Jane Feather - [V Series] (16 page)

Tamsyn shuddered, anger and hideous memory intermingling now to burn with a fierce, consuming flame. Her hand was on her knife, and she wished she had her rifle, not because she felt threatened herself, but because her rage was murderous as she saw what soldiers were doing to the inhabitants of Badajos. There were officers here and there, trying to stop the worst of the excesses, but the men, in the grip of wine and victory, were beyond their control.

Tamsyn saw two officers remonstrating with a ragtag group of infantrymen who were conducting an auction in the street. One of the items on the block was a young girl. A soldier fired his musket over the head of one of the officers, another leveled his weapon at the heart of the other. They were two against twenty drunken savages and were forced to retreat while Tamsyn watched from a doorway.

They turned and left, and she couldn’t blame them, but she stayed herself, waiting until the girl was sold for a ruby the size of a hen’s egg and, amid gales of laughter, tossed into the audience, into the arms of a burly rifleman with an eye patch.

The man carried off his prize, pushing through the crowd, making for a square at the end of the alley. Tamsyn followed, her deadly rage now focused on this
one episode. She couldn’t stop the wholesale savagery, but she would stop this.

The square was an aimless tumult as soldiers wandered in and out of the stores, where doors had been smashed, the iron bars ripped from ground-floor windows, goods spilling out onto the street.

The girl was keening like a lost child, and Tamsyn increased her speed, dogging the soldier’s footsteps, her eyes sweeping the ground for a weapon more substantial than her knife. Two men were playing dice, sitting on a doorstep amid the ruins of a draper’s store. Their muskets were on the ground beside them. Tamsyn darted sideways, grabbed up one of the firearms, and was off and running down the street, ignoring the outraged yells behind her.

The yells ceased quickly—retrieving a musket was not a priority—and the men returned to their game.

A pump stood in the center of the square on a stone plinth reached by three broad, shallow steps. The soldier carried his prize to the steps, clearly intending to enjoy her there in the sunshine. As he set her down, Tamsyn leaped forward, swinging the butt of the musket at his head. It caught him a crack over the ear, and he bellowed, loosening his hold on his captive as he swung to face his attacker.

Tamsyn jumped back, the musket pointing steadily at his heart. “Bastard,” she said with soft ferocity. “Murdering son of a bitch. Raping that little girl is going to make you very proud, isn’t it? And what were you going to do with her when you’d finished? Sell her to your friends here?”

The girl was on her knees on the step, hunched over, still keening. The soldier seemed bemused, his ear ringing from the blow of the musket, blood trickling down
his neck where the skin had broken. He stared at the diminutive figure confronting him, hardly hearing her words.

“Run,
niña
,” Tamsyn said urgently. The girl scrambled to her feet, looking wildly around at the crowded square as if searching for safe passage. Then the soldier seemed to come to his senses, and with another bellow he lunged for the girl as she began to run. Tamsyn stuck out her foot, and he went down to the cobbles, but he was up in a second, shaking his head like an injured bull.

Colonel St. Simon and Captain Frobisher entered the square just as a group of men close to the pump became aware of the altercation on the steps. The young girl was running barefoot across the cobbles, tears of terror streaming from her eyes. She bumped into Julian, who caught her, steadying her against his body, his eyes riveted on the scene in the center of the square. The girl huddled against him, quivering like a hunted fawn, recognizing safety in the gold braid and epaulets of an officer’s uniform.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Julian murmured as a ray of sun caught the unmistakable silvery head of La Violette a second before she disappeared, engulfed by the angry crowd of jeering soldiers. He unpeeled the girl from his side and thrust her at Frank, ordering curtly, “Get her to safety”; then he was running toward the pump, drawing his sword, his pistol in his other hand.

He charged into the middle of the fracas, wielding his sword to left and right, cursing the men in the vivid language of the barracks as he cut a path through them. The vigorous cursing was more potent than his weapons at that moment and seemed to pierce the men’s drunken trance, reminding them on some level of the familiar discipline of everyday life. There was a hesitation,
a slight swaying of the tight circle, and Julian lunged forward to the center.

Tamsyn was struggling in the grip of the man whom she’d deprived of his prize. The musket had been wrenched from her hands, and she was fighting now to pull her knife free from her belt. Julian fired his pistol into the air at the same moment as he grabbed Tamsyn’s free arm. Briefly, she was the rope in a tug of war, then Julian brought his sword slashing down, and the man let go with a roar of pain, blood spurting from a great gash in his hand.

An ugly murmur ran around the circle of men, and others began to move toward the pump from the four corners of the square. Deliberately, Julian sheathed his sword, thrust his pistol into his belt, then turned and caught Tamsyn up under one arm as if she were a sack of potatoes.

“Goddamn your black souls,” he swore at them. “Let me pass. This one’s mine.” He pushed his way down the steps with his violently wriggling burden. Someone laughed, a drunken cackle that was taken up by the others. Their mood changed and they fell back, offering ribald suggestions to the officer, who was good fellow enough to indulge in his own sport.

“Put me down, damn you!” Tamsyn snarled, the blood pounding in her lolling head. It was ludicrous that he should be able to carry her in such a fashion, with neither her feet nor her hands touching the ground. No man had ever before taken advantage of her diminutive stature, and the murderous rage already devouring her blazed to new heights.

“No, I will not, you little fool,” Julian declared, his own anger as hot as Tamsyn’s. “What the devil do you think you’re doing here … meddling in this inferno?
It’s no business of yours. If I’d had a grain of sense, I should have left you to them.”

Tamsyn sunk her teeth into his calf.

Julian’s yell could be heard three streets away. “Bloody savage!” He swung her upward, changing hands on her body as if she were a caber he was going to toss at the Highland games, then swung her around his neck, grasping her wrists in one hand, her ankles in another, so that she dangled like a hunter’s kill.

Tamsyn’s language was enough to turn the air blue as he strode out of the square with her, but Julian ignored her. He was too filled with anger and disgust at what was going on in Badajos to give a thought to Tamsyn’s outrage at this cavalier treatment. He couldn’t imagine what could have brought her into the city except sheer stupidity … unless she was intending to take advantage of chaos and do her own looting.

“God’s grace, Julian, what have you got there?” Frank’s startled voice arrested him as he passed a small courtyard, its metal gates hanging from their hinges.

Julian turned into the courtyard where a fountain bubbled incongruously in the midst of destruction. The girl Tamsyn had rescued was cowering behind Frank, her eyes stark with terror in her ashen face.

“This is Violette,” Julian stated grimly, bending his neck and lifting Tamsyn bodily off his shoulders, setting her on her feet. The girl ran forward with a cry, flinging her arms around Tamsyn, pouring forth a voluble stream of gratitude, her tongue at last loosened.

Julian followed the gist of the tumbling words and finally understood what Tamsyn had been doing in the square. He hadn’t connected the fleeing girl to Violette’s presence. Thankful that he hadn’t expressed his sour supposition that she’d been after her own plunder,
he was about to apologize for his roughness when she turned on him.

“You … you’re no better than that scum … that filthy, murdering, raping rabble!” she declared, spitting the words at him as if they were snake’s venom. “How dare you treat me like that? You’re a blackguard, a piece of gutter-born—”

“Hold your tongue, you!” Julian roared, forgetting all inclination to make peace under this tirade. “If I hadn’t come on the scene,
mi muchacha
, you’d be lying on the cobbles offered up for whoever chose to take a turn.”

“Filthy, loathsome swine,” she said, her voice suddenly low and trembling. To his astonishment Julian saw a gutter of tears in the violet eyes, her face twisted into a mask of grief.

“Soldiers,” she said in the same voice. “Stinking gutter sweepings, every one of them. Barbarians, worse than animals.” Her hand swept around the courtyard in an all-encompassing gesture. “Animals don’t behave like this. They don’t treat their own kind like pieces of insensate trash to be …” She fell abruptly silent as tears clogged her voice. She turned away toward the broken gates, her hand pushing at the air as if she would hold off her stunned audience.

Frank stared in complete bewilderment; the girl shrank against him again. Julian, with a muttered execration, shook himself free of the mesmerizing trance of Tamsyn’s violent, impassioned speech and ran after her.

“Tamsyn!”

“Leave me alone!” She turned her head aside, pushing him away as he came up to her.

A silver tear glistened on her cheek, making rills in the dirt as it trickled down to the corner of her mouth.
Her tongue darted, licked up the tear, but it was followed by another and another.

Julian forgot the accusations she’d hurled at his head. He forgot how much he disliked the brigand in her. He forgot how angry she made him almost every time they came into contact. He was aware only of the power of her distress. He noticed for the first time the blood on her clothes.

“Come,” he said softly. “It’s time we left this place. There’s nothing anyone can do here until they’re surfeited.” He laid a hand on her shoulder to direct her toward the walls of the city.

“Leave me alone!” she repeated, but with less conviction.

Julian shook his head. “I’ll carry you if I must, Violette.”

“Espadachín,”
she threw at him, but the tears were flowing fast now, and she brushed her arm across her eyes, smudging the grime on her cheeks so she looked like a chimney sweep. But she didn’t resist him this time when he put his hand at her waist and ushered her down the street.

“You rescued the girl,” he said, trying to offer her some comfort.

“One among so many!” she shot back. “They’re raping nuns, desecrating the churches, spitting men on their bayonets. I’ve seen it before.” The last sentence was so low, he had to bend his head to hear it, but the intensity of her pain could be heard as clearly as a clarion call.

Outside the city, fatigue parties of Portuguese soldiers were digging pits for the dead, the bodies piled on carts, waiting to be consigned to the earth as soon as the pits were deep enough.

“You’re all as bad as each other,” Tamsyn suddenly renewed her attack. “What possible justification can there be for this? Such slaughter … mindless slaughter.”

“Ask Napoleon,” Julian said dryly. “Ask Philippon. If he’d surrendered the city when it was clear defense was no longer viable, thousands of lives would have been saved. It isn’t just us, Violette.”

“I didn’t say it was,” she retorted. “It’s soldiers. Brutal, bestial—”

“It’s war. It makes beasts of men,” he interrupted. “But what of your father? He made war for the sake of gold … no principle, no—”

“Don’t you dare talk of my father, Englishman!” She spun round on him, and her knife was in her hand, her eyes, still brilliant with tears, now glittered with fury. “What would you know of a man like El Baron? You puny, weak-minded English soldier!” She spat the last word as if it was the ultimate insult.

“And don’t you dare threaten me, Violette.” Julian grabbed her wrist, twisting until her fingers opened around the handle of the knife and it fell to the ground. “I’m sick to death of being savaged by you.” He pushed her away from him so abruptly that she stumbled to her knees. “I wash my hands of you. Go where you please, just get out of my sight.” He spun on his heel and marched, seething, toward the encampment. But after a few yards his pace slowed. Reluctantly, he glanced over his shoulder.

Tamsyn remained on her knees on the ground, her head bowed, tears falling into the mud where she knelt. She seemed unaware of his departure. For the first time since it had happened, she was reliving in every detail the massacre of Pueblo de St. Pedro. Always before,
she’d allowed herself to remember only her father’s death-defying fight, her mother lying peacefully in the shadows. But now she saw the rest of it. The murdered babies, the raped women, the tortured men as the flames of the burning village leaped into the sky. And she and Gabriel, two against several hundred, had watched it all from the hilltop, helpless to do anything. And afterward, three days later, when the savages had left the burned buildings and the massacred inhabitants, taking with them what plunder they could find, they had gone down to the village and buried Cecile and the baron and dug a pit for the others, just like the pits being dug here, because the two of them alone couldn’t dig enough graves for every one of the dead.

“Come along, you can’t stay here.” Julian’s voice was gentle as he bent over her. He lifted her up, and she turned her head into his shoulder. He felt her body shaking with her sobs. He carried her to his own tent, told Dobbin brusquely to make himself scarce, and went inside, closing and tying the tent flap behind them.

“Tell me about it,” he said quietly.

J
ULIAN WALKED THROUGH THE ENCAMPMENT TOWARD THE
hospital tents. There were many of his own men to be found there, and a visit from their colonel would do something to raise their spirits, although little for his own. Those of his men not being shoveled into the grave pits or lying mutilated in the hospitals were indulging in the depths of depravity in Badajos. Restoring them to the keen, good-hearted, spirited fighting men that he knew them to be would take the gallows and the triangles—grim work, but Wellington would order it done with the same ruthless pragmatism as he’d permitted their excesses.