by Mary Balogh
Joana smiled.
* * *
Normally he had no trouble sleeping even under the most adverse of conditions. He had trained himself over the years to sleep even on muddy ground with the rain beating down on him and danger all about him. It was a simple matter of survival, for a man who had not slept was a weaker man than one who had, and strength was everything when it came to soldiering.
But he found it difficult to sleep the night before the Battle of Bussaco. His brain teemed with too many thoughts and feelings.
His company had been expecting him. Nevertheless they had given him a boisterous good welcome and he had felt a surging of joy to be back with them, almost as if he had come home to a family. He had inspected them and watched critically their methodical preparations for battle and made his own. He had reported to General Crauford, who had called him a tricky bastard for absenting himself during weeks of almost eventless marching and turning up just in time for the great show. But the general had slapped him heartily on the back while saying so.
All the preparations were made as quietly as possible, and no one was allowed to show even the topmost hair on his head over the crest of the hill. The French were not to know that the whole of the army awaited them the following day. With luck they would believe that the skirmishers who were on picket duty on the eastern slope were part of a rear guard of merely a few companies set there to delay their advance.
For the same reason, they were to camp in darkness that night. No fires were to be lit. There was to be no hot food.
The long-expected news came during the evening—and excitement stirred up and down the quiet lines—that the French were moving up, that they were camping below the heights, a mere three miles away. Apparently the lights of their fires shone brightly. The men had to take the word of the privileged few who had been permitted to look for themselves.
It would begin the next day. Probably at dawn, perhaps earlier. The pickets would be watching very carefully for a night attack, and the men would sleep close to their lines, fully clothed, their loaded arms at the ready.
Captain Blake had fought in many battles and had lived through many battle eves. There was nothing different about this one. He felt all the usual tense excitement—part exhilaration, part fear. And here there was nothing to allay those feelings. The Light Division was stationed close to headquarters, within sight and sound of the convent, Cole’s Fourth Division to their left on the other side of the ravine that held the main road to Coimbra, Spencer’s First Division to their right.
It was not the imminence of battle that made sleep difficult. And his night was relatively comfortable. Although most of his men slept on the ground in the open and he would normally have joined them there, someone had erected a tent for him, as tents had been erected for most of the officers and for some of the men with wives. And he had not scorned to occupy that tent as he would normally have done—with a few choice words of explanation for the soldier who had thought him grown soft. He slept in the tent with Joana.
He had set a guard over her while he was busy with his company—an eager private who knew him only by reputation and had a tendency to gaze at him worshipfully with a mouth that gaped. Not that a guard seemed necessary. She had shown no sign of wanting to escape. She had even helped erect the tent, apparently. And she had chattered brightly with several surprised officers of her acquaintance—and with a few she had never met before.
“Lucky bastard!” Captain Rowlandson had said to him when he realized that Joana was to share his tent.
But he did not feel lucky. He had steeled himself to parting with her at the convent, had not weakened at all there, but had told all he knew about her, concisely and dispassionately, and then had escaped lightly—or so it had seemed. She had left the room without a word of good-bye—something he had been dreading for days.
But she had come back again. And he had felt a great upsurging of joy when he knew that he would have her with him for at least another day, and a corresponding resentment that it was all to be gone through again, that it was not yet over after all. That perhaps good-byes were yet to be said.
He had wanted to be free to concentrate on the battle ahead. And he had wanted to stride across the room to her after Lord Somerset had left it and sweep her up into his arms.
He did not want this confusion of feelings on the eve of battle. He resented her and he resented Lord Wellington for sending her back to him because for the moment there seemed to be nothing else to do with her.
“Joana,” he said when he joined her in their tent for the short night ahead—he was to be up long before dawn, ready to lead his men in the skirmish line on the hill. He stretched out beside her, turned onto his side to face her, and slid his arm beneath her neck—such familiar actions that he wondered how he would sleep at all at night once she was finally gone. “I will not be making love to you tonight.”
“I know,” she said softly, cuddling up against him and setting an arm about his waist, without indulging in any of her usual wiles.
“I will need all my energy tomorrow,” he said.
“I know.” She rested her cheek against his chest. “I know, Robert. You do not have to explain. Go to sleep now. And don’t spare me a thought tomorrow. I shall not try to run away. I promise—on my honor. And my honor is dear to me.”
He kissed the top of her head and wondered if he would even be alive after the battle to know if she spoke the truth. He normally did not wonder such things. Fearing that one might die in battle was a useless expenditure of energy.
And yet he spent the next half-hour—valuable sleeping time—thinking about the morrow and wondering if he would die and hoping that he would survive to see her one more time, to hold her once more. Just so that he would have the pain of saying good-bye to her at the end of it all and of watching her taken away to captivity! His brain would not cease its activity, no matter how hard he tried to quiet it.
He began to wish that he had made love to her after all.
“Robert.” She whispered his name. “You need to sleep.”
He laughed shortly.
“When you were a boy,” she said quietly, and he could feel her fingers in his hair, “I loved you because you were tall and handsome and because I had never known a young man. And because you had a way of smiling that reached all the way to your eyes and because you were willing to listen to the dreams and ramblings of a girl. And because you could dance and climb and run and kiss. And because . . . oh, because it was summertime and I was young and ready for love.”
Her fingers were moving lightly over his head.
“You were a sweet and gentle boy,” she said. “But you were not weak. You were incredibly strong. Most men would have put up with a great deal of degradation and many insults too for the comforts of the privileged life you were offered. But you gave it all up so that you could retain your integrity and your dignity. And then you made for yourself a life that you could be proud of.”
She made him sound like a bloody saint, he thought with lazy amusement.
“I was stunned when I realized that the two Roberts in my life were one and the same person,” she said. “I could scarcely believe it at first. For so long I had thought you dead. And you looked and seemed very different from the boy of my memory. But it is fitting that you are one and the same. I am glad that you are, and I am glad that you grew into the man you have become. I am glad you lived. Did you know that you are a hero to your men and very popular with them? Allan—the young private you set to guard me—looks upon you as some sort of god. And you are highly respected at headquarters. You have done wonderfully well, and all on your own, without anyone’s help at all.”
Her fingers continued to smooth through his hair.
“Robert?” she whispered after several moments of silence.
But there was no answer.
“And I love the man quite as de
arly as I loved the boy,” she said, her voice no louder than a murmur. “More so. For now I know how hard love is to find, just how difficult it is to find a man worthy to be loved. I will always love you, no matter what happens tomorrow.”
Captain Robert Blake slept on.
* * *
There was something almost eerie about the predawn scene. Thousands of men were woken without the aid of bugles and adjusted their clothing and checked their firearms and ate a cold and hurried breakfast with almost no sound at all beyond the inevitable rustlings and bustlings. There was no sign of open fear, only of a heightened awareness, of a suppressed excitement.
The tents had been dismantled and taken back to the rear. The women who had come up to spend the night with their men were kissing them good-bye without fuss or hysteria and were also taking themselves back.
Joana watched all the activity as if she were a long way off, as if she were not part of it at all. But then she was not. And she hated her lack of involvement. For she felt sick and mortally afraid, feelings that she despised in herself and usually went out of her way to avoid. If only she were preparing for battle alongside the men, she felt, she would not be afraid.
Whoever had decreed that women should not fight was stupid in the extreme, she thought.
The same young private was to guard her that day too. Captain Blake was giving him instructions, crisply, impersonally, as if she meant nothing to him whatsoever, as if she were nothing more than his prisoner. She wondered if the soldier minded missing the battle, if he resented her. He looked proud enough of himself, as if his captain had singled him out for a deed of extraordinary valor.
She tried to fill her mind with such details and thoughts. She tried to ignore the ball of panic that was lodged deep in her stomach.
And then it was time to go. And time for him to go.
“Joana,” he said, looking at her at last. Dawn had still not provided them with enough light to see each other clearly. And there was a mist. He was his granite self, she thought, looking at him too at last. “Go with Private Higgins. And remember your promise of yesterday, if you please. I shall see you later.”
The ball in her stomach exploded and she found herself fighting her legs and her breathing. She wondered if this was what women called the vapors. She lifted her chin and looked steadily at him.
“Until later,” she said, and she gave him her most dazzling smile before turning away.
He was swinging his rifle up onto his shoulder when she whirled back to face him again. “Robert,” she said, and she did not care that the young private was there beside her listening, and perhaps half a dozen other men within earshot. “I love you. I want you to know that.” In case you never return.
His hand stilled on his rifle. His whole body stilled and tensed. And then he nodded curtly, unsmilingly, and turned and strode away.
“Well.” She laughed lightly. “One has to say such things when a man is going into battle, Allan. Now, where are you going to lead me? I hope not right back to the baggage carts and the other women. It would be tedious to hear no news of the battle as it is fought, would it not?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She smiled at him. “You would hate that, would you not?” she said. “You came here to be a part of it all and would be justly annoyed if a mere woman kept you so far beyond the action that you did not even know what was happening. Some of your friends might even call you coward. That would be quite unjust, would it not?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said uncertainly. “But I am following orders. I am proud to follow Captain Blake’s orders.”
“Of course you are,” she said. “And tonight he will be proud of you. For you will have done your job well. I shall even make it easy for you by not trying to escape. I would not do so, you know. I must stay here to see his safe return. I meant what I said to him just now, you see.” She smiled confidentially at him.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
The boy was falling under her spell. She knew that if her next statement had been “Black is white, you know,” he would have replied, “Yes, ma’am.” And she had to ruthlessly press her advantage. She would die of boredom and frustration—and fear—if she had to spend the day right at the rear with the supplies and the baggage and the women. She would not know how the battle went and she would not know how Robert did. And she would be far from the French army. It was just beginning fully to dawn on her that the French army would be close throughout the day.
Perhaps she would have one more chance . . . But, no, she must not expect as much. It would be too good to be true. Besides, she still did not have either her musket or her knife. The former was over Private Higgins’s left shoulder, balancing the rifle over his right. The latter was probably still in Robert’s belt.
“I think,” she said when they were in the no-man’s-land between the front and the baggage train, “this would be a good place to stop, Allan. From here we can watch the action for ourselves, or what can be seen of it from this side of the hill, anyway.”
She stopped and gazed back up the way they had come, to where the thin lines of the British and Portuguese infantry were forming in two lines just behind the crest of the hill. But very little could be seen. The darkness was only just beginning to lift, but the mist had not yet decided to follow suit. Whom would the mist favor? she wondered, and she felt that unfamiliar fear clutch at her again as she pictured Robert, out in front of the lines with his skirmishers, unable to see exactly who or what was advancing on them.
“But if the French take the hill, ma’am,” Private Higgins said, “you will be in danger. You will be safer farther back.”
“But, Allan”—she turned the full force of her charm on him—“I have complete faith in the courage and strength of our gallant men. Don’t you? Of course they will hold back Marshal Massena’s men. And if by some chance they do not, then you will protect me.” She set a hand lightly on his sleeve. “I have complete trust in you. Were you not personally chosen by Captain Blake? I know you would distinguish yourself in my defense.”
He gazed at her with the same worship in his eyes as she had seen there the day before for Robert. Poor boy, she thought. He had probably completely forgotten that he was to guard her as a prisoner and not defend her as his captain’s lady.
“We will stay here for a while, then, ma’am,” he said, “until the action gets too hot. Then I shall escort you farther back.” There was a suggestion of a swagger in his voice, Joana noticed.
She had never been near a battlefront, but she imagined that this no-man’s-land, crossed from north to south by a wide cart track, would be used later by riders carrying messages back and forth between Lord Wellington and the various divisions. Perhaps she would hear news of what was happening.
But her sense of triumph was swallowed up by fear as she heard distant drums and fifes sounding the advance.
French drums and fifes. Sounding the French advance.
26
MARSHAL Massena made the mistake of assuming that if Wellington’s forces were on the ridge at Bussaco at all, they were concentrated in the northern half of the hills. He did not believe that Wellington would be daring enough to string them out the whole ten-mile length of the ridge. His plan was to launch General Reynier’s corps against a low ridge in the center of the hills so that when his men took it they could circle behind the British while Marshal Ney attacked the higher northern front of the hill, up from the road to Coimbra, toward the convent. Marshal Massena intended to surround his enemy.
The first attack came perilously close to success as the French attacked in dense columns behind the brisk skirmishing of their tirailleurs, who cleared the hill of British skirmishers. The early-morning mist was in their favor. It was only the dogged determination of the British infantry and the steady courage of the Portuguese, involved in their first pitched battle, and the timely arrival of General Lei
th’s forces, brought up from the idle right, that averted disaster and sent the French columns hurtling back down the hill in disarray, leaving their dead and wounded behind.
Marshal Ney began his attack soon after seven o’clock, sending General Loison’s division to take the village of Sula and then to push upward along the paved road to the convent and Ross’s battery of twelve guns and the Sula Mill, the allied command post commanded by General Crauford of the Light Division. It was a difficult task, and the lifting of the morning mist gave some of the advantage back to the British.
Joana stood with Private Higgins a little way back from the lateral track that ran the length of the ridge, behind its crest. All was movement and noise and apparent confusion once the fighting had begun, and she knew all the agony of her own helplessness. In Salamanca there had been danger, but there she had been able to control it, to manipulate it. She had not been afraid. Indeed, if the truth were known, she had enjoyed herself there. Here she felt impotent.
Not only was there nothing for her to do, but there seemed to be no way of knowing how the battle was going. No way of knowing if he were still alive. There was all the frustration of the mist and the top of the ridge, which would have hidden her view of the action even without the mist, and the deafening and terrifying sounds of the drums and the guns, coming all from the south at first.
At the start she made no attempt to stop any of the riders who galloped back and forth along the path, obviously carrying important messages from one command post to another. But she bristled when one yelled in passing.
“Women to the rear!” he roared. “Goddammit, soldier. Get her out of the way.” He rode on without pausing.
Private Higgins coughed nervously. “For your own safety, ma’am . . .” he began.
But the insult had been all Joana had needed to bring her out of the near-paralysis that the sound of the guns had imposed on her. She stepped out onto the path and yelled epithets after the departing and oblivious staff officer that had the poor private gaping in astonishment.