She smiled a farewell at Madelaine, and the captain led her away.
“I’m to be all alone, am I?” said the duke. “I don’t suppose you’d come to my rescue, Mrs Ardingly, and do me the honour of this dance?”
“Oh yes!” the duchess agreed. “Not that a country dance is a very wonderful place for conversation, but you must let her tell you all about her cause. I’m determined to be a subscriber!”
Fifteen
Sebastian had left theballroom after his dance with Lady Frances. He returned in time for the second dance’s conclusion, and saw Madelaine being led from the dance floor by Captain Littleton. It seemed her dance with the duke had swiftly led to another invitation.
The man took her to the side of the room, where his wife sat with her sisters. From the smiles, it looked as though introductions were being made.
Mrs Littleton’s sisters were the Gretna Getaways, as Sebastian had once named the flighty, giddy Miss Parlings. He suspected they both knew it, but they still eyed him with smiling interest as he drew up at Mrs Ardingly’s side. Like the captain, she was standing, the other three women sitting down.
“I wonder,” Mrs Ardingly addressed the captain, not seeming to notice Sebastian’s arrival, “did you or any of your military colleagues read the article on army floggings published inThe Examiner?”
Ah. Ofcoursethat was to be the topic.
“Yes. I read it.”
“And you don’t agree?”
“That it’s barbaric? I agree with that, all right. And that it’s a waste of men—not just the one punished, but all those who then have to take care of the wretch. But I was also at Badajoz, and I saw the looting there. I know what atrocities can take place when discipline breaks down. It was the darkest irony that men who helped us win that unwinnable battle and survived those odds should then be hanged by their own officers. But Wellington had little choice. And it worked to stop the foulness, foul as it may have been.”
He pulled a face, uncomfortable shadows in his eyes as he looked away to the ceiling, the floor, the gallery where the musicians rustled and retuned.
The shadows were at odds with his slight, boyish frame and his jolly red coat. They were at odds with the spirit of the ball.
“The thing is, Mrs Ardingly,” the captain went on, “you’re right about the effects of cruelty on men. Most soldiers—the common sort who fill the ranks and take the brunt of everything—aren’t there through choice. A lot of them are rough and brutal even before they face war. They’re escaping from starvation, from crimes, or they’ve nowhere else to be and no other way to earn coin. And then you have a handful of officers, used to having servants leap at their every command, who’re put in charge of those men and responsible for creating such discipline as to make them march for mile after mile in killing heat and make camp and break it, night after night, and live on starvation rations, on rotten meat and fouled bread and never enough water.”
Yes, certainly an odd topic for a ballroom, but Sebastian stood and listened alongside Mrs Ardingly. The man’s wife and her sisters were chatting amongst themselves.
“There are two ways of being an officer, Mrs Ardingly. You can lead from the front and by example. Or you can push from the back and prod your men along with a sharpened stick. It’s a damn sight harder to be the first kind. There aren’t many men who can. And those who can’t… I think they live in fear of that mass of men before them turning and fighting back… Mutiny, I suppose.That’swhy they order the floggings. It’s why such punishments are written into army law. There aren’t many ways for a handful of men to control a hundred others—control them to the point where they will go obediently to their deaths.”
But no, there is a third type,Sebastian silently interjected.Men like my uncle, who flog and punish merely because they enjoy it and it makes them feel strong.
“But you said you thought I was right,” said Mrs Ardingly to the captain, “about the effects of such cruelty?”
He nodded, grim. “I’ve seen more men flogged than I’d ever care to remember. Those who survived it…do you think they ever wholeheartedly followed a command again? Or ever grew to love an officer? Bitter resentment, you called it, and that’s an apt description. Resentment and distrust. Those men who were flogged are the ones most likely to hold back at a vital moment, or to desert, or to turn on their own officers.” He gave a cold laugh. “We treat those men like animals—they’ve been treated little better since birth—and then we ask them for such bravery as a knight from legend rarely shows.”
He glanced around, perhaps feeling he was neglecting his wife. The woman met his look with a very wifely smile—all patience and understanding.
Thus fortified, he turned back to finish his piece. “I think you’re right, Mrs Ardingly, that if we want better people, we need them to receive better treatment. We know it with young horses. Why not with men? Count me in, madam. I will gladly support your cause.”
He gave a smart little military salute and turned to attend to his wife.
Perhaps Mrs Ardinglyhadknown Sebastian was there all along, because now she looked round at him with a beaming smile, her current mood apparently good enough to make her forget she hated him.
With a few polite words and a bow, he detached her from the group under the guise of taking her to get some cooling lemonade.
Shewasflushed. Pink and pretty and almost girlish as she told him all about meeting the Duchess of Cumbria and her friends.
“They are going to subscribe! And the duchess might even become a patron. And Captain Littleton has committed himself too. I believe he might join our board.”
“He will do you good. Society has decided to make rather a darling of the heroically injured captain.”
“They are right to do so!”
“He’s won you over too, has he? It’s always very easy to like people who say exactly what one wants to hear.”
