. “I am here.”
He allowed himself the joy of a long look at her, not knowing nor caring how she came to be there.
“You were on a beach,” he said at last. “What were you doing there?”
“So very little,” she replied softly, “until I found you.”
“Charles…” he began, but she said quickly, “He is back in Balaclava.”
He said no more for a little while, trying to reason where he was and why Victoria was with him, but it was too much for his tired brain. Her hand closed over his on the bedclothes, and he looked down at it.
“All we ever seem to do is meet in unexpected places for a brief while. My whole life is spent imagining you to be around every corner. When we do come face to face, there is nothing we can say.”
She lifted his hand to her cheek as she had on the beach, and he felt the wetness against his fingers. “To know you are here is all that matters. Words are not necessary.”
“Neither are tears, Victoria. They have all been shed between us.”
She sat on the side of the bed, holding his hand between her own as the weariness invaded him, closing his lids over the vision he saw. How different she was now from that questioning girl he had first seen by the glow of candles at Wychbourne. If she had been his…
When he next awoke there was sunshine flooding across the counterpane. There was still warmth and comfort around him, and he felt hungry. A French doctor came to dress his wounds and, after that painful business, told Hugo he was pleased with his progress but he must remain in bed for at least a week unless he wished his chest to burst open again.
“You are very fortunate, Monsieur, that your friends brought you to the hotel immediately.” He smiled. “Madame is a very formidable lady. Monsieur’s brother is even more fortunate than yourself, I venture to suggest.”
“Yes,” said Hugo.
After the doctor departed, a dark-eyed Turkish youth brought a tray with a bowl of broth, a soufflé and some jelly. To finish, there was a glass of port wine. He ate it all with less attention to manners than to getting it inside him as quickly as possible.
Left alone, depression returned, to march a long line of recollections before him and relight the pain that had lived with him since October. He remembered the sun-washed valley and the gasping shadows returning; he remembered the wounded from Inkerman being carried in, half hysterical from the nightmare of bayonets in the fog; he remembered the mud and slime of the Crimea where frost bit into hands and feet that projected beyond the one thin blanket at night. He might be safe and warm here, but the Army was slipping away as it sat before Sebastopol.
Victoria came to visit, and he felt ashamed of his own gloom when he saw the joy light her face at the sight of him.
“Your appearance is very timely,” he confessed. “I have become quite fractious and will most likely throw my basin at you at the first sign of your crossing me.”
She smiled. “Now I know you are better. You have always been an unruly patient, Hugo.” Sinking into a rocking chair before the fire, she provided the answer to the puzzle of squeaking timbers and flickering yellow lights on the ceiling. “The latest bulletin from the doctor is very encouraging.”
He could just see her face from where he was lying. “The doctor thinks Madame is a very formidable lady. I would go further than that, Victoria.”
“Letty is coming to see you just as soon as she returns from the hospital,” she said, cutting across his overture to an expression of thanks.
“Letty is here?”
“Jack is in the General Hospital. I fear he has taken a turn for the worse. There is a bad wound in his thigh that will not heal. He was brought down to Scutari with Charles after that terrible day. There were so many — I will not allow myself to think how many. Harry Edmunds died in my arms. I have written to his family but could not give any last messages, for I truly believe he did not know it was the end. And poor Stokes just disappeared — like many others. His wife is over at Scutari every da
y in the belief that he will appear, as you did.” She rose and came to stand at the end of the bed, and he drank in the beauty of her soft concern with greedy eyes. “Hugo, they brought me your…effects. They told me you were dead.”
He knew they must speak of it sooner or later. “They believed I was. I am told two Frenchmen brought me in after coming across me way out on the left flank where they had been operating that day. I must have crawled at an angle, for I could not see where I was going. They threw me across a horse and delivered me to our own lines.” He looked closely at her, but she appeared to be well in control of herself. “I was covered in blood and apparently lifeless. The orderlies accepted the Frenchmen’s word, and I was put with a pile of our dead.” He hastily reassured her, “I knew nothing of any of it. In fact, I knew nothing until several days later when I learned that it was only because an orderly noticed that I felt unusually warm that I was not interred that night. I was removed to the hospital tent, but they had very little hope of my survival. It hung in the balance for three weeks.”
He sensed her anguish but continued. “Even when it appeared that I might live they would not send me to Scutari until I was strong enough to stand the journey.” He gave a twisted smile. “They did not know that ships and I do not make a good partnership.”
“I would not say you were fit to endure the voyage now,” she protested. “What made them order it?”
He was beginning to feel tired again, yet did not want to close his eyes and blot out the picture of her in the sunshine that he treasured. “Conditions up there are unforgivable, Victoria. The soldiers in this army have been betrayed by their commanders and by the government in England. The fit men are ill; the sick are dying. There is no place for hospital patients since the great storm swept the tents away, so they are all being sent here. Those who are not wounded have fever; those who are not fever-ridden are starving; those who are not starving are dying of frostbite.”
Victoria came around to him and sat on the edge of the bed. “Do they have no idea what it is like at Scutari?” she asked gently. “I understand the sick have more chance of remaining alive if they are not sent to the Barrack Hospital.”
He watched the sun playing on the gold ring on her hand. It gleamed a warning at him. “Charles has become fit again, I take it?”
“Yes.”
Dismayed at his lack of courage, he found it necessary to force the question through his lips, so that he must face the answer she would give. “He must also have believed I had not survived that day. Did he…write to his father of the news?”
She made no answer, and he was forced to swallow his pride. “Did he show no sign of… I left a letter to be delivered if I should…” His words trailed off at the expression on her face.
“Charles did not once inquire after you that day and, when I broke the news to him, showed no interest, apart from a certain sense of resignation — as if he had expected it.”
He winced. She had spared him nothing. Why should this truth touch him so deeply? “Charles is not a man who forgives easily.”
“He had nothing to forgive,” she cried with emotion that thickened her voice and deepened the brown of her eyes. “Hugo, I have done something you would condemn in a man. When I have told you, you will have to decide whether you are a man who easily forgives.”
His heart quickened. “I told you once never to apologize to me. There is no need.”
She put her hand to her throat where it played with a large brooch, the wedding ring taking his attention the whole time.
“Because Charles was in the hands of the surgeons your —” she plainly found the word difficult to say — “effects were handed to me. I read the letter and tore it up.”
Swiftly he knew it was not easy to forgive that. The letter had been written after his mother’s death when he was feeling the loss of his family and was meant for his brother’s eyes only. He felt somehow diminished before her in the knowledge that she had read the words he had hoped would save his soul from damnation. It was an effort to remain silent.
“You are angry,” she said sadly, “but it can be nothing to the anger I felt when the truth became known to me. Hugo, that letter did not belong to Charles. No action of yours robbed him of his son, nor put my life in danger.”
*
After Victoria left him, Hugo lay staring at the reflection of flames dancing on the walls. Overwhelming tiredness seeped through every nerve and fiber of his body. It was easy to understand her actions when she was handed a few keepsakes that she believed were all that remained of him. He now understood and tried to excuse, the reading of a private letter, but it did not prevent his feeling humbled in her eyes. Yet, if she had given it to Charles, how much more humiliated would he now feel? He winced inwardly, remembering the cold words in which she had told him of Charles’s indifference to the news of his supposed death. He would not have believed hatred could extend beyond the grave. Charles was a Christian; forgiveness of the soul was part of the creed.
Closing his eyes brought no sleep, neither did it ease his thoughts. The lifting of the burden of guilt he had carried for so long was no relief, for the weight of his brother’s deliberate vengeance for that day more than compensated. He was the perfect whipping boy. Eyes flying open again, he thought of the future. Brotherhood was a bond that could never be broken. For them, the love and loyalty had turned into revenge and distrust, yet they were as firmly tied together as before. Charles would always need to punish him for something he truly believed had robbed him of the sons he should have had. Did he also hate him for not being a blood brother — a Stanford who could continue the line in his stead?
As for himself, the desire he had always had to be just that — a blood brother and true part of the family — would keep him striving to attain the standards Charles had always set him. It was that that had kept him crawling up that valley, had sustained him as he lay in the mud of Balaclava, had kept him sane during the voyage down to Scutari. From now on it would drive him even harder. The campaign in the Crimea was not yet over. He would be there at the end, as he had vowed.
It was the end of another day, and his stamina was low. Pain always crept in with the dusk, and too many ghosts raised their heads in the gathering twilight. He wished the boy would come in and light a lamp to chase them away. Turning restlessly, he wondered how long it would be before the Sirocco returned and Victoria went back to Charles. How could he make her return to such conditions? It was hell enough for men — no female should be exposed to it.
As soon as he was fit, he would return himself…and the game would begin again. He, striving to stay alive, while Charles waited for him to go to pieces. How in God’s name would it all end?
*
For Victoria the days glowed with joyfulness. The doctor had been too optimistic in his estimate of one week in bed, for Hugo was still there after ten days. It made no difference to Victoria. He was getting stronger and would recover — and she could be with him. She still awoke in the night, panic-stricken in the belief that she had only dreamed his return, but it happened less often as time passed.
Letty still went each day to visit Jack and returned to tell Victoria how much better he was in a voice that was optimistic but wistful. Zarina Stokes still haunted the beach at Scutari, believing that if one man could return from the dead, so could another, though she never found the one she sought. Victoria made no attempt to stop her; she was too absorbed in her own happiness.
Two days before Christmas she hurried along the corridor on her morning visit to find Hugo sitting out on a chaise longue looking very pleased with himself.
“Ha!” he cried when she appeared. “I shall soon be filling you with admiration at my elegant bow when you enter. Ladies have been known to faint away with delight as I bend over their fingers.”
“You will be the one to faint away if you try such elegance too soon,” she laughed, coming around to stand before him. “I am glad you have taken off that beard at last. Now I know
you again.”
“Even with this?” He touched his cheek.
“It is an honorable scar. It is part of you,” she said softly.
“Oh yes, it is part of me forever.” His vivid eyes suddenly held turquoise fire. “We were sent to charge the wrong guns that day, Victoria. It was the most tragic blunder in this campaign.”
“I know.” She sat in the rocking chair. “I was on the hill with many others. We could not believe what we saw. At the outset it was naturally assumed you were going to recapture the guns lost that morning, but you rode right past the smaller valley.”
“Do I not know it! There is the most heated battle going on up there over it — everyone anxious to avoid taking the blame. The commander-in-chief insists that his order referred to the guns we had lost to the Russians that morning — they were dragged into Sebastopol that night, I am told, amid much rejoicing. Cardigan insists that he was told to charge the guns at the end of the valley and that his protest was met with a reminder that orders must be met without question. The brigade-commander insists that the written order was ambiguous, that he could not see the guns other than those we attacked and that Captain Nolan, who brought the order and was in a state of extreme excitement and insubordination, pointed to the end of the valley when asked what the order meant.” He ran a hand through his hair in anger. “It was plain to us all that what we were ordered to do was deplorable madness, but I have to admit we could not see the captured guns from our position in the valley. Also, in fairness to Nolan, he did gallop out in the most inexplicable way, waving his sword and shouting at Cardigan, so it could be that he realized the order had been misinterpreted. We shall never know. The poor fellow was the first to fall. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was still unforgivable for commanders to send men so needlessly to their deaths.” He leaned back wearily. “What we did was against all principles of cavalry tactics, was contrary to the ethics of warfare. Lord Cardigan appears to be the only commander who raised objections to what he was told to do. It is that fact that leaves me so disturbed, Victoria.”
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