Lord John and the Hand of Devils (14 page)

He rubbed a hand over his face, groping for some diplomatic reply—and found it, in the feel of the stubble on his own jaw.

“I admire Princess Louisa greatly,” he said. “There are few women who are her equal”—
And thank God for that,
he added to himself—“but I regret that I am not free to undertake any obligation. I have…an understanding. In England.” His understanding with James Fraser was that if he were ever to lay a hand on the man or speak his heart, Fraser would break his neck instantly. It was, however, certainly an understanding, and clear as Waterford crystal.

The dowager looked at him with a narrow gaze of such penetrance that he wanted to tighten his sash further—and take several steps backward. He stood his ground, though, returning the look with one of patent sincerity.

“Hmph!” she said at last. “Well, then. That is good.” Without another word, she turned on her heel. Before she could close the door behind her, he reached out and grasped her arm.

She swung round to him, surprised and outraged at his presumption. He ignored this, though, absorbed in what he had seen as she lifted her hand to the doorframe.

“Pardon, Your Highness,” he said. He touched the medal pinned to the bodice of her gown. He had seen it a hundred times, and assumed it always to contain the image of some saint—which, he supposed, it did, but certainly not in the traditional manner.

“St. Orgevald?” he inquired. The image was crudely embossed, and could easily be taken for something else—if one hadn’t seen the larger version on the lid of the reliquary.

“Certainly.” The old lady fixed him with a glittering eye, shook her head, and went out, closing the door firmly behind her.

For the first time, it occurred to Grey that whoever Orgevald had been, it was entirely possible that he had not originally been a saint. Some rather earthier ancient Germanic deity, perhaps? Pondering this interesting notion, he went to bed.

Chapter 7

Ambush

T
he next day dawned cold and windy. Grey saw pheasants huddling under the cover of shrubs as he rode, crows hugging the ground in the stubbled fields, and slate roofs thick with shuffling doves, feathered bodies packed together in the quest for heat. In spite of their reputed brainlessness, he had to think that the birds were more sensible than he.

Birds had no duty—but it wasn’t quite duty that propelled him on this ragged, chilly morning. It was in part simple curiosity, in part official suspicion. He wished to find the gypsies; in particular, he wished to find
one
gypsy: the woman who had quarreled with Private Bodger soon before his death.

If he were quite honest—and he felt that he could afford to be, so long as it was within the privacy of his own mind—he had another motive for the journey. It would be entirely natural for him to pause at the bridge for a cordial word with the artillerymen, and perhaps see for himself how the boy with the red lips was faring.

While all these motives were undoubtedly sound, though, the real reason for his expedition was simply that it would remove him from the Schloss. He did not feel safe in a house containing the princess Louisa, let alone her mother-in-law. Neither could he go to his usual office in the town, for fear of encountering Stephan.

The whole situation struck him as farcical in the extreme; still, he could not keep himself from thinking about it—about Stephan.

Had he been deluding himself about Stephan’s attraction to him? He was as vain as any man, he supposed, but he could swear…His thoughts went round and round in the same weary circle. And yet, each time he thought to dismiss them entirely, he felt again the overwhelming sense of warmth and casual possession with which Stephan had kissed him. He had not imagined it. And yet…

Embrangled in this tedious but inescapable coil, he reached the bridge by mid-morning, only to find that the young soldier was not in camp.

“Franz? Gone foraging, maybe,” said the Hanoverian corporal, with a shrug. “Or got homesick and run. They do that, the young ones.”

“Got scared,” one of the other men suggested, overhearing.

“Scared of what?” Grey asked sharply, wondering whether in spite of everything, word of the succubus had reached the bridge.

“Scared of his shadow, that one,” said the man he recalled as Samson, making a face. “He keeps talking about the child; he hears a crying child at night.”

“Thought you heard it, too, eh?” said the Hanoverian, not sounding entirely friendly. “The night it rained so hard?”

“Me? I didn’t hear anything then but Franz’s squealing.” There was a rumble of laughter at that, the sound of which made Grey’s heart drop to his boots.
Too late,
he thought. “At the lightning,” Samson added blandly, catching his glance.

“He’s run for home,” the Hanoverian declared. “Let him go; no use here for a coward.”

There was a small sense of disquiet in the man’s manner that belied his confidence, Grey thought—and yet there was nothing to be done about it. He had no direct authority over these men, could not order a search to be undertaken.

As he crossed the bridge, though, he could not help but glance over. The water had subsided only a little; the flood still tumbled past, choked with torn leaves and half-seen sodden objects. He did not want to stop, to be caught looking, and yet looked as carefully as he could, half-expecting to see little Franz’s delicate body broken on the rocks, or the blind eyes of a drowned face trapped beneath the water.

He saw nothing but the usual flood debris, though, and with a slight sense of relief, continued on toward the hills.

He knew nothing save the direction the gypsy wagons had been going when last observed. It was long odds that he would find them, but he searched doggedly, pausing at intervals to scan the countryside with his spyglass, or to look for rising plumes of smoke.

These last occurred sporadically, but proved invariably to be peasant huts or charcoal-burners, all of whom either disappeared promptly when they saw his red coat or stared and crossed themselves, but none of whom admitted to having heard of the gypsies, let alone seen them.

The sun was coming down the sky, and he realized that he must turn back soon or be caught in open country by night. He had a tinderbox and a bottle of ale in his saddlebag, but no food, and the prospect of being marooned in this fashion was unwelcome, particularly with the French forces only a few miles to the west. If the British army had scouts, so did the frogs, and he was lightly armed, with no more than a pair of pistols, a rather dented cavalry saber, and his dagger to hand.

Not wishing to risk Karolus on the boggy ground, he was riding another of his horses, a thickset bay who went by the rather unflattering name of Hognose, but who had excellent manners and a steady foot. Steady enough that Grey could ignore the ground, trying to focus his attention, strained from prolonged tension, into a last look round. The foliage of the hills around him faded into patchwork, shifting constantly in the roiling wind. Again and again, he thought he saw things—human figures, animals moving, the briefly seen corner of a wagon—only to have them prove illusory when he ventured toward them.

The wind whined incessantly in his ears, adding spectral voices to the illusions that plagued him. He rubbed a hand over his face, gone numb from the cold, imagining momentarily that he heard the wails of Franz’s ghostly child. He shook his head to dispel the impression—but it persisted.

He drew Hognose to a stop, turning his head from side to side, listening intently. He was sure he heard it—but what was it? No words were distinguishable above the moaning of the wind, but there
was
a sound, he was sure of it.

At the same time, it seemed to come from nowhere in particular; try as he might, he could not locate it. The horse heard it, too, though—he saw the bay’s ears prick and turn nervously.

“Where?” he said softly, laying the rein on the horse’s neck. “Where is it? Can you find it?”

The horse apparently had little interest in finding the noise, but some in getting away from it; Hognose backed, shuffling on the sandy ground, kicking up sheaves of wet yellow leaves. Grey drew him up sharply, swung down, and wrapped the reins around a bare-branched sapling.

With the horse’s revulsion as guide, he saw what he had overlooked: the churned earth of a badger’s sett, half hidden by the sprawling roots of a large elm. Once focused on this, he could pinpoint the noise as coming from it. And damned if he’d ever heard a badger carry on like that!

Pistol drawn and primed, he edged toward the bank of earth, keeping a wary eye on the nearby trees.

It was certainly crying, but not a child; a sort of muffled whimpering, interspersed with the kind of catch in the breath that injured men often made.

“Wer ist da?”
he demanded, halting just short of the opening to the sett, pistol raised. “You are injured?”

There was a gulp of surprise, followed at once by scrabbling sounds.

“Major? Major Grey? It is you?”

“Franz?” he said, flabbergasted.

“
Ja,
Major! Help me, help me, please!”

Uncocking the pistol and thrusting it back in his belt, he knelt and peered into the hole. Badger setts are normally deep, running straight down for six feet or more before turning, twisting sideways into the badger’s den. This one was no exception; the grimy, tear-streaked face of the young Prussian soldier stared up at him from the bottom, his head a good foot below the rim of the hole.

The boy had broken his leg in falling, and it was no easy matter to lift him straight up. Grey managed it at last by improvising a sling of his own shirt and the boy’s, tied to a rope anchored to Hognose’s saddle.

At last he had the boy laid on the ground, covered with his coat and taking small sips from the bottle of ale.

“Major—” Franz coughed and spluttered, trying to rise on one elbow.

“Hush, don’t try to talk.” Grey patted his arm soothingly, wondering how best to get him back to the bridge. “Everything will be—”

“But Major—the red coats!
Der Inglischeren!
”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Dead Englishmen! It was the little boy; I heard him, and I dug, and—” The boy’s story was spilling out in a torrent of Prussian, and it took no little time for Grey to slow him down sufficiently to disentangle the threads of what he was saying.

He had, Grey understood him to say, repeatedly heard the crying near the bridge, but his fellows either didn’t hear or wouldn’t admit to it, instead teasing him mercilessly about it. At last he determined to go by himself and see if he could find a source for the sound—wind moaning through a hole, as his friend Jurgen had suggested.

“But it wasn’t.” Franz was still pale, but small patches of hectic color glowed in the translucent skin of his cheeks. He had poked about the base of the bridge, discovering eventually a small crack in the rocks at the foot of a pillar on the far side of the river. Thinking that this might indeed be the source of the crying, he had inserted his bayonet and pried at the rock—which had promptly come away, leaving him face to face with a cavity inside the pillar, containing a small, round, very white skull.

“More bones, too, I think. I didn’t stop to look.” The boy swallowed. He had simply run, too panicked to think. When he stopped at last, completely out of breath and with legs like jelly, he had sat down to rest and think what to do.

“They couldn’t beat me more than once for being gone,” he said, with the ghost of a smile. “So I thought I would be gone a little longer.”

This decision was enhanced by the discovery of a grove of walnut trees, and Franz had made his way up into the hills, gathering both nuts and wild blackberries—his lips were still stained purple with the juice, Grey saw.

He had been interrupted in this peaceful pursuit by the sound of gunfire. Throwing himself flat on the ground, he had then crept forward, until he could see over the edge of a little rocky escarpment. Below, in a hollow, he saw a small group of English soldiers, engaged in mortal combat with Austrians.

“Austrians? You are sure?” Grey asked, astonished.

“I know what Austrians look like,” the boy assured him, a little tartly. Knowing what Austrians were capable of, too, he had promptly backed up, risen to his feet, and run as fast as he could in the opposite direction—only to fall into the badger’s sett.

“You were lucky the badger wasn’t at home,” Grey remarked, teeth beginning to chatter. He had reclaimed the remnants of his shirt, but this was insufficient shelter against dropping temperature and probing wind. “But you said dead Englishmen.”

“I think they were all dead,” the boy said. “I didn’t go see.”

Grey, however, must. Leaving the boy covered with his coat and a mound of dead leaves, he untied the horse and turned his head in the direction Franz had indicated.

Proceeding with care and caution in case of lurking Austrians, it was nearly sunset before he found the hollow.

It was Dundas and his survey party; he recognized the uniforms at once. Cursing under his breath, he flung himself off his horse and scrabbled hurriedly from one body to the next, hoping against hope as he pressed shaking fingers against cooling cheeks and flaccid breasts.

Two were still alive: Dundas and a corporal. The corporal was badly wounded and unconscious; Dundas had taken a gun butt to the head and a bayonet through the chest, but the wound had fortunately sealed itself. The lieutenant was disabled and in pain, but not yet on the verge of death.

“Hundreds of the buggers,” he croaked breathlessly, gripping Grey’s arm. “Saw…whole battalion…guns. Going to…the French. Lloyd—followed them. Spying. Heard. Fucking succ—succ—” He coughed hard, spraying a little blood with the saliva, but it seemed to ease his breath temporarily.

“It was a plan. Got women—agents. Slept with men, gave them o-opium. Dreams. Panic, aye?” He was half sitting up, straining to make words, make Grey understand.

Grey understood, only too well. He had been given opium once, by a doctor, and remembered vividly the weirdly erotic dreams that had ensued. Do the same to men who had likely never heard of opium, let alone experienced it, and at the same time, start rumors of a demoness who preyed upon men in their dreams? Particularly with a flesh-and-blood avatar, who could leave such marks as would convince a man he had been so victimized?

Only too effective, and one of the cleverest notions he had ever come across for demoralizing an enemy before attack. It was that alone that gave him some hope, as he comforted Dundas, piling him with coats taken from the dead, dragging the corporal to lie near the lieutenant for the sake of shared warmth, digging through a discarded rucksack for water to give him.

If the combined force of French and Austrians was huge, there would be no need for such subtleties—the enemy would simply roll over the English and their German allies. But if the numbers were closer to equal, and it was still necessary to funnel them across those two narrow bridges…then, yes, it was desirable to face an enemy who had not slept for several nights, whose men were tired and jumpy, whose officers were not paying attention to possible threat, being too occupied with the difficulties close at hand.