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She realized how little she had told him of herself, and perhaps Athol had been equally unforthcoming. Possibly he considered her only a superior servant, and as long as her references were adequate, everything else was superfluous. One did not make friends of servants, especially temporary ones.
She smiled at him. “I have strong opinions about army medical matters, most of which have got me into trouble since I returned to England.”
“Returned?” he said quickly. “From where?”
“The Crimea. Did Mr. Sheldon not tell you?”
“No.” His interest was sharp now. “You were in the Crimea? That’s excellent! No … he simply said you were the best person to nurse extreme injuries. He did not say why.” He was leaning forward a little in his chair, his face eager. “Then you must have seen some terrible things, starvation and dysentery, cholera, smallpox … gangrene …”
“Yes,” she agreed, pulling the last cover over the bed and straightening it. “And anger and despair, and incompetence almost beyond belief. And rats … thousands of rats.” The memory of them was something which would never leave her, the sound of their fat bodies dropping off the walls to run among the men as they lay on floors awash with waste no one had had time or equipment to clean. It was that heavy plop and scamper which chilled her flesh even now, four years after and myriad experiences since.
He was silent while she helped him back into bed and smoothed the covers over him.
“No …” he said quickly as she made to remove the pillows. “Please leave them. I’m not ready to go to sleep yet.”
She drew bac
k.
“Miss Latterly!”
“Yes?”
“Tell me a little about the Crimea … if you don’t mind, that is?”
She sat down in the chair and turned to face him.
“I expect much of it you are familiar with,” she began, sending herself in memory back six years to early in the war. “Crowds of men, some new and eager, with no idea of what to expect, jostling together, full of courage and ready to charge the moment the order should be given. Your heart aches for them because you know how different it will all be in only a few weeks. No one else would believe such a short time could change anyone so much….”
“I would!” he said instantly, leaning forward to twist around towards her, losing his balance for a moment as instinctively he tried to put out the hand that was not there.
She ignored it and allowed him to right himself.
“Did you know that the whole siege of Cawnpore lasted only from June fifth to July seventeenth?” he asked. He was studying her to see what it meant to her. Had she read anything of the accounts of that unspeakable event? Did she have any idea what it meant? Most people had not. He had tried to speak of it to his brother, but Athol had nothing with which to compare it. Gabriel might as well have been speaking of creatures and events on another world. Such emotions were not describable; one had to live them. The thought of telling Perdita never entered his mind. She would be confused and distressed by the little she might grasp. His passion and grief would frighten her, perhaps revolt her. And yet bearing the knowledge alone was almost more than he could endure.
“I could not have timed it,” she confessed. “But I know that events which destroy the flower of a generation and leave wounds which never heal can happen in a day or two.”
He was uncertain. Hope flickered in his eyes that he might not be alone in his memories and his understanding.
“I saw the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava,” she said very quietly. She found she still could not control her voice when she spoke of it. Even the words choked in her throat and brought a prickle of tears to her eyes and an ache to her chest. The sweet, cloying smell of blood always brought it back to her, the drowning pain would never leave her, the bodies of so many mutilated and dying men, many of them barely into their twenties. Behind her closed eyelids she could see them bent in fantastic attitudes, trying to staunch their own wounds with scarlet hands.
Gabriel shook his head silently, and in that moment she knew he had seen things just as terrible. They brimmed behind his eyes, a haunting of the dreams, needing to be shared, not openly, but enough to break the terrible aloneness of being among those who were unaware, who could speak of it as history, as from the pages of a newspaper or a book, to whom the pain was only words.
She asked him the inevitable question. The Mutiny had ravaged all India from Calcutta and Delhi to the mountain passes into Afghanistan where the altitude thinned the air and peaks towered into the sky, the snow unmelted in millennia.
“Were you at Cawnpore?”
He nodded.
“In the relief column?”
“No … I …” He looked at her very steadily. “There were over nine hundred of us, counting women and children and civilians. I was one of the four people who survived.” He looked at her, his eyes filled with tears.
What could one possibly say to that?
“I have never faced such savagery.” She spoke very quietly, a simple, bare truth. “All the death I have seen has been either on the battlefield, incredibly stupid, senseless and pointless, men outmatched by numbers and by guns, ordered to charge impossible targets, but still soldiers even though their lives were squandered. Or people dying of starvation, cold and disease. Far more died of disease than of gunfire, you know.” She shook her head a little. “Yes, of course you know. But I have never seen hatred like that, barbarism that would massacre every living soul. The siege of Sebastopol was at least … military.”
He clung to her understanding, his eyes fixed on hers unwaveringly.
