Authors: Imperial Scandal
Teresa Grant (41 page)
“Sweet Jesus,” Davenport murmured.
“Bonaparte understands the value of theatre,” Malcolm said.
“Unless he’s also a master of illusion, there are a bloody lot of them. I hope to God the Prussians get here.”
Malcolm cast a glance along the Allied lines. “We happy few.”
“Shakespeare was a genius, but he’d never been on a battlefield. Do you know what you’re in for, Rannoch?”
“I’ve seen battles before,” Malcolm said, scenes from the Peninsula fresh in his mind. “But I don’t think any of us has seen anything like what’s about to unfold.”
Cheers went up among the French troops as a figure on a gray horse galloped into their midst.
“Boney,” Davenport said. “Odd to think I’ve never seen him before.”
Malcolm handed his spyglass to Davenport. Bonaparte wore the undress uniform of a colonel in the Imperial Guard and a bicorne hat without cockades. Wellington, too, wore casual dress for battle, though his buckskins and blue coat were more in the style of a gentleman out for a morning’s ride. He wore four cockades on his own bicorne, for Britain, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
Even without a spyglass, the cheers of the French troops for Bonaparte were evident. In response Wellington rode among his own troops, at a sedate trot rather than Bonaparte’s gallop. The duke was greeted with respectful nods but no cheering.
Alexander Gordon pulled up beside Malcolm and Davenport. “Uxbridge has ordered sherry for his staff so they can toast today’s fox.”
“Fox hunting always struck me as a bloody business,” Davenport said. “And a damned waste. My sympathies go to the fox.”
Gordon shot an amused glance at him and held out a paper. “Well, while you’re feeling sympathetic toward Boney, you can take this to Picton. Wellington’s orders.”
Davenport wheeled his horse round but turned back to Malcolm before he rode off. “I don’t say this often, but it’s been a pleasure working with you, Malcolm.”
Malcolm reached between the horses to clasp the other man’s hand. “Likewise, Harry.”
Gordon cast a glance after Davenport as he galloped off. “Odd devil. But a brave one.” He turned his gaze to Malcolm. “We all right, Rannoch?”
“Really, Gordon. Arranging a duel in the middle of a ball?”
Gordon flushed. “Flemming’s one of my oldest friends. One doesn’t refuse such a request from a friend. Besides, no one was badly hurt. If Will hadn’t been drinking he wouldn’t have winged Tony Chase at all.” His gaze moved to the field stretching before them and the French on the opposite ridge. “Seems like child’s play compared to today.”
“It gives both Chase brothers an alibi.”
Gordon met his gaze, a soldier not shirking rebuke. “I couldn’t tell you, Malcolm. It was a confidence.”
Malcolm reached out and gripped his friend’s arm. “It’s all right, Sandy. I do understand.”
Gordon’s face relaxed, though doubt still lurked in his eyes. “If—”
As Gordon spoke, the roar of guns cracked open the summer morning.
It had begun.
Suzanne was kneeling on the hall floor, spooning gruel to Christophe, the young Belgian private, when the sound of guns thundered through the house. Strangely not as loud as the noise two days ago from Quatre Bras, which was farther from Brussels, but still enough to shake the windows in their frames and set the crystals in the chandelier tinkling.
“It’s started,” Christophe said.
“Yes.” Suzanne kept her fingers steady on the spoon. The hall clock showed that it was just before eleven-thirty. Across the hall, Cordelia was applying fresh fomentations to Angus, the Highland sergeant. Aline was bathing the face of Higgins, an infantry corporal. Both women went still and met Suzanne’s gaze for a moment. Suzanne gave them the most encouraging smile she could muster. Aline grinned with determination. Cordelia gave an ironic smile. Suzanne looked back at Christophe. “It’s started, but it will be a long time before it ends.”
“I should be there.”
“Nonsense. You did more than enough at Quatre Bras. You have to let others have their turn.”
He gave a weak smile. “You’re kind, Madame Rannoch.”
“I’m practical. Have some more broth.”
David and Simon came through the front door a few minutes later. They had gone to arrange burial for the soldier who had died during the night. Suzanne, Cordelia, and Aline met them by the door. They had long since given up having a footman answer the door. The servants were all helping care for the wounded, either in the house or in the streets.
“Any news?” Aline asked.
“Wild rumors,” David said. “No news.”
“Save that apparently some wealthy Bruxellois are preparing a banquet to welcome the victorious emperor and his officers,” Simon added. “Meanwhile, some of their compatriots are fleeing for Antwerp. People are lined up trying to get passports from Colonel Jones. Poor devil may be thinking it would have been less arduous to take the field than to be left in Brussels as military commander.”
“And more wounded are being brought in,” David said.
“Or limping in. We found one man who fell at Quatre Bras two days ago.” Anger sharpened Simon’s usually ironic voice. “He crawled out of the mud yesterday and walked twenty-some miles to Brussels. It’s a miracle he survived. We got him to his billet.”
David looked at Suzanne. “We thought we’d take one of the carriages and drive toward Waterloo. We can bring back what men we can and see if we can learn any news.”
“Of course.”
David and Simon left the house, shoulder to shoulder. They worked together seamlessly in the face of necessity, yet she could still feel the distance between them. As though the air between them was empty where before it had pulsed with a tangible connection. How much could be lost so quickly.
Stuart stopped by an hour or so later. “All those years in Lisbon,” he said, glancing round the hall, “I don’t think I ever realized quite how fortunate we were to be so removed from the battlefield.” He squeezed her arm. “You’re doing a capital job, which doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
“Thank you,” Suzanne said, oddly touched. Stuart had come to be almost like family in the years she’d been Malcolm’s wife. For some reason, seeing anyone she was close to these past few days made her want to burst into tears.
Stuart took her arm and steered her into the privacy of the study, where no soldiers were quartered. “I received a dispatch from Wellington at seven this morning. Basically instructing me to guard against panic.” He regarded her with a faint smile. “You aren’t panicked, I take it?”
“After all these years don’t you know me?”
The smile deepened to a grin. “Quite right.” His face turned serious. “We need to be ready to move the British civilians and our allies out of Brussels should things go against us. Wellington may have to fall back and leave Brussels to the French. Are you prepared to move quickly if necessary?”
She nodded. “Malcolm left travel documents and we have horses ready in the stables. I have the necessary items packed.”
“Good girl. I’ve talked to Capellen”—Baron van der Capellen was the secretary of state of the Netherlands—“and he’s issued a proclamation designed to be reassuring. I daresay it will be some time before we hear anything more. I haven’t had any news from Malcolm. I suspect you haven’t, either?”
She shook her head.
“Yes, well, I wouldn’t have expected to. Don’t believe everything you hear today. Rumors are thick as molasses already.”
“My dear sir,” Suzanne said, firmly ignoring the fear that was twisting her stomach into knots, “by now you should know me well enough to realize I’m a healthy skeptic about everything.”
“You’re one in a million, Suzanne. If there were more women like you, I wouldn’t be a bachelor.”
“If you were less fond of flirting you wouldn’t be a bachelor.”
He grinned. “You have a point. One would never have guessed it was Malcolm who had the makings of an ideal husband. But then you make it look easy.”
She nearly did cry then. It was only all her years of training that preserved her self-command.
45
B
lack smoke swirled through the remnants of mist. The French guns sounded, the Allied cannon thundered back. Most of the French fire focused on the château of Hougoumont. Harry, sent with a message from Wellington, who was directing the battle over the château personally, to the Prince of Orange, who had command of the troops involved, drew Claudius up on the ridge above the château at an angle that gave him a good view of the scene below. French and Hanoverians clashed in the wood south of the château. Howitzer shells rained down from the Allied ridge, but the French pushed on. Through the thick smoke, Harry saw that some of the French were already scaling the walls and attempting to drag British muskets out of the loopholes the British had cut in the stone.
lack smoke swirled through the remnants of mist. The French guns sounded, the Allied cannon thundered back. Most of the French fire focused on the château of Hougoumont. Harry, sent with a message from Wellington, who was directing the battle over the château personally, to the Prince of Orange, who had command of the troops involved, drew Claudius up on the ridge above the château at an angle that gave him a good view of the scene below. French and Hanoverians clashed in the wood south of the château. Howitzer shells rained down from the Allied ridge, but the French pushed on. Through the thick smoke, Harry saw that some of the French were already scaling the walls and attempting to drag British muskets out of the loopholes the British had cut in the stone.
“Do you think the battle hangs on this?” A Dutch-Belgian lieutenant pulled up beside Harry.
“Not necessarily, but if the French take the château they’ll be in a damned good position to fire on us.” Davenport turned and then started as he recognized the thin, intent face of the lieutenant he had last seen at Le Paon d’Or with Rachel Garnier. “Rivaux.”
“Colonel Davenport.” Henri Rivaux sketched a salute. “The prince has sent me with a message for the duke.”
“I’m bringing a message from the duke to the prince.” Harry ran his gaze over Rivaux. His shoulders were straight, his hands steady on the reins, but his face was as pale as linen fresh from the laundry basket. “Your first battle?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Not in the least. When did you last see your lady in Brussels?”
“Rachel? Just before we marched.” Rivaux gave a brief smile. “Thank you. For asking. For calling her that. For understanding—”
“What she means to you?” Harry prided himself on having little use for love, but he vividly recalled the way Rivaux’s gaze had clung to Rachel’s face. It had taken Harry back to the ballroom at Devonshire House five years ago. His first glimpse of Cordelia’s brilliant, discontented face, and the start of a longing that tore at the soul. “If there’s any good that comes of war, I think perhaps it’s that it makes us understand what’s important.”
Rivaux nodded. “How true. If—Good God.”
Below them, French infantry had pushed through the northern gates of the château. Five men in the uniform of the Coldstream Guard fell against the gates, pressing them closed against the force of more French who would pour through. The gates shuddered. The French pressed forward, the guards pushed back, while inside the French who had already broken through battled the Allied defenders. At last, the gates slammed closed.
“Pity the poor French bastards left inside,” Harry said.
Rivaux, who had been a spy among French sympathizers, grimaced. Then he gathered up the reins and gave a quick salute. “I must be off. My compliments to you, Colonel Davenport.”
“And mine to you.” Harry returned the salute.
Rivaux galloped toward Wellington’s position. A few moments later, a howitzer shell fell short of its mark and slammed into Rivaux’s horse.
Horse and rider tumbled to the ground. Harry touched his heels to Claudius and galloped forward. Rivaux’s horse had had its front legs blown off at the knees. Its chest was a pulpy mess. Harry swung down from the saddle, cast a quick glance at the horse, and put a bullet through the poor animal’s head. Then he bent over Rivaux. A fragment had struck the lieutenant in the chest and another in the head. His eyes were closed, but as Harry bent over him they blinked open. “Davenport. Silly. Must—”
“I’ll take your message. After I get you behind the lines.”
Rivaux struggled to draw a breath. “Can’t—”
“Don’t be a damned idiot, Rivaux.” Harry lifted the young lieutenant in his arms as gently as he could, but Rivaux sucked in his breath. By the time Harry levered him over Claudius, Rivaux seemed to have fainted, which was probably a mercy. Harry swung into the saddle and touched his heels to Claudius.
His quickest route took him to the Prince of Orange, whom he found with March and Rebecque beside him. “I’ve a message for you, sir,” Harry said. “And one of your men who needs attending to.”
“Good God!” the prince exclaimed. “Poor Rivaux. Is he—”
“He will be if he doesn’t receive attention quickly.”
March had already set about issuing orders. As two soldiers lifted Rivaux from the saddle, he opened his eyes and looked at Davenport. “Tell Rachel—”
“My dear fellow, I daresay you’ll see her before I do.” Harry took Rivaux’s hand and pressed it between his own. Then he looked into Rivaux’s eyes, making no attempt to maintain his usual ironic defenses. “But should the need arise you have my word on it. I’ll tell her precisely how you feel.”
“You can’t know—”
“Oh, but I do.” An image of the twenty-year-old Cordelia hung vivid in his mind. For once, he didn’t try to banish it. “Love’s a remarkably universal emotion.”
Raoul O’Roarke reined in his restive horse, sweat dripping from his forehead, and muttered a curse. The damned assault on Hougoumont, intended as a diversion, had sucked up far too many French troops. They should have taken the château within the first hour. It was now almost half past one, nearly two hours since the assault on Hougoumont had begun. Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s youngest brother, was leading a ferocious fight, but he was pulling precious resources away from the rest of the battle.
Raoul had spent the time supervising the placement of a battery of guns—twelve-pounders and eight-pounders and horse artillery—in front of d’Erlon’s infantry divisions. Now, with a crashing rumble, a renewed cannonade thundered across the valley. The cannonballs should have ricocheted over the crest of the opposite ridge and reached the Allied soldiers sheltering behind it, but they fell into the mud. The poor Dutch-Belgian devils at the front of the Allied lines were cut to pieces, but most of the Allied army remained safely behind the reverse slope of the ridge or the thick hedges that bordered it.
Though the assault of the guns was less effective than it should have been, the French infantry began to advance in columns. Save that instead of the narrow columns that Raoul had seen prove ruinously ineffective against British infantry, d’Erlon spread his men into shallower, wider columns that were closer to line formation yet still deeper than the Allied lines they faced. “Clever,” Raoul murmured to Flahaut, who had pulled up beside him. “The British muskets cut our columns to pieces in the Peninsula.”
Drumbeats and voices raised in “The Marseillaise” echoed across the valley. Flahaut scanned the mass of advancing French. “They look as though they’re going to sweep right over the British and Dutch-Belgians.”
Raoul frowned at the Allied ridge. It wasn’t like Wellington to sit this quietly and let the enemy overwhelm him. “I wouldn’t cry victory yet. ‘That island of England breeds very valiant creatures,’ ” he added in English rather than the French they’d been speaking.
“Must you start quoting now of all times, O’Roarke?”
“It’s rather apt. Wellington’s sure to have a counter-measure up his sleeve.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Flahaut gathered up the reins, then looked back over his shoulder. “O’Roarke,” he said, over the roar of cannon fire and blare of martial music.
Raoul looked into the younger man’s eyes, dark with fear and uncertainty. “If I live through this and you don’t, of course I’ll tell Hortense. Not that she doesn’t know already.”
“Thank you.” A smile crossed Flahaut’s smoke-blackened, blood-smeared face. He regarded Raoul for a moment, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare of the sun. “What about Suzanne?”
Raoul drew a breath. His neckcloth seemed to have tightened round his throat. “Tell her that I have every confidence she’ll make the right decisions.”
Flahaut looked at him a moment longer, then saluted and rode off. Raoul turned his gaze to the opposite ridge. Quiot’s left brigade had success at the walled farm of La Haye Sainte, driving back the King’s German Legion troops in the orchard. His right brigade drove Prince Bernhard’s Saxe-Weimar brigade from the twin farms of Papelotte and La Haye and pushed the 95th from the sandpit opposite La Haye Sainte. A Dutch-Belgian light brigade either withdrew or fled.
But Wellington had indeed had a counter-measure up his sleeve. Squadron after squadron of Allied heavy cavalry charged down the slope. The French cavalry met them near La Haye Sainte. The French cuirassiers should have been able to hold them, but the Allied cavalry were fresh and ready for blood after missing the fighting at Quatre Bras. The French cavalry broke in confusion before the Allied charge. Much of the infantry followed suit in a tangle of fallen men and blood-spattered ground.
Raoul spurred his horse forward from his station at the gun battery, calling to the retreating soldiers to rally and re-form. His cries fell on deaf ears. Formations dissolved, men ran away, others stood their ground and hacked wildly at the onrushing Allied soldiers only to be mowed down by the tide. The eagles of the 45th and 105th glittered in the hands of Allied soldiers, drunk on their success.
Raoul waited for the British cavalry to rally and draw back. But the Scots Greys instead pounded on across the valley. Good God, the madmen. They would be slaughtered.
The thunder of hooves shook the ground. Cries of “92nd” and “Scotland forever” carried on the breeze over the screams and groans and neighing of horses as the Allied cavalry fell beneath the blows of the French cuirassiers and lancers who had been sent up as reinforcements. For a moment Raoul could almost smell the salt breeze off Dunmykel Bay in Perthshire.
More Allied cavalry pounded after. Life Guards and King’s Dragoons judging by the helmets and crests. They slammed against Travers’s cuirassiers, British swords smashing against French breastplates. Raoul drew in his breath. Dear heaven, was that Lord Uxbridge leading the Household Cavalry? Why the devil hadn’t the cavalry commander remained behind to direct the reserves?
The breeze carried the sickly-sweet smell of fresh blood. Buglers sounded the rally, but by then the British cavalry were tired, scattered, and deep in enemy lines. Raoul drew his sword as the British swept over the French guns. Instinct took over, honed through the Revolution, the United Irish Uprising, the Peninsular War. He cut, parried, slashed, dispatching soldier after soldier.
He ran his sword through the throat of a dragoon, pulled it clear, and wheeled his horse round to parry an attack from a hussar lieutenant. He dispatched the hussar with a cut to the chest, then nearly fell from the saddle as his horse stumbled. He looked down to see that his horse had tripped over the body of a French private. He found himself staring into the dead blue eyes of Philippe Valery.
Later, when the numbness wore off, he would feel grief. If he survived.
Someone touched his arm. He spun round in the saddle, sword raised.
“O’Roarke.” Flahaut grabbed him by the arm. “Pull back. The British are trapped.”
French lancers and hussars filled the valley, cutting the British cavalry off from their lines. The British cavalry circled in disarray. One colonel, both his arms shot off, gripped his horse’s reins between his teeth. French swords and lances hacked and stabbed those who tried to ride back to their own lines. Raoul saw Sir William Ponsonby, with whom he had shared a glass of champagne at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, fall to a lance thrust.
“Christ,” Flahaut said. “Only a handful of them can have survived.”
Raoul wiped his hand across his face and realized he’d smeared blood over his forehead. “They took two eagles. And more than a dozen of our guns are disabled.”
“Are you saying the fight went to them?”
Raoul tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and dragged it across his forehead. “I’m saying it was a damned waste.”
Livia’s and Robbie’s nurses managed to take the three children to the park for a bit of fresh air in the early afternoon. The nurses, two sensible girls, reported that the city was eerily quiet, though there were horses drawn up before a number of houses, poised for flight. The children were a bit subdued but did not appear overly alarmed. After they’d been fed, they were happy to settle down in the hall beside the healthier of the wounded.
“Geoff says keeping one’s spirits up is half the battle to recovering,” Aline said, watching Colin and Robbie build a fort for Colin’s lead soldiers in Christophe’s sheets.
“I used to carry Colin about with me when I was nursing the wounded in Spain,” Suzanne said. “It always seemed to cheer them. And it’s rendered Colin wonderfully unflappable.”
Simon and David returned a short time later, with a towheaded ensign with a head wound and a redheaded Highlander who had died on the journey into the city. Simon, who had been holding the dying man in his lap, sprang down from the carriage without speaking, cheeks streaked with damp.
“People are drinking beer in the suburbs,” he said to Suzanne, when the towheaded boy had been settled in the hall with Aline, and they were in the kitchen gulping down cups of tea Cordelia had made. “Quite as though it were an ordinary Sunday.”
“But a bit farther into the forest the road is littered with baggage.” David stirred sugar into his tea as though he’d forgot what he was doing with his hands. “The wounded are picking their way over the wreckage and all too many have dropped in their tracks.” He flung down the spoon, spattering tea over the deal table.
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