Chapter Six
Mud was inhis eyes and up his nose and between his fingers as he struggled upright. He would drown in the sticky morass if he stayed down. He had to get up. He had to help. He had to get back to the work no one else could do. All sound was muffled and distant, and bright blood dripped, mingling with the mud. His blood.
The thunder of guns, suddenly loud again, almost drowned out the groans of the dying as he struggled to bandage wounds that gaped in defiance like bloody grins. From somewhere close by, piercing its way into his deaf ears, came the unmistakeable scream of a wounded horse.
Scrabbling fingers grabbed at his leg. A voice: pleading, weak, insistent, unforgettable. “Doctor, doctor, you have to help me. My legs…”
He was looking, from only two feet away, into a haggard face mad with pain and shock. Familiar eyes stared at him out of a mask of filth and blood. Eyes he knew. Eyes he’d seen so many times before. Eyes that haunted his every moment. The man who owned those eyes opened wide a mouth smeared with blood, his teeth blackened stumps. “My legs, doctor, I can’t feel my legs.”
Harry looked down. The man was lying in the mud, his left hand gripping Harry’s dirty trouser leg. Harry knew what he would see, but couldn’t drag his eyes away.
The man had no legs of his own, just ragged, bloody stumps.
Harry opened his mouth to speak and the air around himshuddered, mud flew, the man vanished and Harry was thrown violently through the air to land, face down in the mud again, drowning in it.
He floundered, his head swimming. His back was wet, his right leg refused to move when he tried to push himself onto his knees. More mud flew, and with it, pieces of human body. A hand, severed at the wrist by some powerful force, landed beside him, the gold of the ring on one of the fingers winking at him out of the haze of gunpowder smoke.
The man with no legs reared up in front of him, his mouth a gaping black hole. “Doctor, doctor! Help me!”
Harry opened his own mouth and screamed.
His scream was enough to sever the link that was keeping him trapped in his nightmare. He awoke with a start and sat bolt upright in bed, his heart hammering, sweat drenching his whole body, breath coming in panicked gasps.
Where was he? This wasn’t the slope-ceilinged bedroom he’d slept in at Hester’s house. The whole place was strange to him. Strange and alien. Was it another part of the nightmare?
He waited, willing his heartbeat to slow.
No one came.
And he remembered where he was.
Of course, this house was large. Much bigger than Hester’s house by the sea in Suffolk. If he’d awoken screaming there, she’d have been in his room before he was properly awake. Here, there was no one to overhear his night horrors. The servants would be snug in their attic rooms, and Crawford and Mrs. Lockhart would be in their accommodation at the back of the house, near the servants’ hall. No one to hear the terrified cries of their lonely master.
His heart now beginning to return to normal, he pushed the covers back and got out of bed. He’d not get back to sleep now. He never did after a nightmare as bad as this. Not all of them were this graphic, so it might be that being in a new, hitherto unknown placehad triggered so vivid a dream. He drew back the heavy brocade curtains. The sun was already up, casting golden rays like a balm across the misty autumnal countryside. He’d always loved the arrival of autumn, with its crisp nights and warm, sunny days, the threat of frost in the air, and the first hint of the turning of the leaves.
He might as well get dressed. No point in sitting around in his bedroom feeling sorry for himself. He put a hand to his damp back, touching his fingertips to the raised scars the shrapnel had left. The shrapnel from the shell that had exploded inside the infantry square where he’d been patching up the wounded so they could rejoin the fight. And where he’d had to abandon the dying to do just that by themselves. No time for those who wouldn’t be useful.
Since that fateful day, he was always so damned stiff in the mornings. Bending down to get his boots on was as difficult here as it had been at Hester’s house, but he was well used to doing everything for himself and loath to change matters. When he’d first arrived in Suffolk, he’d been weak as a kitten and unable to do anything. Determination had served him well then, and Hester had been forcibly persuaded to take a step back and let him try. At first he’d failed, of course, and anger had taken hold of him. Turning to someone else for help had proved as difficult then as it had been when he’d been a determined to be independent child.
He freely acknowledged he’d been a terrible patient for Hester. She’d probably been glad to see the back of him. He’d been rudely ungrateful for her help, bad tempered, and angry most of the time at his own inability to do things. Poor woman. She’d suffered a lot in her life and it had been unfair of him to treat her the way he had. But she’d been a saint, always kind, always happy to step back or to help him, always encouraging. He’d not been a good brother to her.
Once dressed, his cravat tied in the simplest of knots, he picked up his walking cane from where he’d left it against the wall and, leaning on it as little as possible, emerged onto the west wing corridor andheaded for the stairs.
At first at Hester’s he’d had to sleep downstairs, and even now stairs presented a challenge. One hand on the sturdy oak banisters and the other on his cane, he made it to the deserted hallway. The sound of girlish chatter came from the parlor where he’d drunk port last night, all alone. Probably a couple of the maids laying the fires. The morning’s autumnal chill indicated the necessity for them.
No sign of Crawford, who might at this hour be consuming his breakfast in the servants’ hall. Good. He could make his escape without being seen.
The front door was still bolted shut, but the bolt slid to one side with well-oiled efficiency. Harry let himself out into the shelter of the roofed porch.
The air was chillier still outside, and a few shreds of mist clung to the tops of the trees that surrounded the garden. Beyond that the landscape retreated into the hazy distance. Dew sparkled on the grass, as yet untouched by any sign of human footfall. He drew in a deep refreshing breath that served to banish his nightmares back to where they belonged. Time to go and explore his estate when few others were about.
He circumnavigated the gardens first, walking along the treeline and pausing where he’d espied those three young girls watching the house through their telescope last night. No sign of their presence remained, but he climbed over the earth and stone bank that served as a delineation of the garden and stood on the far side for a few moments, wondering where they’d gone and who they were.
The locals, many of whom lived in cottages Mr. Pratt had told him he owned, must all have known of his imminent arrival, and he was obviously interesting enough for them to want to take a look at. What exactly had Mr. Pratt said? That apart from the house and gardens there were seven tenanted farms amounting to over a thousand acres in all. And a number of cottages either in the village or close to it.Presumably those three young spies had come from one of the farms or cottages. He’d probably have to go round and meet all his tenants at some point. He’d be able to find out, without giving away that he’d seen them, where the spies came from then. For some reason this seemed important to him.
He turned and looked back at the house, keeping behind one of the tall chestnut trees out of an instinct not to want to be seen himself. Any of the servants might be looking out of the window and find it odd to see their master lurking just outside the garden wall. He didn’t want them thinking him strange. Smoke rose from several of the chimneys so he must have been right about the maids lighting the fires. But this didn’t inspire him to return home.
Home. Of course, this was his home now, even if it didn’t feel as though it was. Until he’d gone off to university in Edinburgh at the age of seventeen, he’d called the town house in Ipswich home. All his sisters had been married by then, so it had just been him and his mother left in the house where his father had died five years earlier, straight after he’d retired from the navy. Harry had very few memories of his father, who’d mostly been away at sea throughout his childhood, but he did remember him dying. How absurd that someone who’d spent his life at sea and weathered storms and battles should expire from something so simple as a chill while on dry land. Absurd and unjust.
