Jess wanted to laugh at the astonishment on Bones’ face, but the moment was too highly charged. The major took the money in the handkerchief, staring at it as though he expected pus to ooze from the folds. “My God,” Bones exclaimed, breathing the word in a way that made the hair stand on Jess’s neck. “She still needs an escort, Mason, now that your wife is dead. I aim to be that man.”
“You’re too late, Major,” Captain Mason said calmly. There was nothing of defeat in his voice now; Jess could hardly recognize his tone. “Captain Randall here married my dear one this afternoon.”
Jess wished he had leisure to analyze the finality and triumph in Captain Mason’s voice. What a weak man you are, he marveled to himself. I can almost think that you truly are giving a thought to Elinore now, when it is too late.
“By God, you’re joking,” Bones said, his voice more a growl than human speech.
“Not at all. When he thought—as I am certain everyone in our division thought—that Bertie Mason would not come through again, he married my girl,” Mason said. “You’re too late.”
Jess had cause to reflect, in the coming weeks, on the mischief three words could do. As he heard them coming in undisguised relief from Captain Mason, he knew that Major Bones’ cup of bile—already full—ran over. He waited for Bones to slap him down to a bleeding nubbin.
Bones did nothing, even though the small room seemed almost to swell with his anger. He stared at the money handkerchief in his hand, and then at Jess. The tension was so palpable that Harper left his post by the door and came into the room.
“Captain Randall, you will regret this.”
What will you do to me? Jess thought wearily. There are some rules in our society, rough as it is, and even you have to abide by them. “I love her,” he said quietly. “I always have.”
Bones smiled then, and it was an awful sight. “Hold that thought,” he replied, his voice low and filled with menace. He left the room quietly, his face a study in control. The men in the room each heaved a sigh of relief. “Well, that was better than I thought, Jess,” Mason said finally. He stood there a long moment, as if wondering what to do.
“I believe your company needs you,” Jess reminded him gently.
“Oh, yes.” He extended his hand. “Do take good care of my daughter,” he said, and then shook his head, as if realizing how fatuous he sounded. “It will be the first time anyone has done so. What a novelty for her.” He made no effort to hide the shame in his voice. His eyes on the ground, Captain Mason left the house.
Jess walked back to the marching hospital in silence, Harper trailing along behind. The chief surgeon was in Number Eight. The last carton of supplies was tied with twine almost as carefully as though something was in it that would do any good. “We’ll be fine if we meet with no emergencies, Jess,” he said, his voice cheerful. “I am devoutly, fervently wishing for a retreat as boring as nature and war will allow. Do I ask too much?”
Jess smiled. “We can dream.” He looked at his wife, who sat by Jenks’ cot, her hand in his. “Ho, Jenks,” he called. “You’ll make me jealous.” He was rewarded with a blush from Elinore, and the sketch of a smile from the man who labored to breathe.
He made his rounds, and regretfully dismissed six more patients. He did not think Jenks would last out the week on a retreat. Two patients might improve—those two sitting up in their cots—if the rain would let up, and they could rest frequently. Restorative jellies would be nice, as well, he thought, and porridge with cream and the occasional egg. Oh, Hippocrates, did ever a surgeon blather on to you as I am doing now?
“What is our order of march?” he asked Sheffield.
The Chief looked up from the roster in his hand. “The Thirteenth Foot is moving out now, and the Tenth is coming behind them.” He looked closer at the roster in the failing light. “By morning, we will be escorted by our own favorite Eleventh.”
“Good,” Jess said fervently, thinking of his particular friends in that regiment, trusted men who watched his back when he was too busy to care for his own safety at Bussaco and Fuentes, and then Salamanca. Just knowing they would be marching with the Eleventh gave him his first peaceful moment since he said “I do” in the dead tent.
Sheffield came closer. “Dan and I will sleep here in the hospital tonight. You and Nell can have the tent.”
He couldn’t resist a smile at his mentor. “Chief, it’s going to be a long time before Elinore and I share a cot.”
Sheffield’s reply didn’t surprise him, but it did make him wish that through all these years of war and worry, he had been able to know the man better. “Jesse, would it surprise you to know that sometimes there is nothing finer than simply holding the hand of a lovely woman, or talking to her? I think you’re going to learn a lot from Nell.”
“More than she will learn from me?” he joked, touched at Sheffield’s interest.
The chief surgeon smiled back. “You really have no notion of how obvious your own integrity is, do you? Oh, don’t blush Jess. It’s true.” He came close enough to put his arm around Jess. “The only thing Nell needs to learn from you is that you will never let her down.”
“I won’t, you know,” he said quickly.
“See that you don’t.”
* * *
He usually liked that moment in a marching hospital before the lights went dim, when all the patients had been tended and everything had been put in order. He stood a long moment before Jenks’ cot. Dan already sat there, ready for the first watch. Jess touched his shoulder, and left the tent. He stood at the entrance to the sleeping tent for a long moment, wondering why he felt so uneasy, even during this twilight moment that usually brought him the most pleasure. He reckoned finally that there wasn’t much that Major Bones could do to him. Surely he had his own responsibilities on the retreat.
Elinore sat on the cot where the chief surgeon usually slept. His eyes went to the blue beads in her lap, and he sat down across from her on his own cot. “Did the Chief give those to you? He saved them all these years, and restrung them.”
Her eyes glistened with tears. “He said he would get me a better wedding present when we were all safe behind the lines again, Captain.” She let the beads click through her fingers. “I was awfully young then, wasn’t I?”
You’ve never been allowed to be young, my love, he thought. “Yes, you were. Elinore, you can call me Jesse or Jess now.”
“I will, eventually,” she said.
He was too tired to comment, and maybe a little irritated with himself. Silly you, he thought. You’re married a few hours under strange circumstances, and you think it will be Jess right off, no matter how many years she’s known you? He took off his shoes and lay down on the cot. There was so much he wanted to say to the lovely lady sharing the tent with him, but his eyes closed and he slept instead.
He slept soundly all night, only dimly aware of Elinore sleeping on the other cot, and then aware of nothing until the Thirteenth pulled out, and the Tenth pulled in. Or was it the Eleventh? Amazing how his tired mind could hear the rattle of chains and tack, the creak of leather, the suck and pull of heavy wheels rolling through mud, then filter it out.
He woke just as the sun was coming up. He glanced at Elinore curled up in the other cot, her breathing even and deep, then lay back to enjoy the moment of silence.
Silence. In one motion he was on his feet and out of the tent. The chief surgeon and Dan were ahead of him, standing by the opening to the marching hospital, staring as he was staring.
“Where are they?” he asked finally, his voice hoarse from sleep. “Where is the Eleventh?”
Sheffield said nothing for a long moment. His face appeared to drain of all color as he stared at the empty road, and the vacant clearing across it. “Dan, get me the roster,” he said. His voice sounded unfamiliar to Jess.
In another moment he held the retreat order in his hands. He read it again as Jess stood beside him, hardly breathing, then balled up the paper and lobbed it
into the middle of the road, where it quickly absorbed water from last night’s rain, and sank in a wagon wheel rut.
“Damned foolish of me,” he said finally, sounding more tired than if he had spent the day and night in surgery. “I must be getting old. I forgot that Major Bones was in charge of the order of march,” he said. “Jess, I fear we have been abandoned.”
Chapter Six
No one seemed to know what to say; maybe what had happened was too big for words. I must be awfully naive, Jess thought when his mind began to work again. It’s beyond me to think that a brother officer and an Englishman would do something so wicked.
Nell stood beside him, leaning against his shoulder and probably not even aware of it. Her face paled as she took in the emptiness around the marching hospital. “It was Bones, wasn’t it?” she said at last, and her voice sounded unfamiliar in its shock. He nodded, unable to trust his own voice.
“I am so sorry,” she said, then turned away from him and Sheffield. The shame in her voice lashed at his heart. As he watched, miserable, she moved closer to the road and stood there, apart from them, as the sky lightened.
When the sun had cleared the low mountains, he could see, strewn across the soggy road, remnants of clothing, some shards of crockery, and a few bare sticks that might have been furniture, all driven into the mud by gun carriages, wagons, marching men, and horses’ hooves. He only had to wonder for a minute what it was, because Elinore started to sob. She raised her skirt as though she was going to plunge into the quagmire after the pitiful fragments. He started for her, but she stopped.
He stood there, stymied by his own indecisiveness. He did not know whether he should go to Elinore, or leave her alone at the road’s edge. A great lot of good I have been doing her since our wedding, he thought as the Chief walked to the road and clasped an arm around his wife’s shoulder.
“Clever of him, and so simple really,” Sheffield said, his tone both bracing and conversational, perhaps to put Elinore at rest. “It couldn’t have been hard, especially in the dark, to let each regiment think it was being followed by another that would escort us. Clever.” The Chief kissed Elinore’s forehead. “My dear, you knew his measure far better than the rest of us, didn’t you? Well, good riddance to him is what I say.”
Elinore sighed. To Jess’s dismay, he could see nothing of the cheerful lady who served so faithfully in the marching hospital. He came closer to hear what she said against the chief surgeon’s chest. “Do you think we Masons are going to be bad luck forever, Chief?”
He thought then that Dan O’Leary must have given him a push forward, but he couldn’t be sure. He cursed his own shyness, but found his voice. “You’re a Randall now, Elinore,” he said when he got over his surprise at suddenly standing so close to his wife. “A Randall,” he repeated. The Chief stepped back and pointed Elinore in his direction. With so much encouragement, he had no qualms about taking her hand. “We Randalls have nothing but bonny luck. It’s written on our crest, Elinore: ‘Luck follows love.’”
“There you are then, dearie,” Sheffield said. He smiled at them both and then nodded to Daniel. “Come, lad! We’d better prepare our patients for travel.” He nodded to Jess. “I’m appointing you to figure out how we’re going to get out of here.” He winked. “Since you have all that luck, Captain Randall, eh?”
If his chief had told him to sprout wings and fly to the lines of Torres Vedras, he could not have been more surprised. Anger followed: How dare he give me the impossible task, Hippocrates? Shame tread on anger’s heels when he glanced down at the fear in his wife’s eyes. Humility traipsed along behind them both, eyes cast down as always. He thought of everything he had promised when he swore Hippocrates’ stupid oath. Nowhere did anything explain this situation, but the burden was his. So be it.
First things first; even Jenks and his labored breathing could wait for a moment. He draped his arm around Elinore’s slight shoulders and stooped a little to whisper in her ear. “Elinore, I don’t want you to doubt that I can do this,” he whispered. “I can tell you not to worry, but I know you will. I insist, however, that you don’t go into agonies about arriving at a solution by yourself. Let me do that now.”
She seemed to understand what he meant. “What can I do to help?” she whispered back, after a moment’s thought, her cheek still close to his, her lips near his ear this time.
Give her something to do. “Under my cot I have a cotton satchel like this leather one I carry my medicine in,” he told her. “Get in my trunk and figure out what I should transfer to the satchel. We’re all going to be traveling light.”
She nodded and went into the sleeping tent, leaving him with the larger problem. He wanted to follow her, sit on his cot, and wait for Sheffield to take charge. He wanted to feel sorry for himself, but a larger thought intruded and would not leave. Obviously he thinks I can make order out of this mess, he told himself. Perhaps I can.
Thoughtfully, he walked around the marching hospital, looking for a solution. Bones had left nothing behind that would be of any use, except the tent and all the cots inside. And that was it, pure and simple. “Well, now,” he said out loud.
He was back in his tent in a moment. Elinore looked up in surprise. She held up one of his shirts. “These are all disgraceful,” she scolded. “Didn’t you ever go to a party in Lisbon? I know why I am shabby, but why are you so shabby?”
He had the grace to feel a twinge of embarrassment. “I’d really rather flop on my cot with a good book, Elinore,” he told her. “Even in Lisbon. Oh, especially in Lisbon.” He grinned at her. “And now you’re regretting your marriage to such a boring man, I vow.”
She said nothing, returning no answer beyond a blush. She looked so darling there with his shirts in her hands that he wanted to touch her in places anatomical and see if she reacted as his lecturer on partes della femina predicted. He did not doubt that he had the touch, which brought a blush to his own face.
Back to the problem, or rather, its solution. “Elinore, come with me now. I need an interpreter.”
She asked no questions, but dropped the shirts on his cot and followed him from the tent. He told himself that he took her hand to hurry her along, but he knew he just wanted to feel that much of her.
It was a short walk through muddy streets to the alcalde’s headquarters. He didn’t know what it was constructed of, but the whole structure seemed to be peeling. A sharp rap on the door brought the alcalde himself, looking impatient and ready to be disagreeable, rather like a burdened relative who has been praying for his houseguests to leave, and feeling no patience for the stragglers remaining.
Before he had a chance to close the door on them, Jess greeted him in Spanish and asked to come inside. “We are allies,” he reminded the Spaniard pointedly, and it gained them entrance, although not the offer of a seat or a glass of wine. Never mind; he didn’t require niceties. He had explained the whole matter to Elinore on the walk. He looked at her, and she began at once.
She had a lovely accent, and Jess found himself doubly impressed. Who, he reasoned, would ever turn down such a sweet-faced lady?
It appeared to be a hard bargain. Elinore stated her case, and listened to the return flow from the alcalde. She inclined her head toward Jess. “He says he will give you a wagon for the tents and cots, but not a single horse. He says he has none to spare.”
“He’s a liar,” Jess whispered back. “What good is a wagon without horses?”
She returned to the bargaining. Don’t promise him too much, Jess thought. “He will not budge beyond a wagon. In fact, he wants to know what is stopping him from taking the whole lot after we leave? He reminds us that the French are just waiting behind the walls of Burgos for us to leave.”
“Please tell the old wind satchel that we are still allies—in case he has forgotten—and that I promise to put a torch to the tent and the cots, rather than give them up.”
She turned her charm upon the alcalde again, but even Jess could tell that
the man had no other offer to make. Without bothering to wait for her translation, he told her to take the man’s offer. “And tell him to bring the wagon to the marching hospital right away.”
“We still don’t have any horses, Captain,” she reminded him when they left.
He tightened his grip on her fingers. “My dear, I am about to engage in real skullduggery. Please look away. It is probably too much to ask you to stop your ears. Harper!” he called as they neared the tent. “I want you now!”
I can’t believe I am about to do this, he thought as the private threw back the tent flap and gave another of his patently slovenly salutes. “Harper, you are to find me two horses. I don’t care how you do it. If you squirreled away any of the QM’s money when I wasn’t watching, use that. If your pockets are as to let as mine, just get me horses. Take Wilkie.” He thought a moment. “In fact, you may exchange him for horses.”
Harper laughed. “Who’d want’im? Sir, you told me I was never to do anything underhanded again,” he reminded Jess virtuously.
“What a fool I was, Private,” Jess replied. “Overlook it, please. Now, do it.”
With a grin of absolute understanding, Harper sloped off. Jess took Elinore’s hand again and went back to his tent. As she watched, he picked out the best shirt and trousers among his tatters, one book of surgery in Italian that he could not bear to part with, a pair of shoes, and his comb and toothbrush. He crammed them in the canvas satchel and picked up his overcoat.
“You will take your rosary,” she said, putting it in the satchel.
“I am not much of a Catholic,” he told her.
“You might want it,” she said calmly. “And this bay rum.”
“Oh, my dear, I don’t need that,” he said in protest.
“I like it.”
Oh, you do? he asked himself. I had no idea. “Very well. I hate to disappoint the ladies.”
The alcalde’s men brought the wagon and immediately began to dismantle the tent. Jess could hardly hide his disappointment at the wagon, a miserable affair with wobbly wheels and only room for two stretchers. The axles and wheels were entirely of wood and looked drier than bones. (Oh, dreadful word.) Well, it will not be a silent retreat from Number Eight of the Peninsular Royal Medical Corps, he thought.
Carla Kelly Page 8