Anne Perry - The Face of a Stranger

They were staring at her, waiting for her to say something more, some word of praise for him. After all, he had been a soldier-a major in the cavalry.

"I remember he was charming." She refused to lie, even for his family. "He had the most delightful smile."

Fabia relaxed and sat back. "That was Joscelin," she agreed with a misty look in her blue eyes. "Courage and a kind of gaiety, even in the most dreadful circumstances. I can still hardly believe he is gone-I half think he will throw the door open and stride in, apologizing for being late and telling us how hungry he is."

Hester looked at the table piled high with food that would have done half a regiment at the height of the siege. They used the word hunger so easily.

General Wadham sat back and wiped his napkin over his lips.

"A fine man," he said quietly. "You must have been very proud of him, my dear. A soldier's life is all too often short, but he carries honor with him, and he will not be forgotten."

The table was silent but for the clink of silver on porcelain. No one could think of any immediate reply. Fabia's face was full of a bleak and terrible grief, an almost devastating loneliness. Rosamond stared into space, and Lovel looked quietly wretched, whether for their pain or his own was impossible to know. Was it memory or the present which robbed him?

Menard chewed his food over and over, as if his throat were too tight and his mouth too dry to swallow it.

"Glorious campaign," the general went on presently. "Live in the annals of history. Never be surpassed for courage. Thin Red Line, and all that."

Hester found herself suddenly choked with tears, anger and grief boiling up inside her, and intolerable frustration. She could see the hills beyond the Alma River more sharply than the figures around the table and the winking crystal. She could see the breastwork on the forward ridges as it had been that morning, bristling with enemy guns, the Greater and Lesser Redoubts, the wicker barricades filled with stones. Behind them were Prince Menshikoff's fifty thousand men. She remembered the smell of the breeze off the sea. She had stood with the women who had followed the army and watched Lord Raglan sitting in frock coat and white shirt, his back ramrod stiff in the saddle.

At one o'clock the bugle had sounded and the infantry advanced shoulder to shoulder into the mouths of the Russian guns and were cut down like corn. For ninety minutes they were massacred, then at last the order was given and the Hussars, Lancers and Fusiliers joined in, each in perfect order.

"Look well at that," a major had said to one of the wives, "for the Queen of England would give her eyes to see it."

Everywhere men were falling. The colors carried high were ragged with shot. As one bearer fell another took his place, and in his turn fell and was succeeded. Orders were conflicting, men advanced and retreated over each other. The Grenadiers advanced, a moving wall of bearskins, then the Black Watch of the Highland Brigade.

The Dragoons were held back, never used. Why? When asked, Lord Raglan had replied that he had been thinking of Agnes!

Hester remembered going over the battlefield afterwards, the ground soaked with blood, seeing mangled bodies, some so terrible the limbs lay yards away. She had done all she could to relieve the suffering, working till exhaustion numbed her beyond feeling and she was dizzy with the sights and sounds of pain. Wounded were piled on carts and trundled to field hospital tents. She had worked all night and all day, exhausted, dry-mouthed with thirst, aching and drenched with horror. Orderlies had tried to stop the bleeding; there was little to do for shock but a few precious drops of brandy. What she would have given then for the contents of Shelburne's cellars.

The dinner table conversation buzzed on around her, cheerful, courteous, and ignorant. The flowers swam in her vision, summer blooms grown by careful gardeners, orchids tended in the glass conservatory. She thought of herself walking in the grass one hot afternoon with letters from home in her pocket, amid the dwarf roses and the blue larkspur that grew again in the field of Balaclava the year after the Charge of the Light Brigade, that idiotic piece of insane bungling and suicidal heroism. She had gone back to the hospital and tried to write and tell them what it was really like, what she was doing and how it felt, the sharing and the good things, the friendships, Fanny Bolsover, laughter, courage. The dry resignation of the men when they were issued green coffee beans, and no means to roast or grind them, had evoked her admiration so deeply it made her throat ache with sudden pride. She could hear the scratching of the quill over the paper now-and the sound as she tore it up.

"Fine man," General Wadham was saying, staring into his claret glass. "One of England's heroes. Lucan and Cardigan are related-I suppose you know? Lucan married one of Lord Cardigan's sisters-what a family." He shook his head in wonder. "What duty!"

"Inspires us all," Ursula agreed with shining eyes.

"They hated each other on sight," Hester said before she had time for discretion to guard her tongue.

"I beg your pardon!" The general stared at her coldly, his rather wispy eyebrows raised. His look centered all his incredulity at her impertinence and disapproval of women who spoke when it was not required of them.

Hester was stung by it. He was exactly the sort of blind, arrogant fool who had caused such immeasurable loss on the battlefield through refusal to be informed, rigidity of thought, panic when they found they were wrong, and personal emotion which overrode truth.

"I said that Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan hated each other from the moment they met," she repeated clearly in the total silence.

"I think you are hardly in a position to judge such a thing, madame." He regarded her with total contempt. She was less than a subaltern, less than a private, for heaven's sake-she was a woman! And she had contradicted him, at least by implication and at the dinner table.

“I was on the battlefield at the Alma, at Inkermann and at Balaclava, and at the siege of Sebastopol, sir," she answered without dropping her gaze. "Where were you?"

His face flushed scarlet. "Good manners, and regard for our hosts, forbid me from giving you the answer you deserve, madame," he said very stiffly. "Since the meal is finished, perhaps it is time the ladies wished to retire to the withdrawing room?"

Rosamond made as if to rise in obedience, and Ursula laid her napkin beside her plate, although there was still half a pear unfinished on it.

Fabia sat where she was, two spots of color in her cheeks, and very carefully and deliberately Callandra reached for a peach and began to peel it with her fruit knife and fork, a small smile on her face.

No one moved. The silence deepened.

"I believe it is going to be a hard winter," Lovel said at last. "Old Beckinsale was saying he expects to lose half his crop."

"He says that every year," Menard grunted and finished the remnant of his wine, throwing it back without savor, merely as if he would not waste it.

"A lot of people say things every year." Callandra cut away a squashy piece of fruit carefully and pushed it to the side of her plate. “It is forty years since we beat Napoleon at Waterloo, and most of us still think we have the same invincible army and we expect to win with the same tactics and the same discipline and courage that defeated half Europe and ended an empire.''

"And by God, we shall, madame!" The general slammed down his palm, making the cutlery jump. "The British soldier is the superior of any man alive!"

"I don't doubt it," Callandra agreed. "It is the British general in the field who is a hidebound and incompetent ass."

"Callandra! For God's sake!" Fabia was appalled.