Read Chapter 28: The Healer's Grief

The dawn came gray and indifferent, as if the world had not noticed that Pierre Delacroix had stopped breathing.

Élise knelt in the long grass beside the west wall drain, her brother's body cradled across her lap. The river beyond the keep's shadow moved past with a soft, constant murmur, unconcerned with grief. She had washed Pierre's face with water from her canteen. The gash across his throat had stopped bleeding long ago. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.

James stood a few yards off, watchful, his pistol drawn and scanning the tree line. He had not spoken in over an hour. Neither had she.

The plan had been simple in its desperation. Carry Pierre through the drain, follow the river to the road, find a cart or a horse, and reach Paris before the scarred officer roused his men. The drain had been exactly where Pierre said it would be—wide enough for a man to crawl through, its mouth half-hidden by reeds and mud. They had dragged Pierre's body through it in silence, the cold water soaking them to the chest, the stone scraping against his lifeless limbs with every pull.

Élise had done the pulling. James had taken the feet, but she had insisted on holding her brother's shoulders, keeping his head above the water as though he might still drown.

Now she sat in the grass and could not make herself stand.

"He needs to be buried," James said quietly. "We cannot carry him to Paris."

"He is not heavy."

"He is not light, either. And we are both wounded, Élise. We will not make it half a day carrying him."

She looked down at Pierre's face. In death, he looked younger than she remembered him. The man she had found in the dungeon—thin, scarred, hollow-eyed—was gone. The face beneath her hands was somehow the boy who had taught her to skip stones on the canal behind their house in Charleroi.

"He died for me," she said.

James said nothing. He had no answer for that. No one did.

"He spent years in that place—that hole in the ground—and the moment I found him, he died pulling me out of it." Her voice cracked on the last word. She pressed her palm against Pierre's cold cheek, as if she could push the warmth back into him through sheer will. "He was alive, James. All this time, he was alive, and I told myself he was dead. I grieved him and moved on, and he was in the dark, waiting for me to come."

"You did come."

"Too late."

James holstered his pistol and walked over to her. He crouched down, his knee popping audibly, his face tight with the pain of his own wounds. He did not reach for her. He knew better now.

"We need to move," he said, gentler. "The officer will wake. His men will find the bodies. They will follow the drain, and they will find the river, and they will find us."

"Let them come."

"Élise—"

"I said let them come." She looked up at him, and there was something in her eyes that he had not seen before. Something cold and hard and new. "They killed him. The men who took him, the men who held him, the men who wore those coats—they killed my brother. And I want them to come, James. I want them to come so I can show them what I have learned."

"Them" hung in the air between them. James understood, with a sick lurch in his stomach, that she did not mean only the scarred officer and his men.

She meant the British.

He sat down heavily in the grass beside her, wincing as the movement pulled at the bandage beneath his shirt. For a long moment, he said nothing. The river murmured. A bird called somewhere in the trees.

"You think I am one of them," he said at last.

"I think you wear their uniform."

"I wear this uniform because I was born in Kent and my father was a soldier before me. I did not choose it any more than Pierre chose to be conscripted into Napoleon's army."

"Your army took him."

"Napoleon took him first." James kept his voice level, though something in his chest was tightening. "Your brother was not taken by British soldiers, Élise. He was conscripted by the French—your French—and he marched against us, and he was captured, and he was held by men who are not soldiers at all."

"They wore your coats."

"They stole them."

Élise laughed, a bitter, broken sound. "You would say that. You would say anything."

James got to his feet. He was angry now—she could see it in the set of his jaw, in the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides. But he did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice.

"Stay here," he said. "I will find somewhere to bury him."

He walked toward the tree line without waiting for an answer. Élise watched him go, and she felt the anger inside her—the hot, shapeless rage that had been building since she saw Pierre's face in that dungeon—begin to curdle into something else. Guilt, maybe. Shame.

She looked down at her brother.

"What do I do?" she whispered.

Pierre, of course, had no answer.

---

James was gone for the better part of an hour. Élise used the time to wash Pierre's wounds one last time, to close his collar over the gash in his throat, to fold his hands over his chest and arrange his limbs so that he looked almost peaceful. She sang to him, soft and low, the lullaby their mother had sung to them both as children. The words came back to her easily, though she had not thought of them in years.

When James returned, his face was smeared with dirt and his hands were raw. He had found a clearing, he said, beneath an old oak. Soft ground. Quiet. He could dig.

They carried Pierre together. James took his shoulders this time, and Élise took his feet, and they moved slowly through the underbrush until they reached the clearing. The oak was enormous, its branches spreading wide and sheltering, and the ground beneath it was soft with years of fallen leaves.

James had already dug the grave. It was not deep—the ground was rocky, and he had only his hands and a sharpened stick—but it would do. It would have to do.

They lowered Pierre into the earth together. Élise climbed down into the grave and arranged him one last time, straightening his coat, brushing a leaf from his hair. She pressed a kiss to his forehead.

"I will find them," she said. "The men who did this. I will find them all."

She climbed out of the grave, and James began to push the earth back in. Élise stood beside him, watching, until the soil covered her brother's face and then his chest and then all of him, and the mound was smooth and dark and final.

James found two flat stones and laid them crosswise at the head of the grave. He stood back, breathing hard.

"He deserves a marker," he said. "Something with his name."

"We cannot leave his name." Élise's voice was hollow. "If the officers find this grave, they will know we buried him here. They will know we were here."

James nodded. He understood. He had understood war long enough to know that even the dead could not always be honored.

They stood in silence for a long moment. Then James reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was creased and worn, the edges soft with handling.

"I found this in the fortress," he said. "In the officer's quarters. I took it before we left."

Élise looked at the paper but did not reach for it. "What is it?"

"A letter. From London." James unfolded it and held it out to her. "Read it."

She took it reluctantly. The handwriting was formal, the ink faded but legible. It was addressed to the scarred officer—Colonel Whitmore, the letter called him—and it was from a man signing himself as a undersecretary at the War Office.

She read it once. Then again. The words swam before her eyes.

"...your proposal to sow discord between the French and the Belgians is hereby rejected... His Majesty's government will not countenance any action that might provoke a renewal of hostilities... you are ordered to stand down and report to London for disciplinary review... your commission is suspended pending inquiry..."

Élise looked up at James.

"They were acting without orders," he said. "Whitmore and his men—they are not soldiers of the Crown anymore. They are renegades. The War Office sent him orders to stand down, and he ignored them. He has been running his own operation for months."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because he wants war. He believes that a new war, a bigger war, would be good for England. For his career. For his fortune." James's voice was flat, tired. "He was at Waterloo. He saw what it cost. And he wants more of it."

Élise stared at the letter. Then she looked at the grave.

"Pierre was not killed by your army," she said slowly.

"No."

"He was killed by a rogue officer. A criminal."

"Yes."

She folded the letter carefully and handed it back to him. The rage was still there, coiled in her chest, but it had changed shape. It was no longer aimed at James, at his uniform, at the country he served. It had found a truer target.

"I am sorry," she said.

James looked at her. "For what?"

"For blaming you. For wanting to blame you." She met his eyes. "You came for me. You carried my brother's body. You dug his grave with your bare hands. And I repaid you with accusations."

"You were grieving."

"That is not an excuse."

James was quiet for a moment. Then he stepped forward and, very gently, took her hand. His fingers were cold and dirt-caked, but his grip was warm.

"You loved him," he said. "And you lost him. Twice." He squeezed her hand. "You do not need to apologize to me for that."

Élise looked down at their joined hands. Then she looked up at him, and for the first time since the fortress, she let herself see him. The exhaustion in his face. The wound in his side. The way he stood, favoring one leg, still ready to run, still ready to fight, still ready to protect her.

"You read my letter," she said.

James went very still.

"The one you gave me at the convent. Outside Marguerite's room." She watched his face. "You did not wait for me to read it yourself?"

His ears reddened. "I... I wanted to know what I had written."

"And?"

He looked away, then back. "I stand by every word."

Élise did not smile. There was no smile in her yet. But something in her chest loosened, just a little.

"We should go," she said. "Paris is far."

James nodded. He released her hand and looked once more at the grave—the simple mound of earth, the two stones, the silence beneath the oak.

"He was brave," James said. "In that dungeon. He did not beg. He did not bargain. He told us the truth and he took the blow meant for you."

"He was always brave," Élise said. "He was brave when he was a boy, and he was brave when he marched to war, and he was brave when he died." Her voice caught, but she did not look away from the grave. "I will carry that with me."

James said nothing. He did not need to.

They turned together and walked out of the clearing, toward the road that led to Paris.