The Sergeant's Lady (4 page)

“The common rabble of the army do not need your help.”

“Unless you propose to fight a war with nothing but officers,” she said, “the
common rabble,
as you call them, are necessary to the campaign and therefore, even aside from the demands of humanity itself, they are worthy of our attention.”

“Perhaps. But their whores are not.”

“She is not a whore! And even if she was, if a woman had no choice but to enter such a state, she would still be deserving of compassion.”

“Of course
you
would have sympathy with whores, madam.”

“I have
never
played you false, Sebastian, as you ought well to know by now.”

“I know what I saw.”

Anna gritted her teeth. This was the old argument, their oldest, and it was useless to fight it again, so she changed her tack. “Helen helped deliver the baby, too, and Alec thinks she did right.”

“If your cousin chooses to allow his wife to help birth some Spanish whore’s mongrel whelp, that is his affair, but
you
shall comport yourself respectably in the future.”

Mongrel whelp? He called that beautiful baby she’d cradled in her arms today a
mongrel whelp?

“
Damn
you,” she said, swept up in a current of anger stronger than she had ever experienced. “I’m glad I’m barren, since the world is thereby spared any more of
your
misbegotten spawn.”

Sebastian turned bright red.
“Bitch.”
Lightning-fast, his right hand flew up and he slapped her hard across the face.

Anna staggered backward under the force of the blow and stumbled into the washstand. The ewer fell to the floor and shattered in a noisy crash. Water splashed the hem of her dress and broken pieces crunched beneath her booted feet as Sebastian seized her by the shoulders and shoved her against the wall.

Alec appeared in the doorway.

“Arrington, get out,” he said.

“This isn’t your concern,” Sebastian spat, digging his fingers harder into Anna’s shoulders.

“My cousin will always be my concern.”

“A cousin is far less to a woman than her husband.”

“That depends upon the husband. I am also your commanding officer, and your behavior while we are guests in someone’s home is indubitably my concern,” Alec added with a pointed glance at the porcelain shards scattered across the floor. “So you will leave this house until you are prepared to comport yourself as a gentleman within it.”

Sebastian’s face still blazed red with fury, but he was not one to disobey a direct order. He unclenched his hands from Anna’s shoulders and stalked from the room without another word.

Anna’s knees wobbled and her eyes burned, but she would not let herself weep or faint. She took a deep breath and tried to speak, but no words came out.

Alec hurried to her side. “Are you badly hurt, lass?”

She shook her head. “No, no. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing!”

He lifted a hand as if to touch her sore cheek, and Anna turned her face aside.

“What are we to do with you?” Alec asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’ve nothing to apologize for. I rue the day you met Arrington, that’s all.”

“So do I,” she said. “So do I.”

“Come along, lass. You won’t stay here tonight. You’ll sleep with Helen and the children, and I’ll guard the door.”

“Surely that isn’t necessary,” she said, though she obediently followed him out of the room and down the corridor to the slightly larger chamber where he and Helen were quartered.

“Better safe than sorry.”

An anxious Helen awaited them at the door, and Anna was obliged to submit to her embrace and to accept a cool, damp cloth to press against her stinging cheek. “Where are the children?” She strove for normalcy.

“María took them downstairs to have a bath, so they didn’t hear any of that, thank God.”

“But everyone else did,” Anna said gloomily.

“Not exactly what was said, but we couldn’t help hearing that you were quarreling.”

“It’s more than quarreling if it ends with you bruised and shoved against a wall.” Alec stalked to the window and stared out at the dusty street. “You can’t go on like this, lass.”

Anna sighed and removed the cloth from her cheek as Helen led her to a chair and urged her to sit. “I know. But what am I to do?”

“Go home with the next courier or convoy,” Alec said, “and seek a separation. All the family will support you. You must know that.”

“I do. But it feels like giving up. I—I wanted to have a normal marriage, and I thought if I just kept trying…” Now she couldn’t hold back the tears, and Alec and Helen sat on either side of her, patting her shoulders and soothing her. She wished she could push them away. If only she could be alone, but solitude was so rare with the army as to be almost nonexistent.

“You did try,” Alec said. “None of this is your fault.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Helen said stoutly. “And once you’re gone, if we can just catch Sebastian with another woman, we’ll testify of his adultery and cruelty toward you, and you can get a divorce and be free to marry again.”

Anna laughed shakily. “If only it were so simple.” If Parliament granted every woman with an unfaithful husband who’d slapped or shaken her a divorce, it would actually be a common state.

“With your money and your family, it can be.”

“I didn’t want this to happen,” Anna said.

“We know,” Helen said. “But you need to go home, for your own safety. Alec is right. You can’t go on like this.”

Anna’s cheek still smarted, and she couldn’t
think
. “I don’t know.”

“Well,” Helen said kindly. “You need to eat, and rest. We can talk of it in the morning.”

Thankfully, no one expected Anna to dine at Lieutenant-Colonel Kent’s table that night. She and Helen had their dinner in the bedroom with Alec and Helen’s children, four-your-old Nell and toddling Charlie. Nell, naturally, asked about Anna’s reddened cheek, though she seemed to accept Helen’s explanation that Anna had been sunburned on just that side of her face. After that the girl monopolized the dinner conversation, telling them of all the remarkable things she had seen that day—a dog with only three legs, a cavalry remount galloping loose, a little Spanish girl who’d run out of her house wearing
no clothes at all
, chased by a shouting woman—and for once Helen made no effort to restrain her daughter’s chatter.

They went to bed at twilight, since full darkness came so late on these midsummer nights. Crowded together with Helen and the children, with Nell in particular a sweaty bundle nestled against her back, Anna lay awake. She supposed Alec and Helen were right, and her marriage had at last passed beyond any hope of redemption. But she dreaded the shame of returning home alone, marked as a failure, an object of pity. Despite Alec and Helen’s reassurances, some part of her wondered if she was truly blameless in the failure of her marriage. If she had been different somehow, more yielding, more what Sebastian had expected in a wife, then surely he might have been the man he had seemed to be during their courtship—grave, courteous, and gentle.

A little after midnight, as Anna finally drifted toward sleep, she was jerked back to full wakefulness by a commotion in the village street below—a woman’s scream and angry men’s voices shouting.

The children slumbered on—Helen always said Nell and Charlie could sleep through a cannonade—but Helen sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. “What on earth?”

“Nothing good, by the sound of it,” Anna whispered.

“Well,
we’re
safe.” Helen sank back onto her pillow, but Anna could tell she remained wide awake, listening to the shouts below. Anna tried, but she couldn’t sort out the jumble of Spanish and English piled on top of each other. She was sure they would hear the tale in the morning, if it was as bad as it sounded.

Had Sebastian returned yet? Anna hadn’t heard him, but perhaps he had been chastened by Alec’s rebuke and chosen not to make a stir when he found their room empty. Perhaps tomorrow he would revert to the cold and cruel, but bearable, Sebastian she knew so well and they would go on as before.

The noise in the street shifted, growing in volume, and Anna realized that some of the shouting men had come into the very house where they lay. She and Helen both sat up, all pretense of sleep abandoned, and clutched each other’s hands.

Now Alec’s voice sounded outside the thick door, questioning and exclaiming, and then came a knock at the door. Alec stepped inside, just recognizable in the faint moonlight from the single window. “Anna?”

“What is it?” And why was he speaking to her and not to his wife?

“That noise—I’m sure you heard—there’s no easy way to say this, lass. It was about Sebastian. He’s dead.”

Anna never slept at all that night. It took them hours to piece together just what had happened, but ultimately they learned that Sebastian had gone to a tavern with certain brother officers whose company he found congenial. There he had drunk a good deal and made bitter complaint against the faithlessness and perfidy of the female sex.

At length he had gone out into the street and spotted a local girl walking alone. Something about her appearance, or simply her solitude, had made him assume her to be a whore, and he had seized her and demanded in his broken Spanish to know her price. He had then either misunderstood or chosen to ignore her protests and pushed her against the nearest wall, determined to have her. She had screamed—and it had turned out that she was neither a whore nor unaccompanied, but instead the daughter of the
alcalde
himself, walking back with her two brothers from visiting their sister on her deathbed. The brothers had merely fallen about a dozen paces behind, and when they had seen an
inglés
threatening their sister’s virtue, they had instantly acted upon their outraged honor and desire to protect the one sister they had left alive. Neither was a towering giant of a man like Sebastian, but they were big for Spaniards, they carried sharp knives, and neither was drunk. The outcome had been inevitable.

It had taken the combined efforts of cooler heads among both the villagers and the British officers to prevent the situation from degenerating into a riot. But when Lieutenant-Colonel Kent and some of the other senior officers staying in the village heard the girl’s story—Anna gathered that Lord Wellington himself had become involved by that point—they had agreed that the brothers had been justified in their actions and that the army would not seek any penalty against them. It would hardly help the army’s occasionally tense relations with their Spanish allies to attempt to prosecute the family of a local magistrate under such circumstances.

For the first few hours, Anna sat numb, unable to feel anything beyond a dazed guilt that the very day before she had all but wished him dead. But when she began to reflect on how he had died, she seethed with humiliation and fury that a man she had once thought she loved could have brought so much dishonor upon himself, their marriage and all the army.

“I won’t grieve him,” she said as dawn broke and Helen buttoned her into her one black dress.

“No one will expect it of you,” Helen said as she fastened the top button, high at Anna’s throat.

“I wish—” her voice broke and she fought to keep it under control, “—I wish I could be back at Dunmalcolm
now
. I wish I didn’t have to go out there and face them all.”

Helen gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze. “No one will hold it against you if you don’t face anyone until we march. I believe we’re to stay until tomorrow morning.”

“It won’t get any easier if I wait.”

Helen shrugged. “Have it your way. You Gordons always do.”

And so Anna attended Sebastian’s burial on a hillside above the village, accompanied only by Alec, Helen, and the chaplain who read the service. He had no casket, only a canvas shroud. His grave, hastily dug by a detail of troopers from the regiment, was shallow. Despite her deep, cold anger Anna felt a pang of…not grief, but
wrongness
, that he must lie forever so far from his ancestral home. While Alec and Helen waited, she knelt beside the grave, resting a hand on the warm Spanish earth as she thought of England in June, cool and boundlessly green. It had also been June when she and Sebastian had met, two years and an eternity ago.

Her eyes burned and she shut them hard. She stood, brushed the dust from her skirts and walked away without looking back.

She breakfasted in the officers’ mess and endured their pitying, speculative looks, and then sat with Lieutenant-Colonel Kent to discuss the disposal of Sebastian’s gear and effects. His boots, spare uniform and horses would all be auctioned off to his brother officers, and the lieutenant-colonel delicately hinted that she might find the proceeds of the sale helpful on her journey home even though she did not need the money to survive upon, heiress that she was.

After her talk with Lieutenant-Colonel Kent, she trudged upstairs to sort through Sebastian’s trunk. She was relieved to have an excuse for a brief respite from the pitying stares of everyone from the lieutenant-colonel down to little Beatriz, but when she opened the door, she saw that no one had cleaned up the shards of the broken ewer. Her breath quickened as the memories washed over her—the pain of the slap, his big hands digging into her shoulders, her head thudding against the wall.

Their last words to each other had been damnation. Such an end to the marriage she had entered as a hopeful, infatuated girl. Only two years ago, but that giddy bride seemed like another woman entirely.

She took a deep breath and stepped into the tiny room, gathering up her black bombazine skirts as though the shards of porcelain were mud that would soil them. She picked her way to Sebastian’s trunk and sat on the bed to open it, noting as she did the dull ache in the pit of her belly that meant her courses would start within the day, as predictably and regularly as they always had.

Anna blinked back more tears. She had meant her last words to Sebastian. She was glad no child had been born into their travesty of a marriage. But now that he was gone, she wished she was pregnant after all. The child would have been born an innocent, and she would have brought it up among her family to be nothing like Sebastian at all.

That would not be. It could never be. She rested her head in her hands for a moment, massaging her temples, willing the tears to stop. When they did, she resolutely opened the trunk and began sorting the contents.

Most of it could go to auction or be given away. Sebastian had been the biggest man in the Sixteenth, but his clothing could be cut down to fit smaller men by any capable tailor. A few soldiers had practiced that trade before enlisting, and they were always glad to earn a few extra coins with their old skills. The boots and shoes were more difficult, but surely somewhere in the army there was another man with feet as big. His saber Anna would send to his mother, for she would want something of her son’s despite the ignominy of his death. If it were up to her she would protect the senior Mrs. Arrington from learning the details, but she knew there must be at least a score of officers already writing home to their families about the fascinating and sordid scandal.

It was dreadful to know herself the subject of scandal and worse, of pity. But here, while she was alone, she could own up to her relief to be free and bound for home. She bit her lip and delved into the very bottom of the trunk. Her fingers encountered a few heavier objects—a broken sword belt, a little pouch of coins and a heavy flat oval the size of her palm. She pulled it from beneath the neatly folded stacks of linen and nearly wept again.

A gold locket, engraved with a stylized Scottish thistle. She opened the catch and stared at her own face, smiling brightly at the painter, her green eyes happy and sparkling. Her miniature, painted at Dunmalcolm when she was a girl of seventeen just beginning to go to the local balls and full of dreams of going to London for her Season and falling in love. She had given it to Sebastian in the brief, halcyon days of their courtship and engagement when they had been happy together, and she had not seen it for two years.

Anna was tempted to pry the portrait out, toss it in the fire and add the locket to the pile of impersonal belongings to be sold at auction. But her aunt and uncle, who had raised her as their own after she was left an orphan at the age of nine, had admired and cherished that miniature. She knew they would never forgive her if they learned she had destroyed it. Reluctantly she reached through the slit in her dress to the pocket she wore tied around her waist to carry valuables securely. She would give it to her aunt and uncle or perhaps to her brother. They would value it even if she could not.

The tiny room and its memories felt like a prison cell. She needed to escape, to breathe free air again, but where could she go to avoid all those staring, pitying eyes?

Horses. She would say she was going to look at Sebastian’s horses, and with any luck the troopers guarding the Sixteenth’s string would leave her in peace. She hurried downstairs, brushing off the condolences and inquiries of everyone she passed, as best as she could.

That was the beauty of horses. They did not stare, or at least their kind brown eyes watched her only out of hope that she had brought them something good to eat. Anna moved easily among the great beasts who had been picketed in a stand of fresh grass, still spring-green and sweet-smelling. She ignored Sebastian’s two chargers, the black stallion, Caesar, and the bay gelding, Oberon. They were giant beasts, fine enough cavalry mounts for a big man, and Anna was sure they would bring a good price at auction. But they were Sebastian’s, and she had always preferred a smaller, more graceful horse, like the Arabians her brother bred in Gloucestershire, or like Alec’s Spanish mare, Dulcinea.

There she was! Anna picked her way through the pasture to where the beautiful dappled gray grazed, her long, thick tail flicking away the flies, for Alec would not have it docked according to the English custom. The mare raised her head and thrust her inquisitive muzzle toward Anna, who produced a slice of bread scavenged from the kitchen. Dulcinea gravely accepted this offering, taking it from Anna’s outstretched hand with delicate care. Anna drew closer, stroking the short, arched neck, drinking in the sweet aroma of horse, and at last burying her face against the mare’s perfectly sloped shoulder. Here it was safe to weep.

***

As Will led Mrs. Arrington’s donkey into the heart of the village where the army had camped, he quickly realized something momentous must be afoot. It could not be the enemy, for he had heard no musketry or cannon, and his regiment had received no new orders that morning. But the village was abuzz with talk, the Spanish were eyeing the British and Portuguese soldiers with an unusual air of distrust, and Will saw a cluster of high-ranking officers and their aides, a visibly angry Lord Wellington at the center of the group, hurry into the finest house in the shabby little village.

“What’s amiss?” he asked the young trooper who was standing desultory sentry over the Sixteenth’s great string of horses.

The trooper’s eyebrows lifted in amazement. “You haven’t heard?”

“We’re camped a mile away,” Will explained. “Whatever it is, it hasn’t made it that far yet.”

“Well, then.” The trooper grinned with the relish of a man with a good tale and a fresh audience to tell it to. “Captain Arrington of this very regiment mistook the
alcalde’s
daughter for a whore last night and tried to rape her. She screamed, her brothers came running, and they slit his throat.”

“He’s dead?”

“Of course he is. Hard to survive a knife to the throat, ain’t it?”

If
he
was dead, then
she
was free and he could never hurt her again. “What of Mrs. Arrington?” he heard himself ask. At the trooper’s surprised look, he added, “This is her donkey. She lent it to one of our women yesterday, and I came to bring it back.”

“Oh, I see. Well…she’ll do, I suppose. She and her husband had a great quarrel yesterday—they shouted, he hit her, one of them broke some crockery—before he went out and got himself drunk and went after the wrong woman. She’s out there now, looking at his horses before they auction them off,” the trooper said with a casual glance over his shoulder. “No one will much miss him, I’ll tell you that. Every trooper in his company hated him.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish, then,” Will said fervently.

“Amen, Sergeant.”

“I’ll take that donkey’s saddle,” the trooper said, “but would you mind too terribly finding a place to picket it in the field? I oughtn’t to leave my post.”

That was pure laziness on the trooper’s part, since surely part of his duty was to aid any horse in distress or catch any that got loose. But Will was not going to complain about anything that gave him a chance to see how Mrs. Arrington fared.

He wove between the grazing horses, leading the patient donkey, until he spotted a small black-clad figure leaning against a dappled-gray Spanish mare that he recognized as Mrs. Arrington’s cousin’s mount from yesterday.

“Mrs. Arrington!” he called as he approached.

He saw too late that her shoulders were shaking with sobs and wished that he had not spoken. But she turned to face him, a tremulous smile on her lips. “Sergeant Atkins.”

He stopped about four feet from her. “I brought your donkey back,” he said, rather lamely.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yes. Thank you. You…heard, I suppose?”

The left side of her face was faintly swollen and just a little redder than the right. Her husband must have struck her there, and Will burned with pointless rage against the dead man. “I did, ma’am.”

“I’m sure it’s the talk of the army.”

He didn’t try to deny it. “So you came here to escape,” he guessed.

One corner of her mouth lifted. “Horses don’t stare.”

He looked away from her, fixing his eyes on a nondescript chestnut grazing a little to his left.

She sighed, but it was an amused sound. “Or go to great lengths to avoid staring.”

He met her eyes again. “I’ll go. I know you want to be alone.”

“No. It’s good—I’m glad to see you again. I hope Juana and the baby are well.”

“Well and thriving, thank you, ma’am. And you—” It was none of his business to ask, but he spoke anyway, “—I know this must be…impossibly difficult…but you will be well?”

She blinked hard and nodded. “I will. I wish I could go home
now
, but I shall contrive. Somehow.”

Of course she must want to go home, and suddenly convoy duty no longer seemed like drudgery. “It isn’t quite
now
,” he said. “But there’s to be a wounded convoy for Lisbon, next week. Our company is to escort it.”

“Next week?” Her eyes shone brightly through her unshed tears.