Carla Kelly (25 page)

The Frenchman was obviously the only horseman among them. With a clicking sound and a graceful dip of the reins, he edged his horse close to Jesse. “He did, sir, and I listened to his ravings for a while—I never heard a more successful madman—then tied him up with a bellpull.” He shrugged. “Captain, I am not as good a man as you.”

“He is our ally,” Jesse said, but his argument sounded feeble to his own ears.

“Perhaps,” Leger replied. “I would not encourage too many armies as small as ours to visit Tordesillas again anytime soon. And now I suggest we leave this place.”

“With pleasure,” Elinore said. “Jesse, did you know that…that dreadful man was planning to keep me here to paint my picture? Why on earth?”

“He thought you were beautiful. I agree with him,” he said impulsively.

He could tell by her blush and the way she looked at him out of the corner of her eyes that she was pleased. “But you have just told me he was insane,” she teased.

“He had an eye for loveliness, Elinore, same as I do.” There, think on that for a while, he thought as he spurred his horse up close to Harper, who was deeply involved in staying in the saddle. “Private, it appears to me that the hussars will never issue you a summons to join their ranks.”

“I won’t go if they do,” Harper replied a trifle grimly.

“What can you tell me about that man on the roof?”

“Nothing much. I think he said he knew you from Santos. I think he said something about a baby, and then he was gone.”

I guess Senor Ramos meant it when he said he liked to pay his debts, Jesse thought as he moved closer to Wilkie. “Private, I do believe these horses have French saddles? Any ideas?”

“Not me, Captain. They were saddled and waiting when I started for the barn.”

“And you didn’t set the fire?”

“No, sir.”

They rode through Tordesillas, the town quiet in the early morning. Church bells tolled, and as they crossed the
plaza, the priest from last night came out and motioned for them to stop. “We see the smoke,” he said. “Please assure me that the castle is on fire.”

Jesse stared at him. “Padre, you surprise me.” Unsure of his Spanish, he motioned Elinore forward. She listened to the priest, her eyes wide. “He says that everyone in Tordesillas has been hoping that the French or the British would burn down the castle! He says we are welcome here anytime. Imagine.”

“Do tell him I feel some little guilt because he told me his wife needed Extreme Unction, and he wouldn’t even let me see her. Perhaps I could have helped her.” He looked back at the smoke that rose high over the trees now.

She spoke to the priest and then listened, gasping several times during his reply. When he finished, she told him good-bye as he went back to the church, then turned to Jesse, her eyes wide. “The priest says that the count usually came once a week to ask him to the castle, because his wife was near death.”

“And he wouldn’t go? The people here should expect better from their clergy.”

“Jesse! He says she’s been dead three years!”

“Oh, my,” he said faintly.

“There are all sorts of rumors about French soldiers on patrol disappearing, and even cats and dogs gone, poof! without a trace.” She shook her head, her own amazement undeniable. “Oh, he congratulated you on being so resourceful.”

“I hope you told him that I was the biggest idiot of the whole lot.”

She smiled and blew him a kiss. “I told him thank you quite prettily, Captain, and wasn’t I the lucky lady?”

He felt the strongest urge to lean closer to her from his saddle and kiss her, but he knew that his equestrian skills were no greater than his abilities in shinnying down a rope. He smiled instead, because the whole thing suddenly became monumentally funny to him. Here I jog along like a bag of bones, he thought, bird shit on my trousers, another black eye forming—thank goodness I am not a Cyclops, with the potential for three—with a four-day beard and smelling of cloves. He looked around. I have time on my hands, a beautiful wife who labors under the dementia that
I am a hero, a two-man army of thieves and cutpurses, and a Frenchman who seems to think he is important to Napoleon. Oh, yes, we are riding horses with French saddles, which might suggest to the more rational that we could be in serious trouble. I have a guardian angel, but he has paid his debt to me now, and I think we are on our own. Perhaps now I can write wee Bob and tell him that I did take a commission in the Medical Corps for the adventure of it.

He called a halt when they were out of sight of Tordesillas, and suggested to the others that they ride to Salamanca without stopping. To his dismay, or perhaps their good fortune, Elinore remembered something else the priest had told her. “He said that Soult is rumored to be there already, and only waiting for Souham to move south and join him.”

“That puts a new complexion on this retreat,” he said, more to himself than the others. He hoped that someone would offer a suggestion, but they all seemed to be looking at him, as though expecting some wisdom to come bounding out of him like Athena from Zeus’s brow. “I have an idea,” he said, after a long pause. “We have tried villages, and our luck has been haphazard at best. Castles do not seem to agree with us, either. I suggest the convent now. Elinore, do you remember Santa Isabella?”

She shook her head.

“The Chief had me stay there an extra week while the army moved ahead to Burgos last August. The sisters had an orphanage, and some of the children had the croup. Ring a bell with you now?”

“Why, yes, it does. It’s a little west of Salamanca, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

They arrived after dark, picking their way along a stony path lit only by the moon, which appeared to be in danger of disappearing behind a bank of clouds coming up quickly from the north and east. Only one lamp gleamed outside the convent walls, but Jesse knew enough of Spanish poverty to feel no alarm. Elinore gasped when he jangled the bell outside the massive gate and the sound seemed to bounce off the walls. He reached out and touched her leg. “Don’t worry, my dear, I know this place.”

He smiled in the dark, already relishing the opportunity to show the others something of his own skill. Two of the nuns were from Italy, and it was going to be his turn to demonstrate his linguistic prowess. Hippocrates, the sin of pride is the stumbling block of physicians, eh? he told himself as he heard footsteps and waited for the smaller gate cut in the larger one to be opened.

Lorenzo the slow boy was there at the gate, peering around it at first, tugging it open when he saw how few they were, then running to call for the nuns. Sister Maria Josefina came first, tall and handsome and so Italian. She smiled to recognize him, taking his hand in hers, her beautiful Tuscan-flavored Italian tumbling out as though she had been waiting just for his arrival.

“Captain Randall, you are an answer to my prayers. How did you know we needed you?”

“It is not the children again, is it?” he replied in Italian.

“No, we have sent them south to a safer place. Oh, sir, there are others. Do follow me, and bring your men.” She peered closer. “Captain, do you have a wife now.”

“I do, sister.”

“High time. Bellissima.”

He indicated the others to follow, and left Lorenzo with the horses. He had to hurry to keep up with the nun because she was taller than he was, and had a longer stride. He almost ran with her down one corridor, the others trailing behind. She stopped and pushed open the smaller portion of another large door, this one of iron.

When she spoke next, it was in French. “I have brought you help,” she said in a louder voice. He felt the familiar tingle down his spine as he stared at two rows of French soldiers, some on cots, others lying on pallets. “My God, sister,” he whispered. “My God.”

T
he shock in his voice rooted Elinore to the spot. The anguished look he gave her—one that cried “please help” without a word spoken—next set her in motion. Despite his obvious need for her, when she reached the doorway he extended both arms to prevent her from crossing the threshold. She could only look over his arm and gasp.

“They’re French!” she exclaimed, then pinched her nostrils shut. The odor of putrefaction was almost overwhelming, even though the room was large—it must have been the convent’s refectory—and the air cool. The men lay in two rows facing each other. These are the enemy, she thought, and then, God help them.

She recognized them immediately for what they were, men whose injuries were too severe for the retreating French to take with them after the battle of Salamanca in July. Only now in cold November were some of them recuperating, while others faded. She looked at them, thought of the three men left behind with Daniel O’Leary in Santos, and wondered all over again why nations fight.

She made no move to follow Jesse when he and the nun began to walk slowly by the wounded men. She was speaking to him in Italian. Hands behind his back, eyes lowered as though he wanted to look everywhere but at the men, Jesse listened, nodding now and then. They turned when they reached the end of the row, and this time he looked at the men. A few more feet, and then he stopped.

Elinore took her fingers from her nose, breathing slowly and evenly, concentrating on the act of breathing, rather than the ferocious stench of the body when it turns on itself. In another moment she felt her heart resume its normal
pace. Her hand when she lowered it was steady. She looked at her husband again, not surprised that he had found a stool from somewhere and seated himself beside a man who had propped himself up on one elbow and who gestured as he spoke.

The man appeared near death, his cheeks sunken, but red with fever, his dark eyes so bright they almost glittered. She thought it odd that he should have the energy to gesture until she noticed the satchel with the cross on it at the foot of his cot.

“Monsieur Leger, I think Jesse has found another surgeon,” she said.

“He has found the enemy!” Leger hissed.

She stared at him, shocked. “I…I don’t think he sees it that way,” she said when she found her voice.

“He is a fool then.”

“Elinore, please bring me my shoulder bag. I left it by the door,” Jesse called, raising his voice, and yet still speaking softly, in the way that surgeons did when there were patients they did not wish to disturb.

She nodded and found the bag. Leger grabbed her arm. “If he treats these French soldiers, he is a traitor!”

“Monsieur, he is a surgeon,” she said quietly. “It is not in his power to be anything else. Let go of me.”

She was not sure what she would do if he did not release her, but Harper solved the problem by placing both meaty hands on the Frenchman’s shoulders and giving him a shake. He put his face close to Leger’s. “Let ’er go. ’Twouldn’t bother me much to land you in one of them cots.”

Jesse was on his feet now, his face pale. “Elinore, are you all right?”

In the middle of hell, he is worried about me, she thought. She knew then that if she lived to be old, she would never forget the peculiar grace of the moment. “Stay there, my dear,” she called. “It’s nothing.” She took in her surroundings, the nuns who had gathered by now, the French patients, and the look on her husband’s face when she called him “my dear.” She knew beyond doubt there was no other place in the universe for her.

Leger turned on his heel and left the hall. In another moment she heard the massive door slam. Harper and Wilkie
exchanged glances. “D’ye know, Wilkie, there are times I get distressed with me fellows, but I’ve never seen the profit in hating them all.”

“Private ’arper, it does seem a bit uncouth, eh?” Wilkie agreed. “Mrs. Randall, do you understand the workings of the aristocratic mind?”

“I only know there is more sorrow in his life than any of us know,” she said quietly. “Where I might have judged earlier, I would not presume so now.”

The men were silent then, and she shouldered her husband’s medical bag. I do hope I live long enough to appreciate what I have learned on this retreat, she thought. Didn’t Jesse promise me some Randall luck? Something tells me I am not the first woman led astray by a husband’s promise. The notion made her want to smile.

“Here you are, Jesse,” she said. There wasn’t any point in calling him Captain, or even Chief anymore, not after calling him my dear. “Monsieur Leger seems to think you are a traitor for setting foot in this room.”

“What a relief that I am not too concerned about his opinion,” he replied. He nodded to the man on the cot. “This is Captain Philippe Barzun.” He smiled. “What do I learn in a few moments but he is also a graduate of the University of Milan, although a few years before I matriculated. This is my wife,” he concluded in Italian.

She smiled at the surgeon, who put a hand to his chest and managed a bow from his cot that someone contrived to be elegant. He spoke to Jesse in Italian, and she could not overlook the blush that rose to her husband’s face. She raised her eyebrows at him. “He said he did not know that British woman were so beautiful, and what does she see in a surgeon?” he related.

It was her turn to blush. She tried not to look as Jesse raised the blanket off the basket frame at the end of the cot to reveal a leg swollen to grotesque proportions bound in a stained bandage far too constricting. He reached in his bag for his surgical scissors, and listened to Barzun.

“My dear, he wants you to take that basin down the row and toward the end. You will see several soldiers there with fever. They could use a cool cloth.”

“He’s sending me away, isn’t he?” she asked, her voice
calm. The odor from the wound was overpowering, now that the blanket had been turned back.

“Yes, and if he didn’t, I would. Go now.”

She did as he said, walking to the end of the row, and sitting down between two soldiers. One of them must have been a cuirassier, because his chest armor had been upended on the table and doubled as a washbasin. The younger soldier had been burned. She looked closer at his arm. The burn had obviously been cleaned at one time, but not recently. Jaws clenched, she concentrated on wiping his face and neck. In the light of his injury, her act so puny, he still opened his eyes and smiled. “
Merci
,” he whispered.