Chapter Sixteen
They let their horses amble along for a while. They were in no hurry. There was plenty of time to get to the town where Tomas and their carriage would be meeting them.
Tessa was lost in a reverie, but she seemed lighter, somehow, as if visiting the scene of the battle and planting her acorns and bluebells had lifted some weight off her shoulders.
“I’m sorry for crying all over you,” she said after a while.
“But thank you for letting me. For some reason it has made me feel better—that and planting the acorns and bluebells. I didn’t really ever get to mourn Louis.
I was married by then, and . . . well,”— she grimaced—“I wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t appropriate.”
He gave her a sharp glance. “Not appropriate? To mourn your own brother.”
Looking straight ahead, she said in a peevish tone, “Must you do that, woman? The noise is bad enough, but tears make you look hellish ugly, demmit! I didn’t marry you to look ugly.” It was clearly a quote.
One of her damned husbands, he thought grimly. He didn’t even try to work out which. He despised them both.
“So I stopped. Bottled it up.” She glanced at him. “But all that’s in the past. With you, it’s different.” She was silent a moment then added, “I feel . . . seen.”
“Seen? What do you mean?”
“Oh, just that both my husbands liked my looks, but not who I was. They preferred me to be like. . . like a doll. No opinions, no thoughts except ones related to them. And when they went out it was as if they had placed me on a shelf, to only be useful or even active unless they were present.”
“Their loss,” was all Marcus said, but underneath he was boiling at the thought that the lively and spirited little girl he’d once known had been treated like a doll.
“But today, when I was weeping for Louis and all those other poor boys and men killed in the battle, you didn’t seem to mind how it made me look. You just held me and let me cry as long as I wanted to.”
“Well of course I did.” She didn’t need to know how helpless it made him feel, not to be able to do anything except hold her as she wept. And give her a handkerchief.
“It was exactly what I needed. You didn’t reproach me or even hurry me.” She gave a little laugh and wiped away another couple of tears. “Sorry to be so melancholy. It’s all water under the bridge now.”
They rode on, rounded the curve of a small hill and saw below them a village.
Barely deserving of the name, it was just a few scattered houses down a narrow dusty lane, off the road on which they were traveling.
The village looked deserted, but the road looked cool and shady, lined with trees, and they could see the glint of water from a small stream.
“Oh look, a stream,” she said. “Could we go down there? Water the horses?”
“Of course.”
“Race you,” Tessa said and urged her horse forward.
Marcus let her lead at first, but he soon caught up. As he passed her, he heard her laugh, and his heart swelled. She really was feeling better after visiting the battlefield. As if a weight had been lifted.
By the time they were approaching the village, he was ahead by several lengths. A slight curve of the road into the village, and there was movement ahead. A toddler emerged from a tangle of weeds and stopped, right in the center of the narrow road.
Tessa saw the child at the same time as Marcus.
She screamed a warning, but he was moving too quickly and was unable to stop in time.
In desperation he urged his mount to leap over the little creature—who seemed frozen.
To his relief the horse jumped. Wrenching his horse to a halt, he flung himself out of the saddle and raced back to check on the child, praying that it was unhurt.
Tessa, who had stopped in time, was crouched beside a ragged little toddler. Who made no sound.
“Is he all right?” he gasped. “I didn’t hit him, did I?” He could see no blood but that didn’t mean anything. “I tried not to hit him, but he just burst from the undergrowth, right in my horse’s path.”
“She seems to be unhurt,” Tessa said.
“She?”
“She’s a little girl.”
The child turned her head and looked up at Marcus. She still hadn’t made a sound. She was trembling a little but not crying. He crouched down beside her. “Are you all right?” he asked gently in French.
She just looked up at him curiously. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe she didn’t know French, and only spoke Flemish or whatever dialect they spoke in this place. He looked around, and still the place seemed deserted.
He tried again, but again she said nothing.
“Do you think she’s in shock?” Marcus said.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem very upset, poor little mite.” She gently stroked the child’s dirty face. “Are you, p’tite?”
As if to prove Tessa’s words, the child held up the ragged bunch of wildflowers clutched in her grubby fist and offered them to Tessa with a small hesitant smile.
“Merci, p’tite,” Tessa said in halting French. “Les fleurs sont très jolies.”
The little girl’s smile widened.
“Thank God,” Marcus muttered to himself. She understood. And was all right.
He breathed out several slow deep breaths. He could have killed her, but she was all right.
But who did she belong to? He looked around again. The village was barely worth the name, just a straggle of run-down houses and what looked like a blacksmith’s forge, also looking the worse for wear.
They’d probably had several armies run over them.
But smoke came from one of the chimneys and a dog was tied up outside the smith’s premises. So where were the people? The child’s mother?
They’d made something of a dramatic entrance; the thunder of hooves alone should have been noticed, let alone Tessa’s desperate scream, but nobody had come to investigate.
“She’s terribly neglected, Marcus,” Tessa murmured.
He looked. The little girl was skinny and dressed—if you could call it dressed—in a few filthy and inadequate rags; barefoot, bare-legged and bare-bottomed.
Her hair was a dusty indeterminate color, matted and with dead leaves and clumps of various unknown substances caught in it.
She looked from him to Tessa and back again, with wide, bright blue eyes shining from the dirty face.
She didn’t seem distressed at all, but still hadn’t spoken. Why? She was very small. Did children of that age even speak? When did children learn to speak? He had no idea.
As if she’d heard his unspoken question, the little girl touched the ragged flowers that Tessa held and said, “Fleurs.”
He gave another sigh of relief.
“Is she hurt?” a voice said behind them. It was a woman of about his own age. Her face thin and careworn, she was clad in a faded blue, threadbare dress.
“Are you the mother?” Marcus asked.
She shook her head. “The mother died weeks ago, God rest her soul.” She crossed herself.
“Then who is responsible for the child?”
The woman hesitated, then pointed to the smithy. “It should be him, but. . .” She pulled a face and shrugged. “I would have taken her in, but I have my own brood to feed.” She gestured behind her. A gaggle of small faces peered from the door of one of the cottages.
As he watched, a boy of about ten or eleven detached himself from the group and caught the reins of their horses, who were lazily cropping grass. In silent gestures, he asked whether he could take the horses to the stream.
“My son,” the woman said. “He is a good boy.”
Marcus nodded his assent and the boy led the horses toward the stream. Marcus returned his attention to the child. She was barely more than a baby. How could anyone let her get into a state like this? And wander about unsupervised.
The woman followed his gaze and added with dignity, “I am a widow, m’sieur. My husband died fighting for the Emperor. I help this little one when I can, but when my own children are going hungry. . .” She gave another fatalistic shrug.
Marcus nodded. “I’ll speak to the smithy,” he told Tessa. Will you be all right here?”
“Of course.”
#
THE SMITHY WAS DUSTY and unlike the one in his home village, it was untidy and looked neglected, with tools dropped where they fell. There was no sign of life. He called out, but nobody answered. Yet the forge was still warm and he could see faintly glowing coals inside.
He called again, and heard a grunt inside. He followed it through a door and found a man of fifty or more, disheveled, unshaven and dirty, sitting on a chair. On the table beside him was a board with cheese, half a loaf, a bowl of olives and a tumbler of wine.
The man gave him a hostile look and swilled a mouthful of wine around his mouth before swallowing. He made no attempt to get up. He merely eyed Marcus with a baleful expression.
“You are the smith?” Marcus said, hoping the man spoke French.
The man lifted his shoulder slightly, which Marcus took to be assent.
“I understand you are responsible for that little girl outside.”
The man spat. “Not my blood, not my responsibility.” His accent was thick, but understandable. A native Flemish speaker, no doubt.
Marcus held his temper. “Then whose is she?”
The smith shrugged, as if to say, ‘who cares?’
“The woman outside said she was yours,” Marcus persisted.
The smith gave him a long look, drained his glass and said, “My son, he go off to fight for l’Emperor”—he spat again, seeming not to care that it was his own floor, albeit filthy. “He bring back a woman—a wife, or so he say. A foreigner. From Avignon.” He snorted.
“Then l’Emperor returns and the fighting starts again.
” He gestured in the rough direction of Waterloo.
He shrugged. “My son never come home. “His woman go looking for him, but instead she come back with a wounded man. An English aristo!” He spat perilously close to Marcus’s boot. “An officer.” He spat again.
“And so?” Marcus prompted grimly
“She look after him. He get better. He go back to Angleterre.” He spat again. Much more and he could mop his floor with it, Marcus thought.