Web of Love

Chapter 8

THE NINETY-FIFTH DID NOT SEE A GREAT DEAL of action the following day. The French forces under Bonaparte’s direct command had won a complete victory at Ligny, with the result that the tattered Prussian army was in full retreat north to Wavre and their commander lying severely wounded in a farmhouse, though he stubbornly refused either to die or to give in to his condition. Marshal Ney had not broken through the British and allied lines at Quatre Bras, but he had battered and bruised them and stood a good chance of shattering them completely on Saturday, June 17.

But surprisingly, no attack came during the morning, and the Duke of Wellington was able to withdraw all his troops in good order northward to a position he had picked out weeks before, a position on the crossroads south of the village of Waterloo and the Forest of Soignes and north of the inn La Belle Alliance on the main road to Brussels.

The men of the Ninety-fifth were the last to retreat, with the cavalry, having been assigned the unwelcome task in the morning of forming burial details to go out between the lines and try to give their own dead some sort of decent burial. The men in Lord Eden’s group dragged a pair of boots from under one bush to find a French cavalry officer at the end of them, still breathing. Those few men who were new to the company were surprised when their lieutenant ordered three of them to lift the Frenchman carefully and carry him to a nearby farmhouse, where some of their own wounded were being tended.

“I said carefully!” he barked before turning to lead the way.

One veteran grinned at a new recruit. “If you was to arsk,” he said, “you would be told that the bleeding orfficer ain’t a Frenchie or an Englishman but an ’uman being.” He tapped his temple several times and looked significantly at the recruit.

“Crazy?” the lad asked.

The veteran continued to grin. “But you never says it out loud,” he said, “or one of us is likely to flatten your nose level with the rest of your face, see.”

They had a miserable retreat of it. It started to rain before they were even on their way, and it was like to rain for the rest of the week, the men predicted gloomily, gazing up at the angry clouds and noting that there was a full-blown storm coming up. They forgot that the week was already ending. One tended to lose track of what day or date it was when one was on active duty.

And as if the marching and the getting soaked were not enough troubles, men with more energy than others grumbled, they were getting thoroughly peppered from behind by those damned French. Indeed, most of them agreed, the only fun they had all day was watching and cheering and jeering the Guards-the Hyde Park soldiers, as they were contemptuously called-driving the advancing French back from the village of Genappe, where the duke had spent the night before. They did all right, those cavalry Guards, despite the rain and the slithering mud. But it was quite hilarious to see the scarlet of their smart uniforms and the shine on their polished boots disappear beneath a liberal coating of mud.

It was enough to drive them all home bawling to cry on their mammies’ shoulders, one witty rifleman bellowed to an appreciative audience. But there was no other fun at all. Only the interminable trudging and mud, and the blinding flashes of lightning and the crashes of thunder that made their backs twitch, so much like the heavy guns did they sound. And at the end of it all they found a nice muddy bed for the night at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. And no rations. Trust the bloody commissary wagons to have trundled off to Brussels by now, grumbling voices too weary to be mutinous murmured to comrades. Or Ghent. Or Ostend. Or perhaps they were being loaded onto bleeding ships already to feed the bleeding sailors.

And the rain kept sheeting down.

LADY ANDREA AND Mrs. Simpson had been right, Madeline thought when she had the luxury of a moment in which to think. The first terrible feeling of panic and nausea and light-headedness when the wounded began to arrive passed almost before it was felt. The urge to go out into the street to find if she would recognize any of the poor men dragging themselves into the city or being half-dragged along by comrades in little better case than they was stronger than the desire to rush up to her room to bury her face in a pillow and clamp her hands over her ears.

And once out there, though none of them was Dom or any other soldier she knew, there was no going back in again. Someone else had been right too-but she could not remember who had said it; they were all thirsty and begging for water. And while rushing in and out of the house with slopping pails of water and smelling salts and bandages, she quickly forgot everything but the need to quieten pathetic pleading voices, to help someone limp along, to help another sit down in the roadway for a moment, to wave smelling salts beneath the noses of the fainting, to wipe a dusty face with a damp cloth. And always to help the men to a drink.

Her senses were allowed to accustom themselves gradually to the gruesome sights. Those who arrived first were those who could still somehow drag themselves along, the somewhat lesser wounded. It was later in the day before the worse cases began to arrive, those too weak to move themselves. They came by the cartload, right into the city and onto the streets, many of them, though by the afternoon, tents for the wounded had been set up at both the Namur and the Louvain gates.

And then it began to rain. Men who must have welcomed the cooling drops at first were soon soaked through to the skin, muddy, and shivering. And women tended them with sodden skirts and hair that plastered itself to their heads and faces and dripped streams of water down their necks.

Lady Andrea and Madeline began to move inside as many of the men from the street in front of the house as could move of their own volition or with a little help. A few, those with unhurt legs, were put to bed upstairs, with no thought to the mud that quickly transferred itself to the delicate silk sheets. Others stretched themselves out on the carpets downstairs and counted themselves blessed.

Madeline hauled off mud-caked boots, cut uniforms from congealed or still-flowing wounds, bathed and bandaged cuts and gaping holes, soothed fevered brows, held reaching hands, spoke quiet words that she could never afterward recall, once closed eyes that would never close themselves again-with a hand that scarcely trembled. And always, constantly, held weakened hands and heads so that the cup of water might reach thirsting mouths.

She scarcely thought of her twin all day. There was no time to think. And it was not desirable to think. Mrs. Simpson had been right about that too. But she saw him in every face around her, in every lifted arm. She heard him in every muffled moan and plea for water, in every gasp of thanks.

She did not know when night came. She did not even know that the rain still lashed down outside. There was no leisure in which to wonder if her brother was still alive to feel all the discomfort of a night spent outdoors during the final hours of a lengthy thunderstorm.

LORD EDEN WAS very definitely alive. And uncomfortable. And hungry. He had a chance to share a scrawny fowl and a bottle of wine with Colonel Barnard of his regiment in the small cottage the latter had commandeered for the night. But with one last regretful look Lord Eden waved a dismissive hand, said that the bird was not nearly plump enough for his delicate palate, grinned at the other two officers gathered there, and returned to his hungry, sodden men.

“A strange fellow, Eden,” the colonel said before turning his attention to the pathetic feast spread before him.

Lord Eden and Captain Simpson spent a tolerably comfortable night huddled beneath two blankets, a thick layer of clay spread over the top one for warmth and waterproofing, their heads resting on saddlebags. Those poor devils who had never been on a campaign before! Charlie remarked before yawning loudly and falling asleep just as if he were lying on a feather bed. They must be suffering. If one just ignored an empty, protesting belly and the muddy ground, and pretended that one was not wet through to the bone, one could not ask for greater comfort, Lord Eden agreed, sliding into oblivion only moments after his friend.

But the morning was a different matter. Although the rain had stopped, everyone and everything was wet and muddy. And shivering. Guns were unfit to be fired. Stomachs were so empty that they felt and sounded like echoes in a hollow cave. And when might the French be expected to attack? They had bivouacked alarmingly close to the allied lines and would surely want to make an early push for victory.

But the attack did not come all morning. Somehow, despite the prevailing wetness, fires were built and stiff hands warmed and sodden clothes steamed. Guns were carefully cleaned and polished by thawing hands. And finally the commissary wagons appeared from somewhere and the men had breakfast.

But one did not feel quite as one would like to feel before a major battle, Lord Eden thought, walking among his men to see that the proper preparations were being made. But then, one never did. And the consolation was that the enemy would feel no better. And he did not doubt that this would be a major battle, perhaps the biggest of his experience. They certainly could not retreat any farther without losing Brussels.

The morning was a long one. Let them get started, he thought constantly, and heard as constantly on the lips of the men about him. Even though we aren’t as ready as we would like to be, let them get started.

But when the attack did begin, all the activity was directed far to the right of their position at the crossroads. The French were trying to take the villa of Hougoumont, and the British and German defenders were just as determined that they would do no such thing.

“Poor devils!” one rifleman commented.

“Wisht they’d come this way,” another said, staring off to the right with narrowed eyes, though the lie of the land blocked the view of the villa from his sight.

It was half-past one in the afternoon before the heavy French guns, amassed on the slope to the south of the allied lines, all opened fire at once in the most deadly bombardment that even the oldest veteran had ever experienced. Men died and men cursed in impotent rage. There was nothing that could be done to defend oneself against such attack. The bombardment was a sure prelude to an infantry attack, to be followed doubtless by a cavalry attack. Let them come on, then. Enough of this!

The men of the Ninety-fifth were ordered back from the road behind a rise of land, where they could lie down in relative safety from the relentless pounding of the guns. But still men died.

The survivors felt enormous relief and a deep, knee-weakening dread when the guns stopped suddenly and the French drums could be heard heralding the approach of infantry. And their position, which had sheltered them from the cannon, made matters more nerve-racking now, for they were crouched down behind the rise and could not see who-or what-was approaching.

It was three solid phalanxes of infantry that were coming, each twenty-five men deep and one hundred and fifty men wide. All yelling their bone-chilling battle cry, “Vive l’empereur!” But the riflemen were unaware of the statistics when they were finally given the order to rise and fire. They saw only masses of the enemy alarmingly close and soon falling in satisfying heaps to the first volley from their faithful Baker rifles.

Volumes might be written in years to come about the fortunes and misfortunes of that fateful Sunday, June 18, on which the battle was fought that the Duke of Wellington later dubbed the Battle of Waterloo, according to his custom, after the village where he had stayed the night before. But to the men who fought in it there were only themselves and their immediate comrades, their weapons, and the interminable noise and smell, and the day that seemed a week long.

In all the noise and smoke of battle, and the crowds of milling soldiers and the piles of dead and wounded, it was impossible for an individual to know how the battle was going. All each man could know was that he was there and had not yet given an inch of ground, that his comrades were ranged around him, and that his officers were still giving orders that he obeyed without question.

Had Hougoumont fallen? The men of the Ninety-fifth did not know, and probably did not care. Would La Haye Sainte, the farmhouse in front of them being held by a company of German soldiers, hold? It was their job to see that it did. And may pity help them if it did not and the French had a chance to move their guns into the courtyard. They would be blown off the face of the earth.

Had the Prussians come from Wavre? Were they on their way? The lines were getting thinner and there seemed to be no more reserves to move up. But who knew? Perhaps farther along, the line was as solid and thick as ever. Or perhaps there was no other line beyond the little stretch that they could see to either side of them. Perhaps everyone else had fled as Bylandt’s Belgians had done right next to them during that first charge of the French infantry.

General Picton was dead. They all saw him fall a moment after yelling encouragement to his men to push back the advancing French infantry lines. That was real to them.

And then late in the day La Haye Sainte did fall to a concerted attack, and the last surviving defenders fought their way out and back to the crossroads.

“Now all hell will break loose!” someone at Lord Eden’s elbow remarked, and was proved right without further delay.

The men fought doggedly on, all the odds against them. Yet when it seemed they must break, encouragement came that no British soldier could ever resist.

“Stand fast, Ninety-fifth,” the steady voice of the Duke of Wellington said above the din. “We must not be beat. What will they say in England?”

The men fought on, the duke with them, until it was clear to him that they would not break.

But the battle and the world ended for Lord Eden during a momentary lull in the action. A swift glance to either side of him revealed Charlie Simpson lying on the ground, a corporal kneeling over him. Lord Eden elbowed his way through the throng of his own men and fell to his knees beside his friend.

“You have been hit, Charlie?” he asked unnecessarily. “Lie still. I’ll have a stretcher brought up. We’ll have you back from here before you can count to ten.”

But there was that long-familiar look in his friend’s face. The look of sure death.

The glazing eyes searched for his and found them. “I’m done for, lad,” Charlie said.

And they were too old and experienced soldiers to live a lie. Lord Eden closed his mouth, which had opened to make a hearty protest. He took his friend’s limp hand in his own.

“I’m here, Charlie,” he said.

“Ellen.” The voice was faint, dreamy almost. “Jennifer.”

Lord Eden leaned forward until his face was a few inches from Captain Simpson’s. “They will never be in need,” he said. “I swear that to you, Charlie. I will always take care of them. Do you hear me?”

But Charlie was looking through him, beyond him, with eyes that were fast clouding. And then the eyes were lifeless.

His friend was dead.

Lord Eden fought panic and tears. There was no leisure now to grieve. He grasped his sword and started to get to his feet.

And then he knew, with some surprise and no pain at all, that he had been hit. There was a rush of warmth about his ribs. His eyes widened before he fell forward across the body of his friend.

ELLEN KNEW THAT she could not shut herself into her rooms tending the needs of one poor boy. There were more men out there, men in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, and they would need all the nurses that could be found. Besides, Charlie might be out there. She must look for him. Or other men of her acquaintance. She must look for them. Lord Eden might be out there.

And so she ventured out in Saturday afternoon’s torrential rain when the boy had settled into a rather fevered sleep, his arm swathed in a fresh bandage, swollen and angry-looking, it was true, but with the wound clean. She had hopes that she could save him from amputation. It was amazing that the arm had not been sawed off before he left the battlefield. The surgeons had not had time to amputate, the boy had said. In her experience, the very fastest treatment field surgeons knew for arm and leg injuries was amputation. But most of them were unnecessary, she had always felt. She would save the boy. She did not know his name.

The wounded were being carried inside the cathedral not far from where she lived. She stepped sharply over to one sodden bundle whom no one was making any attempt to move. He was Charlie, she thought with a sick lurch of the stomach. But he was a stranger. She knelt and put a hand to his wet brow. He stared straight through her arm.

“Carry this man inside out of the rain,” she called in French to a man who had just emerged from the cathedral.

“It is not worth disturbing him,” the man said, not unkindly. “He will not last.”

“But he will not die untended and unloved,” she said, rising to her feet and running back in the direction of home. A few minutes later she was hurrying back again with two of the menservants from the other part of the house in which she lived. And together they carried the soldier to her rooms and set him down on the bed that had been the maid’s.

“Thank you,” she said as the two servants withdrew, but she did not take her eyes from the wounded soldier, who had not made a sound beyond one faint moan when they had first lifted him. His eyes were open, but they were neither living nor dead.

“It is all right, my dear,” she said softly, taking a towel and dabbing lightly at his wet face and hair. “You are safe now. No one will harm you.”

His boots came off easily, she was thankful to find. She set herself the task of cutting the rest of his clothes away so that she would not have to move him. It looked as if no one had tended his wound, a gaping hole in the stomach that should surely have killed him instantly. Ellen patted him dry and went for one of Charlie’s silk shirts to make a light pad to set over the wound. She covered him with a blanket and smoothed her hand over his bald head. He must be of an age with Charlie.

His eyes were on her, she saw.

“You are dry now,” she said, “and warm. You are safe now. I shall care for you. No one will harm you.”

He continued to look at her. She did not know if he heard her or saw her.

“I will bring you some water,” she said. “You are probably thirsty.”

And the boy was thirsty, she found, and tossing feverishly on his bed and groaning when his bandaged arm touched the mattress. She spent some time with him, straightening the sheets, smoothing back his hair, bending to kiss his forehead when he looked up at her with a boyish trust and hope in his fevered eyes.

Before the day was out, the door to her rooms was permanently open. The house became one again as it filled with wounded and Ellen was called upon to give advice from her experience with tending injured soldiers. Servants from the house watched over her wounded when she occasionally went outside that day and the next and the next. A great battle was raging to the south, she heard. A great disaster. A great defeat, perhaps. No one knew, and the wounded brought conflicting reports, though most seemed agreed that it was going badly for the allies.

But she no longer cared for news. Only for the suffering in the city and her own helplessness to alleviate more than a very small portion of it. And her obsession with looking into the faces of all the soldiers stumbling past or stretched on straw beds in the streets.

Was some other woman caring for Charlie? she wondered as she hurried back along the Rue de la Montagne after an hour away early on Monday morning. Was he well and still fighting somewhere? Was the battle still on? Was he dead?

Deaden the mind. She hurried on.

But she looked up sharply at a group of horsemen proceeding slowly along the street, all in military uniform. The one in the middle was slumped forward in his saddle. The soldier to his right held a steadying hand against him. She felt all the blood draining from her head.

“Do you know this man, ma’am?” the soldier on the left called, touching a hand to his shako. “He said the Rue de la Montagne, but that is all he seems to remember. I don’t think he even knows his own name any longer.”

“Eden,” she said past lips and a tongue suddenly dry and feeling twice their size. “He is Lieutenant Lord Eden. Yes, this is where he belongs. Bring him in, will you, please?”

The soldier who had spoken to her saluted more smartly. “This is the house, my lady?” he said. “We are going to have a hard time. He can’t move. All swollen up. Is there anyone who can help?”

“Go inside and call some servants,” she said. She was alongside the horse, touching his boot, seeing that indeed his legs were badly swollen, seeing too that he was not quite unconscious. His breath was being drawn in labored rasps.

“You are home,” she said softly. “You are home now, my dear. We will have you inside and in bed in no time. Just a few minutes more and then you can rest.”

She did not know if he heard her. The same two servants who had helped her carry the man from outside the cathedral came out of the house. Ellen had to turn her back and bite her lips as the four men eased Lord Eden from the saddle. He screamed when they first touched him, and moaned with every agonized breath after that.

She led the way up the stairs and into her own bedchamber.

“Set him down here,” she said. “Oh, how am I to get his boots off?” His legs were so swollen that the boots were cutting into his calves.

“I’ll fetch a knife and cut them off, ma’am,” one of the servants said.

“May we leave, my lady?” one of the soldiers asked. “Is there anything else we can do?”

“No,” she said. “You have your duty to get back to, doubtless. I shall care for him now.”

“Lucky man to have his wife here,” the other said before the two of them withdrew.

And yet again she set about the task of cutting away an entire uniform. She washed the caked mud from his body and patted gently with a towel. She winced at the sight of the heavy bandage around his ribs and over his chest and at the sticky mass of blood that had oozed from the bandage and run down his right side and thigh. He moaned constantly.

“You are home, my dear,” she said, washing his face finally and looking down into the pain-racked eyes she had been afraid to look into until that moment. “You are home and safe now. And may rest. I shall not change your bandage until later. You are safe. No one is going to harm you now.”

“Safe,” he said thickly. “Always safe. Here.”

“Yes,” she said, touching his fair wavy hair and putting it back from his brow. “Safe, my dear. You are always safe here. Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”

His breathing was labored again. He closed his eyes and moaned. She stroked his hair.

“Charlie,” he said.

Her hand fell still. “Yes,” she said. “I am Charlie’s wife. And I am going to look after you.”

“Charlie,” he said. His eyes were open again, glazed with pain.

“Yes?” she said softly. His hand was waving weakly above the blanket she had laid over him. She took it in both of hers.

“Gone,” he said. “He’s gone. I was with him.”

“Yes.” She was stroking the back of his hand. “You must not let it worry your mind any longer. Rest now. You shall tell me all about it later. Thank you for bringing me the news. Is that why you directed those soldiers here? Thank you, my dear. You must sleep now. Sleep now.” She smiled down into the eyes that were looking into hers. “Sleep now.”

The boy was calling for water.

LORD EDEN HAD COME to himself in a farm cowhouse at Mont St. Jean, seven hundred yards behind the crossroads. The shells were falling more thickly there, someone was saying, than at the front itself. He looked about him. The ground was thick with wounded. Was he one of them?

His chest felt so swollen that he could hardly breathe. He could feel blood oozing down his side. He was lifted to a table eventually. He rather thought that the scream he heard had come from his own mouth, though it was not by any means the only one he had heard during his half-hour of returned consciousness.

The surgeon who looked down at him with weary eyes was splattered with blood from head to waist. Lord Eden closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and concentrated on not shaming himself any more, now that he was expecting pain and it was not to take him by surprise.

He was fortunate enough to faint while the flattened ball was cut from his chest, but the gush of clotted blood that came from the wound brought consciousness and relief from the terrible pressure at the same moment. He heard himself groan, and cut off the sound in the middle as hands lifted him from the table and set him on the floor again.

It was amazing how small the world became when one was in pain, he thought. He was shuttered and enclosed by it, an agony of knifelike pain. He must have broken ribs.

He did not know how long he lay there before hands were lifting him again and setting him astride a horse.

“It’s not the best, sir,” a voice said. “But the roads are so clogged up that it might take you days to get through on a wagon. You are one of the lucky ones.”

One of the lucky ones. The words ran like a refrain through his muddled, fevered, agonized brain for the rest of the night. He did not know where he was or who was with him. He did not know where he came from or why he was on this ride.

But there was something ahead of him. Someone. Someone he must reach, and then he would be safe. All would be well. Mama? She was in London. Edmund? Yes, Edmund. Alexandra would look after him, and Edmund would make everything right, as he always had done. A big boat, Christopher had said. A big boat. Edmund was gone.

Madeline? He had to reach Madeline. She would be worried. He had promised not to die. He mustn’t die. Madeline would be fit to throw hatchets if he did. He had to get to Madeline. Where was she? Not at Edmund’s. Edmund was gone. Where was she? Had she gone too? Was she in London? At Amberley? She shouldn’t have gone. He needed her. She should have stayed.

Charlie. He would go to Charlie. The Rue de la Montagne. He must remember that. Rue de la Montagne. He said it over and over to himself. He said it aloud. There was comfort there. He would be able to rest there. She would be there, and she would not fuss him or talk too loudly. She would look after him. Yes, she was the one he had to go to.

He had something to tell her. She would look after him, but he had something to tell her first. He couldn’t remember what. He would remember when he saw her. The Rue de la Montagne. The Rue de la Montagne.

And then he heard her voice. But he could not move. He did not dare move. Someone was touching him, pulling at him. They would kill him. Where had she gone? Was that him screaming again? Not again. He must not do that again. He would frighten her and disgust her perhaps. But who was making those sounds?

His body was on fire. It felt as if it must explode at any moment. He fixed his eyes on the only comfort there was. A face bending over him. Busy at something. And there was some comfort. The terrible pressure of his clothes and boots against his body had gone. And there were cool cloths against him. And was that a pillow beneath his head? She was there. He could relax now. She was there, and her cool hand was on his brow.

He had something to tell her.

“Charlie,” he heard someone say. And then he remembered.

And he told her.

Had he told her? She was looking at him with a calm marble face. She smiled. She told him to go to sleep. And then she lifted his hand to her cheek, kissed the back of it, laid it down on top of the blanket, and was gone.

But she was there. He was home now. He could not sleep, but he could retreat into his pain again. She was there.