Chapter Four
Captain Harry Madeleywoke drenched in sweat yet again, just as he’d done almost every day for the last three months. For a few long moments the fact that he was safe in his own bed at his sister’s house in Suffolk completely escaped him, as unreasoning panic refused to relinquish its hold on his unquiet dreams. All he could see were the desperate, ghostly hands as they reached out of the mire of mud and blood that surrounded him, clutching at his legs as he struggled to free himself. All he could hear were the plaintive cries of the dying battering at his ears. All he could feel was the terrible guilt that he couldn’t help any of them.
He had to get away before they dragged him down into their midst in the suffocating mud, from which there would be no return. Struggling in their grasp, his senses finally returned, and he realized it was only his bedsheets, entangled as they were around his legs, that had him in their iron grip. He fought himself free of them, but his head still pounded to the echo of heavy gunfire, and his heart was racing as though he’d run all the way to the sea and back.
He pushed himself upright in bed, as the hammering of his heart began to slow, and the sound in his head of the guns died way. He was panting hard, his nightshirt drenched, again, but at least he wasn’t back there, on the battlefield that had been his hell on earth. He was safe on the Suffolk coast with Hester. The dead were gone. The battle was over. And he was safe. Yes, he was safe. He had to repeat that thoughtfor fear he couldn’t convince himself.
He shook his head in an attempt to clear it from the residual tendrils of his nightmare. The things he saw, and felt and smelled in his sleep were so real, he believed them every time, despite every night trying to convince himself that what was inevitably to come would all be just in his mind.
Outside his window the lightening sky showed him dawn was fast approaching and a blackbird, early as usual, was joyfully singing its arrival. No, he wasn’t still trying to piece men back together so they could be shoved back into the front line. They were gone, and he was safe.
He was safe.
The need to repeat those words out loud arose. To make them more real than the nightmares. Instead, he gave himself a shake and then shivered. The sweat cooling on his body had him reaching for a blanket. The late September weather had chilled the nights and he wouldn’t be surprised to discover a light frost on the gardens and fields.
He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and swung his legs out to sit for a moment on the edge of his devastated bed. He mustn’t let Hester guess he’d had another nightmare or she’d worry, and he didn’t want his sister doing that. As the oldest, she’d seen it as her job to worry about him when he’d been a boy, and now, as a childless widow, she seemed to think it her calling to mend her broken brother. The fact that he was broken in more than just his body frustrated her, but, despite her best efforts, she’d been unable to find a way to heal his mind.
He stood up, as always his damaged right leg stiff with the inactivity of those hours lying still in bed, and cast his tumbled bedding a dubious glance. Best to make some sort of an attempt to sort out the mess. And, once he was dressed, he could walk down to the sea. Hobble down to the sea would be a more fitting description. Fresh airwas what he needed. Fresh air and solitude with just the sound of the wind and waves, and the cry of gulls. Not the fussing of a well-meaning but irritating older sister who seemed to want to replace his long-dead mother.
There was enough light in the room to show him the glass of water on his bedside table, so he picked it up, noting with annoyance how his hands were shaking. He put it down again lest he spilled it and fisted both hands, but the shaking didn’t stop.
Damn it. Bloody damn it. At least Hester wasn’t here to see. He didn’t shake after every nightmare, but tonight’s had been one of the worst so far.
He wouldn’t think about it. Refusing to give in to what he saw as an infirmity was his only weapon.
Better get dressed and let the sea wind blow the night away.
Some fifteen minutes later, slowed down by the difficulty with buttons his shaking hands produced, he was downstairs, his walking stick in his hand, letting himself out of the front door of Hester’s house. One of the larger houses in the little coastal village, it lay on the outskirts, not far from the flint and mudstone church and its squat tower where her late husband had been rector and where she’d already told him she intended to end up.
As he strode down the lane past the sleeping cottages of Hester’s neighbors, the sun sent shafts of dazzling light across the eastern horizon. No doubt the local housewives would be stirring themselves and lighting their hearth fires, the servants of the better off doing so for their mistresses. The men who fished for a living would already be out at sea, waiting to return with the next high tide. Their women folk would be waiting, ready to salt and dry the fish for the coming winter. Others would soon be off to the farms they labored on, their children to the little dame school to learn their letters. A village typical of the Suffolk coast and one that he’d come to love in the time he’d spent here recuperating from his battle wounds. Quiet, unassuming, itspeople welcoming to the injured soldier who’d arrived to stay with his sister, the widow of their parish priest. Because they loved her, they’d taken Harry under their wing and all had shown interest in his slow progress as the months passed.
Too much interest at times. Harry was not a man who liked to be coddled and fussed over. Hester and her friends, the well-meaning wives of the more well to do of the village, liked to do just that. And even the wives of the fishermen and farm laborers liked to pass the time of day with him and compliment him on how much better he was walking.
Which was one of the reasons he loved going out this early, with no one else about. He’d been doing it most days since he’d felt able to, using it as an escape from having to be polite and listen to the chatter of Hester’s concerned friends.
He stepped out with vigor, trying to avoid using the cane too much, but it was difficult. His right leg still felt stiff and awkward, as though not only did the muscles not want to function, but they were also twisted into shapes they’d never had before and were fighting against him. However, he was determined to walk a little further every day, pushing through the pain. He was a young man still, and he refused to let his injuries dictate turning him into an old man before his time. He was itching to be able to throw the cane away.
A brisk breeze stirred his overly long, light brown hair, carrying with it the smell of the sea and the weeds that would have been left high and dry by the last tide, salty and enticing. It was at times like this that he could fully understand how both his late father and grandfather had felt its call. Not that he ever had. In fact, he hadn’t considered even the army until some years after he’d qualified as a doctor at Edinburgh University. He’d come to serving his country late, unlike the naval forebears he was so proud of, who’d both joined up as little more than boys.
And now, thanks to his grandfather’s family, a family he’d had noidea existed, he was about to do something neither of them had ever done. He was about to put a “sir” in front of his name and become a baronet. He already had, technically, although he didn’t feel as though this would be true until he arrived at what was supposed to be his ancestral home. Only then would this all finally become real.
He reached the sand dunes, which with their deep, soft sand slowed his pace, and kept on going. Gulls wheeled overhead, their cries raucous and harsh, their bodies bending in the wind like scimitars, and that same wind snatched at his hair, blowing it into his eyes.
As he reached the more solid, damp sand that marked where the last high tide had left its deposits of weed and driftwood and bits of old fishing nets, he halted. Pushing his hair back from his face, he narrowed his eyes as he surveyed the sea, gilded, now, as though molten, with the light of the rising sun. This might be the last time he saw this sea, saw a dawn like this one. Windrush Hall was in the very center of England, miles from the roar of the waves as they rolled up the beach and sucked the sand back with them. Miles from the call of gulls he’d grown up with and that had made Hester’s house feel so much like home. Would he feel safe away from the sea? Did he want, now he was offered it, the chance to leave Hester and her care? Was there something in him that was afraid to do so? Did he still need the security she’d offered him when he’d returned, such an invalid, from Belgium?
He heaved a shuddering sigh. And what would it be like, to be a baronet? To meet family he hadn’t known existed? His father, who’d died when he was twelve, had never intimated there might be a title somewhere in the family, nor that he possessed any relations at all. And Hester, who was a full twelve years his senior, had known as little about this baronetcy he seemed to have inherited as he did.
Both of them had been shocked into silence when that solicitor fellow had arrived. Mr. Pratt. Not a name he’d have wished upon his worst enemy. But the fellow did seem to know what he was talkingabout. A distant cousin, dead unexpectedly and with no direct male heir. Only he, Captain Harry Madeley, late of Wellington’s army and now invalided out with no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life other than stay here, living off Hester’s kindness and his army pension. And now he didn’t have to.
Harry walked slowly down the wet sand. The tide being right out, it stretched away into the far, wave-fringed distance and off to right and left for miles, with not a single person in view. He had it to himself, just as he liked. He’d come here to stay with his sister after the hospital in Brussels had discharged him, a poor, limping, pain-racked creature. And Hester, with her common-sense attitude to the sick, no doubt gained with her experience nursing first their mother then her own husband through their long illnesses, had applied her knowledge and nursed him back to health while at the same time refusing to let him indulge in any ideas of remaining an invalid. Her fierce love had been the making of him. But for the nightmares. She could do nothing about the nightmares.
Of course, she knew he had them, just not how often. When he’d been so weak at the start and in such pain, she’d spent a considerable time sitting beside his bed while he fitfully slept, and she couldn’t have missed the night terrors. He knew and she did too, that they were memories of the battle he’d been wounded in. Of the bloodbath that had been Waterloo. Not just of the battle though, but also of the job he’d had to do inside the infantry square, patching up the wounded, leaving those with no chance at recovery to die, sending the rest back to the front of the line as quickly as he could, and all the while under heavy fire.
No, he wouldn’t delve deeply into that. It was bad enough they haunted his dreams, without them breaking out and haunting his days as well.
He and Hester both knew he’d been lucky not to have been worse wounded. Men had lost limbs, had their jaws shattered, their facesdisfigured, and many had died. And he’d had the good luck to only be caught by shrapnel. Only. The doctors at the battlefield hospital at Mont-St-Jean, his friends and colleagues so short a time before, had removed most of the shrapnel from his back and leg, but there was one bit lodged close to his spine they’d not dared to try removing in case it severed his spinal cord. As a doctor himself, Harry was well aware that this remaining piece could still move. If that ever happened, he’d decided, he’d use the pistol he always kept close and kill himself. Only Hester and his other sisters would miss him.
He left the dunes far behind him, heading towards the distant waves, the golden sand cast in temporary ripples beneath his feet, the distinctive prints of birds, and the little holes left by the razor clams the only hint any other living creature might be on the beach with him. The solitude enveloped him, the distant roar of the waves, the sighing of the wind and the constant calls of the gulls drowning out the sound of guns. As it should be.
