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The Reluctant Rogue by Elizabeth Powell
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Lady Sparrow by Barbara Metzger
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A Spinster’s Luck by Rhonda Woodward
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The Traitor’s Daughter by Elizabeth Powell
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A Lord for Olivia by June Calvin
The Golden Feather by Amanda McCabe
One Touch of Magic by Amanda McCabe
A Homespun Regency Christmas
Regency Christmas Wishes Anthology
SIGNET REGENCY ROMANCE
The Wedding Journey
Carla Kelly
InterMix Books, New York
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not have any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE WEDDING JOURNEY
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Signet Books edition / December 2002
InterMix eBook edition / January 2013
Copyright © 2002 by Carla Kelly.
Excerpt from Libby’s London Merchant copyright © 1991 by Carla Kelly.
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ISBN: 978-1-101-57891-9
INTERMIX
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ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
This book is lovingly dedicated to the surgeons
in Wellington’s Marching Hospitals
and
Edward J. “Bud” Hagan, MD (1916-2008)
Combat Surgeon, U.S. Navy, with the
First Marine Division, South Pacific 1943-45.
“One must always get over heavy ground as lightly as possible.”
—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Libby’s London Merchant
About the Author
Prologue
Captain Jesse Cameron Randall, assistant surgeon of Marching Hospital Number Eight, was no lover of paperwork, but he had no trouble declining an invitation from his brother officers to drink up the dead ration that always signaled the beginning of a retreat. Even using the argument that the bottles would be an encumbrance, it struck him as unseemly to polish off the liquor and wine belonging to officers who had died during the campaign. Somehow, toasting “Glorious War” and then downing the booze of dead men smacked of more hypocrisy than he cared to tote about.
Besides, everyone would be required to give a toast. Yes, he was shy, but more than that, his quiet toast of “Do no harm,” had dampened other such gatherings. Do no harm. Eight years ago in 1804, with another company of practitioners, he had recited the Hippocratic Oath in the cathedral adjacent to the University of Milan. It was his own toast to death, and after all these years, he had drunk his fill of it. He preferred to stay under Number Eight’s canvas and finish his reports.
Thinking of hypocrisy, he smiled to himself, and knew he was the biggest hypocrite in Wellington’s Peninsular army. Paperwork be damned; he wanted to keep Nell Mason in view. Elinore Ophelia Mason, to be accurate, he amended, a grandiose name for the compact young lady preparing a plaster at the other end of the tent. He loved her. Even the occasional glance in her direction was balm in Gilead, here on the outskirts of boring, disgusting, irritating Burgos. He knew it was love; he never doubted it.
Rain had thundered down for three days now, dratted rain. S
omewhere in normally parched Spain, he was certain there were farmers lighting candles in gratitude. He took no pleasure in it, not after a frantic camp follower had rushed into Number Eight yesterday, carrying her toddler, blue and suffocated from falling in the mud and unable to right herself. He had tried for an hour to resuscitate the little one, long after the chief surgeon, Major Sheffield, gave his shoulder a shake. He hated the mud.
The only bright spot in the whole, dismal affair was his relief that Nell didn’t see him fail. Her own mother was ill with camp fever. By the time she learned of the incident from Dan O’Leary, chief hospital steward, the baby had already been taken to the dead tent. She had cried anyway.
Jess put down his dip pen. Rain had first called his attention to Nell Mason seven years ago in Canada, his first posting with the division. In autumn on a rainy day much like this one, he had watched two children digging in the mud by their tent. Tired from duty in the fever tent, it had taken him awhile to realize that they were trying to spade out a trench around the family tent to keep the rain out.
Major Sheffield had come over to stand beside him, and swore. “Blast and damn! Why can’t Bertie Mason look after his own?” In a moment he had summoned two privates from Number Eight to dig the trench. The boy was frankly embarrassed and ducked his head. The girl gathered her soaking cloak around her and picked her way to stand beside Sheffield, inclining her head toward him for a small moment and then hurrying away.
“You wait, now,” Sheffield had told him as they removed their cloaks later in their tent. “Tomorrow there will be a little something just inside the tent.”
Sure enough, when he had opened the tent flap in the morning, he stared down at a blue bead, which he handed to Sheffield. With a smile, the chief surgeon took out a strand of similar beads from an inside pocket, unknotted the string, and added it. “She is scrupulous about paying for help,” he had said, then held up the little necklace to the light. “When I feel all puffed up, I like to pull this out and think about the widow’s mite. Help’um when you can, lad. No one else will.”
That was his introduction to the Masons and endless camp gossip about Bertram and Audrey Mason, two sillies with no more income than a captain of foot, who lived precariously one step ahead of their creditors. In that hypocrisy peculiar to the officer corps, he had watched officers’ wives ignore Audrey Mason, and admonish their children not to play with Will or Nell.
Even now, eight years and a continent later, he remembered when the blue beads ran out. He had left the butt end of a roast, crispy-cooked, outside the Masons’ tent, something hardly worth mentioning. In the morning, Nell had come to Number Eight in tears, brushing past him to stand before his superior, who knelt beside her.
“I have no more beads, sir,” she had whispered to Sheffield while Jesse eavesdropped shamelessly.
The starkness of that memory made him pick up the pen again to continue the death report. Then he put it down, not sure, even after eight years, which was the lesser of two evils. In his own youth, or ignorance, he had almost told the Chief to give her back the beads, so the game could begin again. A closer look told him volumes about the character of the little girl standing so close to Sheffield. The matter was deeply real to her. The realization of just how much the Mason children needed the surgeons’ little favors came like a slap.
As he watched, Sheffield had eased himself onto a stool and took Nell on his lap. “I have a better idea,” he told her. “You can come to work for me. We’re always in need of a good sweeping out, and Will could carry rubbish to the burn pit.”
She nodded, the shame gone, but replaced by hesitation. “I might be afraid,” she said.
“No need, lass,” the Chief had told her. “You and Will may only come here when I say so.” He seemed to understand her hesitation. “I need your help! So does our good king.”
Jesse had watched in amusement then as she seriously considered Sheffield’s adroit appeal to her patriotism.
“You are certain?”
“Never more so. You must come when either I or Captain Randall here call you.”
She had nodded and left the tent then. Sheffield held up his hand, ready to ward off an argument. “Jesse, don’t tell me they’ll be seeing life in the rough in Number Eight! They will be warm here and dry, and we always have food, even when Bertie Mason gambles away his pay.”
“But…”
Sheffield only shook his hand, the gesture as clear as yesterday to Jess as he sat staring at the papers in front of him. “No arguments! A marching hospital is not a bad place to grow up. You might, too. Stranger things have happened.”
Chapter One
I must ask you, Chief, if I grew up, he thought, returning to his paperwork. He stirred the ink, cursed the titans of red tape, and glanced down the tent to Nell Mason, eighteen now, as she warmed a bit of plaster on the portable hob. Two parts each of powdered lead monoxide, pork lard, and olive oil, he thought, and one part Nell Mason.
He got up and walked the length of the tent to observe as she efficiently rolled the plaster pill around the hob with a wooden spatula until it was the right consistency. She flipped it onto the little slab of marble, then flattened it onto the two layers of gauze that he obligingly anchored with his fingers. Two strokes measured the precise thickness. She looked at him then. “Should I?”
“Of course,” he told her. “Private Hornsby would be dashed disappointed if I applied that plaster, Nell. He might decline and die.”
She laughed. “Doctor, no one dies from a plaster!”
He smiled, and watched as she sat on a stool by the lucky private. Carefully she drew the edges of the wound together, then applied the little plaster down its length. While she held the plaster in place as it hardened, she kept up a soothing conversation with the private, which rendered him speechless with shyness.
When the little plaster was hard and firmly in place to Nell’s satisfaction, she stood up, and remained there a moment, her hands together. Jess smiled. The private practically writhed like a puppy under her calm gaze. When she could see nothing else to do, she twitched up the blanket a little higher around the man’s shoulders, then returned to her perch by the medicine chest.
He hadn’t been around to watch her turn from a fetching little girl into a lovely woman. Before another month was out in Canada, Jess found himself on a frigate bound for Jamaica with a portion of the division. The rest of Picton’s Third had been posted to Portugal after Boney started taking such an interest in the place. Like the others in Jamaica, Jess chafed to follow the action. The call came finally.
He went home to Dumfries briefly, grateful to be free of the feverish islands after four years. He happily became reacquainted with his parents, admired the family estates, kilted up and danced a jig with his older brothers and their pretty wives. He couldn’t tell them why he liked his army life, so different from their own quiet ways; they never expected much eloquence from him, so it hardly mattered.
His arrival in Lisbon couldn’t have been better timed. Wellington and his army were chafing behind the lines of Torres Vedras, eager for spring and another chance at the French. There was the inevitable typhus to contend with, and what David Sheffield always called “stupid wounds” from an army careless and tired of inaction.
And there was Nell Mason again. He had thought of her now and then in Jamaica. Sheffield had given him a blue bead from his stash when he left Canada for Jamaica, with the mild reminder to look at it occasionally and remember to help others.
He had met Sheffield in Lisbon, and spent a pleasant evening drinking port and catching up on division news. “Will and Nell?” he asked finally.
Sheffield leaned back and shook his head when the waiter offered more port. “Will’s at Cambridge.”
“What? Surely Bertie Mason never came out of an alcoholic stupor and noticed that he had a son with brains?”
“Alas, no. Bertie’s parents told their son that they would educate Will, perhaps in the hope that he mig
ht amount to something.” He stared at the port remaining in his glass. “He won’t disappoint them.” He sighed. “Nell cried to see him go.”
“Surely she’s married by now? Or maybe not. She’s but sixteen, eh?”
“Aye, lad. No, she’s not married, even though she is the prettiest little thing.”
“Why ever not, then?” Jess remembered her earnest blue eyes, and the intense way she swept the tent, as though the fate of nations depended upon it. Charming in that way of eleven-year-olds, but he couldn’t really see her as grown up.
“Would you want Bertie Mason for a father-in-law?”
“Good God, no,” Jess said fervently. “Poor Nell.”
“You understand.” Sheffield leaned back with a sigh. “Now you’re going to ask me if she still sweeps out the hospital tent.”
“I suppose I am,” he said, amused.
“She does more,” Sheffield said simply. “At Talavera, I had such need of her.”
“God, no!” Still in Scotland, peacefully fishing his father’s favorite stream, he had heard of Talavera: three days of heat and death, with fires licking at the wounded.
“The assistant surgeon who replaced you froze and couldn’t do a damned thing,” Sheffield said, his eyes stern with the memory. “Dan O’Leary—you remember my steward?—edged him aside and took over, and Nell took Dan’s place with me.”
Jess was quiet for a long moment. “It’s so irregular.”
“It’s damned irregular!” End of outburst. Looking slightly embarrassed, Sheffield, stared down again. He spoke after a long moment. “We’ve been training her to do Dan’s little jobs, and he’s been assisting me. I know you’re here now, but I want Dan to help both of us. He has the gift, lad, same as you.”
It was a compliment of blinding proportions, unlooked for, and in Jess’s opinion, undeserved, but he knew better than to protest. Savor the moment, Jesse, he told himself with a smile. You know that Sheffield will be on you first thing in the morning for some infraction or other.
Or maybe not, he thought, as he looked at his mentor. Maybe I did grow up. He thought about the earnest little girl he remembered. And maybe I should allow Elinore Ophelia Mason the same opportunity.
Carla Kelly Page 1