He remembered reveille and muster on the morning of September ninth. For the most part, morale had been good, with only four soldiers absent when heads were counted. Of those, one had likely deserted during the previous night, for his tent mates reported he hadn’t been in his cot when they’d risen. Geoffrey privately expected the fellow would get away clean—it was far too easy to vanish in this vast, wild country—but ordered several search parties be sent out in hopes of running him down.
The second, a lance corporal in his twenties whom Geoffrey knew well enough to consider both trustworthy and reliable, was found in his tent, nursing a patently gangrenous foot. After delivering a harsh lecture about the foolishness of concealing illness or injury from one’s commanding officers, Geoffrey had him carried to the medical tent for treatment. The young man would probably lose the appendage. If he did, he would be sent back to England and never receive another shilling in payment for his service or his sacrifice. True, it would be the lad’s own fault for having been afraid to confess that he was hurt, but Geoffrey still thought the British government owed every permanently disabled soldier some small remuneration for his service.
The third was sound asleep in his cot. At first, it seemed the man had rendered himself insensible with too much drink, for there was a slight smell of whiskey about his person, and he did not so much as stir at the sound of raised voices. But when Geoffrey reached down and shook the man’s shoulder, he woke instantly and stared up in dazed but alert surprise. After several confused attempts at conversation, it became apparent the soldier had suffered a near-total hearing loss in one ear sometime during the previous day. He too was sent to the medics.
The fourth and final, however, was the one Geoffrey remembered the most vividly. A private on his first tour of duty, Frederick Carpenter couldn’t have been more than twenty. It had taken the longest to find him because, unlike the others, he hadn’t been in his tent, but instead in the privy tent, puking up what remained of undoubtedly vast quantity of gin he’d drunk the night before, along with what was left of his guts. Shelley wanted to put the young man up on disciplinary charges, but Geoffrey overruled him. The lad was staring down his first battle, and it wasn’t surprising he had over-imbibed. The natural consequences seemed punishment enough, although Geoffrey also ordered the young private to visit him that evening to discuss his transgression…and his fears.
Sadly, Geoffrey did not recall whether that conversation had ever taken place. And now, he did not even know whether the young private had survived his first battle.
Of all the things that rankled him about his current situation, it was his inability to discover the fate of his men—some of whom had been under his command for so long they were more like brothers than subordinates, and others so fresh and green that he almost thought of them as his children—that upset him the most. Those soldiers were his responsibility, and he had failed at his most basic task.
With a stifled curse, he forced himself to stop wallowing in useless recriminations and return to recounting the events of the last day he remembered.
That afternoon, there had been a scuffle between two men over the results of a dice game. Shelley had been the officer on the spot when the argument began. He’d made the damn fool mistake of intervening physically in the fight and had wound up taking an elbow to the nose. Geoffrey arrived just in time to see his second’s prominent proboscis spout an impressive quantity of blood. After commanding the combatants to cease and desist—an order both soldiers instantly obeyed—and meting out encouragement and punishment in appropriate measure, Geoffrey escorted Shelley to the medics for treatment.
The remainder of the day progressed much like any other with tactical drills, supply and weapons inspections and maintenance, and so on, but nothing remarkable occurred until that night’s senior officers’ meeting. Once again, the ground attack would have to be postponed for another full day, since conditions weren’t right for the fleet. The plan now was to commence the battle by both water and land on the morning of the eleventh. There was some grumbling among the officers at the delay, but they all knew winning the ground game would be useless if they didn’t also hold the lake to resupply.
And from there, everything was hazy. He must have left the officer’s meeting and returned to his tent to relax for an hour or so, as was his wont, but he couldn’t say he remembered having done so. One thing he was sure he did not remember was embarking on his usual nightly inspection of his battalion’s section of the encampment. Checking on the well-being of the soldiers under his command at the end of each day seemed to him as vital as ensuring they arrived fit for duty at muster each morning, so this had been part of his routine from the time he’d taken his first field command post. It wasn’t required of him, but he found the undertaking settled his nerves before he retired, and more than one of the soldiers under his command over the years had confided that it settled them, too.
Did the fact that he couldn’t remember starting on his rounds mean he had been attacked before then? Or had something happened while he had been making those rounds that had led to his injury? Or—and this was the most irritating possibility of all—had he actually been injured during the battle but had somehow lost nearly two days’ worth of memories instead of just a few hours?
What he needed, he decided as he sipped the very fine and undiluted cider and stared at the glorious landscape spread out before him, was to find a way to jog his memory. When he’d misplaced an object as a boy, his nurse had always told him to go back to where he’d been the last time he remembered having whatever he had lost. From there, he could retrace his steps and, most of the time, locate the missing object.
And he could do something similar here. Of course, he would have to convince Mrs. Farnsworth to take him to the site of the British encampment on the north side of the Saranac, and he wasn’t entirely certain how far that away was or how long it would take.
Not only that, but she might not deem it in her best interests for him to remember what had happened to him. She wanted his help with the apple harvest, and while he wasn’t convinced he was the best man for the job, he was likely better than no one, and also indirectly responsible for the fact that she was facing a shortage of labor. But if he could walk the area where the camp had been located, he might be able to piece together some of the events he’d forgotten.
So when a wagon became visible around the bend in the road toward the house, he rehearsed the speech he would use to convince her to take him to the spot where his last memories trailed off. It ended with, “In exchange for your help with this, I promise I will stay until the harvest ends or you can hire enough men that you no longer need me.”
He would worry later about whether what he learned, if anything, might lead him to break that promise. And about how he would bear to leave the woman who’d not only saved his life, but made that life seem vibrant and beautiful again.
Chapter Seven
“Anything?” Laura called from her perch on the wagon next to Daniel.
Langston had spent close to half an hour pacing the site of the British camp on the north side of the Saranac, periodically stopping to catch his breath, shake his head, or mutter to himself—and sometimes all three at once. Now he stood about ten yards away with his back to them, gazing intently down the embankment toward the river.
Glancing over his shoulder at her, he grimaced and shook his head. “Not a blessed thing. But…” Pausing, he looked at the slope again, and then added, “I see something that looks odd here.” He pointed for emphasis at the ground in front of him, but thanks to the slope and the distance, Laura couldn’t see the object.
Daniel shifted on the bench next to her and said under his breath, “How much longer is this going to take?”
She raised her hands in a helpless gesture. “As long as it does. It is a small sacrifice in exchange for his promise to stay and help with the harvest.”
If she’d had a choice, she would have left Daniel at home and brought Jos
eph instead, but driving through town with her Negro foreman and a strange white man had seemed like a good way to bring unnecessary and potentially unpleasant attention. Driving alone with a strange white man would have been even worse, of course, not to mention the obvious risks. It was one thing to trust Langston not to do her harm when he was still physically weak and there were two able-bodied men on the premises, but it was quite another to venture miles from home by herself with him now that he had mostly recovered. So she’d had to bring Daniel, and he hadn’t been happy about it. Especially when she’d informed him that they would not use this as an opportunity to surrender Langston to the forces at Fort Moreau despite the proximity of the military base to the location of the British encampment.
While she spoke, Langston took several steps down the bank and stooped to examine whatever had caught his interest. His spine stiffened noticeably as he studied the object. After several seconds, he stood up and turned to face the wagon again. His expression profoundly troubled, he held out a denuded tree branch about three feet long and three inches in diameter.
“It appears you were right, Mrs. Farnsworth. I was attacked on this side of the river and this—” he shook the stick, “—is what I was struck with.”
Her curiosity piqued, Laura moved to step down from the wagon. Daniel grabbed her biceps. “Mother,” he warned through gritted teeth.
She pulled her arm from his grasp. “For the love of heaven, you are right here,” she hissed. “He is not going to do me violence right in front of you, especially when he knows perfectly well you have a rifle with you.”
Her son rolled his eyes. “I don’t understand why you are so willing to give him the benefit of every doubt. From the day we found him, you have taken his part, right down to this fool’s errand.”
Not for the first time, Laura wished she hadn’t raised such a perceptive child. She was quicker to trust Langston than she should be, given who he was, but she could hardly tell Daniel why she was inclined to do so. That she liked the British officer in a way a young man might not wish to imagine his widowed mother capable of. “Why are you so unwilling to give him even the smallest credit? He could have killed us five times over by now if he’d wanted to. Instead, he has been nothing but courteous, grateful, and—as far as we can tell—honest with us.”
“As far as we can tell,” Daniel repeated ominously, but he made no further effort to prevent her from descending from the wagon.
Lifting her skirts to avoid trailing them in clumps of dirt, she met Langston as he climbed the slope with his discovery. As soon as she was close enough to make out details, she understood why he was so certain that this branch was the weapon that had felled him. A small clump of cider-colored hair clung to a patch of a viscous reddish-brown substance near the narrow end of the makeshift club.
Inhaling sharply, she met his gaze and winced, unable to keep from imagining what it must have felt like to be struck full force on the back of the head with such an implement. “You are lucky you survived.”
“I would not have if you hadn’t come along.” He tossed the branch aside and dusted his palms against one another. “And I still don’t remember a bloo—blessed thing about who struck me or why. It could have been any one of ten thousand British soldiers, but it also could have been an American. Nothing’s to say I didn’t interrupt some of your fellows sneaking across the river on a night raid.”
That particular explanation for his injury hadn’t occurred to her, but unless he actually remembered that this was what had happened, the speculation that he’d been attacked by an American soldier changed nothing. The possibility that he’d been harmed by one of his own men remained too likely to be dismissed. And there was still so much that made no sense.
“It is hard to understand how you ended up on the south side of the river, so far from here,” she said musingly as he strode up the embankment to meet her. “An American soldier would have had no reason to move you.”
Langston frowned and nodded his agreement. “That is certainly a puzzle. I can’t imagine I got up and wandered across the river myself after being struck by that.” He gestured at the branch. “Or that I got up again at all, to be honest. But I must have done, or else whoever hit me went to a great deal of effort to transport me all the way to where you found me.”
“It makes me wonder if he—or they, since it would take more than one person to carry you across the river—wanted you to be found. Though perhaps they did not think you would still be alive when that happened.”
His expression went blank for a few seconds as he considered this observation, and then he gave her a look of approbation that warmed her to her toes. And, well, other places. “You know, that makes a great deal of sense. Right by the road like that, someone was bound to find my corpse.” His cheeks puffed out with a breath he released slowly and heavily. “But why? That is what I cannot fathom. Not to mention how, because I can’t think of any rational reason for an American to do such a thing and it would be suicidal for a British soldier to try it.”
Laura was about to admit that she was as baffled as he when a loud whistle rang out.
Daniel.
She glared over her shoulder at her son. He rolled his hand in a hurry-up motion. Frowning, she held up her hand to indicate she wasn’t ready yet. Daniel’s shoulders drooped, and he mimed an exaggerated roll of his eyes.
“Pay him no heed,” she began, but Mr. Langston smiled and shook his head.
“No, no. I have kept you both long enough on a Saturday morning. And there is nothing more for me to learn here.”
He made to start the trek back to the wagon, but Laura laid her hand on his biceps to forestall him. A hot prickle of awareness sped up her arm and spread through her veins at the contact. Although there was nothing suggestive in the touch, her imagination flashed on an image so salacious that she nearly blushed. For in her mind’s eye, they were both naked, and the hard muscle beneath her hand was flexed to brace himself above her while he drove into her, again and again. She was so surprised by the specificity and vividness of the idea that she momentarily forgot her purpose.
Langston stopped and gave her a quizzical look. “Yes?” he asked mildly.
Her pulse fluttered weirdly in her throat, but she managed to keep her agitation from creeping into her voice. “What would you have done if you had remembered the who and why?”
His expression turned somber. “I suppose it would depend upon who and what the who and the why were.” The corners of his mouth deepened into a self-deprecating half smile, and he huffed out a short laugh. “That was certainly convoluted, wasn’t it?”
“I understood what you meant,” she assured him. “But what I want to know, I suppose, is whether you want to know the truth not just for your own safety, but so you can return to fighting this war against my country.”
“Ah.”
The single syllable contained more information than he probably intended to convey, but she understood instantly that she had probed something deep and raw by asking the question. He looked away from her, staring at the beaten ground upon which the British army had been camped less than two weeks ago. She let the silence stretch, hoping he would say more if she did not fill the empty space.
Finally, he met her eyes and said, “I am not anxious to fight this or any war.” He must have seen her doubt of this statement on her face, for he added, “This may be difficult for you to understand, but I was raised knowing I would be a soldier in much the same way I suppose your son has been raised knowing he will be a farmer. As a result, I never gave much consideration to doing anything else. The fact that being in the military would mean fighting wars and killing people was something I knew, but I didn’t truly understand that until my first battle.”
The gold in his irises flickered with emotion, but his expression remained blank. “That first battle almost broke me. I lost three dozen of the hundred men under my command, and it was a bloody pointless encounter that I knew even then would make no dif
ference in the outcome of the war. After it was over, my captain took me aside and explained two things to me about being a career officer. The first was that it was never my job to determine whether any particular battle or even the war as a whole was worth fighting. ‘Morality is for politicians,’ he told me. ‘If you try to figure out which battles and which wars are just, you’ll only drive yourself mad.’” He fell silent, obviously replaying the decades-old encounter in his mind.
Dear God in heaven, but he must have been so young. And to think he had needed to be so cynical in order to survive. “And the second?” she prompted.
His eyes flashed again, but this time, the emotion was more optimistic. Not happy, precisely, but confident. “Good soldiers—and especially good officers—fight only for each other. Not for king or country or cause, but to keep as many of our fellow men alive as we can until the people in charge of determining the morality of the thing decide it’s over.
“So, to answer your original question, I’m not anxious to fight this war against your country. I would much prefer that people in charge decide this war is over than to continue fighting it. What I am anxious to do is to learn the fate of the soldiers who were under my command. I would do almost anything to get back to Fort York so I can find out how they fared.”
“Yet you offered to surrender yourself to the American military, and they certainlywouldn't allow you to go back to Canada until this is over.”
Sleeping with the Enemy: Lords of Lancashire, Book 4 Page 5