Read Chapter 1: The Bloodied Field

The rain had stopped sometime past midnight, leaving the field a black mirror of mud and shattered steel. Élise Delacroix moved through it with the practiced silence of the dead, her boots sinking ankle-deep in the mire, her oilcloth apron stiff with blood that was not her own.

She carried a lantern shuttered to a single sliver of light, and a canvas satchel heavy with bandages, laudanum, and the last of the dried moss she’d gathered from the hedgerows. The surgeons called her foolish to go out at all. The wounded were the wounded; the ones who'd survived the day would survive the night, and the ones who hadn't were beyond saving. But Élise had learned four years ago, in the burned villages of Spain, that men did not die in tidy shifts. They died alone, in the dark, calling for their mothers.

She knelt beside a young French grenadier, his chest a ruin of blackened cloth and meat. He was dead. His eyes were open, fixed on a sky he could no longer see. Élise closed them with two fingers and moved on.

The field stretched in every direction like a terrible harvest. Sixteen hours of cannonade and cavalry and screaming had churned the wheat and the men together, and now the rain had glued them to the earth. She stepped over an arm, then a leg still booted, then a horse whose ribs had been split by a roundshot. She did not count them. She had stopped counting at a thousand.

A sound. A moan, low and wet, like water struggling through a stone. Élise stopped.

The moan came again, from a tangle of bodies piled against a broken artillery caisson. She unshuttered her lantern fully, letting the yellow light spill over a nightmare of limbs. Prussian blue. French grey. British red, darkened by mud to the color of old bricks. Somewhere beneath them, the sound.

She set the lantern in the mud and began to pull the bodies aside. A Prussian hussar—dead, his face a mask of powder burns. A French voltigeur—dead, half his skull gone. Two more she could not identify, tangled so tight they might have been two men or one beast with many limbs. Each body was heavier than she remembered. The rain had swollen them.

Then she saw him.

He was pinned beneath the voltigeur, but his uniform was British—scarlet and gold, the epaulettes of an officer. His face was turned away, but she saw the great dark stain spreading across his thigh, and the way he had bitten through his lip to silence himself. He was alive, but barely. His blood had pooled beneath him, mixing with the water into a thin pink that seeped toward her knees.

“Hush now,” she said, in French. Then again, in her careful English, the words learned from a wounded sergeant in a Madrid hospital. “I am here. Do not move.”

He tried to turn his head, but the effort cost him. His eyes found hers—grey, or blue, it was hard to tell in the lantern light—and for a moment they held a clarity that told her he knew exactly where he was, and what had happened to him. Then the clarity dimmed, and he went slack.

Élise did not hesitate. She had done this before, crouched in the wreckage of half a dozen battlefields. She hooked her hands under his arms and pulled, her boots sliding in the mud, her teeth grinding with the effort. He was a large man, broad in the shoulders, and the dead voltigeur had to be shoved off with her heel. She dragged him clear of the caisson, clear of the tangled bodies, until they reached a stretch of ground where the mud was only mud.

She knelt beside him and cut away his trouser leg with the small knife she kept on a cord at her waist. The wound was bad. A musket ball had passed through the meat of his thigh, smashing something on the way—she could see the white splinter of bone pointing through the torn flesh. The bleeding was slow now, not the bright pulsing of a severed artery, but slow would not save him. Slow would kill him just as surely, with fever and rot and the surgeon’s saw.

“I am going to stop the bleeding,” she said, more to herself than to him. She packed the wound with moss, ignoring the wet squelch of it, and bound it tight with strips torn from her own petticoat. Then she sat back and looked at the field, and at the distant glow of the farmhouse where the surgeons had set up their hospital.

It was half a mile. Maybe more. She could not carry him that far. She would have to drag him.

Élise took a breath, and then another. Her hands were shaking—from cold, from exhaustion, from the long hours of crouching and lifting and closing dead eyes. She wiped them on her apron, took hold of his collar, and began to pull.

The mud fought her for every step. She staggered, slipped, fell once so hard that she swallowed a mouthful of rainwater and something worse. She crawled back to him, took new hold, and pulled again. She did not think about the pain in her shoulders, or the heat that spread up her arms from the raw places where the canvas strap of her satchel had chafed. She thought about her brother, Théo, forced into the Grande Armée at seventeen, and the letter she had not received for three years.

She thought: someone is searching for this man. Someone is waiting.

The farmhouse grew. A squat stone building ringed with wagons and carcasses and the moving shadows of those who still breathed. Lantern light spilled from its broken door, and with it came the sound of saws and screaming and the clipped, unrelenting voices of men who had decided who would live and who would not.

Élise reached the edge of the yard and collapsed.

For a moment—she did not know how long—she lay face down in the mud, her chest heaving, her ears full of the roar of her own blood. Then hands were on her, lifting her, and a man’s voice, sharp with irritation.

“Who is this? Who let a woman out on the field?”

“She brought a casualty. Officer, by the look of him.”

“Bring him in. Bring her in too, before she drowns on dry ground.”

They carried the British officer past her, and Élise saw his face fully for the first time by the light of the torch above the door. He was young—younger than she had thought. Perhaps twenty-five or-six, with a lean, sharp-boned face that was handsome in the way of a sword blade. His hair was dark, lank with rain, and there was a pale scar across his jaw that had never been stitched properly.

He stirred as they carried him in, and his eyes opened again, finding hers in the crowd of faces. His lips moved, but no sound came out. Then they took him inside, and the door swung shut, and Élise was left in the yard with a basin of water and a young volunteer who pressed a cup of weak wine into her hands.

“Drink it,” the volunteer said. “You look worse than most of the men they’ve carried in.”

Élise drank. The wine was sour and watery, but it stopped her shaking. She sat on an overturned barrel, watching the door, and after a time she stood and followed him inside.

The farmhouse was a chaos of cots and straw and men who had been arranged on the floor in lines, like harvest that had rotted before it could be gathered. The surgeons had set up a table by the hearth, and there were lanterns burning, and a saw lying not far from a pile of severed limbs. Élise looked for the British officer. She found him on a cot near the wall, already stripped to the waist, his wounded leg exposed and glistening under the lamplight.

A man in a bloodstained black coat was examining him—the senior surgeon, old and stooped, with fingers that moved as if they had forgotten tenderness. He pressed at the wound, and the officer’s face went white, and his jaw clenched, but he did not make a sound.

“The bone is shattered,” the surgeon said. “It will have to come off.”

“No.”

The voice was a ragged croak, and it came from the officer himself. His eyes were open again, fixed on the surgeon with a feverish intensity.

“No,” he said again. “Not the leg.”

The surgeon did not look up. “You’ll lose the leg or you’ll lose the life. I’ve seen this wound a hundred times. The bone will fester. The fever will take you. Better to cut it now, cleanly, while you still have the strength to survive.”

The officer’s hand shot out and seized the surgeon’s wrist. His grip was shockingly strong.

“I would rather die whole than live a cripple.”

The surgeon looked at him with something between pity and contempt. “That is your choice, but it is not one I will help you make. You’ll be asleep in a moment, and when you wake, you’ll thank me.”

He gestured to an orderly, who stepped forward pressing a rag soaked in something dark against the officer’s mouth. The officer tried to turn his head away.

Élise stepped forward before she had thought about it.

“Wait.”

The surgeon turned. His eyes were pale and watery, and they looked at her the way one looks at a fly that has landed on a wound.

“Who are you?”

“Élise Delacroix. I have been nursing for four years—in Spain, in the Peninsula. I’ve dressed wounds like this one, cleanly, without the knife. With rest and good care, the bone can be set. The wound can be kept clean. There’s a chance it will heal.”

The surgeon’s mouth twisted. “A chance. You would gamble a man’s life on a chance, on the word of a woman who has no training beyond what she has picked up in the muck of a camp? I have seen more wounds than you have seen sunrises. I tell you the leg must go.”

The officer’s eyes found hers again. There was something in them she could not name—not hope, not trust, but a desperate clarity, as if he were trying to see through her to some truth.

“Please,” he said, and she did not know if he was speaking to her or to the surgeon. “Not the leg.”

Élise looked at the surgeon.

“I will take responsibility. If it does not heal, you may say I killed him. But give me until morning. Give me until morning, before you cut.”

The surgeon stared at her for a long moment. Then he laughed, a dry, humorless sound.

“Until morning,” he said. “And then I will do what must be done, one way or another.”

He turned and walked away, leaving her alone with the officer and the lantern light and the distant screaming of the night.

The officer’s eyes had closed again. His chest rose and fell in shallow, even breaths. She knelt beside him, and for the first time, saw that he had a letter tucked into the inner pocket of his coat, which the orderlies had removed and laid on the cot beside him. The envelope was stained with blood, but the writing on the front was still clear, in a hand that sloped elegantly to the right.

Lady Ashworth.

Élise looked from the letter to his face, and felt something cold move through her—a recognition she could not place. She tucked the letter back into his coat, and began to work.