‘Go on,’ he said, his voice harsh with command, despite his resolve to be gentle. ‘Back to your room.’ If he spoke to Dog like that he got a reproachful look from melting brown eyes, accompanied by a drooping tail. Rose merely lowered her lashes and nodded. Yet somehow the gesture was anything but meek. She had assessed his mood and he suspected he was now being humoured with obedience while it suited her. Rose got to her feet in one fluid motion and walked to the door, the oversized nightgown swishing around her slim body, one moment cloaking it, the next caressing an almost-elegant curve of hip and thigh.
Flint cursed under his breath, low and fluent, as he dragged on his shirt, welcoming the distracting stab of pain as he tucked the tails into his trousers and looped the braces over his shoulders. His feet wanted to go straight to the dressing-room door, but instead he went downstairs.
The men had slept, it seemed, like the dead, but all of them had woken up in better shape than before. Maggie and Moss between them had sorted them into bed cases, the walking wounded who could care for their fellows and two who were in not much worse condition than Flint.
Maggie despatched those two upstairs with hot water for Rose—‘And just knock and leave it at the door, mind!’—and for Flint’s bath. ‘Good thing you left a spare uniform here,’ she grumbled at him when he handed her the wreckage of his shirt. ‘Most of this is fit for the rag bag.’
‘I know,’ Flint said, straight-faced. ‘Anyone would think I’d fought two battles and been in a rainstorm in it.’ He dodged the cuff she aimed at him. ‘Can you do anything about fitting Rose out, Maggie?’
‘Aye, that I can. My sister Susan leaves clothes here for when she visits, saves carting too much baggage back and forth. The size’ll be about right, I dare say.’
‘Anything else she needs, just give me the bills.’ He stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked back. ‘Her man’s dead, Maggie. She’s shocked, but I can’t say she’s grieving exactly. I don’t know what it is, she doesn’t seem the sort to just shrug that off.’
‘Likely he knocked her around,’ Maggie said with distaste. ‘She’s happy enough with you, by the looks of it.’
If he, a big, murderous bastard, made Rose feel happy, then her last man must have been a brute, Flint concluded as he stood in the bath and did his best to scrub off the dirt that had escaped last night’s dowsing under the pump, without soaking the fresh bandage. The thought of unkindness to Rose made him angry, he discovered as he climbed out, feeling completely human again for the first time in days.
As he ran the razor through four days’ accumulation of beard he heard the faint sounds of splashing from the little room. His memory, with inconvenient precision, presented the memory of Rose’s body in his arms, in his bed against his naked chest, of her walking away with the wary grace of a young deer. Tension gathered low in his belly, heavy and demanding. With an inward snarl at his own lack of self-control he finished shaving, scrubbed a towel over his face.
She needed time and the last thing he needed at the moment was a woman. Sex, yes. He could certainly do with that, but a man could manage. His body protested that it always needed a woman and was firmly ignored while he rummaged in the clothes press for his spare uniform. Women were demanding, expected emotions he did not have to share. This one was tying him in knots and she wasn’t even his, whatever Maggie said.
Maggie had brushed his dress uniform and he shoved it aside, smart, expensive, reeking of officer and privilege. It reminded him again of the confounded Duchess of Richmond’s confounded ball where he had stood around, under orders to do the pretty, pretend to be a gentleman and generally give the impression that the nickname of Randall’s Rogues that attached to their irregular unit of artillery was a light-hearted jest and not a mild description for a bunch of semi-lawless adventurers.
He’d even had to let Moss cut his hair, he thought with a snarl as he stood in front of the mirror and raked the severe new crop into order. Fashionable, Maggie had said with approval. Damned frippery, more like. Flint buckled on his sword belt, grabbed his shako and ran downstairs for his breakfast.
* * *
‘Hawkins! With me.’
‘Sir.’ The sergeant came in, buttoning his tunic. He’d shaved and found a half-decent shirt from somewhere.
‘We’ll go and report in and see who is where.’
They walked out into the crowded cobbled streets where men lay on piles of straw under makeshift awnings with townswomen, medical orderlies and nuns tending to them. They kept their eyes skinned for familiar faces or the blue of an artillery uniform jacket.
The news on the street was that Wellington had left his house on Rue Montagne du Parc for Nivelles, where the army was bivouacked. ‘We’d best start at HQ, see what staff he’s left behind and get our orders, then locate the colonel,’ Flint decided as they began the steep climb up from the lower town. It was slow progress.
‘How’s Miss Rose, sir?’
‘Miss?’
Hawkins shrugged. ‘She behaves like a lady, Major. So Maggie says.’
‘She was living with a man from the Seventy-Third, now no longer with us, poor devil. I doubt that makes her a lady.’
‘I think she’s got a nice way with her, what I’ve seen,’ the sergeant said stubbornly as they stopped to help a nun move a man on to a stretcher without jarring the bloody stump of his leg. ‘Pretty little thing.’
‘Most you’ve seen of her is a filthy waif glued to me like a kitten stuck up a tree. Her nice ways got her into my bed this morning,’ Flint snapped. ‘Not what I’d call ladylike.’
‘Needs a cuddle, most likely,’ Hawkins said, impervious to Flint’s sudden bad temper. ‘Women do when they’re upset. Useful that, I always think. You know, you give her a cuddle, bit of a squeeze, buss on the cheek, the next thing you know she’s stopped crying and you’re—’
‘You can discuss your techniques of courtship with the duke when we catch up with him,’ Flint suggested as they returned the salute of the sentry at the gate of what had been Wellington’s house. ‘They say he’s got about as much finesse as you have between the sheets.’
The scene was somewhat different from the weeks before the battle when the house had been mobbed by every person of fashion—or pretentions of gentility—hoping to gain access to the great man. Now it was all business, with red-eyed adjutants, scurrying orderlies and groups of weary men consulting notes and maps as they dealt with the aftermath of the Field Marshall’s departure.
‘Major!’ Flint turned to see Lieutenant Foster, their brigade surgeon. He looked bone-weary, but he’d managed to change and shave. ‘I was coming to find you. I’ve a list of which of our men are where, I just need the names and locations of any you brought back yesterday.’
‘What’s the butcher’s bill?’ Flint demanded.
‘Eighty, unless any more go in the next few days, and that’s always possible.’ Foster shrugged philosophically. ‘I’ve got as many of the badly wounded ones as I can with the nuns, they’re better at offering comfort and the wards are cleaner and quieter.’
‘Hawkins, take the lieutenant down to see the men at Maggie’s, then get a list from him of where everyone is. We can add a few more to the dead list, Foster. Let me know what needs doing when we both get back to the house. And you, Lieutenant, when you’ve seen those last few men, you get back to your lodgings and sleep until this afternoon at least. That’s an order.’
‘But, Major, the colonel—’
‘Go!’ To hell with Randall, he could wait until Flint had reported in here at HQ before he started throwing out his orders.
The adjutant at the desk consulted a sheaf of papers.