The Sergeant's Lady (27 page)

Will looked at Anna, and she grinned at him. “This lady,” he said formally, “has done me the great honor of agreeing to become my wife.”

“I knew how it would be,” Juana said with satisfaction.

“My felicitations to you both,” Matheson said.

“Thank you,” Anna said. “We’ve decided that Arthur and I must sail with the next fleet, and Will and I shall be married when I reach Calcutta. Would you be willing to advise me about seeking passage?”

“I am entirely at your service, ma’am.”

“Why not sail together?” Juana asked. “If you go now, with any luck you will be there before that baby learns to crawl. If you delay, you may spend your entire voyage keeping him from breaking his neck. It was bad enough with Anita, only sailing from Lisbon. I cannot imagine four months of it.”

“I know nothing of children, but there is wisdom in what she says,” Matheson said.

Will and Anna exchanged glances. “But the fleet could sail in a matter of hours,” Anna said. “And we cannot be married before then—we have no license.”

“Even if we could, I’m in main-deck steerage with a hammock slung over a cannon,” Will added.

“Those are not insurmountable objections,” Matheson said. “Once the fleet is under way, you can be married without a license at sea, as long as you have a clergyman, which the
Felix
does—Mr. Putnam is going out to be a clerk, but he was a curate before. And with Colonel MacKinnon taken ill and unable to sail, there should be a roundhouse cabin available, if Captain Denney hasn’t already sold it to someone else.”

Will and Anna exchanged a wild look. “It’s madness,” he said.

She laughed. “But hadn’t we agreed already that we’re mad?”

***

In later years Anna could never give a coherent account of the next several hours. They flew by in a blur of frantic shopping, sorting and re-sorting her trunks, and penning hurried letters to James and her banker. Juana minded Arthur, and Will and Mr. Matheson negotiated with Captain Denney. Anna tried to persuade Juana to come with them, but she smiled and shook her head.

“I like it in Market Stretton,” she said. “I’ve traveled far enough. You and Will can keep your adventures.”

The same boatman Anna had negotiated with that morning rowed them to the
Felix
that afternoon as a faint breeze began to stir. She was hoisted onto the deck in a bosun’s chair, then watched with pounding heart as Arthur was lifted up in a basket.

They had hardly got well aboard when the fleet’s ships began to unfurl their sails, and as the sun sank toward the horizon, the great fleet, twenty East Indiamen flanked by half a dozen naval frigates as escort, made their ponderous way southwest down the Channel.

She and Will were married at sunset—the young curate, Mr. Putnam, thought the timing romantic—with the captain and the
Felix’s
only other lady passenger, a Miss Martin, for witnesses. Anna felt a moment’s panic as the ring portion of the ceremony drew near. Surely Will hadn’t had time to find a ring in that frantic afternoon. But he smiled and produced a simple silver circlet from his coat pocket, and she used her right hand to steady her left as he slid it onto her ring finger.
At last.

The captain treated them to a fine supper, and Anna felt ready to burst with joy every time someone at the table addressed her as “Mrs. Atkins.” She and Will were seated opposite each other, and she drank in the sight of him, so dear and beloved. Now she belonged to him and he to her, with nothing left to hide. Many would never approve of them, she knew that, but she and Will knew how to fight for each other, and they would make a place for themselves. Perhaps even Aunt Lilias would forgive her someday and welcome them at Dunmalcolm. If not, well, Anna would find a place in India to love as much, with Will and Arthur and their children yet unborn. And they could always return to Scotland one day and make their own place there, too, after Will made his fortune and his name. Her world was large again, full of possibilities, full of love.

Arthur slumbered the meal away in a basket behind her chair, but when he awoke and cried, she excused herself and took him to the cabin that their little family would share for the next several months.

They had all the furniture the unlucky Colonel MacKinnon had already purchased for the journey, though Anna didn’t know if the sum they had paid for it would line that gentleman’s pockets or Captain Denney’s. The little room was crowded with a sofa, a table and two chairs, a bureau, two of their trunks, and a washstand, all lashed firmly to the deck. The ship’s carpenter had hastily knocked together a sort of crib for Arthur in one corner. “The ship’s motion will lull him as well as any cradle, ma’am,” he’d said as he showed her and Will his handiwork earlier that evening, and Anna was sure it would. She wasn’t seasick this time, but she had yet to get her sea legs, and she managed to bruise her shin staggering into one of the trunks as she made her way to the sofa to feed Arthur.

She eyed the hanging cot that she and Will would share rather dubiously, though she supposed it was better than a hammock or trying to crowd together onto the narrow sofa. She was married to Will now, though they had yet to have enough privacy today to so much as exchange a kiss. She felt a sudden deluge of bridal anxiety, far more than she had felt on her first, ill-fated wedding night.

When Arthur had eaten his fill she dressed him in clean linen and sang him lullabies as she settled him into his makeshift crib.

“I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight in all my life.”

She hadn’t heard Will come in, and she smiled shyly at him as he sank to his knees beside her. Arthur was asleep now, one arm flung above his head, his dark, thick eyelashes fringing his soft, fair skin.

“I should warn you,” she said, “he’ll probably wake at least once during the night.”

“I don’t mind.” He slid his arm around her waist, and she jumped at the contact. “Nervous?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“A little,” she confessed. “It occurred to me while I was waiting for you that we hadn’t even kissed yet today.”

He grinned. “Well, if
that’s
all you’re worried about—” His voice took on that deeper note she loved so, baritone dipping to bass, and Anna’s anxieties melted away. Then his mouth was on hers, hot, hungry, and probing, and she twisted closer to him, aching for more of his touch. It had been too long, far too long.

“I’ve missed you,” she said when he broke the contact. “Every day, every night, I’ve missed you.”

“Likewise. Anna—I’m so glad I don’t even know how to say it.” He sobered and drew back a little. “But I’m worried about this.” He shrugged his left arm, the one with the missing hand and forearm. “I’m not quite the same man I was before, and there are…certain things that used to drive you wild that I can’t think how to do with just the one hand.”

She reached out and cupped the end of his arm, both to grow accustomed to it and to assure him that nothing about him frightened or repulsed her. “Will,” she said, “I seem to recall that you have a fine imagination. I haven’t the slightest doubt you’ll continue to discover ways to drive me wild.”

He glanced at the hanging bed, then smiled at her, a hungry gleam in his amber eyes. “I think I’m ready to embark upon a voyage of discovery.”

She laughed as he drew her to her feet.

They undressed together, with ample kisses and caresses. Anna was about to suggest that the bed could wait, that the couch or even the floor would do for the moment, when she felt a flat oval beneath Will’s shirt and paused, one hand on his chest, the other laid against his face. “The miniature,” she murmured.

He bent his head to rest his forehead against hers. “I’ve kept it there, against my skin.”

She swayed against him, pushing his shirt off over his head. “Tonight you’ll have
me
there.”

They made it to the bed after all, laughing together as they sought to find their rhythm and balance as it rocked and swayed. But when they were joined, Anna wept with the joy of it, arching her body up to meet his and tracing the paths of scars old and new with hands and lips.

Afterward she lay with her head pillowed on his shoulder as he caressed her face and stroked her hair. “My wife,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “My lady wife.”

She snuggled yet closer. “Always.”

The Sergeant’s Lady
takes place in the middle of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), during which an Anglo-Portuguese army, commanded by the future Duke of Wellington and working in cooperation with Spanish guerilla forces, gradually drove the armies of Napoleonic France from Spain and Portugal.

The 95th Rifles and 16th Light Dragoons were real regiments, and I hope their ghosts will forgive me for inflicting George Montmorency and Sebastian Arrington upon them in return for giving them Will Atkins, Dan Reynolds and Alec Gordon. All the named battles are real, from the harrowing retreat to Corunna to the horrors of the storming of Badajoz.

What’s invented? All characters below the rank of general and all the unnamed skirmishes and troop movements. The summer of 1811 was a relative lull in the war, so it provided a perfect setting for my intimate story of unlikely lovers in a dangerous time.

My full list of research sources would run for pages on end, but if you’d like to learn more,
Wellington’s Rifles
and
The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes
, both by Mark Urban, are readable and interesting, though I don’t wholly agree with Urban’s take on Wellington. If you finish those hungry for more, there are any number of soldier memoirs, including a few written or dictated by enlisted men, and if you find yourself as hooked on the period as I am, find a copy of Elizabeth Longford’s
Wellington: The Years of the Sword.
And if you want to know what pregnancy and childbirth were like for women two hundred years ago, read
In the Family Way,
by Judith Schneid-Lewis.

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