The Covert Captain, page 14
Eleanor shrugged. “You are loaded, Major.”
“I bloody well saw you do it! Haven’t you more to say?”
“Be careful,” she answered, and met his hand in the middle of the pistol barrel.
It was hers, this time, to call for the shot that might kill one or the other of her closest kin. It was four years since her last action, but Eleanor’s voice had only one timbre for Fire! The sparks went up on both sides amidst a storm of startled pigeons.
Sherbourne’s dark form never wavered in the smoke; Colquhoun was down, neatly, suddenly dropping from Eleanor’s view. She forgot the code duello and broke for her brother’s side at a run.
He was bleeding buckets—they must share stock, after all—but even with the surgeon wittering about, Eleanor could see the wound was no more than a tidy-edged gash at Colquhoun’s right elbow. She went to her knees upon the turf, to sort what needed sorting. See to it, Nora.
“Keep her from me, Mr. Giles!”
No females in view, the surgeon gave way to the captain.
“Will you not let me die in peace!” Sir Colquhoun lay like an eel in the grass, making attempt to writhe from Eleanor’s reach.
“You will not die today, sir.” Eleanor knelt with all her weight upon Colquhoun’s arm, winding and packing linen faster than the surgeon could hand it. “It is a flesh wound, and half what it might be. Go back to Moorlowe,” she said, in the iron voice that sent her company forward. “Forget I exist.”
Colquhoun had lost his wit, or else pretended senseless. He spoke to her not again.
It was some minutes later that she remembered Sherbourne’s pistol. Eleanor unholstered and examined it for blood and damp, found all pristine, and looked about for its owner.
He leant upon a tree near her, his game leg tucked back, but came a few wincing steps to meet her. Sherbourne gestured out at her bloodied coat and breeches, and his own pain fled his face. He looked aghast.
“You’re hit, Fleming!”
She shook her head. “Sherry, I was not in the fight.”
“Oh.” Sherbourne shook his head. “None yours, then?” He took the pistol-butt when she offered it, and holstered it on the second attempt. “And he shan’t be so ridiculous as to die?”
“No, Major.”
“Sure you’re not hurt? Show the sword-arm.”
Eleanor shrugged from her coat sleeve, obedient by habit; no blood was on the linen beneath.
“Thank God. I thought the imbecile had winged you.”
“Not I,” she said, parched suddenly of speech. She had known him half her life, and never seen the expression that darkened Sherbourne’s features. He looked as if he had fallen from saddle at speed, and got upright again with no outward hurt, but every bone inside him had broken to filaments.
“We are…we are at quits, then, are we not? I suppose we must be. Wh-what a devilish thing.” Sherbourne blinked at her. “I have had years to settle with—with burying such bits of you as Boney sent back upon your shield.”
“Likewise you.”
“This is different,” he said, and she gave him the grace of turning on her heel.
Chapter 18
It was not a bad trade, exercising horses of a morning in Rotten Row; the beasts were fine, the work was light, and she was used to the smell of stables in the rain. Eleanor had enough, with her quarter’s half-pay packet, for coal and candles and letter-paper, and to pay for any letters that might come.
There had been two from Harry, at intervals of near a month—posted by the upstairs maid, Eleanor thought, on her half-holiday to Bournesea—and Eleanor had memorized them, Harriet’s plain hand filling pages and margins with hope and sweetness and grief.
There had been one from Sherbourne, early on, to say that Capt. Fleming’s dispatches of the 3d., 4th, 5th, 6th of the month &c. had been burnt unopened. Eleanor had cut the clean half from Sherbourne’s sheet and thrown the words away.
The wind and rain drove her into a coffeehouse on her walk home; she sat dripping dry until just past nine in the morning, when she could no longer bear the smoke or the coffee, and consigned her dinner money to a cab.
A man in livery stood on the steps of the Clarges Street house, gazing like a mule at the knockerless door; he was stamping and hunching against the rain, and at Eleanor’s step he turned to look fury out at the street.
“Captain Nathaniel Fleming?”
“Who wants him?”
“The right honorable the Earl of Sherbourne, sir, and he will ‘wait your answer.”
“How should you know I’m Fleming?”
“His lordship bade me look out a slight man and fair, sir—and you’ve come to the door with the key in your hand.”
Eleanor came up the steps still tucking away the very small change from the cab. “Why the devil didn’t you knock, man?”
“Knocker’s not out, sir.”
She mimed striking the cracked panels with her glove directly, rolled her eyes, and shouldered the door when it stuck. “Drip anywhere you like,” Eleanor told the footman, “but I’m afraid my answer to the right honorable the Earl will be go to hell.”
The footman had taken out a slim letter, kept dry against his person. “He did say you would tell me to fu—fornicate myself, sir, but he said to tell you most particularly that it concerned your lady wife.”
“My lady wife,” echoed Eleanor. Her knees went loose and sent her to the floor. When she collected herself, she saw that the letter was a sheet torn from Sherbourne’s diary, foxed all over the back with sums and scribbles. She took it before the tremor could reach her hand.
It was short.
Come at once. Sent enough change horses every post. Sherbourne.
He had sealed it without taking the ring from his finger, and he had sent his pocket. It was brimful when the footman handed it over, more than Eleanor had ever seen in ready money. She closed it and hung it round her neck, and started away for her greatcoat and pistols.
“Captain? Captain, what of your answer?”
“I’ll carry it myself.”
She had winded four horses before she reached the Essex road, and now something was in it. In the setting sunlight Eleanor discerned six or seven soldiers, and two of their beasts, watching along a fence that stopped the road, sealed the ditch upon either side, and trailed away, sharp-topped and shoulder-high, into the fields. It had been thrown up in haste—she could smell fresh resin oozing from the stakes fifty lengths along—but it would be murder to try and get over. She shielded her eyes and picked out the bright white and brighter red of the Sixth Inniskilling, muskets and lances and all.
“Oh fuck, Harry,” said Eleanor aloud. She knew no one in the regiment to bribe or to bluff. Infamous, Wellesley had called them, and not only for the way they hacked in the field; they made excellent riot-troops from their love of a riot, and even now they might be spoiling for a fight, sitting on post with nothing to do but scan the road.
She sat forward and rode straight on, because there was nothing for it.
“Stand who goes there!”
They waited longer to challenge Eleanor than she liked; it pricked her nerves to come so close to armed men on a strange mount. She paid too little heed to her hands—she was surpassing weary—and the hired stallion chafed and danced beneath her.
“Stand, in the King’s name!”
“Evening, gents,” said Eleanor. Holding the horse to rest, she pushed the handkerchief from her mouth and nose, the better not to be shot for a highwayman. Her voice was dust all the same. “What’s all this? I did not know the Skins were on home service. “
“You have the advantage of us, sir,” said the lieutenant who had been straddling the gate. “I am Lieutenant Oates of the Sixth Inniskilling, and pray who are you?”
“Captain ’Thaniel Fleming, Seventh Queen’s Own, and pray give me the road.”
The lieutenant regarded Fleming, hatless, gloveless, and grimed as she was, with a cavalry sabre to keep her greatcoat down and a pistol each side of her waist. He shook his head somewhat and then saluted her, as she had thought never to see again, but he did not open the gate. “Beg pardon, sir, but I cannot. We are put here to enforce quarantine.”
“Upon my word I’ll not prevent you. I will not leave Bournebrook while you and your men are posted here, and I mean to ride straight on through Bournesea village; but I must, I must away.”
“Thirty souls have died in the village yonder; it’s sauve qui peut, you’re mad to go forward. Sir.”
“I am on the Earl’s business; I am ordered.” She held up Sherry’s letter with its blobby seal, though at a distance it might have been anyone’s.
“He had hope of you yesterevening, before the guard was set,” said the lieutenant of the Inniskilling. “Hard luck on you coming now. Last orders we had came from the lord Beauchamp, and they say none to pass.”
“It won’t do,” she answered. “I must to Bournebrook tonight, and my horse is near blown.”
“We are obliged to fire upon anyone who tries to gain the road, Captain. Even a superior officer.”
“Even Prinny,” one added.
“It would take a deal of shot to drop Prinny,” Eleanor said agreeably. “Well. I understand. Give you good night, sirs.” She hunched her shoulders and turned the black horse’s head, patting along his neck and sparing him every breath she could. “Oh, I am sorry, dear boy, I am sorry!”
She had never given a horse the spur in peace-time. Eleanor winced to feel the beast start beneath her; then it was all she could do to bring him back round to the gate and rein, hard and reckless, for the jump.
She saw the lieutenant and two others go aside; she shut her teeth and prayed none would go under. Next moment she was thrown up from her tack, legs and back and shoulders so punished she closed her eyes for pain.
The stallion was landing: one beats, two beats, three, God do not stop! Four and away, without a stop, without her neck broken on the stones. Eleanor came down into her seat and wept. She was away, and fast.
Shouts went up behind her, but they sent no rider, or else none would come into the quarantine. If the dragoons kept their word and opened fire, she never knew; let them try, limp over the horse’s neck as she was, to take a bead on her head. She knew only that the ground was rising, the road rolling up toward the great house on the cliff. Eleanor pressed the horse up to hellfire; she would have taken stripes from one of her own men who did so, in battle, but it was not her own life she rode for.
“Nora.” Harriet’s voice had some strength left, though all her color came from fever. She held up her hands to Eleanor, and smiled.
“Harry.” Eleanor smiled back, to steady her countenance. “How is it with you, dearest?”
“I am very low, I think, but not fever-mad yet. Or perhaps I am, as you have been here a hundred times since I’ve been ill, and held my hands then too.”
Eleanor kissed Harriet’s forehead. “Quite real, upon my word.”
“Then you ought not to be here! Sherry’s surgeon—so dreadful, he will converse while he bleeds one—says it is some contagion from the village. I believe he pressed Sherry for a quarantine.”
“The village is shut,” agreed Eleanor. She perched close on the corner of the mattress, bracing Harriet when she would have flinched away. “By grace I don’t take fevers—I had them all out as a child—so I think I may safely stay. Callander is a saw-bones, dearest, he’s not your man for a fever. Whatever he’s conversed upon, you may forget it.”
Faltering a bit as she tried to reason it, Harriet frowned, “If the Bournesea road is shut, how came you here?”
“Rode,” shrugged Eleanor. She pressed Harriet’s scorching hands and stood, briskly, though all her muscles screamed. She took a sharp breath and cast back Harriet’s blankets. “Cold,” she warned, and then Eleanor came over faint.
She mastered it quickly enough, eyes lowered and palms unshaking against Harriet’s bare legs. From Harriet’s ankles up to the edge of her nightshift, crumpled about her thighs, ran a hundred thousand specks of brightest red, rough under Eleanor’s hands like sand upon a letter.
“Nora,” Harriet implored. “Nora, what?”
Eleanor tucked the sweat-sour covers round her again, because she was shivering hard; she sat again on the bed’s edge and drew Harriet against her, letting Harriet cool her face against the buttons of her coat.
“You looked so frightened,” Harriet said, muffled.
“An officer of the king’s army, frightened!” Eleanor lied, brushing a kiss to the top of Harriet’s head. “It is only miliary fever. Nothing that will take you from us.”
“But Sherry sent for you.” Harriet’s fingers tightened along Eleanor’s arm. “I know he did. He must think—”
“He thinks me prettier than Callander, I don’t doubt. Or else he thought it should please you to see me.”
Harriet laughed, hoarse, not a little strange. “Give over, Nora. He sent for you that he might not have me upon his conscience.”
“I believe he sent for me because he knew I would not have you upon mine.”
“Only promise not to bleed me again, dearest, and I’ll absolve you.” Harriet trailed off into laughter again.
“Fools bleed a fever,” scoffed Eleanor.
“Huzzah,” said Harriet, throwing her arms round Eleanor’s waist. “I should never love a fool.”
“Fleming!”
Eleanor came to her feet on the moment, but could not find the will to brace for a blow. She laid her hand against Harriet’s lips, to make certain she breathed, and then might have staggered a bit, bone-weary and wrung with grief. “For God’s sake, call me out when it is all over. Have me flogged or shot as you must, only keep out of it while she lives.”
“Nathaniel—madam—bloody hell. How does she?”
“Out of her head.” The ribbon had long fallen from Eleanor’s queue; she forced the tangle behind her ears and ignored Sherbourne’s regard of it. “It may be a mercy it’s so.”
Sherbourne had kept distance; now he came into the sickroom with his hands out like a beggar. “I swear if she is made well you will have anything you like. Anything.”
“Sherry,” she made bold to address him. “Have you slept?”
“Please,” he said. “The best horse in my lines. Fifty thousand—a hundred thousand pounds.”
“Pipe down, man. She is poorly enough without you raving. And you haven’t got fifty thousand pounds.”
“I swear it, Spaniel, bring her through this as you did me, and I will go on my knees to Doctor’s Commons for your marriage-license.”
Eleanor stared. Then she laughed, much as Harriet had; a sound at home in a death-room.
“Madam!”
“Perhaps not on your knees,” she said at last. She touched Sherbourne’s forearm, and he did not flinch. “I will do everything—everything, old friend, but God knows what will come.”
“God save you, madam.”
“Sherbourne, if you bow, I will break in all your teeth! The keys to your stillroom I will take,” said Eleanor, when he looked blank at her. “And your ice-house.”
Chapter 19
Sherbourne was close by her elbow before Eleanor heard his footfalls. She was stretched past weariness, aching in her last sinew, her eyes smarting as if spirits of wine had been dashed in them. Every murmur from the depths of Harriet’s fever made Eleanor’s heart a drum.
“Fleming,” Sherbourne said. She was used to his summons, in all watches and all weathers; she sat up now, a little, and attended. The major held something, small, black—Eleanor might swear it was a Testament—in his left hand, and a leaf of paper in his right.
“Nora.” Sherbourne had not used her Christian name since learning it. It sounded, now, at odds with his voice. “Nora, my dear.”
Sense, breeding, education fled away. She gawped.
“I must tell you—your brother,” he tried, who had written a thousand letters mourning a thousand English sons. “I came to—your brother—Moorlowe house in Yorkshire has passed to Nathaniel Fleming, a captain of my regiment, and I have here a letter inquiring that gentleman’s direction.”
Eleanor was still breathing, because she breathed like a landed fish. She thought she had got a nosebleed; something salt streamed down into her mouth. Sherbourne was white and unsettled when she regarded him, his hands sketching in the air as if he did not know what to bid them do. Eleanor reached and caught them, and it was nothing like taking Harriet’s hands, but he held on fast as life.
“Stand down, Captain Fleming. I’ll take this watch.”
“Harry…”
Sherbourne helped Eleanor to her feet. “Eat. Sleep. Orders.”
“Wake up, Major Queernabs, I have need of you.” Fleming tapped Sherbourne with one of the empty buckets she had brought from the scullery. When he stirred only as if to brush off a fly, she laid the bucket on again with a thump.
“Give over! Christ, I’ve a head.” Then Sherbourne knew his surroundings; he sat up so quickly as to knock his tumbler into a pigeon pie. “Fleming. Harry?”
“I’ve laid on as much boneset as I dare, and poultice of yarrow to draw the fever from her heart; gave her to drink, and now your house has no water, Major, so we are going to fetch some.”
“We,” gurgled Sherbourne. “Staff for that. Don’t be foolish.”
“I have sent your staff to the lodge, before they are all taken scarlet. Rations to the kitchen-garden gate, mornings. Cellar locked, I’m afraid.”
“God damn you,” said Sherbourne, very slowly, holding to his head as if it echoed.
He spoke again only in the sunlight of the courtyard, having soaked himself under the pump until his curls were sodden down. “I wonder you are still standing.”
“I must,” Eleanor said, astonished. She bent to lay her buckets under the water, betraying the sleepless nights only by stiffness.
“What is it like to do everything in, in, what used you to say—”
