Chasing the Heiress

by Rachael Miles

  “Give me the name, and I’ll tell you what I can. But I have only a few moments. I’m to offer some good words about Prinny once he arrives.”

  “We haven’t the name. That’s the problem. We are looking for an officer who reared his daughter in the camps and taught her to shoot and fence. She was at Badajoz, and we believe her fiancé was in the Ninety-fifth.”

  Hampton grew solemn, distant. “I’m afraid I can’t help you after all, my boy.”

  Colin pushed forward. “She disappeared last week, and we fear she might be in danger.”

  “But you don’t know her name.”

  “I knew her as Lucy.”

  Hampton picked up his pocket watch and checked the time. “I cannot help you. A girl who could shoot at Badajoz? That would have been dreadful for morale.”

  Colin started to object, but Aidan held out his hand for him to be quiet.

  “Are you saying that there was no girl, or that she would have been kept a secret? Even now, a secret?”

  “If there had been such a girl, then Wellington would have wanted to make sure that no one knew.”

  Chapter Thirty

  She wasn’t sure where she was. She couldn’t open her eyes. She could move her fingers. She pressed the tip of her thumb to her forefinger and felt only numbness. Drugged. She fought to remember.

  She groaned. A rough hand touched her face.

  “She’s waking up.”

  She heard indistinct voices. A calloused hand forced open her mouth. Bitter liquid dripped on her tongue. She knew the taste. More laudanum. She tried to spit it out, but the hand shut her mouth and held it closed.

  Her limbs began to float, as the darkness enveloped her.

  * * *

  She was cold. The wall against her back was uneven stone, dank with mold. She’d been set in a corner, her neck crooked painfully against the side wall.

  Her arms felt heavy; they hung at her sides, hands against her thighs. Under her fingers, she felt a coarse woven fabric. She moved her fingers, feeling for the edges. A thin pallet.

  She tried to turn her head to the room, but bile rose in her throat. Nausea. Too much laudanum.

  Slowly. She could turn her head if she moved it slowly.

  The room was dark, but the air smelled of unwashed bodies. She could make out the sounds of two, or more, people sleeping. She held her own breath and tried to count the noises made by the other sleepers. At least two.

  With effort, she could move her left hand. Beside the pallet was a thin folded blanket. She had enough strength in her hand to pull it into her lap, then with concentration, she lifted her right hand to help her left hand stretch it across her lap. Exhausted, she let her hand fall back to her side.

  Her fingers felt the floor. Wood, old and much marred. Her fingers could trace its deep groves. Her left hand found a lidded chamber pot to her right. With the laudanum she had been given, she had little need of it.

  One of the sleepers grunted and rolled over in the dark. Were they also captives or her captors?

  She waited, listening.

  She slept again.

  She awoke sometime later. The transit of the moon now offered a weak half-light. The sleepers still slept. How much could she move without waking them?

  She tried to move her legs. One of her legs was tied. She leaned forward and felt a shackle on her ankle. The thick fetters were bolted to the wall inches below her feet. The chain measured no more than three spans of her hand. Enough to stand and no more. No hope of escape.

  Colin. She thought of the last time she’d seen him. She’d touched his face and looked into his eyes. He’d clasped her hand in his, kissed the inside of her palm. She’d intended the moment to signal her commitment to him. But, with her gone, he would think she had meant goodbye. He wouldn’t look for her.

  She was alone. She would have cried, but she couldn’t.

  She hunched down onto the floor, facing the wall. She pulled the blanket up from her lap over her shoulder. She curled her knees into her belly as protection, against her invisible foes. She struggled against sleep, but it came against her will.

  * * *

  She woke again. It was morning, but what morning she did not know. Her right forearm throbbed with pain. It was bandaged. She didn’t remember hurting herself. She was afraid to take off the bandage. That was at least clean, and she didn’t wish to see what they might replace it with.

  She pushed herself partway up and examined her cell. A long, thin room in the upper level of the building. Tree limbs moved with the breeze outside the window.

  The window had no glass, just an opening to the outdoors. The cold would be unbearable in another week or two when fall finally set in. The fireplace looked long unused, no cinders or ashes on the stone hearth. The other occupants were gone. Three other pallets stuffed with straw lay on the floor, each one near a shackle bolted to the wall near the floor. Dirty linens and blankets were piled high in the corner to her right. A prison or an asylum. She blinked away tears.

  Footsteps, heavy, approached her cell. A key scraped in the lock. She lay down as quickly as she could. She forced her eyes closed, wanting to watch, to see who her captors were.

  Footsteps approached and stopped near her. She made her breath shallow and even. A thin hand grasped her shoulder and shook.

  “Wake up. Time to eat.”

  She pretended to be just awakening, her movements slow and languid. It was easy to do. There was still so much drug in her body.

  “Open yer eyes.”

  She complied but kept them deliberately unfocused.

  “Ah, too drugged still. Lucky they didn’t kill yer with it. But yer’s safe now. As long as ye abide by the rules, yer’ll be treated fairly. They says yer a wild one. Need to keep ye close so ye don’t harm yerself agin. Do as I says, and yer’ll do fine. We keep an orderly house here. Understand?”

  Lucy nodded. A linen-covered tray sat on the floor behind the woman. She leaned down and helped Lucy sit up.

  “I’m Smith. I watch the lodgers. Yer name is Sally. Doesn’t matter what yer name was afore. It’s Sally now. Matron likes her lodgers all meek and easy. She won’t ken well to arguing about why yer here. Your relatives pay her well to keep ya, and she won’t like to find yer isn’t crazy. Best be a bit melancholy and grateful.”

  Lucy nodded again.

  Suddenly, from her right, the pile of blankets moved, and thin arms grabbed at the tray. Lucy recoiled instinctively.

  “No, Moll. That’s Sally’s.” Smith pushed the tray toward Lucy. Then she took a piece of dried bread from her apron pocket. “Here’s a treat.”

  The pile transformed to an emaciated woman with large eyes and a dirty face. So tiny one could think her a child except for her hair, almost completely grey, and the lines on her face. Smith tossed the bread, and Moll with surprising speed, caught it, and retreated to her corner. Her back to the walls, she squatted, gnawing the bread with suspicious eyes.

  Lucy looked at her with dread. Was this what she was to become? Old, mad, and alone?

  “Ah, don’t fear her, luv. Just keep yer distance,” Smith said plainly. “Moll’s long past human. Acts like one of those African monkeys in the Royal Menagerie. If we let her into the garden, she climbs whatever is nearby. Last time, she took to the matron’s rose trellis. Thorns in her hands and feet, and never noticed. Cold don’t faze her. She breaks the window fast as we replace it.”

  Smith uncovered the tray, revealing a bowl of oats and some cheese. “Yer family is paying dear for yer meals. Few gets this much.”

  She needed to learn the rules of the place, to appear compliant. It was her only hope of escape. If she tried to escape and failed, there would be no second chance.

  “This is yer room. You share it with Moll, Dinah, and sometimes with Rebecca when she’s offended the matron. Dinah works in the yard, Rebecca in the kitchen. Moll, well, she keeps here most days.”

  The nurse held out a spoonful of oats. The smell reminded her of
mornings in the camp, the sunlight on the walls of Lisbon. James and her father welcoming her to the fire, smiling. She drifted.

  “No, gel. You must eat. It’ll help with whatever they gave you.”

  She opened her mouth, and Smith fed her like an infant.

  She slept again.

  * * *

  She woke in the night. Moll stood in front of the window, swaying. The moon was almost full. Moll held one arm outstretched through the window, reaching for something. She moaned and hummed. The tune hung at the edges of Lucy’s memory.

  She slept. Moll’s moans became the moans of the wounded. Blood and fire powder. Limbs without bodies. The noise of the cannon. Her own cries rang in her ears.

  “Wake up. Wake up, gel. Yer dreamin. Wake up.”

  Smith shook her awake, then bathed her face with cold water. “There, there. Just a dream. Nothing to be a-feared of. Smith is here.” Her tones were even and soothing, like the voice of a mother with a frightened child.

  * * *

  Sometime later, she awoke to screaming—this time not her own. The woman called Rebecca was struggling against two large men who dragged her into the room from the hall.

  “You should know better than to offend the matron.”

  The woman was wailing, weeping, screaming, fighting them with all her might.

  The men who smelled of the stables threw Rebecca to the floor, pressing her face into the pallet, one man’s knee in her back. “She’ll need air soon. But at least she’s quiet now.” The second man laughed as he locked the shackles on her legs; then they dragged her to her feet and shackled her arms high above her head. The man cursed as she bit his arm, and he slapped her hard, then crushed her face into the corner.

  The first man groped her breasts from behind. “Want a little of this?” he proposed and lifted Rebecca’s skirts, revealing bare legs. He kicked her feet farther apart, and Rebecca struggled against the shackles to close her legs. “Or do you prefer taking your pleasure in the basement?”

  “That one has family.” The second man walked to the still open door. “And they all end up in the basement eventually, and by the third night, they welcome a bit of company.”

  “Looks like you have only me for comfort, lass.”

  Lucy closed her eyes, not wanting to see what would happen next. But Rebecca, rallying, screamed for Smith. And Smith—miraculously—came.

  * * *

  Smith came to rouse her. “Time to see the doctor and meet the matron.”

  Lucy needed to know what line Rebecca had crossed that had led to her being chained against the wall for two days. When they had finally released her arms, Rebecca had crumpled to the floor, and they had left her, curled up there, still shackled at her feet and smelling of her own urine.

  Smith had told her to be meek.

  The matron was a well-dressed woman, with a cross at her neck and a Bible in her hands. A member of one of the reforming societies. Lucy’s heart sank.

  An older man, hunched and wizened, removed the bandage from her arm. He pressed on the wound to see if it would weep. “Ah, nicely mending. No weeping of the wound. You are lucky, girl. A wound like this could putrefy easily.” He watched her eyes for a reaction, and Lucy was careful not to give one. Shaking his head slowly, he latched his medical bag, then spoke to the matron. “If the weather suits, she may walk in the garden three times a day.”

  “No, she is able in body, if not in mind. She will walk in the garden only if she has completed her chores.”

  The doctor picked up his bag and left, leaving Lucy standing quietly.

  “Your family tells me that you suffer from fits of melancholy and in one of those fits you harmed yourself.” The matron’s voice was hard and stern.

  Lucy kept her gaze at a spot on the floor six inches before her toes.

  “While you have been healing, you have been allowed to remain in your room, but now you will go about with the other patients. If you comport yourself well and do your work cheerfully, you may remain with the others. If you do not, you will be confined in your room until your demeanor improves. If your manner is not improved by that correction, then you will be moved to the cellar, where the dark can calm your nerves and promote useful reflection. Do you understand me, Sally?”

  Lucy nodded her head, keeping the movement slow and her eyes fixed on the rather elegant carpet.

  “If you work cheerfully and well, you will find that we do everything to make our guests comfortable. You will be allowed to wash your face and hands three mornings a week and bathe every two weeks in the warm months, every month in the cold. We will give you flannel to wrap your feet when the days grow colder, and we will change your straw whenever it is wet or dirty. Until we can be sure you will do yourself no more harm, you will be confined to a strait waistcoat after you complete your work. Do you understand me?

  Lucy nodded.

  “Then you may go. Smith, escort Sally to the kitchen, where she may begin her chores.”

  * * *

  She no longer knew what day it was. She had begun to make scratches in the floor next to her pallet to keep track of time, but she hadn’t begun her calendar immediately. And any time the matron entertained the local magistrate or her friends, the patients were given laudanum to make them appear placid and content. She never knew how many days she lost. But her scratches numbered twenty-one.

  Her routine was unvarying.

  She would awaken in the morning. Three times a week, Smith would bring a bowl to her room and let her wash her face and hands. Then Smith would unlock the chain that connected to the metal ring bolted on her ankle. She would go down the stairs with the other women, sit in rows at the tables, and eat a bowl of porridge. Most days, she and the other women were served from a common bowl, but on other days her porridge came to the table already in a bowl. On those days, she ate as little as possible. Sometimes she had to avoid eating on regular days, so that they would not figure out that she knew the pattern. She grew thin.

  After breakfast, whether she ate the porridge or not, she would work first in the kitchen, once more a scullery maid. If she were too good at washing, she would never be allowed to do anything else, so she had to work to splash the water on the floor or to bang the pots together loudly enough that the Cook cursed at her clumsiness. Tea was always safe because she ate it in the kitchen, but it was rarely more than a biscuit and cup of tea.

  Every other afternoon, she would scrub the floors alone, working her way through the whole house once a week. On the other afternoons she would work in the kitchen garden. Though the days were growing cold, there were late plants to harvest and beds to prepare for spring.

  Each day before it grew dark, she would walk in the garden with the other patients, making slow circles around its edges under the watchful gaze of Smith or one of the other nurses. She knew each crack in the garden wall, each place where she might find a handhold. She had looked out each window in the house as she mopped the floors, trying to learn the lay of the land beyond the asylum, trying to find a way out. She hadn’t been able yet to find one.

  In the evenings, the mistress would read from deportment books or from revivalist sermons while the able-bodied inmates embroidered in the half-dark of the firelight. Lucy found it strange that the matron would read long lists of how to behave at a ball when her audience largely would never have occasion to attend one. The matron would sell the best of their embroidery at a shop in London, so those who were particularly accomplished sewed all day under the matron’s watchful eye. Lucy had realized that she would never find a way of escape if she were too accomplished at the needle, so she sewed poorly. Each time she made her stitches uneven or knotted the thread, the matron hit her knuckles hard with a ruler, leaving bruises across the backs of her fingers and hand. But she kept up the illusion until eventually the matron was convinced she lacked the ability to improve, and she was trusted only with the most rudimentary repairs.

  While her work was often sloppy, no one could fault h
er for being disagreeable. In each task, she acted as if she were a bit dim. Meekly apologetic, she never fought back, but instead stood quietly awaiting each blow.

  She was afraid, afraid she would have to spend her life here, unremembered, unknown, called by a name that wasn’t her own. The worn hands she had been so proud of at Nell’s only lent truth to her cousin’s tales. No lady would have the hands of a scullery maid.

  * * *

  She learned quickly that it was safest to agree and, when she couldn’t simply agree, to say nothing at all. To bow her head and appear contrite. Silence was safety.

  The trick was to avoid offending the mistress. Yet this was harder than one might imagine.

  The cold made her fingers clumsy, as did lack of food. If she fell asleep at her sewing frame, she awoke to the hard rap of a switch on her fingers and a lecture on the sins of laziness. The cold made the switch ache to her bones, but if she cried out, more punishment followed.

  Matron believed that stern discipline would lead her guests to lives of useful domesticity. She’d been told that Lucy was headstrong and lazy, so she did everything to beat both qualities out of her charge. Whether her charge complied from exhaustion or beatings, the matron didn’t care.

  * * *

  Moll was howling again and beating her head against the wall. Luckily, since the last time, when Moll had tried to strangle her, they had allowed Lucy to move to another corner of the room, one where Moll couldn’t reach her.

  “She relives the happy moments does our Molly. She sings to her babe, welcomes her man home. They both died in a fire, and Molly was the only one got out.” Smith carried new straw for Moll’s bed. “They say she tried to throw herself into the flames, but some cruel man passing by thought it would be better for her to live than die that day. He held her back, and her mind broke with sorrow. She lives in a past that’s better than her present. But if I were her, I would too. If I could find a happy moment in the past, instead of this place, I would want to hold on to it. For her, we’re the nightmare.”

  “Will I go mad?” Lucy was afraid even to voice the words.