Энни Бэрроуз – A Mistress For Major Bartlett (страница 7)

The First Rogue scratched his chin. ‘Hospitals in town are all full as they can hold. Saw them laying the wounded out in the park and all along the sides of the streets, too. And that was before we come out ’ere. Gawd alone knows what it’ll be like by now.’

‘Well, what about taking him back to his lodgings, then? His man could help, couldn’t he?’ Justin’s own body servant, Robbins, was always tending Justin when he was wounded. Gideon had told her so.

‘His man’s used up,’ said the Second Rogue brusquely.

She’d heard Justin apply that term to the butcher’s bill after a battle. He didn’t speak of his troops dying, but of being used up.

‘What are we to do with him, then?’ It never occurred to her, not for one moment, to simply mount Castor, ride away and leave him. In some weird way, it felt that if she just left the Major’s fate in the hands of providence, it would be tantamount to submitting to the horrid inevitability of death itself.

Which would somehow dishonour Gideon’s memory.

‘You’ve got all those medical supplies in yer bags,’ said Rogue Two.

‘How...how did you know?’

He shrugged. ‘Had a look.’

He’d gone through her saddlebags, while she’d been climbing over the wall, and throwing stones at the looters? Or had it been later, when she was washing her hands in the stream?

‘I didn’t take nothing,’ he protested.

‘Look, it’s plain as a pikestaff you’ve been sent here to save our Major,’ said Rogue One. ‘If you nurse him, there’s a chance he’ll pull through.’

‘Me? But...’ She thought of the wounds covering his body, not to mention the huge tear across his scalp.

Then she saw their faces harden. Take on a tinge of disappointment. Of disapproval.

Of course, they wouldn’t believe she didn’t feel capable of nursing their Major. They had no idea how inadequate she felt. They would just think she was too high and mighty to lower herself to their level.

‘I suppose I could try,’ she explained. ‘I mean, the little I might be able to do is bound to be better than nothing, isn’t it?’

‘I took a gander when we put ’im in the wagon,’ said Rogue Two. ‘His skull ain’t broke. A lady like you could stitch him up as nice as any doctor. And then it’ll just be nursing he needs.’

‘Plenty of drink,’ said Rogue One. ‘Get all his wounds clean.’

‘We’ll help you with that. Lifting him and turning him and such.’

They made it sound so simple.

They made it sound as though she was perfectly capable of taking charge of a severely wounded man.

Her heart started hammering in her chest.

Perhaps she really could do it. After all, they’d said they’d help her. And now she came to think of it, hadn’t she already done much, much more than anyone would ever have thought possible? She’d reached Brussels unaccompanied when everyone else was fleeing the place. She’d rescued the snarling, snapping Ben from the teetering wreckage of a baggage cart. She’d ignored the Hussars and made her own judgement about whether the French were about to overrun Brussels, and been right. She’d even stood up to those women who’d been trying to murder poor Major Bartlett. And that after riding across a battlefield without totally fainting away.

And she could sew.

And even though she’d never nursed anyone in her life, she had listened most attentively to every word of Bridget’s advice, because she’d believed she was going to be nursing Gideon. Marigold was for cleansing wounds to stop them from putrefying. Comfrey was for healing cuts. And apparently she could make a sort of tea from the dried meadowsweet flowers, which was less bitter and nasty than willow bark and almost as effective at reducing fever.

Poor Gideon wouldn’t need any of that, now. He was beyond anyone’s help.

But this man had fallen, literally, into her lap.

Had begged her to save him.

And there was nobody else to do it. He had nobody.

Just as she had nobody.

Well, she thought, firming her lips, he might not know it, but he had her.

‘Very well, then,’ she said, clambering back into the wagon. ‘I will do my best. We’ll take him to my lodgings.’

She’d already begun to prove, at least to herself, that she wasn’t that fragile girl whose only hope, so her entire family believed, was in finding some man to marry her and look after her.

This was her chance to prove to them, too, that she didn’t need anyone to look after her. On the contrary!

With her head held high, she gave the Rogues her direction, then knelt down to cushion the Major’s head against her breasts once more for the remainder of the journey.

* * *

Pretty soon they were drawing up outside a house on the Rue de Regence, unloading the Major by means of the stretcher with which the cart was equipped and banging on the door for entry.

‘Oh, my lady,’ cried Madame le Brun. ‘You found him then? You found your brother?’

The men holding the stretcher glanced at her, then looked straight ahead, their faces wiped clean of expression.

Sarah blinked.

The night before, when she’d turned up frightened, and bedraggled, clutching Castor’s reins for dear life, she’d told Madame le Brun how she’d run away from Antwerp to search for her twin, because she’d heard a rumour he’d been killed, but refused to believe it. She’d explained that she’d returned to her former lodgings because she hadn’t known where else to spend the night, with the outcome of the battle currently raging still being so uncertain. The house where Lord Blanchards had rented rooms when Brussels had been the centre of a sort of cosmopolitan social whirl might not have been in the most fashionable quarter of town, but it was well kept and respectable. And Madame le Brun had been a very motherly sort of landlady.

It would be terrible to lie to her. Sarah hated people who told lies and she avoided telling them herself. Yet there was a difference, she’d always found, in letting people assume whatever they liked. Particularly if the absolute truth would cause too much awkwardness.

‘He is very gravely wounded,’ she therefore told Madame le Brun, neatly sidestepping the issue of his identity altogether.

‘I shall be nursing him myself, so it will be best to put him in my room. The room I had when I was here before.’ She smiled vaguely in Madame’s direction, but spoke to the men. ‘Careful how you get him up the stairs.’

At that moment Ben provided a welcome diversion by attempting to follow them inside.

‘Oh, no. This I cannot have,’ shrieked Madame le Brun, making shooing motions at the dog, who’d acquired an extra layer of mud since the last time she’d seen him. ‘The stables! The stables is the place for the animals.’

Ben took exception to anyone trying to get between him and the three members of his adopted pack who were already mounting the stairs. He bared his teeth at the landlady, and growled.

In the ensuing fracas, the Rogues manoeuvred the stretcher up the stairs and into Sarah’s old room. And no more questions were asked about the wounded man’s identity. By the time the landlady, the dog and Sarah caught up, in a welter of snapping teeth and loudly voiced recriminations, the Rogues had got their Major on to her bed.

‘Madame,’ said Sarah, ‘we can settle the question of what to do with the dog, who as you can see is very devoted to his master, later, can we not? What we really need, right now, is plenty of fresh linen, and hot water, and towels.’

Even though she hadn’t actually ever nursed anyone before, it was obvious that the first thing they needed to do was get the poor man cleaned up.

‘Oh, le pauvre,’ said Madame le Brun, crossing herself as she caught her first proper sight of the Major’s battered and semi-clothed body. ‘Fresh sheets, yes, and water and towels, too. Of course. Though the dog...’

‘Yes, yes, I promise you I will deal with the dog, too. He won’t be any bother. But please...’ Sarah allowed her eyes to fill with tears as she indicated Major Bartlett’s body.

‘Very well, my lady. Though I cannot think it is right for an animal so dirty to be in the room with one so badly hurt...’

‘The dog it was as found him,’ put in the First Rogue.

‘Yes, we owe Ben a great deal,’ said Sarah.

Madame le Brun grumbled about the invasion of her property by such a large, fierce and dirty dog, but she did so on her way out the door.

Sarah could hardly believe she’d won that battle. Why, only the night before, she’d cowered in the stables because Madame wouldn’t let the dog in the house, and Sarah had been afraid that someone trying to escape Brussels before the French forces arrived might try to steal her horse. She’d been too timid to do more than wheedle a blanket and some paper and ink from Madame. Today she’d got the dog and a wounded officer right into her very bedroom.

It was a heady feeling.

Which lasted only as long as it took for her to notice that the Rogues were intent on stripping the Major of his clothes. They’d already pulled off his one remaining boot. Ben pounced on it and bore it off to the hearthrug, from which vantage point he could keep an eye on proceedings while having a good chew.

‘You’ll be wanting to fetch those medical supplies, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the First Rogue suggested gruffly, pausing in the act of undoing the Major’s breeches. ‘While we start getting him cleaned up a bit.’