Page 13 of The Forbidden Love of an Officer
He rose and turned to her. Ignoring her observation, he squatted, gripped the hem and sliced into it with the sword’s edge. After he had done it, he dropped the sword and tore a strip with his hands. She stood still. Frozen.
When he straightened, he said, ‘Ellen, can you tie this about the man’s arm? Here…’ He clasped one of her hands and pulled her towards the postilion rider who sat at the back of the carriage. ‘Do not worry about taking his coat off, just tie it over the top, just above the wound, as tightly as you can to stop the bleeding. Do you understand?’
She nodded and began as the man watched her in silence, in pain, looking faint as blood dripped from his limp hand onto the ground.
Paul walked away. She heard him talking to the driver and realised they were moving the highway man’s body. Her trembling fingers struggled to tie the cotton, but she managed.
Cold seeping deep into her flesh, she shivered, her teeth chattering.
‘Ellen, get in the carriage.’ Paul’s words were an order. Not knowing what else to do, she did. It was just as cold within, and dark, and lonely.
After a moment he opened the door. ‘I am going to ride on the box to the nearest inn. We will sort everything out there.’ There was a dark stain on his grey pantaloons. Blood.
She nodded. She had left everything she knew behind her. This was a world of unknowns. She had never imagined anything like this might happen.
The carriage lurched into motion. She heard Paul talking on the box above her, but not his words.
Images of the man lying on the grass and Paul standing over him cluttered Ellen’s mind. Her senses waited for something to happen as the carriage rolled slowly on towards the next inn, their pace restricted to protect the wounded man who must be sitting beside Paul.
Every sound reverberated through her body. She could still smell the gunpowder as if it were in the carriage. She shivered, her arms folding over her chest as she swallowed, trying to clear her dry throat. Then she gritted her teeth to stop them chattering.
The next inn was in the middle of nowhere at the edge of the road. The golden light of an oil lantern bleached out the moonlight when they turned into the courtyard, but the carriage was still dark inside, since Paul had put out the lamp.
Ellen looked through the window, her fingers shaking as she put on her cloak and bonnet.
Yawning men appeared from the stalls, grooms ready to change their horses.
She saw Paul jump down from the box and say something, and a man’s eyes opened wide, staring at Paul. Then the man ran into the inn.
Paul turned to the carriage, opened the door and knocked down the step, not meeting her gaze until he offered his hand to her. The hand that had recently killed a man. But then it must have killed many men during the Peninsular War. Her fingers shook as she took it.
‘Ellen,’ he whispered, ‘I have told them you are my wife. I have asked for a private parlour for you to wait in while I sort this mess out. Do you wish me to order a warm drink for you? Chocolate? You look in shock.’
She nodded. She was shocked.
His fingers holding hers, he led her across the courtyard, and she tried not to think of the dead man whose body lay sprawled over the back of the carriage, on top of Paul’s trunk.
But she did think of the injured man as she heard him climb down behind her. There was a word spoken, ‘Surgeon’.
Paul had killed the man to protect them.
This was the ugly world he knew, she had only known the sanctuary of her father’s property.
A lone rider left the courtyard, she presumed to fetch a surgeon.
‘Ellen, wait here,’ he commanded when she was seated in the parlour. But he did not then walk away; he squatted down and rubbed her gloved hands as he held them together, as if warming them. Then he said more gently, ‘I will be back in a while, as soon as I can.’
She nodded.
He had not returned when her warm chocolate arrived. She sat in silence, sipping it – drowning. How would she cope on the edge of a battlefield? Paul was more than the man she knew, the man who overflowed with vibrancy, who smiled and laughed easily – he had killed a man with no thought, or remorse.
She had taken neither her bonnet nor her cloak off, and the fire in the hearth blazed, but she was cold.
Paul arrived an hour later – an hour which she’d endured in the form of a statue, sitting in the chair staring at the cup of chocolate in her hands.
He shut the door behind him; the action sent her nerves reeling. She was unused to being in a room alone with a man, and yet they had spent days confined in the carriage. But now she knew she had spent those days with a man who could kill so brutally and close his heart off to it.
An expression of pain flickered across his face as she looked up. He had seen her flinch.
