rooms. “Come, my dear. I will soon have a soothing bandage on that arm and a warm, comfortable bed for you to sleep in. And you shall have your drink.”
He was a child, she thought in some horror. She doubted that he was sixteen. And his eyes were already brightening with fever.
She lowered him carefully to the sofa in the parlor and went for a glass of water before removing his boots or tackling the sleeve that was stuck firmly to his right arm together with a heavy bandage.
“They removed the ball,” the boy said. “I thought they was going to take my arm off. I reckon they was too busy. Don’t touch me, lady. Let me be. Don’t touch me.”
“You shall lie down in bed,” she said gently. “I will not hurt you, my dear. And you will feel so much better afterward. I promise you. I have nursed many boys like you, you know. You must pretend that I am your mother. Do you have a mother?”
She coaxed him to the bed that had been Jennifer’s and stroked her hand gently over his dusty hair on the pillow until the panic had receded from his brightened eyes. “There, there,” she said, smiling at him, “it will be all right, my dear. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”
Was some woman murmuring comfort to Charlie somewhere in the city? Was he too badly hurt or too delirious to remember where he lived? Was some woman trying to cleanse and bind Lord Eden’s wound, wincing herself at every hurt she knew herself to be inflicting on him?
Or were they out there somewhere unhurt, preparing to fight again? Or actually engaged in battle? But there was no sound of guns today.
Or were they lying dead somewhere?
Deaden the mind.
Remove the sleeve and the bandages inch by cautious inch to reveal the red and swollen flesh. Murmur comfort to the boy who had fought like a man the day before and who was trying very hard not to sob like a child. Keep talking to him. Smile kindly into his eyes. Let him know himself loved.
And deaden the mind.
Chapter 8
THE NINETY-FIFTH DID NOT SEE A GREAT DEAL of action the following day. The French forces under Bonaparte’s direct command had won a complete victory at Ligny, with the result that the tattered Prussian army was in full retreat north to Wavre and their commander lying severely wounded in a farmhouse, though he stubbornly refused either to die or to give in to his condition. Marshal Ney had not broken through the British and allied lines at Quatre Bras, but he had battered and bruised them and stood a good chance of shattering them completely on Saturday, June 17.
But surprisingly, no attack came during the morning, and the Duke of Wellington was able to withdraw all his troops in good order northward to a position he had picked out weeks before, a position on the crossroads south of the village of Waterloo and the Forest of Soignes and north of the inn La Belle Alliance on the main road to Brussels.
The men of the Ninety-fifth were the last to retreat, with the cavalry, having been assigned the unwelcome task in the morning of forming burial details to go out between the lines and try to give their own dead some sort of decent burial. The men in Lord Eden’s group dragged a pair of boots from under one bush to find a French cavalry officer at the end of them, still breathing. Those few men who were new to the company were surprised when their lieutenant ordered three of them to lift the Frenchman carefully and carry him to a nearby farmhouse, where some of their own wounded were being tended.
“I said carefully!” he barked before turning to lead the way.
One veteran grinned at a new recruit. “If you was to arsk,” he said, “you would be told that the bleeding orfficer ain’t a Frenchie or an Englishman but an ’uman being.” He tapped his temple several times and looked significantly at the recruit.
“Crazy?” the lad asked.
The veteran continued to grin. “But you never says it out loud,” he said, “or one of us is likely to flatten your nose level with the rest of your face, see.”
They had a miserable retreat of it. It started to rain before they were even on their way, and it was like to rain for the rest of the week, the men predicted gloomily, gazing up at the angry clouds and noting that there was a full-blown storm coming up. They forgot that the week was already ending. One tended to lose track of what day or date it was when one was on active duty.
And as if the marching and the getting soaked were not enough troubles, men with more energy than others grumbled, they were getting thoroughly peppered from behind by those damned French. Indeed, most of them agreed, the only fun they had all day was watching and cheering and jeering the Guards-the Hyde Park soldiers, as they were contemptuously called-driving the advancing French back from the village of Genappe, where the duke had spent the night before. They did all right, those cavalry Guards, despite the rain and the slithering mud. But it was quite hilarious to see the scarlet of their smart uniforms and the shine on their polished boots disappear beneath a liberal coating of mud.
It was enough to drive them all home bawling to cry on their mammies’ shoulders, one witty rifleman bellowed to an appreciative audience. But there was no other fun at all. Only the interminable trudging and mud, and the blinding flashes of lightning and the crashes of thunder that made their backs twitch, so much like the heavy guns did they sound. And at the end of it all they found a nice muddy bed for the night at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. And no rations. Trust the bloody commissary wagons to have trundled off to Brussels by now, grumbling voices too weary to be mutinous murmured to comrades. Or Ghent. Or Ostend. Or perhaps they were being loaded onto bleeding ships already to feed the bleeding sailors.
And the rain kept sheeting down.
LADY ANDREA AND Mrs. Simpson had been right, Madeline thought when she had the luxury of a moment in which to think. The first terrible feeling of panic and nausea and light-headedness when the wounded began to arrive passed almost before it was felt. The urge to go out into the street to find if she would recognize any of the poor men dragging themselves into the city or being half-dragged along by comrades in little better case than they was stronger than the desire to rush up to her room to bury her face in a pillow and clamp her hands over her ears.
And once out there, though none of them was Dom or any other soldier she knew, there was no going back in again. Someone else had been right too-but she could not remember who had said it; they were all thirsty and begging for water. And while rushing in and out of the house with slopping pails of water and smelling salts and bandages, she quickly forgot everything but the need to quieten pathetic pleading voices, to help someone limp along, to help another sit down in the roadway for a moment, to wave smelling salts beneath the noses of the fainting, to wipe a dusty face with a damp cloth. And always to help the men to a drink.
Her senses were allowed to accustom themselves gradually to the gruesome sights. Those who arrived first were those who could still somehow drag themselves along, the somewhat lesser wounded. It was later in the day before the worse cases began to arrive, those too weak to move themselves. They came by the cartload, right into the city and onto the streets, many of them, though by the afternoon, tents for the wounded had been set up at both the Namur and the Louvain gates.
And then it began to rain. Men who must have welcomed the cooling drops at first were soon soaked through to the skin, muddy, and shivering. And women tended them with sodden skirts and hair that plastered itself to their heads and faces and dripped streams of water down their necks.
Lady Andrea and Madeline began to move inside as many of the men from the street in front of the house as could move of their own volition or with a little help. A few, those with unhurt legs, were put to bed upstairs, with no thought to the mud that quickly transferred itself to the delicate silk sheets. Others stretched themselves out on the carpets downstairs and counted themselves blessed.
Madeline hauled off mud-caked boots, cut uniforms from congealed or still-flowing wounds, bathed and bandaged cuts and gaping holes, soothed fevered brows, held reaching hands, spoke quiet words that she could never afterward recall, once closed eyes that would never close themselves again-with a hand that scarcely
