Chapter Four #2
Both of them had been shocked into silence when that solicitor fellow had arrived.
Mr. Pratt. Not a name he’d have wished upon his worst enemy.
But the fellow did seem to know what he was talking about.
A distant cousin, dead unexpectedly and with no direct male heir.
Only he, Captain Harry Madeley, late of Wellington’s army and now invalided out with no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life other than stay here, living off Hester’s kindness and his army pension. And now he didn’t have to.
Harry walked slowly down the wet sand. The tide being right out, it stretched away into the far, wave-fringed distance and off to right and left for miles, with not a single person in view.
He had it to himself, just as he liked. He’d come here to stay with his sister after the hospital in Brussels had discharged him, a poor, limping, pain-racked creature.
And Hester, with her common-sense attitude to the sick, no doubt gained with her experience nursing first their mother then her own husband through their long illnesses, had applied her knowledge and nursed him back to health while at the same time refusing to let him indulge in any ideas of remaining an invalid.
Her fierce love had been the making of him.
But for the nightmares. She could do nothing about the nightmares.
Of course, she knew he had them, just not how often.
When he’d been so weak at the start and in such pain, she’d spent a considerable time sitting beside his bed while he fitfully slept, and she couldn’t have missed the night terrors.
He knew and she did too, that they were memories of the battle he’d been wounded in.
Of the bloodbath that had been Waterloo.
Not just of the battle though, but also of the job he’d had to do inside the infantry square, patching up the wounded, leaving those with no chance at recovery to die, sending the rest back to the front of the line as quickly as he could, and all the while under heavy fire.
No, he wouldn’t delve deeply into that. It was bad enough they haunted his dreams, without them breaking out and haunting his days as well.
He and Hester both knew he’d been lucky not to have been worse wounded.
Men had lost limbs, had their jaws shattered, their faces disfigured, and many had died.
And he’d had the good luck to only be caught by shrapnel.
Only. The doctors at the battlefield hospital at Mont-St-Jean, his friends and colleagues so short a time before, had removed most of the shrapnel from his back and leg, but there was one bit lodged close to his spine they’d not dared to try removing in case it severed his spinal cord.
As a doctor himself, Harry was well aware that this remaining piece could still move.
If that ever happened, he’d decided, he’d use the pistol he always kept close and kill himself.
Only Hester and his other sisters would miss him.
He left the dunes far behind him, heading towards the distant waves, the golden sand cast in temporary ripples beneath his feet, the distinctive prints of birds, and the little holes left by the razor clams the only hint any other living creature might be on the beach with him.
The solitude enveloped him, the distant roar of the waves, the sighing of the wind and the constant calls of the gulls drowning out the sound of guns. As it should be.
Sir Harry Madeley. He had to admit it sounded good. Or should he be Sir Henry? More formal, but he’d always been Harry to his four sisters and his mother. God rest her soul. She would have been both amazed and ecstatic to discover her only son had become a baronet.
Further out on the beach the wind increased, blowing in from the sea, wet with spray.
It was at times like this that he couldn’t keep the faces out of his head.
The faces of the men who’d never again feel the wind on their skin, smell the salty tang of the sea, stride out strong and young and brave.
It was as if they marched before him in silent, accusing lines.
Sometimes he wondered if he let them do so on purpose because he wanted to punish himself for not having saved them.
Why else would he walk out every day on the sands, guilty for feeling so alive, so rejuvenated, and so far from the thunder of guns and the stink of cordite in the air.
In so much blissful solitude. Despite his own determination, every day he had to fight to shut out the shrieks of mortally wounded men, the rattle of carbines, the screams of dying horses.
No. He didn’t want to remember being at the center of the infantry square, riflemen’s backs to him as they fought off wave after wave of Napoleon’s forces while he struggled in the center to staunch the bleeding, to repair the fallen and send them back again to the front line.
Nor the miasma of death that had hung over the Mont-St-Jean field hospital.
He shook his head to clear it of all those unwelcome images that just wouldn’t stay out of his head. They needed to be banished to his nightmares, not allowed to shove their way into his waking hours this way.
He’d reached the sea’s edge now, the waves rolling in towards him, white-capped and unstoppable now the tide was on the turn. Water, tempting and persuasive, lapped around his boots, ankle deep.
Right now, if he so chose, he could keep on going.
Walk into the water until it closed over his head, and join the men he’d so badly let down.
The men who’d died when he’d lived. The men he’d patched up and sent back out to fight.
And die. Men so much more deserving than he was.
Brave and stalwart men who’d fought throughout the Peninsular War and returned to fight again at Waterloo. And fallen all around him.
Unlike them, he’d come so lately to the war.
Johnny-come-lately, that was him, as one of his old friends, dead now, had laughingly described him.
He’d thought his small contribution worthwhile, a calling, something he was meant to do to carry on the military tradition of his family.
But was any war worthwhile? Was all that death and destruction justifiable?
He’d been trained to save lives, to preserve them, and all he’d been asked to do was mend them enough so they could return to fight again.
A wave topped his boots and water trickled down inside them. He was nearly knee deep. The tide was coming in. If he didn’t turn now, he’d get his wish.
Without another look for the expanse of the grey North Sea, he turned and waded back to the sand. Not today. Not yet. Not with Hester waiting for him in her house, eager for her cherished little brother to fulfill what she saw as his place in life.