To attain freedom, first she had to find Lord Somerton’s heir.
Chapter One
LONDON 28 JUNE 1815
‘Are you certain he’s here?’ Isabel—Lady Somerton—asked, her voice muffled by the lavender-scented kerchief she had pressed to her nose and mouth.
The pathetic piece of muslin did little to conceal the stench of unwashed bodies, blood, corrupted wounds, and worse that pervaded the makeshift hospital. The price Wellington had paid for the victory lay crowded on filthy straw mattresses on the makeshift hospital floor of an old warehouse in Battersea.
The wounded of Waterloo had been crowded together, so many of them that only a curtain separated the officers from the other ranks. Most still wore the tattered remnants of the uniform they had worn in battle over ten days ago, and it looked to Isabel as if the rough bandages over their wounds had not been changed in days.
A young boy, hardly older than Peter Thompson, the stable boy at Brantstone, screamed for his mother. Her heart stopped at the heartrending sound, and she turned and knelt beside him, smoothing the hair back from his burning forehead. The childhad probably been a drummer boy, caught in the horror of the battle.
He clutched her hand, looking at her with unseeing eyes, and she murmured to him, the sort of platitudes she imagined a mother would use with an ailing child. His breathing steadied and then stilled; the hand clutching hers fell away.
Her companion, Bragge, the Somerton man of business, touched her shoulder.
‘Come away, my lady.’
She stared down at the child on the cot.
‘But ...’
‘He’s dead, my lady.’
Bile rose in her throat, but she swallowed it down. She could not show weakness, not now. She needed all her strength.
She rose slowly to her feet and cast the dead boy one last look, her lips moving in silent prayer for his soul and the mother who would grieve for her son.
Beyond the curtain, the conditions for the officers were little better. At least they had cots, not straw-filled bags, but those who had survived the rapid evacuation to England were in a poor state.
‘The orderly over there said he’s in that corner, m’lady.’ Bragge’s voice carried no conviction, and he looked as green and sickly as she felt.
He held the lantern higher to illuminate the man they had sought for so many months.
He lay on his left side with his back to them. A torn and stained scarlet jacket with yellow facings and a captain’s epaulets had been thrown across his shoulders, and a ragged blanket covered his torso and legs. All Isabel could see of the man was dark, matted hair.
Isabel held back for a moment, wondering what she would say. She had rehearsed a pretty little speech in the coach, but now, as she looked down at the man, known to the world as Captain Sebastian Alder, the words deserted her. How would hetake the news? It could not be every day that the humble son of a country parson found himself elevated to the peerage. Would he rejoice or rail against his mother, who had kept the secret of his parentage from him?
Doubt seized her. What manner of man would he turn out to be? Surely a parson’s son would have some education, but would he be capable of running the Somerton estates? For the first time since hearing the news that they had found the heir to the Somerton estates, a niggling doubt caught her.
‘M’ lady?’
Bragge’s voice broke through her musing, and she took a deep breath. Steeling her nerves, she reached out a gloved hand, touching the man on the shoulder.
‘Captain Alder?’
Her uncertainty caught in the rising tone.
When he did not stir, she looked up at Bragge, her heart sinking.
‘Are we too late?’ she ventured.
‘Try again, my lady.’
She bent down and closed her fingers on his shoulder, shaking him.
With a speed that took her completely by surprise, a hand grasped her wrist as the man rolled onto his back, hot, angry, feverish eyes seeking out the person who had disturbed him.
