Guns of the Dawn Read Online Free Page A

this clumsy girl has done with my hair!’ Alice demanded. She had their father’s golden locks, while both her sisters had their mother’s darkly
shining red, and she was altogether too aware of her striking looks. The war to Alice was merely an inconvenient rationing of suitors, as though the Parliament of Denland had set out purposefully
to keep her from making a decent match.
    ‘Alice, leave the poor girl alone,’ Emily said.
    Alice scowled at her. ‘Well, just look at me.’ She eyed her sister speculatively. ‘Better than you, though. At least my gown suits the occasion.’
    ‘Red? It’s not very tasteful,’ Emily said.
    Alice stuck her tongue out. ‘Well, I think it’s
patriotic
, thank you very much. I want to impress the soldiers. When are they coming, anyway? They’d better not be
late.’
    ‘They’re not coming because of you,’ Emily pointed out. ‘And they must be almost here. I saw their lights from upstairs. Cook, are you ready?’
    ‘I don’t know as I’ll ever be,’ replied their long-suffering cook, who did the work of three these days. ‘Which means, I s’pose, I’m ready as I’ll
get.’
    ‘Where’s Mary?’
    Cook indicated the front door with a jerk of her head.
    ‘In this cold, with the
baby?
She must be touched in the head.’ Emily went to the door and opened it a crack, feeling the chill course past her ankles. Sure enough, the
eldest Marshwic sister was out by the stables, a tall, shrouded shape caught by the light cast from the house.
    ‘Mary come in at once. You’ll catch your death!’ Emily shouted to her. She saw a pale flash as Mary turned her face towards the house. Beyond her, the lanterns of the
approaching men were weaving hazily through the mist.
    ‘Mary come on. Neither waiting nor watching will help them come any sooner.’
Or later
, Emily added to herself.
If it would, we’d both be standing out
there.
    She saw her sister turn and walk slowly back to the door, her face solemn. The baby clutched at her cloak with both tiny hands, its little red face screwed up against the cold.
    Emily cast a glance about Grammaine’s spacious kitchen, seeing her whole life arrayed around it. Her sisters, Mary withdrawn and Alice fussing; Cook at the hearth and Jenna working at the
imagined slight to Alice’s hair. There was Poldry, too, coming down the stairs in his shabby coat that he would never change until it fell apart altogether; while outside, she knew that Grant
would be feeding a horse and getting it ready to travel.
    Just one missing.
    ‘They’re at the gate, ma’am,’ said Poldry. He had stopped three steps from the bottom, his customary little pulpit from which he ordered the other servants. The station
gave him a curiously sombre look, like a minister conducting a funeral. Emily and Mary exchanged a look of shared strength.
    There was a knock on the door, and Emily knew that nobody else would open it. The task was left to her.
    And there they were as she opened the door to them. Behind them, horses steamed and stamped in the cold and dark and, when the glow of the lanterns from the kitchen fell across them, it was as
though they had not seen warmth or light for a long time. Here were a dozen serious-faced men on the move before the sun was, with pack-straps cinching their cloaks, and their crested helms tipped
back. In that light, with only the night behind them, they could have been of any age, or from any time. They were soldiers only, with everything else stripped from them.
    But closer study of each face in turn showed her many things. She saw eyes that were wide, a lip that trembled, pale faces, and all of them so young. Had any of them used a razor more than once?
Had they sweethearts, these lads, or had the woman that kissed each goodbye been a mother, watching her son recede into the darkness?
    In the lead was an older man, squat and unshaven in stark contrast to his charges. She recognized his face from two weeks before, preaching to