“Time for your medication, Mr Dempster. Hmm?”
Miles swivelled again on his schoolroom chair – nigh collapsing it – to find a stout nurse with a glass of… Well, it looked green and foul and lumpy.
“No! I beg yer,” Dempster cried, his one hand to his heart. “Have mercy! I can’t take no more!”
“All of it, you cheeky rascal.” And with a narrow-eyed glance, the nurse placed it on the side table and returned to her trolley of treats.
Dempster smirked. “Strict as a curate on Sunday mornings, she is. Some of ’em pocket a bit of coin on the side from relatives to treat yer better but not that one.”
“Do you have relatives here in London?”
He shook his head with a twist of lip. “Nah, no one. But that nurse looks out for me in any case. The Angel offered her somethin’ on my behalf but she wouldn’t have it. A good ’un.”
“Angel?”
“Aye.” Dempster closed his eyes. “Been blessed by her a few times now.”
Miles had never pegged Dempster as a pious man. “Is she a nun?”
He shook his head and laughed. “Nah. First clapped me eyes on her when I came back from Waterloo, over at St Thomas’. Such a sight for a battered soldier and with a voice gentle as a Spanish summer breeze. Then when I came here…must’ve been two-month past, though it feels a bleedin’ year to the day, she came by again.”
“What does this Angel do?”
“Draws stuff.”
“Draws?”
“Aye.” He opened his eyes – pure as a lake. “She asks about m’time in the army and then draws…battles and stuff. Bit odd, if you ask me, but she’s so pretty and asks so nicely. Gives some coin fer it too and brings blankets and food. Most of the army men in the hospitals know her. We all call her the Angel.”
“Well I never.”
“And she’s asked about you once or twice too…” He winked. “Or thrice.”
“Me?”
Dempster sipped the green stuff and grimaced. “Hmm. Seems to have heard of yer. Went over the Vitoria set-to once. Wanted every detail, she did.”
Rather stupefied, Miles sat back in the chair, its wooden legs groaning.
He’d seen a painting of that battle by The Witness. The one that hung upon the army major’s wall.
A coincidence?
Or…
If the artist had never actually been a soldier, had never been to battle, it would make sense to ask the actual men who’d been there for a true account…
With brush in hand, the artist became both witness and scribe, committing the men’s words to canvas: the fury, the confusion, the victory, the anguish. In each stroke, the echo of cannon fire; in every hue, the shadow of grief, thus rendering not merely the likeness of battle, but the very soul of it…
No wonder they were so bloody good.
But where did this Angel fit in?
Did she work for the artist?
Drawing preliminary sketches?
Or…
