Chapter 1 #2
The baker stood up. “Wait here.” She bustled off along the street and disappeared into another shop.
A few minutes later, she came back, smiling.
“You and the children will sleep here tonight, Mrs. Parker. You can have my brother’s room.
” Her eyes filled with tears, which she blinked away.
“He died at Talavera, he did, and I know he’d want me to help a fellow soldier’s wife. ”
She gave a decisive nod. “And then, in the morning, the carter will take you on your journey. He is not going far, but he’ll save a day’s walking, I reckon.”
Maggie accepted, and tried to offer money for bed and board, but the baker said that Will had fought to save England, and the least she could do was help his little family.
The carter said the same. “I was in the Peninsula, ma’am.
If I cannot help the family of one of our own, what is the world coming to? ”
She spent a pleasant ride sharing memories of funny or heartwarming things that happened during the wars, each of them—by silent mutual agreement—avoiding mention of all the tragedies they had seen.
When their ways parted, he left her with an innkeeper’s son who had been in his company in the army, and the son insisted that his family would be glad to have her and the two little ones to stay for the night. Maggie went to sleep as soon as the children, and dreamt of Will.
In the morning, a friend of the innkeeper’s son drove her north, but he proved to be not quite so charitable, and in the end, Maggie had to produce the pistol that her father had given her long ago.
It was not loaded, of course. Loaded guns could not be carried in pockets and were, in any case, not safe around children.
Maggie judged that the man would not know the difference, and she was right.
He unloaded her wheelbarrow and her possessions from his cart, called her some unpleasant names, and went on his way.
And so it went through the rest of September and into October.
Maggie and her children found safe refuge some nights and on others slept outside under the stars.
Sometimes they were offered lifts and sometimes they walked.
Three times, they stopped for several days while Maggie harvested vegetables, picked fruit, or stacked hay.
Twice more, Maggie had to use her pistol to discourage someone with quite the wrong idea about camp followers.
Most of those who offered them help were ex-soldiers or families who had lost someone to war. They all proved to be trustworthy. In a little over three weeks, Maggie and the children arrived at the first village of Ashton on her list.
Her heart warmed by the kindness of so many people, she called first on the innkeeper and then on the vicar to find out whether the neighborhood held a family called Parker, whose son William had been in Spain with the army.
But the answer at both places was ‘No.’ This was the wrong Ashton.
The vicar and his wife were kind enough to give her and the children a place to sleep.
Maggie assured them that she was not discouraged.
Disappointed, of course, but it had been too much to hope that they would strike lucky at the first try.
Tomorrow, the little family would begin their journey to the next Ashton on the list.
* * *
Ashton-on-Dove, England, September 1814
Will Parker had largely recovered from the injuries that had nearly killed him at Toulouse.
He would walk with a limp forever, but at least he still had his leg, even if it was scarred from multiple shrapnel strikes and twisted from an ill-set bone.
He had a long deep scar across his shoulder and back where he’d apparently been hit by a sword.
But the worst thing was the hole in his memory.
More than two years had disappeared from his mind, leaving a blank. His mother said he’d had a blow on his head during the fighting for Cuidad Rodrigo, and the doctor said that explained it, for he’d apparently had a second blow in exactly the same place at Toulouse.
He remembered the beginning of the siege at Cuidad Rodrigo and then nothing else, until he had woken up more than two years later in a surgery tent in France.
Woken and slipped back into unconsciousness over and again through more than a month until at last he found himself in his own familiar boyhood bedroom back in Ashton-on-Dove, under his mother’s care.
With enough memories of the war up until his first injury, Will didn’t mind that he had forgotten another two years of the same.
Except that he was bone-deep certain that something important was hidden in that hole.
Something he desperately wanted to remember.
Something that left him uneasy and unsettled.
But trying to force the memories to surface only gave him a headache, and he had work to do.
Since he managed to get back on his feet again, he’d been keeping accounts and records for most of the merchants in their little village, using skills he must have developed during the two missing years.
How odd to keep the skill but lose all memory of acquiring it.
He was good at the work, but something was still missing. He didn’t fit into the life he’d had before he joined the army, and the life he was building felt wrong, somehow. The old familiar places no longer felt like home.
If only he could remember the important matter he was certain hid somewhere, deep in the shadows of his memory.