A Stranger at Castonbury(5)
Catalina nodded, but inside she felt that cold touch of disquiet. Her life in the past few months had been nothing but moving, going wherever her nursing skills were needed, wherever she had to be in this strange new life. But she didn’t want to be away from Jamie yet.
Not yet.
When they made their way into camp amid the rumble of thunder, it looked to be the usual sort of evening. Men sitting around the fires and outside their tents, talking, laughing, playing cards, passing the long hours. Sometimes Colonel Chambers would host a dinner party or there would be dancing, but tonight everyone seemed to be in a quieter mood. Catalina could hear the strains of some sad ballad in the distance, and it added to the melancholy mood of the approaching storm.
As they passed by the largest tent, the one used for dining and officers’ meetings, Chambers stepped outside and called to Jamie.
‘Hatherton,’ he said. ‘May I speak with you for a moment?’
The man was usually all blustery good humour, not as vivacious as his wife but friendly and cheerful, handsome in his pale English way. But tonight he seemed unusually sombre, and that touch of disquiet inside Catalina grew like an icicle, freezing her heart.
‘Certainly, Colonel Chambers,’ Jamie answered. He kissed Catalina’s hand and said quietly, ‘I will meet you at my tent as soon as I can—Lady Hatherton.’
Lady Hatherton—how strange it sounded. How foreign. Could it ever truly belong to her? Would it ever feel like it was hers? Yet Jamie’s grey eyes warmed her, reassured her, and she smiled at him. No matter how strange his English title sounded, he was just Jamie, and that was the important thing. The only thing.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You must attend to your business. I will wait for you there.’
As Catalina left Jamie, she caught a glimpse of a flutter of pale fabric beside the tent. She looked up and saw that it was Alicia Walters. The woman hovered beside the canvas wall, and Catalina was shocked to see the streak of tears on her cheeks before she spun around and hurried away.
Catalina glanced back at the closed flap of the tent. It opened a crack, just enough for her to see most of the regiment’s officers gathered around a table scattered with maps. For an instant she considered running after Alicia and making the woman tell what she knew, but Alicia had vanished into the night.
Catalina quickly made her way to Jamie’s tent, which was set almost to the edge of the camp. It was quiet there, darker, almost as if they had a space all to themselves. It was also larger than hers, she saw as she stepped inside. The bed was more spacious, and there was a table piled with locked document cases and ringed with folding camp stools. He had decorated it much like the church, with candles and bouquets of flowers that made the dusty, warm air smell sweet and disguised the harsh, masculine military lines of the room.
The sheets on the bed were crisp and clean, turned back to reveal flower petals scattered across it in a bright pattern. It made Catalina smile and shiver at the same time to see it, to imagine lying with Jamie there as the flowers clung to their bare skin.
She turned away from the bed and went to the shaving stand. Jamie’s combs and brushes were neatly arrayed there, along with a small pastel portrait of two girls she knew were his sisters, Kate and Phaedra. Their blue-grey eyes, so like Jamie’s, gleamed with laughter and mischief as they looked out from the frame. She knew Jamie had other siblings and a father, the duke, still living in England, but this was the only personal memento in the tent.
Catalina unpinned her mantilla and carefully folded it before she pulled the combs from her hair and let the heavy, dark mass fall over her shoulders. The thunder was louder now, a steady roar too much like cannon fire, and she could hear the first beats of raindrops against the canvas.
She folded back the flap and peered out into the night. In the distance she could see the lights from the large tent where Jamie was, but then a flash of sparkling lightning split the darkness and for a second she was blinded. She closed her eyes against the light and shivered.
It was a strange night, almost unreal. She could scarcely believe what she had just done. She had married Jamie, and now she was waiting for him, her husband. The darkness, the storm, the shivering anticipation of what was coming, seemed to enclose her in a dream. The whole world had gone mad around her—why should she not be mad too?
Catalina let her head fall back as she listened to the rain batter against the tent and the earth outside, as she inhaled the sweet musky scent of the storm. The rain fell in earnest now, a true storm, and inside her chest her heart seemed to pound louder than the thunder. She turned away from the rain and let the flap fall closed. The sound was muffled now, and she felt almost as if she was enclosed in a cave alone, away from the real world. She sat down on the edge of the bed, and the scent of clean, sun-warmed sheets and flowers rose around her.