Gallant Officer, Forbidden Lady. Diane GastonЧитать онлайн книгу.
The woman, with a despairing last glance towards her husband, put her arm around her son’s shoulder and gestured for them to follow her.
They made their way through the alley to a doorway facing a narrow street not far from where they had been.
‘My house,’ she whispered.
The door was ajar. The captain signalled them to stay while he entered. A few moments later he returned. ‘No one is here.’
Jack stepped inside. The place had been ransacked. Furniture was shattered, dishes broken, papers scattered everywhere. The house consisted only of a front room, a kitchen and a bedroom. He kicked debris aside to make room for them to walk. Captain Deane pulled what remained of a bed’s mattress into the front room, clearing a space for it in the corner. The woman came from the kitchen with cups of water for them. The boy stayed at her side, looking numb.
Jack drank thirstily.
‘Can you keep watch?’ the captain asked after drinking his fill. ‘I’ll sleep for an hour or so, then relieve you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jack replied. He might as well stand watch. He certainly could not sleep. Indeed, he wondered if he would ever sleep again.
They barricaded the door with some of the broken furniture, and Jack salvaged a chair whose seat and legs were still intact. He placed it at the window and sat.
The captain gestured for the woman and her son to sleep on the mattress. He sat on the floor, his back leaning against the wall.
Outside the sounds of carnage continued, but no one approached. Jack stared out on to a street that looked deceptively innocent and peaceful.
Perhaps by morning the carnage would be over, and Jack would be able to return to his camp. Perhaps his major and the others in their patrol would still be alive. Perhaps someone, before this war was over, would put a sword through Edwin Tranville’s heart for his part in this horror.
Jack reloaded his pistol and kept it at the ready. In the stillness, images flooded into his mind, over and over, flashing like torture, forcing him to relive the horror of this day.
His fingers itched to make the images stop, to capture them, imprison them, store them away so they would leave him alone.
The sky lightened as dawn arrived, but Jack still heard the drunken shouts, the musket shots, the screams. They were real. Even though it was day, the plundering continued.
Captain Deane woke and walked over to Jack, standing for a moment to listen.
‘By God, they are still at it.’ The captain rubbed his face. ‘Get some sleep, Ensign. We’ll wait. Maybe things will quieten down soon.’
Jack gave the captain his seat. He glanced at the corner of the room where the woman and boy lay. The boy was curled up in a ball and looked very young and vulnerable. The woman was awake.
Jack surveyed the room and started picking up the sheets of paper scattered about the floor. He examined them. Some sides were blank.
‘Do you need these?’ he asked the woman, holding up a fist full of paper.
‘Non.’ She turned away.
Some of the sheets appeared to contain correspondence, perhaps from loved ones at home. Jack felt mildly guilty for taking them, but his notebook was stored safely in his kit back at his regiment’s encampment and he’d not realised how badly he would need paper.
He found a wide piece of board and carried it to a spot of light from another window. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he placed the board on his lap and fished in his pockets for his wooden graphite pencil. Jack placed one of the sheets of paper on the board, and heaved a heavy breath.
He started to draw.
The images trapped in his brain flowed from his fingers to the tip of his pencil on to the paper. He could not get them out fast enough. He filled one, two, three sheets and still he was not done. He needed to draw them all.
Only then, after he’d captured every image, would he be free of them. Only then could he dare to rest. Only then could he sleep.
Chapter One
London—June 1814
It was like walking in a dream.
All around him, history paintings, landscapes, allegories, portraits hung one next to the other like puzzle pieces until every space, floor to ceiling, was covered.
Jack wandered through the exhibition room of the Royal Academy of Art, gazing at the incredible variety, the skill, the beauty of the works. He could not believe he was here.
His regiment had been called back to England a year ago. Napoleon had abdicated, and the army had no immediate need for his services. Jack, like most of the young officers who’d lived through the war, had risen in rank. He’d been promoted to lieutenant, which gave him a bit more money when he went on half-pay. This gave him the opportunity to do what he yearned to do, needed to do. To draw. To paint. To create beauty and forget death and destruction.
Jack had gone directly to Bath, to the home of his mother and sister, the town where his mentor, Sir Cecil Harper, also lived. Sir Cecil had fostered Jack’s need to draw ever since he’d been a boy and he became Jack’s tutor again. Somehow the war had not robbed Jack of the ability to paint. At Sir Cecil’s insistence, he submitted his paintings to the Royal Academy for its summer exhibition. Miraculously the Royal Academy accepted two of them.
They now hung here on the walls of Somerset House, home of the Royal Academy, next to the likes of Lawrence and Fuseli and Turner, in a room crowded with spectators who had not yet left the city for the summer.
Crowds disquieted Jack. The rumble of voices sounded in his ears like distant cannonade and set off memories that threatened to propel him back into the nightmare of war.
A gentleman brushed against him, and Jack almost swung at him. Luckily the man took no notice. Jack unclenched his fist, but the rumble grew louder and the sensation of cannons, more vivid. His heart beat faster and it seemed as if the room grew darker. This had happened before, a harbinger of a vision. Soon he would be back in battle again, complete with sounds and smells and fears.
Jack closed his eyes and held very still, hoping no one could tell the battle that waged inside. When he opened his eyes again, he gazed up at his sister’s portrait, hung high and difficult to see, as befitted his status as a nobody. The painting grounded him. He was in London, at Somerset House, amid beauty. He smiled gratefully at her image.
‘Which painting pleases you so?’ a low and musical voice asked.
At Jack’s elbow stood a young woman, breathtakingly lovely, looking precisely as if she had emerged from one of the canvases. For a brief moment he wondered if she too was a trick his mind was playing on him. Her skin was like silk of the palest rose, beautifully contrasted by her rich auburn hair. Her lips, deep and dusky pink, shimmered as if she’d that moment moistened them with her tongue. Large, sparkling eyes, the green of lush meadows and fringed with long mink-brown lashes, met his gaze with a fleeting expression of sympathy.
‘Do say it is the one of the young lady.’ She pointed to his sister’s portrait.
Tearing his eyes away from her for a moment, he glanced back at the painting of his sister. ‘Do you like that one?’ he managed to respond.
‘I do, indeed.’ Her eyes narrowed in consideration. ‘She is so fresh and lovely. The rendering is most life-like, but that is not the whole of it, I think—’ she paused, moistening her lips, and more than Jack’s artistic sensibilities came alive with the gesture ‘—it is most lovingly painted.’
‘Lovingly painted?’ Jack glanced back again at the canvas, but just for a second, because he could not bear to wrest his eyes from her.
‘Yes.’