Read Chapter 8: The Missing Captain

The morning light came gray and reluctant through the hospital windows, and with it came Major Hale.

Élise was at the far end of the ward, wringing out bandages over a basin, when she heard the clack of boots on the wooden floor. A tall man with a weathered face and a scar cutting through his left eyebrow stopped at Ashworth’s cot. She watched him from the corner of her eye as she worked.

“Ashworth,” the man said, voice low and rough. “Thank God. They told me you were here. Thought you’d died at Hougoumont with the rest of them.”

Ashworth’s head turned on the pillow. His eyes were still bright with fever, but his voice was steady. “Hale. You look like hell.”

Hale laughed—a short, tired sound. “Walked from Waterloo to Brussels on a twisted ankle and a prayer. I’ll look worse before I’m done.” He pulled a stool close to the cot and sat heavily. “I came looking for Whitmore. He was supposed to meet me in Brussels three days ago. No word. Rumor says he was at Hougoumont. You were at Hougoumont. Tell me you saw him get out.”

Élise’s hands stilled over the bandages.

Ashworth was quiet for a long moment. She saw his throat move as he swallowed.

“I saw him fall,” Ashworth said. “Hougoumont, around noon. French infantry broke the north gate. He was in the yard. I tried to reach him, but the press was too thick. When I looked again, he was down. I couldn’t get to him before we were pushed back.”

Hale’s jaw tightened. He stared at the floor. “You saw him die?”

“I saw him fall,” Ashworth repeated. “In that chaos, no one could be certain of anything. But I cleared the yard with the Coldstreams later. He wasn’t among the living.”

Hale nodded slowly. He sat silent for a moment, then stood, pressing a hand to Ashworth’s shoulder. “I’ll make inquiries. His family will want word.” He paused. “You look like you’re still carrying the fever. Rest, man. That’s an order.”

“You’re not my commanding officer, Hale.”

“Good thing too. You never followed orders worth a damn.” Hale almost smiled, then turned and left, his boots receding down the ward.

Élise picked the bandages up and carried them toward Ashworth’s cot. His eyes were closed, but his fingers were white where they gripped the blanket. She set the bandages on the table and began to replace the dressing on his leg without speaking.

“You heard,” he said.

“It was difficult not to,” she said, focusing on the wound. The flesh was angry and swollen, but the smell of rot had lessened. Dr. Thorne’s leeches had done their work. “Captain Whitmore was your friend?”

Ashworth opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. “He was a good officer. A decent man. He saved my life at Quatre Bras. Pulled me off a horse that had fallen on top of me while the French were advancing.” He paused. “I owed him more than I could ever repay.”

She did not press. The silence between them stretched as she worked.

Later that morning, after she had changed his dressings and brought him a cup of weak broth, Élise noticed the coat again—still slung on the peg where she had hung it days ago, still smelling of smoke and mud and blood. Margaret had been tasked with the patients’ belongings, but the English nurse had been occupied with the new stream of wounded arriving from the field. The coat had remained untouched.

Élise’s fingers strayed toward it before she could stop herself. The locket was still in the inner pocket. She had checked it twice since the night she’d found the scrap of paper. But it was not the locket she reached for now.

The coat was fine wool, officer’s cut, with the wear of years at the elbows and the inside collar. She ran her hands along the seams, feeling the give of fabric where papers might be hidden. She had mended her brother’s coats often enough to know where men tucked things away.

Near the hem, her fingers found a ridge.

She turned the coat inside out. The lining was split at the bottom, stitched shut with a different thread—fresher, less discolored. She worked the stitching loose with her fingernails and reached inside.

The paper was folded twice, small enough to fit in a watch pocket. She opened it in the gray light of the ward and read.

*To Lt. Col. Ashworth—whom I trust with my life and my name, for what little time either will serve.*

*If you read this, I am dead, and you have survived—God forgive me for wishing both things. The mission I told you of is not what I claimed. I depart for Brussels tomorrow under orders from a man I have never met, carrying dispatches to a contact at the Hôtel du Chêne on the Rue de la Montagne. He will know me by the phrase “the winter rose blooms for her.”*

*But I go with misgivings I cannot shake. There is a woman in Brussels who knows more of this affair than I do. Marie Laurent. She held answers about this war’s hidden work—about who truly directs it. If I do not return, find her. She is the key to everything.*

*Do not mourn me. Find her. Whatever I have been, whatever I have done, this much I ask of you.*

*Your friend,* *Edward Whitmore*

Élise read the letter twice. Her hands trembled.

Marie Laurent. The name on the scrap of paper she had hidden in her bodice. The name Ashworth had claimed was his sister’s married name—the sister he said he was searching for.

But this letter, written by actual Captain Whitmore to actual Lieutenant Colonel Ashworth, said Marie Laurent was something else. Something to do with “hidden work.” With dispatches. With a contact at a hotel in Brussels.

And Ashworth had said he saw Whitmore die at Hougoumont.

Élise folded the letter slowly and slid it into her pocket.

She stood in the middle of the ward, surrounded by the groans of wounded men and the sharp smell of vinegar and pus, and felt the floor tilt beneath her.

Ashworth wore Whitmore’s coat. The officers had said so—the cut, the insignia, the name on the collar. And Ashworth allowed it. He answered to it. He had let them call him Whitmore and had not corrected them. But this letter was addressed to Ashworth. This letter had been in a coat that had Ashworth’s name on the inside lining, if she read the faint stitching correctly.

She turned the coat over. Yes. *Ashworth*—hand-stitched in small letters along the seam, a tailor’s mark or a wife’s attention.

So this coat belonged to Ashworth, not Whitmore. And yet Ashworth had told Major Hale he had seen Whitmore die at Hougoumont, while wearing a coat that carried Whitmore’s name where the officers could see it.

Unless the coat had been Whitmore’s and had been given or transferred to Ashworth at some point—but the inside seam bore only Ashworth’s name. And Margaret had called him Captain Whitmore, and he had answered to it. Dr. Thorne had called him Whitmore, and he had answered to it.

Élise stood very still.

The man in her care was not Whitmore. He was Ashworth, of that she was nearly certain now. But he was letting everyone believe he was Whitmore—the dead man, the man whose last letter begged him to find Marie Laurent.

Why would a man in his right mind steal a dead friend’s name?

She tucked the letter into her apron pocket, then removed it and placed it inside her bodice beside the scrap of paper that had started all this. Two pieces of paper, two names, one woman.

She returned to Ashworth’s cot. He was awake, watching her with an unreadable expression as she approached.

“You look pale, sister,” he said. “Has my leg turned again?”

“No,” she said. “Your leg is healing.”

“Then what troubles you?”

She opened her mouth. The questions gathered at her lips, and she bit them back. *Who are you? Why do you hide behind a dead man’s name? Why did you tell Major Hale that Whitmore died—unless you watched him die and took his place for a reason the letter suggests you never wanted?*

“Nothing,” she said. “I am tired.”

He did not believe her. She saw it in his face. But he did not press.

As she turned to leave, she heard him speak again, low and careful. “Élise.” He rarely used her name. It always felt like he was testing her with it, seeing how she would respond. “If you find something—something that confuses you, something you do not understand—I would counsel you to bring it to me before you act on it.”

Her blood went cold. She faced him. “Is that a threat?”

“No.” He met her eyes and held them. “It is a kindness.”

She walked away without answering.

At the far end of the ward, Margaret stood with a stack of folded linens in her arms, watching her with narrowed eyes.

Élise moved past her toward the door.

“Sister,” Margaret said sharply. “Where are you going?”

“To fetch water,” Élise said, and left before the English nurse could ask anything else.

Out in the courtyard, she pressed her back against the cold stone wall and pressed a hand to her chest, feeling both papers against her heart. She stared at the gray sky and thought about the route to Brussels—the Hôtel du Chêne on the Rue de la Montagne. The man who would know the phrase about a winter rose. The woman named Marie Laurent, who was key to something Ashworth did not want her to understand.

She thought about the boy in the Prussian prison camp, her brother Théo, waiting for someone to help him.

She thought about the man who wore a dead friend’s coat and asked her to trust him.

Two names. Two secrets. The scrap of paper said Marie Laurent, 1812. The letter said Marie Laurent held answers to a dispatch mission in Brussels.

Élise pulled the scrap of paper from her bodice and read it one more time in the gray daylight.

*M.L., Brussels, 1812. Under the rose. Find her.*

The same phrase repeated in Whitmore’s letter: the winter rose. It could not be coincidence.

She looked toward the road that led north to Brussels, invisible from where she stood.

The letter had said the contact would know Whitmore by a phrase. It had not said what would happen if someone else spoke it.

Élise folded both papers carefully and tucked them away.