An Improper Arrangement

Cooper stretched out his legs on the cold ground, as if settling in for the duration. “And there you have it, Gabe. Let’s just go back to blaming the dastardly Earl of Broxley, who remains, after all, the reason we’re here halfheartedly playing at nursemaids to his heir in the first place.”

Everyone was quiet until Rigby fell to his back, holding up his leg and fiercely rubbing his calf. “Cramp, damn it all. I’m telling you, Gabe, this isn’t exactly the best time you’ve ever shown us.” He pulled himself up and peered toward the tree line once more. “Haven’t seen a thing, not even a rabbit for our pot. What’s the time, Darby old man?”

“Nearly ten. We’ve been cooling our heels for more than twenty minutes.”

Gabriel had been eyeing the sweep of landscape to his left, his right, mentally positioning the soldiers Neville would bring with him. Every hundred yards should do it, and there was ample cover. “He should have been back by now, or at least alerted the general and sent Ames along to relieve us.”

Rigby snorted with laughter. “Probably stopped to change his drawers, the thought of a battle scaring the piss out of him.”

“Listen. Have you noticed—Rigby’s appreciation of his own wit notwithstanding—how quiet it is? No birds, no small animals scuttling through the undergrowth. We’re not the only ones holding our breath, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.”

“That damn eerie quiet before all hell unleashes on us,” Cooper said, raising his head as if to sniff the air. “Time to go?”

“Time to go,” Gabriel agreed.

“Didn’t somebody already suggest that?” Rigby grumbled. “I know I was thinking about—”

Anything Rigby may have added was blotted out by the short blast from a bugle as a double line of battle-seasoned French cavalry burst from the trees in a near-instant gallop, followed hard by a seemingly endless number of infantry marching double time, their bayonets already fixed. Hundreds of birds that had been nesting in the treetops took to the sky, almost as if they were part of the charge.

What commander sends cavalry first? A desperate man? Or an insanely clever tactician, one unafraid to adjust his attack order to the situation. It had to be Bonaparte himself coming at them. Gabriel cursed himself for not considering every last alternative. He’d put his friends in danger well above what they’d have had if they’d stayed with their troops.

“Do you know how much I hate it when you’re right!” Darby yelled at Gabriel. They threw off their cumbersome greatcoats and shouldered their packs as they headed down the hill toward the thin line of trees standing between them and the snakelike line of tents along the river, the camp that now seemed so far away.

There were no English soldiers marching toward them to give them cover until they could reach their own lines. No Sergeant Major Ames, no Russian troops falling into formation in front of their tents, weapons at the ready. And no Myles Neville to be seen anywhere. Only the smoke from thousands of small cooking fires rose up to meet them, that and the smell of borscht.

Behind them and closing rapidly came the sound of thundering hooves and shouting Frenchmen.

Would an earlier warning have altered the outcome that day? Probably not. Napoleon knew he badly needed a victory to rally the French people, and although not all his infantry might be well trained or even well armed, they did outnumber the Allied troops nearly four to one.

In less than an hour, the easy triumph of La Rothière became the embarrassing debacle at Champaubert, with morale swinging back in Napoleon’s favor, giving him the will to fight on. After all, he’d lost only two hundred of his men, while the Allies’ casualties numbered over four thousand, with many more taken prisoner, including Olssufiev.

By some miracle, Gabriel and his friends survived the rout, but not without consequences. Cooper Townsend had taken a ball in his side, and Jeremiah Rigby was occupied guiding Darby Travers along the rough track that ran beside the roadway; the man’s eyes were covered with bandages.

“Move aside! Move aside!”

The command, issued in guttural French, warned the seemingly endless line of prisoners to stumble into the slush and mud at either side of the roadway as yet another equipage rolled by.

Gabriel looked up in time to see the Russian general and several of his senior staff being driven past the long line of marching prisoners in a horse-drawn wagon. Rank had its privileges, even in defeat.

“Where’s Broxley’s brat?” he shouted, knowing the man couldn’t understand a word of English but not really caring at the moment. He chased after the wagon, hauling Cooper along with him.

“I can’t go on, Gabe,” Cooper gasped out as exhaustion stopped their pursuit. “Did you see him? I didn’t see him.”

“I saw him. Perched right up next to Olssufiev. Somebody stuck him in a Russian officer’s uniform.”

“So now he’s under the general’s protection. Politics, that’s all it is, Gabe. Money and politics. Let it go.”

But Gabriel was incensed, nearly out of his mind with rage and with no clear direction to focus it. Coop could be dying. Darby had probably lost vision in at least one of his eyes. Many of their men were still sprawled on the muddy ground, left there for their bodies to rot as the French stripped them of boots and weapons, food and ammunition, before abandoning the battlefield.

“When you see your papa,” he shouted as the wagon kept moving, “tell him I damn his eyes for what happened here today—and damn you for a bloody coward!”

He didn’t feel the butt of the French rifle slam into the side of his head, although when he woke, lying half in an icy puddle, it was with a headache that would come back to plague him for nearly a year.

Not quite two months after what would be his last real victory, Napoleon was finally forced to abdicate, and at last everyone could go home. Indeed, Gabriel Sinclair and his friends Jeremiah Rigby and Cooper Townsend were relaxing at White’s, sipping wine and shelling walnuts when the last of their quartet, Darby Travers, arrived to join them. He tossed a folded newspaper onto the table before dropping into a chair, his face dark with disgust.

“Read that, my friends. Myles Neville has just been honored by the Russians for indispensable services to General Olssufiev, Mother Russia and all God’s fair creatures, I imagine. It says there that they gave him a party and a bloody medal in Paris. Can you believe it? Not content to get his son back alive, that damned Earl of Broxley has somehow managed to turn piss-pants into a hero.”

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_a1bb2870-b8db-5505-8b05-7cbc0acb245d)

Cranbrook Chase, August 1815

BASIL SINCLAIR, SIXTH DUKE of Cranbrook, was dying.

Or perhaps not.

One never knew with Basil.

Most anything could send him staggering to his bed, telling all who would listen (a diminishing number of ears), that he was not long for this world, about to shuffle off this mortal coil, stick his spoon in the wall, cock up his toes, be carried to bed on six men’s shoulders—et cetera.

He hadn’t always been this way. Twenty years past, he was a happily married fifth son, living the life of the pampered and heavily allowanced, traveling the world with his lovely wife, Vivien.

Vivien and Basil, Basil and Vivien, carefree, high-spirited, game for any adventure. And without a care in the world.

But then Boswell, the second duke, died within days of his sixtieth birthday. Fit as a fiddle, happy as a lark, drinking and carousing, mounting a mistress in the country, keeping a canary bird or two in the city. The picture of health (and the envy of many), he was heading toward the dance floor with a lovely young thing on his arm one evening when suddenly he stopped, said something very much like “Erp?” rolled his eyes heavenward…and dropped like a stone.

Unnerving, to say the least, but the fellow had certainly had a good run at life. All things considered, his wasn’t such a bad way to go.

Basil and Vivien paid their respects, mourned in their fashion (a trip to Africa to hunt anything with four legs and a tail), secure in the knowledge that their allowance would continue under Basil’s oldest brother.

Until Bennett, the third duke, just two weeks shy of his sixtieth birthday, whilst driving his new pair of matched bays in Hyde Park, his recently affianced and hopefully fertile bride-to-be at his side, uttered a rather surprised “Erp?” rolled up his eyes and toppled to the gravel drive. Luckily, the bays, being, as the saying went, “all show and no go,” were easily stopped before running the curricle and screeching fiancée into the Serpentine.

Basil, learning the news nearly six months later, gnawed on his bottom lip as his darling Vivien oohed and aahed at the sight of the Taj Mahal, unaware that a small seed of worry had planted itself in her husband’s brain.

Sixteen months later, when Ballard (the fourth duke, for those keeping track, and Basil most certainly was), having just finessed a mediocre hand into a five-thousand-guinea profit, reached out to gather in his winnings, he suddenly hesitated, then said something his fellow gamblers swore sounded exactly like “Erp?” At nearly the same time, his eyes rolled up in his head, and a moment later he was facedown in the chips.

Ballard had been eight days shy of his sixtieth birthday.

“Let me guess,” Jeremiah Rigby said, holding up a hand to interrupt his friend Gabriel as he told the story. The two sat on a bench in the Cranbrook Chase gardens. “Basil and Vivien were on the moon munching green cheese when they got the word?”

Gabriel smiled, because he wasn’t a man devoid of humor, even rather dark humor. “Not quite. They were somewhere in Virginia, visiting a distant relative of my aunt’s. She’s just home from there now, by the way, having had her reunion shortened by Uncle Ballard’s death.”

“Your uncle didn’t go with her, obviously, considering he’s upstairs dying.”

“Again. He’s dying again. But let me finish.”

“Yes, there’s another B in there somewhere, isn’t there? The first duke was a busy man, and his wife even more so. Bronson? Bundy? Baldric? Now tell me he erped in Prinney’s lap, and I’ll die a happy man.”

“Bellamy, and he was being fitted with a new rig-out when it happened. Word has it the waistcoat was to be striped orange satin, so at least Society was spared that.”