Since the Surrender (6 page)

He had been fascinated.

“You thought wrongly, Sergeant Maris,” she continued in that gentle, gentle tone. “He is my husband and your commanding officer, and as such he will have your respect at all times and you will refer to him with respect at all times. I have enjoyed our conversation him with respect at all times. I have enjoyed our conversation because until now you have been all that is respectful. I shall forgive you this one transgression and I shall not share our conversation with my husband. If I ever hear you saying such a thing about him ever again, I will make very certain you are flogged.”

All said nearly apologetically. All said quite softly. But she impaled that soldier with a stare.

For a long moment he seemed helpless to move away from it. Finally he slunk tentatively, awkwardly, away from her, bowing and muttering apologies, as if she were indeed armed with a pike. She had stared after him, pupils flared, delicate jaw set, cheeks pink. Apparently lost in thought. And then at last she took a deep breath and seemed to sigh it out.

She flicked her eyes up. They flared in surprise when she saw Chase.

She knew instantly he’d witnessed all of it.

She went very still, and an interesting variety of emotions chased each other across her face, as if in that moment she could not decide whom to be.

And then she gave up; she’d been caught. She shrugged one shoulder. Then, chin up, held his gaze for an inscrutable moment or two, awaiting his reaction, his verdict.

He hadn’t been able to help it: he smiled crookedly, and brought his hands together in slow, silent applause. Bravo, he mouthed. She’d done almost precisely what he would have done.

She bit back a smile. White teeth sinking briefly into her full, soft bottom lip: he remembered that image for a long time after. And then she gave a deep, theatrical, sardonic curtsy, which deepened his smile, and she glided away toward one of her sisters, who’d been flirting a little too overtly with another soldier for most of the evening, which is what they did most evenings. Rosalind March, he’d realized then, was forever looking after her sisters. A détente of sorts had been reached between them. And as he was her husband’s closest confidant, they were ever thrown together

—at balls, and dinners both large and private—and détente evolved into a friendship.

If one could call careful politeness stretched over a hum of sensual awareness friendship, that is.

Chase found himself cataloguing the minutest things about her. The head tilt, the shoulder roll—she did that when she thought no one was watching; he knew it was her way of shifting the mantle of grace and gravity thrown over her the moment she became a colonel’s wife. She wore it willingly but it had never fit comfortably, and Chase was certain he was the only one who noticed the strain. The faint birthmark on her collarbone, roughly the shape of a fan. The quickly disguised flint in her green eyes whenever someone made a foolish remark, betraying a surprisingly impatient mind. The affectionate deference with which she always addressed her husband. The myriad subtle colors in her hair, from…well, flaxen, for lack of a less dramatic word, to a shining honey-brown, the bitten down nail of the little finger on her left hand, a sign of worries Rosalind March never betrayed in any other way, and—thanks to a conspiracy between candlelight, a chilly room, a dropped shawl, a silk bodice, and a strategically timed glance—the precise outline of her nipples.

her nipples.

He knew that she generally smelled faintly of rosewater. One night Chase had danced with her and discovered she smelled both very faintly of rosewater and her husband’s shaving soap, much the way a woman who had just been kissed—or considerably more—by her husband might before she’d gone down to the soiree. Jealousy had been a shocking machete swipe through his torso. He’d been unable to speak or even, for an instant, breathe. He’d given her saturnine silence for the duration of the dance. He’d taken perverse pleasure in deflecting her conversation the way a window deflects pebbles hurled by a lover at midnight. He knew it was childish. He knew it was unforgivably rude. Perhaps even cowardly, a word he would have called anyone out over should they have had the grave stupidity to direct it at him, and not even his brothers were quite that stupid.

He’d read La Morte D’Artur when he was a child, for God’s sake. And though he’d enjoyed the questing and the battles, he always found the Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere business—the drama! The anguish! Good God—impractical and surely avoidable. In truth, he didn’t know what to do.

He was at the mercy of something he didn’t understand. And in that moment, he’d felt like a child, not like a battle-hardened soldier. He’d watched hurt darken her pale green eyes.

Then anger.

Then wounded pride.

When the last gave way to comprehension, he knew he was in trouble. The girl was cleverer than he preferred. Than she, for reasons of her own, preferred anyone to know.

And after this, any easiness between them was gone as if it had never been.

She began to watch him, too, in just the same way. And for the same reasons. Silence separated them. Fascination bound them. Entirely his fault.

He knew himself, and he knew her, which meant he should have known how it all would end.

He shook himself back to the present urgency: his search for the Mumford Arms.

“Rosewater,” he muttered darkly and kept walking. He might as well blame the rosewater as anything else.

“Wot’s rosewater? Can ye drink it?” Damned urchin was still behind him.

Chase shot him a dark look. “You’d have to be foxed to drink it. It’s

…something girls wear. To smell like girls. To smell like…flowers.”

The boy’s face crinkled in incredulity. “I ken no girls what smell like flowers.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment.”

“I dinna like girls at all.”

“That makes you a clever lad, indeed.”

The urchin glowed in male solidarity, not at all discouraged by Chase’s discouraging tone. “D’yer ever drink rosewater?”

“I’ve never been quite that foxed, no.”

“D’yer drink whiskey before?”

“Yes.”

“Rye?”

“Yes.”

“Gin?”

“Yes.” He could do this all day.

“Brandy?”

“Yes.”

“Blood?”

“Once or twice.”

“Cor!” The boy gave a thrilled leap straight up and then frisked sideways. Chase gave him a blackly quelling look and the frisking stopped and the urchin ran to catch up. “Blood!”

“Inadvertently, mind you,” Chase said sternly.

“In a vertinly? A vertinly is a tankard, like?”

“‘Inadvertently.’ It’s a word that means ‘not at all on purpose.’ It was just that after the battle of Waterloo the whole of the battlefield was covered with soldiers dead and dying, and the canteens of water were nearly all empty, and all the dead and wounded soldiers lay over the field for hours, for nearly a day, with nothing to drink or eat. There was many a soldier would have fought that battle all over again for one sip of water, whether or not blood was in it. So, yes: I wanted to live. And the water I found in a well tasted of blood, and more than one of us drank of it.”

The urchin was all palpable, speechless awe.

It occurred to Chase that this was the first time he’d recited this part of his story in detail to…anyone. He began to understand why his father and his uncles enjoyed telling stories to their boys: in making a legend, one could gild horror. So they could be reminded more of the courage than the carnage at times when the cost seemed too high. And he could remind himself of a time when he felt essential.

“Ye were lamed at Waterloo?”

“You could say that.”

“Can I see it? Your leg?”

“No.”

“Wot ’appened?”

Chase recited without missing a stride. “I woke with a great weight upon me, and I couldn’t see at all; ’twas black before my eyes. I thought I was blind. I could hear moans and screams all around me, cries and words from men in English and French. I wiped at my eyes and discovered I wasn’t blind: my eyes were just filled with blood from a wound to my scalp. I’d been shot here.” He pushed up his hat and his hair and pointed to the white scar as he walked. The boy squinted in fascination up at him, and hopped twice to get a closer look. “They didna get yer brains?”

“No, they did not get my brains. Just my scalp, and the scalp bleeds rather a lot when it’s nicked, just so you know in case you ever sustain a wound to the head.” The boy put his own hand up to his forehead, as if to test the structural integrity of his own scalp. “I wiped the blood from my eyes with my hands so I could see, and I discovered the weight was the body of a French soldier. He was dead, laying right atop me, and his eyes stared right into mine.”

He spoke to the boy as if he were a man, which is what boys preferred, he knew. He preferred it, too: unadulterated truth. He wasn’t the only one to wake to pain beneath a dead man on that day. He wasn’t the heroic Colonel Eversea in that moment. Just another English body battered in its duty to its country. This boy stopped in his tracks, momentarily paralyzed by the gory glory of it all.

Chase took the opportunity to accelerate his pace. The boy, bloody hell, ran to catch up.

“D’yer kill ’im?” he said breathlessly. “The frog atop ye?”

“I must have done. It was my job to kill French soldiers before they killed us.”

“I would ’ave killed ’undreds!” Urchin leaped and pointed an invisible musket at a passerby. “Boom!” The passerby jumped and scowled at the boy, one hand over his heart. The boy grinned. The man shot by the phantom musket sent a commiseration-seeking look toward Chase. Who ignored it, as he was in need of commiseration himself.

“Ah, but it was not so easy. French soldiers were very good fighters, and we took no pleasure in the killing, but we did take pleasure in doing our jobs for our country. When the fighting was done, the hospital wagons took all the wounded soldiers they could carry, French and English, back with us to the hospitals and we were all the same then. All of us fighting men.”

Chase knew the notion that the enemy could be admired was far too philosophically abstruse for the typical bloodthirsty ten-year-old boy. He hoped the urchin would grow bored, halt the stream of questions and abandon him to the luxurious, painful, confusing rush of his memories.

She looked older now. Not worn. Her fine features were more

…distinct. Less girlishly soft now, more refined by circumstances. She was twenty-five.

Her skin. He remembered her skin had been unutterably soft. He knew a sizzle of desire so shockingly fierce his breathing struggled. Oh, God. Even as his mind turned memories of her round and round with suspicion and wonder and resentment, his body felt it was owed her.

His leg chose that moment to remind him that it wasn’t what it once was, and he clenched his teeth against a burgeoning wave of pain and strode onward, hardly missing a stride.

Nor did the urchin.

“D’yer ride a fine ’orse? ’Ave a great gun?”

“Yes and yes. I was captain of the Artillery.”

“D’yer see ’er? The colonel’s wife? When ye were dyin’ on the ground?”

Dying on the ground? He supposed he had been dying on the ground.

“No.” It was painful to admit.

Oh God, what he wouldn’t have given to see her. He’d thought he heard her. He thought he’d smelled her, the rosewater and sweetness amidst the earth of mud and horse, the acrid tang of blood and sweat and gunpowder. Which is when he knew he’d been dying, because he knew this was impossible. He’d thought perhaps someone had flung open a window in Hell and let in the scent of Heaven.

He’d known then that if she was the last thing on earth his senses conjured, the loss of her—the fact that he could never have her

—was inexpressible.

“Why didn’t you see ’er?”

“I was no longer in the colonel’s command on the morning of the battle.”

His leg gave another throb then, helpfully reminding him of the ignominy—and shocking pleasure—leading to that turn of events. And now she wanted his help.

She was delusional if she thought a terrible cow painting had anything at all to do with her sister.

“Oh.” The boy lost interest in this line of questioning. He was onto a gorier one. “So why d’yer limp?”

“My leg was shot open. They wanted to take it off with a great saw and I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Blimey!” the urchin breathed. “Was it bloody and did it hurt? Did your bones show?”

“Quite bloody and it hurt and no one told me whether my bones showed and I couldn’t see whether they did. But they sewed me up, and I stayed in Quatre Bras in a little farmhouse with a kind family until I could walk again, and then I came home to England.”

Before that he’d refused to allow any of his own grievously wounded men to die alone. He heard confessions; he pretended to be the loved ones called for in a fever haze, sat beside them when they could no longer speak at all and ensured that they died knowing their captain valued them. But soon he’d become too ill to do that, and then everything beyond that had been a blur of fever and pain. Shrapnel still, to this day, was working its way to the surface of his skin, the way memories did. Waterloo was still embedded in him, and with it, Rosalind March.

Silent waves of nearly tangible adulation poured from the boy. Chase might as well have just concluded a delightful fairy tale with

“and they all lived happily ever after.”

“I want to be a soldier,” Urchin finally said with hushed awe. Chase snorted and walked on, and the boy scrambled after him like a page in the wake of a royal coach.

“I can work fer ye, like,” he said breathlessly. “Tell you where to find nasty strong drinks and carry messages fer ye and the like.”

nasty strong drinks and carry messages fer ye and the like.”

Interesting definition of a job.

“You cannot. I am not in search of an employee at the moment. I’m in search of a whiskey and a wom—a nice ale.”

He’d just then decided to add a woman to his objective.

“Though yer jus’ wanted a nasty strong drink.” Shrewdly observed.

“I’ll find one, mark my words,” Chase said grimly. He stopped abruptly. “Where the hell is this bloody pub? Did you tell me the truth about its location?”