Page 22 of The Lady's Companion
He was back at the draftsman’s desk again, looking over her shoulder at the entries, putting his arm around her to run his finger down the columns. She would have been offended, except that he seemed not mindful of her presence at all. He kept nodding, chuckling to himself, and nodding again, his eyes on the page, and then down the rows of grain in front of them. He put his arms down finally, and she felt free to breathe again. Not that such nearness to the bailiff was unpleasant; far from it. She found that she enjoyed that smell of hay always about him, and the clean honest scent of lye soap. I am a long way from ballroom pomades and gagging colognes, she thought as she sat quietly, the pen still in her hand.
He took the pen from her and then lifted her from the stool. “Now let us each take a side and pluck out any weeds. I just want the grain shoots. You can ask me about Lady Bushnell now, if you choose.” He hung two more lamps over the tables, then began to weed silently and efficiently, as he did everything.
“What is this grain?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?” She weeded slower, her eyes on the tender, fragile stalks before her, force-grown in winter.
He looked over at her. “Didn’t I say?”
“No! And I’ve been wanting to ask.”
“It’s my Waterloo wheat, Susan,” he said, his eyes unfocusingfor the briefest moment and looking beyond her to a place she had never been. “A detachment from my regiment helped fortify Hougoumont and I swiped a handful of grain from a storage bin that night. I intended to eat it, but never got the time. And when the battle was over, there it was in my pocket.”
He continued his work, then he reached across his row of grain to weed hers, too, and speed her along. “It was growing on the hillside above the chateau. You can’t imagine how tall it was, before it was trampled by both armies.” He touched a sprout, and the touch was almost a caress. “I’m growing it with English grain to get a good seed. This is the third growth and so far, my best combination.”
“My goodness,” Susan said, for want of anything better. “Waterloo tall and English tough. I’ll call it Waterloo Harvest.” He returned his attention to his own row when Susan caught up with him. “Now what do you want to know about Lady Bushnell?”
“How did you meet? Mrs. Skerlong said you soldiered together in Spain, but I hardly …”
“So we did,” he agreed, his eyes unfocusing again for a moment. “And harken. I’ll only tell this once, because it’s no kind reflection on David Wiggins. She saved a thief from a three-hundred-lash flogging.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Chapter Seven
Susan couldn’t say anything for a moment. She stopped weeding and stared at the bailiff across the row from her. When he started weeding her row, too, she remembered what she should be doing and shook her head at him to stop. She weeded in silence for a moment, then her curiosity was bigger than her amazement.
“How can someone survive three hundred lashes? My God, Mr. Wiggins, what did you do to earn such a punishment?”
“I thieved. I was a sergeant in a Welsh border guard called up when Sir John Moore went to Portugal. You seldom saw a regiment so poorly commanded. We were all starving and I stole a box of hard tack for me and my men. The colonel wanted to make an example of me.” He stopped then, looked at her intently. “You really want to hear this?”
She nodded, unable to speak, her eyes wide.
“I think they were about halfway to three hundred. I quit counting after one hundred. All I remember was that my blood was dripping on the ground and I was grunting like a pig.”
She shuddered. “1 can’t even imagine such a thing!”
As she watched, horrified, he turned around and pulled up his shirt. His back was crisscrossed with scars from his neck to his waistband. “They go lower, but you don’t need to see those, too.” He tucked his shirt in and continued weeding as calmly as though he had shown her a hangnail that was troubling him. “It was a hard army, Susan.”
“Yes, but...” she began, then dabbed her fingers across her eyes.
“I don’t remember hearing Lady Bushnell say anything, but the next thing I knew, the flogging had stopped and she was standing between me and the punishment sergeant.” Hefinished the row and waited for her to catch up. “Apparently she and Lord Bushnell had been riding by the regiment. I wish I could have appreciated it, but I was a bit fine drawn by then.”
It was masterful understatement. “She just leaped off her horse and threw herself in the middle of all that?” Susan asked when she could speak.
“So Lord Bushnell told me later. She refused to move until that colonel, goddamn him, agreed to stop. I think she gave him a real tongue lashing, but it all sounded like a swarm of bees to me. I can’t remember it.” He grinned at her. “Old Lord Bushnell told me later that he learned some new words from her that morning.”
When Susan finished weeding, he walked with her to a furnace and put in more coal, then upturned a bucket for her to sit on while he perched on the edge of a table. “I don’t know how she did it, but I was moved from my regiment to the Fighting Fifth. It was regular army and a dandy outfit.”
“Why didn’t you die?”
He shrugged. “I wanted to. You know on Good Friday services when the vicar usually talks about Christ on the cross?” He shook his head. “I have some small idea ... and I can appreciate the thieves on either side.”
“Were you in hospital?” she said, almost fearful of intruding on his thoughts.
“No. It was just after Vimeiro and were on our way back to Torres Vedras. And you know, Lady Bushnell came to me that night when I couldn’t do anything but lie on my stomach and cry from the pain. She washed my back and told me that if I ever thieved again, she would be the first to flog me. I believed her.” Susan nodded, remembering her sharp words.
“In the morning I put on my clothes again and marched with the Fifth.” He looked down at his feet. “I was crying again by the afternoon, but by God, I marched.”
