Susanna Fraser Read Online Free Page A

else’s. He had a way of bringing comfort with him.
    “Do you want me to stay with you?” Luisa asked.
    “Not tonight, I think,” she said. “I’ll need to explain to Jake, as best I can, once he wakes up, and I think it’ll go easier if it’s just the two of us.” Luisa was a dear friend, closer than any Rose had ever had other than her sister-in-law, Jenny, back home, but she was a talker, and just then Rose hungered for quiet more than anything else.
    Luisa nodded. “If you change your mind, I’m right here. I’ll get Fernando.” She ducked into Rose’s tent and emerged a few moments later, bent under the weight of her heavy, sleeping son. Her husband held out his arms for the boy, and she passed him over and gave Rose another hug.
    “Take the stew,” Rose heard herself say. It wouldn’t do to waste food, even now.
    “What about you?”
    She put her hand to her throat and swallowed. Blood and death. Beef and garlic mixed with the red wine Colonel Dryhurst had given her as part of her pay last time she cooked for one of his dinner parties. A treat for you and Sam to share , he’d said with a kindly wink. “I—I can’t.”
    “I understand,” Luisa said. “But you must eat tomorrow. No starving.”
    Rose shook her head and blinked back tears. She wasn’t one to go into a decline. Tomorrow she’d need all her strength and wits about her to decide what she must do. Surely for tonight she could only be a new widow.

Chapter Two
    Elijah intended to go straight to Rose’s tent after he entrusted Sam’s body to the burial detail, but distraction in the form of Lieutenant Farlow intervened.
    “Corporal Cameron,” the young officer called from the entry to his tent. “Just the man I hoped to see.”
    Elijah made himself smile. Ordinarily he was happy to help Farlow—to be the subject of non-patronizing respect from an officer, however junior, truly was gratifying. But now the necklace still hidden beneath his coat seemed to burn into his skin with a far greater discomfort than its bulk alone could account for. The sooner he was free of it, the better. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “How can I help you?”
    Farlow opened his tent flap wider and waved him in. “It’s these dashed accounts again. The colonel wants the Registry of Deceased Soldiers brought up to date as promptly as may be, but I don’t trust my own figures. You know.”
    Elijah did. If one judged Farlow by his speech and manner, he seemed a clever and likely young gentleman indeed—alert, quick-witted and well-informed about everything from the state of the army to debates in Parliament to the latest doings of the London stage. But those gifts deserted him when he was presented with a book or a pen. He could read and work sums, but he was slow and halting about it, prone to misspell words and scramble numbers. It was a mystery to Elijah how such a thing could be, for a man who’d had every advantage of education from infancy up, but he supposed it was something like Pritchard, who struggled to keep step on the march, or Elijah’s own sister, Miriam, who could not carry a tune. He knew Farlow had been sent into the army because his family despaired of placing him in any other genteel profession.
    “I suppose they must have imagined me doing nothing but riding about on a horse waving a sword,” he’d confessed ruefully when he admitted his struggles to Elijah not long after joining the regiment as an ensign. Colonel Dryhurst had invited him to dinner, showing his usual careful civility to a young officer. Elijah had been called into that same meal to settle a bet with an officer from another regiment about the mental capacities of the Negro. He hated such performances. It had been one thing when he was a boy, but as a grown man and an NCO, to be called into the colonel’s tent to recite poetry and demonstrate mental arithmetic was humiliating. Yet it would be churlish to refuse his colonel, the patron of his family who’d