“Leave me alone!” She turned her head aside, pushing him away as he came up to her.
A silver tear glistened on her cheek, making rills in the dirt as it trickled down to the corner of her mouth.
Her tongue darted, licked up the tear, but it was followed by another and another.
Julian forgot the accusations she'd hurled at his head.
He forgot how much he disliked the brigand in her. He forgot how angry she made him almost every time they came into contact. He was aware only of the power of her distress. He noticed for the first time the blood on her clothes.
“Come,” he said softly. “It's time we left this place. There's nothing anyone can do here until they're surfeited.” He laid a hand on her shoulder to direct her toward the walls of the city.
“Leave me alone!” she repeated, but with less conviction.
Julian shook his head. “I'll carry you if I must, Violette.”
“Espadachin,” she threw at him, but the tears were flowing fast now, and she brushed her arm across her eyes, smudging the grime on her cheeks so she looked like a chimney sweep. But she didn't resist him this time when he put his hand at her waist and ushered her down the street.
“You rescued the girl,” he said, trying to offer her some comfort.
“One among so many!” she shot back. “They're rapping nuns, desecrating the churches, spitting men on their bayonets. I've seen it before.” The last sentence was so low, he had to bend his head to hear it, but the intensity of her pain could be heard as clearly as a clarion call.
Outside the city, fatigue parties of Portuguese soldiers were digging pits for the dead, the bodies piled on carts, waiting to be consigned to the earth as soon as the pits were deep enough.
“You're all as bad as each other,” Tamsyn suddenly renewed her attack. “What possible justification can there be for this? Such slaughter… mindless slaughter.”
“Ask Napoleon,” Julian said dryly. “Ask Philippon. If he'd surrendered the city when it was clear defense was no longer viable, thousands of lives would have been saved. It isn't just us, Violette.”
“I didn't say it was,” she retorted. “It's soldiers. Brutal, bestial-”
“It's war. It makes beasts of men,” he interrupted.
“But what of your father? He made war for the sake of gold… no principle, no-”
“Don't you dare talk of my father, Englishman!” She spun round on him, and her knife was in her hand, her eyes, still brilliant with tears, now glittered with fury. “What would you know of a man like El Baron? You puny, weak-minded English soldier!” She spat the last word as if it was the ultimate insult.
“And don't you dare threaten me, Violette.” Julian grabbed her wrist, twisting until her fingers opened around the handle of the knife and it fell to the ground. “I'm sick to death of being savaged by you.” He pushed her away from him so abruptly that she stumbled to her knees. “I wash my hands of you. Go where you please, just get out of my sight.” He spun on his heel and marched, seething, toward the encampment. But after a few yards his pace slowed. Reluctantly, he glanced over his shoulder.
Tamsyn remained on her knees on the ground, her head bowed, tears falling into the mud where she knelt. She seemed unaware of his departure. For the first time since it had happened, she was reliving in every detail the massacre of Pueblo de St. Pedro. Always before, she'd allowed herself to remember only her father's death-defying fight, her mother lying peacefully in the shadows. But now she saw the rest of it. The murdered babies, the raped women, the tortured men as the flames of the burning village leaped into the sky. And she and Gabriel, two against several hundred, had watched it all from the hilltop, helpless to do anything. And afterward, three days later, when the savages had left the burned buildings and the massacred inhabitants, taking with them what plunder they could find, they had gone down to the village and buried Cecile and the baron and dug a pit for the others, just like the pits being dug here, because the two of them alone couldn't dig enough graves for every one of the dead.
“Come along, you can't stay here.” Julian's voice was gentle as he bent over her. He lifted her up, and she turned her head into his shoulder. He felt her body shaking with her sobs. He carried her to his own tent, told Dobbin brusquely to make himself scarce, and went inside, closing and tying the tent Bap behind them.
“Tell me about it,” he said quietly.
Chapter Nine
JULIAN WALKED THROUGH THE ENCAMPMENT TOWARD THE hospital tents. There were many of his own men to be found there, and a visit from their colonel would do something to raise their spirits, although little for his own. Those of his men not being shovelled into the grave pits or lying mutilated in the hospitals were indulging in the depths of depravity in Badajos. Restoring them to the keen, good-hearted, spirited fighting men that he knew them to be would take the gallows and the triangles-grim work, but Wellington would order it done with the same ruthless pragmatism as he'd permitted their excesses.
“Colonel St. Simon, isn't it?”
He was startled from his morose reverie as he ducked into the first tent. A surgeon brandishing a butcher's knife looked up from the trestle table where a man lay strapped and unconscious, his right leg bared to the knee where jagged bone stuck through the skin.
“Yes.” Julian paused politely. He didn't think he knew the surgeon.
“Forgive me… I came across a most unusual young woman last night, said she was a friend… a close friend of yours.” The surgeon wiped his damp forehead with his sleeve. “She was most insistent I give her wounded my immediate attention, very persuasive with it. Said the Peer would know who she was. “
“La Violette,” Julian said almost to himself. “What exactly was she doing?”
“Bringing men in from the field on a magnificent white charger… never seen a horse like it.” The surgeon bent again to his patient, who had stirred and groaned. “Forgive me, he's coming round. I need to get this leg off before he does.”
Julian nodded and walked away, closing his ears to the scrunch of knife through bone. So Tamsyn had spent the night bringing in the wounded on that fidgety Cesar. Offering such aid didn't quite match with her outspoken hatred for all soldiers, but it didn't surprise him that she'd had some part in last night's ghastly proceedings; he was beginning to wonder why she hadn't been with Picton's men scaling the walls of the castle.
He'd learned much in the hour he'd spent with her in his tent. She'd talked in a low voice through her teats, but with perfect coherence. She'd told him of the horror of Pueblo de St. Pedro, and he'd had no difficulty imagining it. He too had seen such things.
But now Colonel, Lord Julian St. Simon was troubled. La Violette had taken on different contours. He was beginning to see complexities where before he'd seen only the opportunistic, gloriously sensual brigand… one whose seductive wiles he must resist with every fiber. Now he saw a young woman left alone in the world by the horrific murder of her beloved parents. A young woman, who had lost all the framework of the only existence she'd known, cast upon a world at war to make her future as she could.
It was a disturbing picture, not least because beneath it he still saw the other Tamsyn. He still believed she'd been playing on Wellington's known susceptibilities with her pathetic story, and yet he knew in his bones that she had been manipulating no heartstrings in his tent when she'd painted the unvarnished picture for him.
He didn't know what to make of any of it. He stopped by a stretcher where a private from his brigade lay breathing raggedly through his mouth, his face smothered in bloodstained bandages.
“The surgeon says you'll be on your way to Lisbon in the morning, Carter,” Julian said. “Out of it for good.”
“I'll not be sorry, sir,” the swathed face said. “But I've lost me nose, sir. What'll the missus say?”