The girl’s eyes grew round, and a flush suffused her pale cheeks. “London, miss?”
“Yes. His Grace has relented, and he wants the baby where he can keep an eye on him. But the same rules apply. The less you’re seen, the better. Keep Cian as quiet as possible, because if His Grace feels like he’s being inconvenienced, he might ship our darling to the nearest orphanage.”
Diana’s arms tightened around the baby, fear wriggling its chilly way up her spine. She had to do whatever it took to protect Cian.
“Tiens! Attrape bandit!”
Evan Eldridge bolted upright in his bed, his arm sweeping wide to fend off the advancing enemy, only to make contact with the bedside table and send a porcelain pitcher flying across the floor. The blankets wound around his legs, trapping him, and he kicked free, pain piercing his thigh like a bayonet. He lashed out again at the French soldier, shouting, “Get back!”
Sweat prickling his chest, his ribs pumped like bellows. Blinking, swallowing, he shook his head, trying to clear the panic and cobwebs. An orderly rushed down the ward, scowling. “What’s going on here? This is a hospital, not a melee.” He didn’t wait for an answer, bending to pick up shards of pottery and mopping up spilled water.
No French soldier, no cannon fire, no smoke or broken, bleeding bodies. He wasn’t on the battlefield of Salamanca. He wasn’t fighting for his life.
He was in the hospital. Still.
“Sorry, bad dream,” he muttered. It was as good an explanation as any, and partially true, though he didn’t remember falling asleep. His heart hammered against his breastbone, and he forced himself to take slow breaths, willing the panic to recede. The dream had seemed so real, he could almost smell the burning gunpowder and hear the shriek of the cannonballs as they whistled through the air.
A bad dream that seemed to repeat every time he relaxed his guard and fell asleep.
Evan dragged his hands down his face. He couldn’t admit what was really bothering him. He couldn’t talk about the cold sweats, the panic, the nightmares, the memory loss, the flashes of anger, the sense of impending disaster that he carried constantly. If he breathed a word, he’d find himself on a one-way trip to Bedlam. He had hopes of getting out of St. Bartholomew’s soon. If he landed in Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, where others with his malady had been taken, he’d never get out.
He held his hands out flat, palms down. Tremors shook his fingers, and he had no power to stop them. Every sudden noise had him jumping out of his skin. Pulling a handkerchief from his dressing gown pocket, he wiped his temples. One would think, after enduring the sweltering heat of Spain, he’d be suffering from the cold of January in England, but the ward resembled a furnace today, though no one else seemed bothered. The soldier in the cot next to him lay under several blankets, and one of the orderlies stumped by, a coal hod banging against his leg as he went to feed the fire.
Evan rolled his neck, trying to ease the knots that had taken up permanent residence between his shoulder blades. Perhaps, if he could only get a decent night’s sleep, this internal jangling might cease, but at the moment he felt like a box of musket balls that had been dropped from a height. Bouncing, rolling, scattering.
The French had a term for it. Vent du boulet. The wind of the bullet. A term for a soldier who heard bullets even when he wasn’t under fire, someone who was losing his grip on reality. Evan had seen such men, vacant expressions, quaking muscles, jerking movements, unable to eat or sleep or cope with the world around them.
Evan feared that was happening to him. If he couldn’t bring himself under control, he’d be thought unfit to rejoin his regiment, unfit for command—or worse, insane and in need of incarceration.
A familiar squeak drew his attention. The cart with the protesting wheel. Why didn’t someone fix that? Every meal, the same thing, squeak, squawk, squeak, squawk, hailing the arrival of pathetic food grown cold in its journey from the basement kitchens to the ward.
“Morning.” The porter removed the cover on the kettle and ladled out a bowl of pasty-looking slop.
“Gruel again?” Stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket, Evan accepted the thick porcelain bowl and heavy spoon. What he wouldn’t give for a slice of bacon or a piece of toast with butter.
“Doctor’s orders.” With a shrug, the porter moved on, squeak, squawk, squeak, squawk.
Evan lifted a spoonful of porridge to his lips, but at the monotonous taste of bland nothing, he let the utensil drop. It was ridiculous, him even still being in the hospital. His leg wound had nearly healed. He should be convalescing at his father’s parsonage in Oxfordshire, where his mother could fuss over him, or at the company barracks, preparing to rejoin the Ninety-Fifth on the Peninsula. Six months since the battle and being shipped back to England was long enough to linger in a sick bed. In fact, compared to the others on the ward, those with amputations, blindness, burns, bullet wounds, Evan felt like a fraud. A few headaches and a nearly healed shrapnel wound in his left thigh were nothing.
Setting aside the bowl, he levered himself upright, tightened the belt on the dressing gown—a luxury his father had brought to him when Evan arrived at the London hospital—and began his slow, determined walk to the far end of the ward and back. The sooner he regained the strength in his leg, the sooner he could get back to his men.
“On the march again, sir?”
He stopped at the bed of Freddie Cuff, an infantryman with a cheeky grin. Freddie always had a quick word for everyone on the ward even though he had lost his right leg. The young man struggled to pull himself up in the bed, and Evan hurried to adjust pillows.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’ll be joining you on your walks soon. Maybe we can have a race.” Freddie’s eyes twinkled. “Doc said he’s going to fit me with a wooden leg as soon as this thing heals up enough.” Waving at his abbreviated limb, he sighed. “Not much use for an infantryman with one leg though. Soon’s I’m healthy enough, they’ll discharge me. Then what am I going to do? I can’t go home to my folks. They barely have enough to live on themselves. That’s why I joined the army in the first place. No job, no training, no money.” It was a question he posed daily, it seemed.
With a twinge of guilt, Evan patted Freddie’s shoulder. “Something will come up. You just work on getting better so we can have that race.” Freddie’s condition, one shared by many veterans, made Evan more grateful than ever to have survived his wounds relatively unscathed and that he would be back in uniform soon. He, too, had joined the military because it was one of the few options open to him, and he’d found a home with his fellow soldier brothers, one to which he was anxious to return. Not to mention, there was still work to be done on the Continent that wouldn’t be finished until old Boney was dead or behind bars.
After six laps of the ward, up from yesterday’s five, Evan’s legs trembled, especially the left. The fresh scar burned and ached where a battlefield doctor had dug out shrapnel and splinters, and later had reopened it to drain infection.
Evan didn’t remember receiving the wound. He didn’t remember anything about that day. And yet something drifted at the edge of recall, something important. Something urgent. Or was it just his addled brain playing tricks on him? He couldn’t trust anything his mind conjured up at the moment.