Chapter 22
But it wasn’t her name. Not her true name.
Mary shook her head as she rode alongside the troop under a relentless sun.
In the three weeks since her first reading lesson with Bjorn—three weeks of traveling north, learning the rules of being an officer, maintaining weapons in the event of an attack, changing clothes in the dark, tromping off into the forest to urinate, and keeping her small but visible breasts bound day and night—why was this, the detail of her real name, the lie that bothered her more than it had in times past? Out of all the other lies?
Merlin had paused to snap up grass, and Mary gently lifted the reins. “Almost there,” she soothed.
“You said that an hour ago,” Henry hollered from behind.
Mary rolled her eyes. “You’re like a child.”
“And you worry about us like a woman.”
Mary’s stomach clenched, and she turned in the saddle to glare at Henry’s sunburned face as he trotted Arthur on her left.
“Oh, come now, don’t look so glum,” he said as he passed. “Friends tell friends the truth.”
She swiveled Merlin around and rode on, hiding a scowl that betrayed her fear and guilt. She was aware of the rest of her platoon watching, trailing her in the procession of a dozen other troops as their forces grew in number.
“I just mean you could afford to loosen up a little,” Henry said. “You’ve been so agitated, so serious since your new promotion—even more serious than usual.”
“Easy for you to say, Danby,” Mary said, touting formality and her rank. “When you are in charge of a hundred souls, let me know how well you sleep through the night.”
Though in truth, only part of her lack of sleep was over her troop.
Despite their scrappy nature, they’d shown themselves worthy of fighting.
Competent. She had total confidence in them.
They had courage, raw and real. The skirmish had already proved it.
They followed her without question, which was as strange as it was wonderful, and they rarely complained despite the hardship of training while traveling—all while knowing more battles loomed ahead.
Their side was gathering, growing into an army unlike anything they’d ever seen.
And so was the enemy’s.
Mary was not guilty of neglecting her duty.
No. Her lack of sleep had more to do with late-night conversations in her tent, followed by late-night nerves once Bjorn fell asleep.
Remembering those talks set her heart ablaze.
The thrill that she was in over her head and, for once in her life, permitting herself the indulgence of toeing the line.
Just the night before, after tracing the alphabet on the dirt floor of the tent in the last light of a candle, Bjorn had grabbed the stick in her hand, his callused fingers brushing hers.
“Not like that,” he said. “This is uppercase, and that is a lowercase Q.”
Her whole body ignited as she held her breath.
“Try again on your own,” he said with a brightness he never showed as a soldier. He rested his chin on his fist, one strong arm propped on his knee.
Mary forced her hand to redraw the shape.
“That’s better.” Bjorn beamed. “I’m sorry. If we had spare paper, this would be so much easier.”
Mary stared at her work, the lines of letters, savoring the heat still tingling down her fingers. “Don’t be sorry,” she said.
Bjorn Van Acker could never know. He would never know. She could not put him at risk. And she refused to name this feeling, even to herself—something older than wars and countries, kings and languages.
A feeling older than names.
But it didn’t need a name, much like Bjorn never needed to know hers.
She could be content—more than content—with the knowledge of him: the constellation of freckles on the round of his right shoulder, the teardrop scar just below his ear, the animated way he read aloud the works of Shakespeare and Joost van den Vondel, Dante and Miguel de Cervantes—the prized treasures from home he lugged in his bag.
There was the way his jaw cracked when he yawned and the sound of his steady breathing throughout the night.
His questions that she’d learned to answer with as much honesty as she’d ever allowed herself—stories about Ma, about her time as a stablehand, and what she’d learned as a navigator aboard Southwick’s ship.
Her plan to find Ma after the war and live a simple life in peace.
Bjorn seemed to care about all of it as much as she cared about his past—the youngest son of a baron, a young but bored child from a long line of war heroes, a boy with a knack for trouble and a facility with words and learning and people.
Arthur snorted, reminding her of Henry’s presence.
“Fine. Keep your little secrets,” Henry taunted when they spotted camp at last, then he laughed as Arthur took off at a gallop. “But only this once,” he called out. Others followed him in a swarm, moving around her.
Mary and Merlin stood in the kicked-up dust, feeling the current of lives, the changes that had already happened as well as the changes she knew—like the breeze coming in over the too-green valley—were coming.
Henry was right; he usually was. Mary had changed, irrevocably. But they all would before this brewing battle was over. If she felt more fear, it was because she had more to lose.
“Listen well!” roared the Duke of Marlborough at the mass gathering of officers, sergeants, and corporals in front of his tent.
He wore a red coat trimmed with gold buttons and a black bicorn hat.
Mary marveled at the uniform—something she and her fellow soldiers did not have.
The group accompanying the duke appeared clean and rested, unlike the men at camp. She hunched and felt out of place.
Mary stood next to Bjorn, his strong arm pressed into hers as more and more restless men joined the throng. She did not budge, and she relished the reassuring touch of him, the feel of anything good, while her heart pounded and told her something terrible approached.
“We gather here as allies,” he boomed. “Tomorrow, we meet the French led by Marshal Villeroi.” The duke’s forehead wrinkled under his powdered wig. “We will give them a fight that will bring them to their knees, or their graves.”
A few cheered while others crossed their arms. Bjorn looked down at Mary, offered a reassuring smile, then returned his gaze to the speaker.
She wondered what Bjorn was thinking—if he would rather talk about anything other than bloodshed with such a gathering of travelers from such far corners of Europe.
“We have sixty-two thousand troops against their estimated sixty thousand, if our scouts are right. We will demolish this enemy in the name of Queen Anne and bring Spain back to her rightful place in the world.”
Mary’s knees ached from all this standing after a full day of riding. Her pulse quickened as the duke went over the weapons and marching orders, the overview of where the drums would sound. The drills needed for a successful charge.
“We are the British Royal Army!” the Duke said, spit spewing as he shouted. “The moment we cross the river, we ride to victory.”
Mary exhaled as Bjorn whispered in her ear, “We’ll stay together. Our troops have proven to do well side by side—our superiors know that.”
Mary nodded, though her gut twisted at the possibility that they might be separated—a thought that had not entered her mind until now. A few men carried armloads of dark blue coats.
“Uniforms for all officers!” the staff called. A press of bodies moved into a queue, and Mary could smell the sour sweat on the man in front of her. Her slight height did not serve her here. The chaos and energy crackled, and she clenched her teeth while nudging her way to the front.
Bjorn tugged her arm out of the mass. Then he handed her a coat. “Here.”
“How did you—”
He put on his own coat. A perfect fit on his sturdy frame. A startling match to the sea of his eyes, which held little joy.
Mary pulled on her own. It sagged a bit, as most of her clothes did—a preference to conceal her form. But it was notably smaller than the rest of the uniforms the others were trying on.
He knew the size of her body. Which made sense, she assured herself. Her height was no secret.
Or, at some point, he had studied her figure. She opened her mouth, then clamped it down again as they awaited further orders.
“Tell me again how we’re supposed to do a synchronized dance with sixty thousand tired men and tired horses?” Henry asked.
He and Mary sat on the ground outside the busy armory, waiting for their swords to be sharpened.
The screech of metal made her nerves scream.
To keep busy, she meticulously cleaned everypart of her musket and bayonet—a foolish task in the swift-approaching twilight.
“We’ll line up in rows, stretched out over two miles,” Mary said.
“Our seventy-four battalions and one hundred twenty-three squadrons will form an unbreakable wall and make the first move across the river barrier by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tell me not as an officer, but as a friend.”
Mary stopped her tinkering and looked at Henry.
His pimples, bless him, had flared again.
Heavy circles shadowed his pale eyes. She wanted to pretend that everything was fine—to radiate her usual, resounding calm.
She wanted to assure him that victory was inevitable.
Just look at all the soldiers, gathered in this united cause.
But her insides churned. She no longer cared only for a secure future—much as she still longed for one and planned to honor her vow to find Ma.
It was the agony of losing Henry, or any of the men she led.
Any mistake she made was no longer hers alone to bear.
The costs of bad intuition, a small blunder, the tiniest of slipups, could be the end of the people in her charge. People she loved.
Loved?
“Still here?” came a voice to Mary’s right.
She gazed up at Bjorn.
“Might be here until dawn,” Henry said, stretching his arms. “I’m not fighting the damn French without my sword. Should’ve just kept it blunt.”
“Not an option,” Mary shot back, her fingers fumbling over the parts of her gun. “I’m not sending you into battle without the best of chances.”
“Read?”
The sound of her name, in Bjorn’s voice, nearly undid her.
“Why are you attaching a bayonet blade upside down on your musket?”
She froze. She hadn’t noticed this thoughtless error. It was only then that she saw her fingers shaking.
Henry reached over and grabbed her hands. “It’s all right to be a little nervous, Read.”
“We’d be halfwits not to be,” Bjorn added.
Mary pulled her hand back. “I’m not nervous,” she said. She couldn’t be. She couldn’t fret and worry “like a woman,” as Henry had rudely accused her of not long ago. She was not, was not, a woman.
What was a woman—this great liability she’d been born with?
And what were the strengths of being one?
Male, female. What did it matter? She had to be more, she imagined, than who she was—more than she’d ever been before. She had to protect people. She had to return to that place of quiet calm, to access the deep well of tranquility she needed in order to fight well tomorrow.
She needed clarity, and her mind had turned to straw—had been turning to straw for weeks. She’d not only allowed it, she’d encouraged it.
Henry exhaled. Bjorn stood with his arms crossed and a look of concern on his face—saying nothing, just waiting and listening.
She memorized their faces. No. She would not. There was no need to. They would not, could not, die.
Mary’s eyes watered. She sucked back the tears, pulled the emotions back inside and cleaned her weapons with renewed vigor.
She was a sealed cask of secrets, watertight and unbreakable.
There would be a day after tomorrow, a sun rising then setting over Mont-Saint-André in the west. There would be a day after tomorrow for all of them. But first, Henry needed his sword.