Vermillion (The Hundred Days Series Book 1) (44 page)

The French battery, insatiable all
afternoon, fell silent.

He wondered if the last shell had
been too close, if his hearing had finally given out, until a drum-beat
vibrated the ground from behind the hills, magnifying into the ruthless thunder
of a thousand hoof beats.

The lines appeared through the heavy
smoke, over hills bordering a half-burned and hotly contested farmstead. They
gleamed like sun on the water, casting a chill over him and every man around
him. The polished breastplates of Marshal Ney's cuirassiers formed an
impenetrable wall, knights from an age past, their towering red plumes giving
the impression of a predatory bird diving to strike.

They were Napoleon's oldest and most
seasoned veterans, men who had seen enough over a decade to make the slaughter
before them perfectly routine. There had been a time when he would have been
intimidated, but Matthew knew the cuirassier's secret: to shock their
opponents’ minds with their appearance, sapping the enemy's courage. He would
show them just how much bravery his men possessed.

Spurring Bremen, he wheeled along
the rear of his line to reach Ty. The major was barking orders down to his
cavalry, now reforming after their brilliant rout.

Matthew held up three fingers,
yelling over the noise with enough force to make his temple pound. “Three
hundred yards!”

Ty's gaze snapped to the field,
making impossibly rapid calculations. “That's only half our effective range!”
Matthew understood the hesitation. Their artillery could reach nearly seven
hundred yards, but not
well
. He was asking Ty to allow the French
incredibly close. It would put the men at risk, but guaranteed heavier
casualties for the enemy. The guns hit more often inside their effective range,
and could still catch a retreat and cut it down over a few hundred yards.

Matthew raised his fingers higher.
“The infantry will hold. Let them come! Three hundred yards, understood?”

He didn't wait for Ty's salute,
trusting that as long as the major breathed, he would follow the order. Riding
back down the line, he shook his saber overhead, gaining the attention of every
remaining officer. “Form up! Squares now and hold fast. We're in for it, lads!”

“Prepare to receive...
cavalry
!”
The order went up along the line, and Matthew knew it filled every soldier with
dread. Grim-faced men knelt in the front ranks bracing blades for the impending
charge while behind them comrades shouldered muskets.

Passing his home regiment, Matthew
raised his saber again, arm trembling at the thundering behind his ribs.
“Havercake lads, who leads the way?”

“
The thirty-third does!”

Matthew thrust his saber higher,
raising in the saddle. “For the Duke of Wellington!”

A ferocious cry rose from the 33
^rd
,
loud enough that their prodigal son Wellington must have heard his old regiment
clear up at the command post.

As if in answer to their
battle-roar, Major Burrell's six-gun battery shuddered its report, smoking the
ridge. Their shot was true, in spite of the ground. The whole first rank of
cuirassiers, almost to a man, fell like silver dominoes.

Subsequent attacks by the French
bore little fruit. He did not envy their position, fighting up the ridge
against Allies above. The advance served its purpose, though, giving the French
battery lordship over more and more of the field. Where the French infantry
fell short, their guns found satisfaction. Artillery tore through his lines,
cutting swaths he could not afford again and again while his men swatted at the
cuirassiers buzzing around their feet.

He ground teeth into his cheek until
his tongue tasted blood. The battle had taken a sudden turn for the worse. It
was not just the loss of so many of his men, or the thin spots it had created
in his ranks. Something was wrong. There was a waver in the men that he knew
too well. Matthew saw it when he skimmed the lines just beyond the ridge,
though it was too late to stop the inevitable.

“Hold, hold!” The center left began
to soften, and Matthew's stomach twisted, predicting what would come next. His
Cumberland Hussars wavered, seeing the scores of men being eaten up around
them. Matthew's infantry was fully committed in the thick of it; there was no
one to send, to bolster the flagging regiment. They pulled back, turned, and
marched for the rear with all the dignity of a three-wheeled post coach. He
held out a faint hope that it was by design. It was possible they had been
given a sudden order to do so. Wellington was famous, even notorious for making
changes mid-stream if it brought the army gains, but almost never without some
communication.

That hope was dashed when Colonel
Seymour, Uxbridge's aide-de-camp, bore down on him like a devil on horseback.

“Dispatches?” Matthew demanded, one
eye on the unfolding disaster.

“No, sir.” Seymour's eyes darted
around them, widening. He must have grasped the absence of Matthew's own aides,
and that General Webb had been out of communication. How much had transpired of
which he was unaware, Matthew wondered.

Seymour caught his breath, priming
for quick summarization. “Uxbridge charged me to stem the retreating Hussars,
but their commander, Von Hacke, will not hear it. He says his men are too
skittish to be invested and will take their
own
horses and quit the
field.”

Bastards.
He skimmed the
ridge where their fading backs were just disappearing and strangled his reins.
Von Hacke's men were volunteers, and their horses did in fact belong to them.
There was nothing to keep them now that the fight had turned desperate. Matthew
scrubbed a hand over his face, staring at the fray. How had the tables turned
so quickly? “Sod it all,” he muttered, almost forgetting Seymour was beside
him. “Look at that goddamned hole.” The Hussar retreat had left a gap in his
center-left, inviting Napoleon inside. The invitation, if the renewed push of
French infantry up the center was any indication, had been accepted.

He poked a finger at the Hussars for
Seymour's benefit. “Tell Uxbridge to prevail upon Von Hacke. Put pressure on
either his dignity or his
neck
.”

Seymour's hand flew up, and he
looked impossibly tired. “I have sir. I've reasoned with second in command as
well. And we continue to do so. Dawson has gone up to beg him into a fallback
position, but I know he will not hear it. We must subtract his regiment.”

'Subtract' was a polite term which
meant 'do without and hope we're not buggered in the process'. So far, Matthew
reckoned, they were only having success with one half of the expression. “Get
word to whatever body Maitland has hidden behind that hill.” He pointed to the
far end of the ridge. “Order them to lie still as the dead, till they can smell
French sweat. Then I want them to volley their arses off.”

“Yes, sir. Good, sir.” Seymour
raised his hand in salute and was gone. Matthew wondered if he should have sent
any other instructions back. Given his missing aides, he might have missed his
last chance.

His hope began to ash, watching the
chaos igniting along his left. Men on both sides of the gap bore the brunt of
Von Hacke's abandoned position, pressed hard by the enemy and faltering. The
infantry strained once, then twice, a creaking dam. It broke with a sharp cry,
and Ney's cavalry poured through in an unstemmable tide.

He galloped between the companies,
barking for them to form up, fall back. “Get those bloody muskets loaded,” he
shouted. “Center-left, center-right!” He waved them back to patch the hole.

They were not lost
. Matthew
smacked the words away, refusing to acknowledge defeat. Lines broke, were
shored up, and re-positioned all the time. They were, however, well beyond
desperate. The men were exhausted, sun-scorched, parched. Their bodies were
beginning to flag in advance of their morale. He needed fresh soldiers,
reinforcements.

Where were the Prussians?
Blucher had promised a rendezvous at a predawn meeting with Wellington. More
than twelve hours had passed with no sign of his approach, not so much as a
dust cloud on the horizon.

Bremen shuffled right to avoid a
rifle blast, then reared violently at the storm of rocks and soil that exploded
in their faces from well positioned artillery. Wheeling him away, Matthew
galloped left and right, weaving in anticipation of the next shell. A musket
shot tore his saddle bag free, spinning Bremen like a cyclone. For the first
time, panic beaded sweat on his neck, running over his wound in a stinging
rivulet he hardly noticed.

Sundown
. Sundown or Blucher,
nothing else would save them.

*          *          *

Frigid salt-spray dotted her lips
and face as she leaned over the rail, staring into a horizon that had swallowed
the last sight of land hours ago. Kate closed her eyes, reaching out with her
heart and trying to feel. They shared a bond now, and she was certain she would
know if Matthew were alive or dead, but the lines of fate were a tangle. She
could only feel the jostle of scales that had not yet tipped their balance.

Canvas snapped overhead, sails
caught and thrown by a temperamental wind that grew in force as the sun came to
rest on the horizon. Only a few of its rays escaped the bank of slate clouds
chasing them, the same dark sky that had seemed to chase her for days. It grew
harder and harder not to feel they were a harbinger.

Slipping a thumb and finger beneath
her shawl and into her neckline, she found Matthew's ribbon and pinched it,
wondering again if sailing from Antwerp had been the right decision. Not that
it had been her choice, really, but if she had put up more of a fight, the
captain might have relented.

It had been simpler on the docks,
when going to London with Adelaide had felt like being shut up in a gilded
cage. She would be a curiosity, liked or disliked equally for who and what she
was. For the first time in years, home had suggested itself as a sanctuary.

A handsome young sailor who strongly
resembled Private Miller passed her, thumbing a chivalrous salute and smiling.
He glanced at the inky clouds starting to simmer overhead, then cocked his head
toward the berth. “Best get below, miss. This storm's a banshee and Cap'n says
things are sure to get rough.”

*          *          *

It was impossible that things could
get worse.

They needed a unified strategy. That
much was clear as he rode back up the lines, observing islands of men fight
vainly for survival with no plan of aiding their brothers. He needed a
strategy, and he needed the Field Marshal. Wellington was shielded somewhere in
a square of infantry, one of countless along the field, cut off from communication.
Not that it mattered, Matthew thought. All but one of the general's aides were
missing, and Maitland currently represented fifty-percent of the remaining
command staff, himself being the other.

French cuirassiers, having mowed a
swath through the Allied center-left, rode hard for the ridge. Little remained
to oppose their onslaught, and they were bound to gain the top in minutes. Once
they held even a fraction of the high ground, they could hold the gate for
their fellows. Pouring in from the east and west, they would route his men with
hardly a bounce to their saddles.

They rode hard, demon horses
climbing the eroding embankment with supernatural grace. Matthew watched for
opportunity, but he did not bother calling out orders. He had no one left to
stop them. He'd poured men like pitch to plug the hole left by Von Hacke's
desertion. The stone had been wrung for blood and found dry. He could only
watch and shape what little clay was left.

The first line of cuirassiers
mounted the slope. Matthew held his breath, bracing, waiting for the plateau's
ground to be devoured under their hooves. He waited, but the charge did not
come. The horses reared and screamed, throwing a few riders.

He scraped blood and grass from the
lens of his glass, wiping with the tail of his shirt and snapping it open. The
cuirassier’s mounts tumbled back before he heard the report, before Maitland's
forgotten fifteen-hundred men sprang up with the roar of hell's legion and
fired arm’s length into the faces of their attackers.

He punched the air, whooping. “You
clever bastards!” Seymour had assured him that Maitland had no ace tucked away
behind the lip of the hillock, that it was spread only with the mangled corpses
unlucky enough to be found by well-launched French shells. They must have lain
there, Maitland's men, among their dead and dying brothers, waiting for their
moment to make so much of so little. Thanks to them, Matthew dared a small
amount of hope.

He trotted closer, frustrated by the
limited view through his glass. For the first time in an hour, they had an
exploitable turn of events. Matthew needed to see, hear, and even smell every
detail in order to make the most of it. Maitland's bayonets skewered the French
heavy cavalry, wave after wave. The pounding took its toll on General Michel's
horse. It lost heart, bucking him up and then down into the fray. Matthew
observed him pierced no fewer than five times.

His Frenchmen unraveled.

“Bravo!” Pure joy surged through
him, bringing Matthew up out of his saddle. A ball pierced the felt of his hat
with a
pop
, claiming it and tossing it out onto the field. He whooped,
undaunted, and leaned low over Bremen's neck. If they had not killed him yet,
they had damn well lost their chance, he decided. “Press them! Press forward!”
he whispered, squinting at every push and pull of the two sides. His own
infantry moved as if heeding his command, spilling down the slope over the
enemy with volcanic force.

Commotion on the right, along the
eastern road, pulled his attention away. A mass of troops came on mechanically,
a war machine of purpose and not men. It was made up of indistinct formations,
obscured in the smoke and fading light.