Put Asunder

By Lynn Bishop

Spain, 1809. Wounded at the Battle of Talavera de la Reina, Michael Rheese flees oncoming French forces—and when he seeks refuge at a grand hacienda, is forced into a barter: refuge for his men, in exchange for Michael’s hand in marriage for Eva, the orphaned granddaughter of the chatelaine. But Eva and Michael’s marriage is short-lived: just hours later, as they race for the English Channel, they run into the French. Michael is shot, dragged off. Dead.

Six years later, Eva arrives in England, having discovered that Michael is still alive. Repeated letters draw no response from him, so she sets out on her own, a lonely and penurious woman, going to meet a man she does not really know.

What will Eva find at the end of her journey? And will the compassionate Mr Denborough, who befriends her along the way, prove more a distraction than a friend?

This is the first of the War Brides series, which follows the lives and loves of women married in times of strife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynn Bishop
• Release date: Dec 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370826865

Lynn Bishop

Lynn Bishop is the ‘romance fiction nom de plume’ of Madhulika Liddle. She is best known for her books featuring the 17th century Mughal detective Muzaffar Jang, although she is also a prolific writer of short fiction, travel writing, and writing related to classic cinemaBackground and Personal Life:Madhulika was born, the second of two daughters, in Haflong (Assam, India) to Andrew Verity Liddle and Muriel Liddle. The first twelve years of her life were spent in various parts of India, since her father was an officer in the Indian Police Service (IPS) and was transferred frequently from one town to another. In 1985, Mr.Liddle was transferred to New Delhi, and Madhulika finished her schooling in the city, where she went on to study at the Institute of Hotel Management, Catering and Nutrition (IHMCN) in New Delhi. Madhulika is married to Tarun Bhandari, a classmate from IHMCN.Madhulika’s elder sister, Swapna Liddle, is an eminent historian whose PhD is on 19th century Delhi, and who has been conducting heritage walks in Delhi for more than a decade now. Their father, Mr. A.V.Liddle, after his retirement from the IPS, pursued his hobby of numismatics and is today concerned one of the world’s leading authorities on Mughal coins.Career :Madhulika worked from 1994 to 2008 in a series of organisations, in varied industries. Her first stint was as a Management Trainee and then an Assistant Manager in Food & Beverage Controls with Habitat World, at the then-newly established India Habitat Centre in Delhi. This was followed by three years with an advertising agency; two years with a travel portal; and finally, four years as an Instructional Designer at NIIT Limited. In early 2008, she resigned from NIIT in order to write full-time.Writings:Madhulika had been writing since childhood, but her first work to be published was a short story named Silent Fear, which won the Femina Thriller Contest in June 2001. She has since written a wide variety of short stories, travel articles, humorous articles, and a novel, The Englishman’s Cameo. In addition, Madhulika maintains a blog on classic cinema.The Muzaffar Jang Series :Madhulika’s best-known series of works are historical whodunnits featuring the 17th century Mughal detective, Muzaffar Jang. Muzaffar Jang first appeared in print in a short story, Murk of Art, in the anthology, 21 Under 40,[1] published by Zubaan Books in 2007. Liddle had already begun work on a full-length Muzaffar Jang novel, which was published by Hachette India in 2009 as The Englishman’s Cameo. Till now, four books in the series have been published:The Englishman’s Cameo (2009)[2]The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries[3](2011)Engraved in Stone (2012)[4]Crimson City (2015)[5]The Englishman’s Cameo (2009)The Englishman’s Cameo introduces Muzaffar Jang, a twenty-five-year-old Mughal nobleman living in the Delhi of 1656 AD. Muzaffar ends up investigating a murder of which his friend, a jeweller’s assistant, is accused. The book became a bestseller in India, and was published in French by Editions Philippe Picquier, as Le Camée Anglais.[6]Both editions received numerous favourable reviews, with Pradeep Sebastian of Business World[7] writing: "Its intimate picture of life in Emperor Shahjahan’s Dilli resembles a delicate Mughal miniature..." and Zac O’Yeah of Deccan Herald[8] describing the book’s "originality and freshness" as its strongest point. Gargi Gupta, for the Hindustan Times,[9] wrote: "The Englishman’s Cameo is a fast-paced yarn written in snappy prose. It also succeeds in evoking the Mughal era through its manners, fashions, jewels and architecture. There’s blood, dead bodies every 50 pages or so, and even a love interest to keep readers hooked."The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries (2011)The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries is a collection of ten short mystery stories set in the latter half of 1656 AD, following Muzaffar Jang’s successful solving of the case of The Englishman’s Cameo. These stories are set against varying backdrops, including the Imperial Atelier, a traditional Mughal garden, the sarai built by the Princess Jahanara in Delhi, and the Royal Elephant Stables. Included in the collection was the first Muzaffar Jang short story (Murk of Art), reprinted in this collection as The Hand of an Artist.Engraved in Stone (2012)Engraved in Stone, the third book in the series, is set in Agra. When a wealthy and influential merchant named Mumtaz Hassan is murdered, the Diwan-e-Kul, Mir Jumla (who is in Agra, en route to the Deccan, where he's been sent on a campaign) assigns Muzaffar the task of finding the culprit. In the process, Muzaffar stumbles across another mystery which is as old as Muzaffar himself.Crimson City (2015)Crimson City, the fourth Muzaffar Jang book, is set in Delhi during early spring, 1657. While the Mughal armies besiege Bidar in the Deccan, Muzaffar comes up against a series of murders in his neighbourhood, as well as other unconnected crimes, including the abduction of a moneylender's infant son, and the death of a wealthy nobleman in the bath house he himself had built.[10]Short storiesMadhulika calls herself "primarily a short story writer". Her first work to be published, in 2001, was a short story (a supernatural thriller called Silent Fear). Since then, she has written a range of short stories in different genres, including black humour, humour, crime and detection, and social awareness. Several of these have won awards (including the prestigious Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Awards Short Story Competition, for A Morning Swim, in 2003) or have been selected for anthologies. In 2016, one of her stories, Poppies in the Snow, was longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a single short story. [11]Madhulika's first collection of contemporary short stories was published as My Lawfully Wedded Husband and Other Stories in 2012. The book is a set of twelve stories, all of which have a twist in the tale.Miscellaneous WritingsMadhulika’s non-fiction writing includes travel writing, humour, and writing on classic cinema.Travel writing: Madhulika first began travel writing as part of her job at a travel portal, www.journeymart.com, where she worked as an Assistant Editor for two years. During this period, she also became a member of the Rough Guides/IgoUgo travel community, writing travel reviews under the pseudonym phileasfogg. Since then, some of her travel writings – on destinations including Salzburg, Palampur, Pondicherry and Beijing – have been published in Indian newspapers such as Lounge (the weekend edition of Mint), Eye (the weekend edition of Indian Express), and National Geographic Traveller (India).Humour: For several years, Madhulika wrote and recorded humorous articles for broadcast on All India Radio’s ‘In a Lighter Vein’ English-language programme. Most of these articles took a tongue-in-cheek look at contemporary India’s many foibles, fads and idiosyncrasies.Classic cinema: Madhulika maintains a blog, primarily on classic cinema (though it also showcases some of her other writing) at www.madhulikaliddle.com. The blog is devoted to reviews, reflections, ‘favourite lists’ and similar posts on cinema prior to the 1970s. Several essays of Madhulika's, focussing on classic Hindi cinema, have been published in anthologies, online literary journals, and newspapers.Awards and Recognition:Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Short Story Competition – Honourable Mention (2002) for Love and the Papaya ManCommonwealth Broadcasting Association Short Story Competition – Overall Winner (2003) for A Morning SwimWinner of the Oxfordbookstore e-Author version 4.0[12] for a set of five short stories: Woman to Woman, The Mango Tree, The Tale of a Summer Vacation, The Marble Princess, and The Sari Satyagraha.Longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award (2016) for Poppies in the Snow[13]

Book preview

Put Asunder

LYNN BISHOP

Copyright © 2016 by MADHULIKA LIDDLE. All Rights Reserved.

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www.madhulikaliddle.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About the author

One last thing

For Anu

Chapter 1

Talavera de la Reina, Castile-La Mancha, Spain

1809

‘And off they go,’ murmured Michael Rheese from his self-appointed post next to the window. He was looking out over the Portina, his good shoulder leaning against the grimy frame of the window. The narrow valley and the low hills were covered with grass, once dry, brittle and golden as the brassy sun above, now a patchy, charred expanse of black that still smouldered. The stream itself, the Portina, had emptied most of its redness in the Tagus, which had swiftly swallowed up all the debris and the blood and carried them away.

Rheese did not know where, and felt no desire to know.

All he, like the four other men in the cramped little room, wanted to know was when it would be their turn to march triumphantly back. If not triumphantly, at least surely. At least to the knowledge that they were going to be safe, fed, clean, rested. Rheese would have given anything for a cup of hot tea, and a good long soak in clean water. A shave. And sleep. Long, deep sleep, uninterrupted by the sound of someone waking him because it looked like the French were attacking. Undisturbed by the groans, the screams, the insane rantings of the thousands who had been left behind at Talavera.

‘Who’s gone, sir?’ Hayes whispered drowsily. ‘General Cuesta and his troops?’

Rheese turned, wincing as he did so, to the man. Three days earlier, on the twenty-sixth day of July, William Hayes had been a strapping lad, blue-eyed and fresh-cheeked, eager to earn glory in battle. Three sunsets later, Hayes looked in danger of never seeing another sunrise. A French musket had blown open his left side, and the bayonet that accompanied it had slashed his stomach. The fire racing across the timber-dry grass of the battlefield had begun licking at his boots, blistering his feet, when Wallace had limped up. Wallace’s own thigh was throbbing from the agony of a ball buried deep and one of his fingers had been lopped off in an encounter with a French sabre. But Wallace was humane enough — human enough — to grab hold of Hayes by one wrist and pull as if his life, not Hayes’s, depended upon it.

He had succeeded in saving Hayes from being burnt to death, but Rheese wondered privately if Wallace’s selflessness would be of any real use. Hayes had been pulled into one of the hospitals at Talavera: a parody of a hospital, its surgeons overworked, its windowpanes broken, its whitewashed walls splattered with blood and gore and God alone knew what else. The Spanish surgeon had taken one look at Hayes and had turned away in a spontaneous gesture of helplessness. Rheese had seen that look, and had snarled at the surgeon for his inhumanity, but even he knew that the surgeon was not inhuman, merely realistic. There was only so much man could do.

Marsh, muttering feverishly to himself in the bed beyond Hayes’s, had been caught in crossfire and had had his back lacerated by canister. And Sherwood — poor, broken Sherwood — had been one of the frontline in the lunatic charge of the 23rd Light Dragoons, across the steep-banked Portina. Sherwood’s horse had been among the first to topple in the stream; the horses galloping behind had simply gone over them. Over Sherwood’s horse, and over Sherwood. Both legs were broken, one arm was in a sling, and every inch ached badly enough for him to plead almost incessantly for a drop of laudanum, whisky, brandy. Anything that would take the pain away.

Of the five men, Rheese was without doubt the most whole. A ball had gone through his left forearm, chipping at the bone as it did so; another ball, whistling dangerously close, had carved a shallow furrow along his right cheekbone. There would be a scar there for the rest of his life, but Rheese did not care. As long as he was more or less in one piece, and in little danger of dying from gangrene or haemorrhage: that was reason enough for rejoicing.

He turned to look over his shoulder at Hayes. ‘No, thank heaven. Not General Cuesta. At least, not yet. No; it’s the rest of them. The Beau, and everybody who isn’t stuck in one of these blasted hospitals.’

Hayes’s eyes were huge and bright with fever in his pale, stubble-shadowed face. ‘They’ve left us?’ It was a brief question, softly spoken, but even in those three words, Rheese could sense the rising panic, the fear of being abandoned.

It was Wallace, the other officer in the room, who spoke. His voice was level, low and reassuring. ‘Only so that they can get to Lisbon. And General Cuesta has promised to stay here with his troops till we’re ready to move on.’

Or dead, thought Rheese bitterly. The Spanish general, nearly seventy years old, was battle-weary and unhappy. His men, ill-fed, ragged, and often armed with nothing more than a rusty sword apiece, looked close to rebellion. If Cuesta decided to stay on in Talavera until his injured allies were either healed or dead, he would risk possible mutiny in his own army.

‘I heard the Spanish lost only a handful of men,’ said Marsh suddenly, in a rare moment of lucidity. His voice, muffled because he was lying on his stomach with his face buried in a threadbare grey blanket, was toneless. ‘And we had more than five thousand dead. Is that right, sir?’

Wallace nodded, then realizing Marsh wasn’t facing him, said, ‘Yes. Something like that.’

Marsh cursed, fluently and bitterly. Then he sank into delirium once again, and except for the muffled blabbering that drifted from his bed, there was silence.

Wallace, his blond hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, reached for the makeshift crutch beside his bed. Everything was makeshift here, from the stretchers made by looping pikes through the sleeves of a greatcoat, to the bandages torn from strips of old bedsheets. Even the fact that the two officers — one of them the grandson and heir of a marquess, no less — were in the same room as the men, was telling.

Rheese wondered, with a private smirk, what his grandfather, stiff-rumped as they came, would have said about this woeful lack of class distinctions. The old man would have been apoplectic. No, not merely apoplectic, but unforgiving. The Marquess’s pride in his pedigree was well-known. That his housekeeper should send out baskets at Christmas to his tenants was the closest he came to associating with the riff-raff, as he termed them. An heir who lived in the same room, breathed the same fetid air, even helped clean and feed common soldiers —.

Rheese shook his head. He would never tell his grandsire. It would kill the old man.

And then it came back to him. The old man was dead.

The letter, dirtied and bloody, had been handed over by a soldier just as Rheese had been mounting up to ride into battle. The other officers, some of them already astride their horses, were moving forward, and the soldier had hurried away in their wake. Rheese had been tempted to tuck the letter into his pocket and read it after the battle, but a small voice had whispered deep in his head: what if there were no ‘after the battle’ for him? So he had ripped open the letter, and read the news of his grandfather’s death, from one of the seizures that had afflicted him over the past few years. He had read, too, that he, Major Michael Rheese of the 3rd Dragoon Guards, was now the Marquess.

Wallace winced as he rose and half-hopped, half-dragged himself across to where Rheese stood, still staring out of the window.

‘Mike.’

To Wallace, Rheese had always been Mike. They had been at Oxford together and when the war began, had gone together to buy their commissions. Six years Rheese had known Wallace, and there were, in his opinion, few men more upright and decent than the soft-spoken Wallace. Or brave, for that matter.

Rheese smiled, a lopsided grin that made a dimple sparkle briefly beside his mouth. ‘How does the leg?’

‘Ah. Bad question, Mike; very bad. Need you ask? It hurts like hell.’ Wallace eased himself down on Rheese’s bed and wiped the perspiration from his upper lip on the damp linen of his shirt sleeve. ‘The heat, the sweat, the flies — oh, dear God. Talk to me, Mike. Distract me, or I’m liable to lose control and start swearing like poor Marsh there. Go on, say something.’

Rheese frowned. He hated this, loathed the fact that some of the best soldiers he knew had been reduced, in a matter of mere minutes, from strong, healthy men to crippled and broken creatures, men for whom every breath was agony. Wallace, with his wounded thigh and his missing finger, was not in as bad shape as most of the rest, but a chance infection could claim him tomorrow. Could claim Rheese too, what with that fractured arm of his.

He put the thought from him with a deliberate effort. He was the senior of the two officers in the room; he was the least injured. The men, and that included Wallace too, depended upon him. Not just for mundane things like keeping them informed of what went on in the street below or across the plain outside the window, but also for other, more noble and idealistic reasons. Like keeping a stiff upper lip even when he would rather be cursing or yammering away into the night like Marsh. Or surreptitiously selling off an old pocket watch, just so that he could buy some olives and oranges to supplement the dry bread and mouldy cheese of their diet. Or doing whatever he could to ensure someone came along and changed Hayes’s dressings every day. Or, like yesterday, doing the nauseating task himself, even though it left him shivering with pain from his own wound.

Right now, Wallace was relying on Rheese to take his mind off the pain.

Rheese made a wry face. ‘Fine young fellow like you doesn’t need cheering up; Cuesta needs cheering up. He must be ruing the day he agreed to look after the bunch of us.’ He raked a hand through his thick, dark hair. ‘Poor bastard. It must be bloody fatiguing to think you have to provide for six thousand of your allies when you don’t have enough to feed your own men. He must be wondering when one of his regiments is going to up and slit his throat.’

Wallace grinned. ‘Save some pity for us. If you ask me, Cuesta’s worries are the least of mine. As long as we get enough to keep body and soul together — at least while we are alive — well, that is sufficient for me.’

Rheese bit his lip. ‘I hope so.’

‘Why so pensive? Do you know something I don’t?’

Rheese rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘No. But I can’t help but wonder if Cuesta is going to abide by the promises he made.’

Wallace raised an eyebrow. ‘You think he won’t?’

‘I wonder. You’ve seen what I have, Wallace. This country, and General Cuesta’s soldiery, for that matter, is in no condition to bear the onus of feeding and looking after six thousand men. For too many people, we’re about as welcome as the French.’

Wallace did not say anything. He looked worried, his eyes huge and dark in his face. Rheese had not looked into a mirror since he had disembarked on Spanish soil, but gazing at his friend’s face, he could well imagine that he saw a reflection of himself. Not in the essentials; Wallace was fair-haired and brown-eyed, Rheese’s hair was dark as a raven’s wing and his eyes as deep and clear a blue as a spring sky. But the scars, the dirt that had sunk in, the horror of these past few days: it was there, Rheese was sure, even in his own face.

‘Cuesta’s promised that if he has to retreat, he’ll transport the lot of us to safety,’ Wallace said. It was said with little conviction, and Rheese greeted it with a grimace. ‘Hell and damnation!’ Wallace spat out. ‘What is to happen of us, Mike? Will we sit here, stewing in our own blood and sweat and piss, waiting for Cuesta to abandon us? Just as the rest have done? All because we happened to be the ones who fell and did not die?’ His voice was rising in his indignation, and Rheese, despite his own anguish, put out a hand to rest on his friend’s shoulder.

‘Have a care for the men, Wallace,’ he whispered. ‘Mustn’t upset them.’

Wallace’s lip curled. For a moment, Rheese thought the other man was going to fling back at him and tell him to shut up, but Wallace, after a look full of frustrated fury, nodded and sank back. He glowered still, but he said nothing.

Rheese pressed his shoulder gently. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘When someone comes by to attend to dressings and such. While the others are busy, we’ll talk.’

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They did not get a chance to speak about it the next morning, because their little room was hit by tragedy even before dawn. The first birds — Rheese marvelled that there were still any of them left; he could have sworn the last sparrow had been killed and eaten days ago — had only just begun to chirp when Sherwood had uttered a scream that had jerked all of them out of a restless, fragile sleep. One single, unearthly scream, and that was it. Rheese, the fastest on his feet, had leapt out of bed and gone rushing to the man’s side. Sherwood was alive, but his face was slick with sweat, his eyes glazed over.

They had tried their best, with Rheese scurrying off to fetch a surgeon. Any surgeon, any nurse, anybody with the slightest claim to medical knowledge. In his absence, Wallace had, one-handed, wiped the man’s face, again and again, and murmured soothing words to him. Marsh and Hayes had looked on from their own beds, their faces sombre, their eyes filled with fear.

It had made no difference. The surgeon, whom Rheese had found, asleep in his bloodied smock and coat, had come and examined Sherwood, and had shaken his head. When Rheese had glared at him, the surgeon had simply moved to lift Sherwood’s wrist from where it lay, parchment-white, on the coarse blanket beside him. He had taken the limb, his thumb and fingers on opposite sides of that thin wrist, and had held it out to Rheese. Rheese had taken the limp hand in his own and had known, even before he touched it, what he would find.

Nothing.

The surgeon had left. Not a word had passed between them.

The rest of the morning had been a busy one for Rheese. With only Wallace able to provide some sort of help, he had gone looking for someone to attend to Sherwood’s poor broken body, to prepare him for burial. He had not found anyone. Those who were around were far too busy attending to the living for Rheese to even think of asking them to attend to one who was dead. After a long but fruitless quest, he had returned to the room with half a bucket of water that was not too dirty. He had taken off his own shirt — it was the only piece of relatively clean linen he had — and, moistening its tails, had used that to wipe Sherwood’s face and neck, and to slick back the dead man’s hair. He had looked down at that face as it lay on the folded blanket, and had offered up a silent prayer of gratitude; Sherwood’s face, at last, was wiped clean of the suffering of these past few days.

‘Well?’ Wallace asked that afternoon, as the two of them stood on the knoll behind the hospital. Sherwood’s body had been taken away, along with those of a dozen or so others, and given a swift, unsentimental burial. Rheese and Wallace had been present, Wallace leaning heavily on a crutch on one side, his friend’s good arm on the other.

Above them, the sun blazed down. The stench of scorched vegetation and rotting flesh hung in the air.

‘Mike,’ Wallace said, when Rheese remained silent. His voice was low, worried.

‘Sherwood died,’ Rheese said softly.

‘Yes. He was going to, Mike. We all knew it. He knew it.’

Rheese raised his head and looked out over the land. Wallace, watching him, could tell that his friend was not really seeing the trees and the grass, or what remained of them, the signs of the havoc that had been wrought here. He was trying to look into the future, as they all were, or most of them. And what he was seeing was disturbing.

‘If we do nothing,’ Rheese muttered, ‘we will all go the way Sherwood did. Tell me, Wallace. What shall we do? Shall we wait here and hope that Cuesta will be true to his word? Dare we even do that?’

From the direction of the hospital came a burst of hysterical screaming. A limb was being sawn off, perhaps. The two men standing near Sherwood’s grave showed no sign of having heard. It had taken less than a week to become inured to the suffering around them. Especially when there was nothing they could have done about it.

‘Let’s sit down,’ Wallace said. ‘My leg feels like it’s on fire.’

Off to the left, down a gentle slope and under a gnarled old olive tree, was a rock, roughly saddle-shaped. Rheese had discovered it on the second day of his internment in the hospital, when, feeling suffocated and restless, he had stepped out of the hospital. The rock, he had thought as he sank gratefully onto it and ran his fingertips along its smooth edges, had not started off thus. It had, he imagined, been a favourite seat for generations of shepherds. Boys or old men, perhaps, sitting here comfortably, possibly even dozing, while their sheep grazed across the hillside.

There were no shepherds now here. They were all either dead or fled, their sheep long killed and eaten by marauding armies.

‘Do you truly think there is anything we can do? How naïve can you be?’ Wallace said. He winced, rubbing gently at his thigh in an attempt to ease an itch without scratching open the wound, still tender, on his leg. ‘You know perfectly well we’ve been ordered to stay here. We have no choice in the matter; we stay here, come hell or high water.’

Rheese reached up and snapped off a dry, brittle twig nestling among the grey-green leaves of the olive tree. He twirled it about in his hand, staring glumly but unseeingly at it. ‘And what,’ he said finally, ‘are we to do if the French attack? Stay here, or are we allowed to retreat? Will it be a retreat then, or will it be considered desertion?’

‘The French won’t attack a hospital. They’ll be more intent on chasing our retreating forces. Why should they bother about a bunch of dying men?’

‘And why should anybody else?’ Rheese flung the twig away with a sound of disgust. ‘You’re the one being naïve, Wallace. We’ve been left behind here, and nobody is going to turn back and come for us. Call me cynical, but I will say it. We’ve been abandoned.’

‘Cuesta will make sure we go back,’ Wallace said, with a dogged determination, as if trying to convince himself as much as Rheese.

But Cuesta did not do as Wallace had said. Or as all of them had hoped. The old general’s armies, never at the forefront of the battle at Talavera, had suffered few losses. There was little point, as Rheese had thought privately to himself, in the Spanish staying on here, waiting for their wounded allies to either die or recover. If Cuesta were a saint, putting the lives of the English soldiers lying in the hospital before his own need for self-preservation, he might have stayed back.

He did not.

Rheese woke one morning to an odd silence. He lay in bed, eyes still closed, suddenly aware of the warm sunshine pouring in through the open window next to him. The sound of birds in the trees. The smell of decay and filth. The almost complete silence, broken only by the occasional moan or grunt of a man in pain, somewhere in the vicinity.

Within moments, he was up, shrugging on his coat, grimacing at the bolt of pain that shot through his injured arm when the sleeve, split to accommodate the splint and heavy bandage, swung heavily against it. He was already half-leaning out of the window, his eyes darting to and fro, when he heard Hayes begin to cough. That woke Wallace too, and after Hayes had been given a sip of water, Wallace limped over to the window. Rheese made room for him, shifting to allow his friend to look out. To where there had been tents and tethered horses, carts and the usual paraphernalia of a military camp. To where there now remained only the unmistakable traces of recent occupation: horse manure, dirty water, piles of ash and refuse, wisps of smoke still rising from fires not tamped down fully.

‘They’re gone,’ Wallace said needlessly. ‘They’ve gone and left us for the French.’ He gripped the frame of the window with both hands, leaning out so far that Rheese had to make a quick grab to prevent him falling out. But Wallace was not paying any heed, not to Rheese, not to the two other men in the room, not to the hundreds of other sick and dying men in the hospital. He was leaning out of the window and yelling imprecations, raining down curses on everybody from Cuesta to Wellesley to Marshall Soult. Rheese hung on to him, murmuring soothing words. But his mind was racing, searching for a way out.

Chapter 2

West of Talavera de la Reina

Eva, her hair tied loosely at the nape and her skirts tucked up, was out in the fields, foraging alongside the remaining two servants. One of them was Juana, her face seamed with wrinkles but her hands as steady and quick as they had been the day she had taken baby Eva into her arms and given her the love of the mother who had died in childbirth. The other was Pedro, Juana’s grand-nephew, six years younger than Eva’s seventeen, and utterly devoted to her. He was down on his haunches now, using an old hoe to dig up roots, searching for anything that could possibly be edible. Juana, too plump and with her joints too stiff to bend over or sit so low, was making forays into the bushes bordering the fields, looking for fruit that might have been overlooked by the birds. She was making slow progress; there was little left here now.

Eva, who had come by this way two days earlier with Pedro, knew that. They had come searching for wild herbs, for something to relieve the monotony of the tough meat and bread they were subsisting upon. They had found nothing. They would almost certainly find nothing today either. She glanced over her shoulder at Pedro. The basket beside him on the ground was half-full with odds and ends: tubers, wild asparagus, some watercress.

She was torn between hunger and worry. They all were. Ever since the armies had come pouring into the Peninsula, food had been squeezed out of the land till there was nothing left. Now, one half of her — the greedy half, tired of the same food day in and day out, and that too so little of it — wanted to gather up everything edible that was in sight, and take it home. It would not be a feast, no. Nothing like the banquets they had known till a few weeks ago, the tables crowded with roast lamb; rabbits with garlic; gazpacho; a pisto redolent with red peppers, aubergines, onions and tomatoes; queso manchego; and with veritable rivers of the local white wine of La Mancha. The wine, the last two bottles of it, carefully hidden away, were still there. So was a wedge of manchego cheese. But the rabbits were all gone, hunted to the last, by the troops who had torn through the countryside. The fields of vegetables were all bare, the cattle dragged off to feed armies, leaving behind only those for which bribes had been paid, or which had been hidden away too skilfully to be found in a hurry.

Eva sighed. No good would come of salivating over what had been. She would have to think about the days to come. With the English heading for Lisbon, perhaps already there, and General Cuesta’s army on the march, there was no knowing when another hungry horde would come tearing down on their little hacienda, ready to rip into their meagre stores. There had been some who had been willing to pay coin, but what was there to buy, when the few people on the farm itself were finding it difficult to feed themselves?

And thinking about the future inevitably led to one decision. They would have to remind themselves that they would need food tomorrow. The day after. If they were alive, they would need to eat to stay alive.

‘Pedro,’ she began to say, meaning to tell him that he should stop, but she got no further than his name. Over the low hill beyond the little grove of olives came the sound of hooves, and of wheels turning. Tired horses, she knew, even before they appeared in a cloud of dust; those hooves did not thunder, they whispered. And the cart,