Tangled (4 page)

Matters were not improved by the fact that the remains of the morning fog combined with the smoke from the guns made all about him almost invisible. And yet in the course of ten minutes or so he had dozens of men toiling back up the hill, and he constantly ran into other men, singly, in pairs, and in small groups, and sent them on their way with blistering curses and menacing sword.

His was not the only waving sword. Suddenly through the smoke and the fog he came across two men, one prone on the ground, the other with a booted foot on his chest and his sword poised to run him through.

"Don't kill him! Take him prisoner." David had snapped out the order even as his brain was interpreting the scene before his eyes.

Both men were British. Captain Scherer was the one down. Julian was about to kill him.

"For the love of God, stop!" David bellowed as Julian turned his head sharply in his direction. "Have you gone mad?"

"Stay out of this, Dave." Julian's voice was harsh and nearly unrecognizable. His eyes were wild with the savage blood lust of battle. "This is none of your concern." And his sword flashed downward.

David heard a shot. Above the constant roar and the deafening thunder of guns from across the battle field, he heard a single shot and watched Julian look back at

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him, surprise in his eyes, before crumpling at the knees and pitching forward across the body of Captain Scherer.

David looked down blankly at the pistol in his hand.

Shrouded in smoke and fog, the moment seemed unreal. This time and this place seemed to bear no relationship to the deadly battle that was raging above and all around. And no relationship to anything else for that matter. The battle and all else were forgotten.

"The devil!" The shaking voice belonged to Captain Scherer. "He was demented, Major. I would be dead if it were not for you. I owe my life to you." He was pushing at the body that had fallen across his own.

David watched a steady hand return his pistol to its holster and felt someone's leaden legs carry him across the distance to the two entangled bodies. He turned Julian's over gently and glanced at the small deadly blood-outlined hole just above his heart. He touched three fingers to Julian's neck. There was no pulse.

"He's dead," he said to no one in particular.

Captain Scherer was struggling to his feet, clutching his bloodied sword arm. "You had no choice, sir," he said, his voice aggrieved,

"other than to watch him kill a brother officer in cold blood. You had no choice."

"Julian." David's lips formed the name, but it was doubtful that anyone would have heard even without the din of the guns.

"He died in battle," Captain Scherer said harshly. "A hero's death, sir. Shot by a fleeing Russian. They are calling, sir."

Three Russian battalions were advancing along the heights above them, cutting them off from the remaining Grenadiers at the Battery with the Duke of Cambridge and the Colors. Voices were yelling at all those left on the slopes of the Kitspur to get back up.

They might never have made it if the French had not come to their rescue as they fought their way through the Russian columns to the Colors and then continued to fight forward with the remaining Guards to take the colors and themselves to the safety of higher ground. But the French came in the nick of time and drove the columns back into St. Clemens' Ravine.

Even so many men did not make it through. Captain

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Mary Balogh

Scherer did by some miracle, despite a useless right arm. Major Lord Tavistock, fighting by sheer instinct, his sword flashing in all directions, his mind numb, fell wounded and would probably have been finished off by a Russian bayonet had not a sergeant and a private dragged him with them to safety. He lost consciousness as he was being carried back to the hospital tents, a musket ball through the muscle of his left arm and one embedded between the calf and bone of his left leg.

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He almost died. It was amazing that he did not. Many thousands of the wounded who wanted desperately to live did not do so. He did not even want to live and yet did.

He cursed the surgeon who would have amputated both his arm and his leg, and threatened him with death or worse if he did so.

Both balls were removed at the hospital at Balaclava. And then the fever set in, the fever that killed far more men than either the wounds or the shock of amputation ever did. The fever made him quite unaware that he was moved yet again and set on board ship and transferred to the barrack hospital at Scutari. Perhaps he would have died there—almost certainly he would have done so—if there had not been a group of lady nurses newly arrived from England who insisted on organization and cleanliness and air and space.

Even so it was amazing that he lived. One of the nurses—their leader—warned him that he might not.

"Your wounds are healing nicely, Major," Miss Nightingale said to him quite matter-of-factly some weeks after his arrival, "and the fever has receded. But you are dying. You know that, don't you?"

For all the care she showed her patients, she was not a woman to mince words. Major Lord Tavistock only just stopped himself from telling her to go to hell. She was a lady after all.

"Only you can heal yourself the rest of the way," she said. "Your real wounds are ones I have no skill with, nor the surgeons either.

You cannot forget all the killing?" Her voice was suddenly gentle, understanding.

"I killed my brother," he told her with closed eyes.

She did not answer him for a long time, and he did not open his eyes to see if she had moved away.

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"I do not know how literally you mean that, Major," she said. "Do you have a wife? Or a mother and father? Or any family? Anyone to grieve for you when you are dead? Is it not self-indulgent to die when you might live?"

When he finally opened his eyes, she was gone.

He had killed Julian. Julian, whom despite everything he had loved. He might have yelled again and deflected that downward flashing blade. Or he might have shot an arm or a leg. Instead he had aimed for the heart.

He had killed her husband, the man she loved more than anyone in the world. He could never go home and face her. He tried not to picture her being told the news when it was brought to her. He tried hard but could see nothing else behind his eyes for hours at a time, whether he was awake or asleep. The thought of finally having to come face-to-face with her, knowing himself to be her husband's murderer, made him long for death and become envious of those about him who died with such apparent ease.

He tried not to picture his father being given the news of Julian's death. And then he pictured his father learning of his own death too.

He was his father's only son, his only child. His father had opposed him buying a commission with the Guards when his position as a landowner in his own right and as heir to an earldom should have kept him at home. But he had had to get away. He had had to get away from
her.
An ironic fact, as it had turned out, when his joining the military had brought Julian into it too a mere few months before his marriage.

Could he deliberately die and cause his father all that suffering?

Could he?

He finally decided to live—almost as if he had total control over his own fate—when he overheard one of the surgeons and Miss Nightingale discussing the desirability of shipping him off back home. Home was the very last place on earth he wanted to be. If he must live in order to avoid going there, then he would live.

He was back with his regiment in the Crimea soon after Christmas and was able to suffer with his men and fellow officers all the indescribable horrors of the winter there without adequate clothing or housing or food. He

32Mary Balogh

almost welcomed the suffering. During the coming year he distinguished himself in action time and again, acquiring for himself a reputation for daring and stern devotion to duty. He also acquired one of the new and coveted Victoria Crosses, a medal awarded for extraordinary valor.

Captain Sir George Scherer had been sent home, an invalid, after the Battle of Inkerman. Captain Sir Julian Cardwell, buried with so many other officers and men on the Inkerman Heights, was remembered as a hero and as something of a lovable rogue.

David found his grave. He went there only once—with dragging footsteps—soon after returning from Scutari. It was a mass grave.

Someone had bungled and buried officers and enlisted men all together. It was customary to bury officers in individual, carefully marked graves. But Julian had been piled under with everyone else—with all the others of all regiments and ranks who were known not to have returned alive up the Kitspur.

All had been confusion and inefficiency after the battle as well as during it, it seemed. David grieved that he had not been there to identify the body, to give Julian a decent burial befitting his rank. He stood looking down, stony-faced, at the large, snow-covered grave.

Julian was there. Julian, his brother. The man he had killed.

He never went back.

Major Lord Tavistock carried his secret and bore his guilt alone.

Craybourne, England, July, 1856

The Peace of Paris was signed in the spring of 1856, ending what came to be known to history as the Crimean War, one of the hardest and most devastating wars in which the British had ever participated.

The survivors of the army that had left Britain more than two years before, including the maimed and the wounded, began to return home.

Rebecca Cardwell still wore black. The veil and the heavy crape had been set aside with reluctance after the first year, but she continued to wear mourning just as she continued to mourn. She had loved him. He had been light and gaiety in her life for so long that she could not remember a time when he had not been. Julian had been her life. She still did not know how to live without him.

Now the pain had become sharper again. And the guilt. She stood in the window of her private sitting room at Craybourne, the Earl of Hartington's country home, staring along the driveway to where it turned into the trees half a mile away. She had stood thus each afternoon for the past four days, waiting for the carriage to return from the station, and supposed she would do so each day until he finally came as he had informed his father he would this week.

David.

She had wished David were dead. David instead of Julian. She had cried bitterly about the unfairness of it, about the fact that it was Julian who had died and David who had survived. She had read somewhere that the good die young, that the evil live on. It was a thoroughly silly idea, but even so—why had it had to be Julian who had died? He had been so full of life and love and laughter.

It had not taken long for rationality to return to her

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mind. And guilt. How could she wish for another man to be dead only so that her husband might live? As if one change in reality could effect the other. She did not wish it. She did not wish David dead.

She only wished Julian alive. She wished they had both survived.

It was just that she had known as soon as the grim-looking soldier had arrived at Craybourne and asked to speak with the earl privately.

She had known that one of them was dead. She had not hoped it was David—never that—as she had waited, sick at heart and sick to the stomach, pacing the tiled hall outside the library, refusing Louisa's company. But she had hoped and hoped that it was not Julian. She had drawn a shaky hope from the fact that the soldier had not asked to speak with her. But hope—if there had been hope—had fled when the library door opened and the earl, looking grave and drawn, had asked her to step inside.

She had known then that it was Julian, not David. The earl had not needed to tell her. But she wished with the last pitiful shred of hope that after all he was calling her in to break the news of the death of his son. She had wished that after all it was David.

But it had been Julian. Dead in the Crimea in a battle they called Inkerman. Dead several weeks before word reached her.

No, when she thought about it rationally, she did not wish that David was dead. But she did hate him. If it were not for him, Julian would never have been in the Crimea. He would still be alive. Instead of which he was dead and buried in a place where she could not even lay flowers on his grave. She leaned forward to rest her forehead against the cool glass of the window. But she straightened up again at a knock on the door. It opened before she could answer.

"Rebecca?" The Countess of Hartington peered around the door, smiled, and stepped inside the room. “I thought you must be up here.

You really should have come walking with us. It is a beautiful day."

"I know you and Father value your time alone together," Rebecca said.

The countess clucked her tongue. "William and I have been married for almost a year," she said. "We are no

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longer on honeymoon. Why will you persist in feeling that you do not quite belong here with us, Rebecca?" She seated herself on a chaise longue and motioned Rebecca to take a seat too.

Rebecca had always felt that she did not quite belong even though she had never for one moment been made to feel unwelcome. She had come to Craybourne because Julian had told her that was where she must go. And she had stayed there after his death because there was nowhere else to go. She had been unable to go to Julian's estate because he had never lived there—and after his death it had passed to a cousin of his. She had been unable to go back home because her own father had died shortly after her wedding and her mother had gone to live with a younger sister in the north of England. Rebecca's brother, Lord Meercham, had leased the house in which they had grown up—eight miles from Craybourne—and taken his family to live in London, though more often than not they were traveling about the country, moving from one house party to another. The settlement Julian had left her would have made it difficult for her to set up alone anywhere.