Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways #5)(13)

Groaning, Beatrix leaned forward and rested her head on the table. Perspiration caused her forehead to stick to the polished wood. She was aware of Lucky leaping up to the table and nuzzling her hair and purring.

Please, dear God, she thought desperately, don’t let Christopher reply. Let it all be finished. Never let him find out it was me.

Chapter Five

Scutari, Crimea

“It occurs to me,” Christopher said conversationally as he lifted a cup of broth to a wounded man’s lips, “that a hospital may be the worst possible place for a man to try to get well.”

The young soldier he was feeding—no more than nineteen or twenty years of age—made a slight sound of amusement as he drank.

Christopher had been brought to the barracks hospital in Scutari three days earlier. He had been wounded during an assault on the Redan during the endless siege on Sebastopol. One moment he’d been accompanying a group of sappers as they carried a ladder toward a Russian bunker, and the next there was an explosion and the sensations of being struck simultaneously in the side and right leg.

The converted barracks were crowded with casualties, rats, and vermin. The only source of water was a fountain at which orderlies queued up to catch a fetid trickle in their pails. As the water was unfit for drinking, it was used for washing and soaking off bandages.

Christopher had bribed the orderlies to bring him a cup of strong spirits. He had sluiced the alcohol over his wounds in the hopes that it would keep them from suppurating. The first time he’d done it, the burst of raw fire had caused him to faint and topple from the bed to the floor, a spectacle that had caused no end of hilarity from the other patients in the ward. Christopher had good-naturedly endured their teasing afterward, knowing that a moment of levity was sorely needed in this squalid place.

The shrapnel had been removed from his side and leg, but the injuries weren’t healing properly. This morning he had discovered that the skin around them was red and tight. The prospect of falling seriously ill in this place was frightening.

Yesterday, despite the outraged protests of the soldiers in the long row of beds, the orderlies had begun to sew a man into his own bloodstained blanket, and take him to the communal burial pit before he had quite finished dying. In response to the patients’ angry cries, the orderlies replied that the man was insensible, and was only minutes away from death, and the bed was desperately needed. All of which was true. However, as one of the few men able to leave his bed, Christopher had interceded, telling them he would wait with the man on the floor until he had breathed his last. For an hour he had sat on the hard stone, brushing away insects, letting the man’s head rest on his uninjured leg.

“You think you did any good for him?” one of the orderlies asked sardonically, when the poor fellow had finally passed away, and Christopher had allowed them to take him.

“Not for him,” Christopher said, his voice low. “But perhaps for them.” He had nodded in the direction of the rows of ragged cots, where the patients lay and watched. It was important for them to believe that if or when their time came, they would be treated with at least a flicker of humanity.

The young soldier in the bed next to Christopher’s was unable to do much of anything for himself, as he had lost an entire arm, and a hand off the other one. Since there were no nurses to spare, Christopher had undertaken to feed him. Wincing and flinching as he knelt by the cot, he lifted the man’s head and helped him to drink from the cup of broth.

“Captain Phelan,” came the crisp voice of one of the Sisters of Charity. With her stern demeanor and forbidding expression, the nun was so intimidating that some of the soldiers had suggested—out of her hearing, of course—that if she were dispatched to fight the Russians, the war would be won in a matter of hours.

Her bristly gray brows rose as she saw Christopher beside the patient’s cot. “Making trouble again?” she asked. “You will return to your own bed, Captain. And do not leave it again . . . unless your intention is to make yourself so ill that we’ll be forced to keep you here indefinitely.”

Obediently Christopher lurched back into his cot.

She came to him and laid a cool hand on his brow.

“Fever,” he heard her announce. “Do not move from this bed, or I’ll have you tied to it, Captain.” Her hand was withdrawn, and something was placed on his chest.

Slitting his eyes open, Christopher saw that she had given him a packet of letters.

Prudence.

He seized it eagerly, fumbling in his eagerness to break the seal.

There were two letters in the packet.

He waited until the sister had left before he opened the one from Prudence. The sight of her handwriting engulfed him with emotion. He wanted her, needed her, with an intensity he couldn’t contain.

Somehow, half a world away, he had fallen in love with her. It didn’t matter that he hardly knew her. What little he knew of her, he loved.

Christopher read the few spare lines.

The words seemed to rearrange themselves like a child’s alphabet game. He puzzled over them until they became coherent.

“. . . I’m not who you think I am . . . please come home and find me . . .”

His lips formed her name soundlessly. He put his hand over his chest, trapping the letter against his rough heartbeat.

What had happened to Prudence?

The strange, impulsive note aroused a tumult in him.