Waterloo, Belgium, June 18, 1815
John Freemantle felt every jolt of the cart like an explosion within his skull.
At least, he thought it was a cart. He had reason to think so; he had been carried semi-conscious in a cart once before, and it was not an experience one forgot. The sickening arrhythmic lurches, each one as bone-rattling as it was nauseating, had nothing in common with the plunging deck of a ship or the joggle of a properly sprung carriage. Moreover, each jolt seemed to give rise to a fresh bout of moaning in a variety of registers, from sources surrounding him at close range. Then there was the smell—sweat and blood, vomit and urine. He was becoming more certain every instant that his initial impression had been correct. He was in a cart.
What he could not determine was why. Freemantle cast his mind back, trying to recall some sequence of events that would logically end with his person residing in such a conveyance. The battle had been going badly, he remembered that. The British and their Belgian allies had been under heavy fire from the more numerous French. Between injuries, deaths, and desertion, Wellington’s line was stretched almost to breaking, and when the news came that the farm La Haye Sainte had fallen, Wellington had no fresh troops he might move to plug the gap. The promised Prussian reinforcements had still not arrived, and so there was nothing for the Duke to do but—
Freemantle remembered with a jolt worse than anything the cart could throw at him, and jerked upright. Or tried to; he only got halfway before pain spiked through his temples and he sagged back down. The Duke had summoned the special battalion. The Duke had sent him, John Freemantle, to summon the special battalion. But something had ambushed him in the woods. And he could dimly remember, as though recalling a dream, a girl with a minx’s face and an impossible pocket watch—
“Battalion,” he croaked.
“Easy, John.”
Freemantle turned his head toward the voice. The movement seemed to take a long time, and a green blur swooped across his field of vision as he did so. He wasn’t sure if he had opened his eyes, or if the sickening haze was present only behind his lids.
He squeezed his eyes hard shut, then forced them open. This time they focused enough to recognize James Warren. Warren was propped upright against the side of the cart, chest and right shoulder bound with blood-soaked bandages, face paperwhite except for the dark shadows under his eyes.
“Battalion,” Freemantle said again. “Burnley. I was—” The cart jerked underneath him, drowning the faint flicker of memory in a flood of queasiness. Freemantle drew a deep breath, holding it until the worst of the sickness past. “What—happened?”
“You were thrown from your horse,” Warren said. He spoke almost without inflection. The gray eyes that regarded Freemantle seemed unnaturally wide, unnaturally steady.
Freemantle made one more effort to sit up, and this time managed it despite the spike of pain through his skull. “The message—”
“Hit your head,” Warren added, as though that were the question he had asked. “They took you to the village to recover.”
“The message, James. The battalion—”
“Didn’t come,” Warren said.
“Oh, God.” The blur of green crashed over his head like an ocean wave. There had been a girl and a pocket watch and an impossible story, and he had—chosen not to bring the message? But no, that was impossible, that was a fever dream. Surely he could never have chosen to betray Wellington. Surely he was guilty of nothing but failure. “Oh, dear God.”
“I wasn’t there,” Warren said, as though he were talking in his sleep. “Leeches wouldn’t let me leave. But I heard. Heard the others talking. They said His Grace was waiting on the battalion. They said it looked like the Prussians might reach us—they were even in sight. But then the infantry broke under the last French charge. The Prussians thought the day lost, and made tracks. It didn’t take long after that…”
“But the Duke,” Freemantle said, struggling to comprehend it. The girl had said they could win without the special battalion. And because of that, Freemantle had chosen to— He shied away from the memory. “Never beaten—all those times on the Peninsula—conjuring possibilities from thin air—how could the Duke—” He stopped at the look on Warren’s face. “Dear God. No.”
“He was trying to rally them,” Warren said hoarsely. “He was—being conspicuous, the way he always—Lord Uxbridge rode at him, shouting, ‘For God’s sake, don’t expose yourself so!’—and then—A lucky shot, they said. Uxbridge was so close that the Duke’s blood—the Duke’s blood splattered—” Warren choked. He coughed, and the crimson stain on his bandages darkened and spread.
“Under Uxbridge,” Freemantle said. It was the only part of the paragraph he could absorb. The other intelligence was too momentous, as though the universe had been pulled up by the roots, or broken and reformed into something entirely new. He could not comprehend it. He pushed it instead to the back of his throbbing brain. The girl had said that, to save the future, he must not bring the message. And he had believed her, as mad as that seemed now, he had chosen— “We’re under Uxbridge. What are we about?” He looked around himself. Bleeding and hastily bandaged comrades-in-arms lay wedged and piled around him, groaning with each fresh lurch of the wheels. Past them, the green haze would not come into focus.
“Retreating,” Warren said, still expressionless, eyes still staring. “Bonaparte sent in the Garde. Immortals. Undefeated.”
“Retreating,” Freemantle repeated. She had said they would win. “Where to? Brussels?”
“In Brussels,” Warren said, “they are preparing feasts to welcome home their Emperor.”
Of course they were. The Belgians had always been more French than Dutch, had never been likely to stand with Napoleon’s enemies in the event of the Emperor’s victory. Some had fled the battlefield, and some— Freemantle had an instant’s memory of Belgians in the Forest of Soignes, but it fled when he tried to grasp it. The effort struck through his head, a blinding spear of pain. The girl had a handkerchief, and a pocket watch, and a glib tongue, and he had believed her, and he was worse than a traitor, worse than a fool. She must have been a French spy. If she were real at all. Perhaps she wasn’t real. He wanted her to not be real.
If she wasn’t real, this was not his fault.
“Bonaparte’s done it,” Warren said. “Separated us from the Prussians. They retreat across the Rhine, we back to the North Sea while the route home is still open to us. The French pursue, but Uxbridge left a small band of monsters to cover our retreat. He thinks they will be enough. He takes the rest home to garrison our shores. It’s too late to use them any other way.”
“Too late,” Freemantle repeated. The words tasted awful on his tongue, slimy and nauseous.
“Not your fault,” Warren said suddenly. But it was. “Even Wotten said so, when he came to fetch me from Mont St. Jean. You hit your head. The Duke oughtn’t to have waited. He delayed too long in sending a second courier. He delayed too long in sending for the monsters in the first place.”
Freemantle’s guts twisted inside him. “No,” he said, as the sky throbbed in time with the throbbing in his temples. “It wasn’t his fault. Never his fault. It was mine—mine—I failed—I caused—” She had said, The message must not get through, and he had said, I have a plan. His hand had thrown the lamp, struck the guard, misdirected the message, lost the war. “I caused this. Oh, God.”
He was no longer wearing his pistols. But a polished-smooth handle still rode on the belt at Warren’s hip. Freemantle reached out, and Warren was too drunk on his own injuries and grief to stop him seizing hold of it.