The footman’s expression was frankly sceptical. “His Excellency is in a meeting with the corps commanders but his imperial highness is with his troops. He is expected back later in the evening.”
Pippa’s face brightened with relief. “He is out? Excellent. Lead me to his chambers, then, where I shall await him.” She followed him with a spring in her step. “What do you offer in terms of refreshment here?” was the last thing Evie heard her ask before she disappeared inside.
Schneider took a deep breath and straightened. “Let us not tarry, then. The meeting is in the war council chamber.”
Evie’s stomach knotted tighter with every step she tookas she trailed after Schneider into the palais. Up a wide staircase, down busy corridors, past countless doors.
She could hear his terse, clipped voice through a set of double doors standing open to a large room, dominated by a table covered in maps, over which several officers leaned, including a tall, broad-shouldered figure impossible to miss. Hartenberg.
“Napoleon moves to the north. His intent is clearly to fall upon Wellington and Blücher before our own preparations are complete. We shall cross the Rhine here,” he traced a line across the parchment, “two columns, near Mannheim and Basel. Our objective remains Nancy. Whatever befalls in the north, we advance.”
Schneider entered without ceremony and saluted.
Hartenberg looked up briefly and missed Evie, who had ducked behind the door just in time.
“Ah, Schneider. I had expected you back sooner. Did you bring the dispatches?”
“Yes, sir.” Schneider handed him a packet of documents, which Hartenberg promptly began to peruse. Schneider glanced back at Evie over his shoulder, but she waved him away with an urgent gesture.
She remained loitering by the door, feeling rather foolish. She now bitterly regretted not being officially announced. How long would she have to remain there before he noticed her?
Unless, of course, she announced herself.
The thought alone made her cringe.
And so she did what she had done at the Hofkriegsrat. She slid into a chair near the door and waited.
The meeting went on and on. Her head nodded forward more than once as she began to dozeoff.
“…and in the eventuality that the enemy proceeds on the right flank, we must?—”
A sharp silence fell. The absolute stillness was more menacing than any shout.
“Schneider!”
The roar finally shattered the quiet like a thunderclap, so loud and furious that Evie jerked awake, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“Not again! What in hell’s name is my wife doing here?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
To saythat the Field Marshal was angry was probably an understatement. He was pale with fury, his jaw was clenched, his nostrils flared, and a vein throbbed visibly in his left temple. But what Evie found most alarming was that expression in his eyes, so dark and terrible, and colder than the hardest steel.
She shrank in her chair.
“Y-your wife insisted on accompanying me, Your Excellency, together with the Countess L-Lindenstein. They were most insistent, it was impossible to talk them out of it.”
“Lindenstein’s wife, too! You have deliberately disobeyed orders, Schneider,” he said in an awful voice, and Schneider wilted like a tulip in the Sahara Desert.
He gave his aide-de-camp such a thorough dressing-down that even the highest officers paled and pulled out their handkerchiefs to dry their own sweating foreheads, relieved that they were not the object of His Excellency’s wrath.
A cold fury, hot as fever, rushed through Evie’s veins.
She had not seen her husband since their wedding day.She had travelled nearly a week to be with him, braving the worst roads, the most terrible kind of weather, and the most badly sprung beds in the shabbiest of inns. She was exhausted, hungry, and weepy, and so ridiculously relieved to finally see him alive and well, and not dead in a sea of blood.
Tears were springing into her eyes because that absurd sensation was unfurling in her chest again. She wanted nothing more than to throw herself into his arms and kiss him senseless, but he was busy scolding his aide-de-camp, who looked increasingly as though he was about to burst into tears himself.
“Enough,” she said quietly, but it was sufficient to startle him into pausing his castigation. “Schneider is not to be blamed because I did order him to take us along; he had no choice. And even if he had not taken us along, we would have stowed away somewhere in the luggage on the roof or in the trunks in the boot. We would have dressed up as boys and joined the next regiment on the way north. Would you have preferred that? I can think of at least another five different ways we could have managed to come here, none of them as safe and reliable as travelling with Schneider. So instead of taking him to task, be grateful that he did bring us, for we arrived safe and sound, when things could have taken a worse turn.”
