Elisabeth Fairchild (22 page)

Wrapped in the sheet, Dulcie went to the window, fear coloring the room, her words. “Horsemen at every opening onto the field.” Two of the mounted men were thrown ignobly from the saddle, beast mastering man.

Roger murmured an oath. With ungainly, hopping gait he stepped into his boots, flung open the door, and clattered down the stairs. Below, the rocks found their mark, thumping soundly the flanks of a handful of horses.

Clouds of angry grey bloomed above the crowd. A handful of voices on the periphery hissed and booed and laughed at the fallen. An officer barked an order. In response the militia gave an unintelligible shout, drew sword and rattled curved sabers at the crowd.

“Lord help us!” Dulcie whispered as the hissing and booing grew louder. A pocket of brick red loomed above a number of young men, afoot in the crowd, clutching stones. A lad threw a brick, an order rang out.

“Disperse the crowd!”

Rearing, squealing, kicking at the air as pain rained down, the rank of mounted men lost all semblance of order. Into their chaos, a bugle sounded. Horrible in implication, the sound hung suspended above angry faces for a breath-stopping moment.

Swords raised, the militia sounded a fresh shout and urged restless mounts forward, haunches bunched--into the packed wall of bodies--into the crowd.

Dulcie fell to her knees, one hand at her throat. Below, rose a dreadful din of dismay. Shrieks. Howls. Like sheep before a pack of wolves the crowd bunched and ran. Horses snorted, wall-eyed, heads high, hard pressed to move, despite the dig of spurs. Too many people in their way. The militia, mindless in their rage, swung sword at those who blocked their way, scything down a human crop, grim reapers. The sun winked on blades gone crimson.

Banner strung hustings and colored flags were slashed, poles hacked to pieces. The speakers fled for their lives.

The crowd, incensed, great in number if not in armaments, fought back with whatever came to hand: sticks, stones, their bare hands. Dulcie grabbed up wet and wrinkled clothing, flinging herself into it.

A second wave of horsemen rode in from the opposite side of the field, swords raised, bugles sounding. Battle-hardened, the 15th Hussars, a flood of blue and crimson, poured from the narrow street onto the field, white braid glinting in the sun, feathered, red-bagged fur caps too jaunty, too cheerful for their purpose.

Darting to the window to watch the melee below as she buttoned, Dulcie determined, as Roger had before her, to do something, anything, to change the unfolding disaster.

She noticed the blood as she stepped into her petticoat. A bright trickle on one leg.

“For shame! For shame!” A woman in the crowd shouted. Dulcie stood frozen, a profound stillness in the midst of chaos as the crowd scattered geese-like before the Hussar. She turned her head, witnessed Roger pushing an old woman from the path of the horsemen. The flash of a sword sliced downward on Roger’s upflung arm. A galloping horse rammed his shoulder, toppling him, trampling him, his body flung beneath the hooves.

She avoided looking at the bright badge of shame on her leg. For shame. For shame. Downstairs she plunged, fighting her way against the stream of people who panicked and fled the field of screams and moans.

Linking arms with a stunned woman who paused to catch her breath, she shouted, “Doors! We need doors. We must help the wounded.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

St. Peter’s Field

“Retreat!”

The call echoed the length of the field, stilling hoofbeats, the noise replaced by the champ of bits, the blowing wheeze of lathered horses, and under it all, a strange chorus, the low moan of the wounded.

“Dismount!”

With a creaking of leather the militia stepped down to loosen girths, wipe clean bloody blades, to observe the fruits of their strange harvest. Hundreds littered the field, too many to count. Tattered banners, slipped shoes and shawls, parasols and hats dotted the grass. Dazed survivors struggled to rise.

Dulcie helped half a dozen of the stunned and bloodied to their feet and directed the doors she had requested brought onto the field to carry away the wounded. Many who had fled, returned to assist with the wounded. In passing two sturdy chaps, who bore away a third, she recognized Roger among the fallen.

Blood stained his sleeve crimson. More blood wet his hair, his brow gashed.

“He is not dead?” she cried. Roger’s hand hung limp. His head lolled. He looked dead. And yet, his chest rose and fell, a pulse beat at his throat.

“Is he kin?”

“My brother,” she murmured, taking refuge in their ruse. “Will you help me get him to our room? There.” She pointed.

Up the stairs they carried him. Then away they went to help others. Hundreds still lay groaning in the field.

Dulcie let them go, tore up a sheet to stop the flow of blood, ran into the street to beg a lad to fetch her water, strangely heartened when he refused the coin she offered.

Help came from unexpected quarters. A woman who had watched as Roger was carried upstairs offered rolls of linen for bandages, another introduced herself as Mrs. Long and asked if Dulcie required anything from the market.

Dulcie made a list: carrots, cabbage, onions, garlic, yarrow, basil and thyme. Also, comfrey, catnip and lemons, though they were sure to be dear. Mrs. Long nodded at each of her requests, took the coins Dulcie offered, and returned within the hour bearing a great string bag full of all that she required.

Dulcie heated water at the little fireplace, and saw to the stripping of Roger’s torn and bloodied clothes. She worked quickly, careful of cuts and bruises, focus fixed on discovering exactly where gashes tore the skin, where the horse’s hooves had pummeled his flesh.

Though his head ran with blood, it was his arm worried her. The gash ran deep and long. Even bound, it soaked through the bandages to stain the bedding, frightening in its very brilliance, tinged blue in her eyes by the leaking of Roger’s life force. She wondered if he would lose movement in the hand.

She pulled out the tiny sewing kit she had brought along with her and carefully threaded the needle. She must sew the gash together, just as he had sewn the gashes on her back. How did one go about stitching human flesh? Her hand shook at the prospect. He deserved a steady hand, even stitches, done while he lay unconscious to spare him additional pain.

Jaw set, she unbound the newly made bandage. How terrible to see beautiful, muscular flesh savaged. Biting her lip, jaw set, she made the first stitch, determined her hands must stop shaking, must do the job neatly.

The water ran red before she finished. Her hands and clothing were spotted with blood. Exhausted, she leaned back, eyes closed, dashing sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. No time for hysterics, no time to allow tears to flow. Mrs. Long returned from the market. Dulcie busied herself cleaning and cutting carrots, cabbage, onions and yarrow.

The whole mixture Dulcie heated like soup in a pot on the fire, indeed Dulcie took more than one meal from the broth, but its primary purpose served as a source of poultices. Cooked to limpness, the vegetables were wrapped around the wound, bound in place with clean linen, changed out as they cooled. The angry swollen areas where he had been stepped on by the horse, she painted with an infusion of catnip. A leech would have to be called for if the swelling got worse.

As she applied these aromatic concoctions she took time to study the man as well as the damage done. She owned great fascination, after all, in touching the body she had begged to take her innocence.

He woke, shouting, “No! Stop!”

Startled, she threw linens over his nakedness, guilt burning in her cheeks.

He woke from the memory of screams, the sound of hoofbeats, the sight of a boy on horseback, an old woman who moved too slowly as the horse bore down upon her, grass clods thrown from it’s hooves. He had scooped up the old woman, and swung her out of the way. Arm raised, he had cried out to the horseback boy--peach fuzz on his cheeks--the clerk from the jewelers in London all got up in uniform--the boy who had died in his arms. “No! Stop!” Arm raised, he had taken the blow, blade arcing against the light--so bright a light--he must close his eyes.

He opened them, not to blue skies and glinting blade, but to white ceilings and ecru walls. He lay not in St. Peter’s Field, but in bed trying to remember taking off his clothes, trying not to wince as he moved, trying to roll to one side because his organ tented the sheets, and Dulcie Selwyn stood beside the bed looking down at him.

His prick! His damnable prick got him into this fix in the first place. He should have been in the field from the start, not plowing Dulcie Selwyn’s fields in this bed, in this room, stealing what she had once confided she meant to save for her husband.

He could not roll in the one direction, to hide his unruly animal need. A bulky poultice on his arm got in the way. He could not roll the other way. His thigh was stiff, his head pained by an egg shaped lump at the temple. The horse. He remembered a horse had trod on him.

Humiliation overtook him. Anger rose, even as his pillock wilted. He felt a wave of relief as she turned her back to him that she might stir a bubbling pot on the hob.

“Thirsty?” she asked, reaching for a pitcher.

“What happened?

“You were trampled.”

He waved impatiently toward the window. “How many hurt?”

“There is no official count.”

“How many?”

“Four, perhaps five hundred,” she said bluntly.

His mind refused to take it in. So many! “Dead?”

“Nine that I know of. One, a woman.”

“Good God!” Wincing he tapped the bandage. “How bad?”

“Saber cut. Deep and long,” she said. “You may lose movement. I am more worried about it festering.”

“What is this?” He cast aside what looked like cabbage leaves in the midst of the bandages.

“A poultice. You must allow it to do its work.”

He stared at the long line of neat, blue-threaded stitches. “You did this?”

She nodded.

He closed his eyes, bothered, not by the pain of his arm so much as the pain in his heart. Hundreds! He should have been on the field. He might have stopped it.

His was a soul in torment. She read the ebb and flow of his light, knew he blamed himself for the deaths, for the injured. He proved a difficult patient.

He tossed and turned on the bed, first hot, flinging away coverlets and then cold, insisting she did not keep the fire stoked high enough.

He did not wish to lie abed when the fever abated, suspiciously eyed her every concoction, she put on his wound or expected him to drink.  She read to him of the riot at St. Peter’s Field. Every paper bulged with “true” and “eyewitness” accounts. They were calling the massacre, Peterloo. The final figures were in. Between four and six hundred had been wounded, eleven were dead, two women.

A full report was released under the inflammatory heading of
“A full, true, and faithful account of the inhuman murders, woundings and other monstrous cruelties exercised by infernals upon an unarmed and distressed people.”

The nation was outraged. No rage left in him, no passion of any kind, Roger turned to stone. He wished nothing more than to turn his back on the event, on Manchester, on Dulcie.

“It is not your fault, you know,” she said one especially trying afternoon.

“It?” he repeated coldly, deliberately obtuse.

She waved a hand toward the window. “The riot. The dead. The injured. You could not have stopped it.”

“You do not know that.” He pinned her with a frigid glare. “If I might have saved even one . . .”

“You would have died trying? You almost did die catching a blow meant for someone else?”

He said nothing.

“You are a fine man, Roger Ramsay, a gentleman devoted to king and country. Do not torment yourself like this. Do not make tawdry that which we shared.”

“I have wronged!” he bit out. “Passion ruled me as much as passion ruled those who struck down the innocent. I was not where I should have been.”

“We have wronged,” she said softly. “I will not allow you to hold yourself completely accountable.”

“I seduced you,” he said harshly.

“I knew what I did.”

“I know better.”

“I have feelings for you. This bond --”

He broke in flatly, impassively. “Do not go on! I have little room for feelings in my life, still less for marriage. You must not fall in love--too easily.”

The words smashed her like glass. She stood before him splintered. All this time, she had believed he shared her intensity of feeling--that he would not, otherwise, have been able to do to her the things he had done.

“Your warning comes too late,” She turned away, could not face him. “I have already fallen.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

August 18, 1819

The Road to London

He insisted they must leave, make all haste back to London, a quiet trip, and somber. His arm pained him with every bump in the road, but he said nothing. It seemed only fair to him that he should suffer. A man who breaks the heart of innocence and trust, of the first bloom of passion in a young woman’s heart, should suffer.

His arm, flesh tender and enflamed, he likened to her heart, and so he said nothing of blood, of pus, of the bandages he changed, of the weariness with which he faced each dawn after sleepless nights.

Her sensibilities were injured. She avoided his eyes, avoided moments alone in his company, avoided speaking to him in anything more than monosyllables. He learned to know her profile well.

He felt the cad, was the cad, found all sight of her reminded him again and again of his churlishness. She played the lop-eared pup; he the booted brute who kicked her. He could not be rid of her fast enough, could not reach London and their moment of separation too soon. He did not like the sight of himself reflected in her wounded blue eyes. Pained and weary, it took every ounce of strength left in him to remain civil.