AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Julia, weary to her bones, sat at the foot of the stairs in the Hôtel de Flandres and wept out of sheer relief. The first word of victory had come at midnight. By dawn on the nineteenth, an exhausted city knew they were safe, that Napoleon had been defeated and the Allies were triumphant.
After a day of constant cannon fire and of rumours, each worse than the one before, it seemed impossible that it was over. Despite files of French prisoners trailing through the town and the sight of captured Eagles, the news had been constantly bad, and as late as ten that night, word was that the Prussians had not yet got through to join up with Welling ton.
Some Light Dragoon officers had come in, none of them seriously wounded, none of them with any firm news of Hal except that he had been all right when they had last seen him. Knowing that a bullet could have hit him seconds after that, the news was not particularly comforting.
She must have dozed a little, despite the noise, for the next thing she knew, was someone calling her name. Blinking, Julia straightened up, stiff from huddling on the cold marble against the carved balustrade.
‘Miss Tresilian!’
‘Captain Grey.’ She got to her feet and hurried to where he was standing, sup ported by an equally battered-looking comrade. ‘You are wounded?’ There was dried blood on his jacket and his arm was in a sling.
He grimaced. ‘In and out. I’ll live.’ He looked as though he wished he had not said that.
For a long moment Julia stared at him before she could find the courage and the words. ‘Where is Hal?’
‘He didn’t come back from the charge.’
The blood seemed to have drained t
o her toes. Julia heard a high-pitched buzz. Doggedly she fought the faintness, hung on until she could ask, ‘Is he dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ Will Grey said and she blessed him for his honesty. She could not have coped with easy lies.
‘Where?’ she asked, surprised to find her voice steady.
‘We were far out on the left flank, east of the Charleroi road. We charged the French guns on the ridge: I last saw him as we hit the bottom of the valley.’ He put out his left hand and caught hers. ‘Why do you ask?’
Why? He expected her to leave Hal on the battlefield to die of his wounds or, if he was dead already, to abandon him to scavengers and an unmarked grave? Hal was her man, just like the wounded officer had said the day before. That last kiss at the duchess’s ball had told her that he wanted her, even if he did not love her. Now he needed her. Whether he accepted it or not, he was her man.
‘Because I am going to go and find him, of course,’ she said as though explaining something very obvious to a child. ‘And bring him back.’
Chapter Fourteen
The air was hot, humid and it stank of putrefaction, buzzed with flies. Three miles after they had passed through the battlements and out towards Ixcelles, Julia got down from the gig and was violently sick, then she doggedly climbed up to her seat again and, despite George’s pleas to turn back, made him drive on.
The early morning sunlight filtered prettily through the leaves of the beech trees as if mocking the people beneath it. It played over the carcases of dead horses, the scattered human bodies, the pools of foul water. Progress was pain fully slow: the road with its dips and summits was clogged with broken-down carts and abandoned kit, and they constantly had to stop for the wounded making their painful way back to Brussels.
‘Don’t look, Miss,’ George kept saying as she craned to stare at every blue jacket she saw.
‘I’ve got to,’ she insisted. The light, the need to see, was why she had not set out last night. Instead, she had forced herself to eat, then to doze restlessly before getting up before dawn to pack everything she thought she might possibly need into the gig. George had stuffed a battered holdall in too, muttering that it had some ‘handy stuff’ in it.
They were deep into the forest of Soignes now. It seemed a dream, that idyllic picnic in the woods. Or perhaps this was the dream: a waking night mare. The village of Waterloo, where Will Grey said some of the wounded officers had been taken, was nine miles from Brussels, the battlefield another mile or so on from that. They passed hamlets of low cottages with names of wounded officers chalked on the doors. Julia got down and checked them all, but saw none she recognized.
The gig lurched on along the deeply rutted way. It must be torment for the wounded on the unsprung wagons. If Hal was badly hurt, she had no idea if they would be able to get him back in the gig. She set her jaw against the jolting and tried to sit up straight. She was going to get him back, whatever it took. Alive or dead—or she would not be able to live with herself.
At last they made it to Waterloo village. The straggling street was lined with small houses and white washed cottages, all dominated by the small, domed church standing high over the deep trench of the road. Neat signs, very different from the chalk scrawls they had been passing, showed where officers had been billeted the night before the battle, and then there were the scrawled names again: Gordon, Picton, de Lancey.
‘So many senior officers,’ she murmured as she read them.
‘Don’t lead from the back, our generals,’ George observed. ‘He’s not here, is he?’
‘No.’ Julia closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘We’re going to have to get to the battlefield.’
She would have night mares about this for the rest of her life, she realized as the gig crested the incline up to the hamlet of Mont St Jean and the ground opened up before her. It was a scene from Dante’s Inferno. There were bodies every where, heaped and singly. There were parts of bodies. There were dead horses and pitiful wounded ones, wandering amongst the men who staggered and crawled towards the Brussels road and some hope of safety and relief from their thirst and pain.
Groups of people were walking slowly among the carnage, stooping, turning over bodies. People like her, she realized, seeing a weeping woman.
‘Bloody looters,’ George muttered, and she saw that not all were seeking loved ones or trying to give aid.
