SirHarry Madeley. He had to admit it sounded good. Or should he be Sir Henry? More formal, but he’d always been Harry to his four sisters and his mother. God rest her soul. She would have been both amazed and ecstatic to discover her only son had become a baronet.
Further out on the beach the wind increased, blowing in from the sea, wet with spray. It was at times like this that he couldn’t keep the faces out of his head. The faces of the men who’d never again feel the wind on their skin, smell the salty tang of the sea, stride out strong and young and brave. It was as if they marched before him in silent, accusing lines.
Sometimes he wondered if he let them do so on purpose because he wanted to punish himself for not having saved them. Why else would he walk out every day on the sands, guilty for feeling so alive, so rejuvenated, and so far from the thunder of guns and the stink of cordite in the air. In so much blissful solitude. Despite his own determination, every day he had to fight to shut out the shrieks ofmortally wounded men, the rattle of carbines, the screams of dying horses.
No. He didn’t want to remember being at the center of the infantry square, riflemen’s backs to him as they fought off wave after wave of Napoleon’s forces while he struggled in the center to staunch the bleeding, to repair the fallen and send them back again to the front line. Nor the miasma of death that had hung over the Mont-St-Jean field hospital.
He shook his head to clear it of all those unwelcome images that just wouldn’t stay out of his head. They needed to be banished to his nightmares, not allowed to shove their way into his waking hours this way.
He’d reached the sea’s edge now, the waves rolling in towards him, white-capped and unstoppable now the tide was on the turn. Water, tempting and persuasive, lapped around his boots, ankle deep.
Right now, if he so chose, he could keep on going. Walk into the water until it closed over his head, and join the men he’d so badly let down. The men who’d died when he’d lived. The men he’d patched up and sent back out to fight. And die. Men so much more deserving than he was. Brave and stalwart men who’d fought throughout the Peninsular War and returned to fight again at Waterloo. And fallen all around him.
Unlike them, he’d come so lately to the war. Johnny-come-lately, that was him, as one of his old friends, dead now, had laughingly described him. He’d thought his small contribution worthwhile, a calling, something he was meant to do to carry on the military tradition of his family. But was any war worthwhile? Was all that death and destruction justifiable? He’d been trained to save lives, to preserve them, and all he’d been asked to do was mend them enough so they could return to fight again.
A wave topped his boots and water trickled down inside them. He was nearly knee deep. The tide was coming in. If he didn’t turn now,he’d get his wish.
Without another look for the expanse of the grey North Sea, he turned and waded back to the sand. Not today. Not yet. Not with Hester waiting for him in her house, eager for her cherished little brother to fulfill what she saw as his place in life.
