Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) (20 page)

• • •

“True, can I come in?” Faith stood at the door of the room they called the library, though it was more like a closet with shelves than anything resembling the grand rooms at Lea Park and Thorne House.

“Of course, widgeon,” True said to her sister, with an affectionate glance. Faith had been tiptoeing around her for days, asking to join her, watching her when she thought her older sister didn’t know. Somehow, in a way only sisters would understand, Faith had divined that something had happened at Lea Park, something extraordinary. But as True would not—
could
not—confide her feelings to her younger sister, Faith was left worried and cautious.

She sidled into the small room and perched on the arm of the only other chair, an oak, heavily-carved Stuart monstrosity. True met her gaze. “What is it, hon?” she asked, setting aside her pen and paper.

“Do you really mean to accept Mr. Bottleby?”

“If he is still of a mind to take me as his wife, yes.” True tried to subdue the faint queasiness and panic that accompanied that statement.

“Do you love him?” Faith’s eyes were wide, and they sparkled the same blue as True saw when she looked in the mirror.

“No, I don’t love him, or at least not in a romantic way,” she said calmly. “He knows that. We have spoken of it, and he believes that it is enough that we like each other, respect each other, and want to work together to help people.”

Faith slid down into the chair, looking about five in her pale blue dress and white apron, her dark curls tied up in a blue ribbon. She had evidently been in the kitchen making pastries, because a dab of flour adorned her nose, adding to the impression of extreme youth. She was one and twenty, though, and not nearly as naïve as her gaze led people to think. “I don’t think you should marry him. I think you should marry the other gentleman.”

“Faith, what are you talking about? There is no other gentleman.”

Rosy lips set in a stubborn line, Faith frowned at her older sister. “You have never kept anything from me before, and I think it is simply dreadful of you to start now, just when there is something interesting to tell. Tell me about him.”

“Honestly, honey, there is no other man who has proposed to me.”

“P’raps not, but there
is
another man,” Faith said shrewdly. She curled her feet up under her and said, “I shall simply plague you until you tell me about him. Or I will write to Bella. She’ll tell me, if you won’t.”

“Don’t you dare!” True gasped. Wouldn’t that make things awkward, if Faith took it into her head to question Arabella as to the identity of “another man”? True gazed down at the paper in front of her for a moment. She had been composing a list of things to take away with her to her new home, and things to leave. She had spoken with the Widow Saunders, and that good woman was ready and willing to help with the housekeeping at the vicarage any time it should overwhelm Faith, which it was likely to on any given day, as Faith had a tendency to go off on a whim if she thought of something she wanted to do. True had spent a good deal of time over the past week with Mr. Wentworth, the man Faith was “walking out” with, and liked him. He was steady, a barrister and a good ten years older than Faith, but very much, from all signs, in love with True’s little sister.

Their father approved, and True did too. With both the girls gone, their father would finally feel free to marry the Widow Saunders after a lengthy spell as a widower. True wanted that for her father, after seeing how the woman coddled and cared for the vicar. She was a youthful fifty or so, with married daughters and sons, and she had been spending more and more time at the vicarage; True now realized what the attraction was. It was mutual, apparently, a love match if ever there was one. She had seen it in both of their eyes when they looked at each other, and it touched her deeply.

And so life was changing for them all. And why was she keeping anything from her sister? She would trust Faith with any secret, and this one was really no different. It might help her to talk it over.

“If I could
choose
anyone in this whole world to marry,” True said absently, fiddling with the quill, “I would chose Wycliffe Prentice, Lord Drake. And not because he is Lord Drake, but because he is Wy; dear, brave, sweet Wy.”

“Lord Drake!” Faith breathed. “How
grand
that sounds. Is he handsome?”

Closing her eyes, True smiled. “He is utterly beautiful, like the stained glass window of Saint Michael in Papa’s church. He has golden hair and golden eyes, and his face looks like it is carved; his very
bones
are beautiful. But he has suffered, and you can see it in his eyes when he doesn’t know anyone is looking at him. When he is happy, they glow gold, but when he’s disturbed, they muddy to brown.”

“How has he suffered?” Faith asked.

“He’s a soldier, a major-general, though he is not above his middle thirties. But he has a sensitive soul, so the death around him, the death he was forced to mete out as a soldier, it has affected him deeply.” True felt the sorrow in her own heart for her friend. She had thought about him often over the past week and hoped he was still doing well. She saw no reason why he should not continue on the road to mending as he seemed to be, but somehow she was uneasy about him.

By the time they headed up to their shared bedroom an hour later, True had told Faith everything. She had cried a little, laughed a little, and sighed a lot over unrequited feelings she had done her best to suppress and would try to conquer before her wedding day. It all seemed unreal so far, since she had still not told Mr. Bottleby her decision. When he came back she would have to, and subdue any residual affection for Drake, but until then she could live in this state of suspended reality.

In their shared room, after they had donned nightrails and True had blown out the candle, Faith spoke once more, drowsily, and as though from a distance.

“True? I forgot to tell you what I came in the library to tell you. A message came this evening. Mr. Bottleby is back, and will be coming to the vicarage tomorrow or the next day for your answer.”

• • •

The day had started with wet, tired, desperately hungry troops awakening from restless sleep in whatever accommodation could be found, the rumble of their yawns and groans and voices like distant thunder. Men slept in cornfields, in the orchard of La Haye Sainte—this was a farmhouse that Wellington had ordered fortified as an outpost and one anchor of his battle area; the other two outposts were a farm called Papelotte and the chateau known as Hougoumont—in hastily rigged tents of standard issue blankets. Drake had spent the night with the select group of commanders in the company of an energetic Wellington. He took his orders from the duke, returned to the field, rallied his troops, and proceeded to move in the patterns decided on the previous night, all on no sleep and little food.

Now it was hours later, late afternoon, and La Haye Sainte was at the center of the fight. All around the Belgian, Dutch, German and British forces the enemy cannonade pounded like thunder; smoke filled the air, obscuring even the burning sun. Then utter silence, and then, more frightening to the experienced among the troops, the insistent drumming of the
pas de charge
and shouts of
Vive l’Empereur
by tens of thousands of voices, followed by massive columns of French infantry marching on the allied positions.

Incredibly, impossibly, the inexperienced Prince of Orange, too young at twenty-two to be Wellington’s second in command but forced on the duke by virtue of the theater of war, now Dutch territory, gave the command to the King’s German Legion, a group of seasoned Hanoverian warriors, to advance. Advance! Christian von Ompteda, experienced and tough commander of the KGL, knew how enormous a mistake it was. There were holes in his line, but his men were in a good defensive position on the right of the crossroads behind La Haye Sainte, a position they could and would defend as long as there was one man left. They should hold fast. Everyone knew that. To move forward was the command of a young and inexperienced soldier, but the prince’s pride would not let him back down even when shown his error.

There was nothing for Ompteda to do but obey his superior officer, for obedience in the army was the only way to ensure order and discipline. Once that broke down, each man felt justified in making his own decisions, and defections were inevitable. So Ompteda would lead his men to their death, and his own death, for honor would not allow him to live while his men died.

Drake, in command of the Kent Light Dragoons, watched in horror as the Germans advanced toward the French, only to be slaughtered, all in five minutes, it seemed. He shouted an order and spurred Andromeda into a gallop, leading his men in a charge down the slope to try to save them, but it was futile. The next seconds were a blur of smoke and sound and thunder. The Germans were mostly dead but Ompteda, valiant to the end, leaped the hedge into the garden of the farm, his sword flashed, and then he went down. Drake’s cavalry was forced back, but not before Drake turned Andromeda, gallant horse as she was, to face a French officer who raised his saber to cut Drake down. Instinct, pure and simple, enabled Drake to thrust with his sword, spearing the Frenchman neatly through, even as his thigh was being sliced open.

Drake saw the man’s mustached face contort as he was dying, and then Andromeda was falling and Drake spilled from the saddle to be buried beneath his horse as around him the battle raged on, shouts and artillery, and the screams of the wounded and dying. And he was dying too, suffocating, being pushed down into the muck and mire of the battlefield by poor Andromeda as she grunted and heaved, and then died from some unknown artillery wound that Drake had not even seen her take. His own blood was pumping into the gray-red mud of the field by La Haye Sainte, and every breath might be his last.

His men, so many of them lost at Quatre Bras, were valiant, but were driven back from that impossible battle. Brewster, Wayne, Williams, Connolly, Stoddart, Andrews . . . so many young men in Drake’s company had fallen, cut to ribbons, slaughtered. But so many others fought on with a single-minded determination that would win the day, or die trying.

But for Drake the fighting was over. The day turned into evening as he alternated between consciousness and unconsciousness, not knowing if the English and allied forces had won the day or went down in ignominious defeat. He was so very thirsty, as though he was in Hades and that was to be his eternal torment; a quick death was not to be his, he feared. The battle raged on and then seemed to drift away from that field, hell on earth for those who lay dying, their groans a chorus of tormented agony. Drake lingered in a hazy world between life and death, feeling his blood seeping from him, hearing people die, seeing only Andromeda’s great flank and young Captain Lewis’s dead, contorted, bloody face as twilight fell.

Time ceased to have meaning.

All around him the dead and dying were being looted by the French who had taken La Haye Sainte, and some who made a fuss about it were murdered where they lay. That barbarism was not confined to the French; allied forces did the same nasty work. The mercifully murdered were the lucky ones, Drake thought; no one would see him under his beast, and he would be forced to die little by little, his vision turning black as life dripped out of his severed vein into the mud. As the sun descended, he did not even have the blessing of unconsciousness anymore, but heard every scream, every tortured last breath, every death rattle around him.

His long career had prepared him for death, he had thought. He had done what he was ordered as a soldier, and had done the best he could for his men as a commander. He had killed often, nearly died a couple of times, but nothing,
nothing
he had ever experienced had prepared him for this agony. The pain was familiar, for he had been wounded at Badajoz, but this infernal waiting, waiting,
waiting
to die. He had always thought death would come quickly, with a musket ball or a saber slash. But now, the thirst and the horror, the utter futility and certainty of death and yet lingering life . . .

And then the dead began to come to him one by one, faces he had never forgotten, though he thought he had. The young Frenchman, his first kill as a raw recruit
. “Ne tirez pas
,
”
and then his shot, and then finding the miniature of wife and babe and the unloaded rifle. And him spending hours mourning for the woman and child who would perhaps starve without husband and father. Then other faces hovered over him, other men he had killed, one after the other, laying the guilt for their deaths at his door, all demanding his life in payment.

June 18, 1815, was a day without end for Major-General Lord Drake. Faces hovered, hands, claws of the dead, reached out and smote him in the ribs, tore at his clothes, pulled his hair, and he felt it before he heard it, felt the scream well up in his throat, and to his everlasting shame, erupt from him as though he were an untried ensign of seventeen, a boy not a man.

He was suffocating, and he would shoot himself before he would die like this, dribble by dribble. He could not suffer this torment when his loaded pistol was in his tunic; if he could just reach it, he would hold it into his mouth and blast his way into eternity, rather than suffer with all the demons of hell clawing his face and tormenting his mind. The pistol! It was in his hand and he would . . .

“Sir . . . Major, I’m here. It’s Horace, sir, let me have the gun, easy like, let me . . .”

Chapter Fifteen

Lady Leathorne stood and wrung her hands, gazing down at the sweating, twisting man who was her son. She put her hand to his damp forehead. “He is burning up! What must we do, Sergeant? What is best? I have never seen him like this.”

Horace wrung out a cloth and applied it to Drake’s forehead, only to have it flung across the room by his restless patient, who uttered an oath more suited to the army barracks than a lady’s presence. “I don’t rightly know, milady. Ain’t never seen him like this, neither, and that be fact, even at his worst, in the field hospital. Coulda knocked me over with a feather last night when I came inta his room like normal when he’s a’screamin’ and a’carryin’ on, and he was crouched under that there bolster, with his pistol in his hand and raisin’ it to his mouth.”