Page 29 of The Lady's Companion
Susan put down her letter unread and pulled her chair up before the fire and beside the bailiff. “What kind of joke is this?” she asked, grateful that his mood had changed.
He laid the glove across his leg and opened his letter. “No joke, Susan. My chief shepherd lost his left hand in a shearing accident a few years back. I wrote to Joel about it, and now he sends the right glove that he has no use for, every time he buys a new pair.”
“The two of you are so clever,” Susan commented, picking up the glove.
“It’s a small thing, but just what old Ben Rich needed to get himself over the melancholy of it all,” the bailiff explained. He smiled again in that oblique way that she was beginning to recognize as shyness. “I don’t think any old Waterloo shades would rise and haunt me if I fibbed and told the old fellow that Steinman was a war hero. It seemed to help.”
“I think you were all heroes,” she said softly, shy herself now as she returned the glove to his leg.
“Not all,” he said, his voice intense again, with no lilt to it. “Not all,” he repeated, leaning back again. “I could tell you...”
He paused. “Except that I won’t.” He picked up the note from the employment agent, and his face relaxed as he continued reading. “Oh, this is good, Susan. ‘David, here is another glove for Ben Rich from his Jewish Waterloo hero, Steinman the Magnificent.’” He looked at Susan, then back at the letter. “Except that I don’t understand this part,” he commented, holding the paper closer to the fire. ‘“Remember the debt I said I could never pay? Have I paid it now? Let me know what you think. Your Waterloo albatross, Joel.’” he crumpled the letter and overhanded it into the fireplace. “Joel is, at times, inscrutable.”
“Waterloo albatross?” Susan asked. She hitched her chair closer. “I have been wondering how you know Mr. Steinman. And what is this debt? And I wish I knew why he was so keen to send me here, considering that Lady Bushnell is a bit of an ogre,” she grumbled, folding the blue dress and putting it on the bureau.
The bailiff looked up from the little blaze from the burning paper and gave her his full attention. His frown turned into a modest smile, and then a grin that went all the way to his eyes. She gazed back at him, pleased that he was gone from gloomy to elated in so short a time, and unable to resist smiling at him, too. What a good thing that my social class makes me impervious to bailiffs with shady backgrounds, she told herself. All of a sudden she didn’t know what to do with her hands. As David Wiggins continued to smile at her, she put them behind her back. Welshmen are so changeable, she thought. I wonder what is on his mind?
“I’m glad you’re feeling cheerful again, but I am just nosyenough to want to know how you became friends with a Jewish employment agent, and at Waterloo yet? I would not have thought Mr. Steinman to be soldier material. That is, if you don’t mind telling me,” she asked, wondering why it was she had a marked tendency to babble in front of the bailiff.
“Oh my word,” David said, still regarding her with an expression that was beginning to make her stomach feel warm. “I suppose I saved his life, and he decided to become my burden. He swore he would do me a good deed that would fulfill his obligation.”
“And did he?” she asked. “From that letter, he seems to think so. Do you?”
“I think he has,” the bailiff replied after another moment of regard in her general direction. He patted the chair she had vacated. “Sit and I’ll tell you. It’s not a long story.”
She did as he said, thinking about Aunt Louisa and propriety, then tucked her feet up under her to be more comfortable. It would be rude for me to tell him that ladies did not listen to war stories, but who is to say that I am still a lady, anyway? she reasoned. There was nothing proper about having this man in her room, and so late at night, except that it felt right. Somehow, I must learn to trust my own judgment, she told herself.
“It’s a tame enough story, Susan. Joel Steinman was a purchasing agent with the army at Ostend, on the coast,” David began.
“You knew him then?”
He shook his head. “No. Our acquaintance was one of those sudden war things. He and others in the commissary went to Mont St. Jean to witness the battle from its height, so he told me later. The Fifth formed one of the squares on the battle line above the farmhouse called La Haye Sainte.”
“Wheat fields?”
“Yeah,” he said simply, and for a moment his eyes sawsomething far away. “By late afternoon it was not much of a square, what with Boney’s lovely daughters pounding away, and the chasseurs riding at us when the guns were silent.” He looked at her. “Have you ever been in a situation that you thought would never end?”
She decided it would be fatuous to compare endlessly waiting for her London Season to something as desperate as that battle, so she shook her head.
“It was the longest day of my life, and the shortest,” he said simply. “Time passed so strangely. It was during one of those intervals when the chasseurs were retiring down the hill and our own gunners were running from the protection of our squares back into the firing lines, when someone in the rear decided that we might—just might—be low on ordnance. Some of the non-combatants watching the fight were pressed into service. Joel was one of them.” The bailiff closed his eyes as if to aid his memory. “He leaped off the cart and tugged out two or three boxes of cartridges before we noticed that the chasseurs were returning, and the cart and driver had fled the front lines.”
“So there he stayed and fought?” Susan asked when the bailiff’s silence continued.
He opened his eyes. “No. There he stayed in time for a shell to crash into his arm. It must have been one of the last shells, before the cavalry was on us again. I was the closest man to him not otherwise occupied, or not wounded too seriously, so I ran to help.”
“No wonder he feels under obligation to you. How good that you were quick enough.”
To her surprise, he shook his head. “I was one of two sergeants still alive, and I left my position beside Lord Bushnell.” His voice shook, and his hand knotted into a fist as it rested on the arm of the chair. He looked at her again, as if asking for judgment. “What could I do? My duty was to stay by my commander, andhere was this man screaming in agony. I went to him, jerked on a tourniquet, but after the next charge, Lord Bushnell was dead.”
Susan rested her hand on his arm. “What could you have done differently?”
She removed her hand when he looked at it. “I should have let Joel die, and stayed by my commander, as I had done in all battles since Talavera, serving both father and son.”
She watched his face in the gentle glow of the fireplace and lamp. He seemed not so much troubled by what he was saying, as thoughtful. I suppose you have had years to revisit this strange, weird landscape over and over in your mind, she considered. “I’m sure the men of the regiment who survived do not blame you for what happened. How could anyone be everywhere?” she asked.
He touched her hand. “I don’t know why I am telling you this. Susan, as soon as I left Lord Bushnell’s side, he was shot by one of his own men. I had been protecting a coward from his own regiment.”
Chapter Nine
