The man had paled and stammered an apology.
“I am Herr Berg,” Georg had told him. “Remember that.”
“Yes, Your Excell—I mean, Herr Berg. I just wanted to say, you are my hero, Your Excell—I mean, Herr Berg. Truly, you are. What you did at Leipzig?—”
Georg skewered him with a glare.
“But we shall not speak of it,” the man stammered. “It is an honour that you sleep among us here. Truly it is.”
The poor man had nearly saluted again before Georg’s hiss brought him to his senses. The man returned some time later bearing a pile of pillows and a blanket and pressed it into Georg’s arms. “Please, take them. They are mine.”
Georg thanked him with a curt nod.
He had made his bed on the narrow bench, a pillow wedged behind his back and the blanket drawn over hislegs, which he had stretched out full length in front of him after Schneider had pulled off his boots. He leaned back against the wooden panelling, arms crossed, scowling at nothing in particular.
The cause of his ill humour was, in the first instance, that cheeky, coppery-haired poppet, who had managed to rile him for reasons he could not entirely account for. Field Marshal Hartenberg was not a man easily provoked. Even in the thick of battle, he was renowned for his nerves of steel.
He huffed.
The second cause lay ill with the measles in the room above.
His bride.
For the first time since his betrothal, a sliver of worry about his future discomfited him. And because ‘worry’ was a foreign word in the Field Marshal’s vocabulary, he was unsettled by the mere discovery that it unsettled him.
What, precisely, was the issue?
She was Julius’s sister. There was no man, aside from the Kaiser, he respected more. There was no man he trusted more. His sister looked graceful enough, as graceful as one could look when one was suffering from the measles, and the few words she’d directed at him had been reasonable and composed. She was, clearly, a gently bred lady.
He should be glad, really, that he was to marry such a fine woman.
She would do very well.
But no, that was not it. Georg shifted and adjusted the pillow behind him. Certainly she would ‘do’ as a wife.
As anyone’s wife.
She would be the grace of anyone’s drawing room, makea fine figure as the field marshal’s wife, a hostess, a salonnière and so forth.
What bothered him, tremendously, was that she had been absconding. Running from him as though she were coerced into this marriage against her will. That was, of course, if that poppet was to be believed, for it had come out of her mouth with poorly concealed glee. But he had no reason to doubt her, since she was Lady Evie’s companion and must naturally have some insight into the workings of her mind.
He rubbed his brow with one finger, perplexed.
It appeared, to his great consternation, that Lady Evie did not want to be married to him.
She was running away.
From this engagement.
From him.
It was as certain as Napoleon’s downfall.
He had never once considered Lady Evie’s thoughts and feelings on the matter until the poppet had thrust them upon him.
This was a variable he had not counted on, though the longer he thought about it, the absurdity of never having considered such a possibility was rather striking. It was, frankly, embarrassing.
No, it was an unforgivable weakness. Catastrophic, even. To overlook a variable of such magnitude in the heat of battle was a fundamental error, and he had always considered himself above such failures. Alas, when it came to women, he found himself on tenuous, marshy ground. A withdrawal of troops would be the best tactic in such a situation, to reconnoitre before attempting a renewed offensive.
