Read Chapter 4: The Debt of Blood

The first thing Élise noticed was that his eyes were open.

She had been changing the dressing on his leg, her fingers moving with the practiced economy of someone who had learned not to flinch at the sight of ruin. The flesh around the wound had settled into a healthier pink, the swelling gone down enough that she could see the shape of the bone beneath, aligned as well as she could manage without cutting him open. She had won this battle, at least for now.

And then she looked up, and he was watching her.

His gaze was steady in a way that startled her—not the glassy, unfocused stare of the fevered, but the clear, assessing look of a man who was taking stock of his surroundings and finding them wanting.

“Where am I?” His voice came out rough, scraped raw by whatever devilment the fever had put him through, but the words were coherent. Carefully formed.

Élise set down the cloth and wiped her hands on her apron. “A field hospital outside Waterloo. You were brought in two days ago.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had any humor in it. “Two days.” His gaze traveled over the canvas ceiling, the rows of cots, the other patients who lay in various states of misery. “I remember... noise. And pain.”

“You had a fever. It broke this morning.”

His eyes came back to her face, and she felt the weight of them. He was younger than she had first thought, now that his features weren’t contorted with agony. Perhaps thirty. His hair was dark, matted with sweat and dirt, and there was a healing gash along his jaw that would leave a scar. But his eyes were the thing she kept returning to—gray, like winter weather, and sharp in a way that suggested he was already calculating something she couldn’t see.

“The battle,” he said. “What happened?”

Élise hesitated. She had learned, in the past days, that the answer to that question depended entirely on who was asking it. The British patients wanted to hear of victory and glory. The French prisoners, the ones they kept in the makeshift pens at the edge of the camp, wanted to hear anything at all that wasn't the silence that followed their defeat.

This man was British—or at least he wore a British uniform—and so she gave him the answer she gave the others.

“The Allied forces prevailed. Napoleon has fled the field. Paris is—well, we hear he has abdicated, though the news is uncertain.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and she watched his throat move as he swallowed. “And the prisoners?”

“There are many.”

“French?”

“Yes. And some Allied wounded still being brought in.” She hesitated, then added, “The French prisoners are kept apart. There is talk of sending them to the prison ships in England, or to the camps in Prussia. No one seems certain.”

He was quiet for a long moment. She thought he might have drifted back into sleep, but then his eyes opened again.

“The man whose coat I was wearing,” he said. “What happened to him?”

Élise’s hands stilled over the roll of bandages. She had wondered when he would ask.

“Lieutenant Hawke,” she said slowly. “He was brought in the same night as you. He died of his wounds before morning.”

She watched something shift in his face. Not quite grief—she didn't think he had known the man well enough for that—but something closer to guilt, a shadow that passed quickly and left his features harder than before.

He said nothing.

“You were wearing his coat,” Élise pressed, because she had been turning this over in her mind since she had found the letter addressed to Lady Ashworth tucked into a breast pocket that had belonged to another man entirely. “How did that come to pass?”

“The battle was chaos.” His voice was flat. “I had been shot in the leg—my own coat was ruined, blood-soaked. Hawke—” He paused. “Hawke found me. He helped me to shelter. And then—” Another pause, longer this time. “He gave me his coat. Said his own wounds were nothing. Said I should take it, that I would need the warmth.”

“And he died.”

“Yes.”

She watched him, waiting for more. But he had closed his eyes again, and his jaw was set in a way that suggested the conversation was over.

Élise finished bandaging his leg in silence. She had a hundred more questions. The letter to Lady Ashworth. The locket with the miniature of a blonde woman. The name Marie Laurent, with its date of 14 February 1812, which she had memorized and hidden away in her bodice, where the paper rustled every time she moved.

But she knew better than to press a wounded man for secrets. Secrets, in times like these, were currency. And she had learned that a patient who was willing to talk would do so in his own time.

But she was not willing to let it go entirely.

“The surgeon will come to examine you soon,” she said, gathering her supplies. “Dr. Thorne. He wanted to take your leg on the first night.”

The officer’s eyes snapped open. “He wanted to—?”

“I stopped him.” She kept her voice even, matter-of-fact. “I believed the leg could be saved without amputation. I have been treating it with a method I learned from my father, who was a battlefield surgeon in the last war.”

“And has it worked?”

“The fever broke. The wound is clean. You will walk again, though perhaps with a limp.” She paused. “That is, if Dr. Thorne does not decide to take the leg anyway. He is not pleased with me for overstepping my place.”

Something flickered in the officer’s gray eyes. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Risk yourself to save a stranger’s leg.” He stared at her with that unsettling intensity. “Why does it matter to you whether I walk or crawl?”

Élise thought of her brother. Of the last time she had seen him, in the spring of 1814, when Napoleon had first abdicated and Théo had come home to their mother’s farm in the Ardennes, thin and hollow-eyed and full of stories he refused to tell. She thought of how he had left again when Napoleon escaped Elba, because the Emperor had called, and Théo had always believed in the Emperor with a fervor that bordered on worship.

She thought of the letter she had never received, the one she had been waiting for since June, a letter that had never come.

She thought of the way her mother’s hands had trembled every time a neighbor came to the door with news of another battle.

“Because I know what it is to watch someone lose the use of their limbs,” she said finally. “And I know what it costs them. What it costs the people who love them.”

The officer held her gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, as though she had answered a question he hadn’t yet asked.

“Lieutenant Hawke,” he said slowly, “was not the only man to die on that field. You said there are French prisoners here?”

“Yes.”

“And they are being treated for their wounds?”

Élise hesitated. This was treacherous ground. “Some of them,” she admitted. “Though not with the same care as the Allied soldiers. There is not enough medicine to go around, and the surgeons prefer to use their supplies on their own men.”

“But you have treated them.”

It wasn’t a question.

“I have,” she said. “When I could.”

“Why?”

She met his eyes. “Because they are someone’s brothers. Someone’s sons. Someone’s—” She stopped, the word catching in her throat. “They are someone’s loved ones. And they are wounded. That is enough for me.”

He was quiet for a long moment. His gaze had softened, she thought, though she couldn't be certain—the light in the tent was dim, and she had learned not to trust her own reading of men’s faces in times like these.

Then he said, “You are not like the other nurses here.”

It was not a question.

“No,” she agreed. “I suppose I am not.”

“What is your name?”

She had not told him. She had not told any of the officers her name, had learned early that to be known was to be watched, and to be watched was to be suspected. She tended to her wounded and kept her head down and tried not to give anyone a reason to ask questions about her lineage, her accent, the French that slipped out when she was tired or frightened or angry.

But this man was looking at her with those gray eyes, and she felt—she didn't know what she felt. Something that made her want to tell the truth, for once.

She didn’t.

“Hélène,” she said. “My name is Hélène.”

He nodded slowly, filing the name away. “Hélène,” he repeated. “I will remember that.”

She left him then, making her way through the rows of wounded men to the supply tent at the far end. Her heart was beating too fast, and she didn’t know why.

She had been lying to herself if she thought she could keep this man at a distance. He was a mystery, and she was drawn to mysteries the way other women were drawn to beautiful sunsets or sweet-smelling flowers. She had spent her whole life trying to solve the puzzle of her brother’s disappearance, and it had taught her one thing: that the closer you got to the truth, the more dangerous it became.

And this man was full of lies. She was certain of it now. His face had shifted too easily when she’d mentioned Lieutenant Hawke’s death. His eyes had been calculating behind that mask of soldierly grief.

He was not who he claimed to be. But she didn’t know who he actually was, or what he was running from.

She reached the supply tent and pushed through the canvas flap. Dr. Thorne was inside, sorting through a crate of empty vials, and he looked up as she entered with an expression that hovered somewhere between irritation and grudging respect.

“The British officer is awake,” she said.

Thorne’s eyebrows rose. “Is he now.”

“He is asking questions about the battle. About the prisoners.”

“He’s a soldier. That’s what soldiers do.” Thorne shrugged. “If he’s well enough to ask questions, he’s well enough to be moved. I’ve got a transport wagon leaving for Brussels in the morning. I’ll have him put on it.”

Élise’s heart stopped. “He’s not well enough to travel. His leg will not survive another day on a rough road.”

“That leg is not my concern anymore.” Thorne’s voice was flat. “My concern is clearing this hospital for the wounded who are still being brought in. The French is retreating, but there are pockets of resistance. There will be more bodies, nurse, and I need beds for them.”

“He will be crippled if you move him.”

“He will be alive.” Thorne met her eyes. “Which is more than I can promise if he stays here and the infection returns. I’ve seen fevers break and come back with a vengeance. This one hasn’t had time to fully clear his blood. He needs rest, but I don’t have time to give it to him.”

He turned back to his crate, dismissing her.

Élise stood in the doorway of the tent, her hands clenched at her sides. She thought of the officer’s gray eyes, watching her. She thought of his question, why does it matter to you whether I walk or crawl?

She thought of Lieutenant Hawke, dying alone in a field with his coat on another man’s shoulders.

And she made a decision.