The Officer and the Proper Lady (24 page)

Hal's mouth on hers was simply bliss, simply comfort and excitement and loving and friend ship and relief, all together, all at once. She cried a little, wriggling close into his embrace and he must have felt the tears, for he lifted his head and touched them away with gentle fingers.

‘Love me, Julia? Now?'

‘Yes. Yes please. Bread and butter loving so I can feel the weight of you and look up into your eyes.'

He laughed and lifted her and laid her on the bed, smoothing away her clothes with the expertise that had once so shamed him. He shed the remains of his uniform and came to lie over her, and she curled her legs around his narrow hips and felt him press intimately close, wanting her. ‘Yes,' Julia murmured, her fingers tight on his shoulders. ‘Yes, now Hal.'

And he stroked smoothly into her as she sighed and arched up to take him, matching his rhythm, reading his eyes and listening to his voice as the words of love became gasps and he groaned and stroked higher and deeper into the yearning
heat of her. The bliss began to ravel and build, and she read his in his face and in the tension of his body, and she matched him, urgent now until he went still, gasped for breath, surged one more time and she went with him, tumbling into the light.

 

Julia came to herself held tight in Hal's arms. She wriggled until she could sit and look at him sprawled in elegant, indecent abandon amidst the wreckage of the bed clothes.

He put up a hand and stroked it down the side of her breast, making her shiver. Then the thing she had not been wanting to think about came and dug its claws into her heart, and she felt the chill touch the warmth of her happiness. ‘You were wearing your uniform when you came for me,' she said.

‘Yes, I had been to Horse Guards.'

‘You have a posting then.'
I will be brave about this.

‘They said if go back in a month they will tell me.'

‘I see. We have a month together: that is more than I feared.'

‘You will not insist on following the drum?'

Julia reached out and brushed the still-damp hair back from his forehead. ‘No. It would worry you and distract you. You were right. I married a soldier, I must accept all that it means.'

‘You will not have to, my love.' Hal caught the hand that was stroking his hair, pulled it to his mouth and kissed it. ‘I am selling out. I will breed horses in Buckinghamshire and we will buy a Town house so we can be frivolous and sociable when it suits us—and you must tell me how many bedrooms we must look for.'

‘For the children?' she asked.
Oh, my brave, wicked rake. You are going to make such a perfect father.
And he was not leaving her. He wanted to stay of his own free will.

‘I had this daydream as I was riding down Whitehall,' Hal
said. ‘Max was looking over his stable door at a brood mare with a long-legged foal at her side, and I was watching my wife and my child playing in the long, soft spring grass. And I thought, that was what it would be to be happy.'

‘Oh.' En chanted by the vision, Julia smiled down at him. ‘A baby for next spring? Hal, there is no time to lose.'

‘That is what I thought, my love,' he agreed, serious except for the wicked sparkle in his eyes as he pulled her down and kissed her. ‘There is no time to lose—and all the time in the world for loving.'

Much was written about Brussels in the months leading up to Waterloo by those who were there. I have relied heavily on these original accounts to under stand Julia's life in the city and what it was like both there, and on the battlefield after June eighteenth.

I have taken liberties with a few dates and facts: the picnic in the Fôret de Soignes did take place, but rather earlier. There were numerous horse races, but not one on the day Hal won. As far as I know, no Brussels church had a stained-glass window with the fall of Lucifer.

But the words of Wellington and Lord Uxbridge are as I report them, the Duke of Brunswick did drop the young Prince of Ligne, Madame Catalani did sing at the Opera during June 1815. I used Captain Mercer's memoirs extensively for the great cavalry review at Ninove.

Brussels has changed greatly since 1815, but the Parc is still there and families still picnic in the Fôret de Soignes. There are few traces now along the road to Mont St Jean of the brave men who marched along it, or relics of the terrible journey back to the city for those wounded. But the church in
Waterloo still faces the inn where Wellington had his headquarters and the museum there pre serves the table where he wrote his orders and many other relics of all the armies.

Julia nursed Hal in a hovel, just as Lady de Lancey did her husband of only a few weeks, but with a much happier result. Magdalene de Lancey's moving and tragic story is told by David Miller in
Lady de Lancey at Waterloo
. I also found his book
The Duchess of Richmond's Ball
very useful. Amongst the memoirs of those present I used Cavalié Mercer's
Journal of the Waterloo Campaign
;
The Days of Battle or Quatre Bras and Waterloo
by An English woman;
The Capel Letters
; John Scott's
Paris Re-Visited in 1815 by way of Brussels and Waterloo
and
The Letters of Spencer Maden
.

Nick Foulkes's
Dancing Into Battle: a Social History of Waterloo
is a highly readable account that brings together a wealth of these original documents.