Jane Feather - [V Series] (15 page)

Men rode up on lathered horses with information for the commander in chief from the thick of the fighting. The message was always one of failure. Every attempt was being beaten back; the troops were exhausted, decimated, their officers slaughtered like flies as the defenders hurled them back from the summit of the ladders. Wellington’s face was white granite in the flickering torchlight as he received the stream of desperate communications, but he seemed to Tamsyn to be unflustered, writing more orders calmly, speaking in collected tones to his staff gathered close around him.

Then the bugle calls changed, and she recognized the note of recall. Over and over it sounded, but she could neither see nor hear any diminution in the savage conflict. The earth continued to throw up flame and burning bodies, whose hideous screams warred with the bellowing of the guns and the exploding mines. It was
impossible to imagine anyone emerging alive from that inferno, and she stood by her nervous horse in a kind of numbed trance of horror, wondering why men would do this, would engage in such wholesale slaughter just to take over an insignificant heap of bricks and mortar.

But coherent reasoning wasn’t possible, and her thoughts and emotions finally centered on the name of Julian St. Simon, repeating itself over and over again in her head like the refrain of a song that wouldn’t be banished. He became the focus of the conflagration, the only reality her mind could grasp, but she couldn’t manage to speculate where he was, whether he was alive, or whether he was lying somewhere under a heap of bodies, screaming in his agony, suffocating in the blood of others, or whether he was now only a cold, pale lump of bleeding clay.

It was half past eleven, an hour and a half after the murderous mayhem had begun, when an officer galloped
ventre à terre
through the group, his horse foam-flecked around the bit, his flanks lathered.

Wellington turned as the horse came to a heaving, panting halt beside him. The exchange was short, but it was clear to the bystanders that something had changed.

“Gentlemen, General Picton’s taken the castle.” Lord March turned from the duke’s side to make the announcement. “He’s withdrawn troops from the trenches to enable him to maintain his position. We should have the city secured shortly.”

So they were in … or a toehold, at least. Tamsyn mounted her horse amid the murmured jubilation and rode slowly down toward the city walls. They were in, but at what horrendous cost. The bodies were piled high, the screams and groans as loud as ever. For the wounded and dying, Picton’s success came too late. She
rode along the walls, heedless of the firing that still continued along the ramparts. The ladders, warm and slippery with blood, still stood against the breaches, littered with severed limbs and tangled corpses.

Had Julian St. Simon survived? It seemed impossible to imagine anyone still living. But even as she thought this, a great cry of triumph went up from within the city walls, and a bugle sounded an exuberant note of victory. The city of Badajos had finally fallen to the besiegers.

Cesar threw up his head and pawed the earth frantically at the smell of blood and this new sound. Tamsyn steadied him and he stood still, obedient to his Mameluke training, but he was quivering with fright, nostrils flared, lips drawn back from the bit.

“All right,” she said softly. “Let’s get out of here.” She turned him away from the city, intending to leave him in Elvas and return on foot, but she hadn’t gone more than a few yards when a man in the green tunic of a rifleman hailed her.

Tamsyn drew rein as the man, pouring blood from a shattered jaw, stumbled over to her. He was trying to hold his jaw together with one hand, while he gestured frantically into the darkness behind him.

Tamsyn dismounted swiftly, tearing off the bandanna she wore around her neck. She was used to wounded men and didn’t flinch from offering what assistance she could. The fact that she swooned dead away at the sight of her own blood was a mortifying secret that only Gabriel knew.

She bound up the man’s jaw with deft, sensitive fingers. “Mount my horse and I’ll take you to the rear.”

The rifleman shook his head, gesturing again behind him, his eyes as eloquent as his mouth was dumb. She stepped into the darkness and almost tripped over a man
groaning in the wet mud. Blood pumped from a gaping wound in his thigh, and he was using both hands to hold the severed flesh together as if it would stanch the flow.

“Me mate,” he whispered. “Get ’im to the ’ospital. ’E’s got a chance. I’m done fer.”

“He’s not going to leave you,” she said softly, bending over him. “I’ll use your belt as a tourniquet, and if you can get onto Cesar, we’ll have you with the surgeons in no time.”

She worked fast, aware even as she did so that the man’s chances of survival were slim. His face was already assuming the ashen cast of a man who looked upon the grave. But his friend wouldn’t leave him, and she understood the power of such loyalties.

With almost superhuman strength his friend lifted him into his arms and somehow onto Cesar’s back.

“Mount behind him so you can hold him steady,” Tamsyn instructed, stroking Cesar’s damp neck.

The rifleman hauled himself up into the high-backed, cushioned saddle. The expression in his eyes said clearly that he didn’t much relish his position atop this restless white steed, but he took a firm hold of his comrade as Tamsyn began to lead the horse toward the rear.

The way was now thronged with limbers and drays bringing the wounded off the field now that the enfilading fire from the ramparts had ceased. People glanced curiously at the small figure, androgynous in the darkness, trudging along beside the magnificent beast and its wounded riders, but everyone was too occupied to do more than stare in passing.

There was chaos at the hospital tents, where torches swung from poles casting flickering light on the bloody
work below. Tamsyn grabbed the sleeve of a passing orderly.

“I’ve two wounded men here. Can you take them?”

He stared at her, distracted, for a minute, then said, “Put ’em down there. We’ll get to ’em when we can.”

“One of them needs immediate attention,” Tamsyn insisted, her eyes flashing. “I didn’t bring him off the field for him to die in the mud within reach of a surgeon.”

“What’s going on here?” A man in the blood-streaked apron of a surgeon paused beside them as he was hurrying along the stretchers, giving orders for the disposition of their occupants.

“I’ve two men in need of immediate attention,” Tamsyn declared. “And this dolt told me to leave them to die in the mud.”

The surgeon blinked and stared in astonishment. “And just who might you be?”

“The commander in chief knows who I am,” she said smartly. “And I’m a friend—a close friend—of Colonel, Lord St. Simon of the Sixth. And while I’m bandying words with this village idiot, other men are dying out there because I’m not bringing them in!” She gestured to the hapless orderly with an expression of acute disgust and snapped, “Help them down.”

The surgeon examined the two men as they came off Cesar. “One walking wounded,” he pronounced. “Take him to the second tent.”

The rifleman with the bandaged jaw shook his head, pain flaring in his eyes and indicated his comrade with the same urgency he’d shown Tamsyn before.

“All right, I’ll see to him,” the surgeon said with a hint of impatience. “I can’t promise much, but that leg will have to come off.… Hey, you there, bring that
stretcher.” He hailed two orderlies, running past at the double.

They stopped and came over, lifting the wounded man onto the stretcher. Only when he saw his friend carried inside to the faint hope to be found in the butchery of the tents did the other rifleman go off with the orderly, sticking his hand out to Tamsyn in mute gratitude before he did so.

“Looks like we have work to do, Cesar,” Tamsyn said, swinging into the saddle. “I know you’ll hate it, but we can’t stand around twiddling our thumbs.”

She rode back toward the city, looking for wounded who could manage this awkward but speedy form of transportation.

Within the city walls Julian St. Simon, miraculously unscathed but blackened from head to toe from gunfire, stood in the central square and took stock. He’d been at the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo three months before and, horrendous though that had been, it had been nothing compared to this April night.

“Julian! Thank God, man.” Frank Frobisher came running across the square. “I saw you go down at the San Jose bastion, but I couldn’t get back to you in the crush.” The captain had lost his hat, his tunic was ripped, and an oozing gash ran from one scorched eyebrow down to the corner of his mouth.

“I lost my footing, nothing more dramatic than that,” Julian said, clapping his friend’s arm in a wordless gesture. “Tim’s gone to the rear. Piece of shrapnel in his eye.”

“And Deerbourne’s fallen,” Frank said, his expression bleak. “And George Castleton and … oh, so many others.” He looked around the deserted square.
The inhabitants of Badajos were behind locked doors, not showing their faces to the victors. Sporadic gunfire still sounded from the ramparts.

“The men are in a savage mood,” he said somberly. “If the Peer allows them to fall out, there’ll be a sack worse than Ciudad Rodrigo.”

“He will,” Julian asserted, clasping the back of his neck, arching it against his hand in a weary gesture. “They fought like tigers, they saw their comrades slaughtered, he’ll give them their revenge.”

Both men looked up at the sky where the evening star was fading fast. “If Wellington had hanged the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo, he’d have saved thousands of lives today,” Julian said in a deadened voice. “Philippon would never have held out here if he faced death at defeat.”

Frank shrugged. “A trifle medieval, though, Julian, putting a defeated garrison to the sword.”

“And you think what’s going to happen here will be civilized?” Julian demanded. “The men are going to go to the devil, and we’ll have the devil’s own work to whip them into shape again at the end of such an orgy.”

Frank made no response to this truth.

It was midmorning when the French garrison was sent under escort to Elvas and the English troops were fallen out. They poured into the city, forcing their way through the clogged breaches, exploding into the city streets, a night of bleeding informing a savage bloodlust that had been given license for unbridled satisfaction.

Two hours after dawn Tamsyn had stabled Cesar, exhausted but docile after his hours of labor, and had fallen into her bed at Senhora Braganza’s cottage just as she
was, muddy and bloodstained, refusing the widow’s pressing offers of food and hot water.

She slept for five hours and awoke refreshed and alert, but with the unmistakable sense that something evil was afoot. She swung out of bed and went to the window. The street below was almost deserted, except for a couple of peasants standing in the shade of a wall. They weren’t talking, merely leaning against the wall puffing on their pipes.

Tamsyn went downstairs. There was no sign of Senhora Braganza, and she went out into the street, still in her filthy clothes. The sounds from Badajos carried over the still morning air. It was a raucous cacophony. Shouts, crashes, screams, intermingling with odd bursts of music from pipe and drum.

She crossed her arms and shivered. She’d heard such sounds before.

Senhora Braganza came hurrying down the streets carrying a milk churn. In a voluble flood of Portuguese, she swept her lodger into the kitchen, sat her down, and prepared an omelette fragrant with crushed thyme and rosemary and a pot of strong, bitter coffee.

Tamsyn ate mechanically; then she rose to her feet, thanked her hostess with an almost absent smile, and walked back out into the street, heedless of the renewed offers of hot water and clean raiment coming from the cottage kitchen.

Her feet took her without any signals from her brain across the pontoon bridge toward Badajos.

The encampment was almost deserted except for the hospital tents where the frantic activity continued unabated, but there were fewer drays and limbers bringing in the wounded now. Once the order to fall out had been given, the men had abandoned their injured comrades
for the orgiastic pleasures to be found in the sack of Badajos.

Tamsyn entered the city through one of the breaches. Someone in the ditch below was calling for water, a low, continuous supplication. She stopped, looking for the sufferer, but couldn’t tell among the tangle of bodies who might be alive. Part of her knew it was madness, but something impelled her onward into the city.

A group of soldiers raced past her, their arms loaded with goods plundered from a store whose smashed door bore mute witness to the looting. The sounds of drunken singing came from an alley, where another group sat around a split casket of wine, scooping the wine into their mouths with hands or their shakos, their muskets lying disregarded at their feet. They looked up as Tamsyn came toward them, their mouths stained red, their eyes unfocused, but they were in a benign mood and only called out a few jocular gibes as she went past.

She’d left her rifle and bandolier in Elvas and carried only a knife at her belt, but it occurred to her that if her male attire didn’t fool the men, her filthy, bloodstained appearance was probably sufficient protection. Her only jewelry was the locket at her neck, and that was hidden beneath her shirt.

She walked on through the cobbled streets, hearing the crack of muskets above a confused babble of screams, and shouts of laughter and rage. Somewhere a drum was beating and a pipe trilled in accompaniment. A nun in a torn black habit ran out of a church, pursued by a laughing, shouting troop of soldiers, tunics and shirts unbuttoned. One of them flourished a gold embroidered altar cloth like a flag of triumph; another carried two massive silver candlesticks.

The nun dodged sideways into a doorway, and Tamsyn
glimpsed her terrified face beneath her cowl before the barred door behind her opened and she was dragged inside to relative safety. The men came charging after her, stopped when they couldn’t find her, and milled around in befuddlement, shaking their heads as if they could solve the mystery in that way. Then someone tossed a wineskin to his companion, and they turned in a body as if obeying some collective instinct, surging back toward the church.