Carla Kelly (25 page)

***

In the week that followed, they were diverted momentarily by the letter from Aunt Louisa, thanking Lady Bushnell for sending three hundred pounds to keep her wretched brother from Newgate, and assuring them that it would never happen again. “Until the next time,” Susan murmured when she folded the letter. “Oh, my lady, thank you for saving him.”

She nodded. “You must deal with him next time, Susan, you and your husband, and I fear it will not be easy.” She patted Susan’s hand, her eyes wistful. “I hope you will learn, in time, to forgive him for . . . for not meeting your expectations.” She sighed. “Few of us do, I fear.”

“I don’t know that I can forgive him,” Susan said honestly.

“In time, my dear, in time,” the widow murmured.

It was a week of almost superhuman effort for Lady Bushnell. The widow dictated only in short sentences, her hand pressed to her chest most of the time, as if to block out continual pain. She called David “sergeant” now, and through her own grief, Susan was not sure that she even knew him as bailiff anymore.

“I cannot bear it,” she told her husband on the stairs as they went up after dinner to sit with her.

“You must, of course, Suzie,” he murmured, his arm around her. “I was so busy with the barley harvest today, I forgot to ask you at dinner: is she almost done with the reminiscence?”

“We finished it this afternoon, David.” She began to cry. “It’s over now.”

He sat with her on the stairs, his arms around her, until she could dry her eyes, square her shoulders, and march into the room with him.

To her surprise, Lady Bushnell was sitting in her chair by the window, the mound of letters in her lap, and the green case with the Waterloo medal on top.

“I’m tired of this room,” she announced, and to Susan’s relief, her voice sounded strong again. “Sergeant, I want you to take me out to that slope. Susan, you go ask Tom the cowman to take the chair. Sergeant, you can carry me.” She smiled at him then, and the years seemed to tumble from her shoulders. “I remember that you carried me once, didn’t you? After Busaco, when the river was high?”

“I did.”

Susan didn’t dare look at him. She knew that voice.

They did as she ordered, Tom carrying the chair and putting it where David quietly directed. He nodded to the widow and hurried back down the slope, shaking his head. The bailiff set Lady Bushnell in the chair, still clutching her precious letters and the medal case.

She was silent as she looked over the Waterloo wheat, watching it dance in the early-evening breeze. It had returned, as its engineer had predicted, battered but whole, the grain heads heavy now with the fruit of summer. Here and there were bare patches where the pounding had been too great, but the field stood and waved its own challenge to the elements.

“You were right about the wheat,” Lady Bushnell said, reaching up her hand for the bailiff to hold it. “You are not always right, though. I ask one thing more of you, Sergeant Wiggins.”

“Pues, le pídame, dama,”
he said, surprisingly, in his bad Peninsula Spanish.

She flashed him a smile that stripped away more years, until Susan had to turn away to keep her heart from cracking in two. Oh, Lady Bushnell, she thought. I love you so much. You are the bravest of the brave.

“Was I wrong to send Charlie to the regiment? Was he a coward at Waterloo? Be truthful, now, you rascal, I beg of you.”

Susan bowed her head and looked away from the wheat, across to the field beyond, where the sun was starting to set. Please, David, do the right thing.

“Yes, you were wrong. He was a coward and unfit to command us at Waterloo,” David said, his voice low and wrenched out of his body by the roots. “A lesser engagement he could have handled, but not Waterloo. We stayed alive because of Colonel March.”

“And you?”

“And me. And the other sergeants who didn’t make it out.”

It was a lot to digest, and Susan was not surprised at the silence from the chair. She turned around and rested herself against David’s back. “Thank you a thousand times,” she murmured against his shirt. When she felt him tense, she knew Lady Bushnell was struggling to speak. She closed her eyes and listened with her heart.

“Do you think Charlie will understand that I only did what I thought was best?” she asked in a voice destroyed with grief. “He was from a family of warriors, so he had to be one, too. The times demanded it. Didn’t they, sergeant?”

“Sì, dama.”

“But tell me, please, was he shot by his own? I have heard it rumored, no matter how you’ve tried to protect me. I must know all, Sergeant.”

“No, my lady. He died in battle. He was not shot by his own.”

Lady Bushnell sighed then, a great sound of relief. “Thank God for that.” Her voice changed then, taking on its authority. “Very well, Sergeant, I wish you and your wife would just leave me alone here until the sun goes down. Go away for a while.” She managed a chuckle. “Susan, you should have brought a blanket with you, as I have seen from my window what you and the sergeant do, when the mood was on you, and you thought I was sleeping!”

Susan laughed and took her husband’s hand, and kissed it. “That only encourages him. Come, Sergeant, let’s leave your
dama
alone for a time.”

He nodded and released the widow’s hand. He kissed her on the cheek, pausing there a moment until she chuckled. “Sergeant, don’t you dare cry. I’ll lose all faith in the regular army if you do! Kiss me, Susan.”

She did, determined not to cry.

“You weren’t much of a lady’s companion,” the woman murmured, her hand against Susan’s cheek. “You’ll never be a pianist, and I’m not sure modern novels are for me.”

“True. Actually, I felt more like a daughter, Lady Bushnell.” She dug deep within herself. “I love you, you know.”

“I know.” Lady Bushnell straightened herself. “Thank you for these letters. Now, go on. Take the sergeant somewhere for a stroll.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you might go ahead and tell him what I’ve been suspecting, if you haven’t already.”

“How did you know?” she asked, suddenly shy.

“I’ve had two of my own, and I know the signs, my love.”

Susan led the bailiff away, and to her relief he did not protest. She tugged him farther up the slope and down to the trees beside the road.

“Tell me what?” he asked when she finally allowed him to stop. They leaned against the fence beside the road. “I think I know, but please, let’s hear it.”

“Well, maybe someday you can write ‘Waterloo Seed Farm, Wiggins and Son,’ on the top of your order books,” she said quietly. “Or maybe ‘Daughter.’ Women are good at growing things, too.”

“Obviously you are,” he said after he kissed her. “Thank you.”

She rested against the fence, then turned to face him. “Now you owe me the truth, David.”

“I already told it. You heard me.”

“You did, but not all, I’m thinking. Charlie
was
killed by his own. You told me that before. Even in the end you could not tell her all the truth.”

He looked back at the hill as though he could see Lady Bushnell through it. “I do not think an old woman needs that much truth. She had enough information now to square herself with her son—and herself.”

Susan placed herself in front of her husband and pulled him close to her, hooking her thumbs into the back of his pants so he could not move away from the fence. “I know you.”

“I should think so,” he temporized, his expression cautious.

“I know you,” she repeated more firmly. “Who are you protecting still? I want to know. Is it . . . is it Colonel March?” She leaned her forehead against him for a brief moment. “Is it you?”

He hesitated, then looked down at her. “I can’t lie to you, can I?”

“No, you can’t. Your lying, stealing, thieving, poaching days are long gone, Sergeant, and you know it.”

He waited, and thought, and she did not press him further. Finally he put his arms around her. “It wasn’t anyone in the regiment, so there’s no shame there.” He sighed. “He had to die, Susan; we all knew it. This wasn’t the same regiment that fought in the Peninsula We had green troops. You could see them weaken with each charge of French cavalry up that slope.” He shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of the memory. “And there was poor Charlie, screaming and scurrying around inside the square, trying to burrow under the corpses.”

She shuddered, trying to imagine the horror.

“The person who killed him didn’t belong to the regiment.”

“Who?” she demanded.

“Joel Steinman,” he said simply.

“God, no!” she breathed. “But . . . but you said. His arm . . .”

“It wasn’t all the way off then. That came later at the field hospital.” The bailiff’s arms tightened around her. “He watched Charlie through one charge, and how Major March and Sergeant Mabry and I worked like Turks to plug holes here and there, draw the men in, keep them battle ready, tell them to aim and fire. It just happened that I was watching him when he did it.”

“How?” she asked, barely breathing out the question.

“After that charge, he took a pistol from Lieutenant Chase’s body, propped it on his knee, and drilled Charlie right through the forehead.”

He could speak then, and more freely, as if the telling of it released him. His tone became almost conversational. “It was the neatest hole you ever saw, Susan. An engineer couldn’t have spaced the thing better, right there between his eyes.”

“Joel,” she said.

“Joel. I’ll never forget the look on his face. He put down that pistol—it was slippery with his blood, dripping in it—and leaned back against that stack of corpses with a serenity I could never even attempt. Susan, I think the army missed out on a great warrior in Joel Steinman.”

Quietly, arm in arm, they walked back over the brow of the hill and stood, watching the Waterloo wheat in the last light before the sun set.

“She’s asleep, Suzie,” the bailiff said as he looked toward the chair.

“No, my love, she’s dead,” Susan said. “Stay here.”

To her relief, he did not follow her. Lady Bushnell sat with her head forward against her chest. Her eyes were closed, but she seemed to be staring at the letters in her slack grasp. As Susan watched in silence, grief, and love, the breeze picked up some of the letters and carried them into the wheat, to lodge fast against the stalks. She watched them go, peace in her heart.

The medal box had fallen to the ground. She knelt beside the chair and picked it up, running her hand over the velvet cover, as Lady Bushnell had done so many times. She opened it, and took out the medal, shaking it to the length of its ribbon, admiring it again.

“For heroes,” she whispered as she raised up and put the medal around Lady Bushnell’s neck. “For heroes.”

Epilogue

She didn’t try to force David to go to the funeral at Bushnell, the family estate. It was enough that he prepared the coffin, spending hours at it and coming to bed red-eyed and in need of great solace. She and Mrs. Skerlong dressed the body and tucked the letters around her feet. She kept the reminiscence. The sergeant put the medal around her neck again before he nailed the coffin shut.

“And so it goes,” he said as he watched the carter take Lady Bushnell away to the family vault to lie quiet and in peace at last beside husband, daughter, and son. “Suzie, we’d better pack. I can’t see any of Lord Bushnell’s relatives who inherit keeping us on here to play with wheat and shear sheep.” He turned his attention to the slope as he did so often now. “I wish I could have bought it, of course, but Lord Hackingham by Gloucester did promise me a place, if I wanted it. It may take a few years, but we’ll do all right.” He tightened his grip on her shoulder as the cart moved over the hill and out of sight. “I’ll write him in a day or two.”

He still hadn’t written by the end of the week, but she did not press him. She was content to stay close by him, resting her head against his shoulder during the long evenings when time was painful, and holding him in her arms as he tried to sleep.

By the next week, the bailiff seemed to have turned a page in his own book of life. He woke up one morning to tease her about her familiarity with the washbasin as she retched into it, then glared at him. After a half hour’s consolation of a more tender nature, he whistled his way down the stairs, and her heart was glad again.

They were finishing lunch and going back to the inventory that the Bushnell estate had requested when Colonel and Mrs. March pulled up to the front door in a barouche.

“Colonel, how nice to see you,” the bailiff said from the front steps. “And Lady Bushne . . . no, no, Mrs. March!”

Susan joined him, and welcomed them in for tea in the sitting room. As they sipped their tea, the Marches spoke of their honeymoon in France and Belgium.

“Sergeant, you wouldn’t believe what’s happened to the battlefield!” the colonel exclaimed, setting down his cup with a click.

“Oh? What can you do to a battlefield?”

“It chaps my thighs,” March said. “You know the tree . . .”

“Who could forget?”

“Gone. Tourists!” He spit out the word like a bad taste. “And damn me if the Belgians—the damned Belgians!—aren’t building a monument bigger than Babel! Chaps my thighs,” he muttered again.

Susan twinkled her eyes at her husband, and he winked back. “It was just a battle, sir,” he said.

Colonel March glared at him. “Sergeant Wiggins, that’s almost blasphemy!” He muttered something into his teacup as he drank the last of it. “But I’ll overlook it.” He smiled at his wife then, and reached into his coat. “Here’s what I really came to give you. The Bushnell family—Lord Bushnell had some distant cousins—thought I should give this to you. Here. Read it.”

The bailiff took the letter and opened it. He read it through, swallowed several times, and handed it wordlessly to Susan.

She took the letter, feeling light-headed and knowing it had nothing to do with the baby. She sat on the edge of David’s chair and he put his arm on her leg, as though in serious need of her presence. She read the letter, then folded it quietly and tucked it in her heart.

“Quilling Manor? And the whole farm?” she asked when she could speak.

The colonel nodded. “And she willed you two an annuity for ten years so you can get the Waterloo Seed Farm into full production. I think you both meant more to her than you knew.”

Susan kissed the top of her husband’s head. No, Colonel March, she thought, we knew.