She and Louisa spoke but little throughout the day. There seemed nothing to say—they knew nothing of what was passing in the battle, and they had parted from their husbands with such different feelings that even speaking of their hopes and fears or attempting consolation felt odd.
Elizabeth was afraid, too, that if she said too much she would dissolve into hysterics again. Too much had happened too quickly, and her power of self-command had already deserted her once. Jack had lied to her, and that knowledge tainted every happy moment they’d shared since consummating their marriage. He had lied to her, and she had given him in exchange complete honesty, total surrender and utter trust. She’d let herself be naked to him, body and soul, over and over again. Now everything in her wanted to armor herself and flee far away to some safe place where she would never be in danger of yielding herself to him, nor to anyone else, again.
Yet as she listened to the distant thunder of battle she could never forget that she’d sent a soldier, a commander, out with words of anger and hate ringing in his ears, and that whatever his sins, a soldier going out to fight deserved blessings and not curses. So she prayed that God would have mercy on his soul and preserve his life. But while she trusted God would hear her, she couldn’t trust his answers. She had after all prayed with all her earnest young faith five years ago that Giles be spared, and heaven had ignored those pleas—and a blessing given when its object was miles away and unable to hear it seemed hardly worthwhile at all.
Again and again throughout the long June day she found her hand drifting to her still-flat abdomen. The cautious part of her hardly wanted to think about it—such a chancy thing, so much could go wrong—but she couldn’t help wondering and calculating. At one point she simply said, “February?” with a hand on her stomach, but Louisa instantly understood. She expected her own child to make his appearance sometime in September, and the change in her figure was becoming obvious despite the fullness of her skirts.
“That sounds right,” she agreed, “though I’m hardly an expert.”
“You know more than I do.”
“I wish I knew more about that,” she said with a significant glace southward, and they sat silently again for a long time.
As the afternoon drew toward evening, wounded soldiers began to trickle into the city. First came men with slight injuries who could stay on their feet, but they were soon followed by wagons filled with maimed, broken men.
The sight awoke Elizabeth from her paralysis. “We must do something.”
“Yes.” Louisa shook off her own torpor and nodded firmly. “We have room for dozens. Food, water—”
“Anything and everything we can.” Already they were hurrying along the wall, back toward the nearest steps leading down into the city.
Upon returning to their house, they discovered one of the maids had fled, but the other servants were all there and as impatient to be doing something as they were. They sent the footman out, and he soon returned with a score or so of lightly wounded men. The more severe cases were going to the city hospital, he reported, though from the look of things they would run out of room soon.
Elizabeth and Louisa went to work alongside the servants, improvising bandages and serving out water, brandy and soup. Elizabeth didn’t ask the men how the battle had gone, but they volunteered the information freely, terrifying her with the news that it was bad indeed, worse than anything they’d known in Spain.
But a blond Rifle officer with a ball lodged in his shoulder who introduced himself as Major Matheson told the soldiers to stop frightening the ladies. “It’s not so bad as that, you’ll see. We were the first ones on the spot, and it was only bad because we had barely enough men to hold the position. We met reinforcements going south all the time we were coming back here, so it will have been improving all along.”
“Sorry, sir,” the sergeant who’d been lamenting the loudest said. “I daresay the major has the right of it,” he added with abrupt cheerfulness. “Old Nosey hasn’t lost a battle yet, and I don’t see why he should begin now.”
The major chuckled. “No reason at all.” He smiled at Elizabeth. “You’re Sir John Armstrong’s wife, are you not, ma’am?”
He made the question sound simple and innocent, by which Elizabeth concluded that if their quarrel at the ball had led to gossip, at least it had been limited to the highest circles. “Yes, sir. You’re in his brigade, aren’t you? Did you see him today?”
“I did. We couldn’t have missed him, though the duke sent the Rifles ahead of the rest to skirmish as soon as we got there. But I saw him again leading the Thirty-Second forward as I was going to the rear after this little souvenir.” He twitched his shoulder and winced. “He was in fine health and spirits then.”
“Thank you,” she said with a shuddering sigh. Of course, Major Matheson had been injured with almost the opening shots of the battle, many hours ago, so who could know if Jack was still well? But she felt reassured nonetheless. “We really ought to get you to a surgeon who can dig that ball out,” she added.
“They’re needed for worse cases than mine. You cleaned it and bandaged it so well, and the rest can wait.”
She shook her head at such stoicism, but she supposed he had the right of it. There couldn’t be surgeons enough for all the wounded who were pouring into town. Her footman, who went about collecting patients for her until the house was filled almost to the rafters, reported a dizzying variety of contradictory rumors—the French had been driven back with 20,000 dead, the British and Prussians had been cut to pieces and everyone should flee, flee for their lives, for the French were almost at the gates.
Through it all, Elizabeth held to Jack’s request that they stay where they were. Her logic, supported by the very reasonable Major Matheson, was that if the allies had truly been routed, they would be seeing even more wounded pouring into the city, and moreover the firing would have grown nearer as the day went on.
As midnight approached, Louisa pulled her aside. “You must sleep. In your condition—”
“You are in the exact same condition,” she pointed out.
“But it’s harder, the first few months. I feel much better now, and not at all tired.”
“You mean you cannot sleep. No one with eyes like yours is not at all tired.”
Louisa sighed agreement. “Still, you ought to go lie down in your own bed for a few hours and at least try to rest. We’ll know more in the morning, I daresay.”
“I gave my bed to Major Matheson and Captain Ackley.”
“Surely that wasn’t necessary!”
“I couldn’t sleep there last night in any case. The bed is too big for one.”
“You will sleep somewhere. I insist.”
“Only if you do.”
In the end, both women lay down for a few brief, restless hours in the maids’ room in the garret, the remaining housemaid having doubled up with the housekeeper.
Chapter Twenty
Other than the hurricane he had once been caught in while crossing the Atlantic, Jack had never known a more violent rainstorm in all his thirty-six years than the one that fell as the army retreated from Quatre Bras to the crossroad of Mont St. Jean on the afternoon of the seventeenth of June.
The men hadn’t wanted to abandon a position they had fought so hard and paid so dearly to hold the day before. Jack sympathized, though he understood Wellington’s reasoning, and he found himself explaining, again and again, to a succession of young subalterns and stubborn privates the importance of working in concert with their allies, of not allowing Bonaparte to force a separation between the British and Prussian armies. Together they outnumbered the French. Apart, the reverse was the case. Now that the Prussians had been driven back from their position of the previous day, the British must perforce withdraw as well. Still, to retreat, and through this miserable lashing rain, after winning a victory seemed a hard lot indeed.
The veterans among his battalions, however, took a more sanguine view. One sergeant, unaccountably c
heerful, shouted to all and sundry that the storm was the best possible omen. “Wellington weather!” he shouted above the din of the storm. “Remember the eve of Salamanca? And what of Sorauren?”
A few other veterans took up the theme. Why, the weather had been just the same! Quite as violent! Now they were sure to prevail. Jack laughed—he had never been a superstitious man but felt cheered nonetheless.
At least the weather was as hard on the pursuers as the pursued, and none of the infantry came under fire, though before the storm had broken Jack had heard some skirmishing among the cavalry and horse artillery who brought up the rear, guarding their withdrawal. They would fight again tomorrow or the next day, he was almost certain. The Prussians had been defeated but not routed, and he knew Wellington planned to offer battle as soon as he was certain the Prussians were able and willing to come to their aid.
Jack prayed his letter had reached Elizabeth. He’d entrusted it just after dawn to an aide who was riding back to Brussels with official messages. If he survived the campaign he would do all he could to earn his wife’s forgiveness, but that was beyond his control now. He couldn’t think beyond his present duty. If only the letter could reach her, at least she would know how sorry he was, and perhaps if he fell she could go about the rest of her life having forgiven him, and able to remember and treasure the happiness they had so briefly shared.
* * *
On the seventeenth of June, Elizabeth heard no guns, but an afternoon’s furious storm more than made up for the noise. They now knew that yesterday the British had won a battle but the Prussians had lost one, and that both armies were retiring closer to the city. She asked Major Matheson, whose quiet good sense she’d come to rely upon, whether the retreat was sufficient cause for her to reconsider her vow to stay put.
“No, not yet,” he replied. “Neither army is broken, and even in the worst case, it won’t be a matter of the French besieging Brussels. If there’s no hope of victory here and now, Wellington will try to get our troops to Ostend and back to England, and the Prussians will retire to the east. The key thing, you must understand, ma’am, is to keep the armies intact so that they may live to fight another day.”
“Wouldn’t that make us prisoners?”
He shrugged and winced. “I must remember to keep my shoulder still. Perhaps it would. But Boney has no more need to occupy Brussels than we do to hold it. He’ll soon have Russians and Austrians on his eastern frontier to worry about. His only hope is to defeat us all in detail, so speed is of the essence. He won’t linger here.”
She shook her head. “If it’s safe, then why is everyone fleeing?”
He smiled ruefully. “Because people are easily frightened, especially those with no experience of such things.”
“Yes. Yes, we are.”
“You seem brave to me, Lady Armstrong. But your husband is right—you’re safe in Brussels. Not quite as safe as you’d be at home in England, perhaps, but you’ll meet with fewer hazards here than you would on the roads. If you’d wanted to leave, the right time would’ve been a week ago. Now that it’s come, you’re safest riding out the storm.”
Reassured for the moment, she went back to the business of caring for the wounded she had taken under her care. Late in the afternoon, a rain-drenched messenger she faintly recognized as one of Wellington’s aides arrived. “Sir John Armstrong asked me to deliver this,” he said, pressing a carefully folded but unsealed sheet of paper into her hands.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“I haven’t time to wait for a reply. I’m riding back to the army straightaway. But if you have any verbal message you’d like me to send...”
She thought hard. She wasn’t ready to send her love and forgiveness, but she couldn’t say nothing, not when she had this unlooked-for chance. “Tell him to be careful,” she said. “Tell him I’m praying for his safety, and that Mrs. Lang and I have stayed here and are doing what we can for the wounded.”
“Very good, ma’am.”
Where to go? She couldn’t read the letter in the parlor, now crammed with at least twenty soldiers. After a moment’s thought, she went back to the maids’ room, the closest thing to a private space the house now had, sat on the narrow bed she’d failed to sleep in the night before, unfolded the letter with shaking hands and read:
My dearest Elizabeth,
I have no right to beg for your forgiveness. I have done nothing to merit it. Nonetheless, I find myself compelled to make you an apology, so that if I fall in this campaign you will at least know I did so having repented of and acknowledged my wrongs by you, and in hopes that you will be able to forgive me at some point hereafter, so that your remembrance of me may contain some remnant of the affection with which you once honored me.
A rusty, unwilling smiled tugged at Elizabeth’s lips. The affection with which you once honored me was the most delicate phrasing she could imagine for her ravenous, unashamed passions. She hadn’t known her cheerfully ribald husband to be capable of such niceties. She wondered what he would’ve said if he’d been entirely certain the letter had no chance of falling into strange hands.
I never comprehended it before today, but I have discovered that I am a coward. Not in battle—in today’s action I felt the same sensible desire to avoid an untimely meeting with a musket ball or a cannon shot that any rational person would share, but no fear or panic that might hinder me from doing my duty. But I have been a coward with you. You may not believe it, but I fell in love with you almost from the moment I saw you waiting for me in the stable yard at the Grange, so proud and brave and defiant. I couldn’t bear for you to know the whole truth of my sins—that I’d gone off with another man’s wife within a fortnight of our wedding, all because I was angry and petulant over not having my own way, because I only knew you pale and grieving and had no notion of how beautiful you are, how splendid and strong, and above all because I wanted to prove to myself that my life hadn’t changed even though I knew full well it had, irrevocably. And then I complained to that woman how dreadful it was that I found myself married, though I knew even then how wrong it was of me to speak ill of my wife, my wife who had taken on a tireless and thankless duty in looking after my mother and my lands despite having no more reason to admire or desire me than I did her.
I regretted my actions before the next dawn. I was ashamed. And because my shame was so great I hid it from you, thinking that you could never forgive me for what I had never forgiven myself. I thought that I was safe, with Bella gone, and that I could build a happy life with you as long as you never found out what I was.
That was the act of a coward. And I acted the coward’s part, too, when Liddicott appeared in Brussels. His behavior toward us made it clear that he knew something, and when you realized who he was, I ought to have admitted the whole to you. Because of my weakness, you were left to learn the truth in the worst possible manner at the worst possible time and place, which I will forever regret.
I know it is far from enough, but believe me that I am sincerely and deeply sorry for the pain that I have caused you. If I live, and you are willing to forgive me one more time, I vow that from now on I will endeavor to show the same courage in our marriage and in my love for you that comes so much more easily to me on the field of battle. And if I am fated to fall—know that I loved you to the best of my poor abilities, and that my last thoughts will be of you.
Yet if I live and you find yourself unable to forgive me, I will make no difficulties if you wish to seek a separation, and will do all in my power to secure a suitable home and income for you in some place far from Northumberland and me.
Thus far, I am well. I don’t know what news has reached Brussels, but please know that we were engaged all day at the crossroads at Quatre Bras, and though it was touch and go at many moments, we prevailed in the end. My brigade was in the thick of the fighting and sustained heavy casualties, but they fought bravely throughout. Wellington fully deserves all the accolades and honors he has been granted; I n
ever saw anything like how he deployed each battalion as it reached the field today and kept our forces in motion to meet each new test or correct each weakness as it developed.
What happens next depends heavily upon the actions of both our allies and our enemies, but know that no matter what comes to pass, I remain
Your loving and faithful husband,
Jack
“Oh.” Elizabeth folded the letter and clutched it to her breast. She forgave him. How could she not after so soul-baring a confession as that? She could hardly imagine what it must have cost his soldier’s heart to write I am a coward.
If only she had said more to the courier who had brought the letter! If only she had spoken of love and forgiveness. She longed to rush out into the rain to give him a better message, but it was too late now. Please, God, let him live, she prayed. Give me the chance to make this right again.
If he’d been afraid—she couldn’t bring herself to use the word coward, no matter what he said—then she’d been proud, smug in a rectitude that had come easily to her because it had never been tested. Of course she’d been faithful to her vows, living in a small village where everyone knew everything there was to know about each other’s affairs, and where none of the gentlemen who might stray from their wives under the right circumstances had been remotely tempting to her. How easy it had been, when she had never known temptation, to puff herself up with pride for avoiding sin.
Let him live. Let him come back to me. I don’t deserve it, but give me another chance.
Again, tears stung her eyes, but this time she managed to hold them back. She had her duty, too, and she meant to do her part. Afterward, there would be time for forgiveness—or mourning.
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