Dedication

  To all those who love the Matilda Saga —

  and to the hundreds of generations of women

  whose stories have become part of it.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  To Keep Leeches

  Store in a sealed Glass Container exposed to Light. Feed weekly. Efficacious for Bruises, especially around the Eye or Knee. One Leech for each Application is Sufficient.

  From the Notebooks of Henrietta Bartley

  WATERLOO

  18 JUNE 1815

  She’d been born on a battlefield; she’d lost her mother on another. Perhaps this would be the battlefield she died on.

  Death crawled around her outside this small fort made of the piled bodies of French and English soldiers. A dozen living men perched their muskets on those who had once been their comrades to ward off attack.

  Beyond the safety of her square, a thousand men, or ten thousand men, lay around her wounded or dead. Horsemen slashed at their enemies, though the main battlefront had moved hours before. The grey and yellow smoke made it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead.

  The luckiest lay still. Other shattered bodies scrambled, struggled, men with legs blown off, some dragging their intestines as they vainly, briefly searched for aid.

  Hen could not help them all.

  She kept her eyes on the more superficial stomach wound she was stitching, glad her patient was unconscious, for she had neither the strength nor an orderly to keep him still. He was fifteen, perhaps, the same age as her, a smoke-black face seeping red from yet another wound, a scrape of shrapnel, perhaps, or a sword cut. Her father had ceased stitching altogether, taping wounds while their supplies held out. He and Hen had arrived in Brussels the day before, too late to acquire the horses, mules and panniers to which he was entitled. They had only the equipment they could carry.

  Surgeon Gilbert’s orders had been to proceed immediately to the Mont-Saint-Jean farm house. He, Hen and Assistant Surgeon Thompson had set out on the Waterloo road at first light, Hen wrapped in an old greatcoat, for the dawn was chill, even in midsummer. They’d trudged through mud and mist, and then green fields, and finally a wheat field sloping gently to a ridge. Larks sang, the wheat rustled. A few carts trundled past. Now and then horses passed them at a gallop, the only sign of war.

  And then the thunder, ripping the air, the ground vibrating. Hen instinctively looked at the sky, but the noise didn’t stop.

  This storm was cannon. Somewhere beyond the ridge ahead of them the battle had finally begun. Within a few heartbeats white horses erupted through the wheat, their blue-coated French riders with sabres drawn.

  Surgeon Gilbert flung Hen down into the mud. Men in red coats scrambled past, panting from a drift of gunpowder fog. British soldiers fleeing towards Brussels, thought Hen, holding her breath. They must be early deserters from what General Wellington called his ‘infamous army’, hastily assembled to fight the returning Napoleon.

  She froze as the French cavalry pursued the men through the field, slashing at necks, shoulders, the horses rearing, their hooves striking down any man who tried to protect himself with bayonet or sword.

  Minutes passed, or hours. Hen tried to peer towards the ridge, but already the battle smoke was too thick to make out what was happening. Even as she looked the haze spread towards them. More redcoats ran past, screaming, dying under the hooves of the cavalry horses or from sabre cuts. So many men, trying vainly to escape . . .

  Surely the battle had not been lost so soon? Napoleon had won the skirmishes at Ligny and Quatre Bras, but even he could not have defeated all the Allied armies within an hour, Hen assured herself. More men and horses appeared like apparitions in the smoke, then vanished, then surged forwards once more.

  At last the French cavalry retreated, a waving mass of red feathers and the glint of steel. There was no need for her father to tell her that it was impossible to head to Mont-Saint-Jean now. Instead Surgeon Gilbert managed to grab the sleeve of one of the fleeing redcoats. He and his friends hesitated, staring at Hen, then her father, then back to Hen again, unmistakably female despite her army coat, her gold plaits shining under her cap.

  ‘We need to form a square,’ ordered Surgeon Gilbert. ‘Hurry, you louts, if you want to live!’

  The first man stared at him. ‘Ain’t got enough men to form a square . . .’

  ‘Use the dead to build the walls,’ said Surgeon Gilbert shortly.

  The man blinked, then gestured to his companions. Assisting a surgeon in a defended square suddenly seemed safer than retreat harried by French cavalry — especially if, by some miracle and the inspired leadership of the Duke of Wellington, the Allied side won.

  Slowly other soldiers joined them, packing the bodies three or four deep at the base till the walls of dead were chest high — tall enough to shelter the living as the tides of battle swept back and forth, low enough to let them fire at the enemy, leaving a small gap that would let in a man, but not a horse. A square was impregnable, if each man held his position and kept his firearms loaded. Even cavalry could not penetrate an infantry square as long as the men who made up each side held their nerve. This square was doubly impregnable. The dead who made its walls could not retreat.

  Hen and her father kept their bodies low, binding, stitching, amputating, Assistant Surgeon Thompson placing those too badly injured to survive in rows at the back of the square, where they could die gazing at the sky, not under the hooves of cavalry horses.

  That had been hours back. The wheat was now a swamp of blood and mud. The sun drooped halfway to the horizon, spreading an orange glow through black and yellow smoke. Horses shrieked in challenge or died, their cries guttural among the shouts and moans of men. Somewhere across the ridge Napoleon and Wellington must still be urging on their troops. The ground trembled from cannon fire and horses’ hooves.

  Hen’s bonnet sat on the muck-soaked soil, holding surgical instruments. Her cap had become a cover for an amputated thigh. She still wore the coat, despite the heat, for she had mislaid her apron. Even her plaits had come loose: a nuisance, as she had to keep pushing the hair from her eyes as she worked, gold now streaked with blood.

  She bit off the final piece of thread from the stomach wound and began to stitch the boy’s face, three quick stitches merely to hold the cut together, rather than the sixteen that would have meant less scarring.

  There was no time at Waterloo for neatness.

  Hen moved to the next man lined up against the wall of bodies. A veteran, for his red uniform had faded to pink, thirty perhaps.

  And dead. She laid a blood-stiff coat over his face so her father would not waste time on a soldier beyond man’s aid, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. The dead man deserved tears, even if she didn’t know his name. The man lying beside him — a captain by his uniform — opened eyes as blue as the sky above the smoke and cloud. He stared at Hen and raised a trembling hand to touch her hair. ‘I am in Heaven then.’

  ‘Not yet I warrant, sir.’ Hen sliced open his trousers to try to find the source of the blood still pooling on the ground. If the blood flowed, they were still alive. ‘How goes the battle, Captain?’

  ‘Lost,’ said the captain, still smiling at her vaguely. He yawned, as men did as they died from loss of blood. ‘The French killed Ponsonby, you know. They’ve routed the Scots Greys. The Household Cavalry are all broken up.’

  He didn’t seem to notice Hen staring at his thigh. His femoral artery had been sliced through. It was a miracle he had lived even a few minutes. Already his eyes were closing. ‘The French waited till we were sixty feet away,’ he murmured, almost happily. ‘They opened fire. The whole rank of us mowed down like grass before a scythe . . .’

  The words faded. Hen gently shut his eyes.

  ‘Don’t you listen to ’im, Miss. The French cavalry is spent. The Iron Duke ’as us forming squares.’ The speaker might have been thirty or eighty, with the leathery skin of a lifetime soldier. ‘Don’t you worry about me, neither,’ he added. ‘Just got me arm broke. Got it set right now. I’ll be up and at ’em.’

  Hen glanced at his arm. It had indeed been set, strapped to what looked like a French bayonet, though she doubted the
man would be able to walk, much less fight . . .

  Which soldier was correct? Wellington had never lost a battle yet, but nor had he ever faced Napoleon, the master strategist of Europe. But Hen had seen enough warfare to know that those in the midst of battle might know least, for all they could see was their small corner.

  ‘Hen! I need you!’ Impossible to hear her father’s words from across the square, but she guessed what he was saying as he nodded at a bloodstained sergeant the volunteers had placed on the ground before him.

  She grabbed her bonnet of instruments and ducked over to him, keeping her head down, for shots still rang out around them, even if the main forces were deployed elsewhere, then crouched beside him. Surgeon Gilbert’s arms were red to the elbow, and his leather apron black and dripping.

  Their patient on the blood-damp ground was young to be a sergeant, short and wiry. A cut bled freely on his cheek, but pumped strongly from his lower leg, cloth and flesh mangled together.

  And she knew him. Had she met him after the battle of Vimeiro? Or was it Corunna, Talavera, Lisbon, Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca? Perhaps it had been the Battle of Toulouse. Toulouse was where Mama had died, a cut turned septic so even her remedies couldn’t cure her. Hen and her father’s grief remained private among the public triumph as General Wellesley — now the Duke of Wellington — defeated Marshal Soult, ending Napoleon’s rule over most of Europe.

  Until ninety days ago, when Napoleon returned.

  ‘Papa, it’s Sergeant Drivers,’ she said urgently. ‘Remember? We met him and his wife just after the Battle of Salamanca. Sergeant Drivers.’

  Surgeon Gilbert stared wearily at the crumpled body in front of him. ‘That was a good night,’ he said slowly.

  Hen nodded. Sergeant Drivers had just been promoted on the field for bravery. He’d stolen a chicken to celebrate, breaking Wellesley’s orders not to loot. He’d asked Mama to hide it. The best place to hide a chicken, of course, was in a stew pot.

  She remembered the sergeant’s mischievous face as he opened his coat to show Mama his feathered plunder. Sergeant Drivers and his wife had dined with them that night, on Spanish chicken stewed with orange juice and almonds, and Mama’s soda bread. The sergeant’s wife was Spanish, like Mama. She and Mama had danced after dinner, clicking their fingers instead of castanets, while one of the carters played a guitar, a crowd gathering to clap the beat.

  And then the sergeant had danced with Hen, showing her the steps and laughing at her mistakes. So many women to choose from, but he had asked a twelve-year-old girl to dance with him . . .

  ‘His leg will have to go,’ said Surgeon Gilbert abruptly.

  Not his leg, thought Hen desperately. How could he dance with only one leg?

  Sergeant Drivers stared up at them, echoing her thoughts. ‘A man’s no use without a leg.’

  But there was no choice. Or rather there was a choice, but little time in which to make it. The sergeant had lost too much blood already. She took a breath, steadying herself, and bent down close to him. ‘Sergeant Drivers,’ she said clearly.

  The sergeant tried to focus on her face. ‘Little Miss Hen,’ he muttered.

  ‘Not so little now. Do you trust me, Sergeant?’

  ‘Little Miss Hen,’ he repeated, still gazing at her, as if wondering what she was doing among the bayonets and cannon.

  ‘My father is a surgeon, remember? I’m helping him. If we don’t take off your leg you’ll lose your life. Do you understand? Please. Your leg or your life?’

  Sergeant Drivers’s gaze met hers. ‘Life,’ he said at last. He managed to smile. ‘Little Miss Hen! Best chicken I ever ate.’

  ‘Remember it now,’ said Hen, automatically smiling back at him. Sometimes we can give nothing but a smile. After which battle had Mama said that? Hen had smiled at every patient since.

  ‘Just keep thinking of that chicken and how you’ll be eating more, and just as good. Is Mrs Drivers with you?’ Hen grabbed the iron clamp.

  ‘Aye, Isobel’s waiting for me in Brussels . . .’ The words became a gasp as Hen twisted the clamp around his thigh, cutting off the blood supply as Thompson held the man down.

  Surgeon Gilbert’s bone saw began to cut through flesh, muscle and both bones in the man’s leg. The amputation took less than a minute — the time that it took for Sergeant Drivers to scream eight times, gripping the ground with white fingers, holding himself with such iron control that the assistant surgeon didn’t need to hold him down. Few surgeons could cut as fast or as neatly as Surgeon Gilbert. His patients mostly survived.

  Hen took up the wooden-handled surgical iron, red hot in its bed of coals. Sergeant Drivers screamed again as she pressed the iron to the living stump.

  Sergeant Drivers fainted, which meant Hen did not have to spare him some of her small supply of laudanum till he was conscious again. The wound was now sealed cleanly, with no further bleeding, and so unlikely to become infected, especially with his wife to care for him. Assuming the French allowed those in this square to live . . .

  She blinked away tears. Useless tears. Stupid tears. But she had never seen a man take his surgery so bravely.

  ‘Don’t want to be tripping over this.’ Thompson hauled the sergeant’s shattered leg over to the wall of bodies. Hen forced herself not to look at it. It had been such a happy night . . .

  Surgeon Gilbert wearily moved to the next man in line — a Frenchman, but Thompson had checked he was unarmed and Surgeon Gilbert did not refuse to tend the enemy. Hen picked one of the last clean rags from the surgery bag and dipped it in rose oil. She tied it carefully over Sergeant Drivers’s stump, then removed the clamp. She took his hand as she studied his face, noting the darkness of blood loss under his eyes, but his pulse was strong. What had he and his wife been doing since Salamanca? Serving in the Americas perhaps . . .

  Something moved behind her. She turned in time to see a young man — an officer in the fine uniform of the Hussars — quickly dismount from his horse, then haul the bloody body draped over it across his shoulder. He stepped through the narrow passage in their protecting wall of dead and laid the body down.

  He beckoned to Hen. ‘Surgeon! Attend this man. Now!’

  ‘He’ll have to wait his turn.’ Hen moved towards the next patient. Back in their Peninsular days her father had adopted the new French system of triage — the most urgent cases attended first, no matter what their rank. Those he knew he could not help were not treated at all.

  ‘How dare you?’ The officer grabbed the collar of her coat and hauled her up to face him. ‘Egad, sir, I’ll have you cashiered for this. This man is a lieutenant in the Household Cavalry . . .’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s the Prince of Wales. Let go, you fool, or you’ll get us both shot.’ She pulled away from him, ducking down behind the cover of the walls again.

  The officer squatted automatically and stared at her. Hen knew the moment he actually saw her face above the bulk of her army greatcoat, the tangle of her blonde hair.

  ‘You’re a girl!’ The officer stared around the square. ‘Someone said there was a surgeon here.’ He hesitated. ‘They’ve burned the chateau. I’d better try to get him to the hospital at Mont-Saint-Jean. But my horse is blown and there’s Frenchies on either side. I don’t know that he’ll make it.’

  The body on the ground groaned, becoming a young man, twenty perhaps. Hen kneeled, quickly assessing him. A pale face, with the sunken eyes of massive blood loss; his left arm shattered just below the elbow, a rough tourniquet above. No other wound visible.

  The young man opened his eyes and stared at her. Brown eyes, the clearest she had ever seen. A small eddy of clean air and sunlight drifted over them. ‘An angel come to hell,’ the young man whispered, then closed his eyes again.

  ‘Where is the surgeon?’ demanded the other officer urgently, peering through the smoke.

  ‘Busy.’ She did not bother to call the man ‘sir’. Surgeon Gilbert would operate on at least another six men before he would attend this lieutenant. ‘Threatening him won’t help,’ she added, with pride.

  Her father had been on a half-pay pension when he had taken up his commission again only a week earlier. If Wellington won — when Wellington won, Hen told herself — her father would probably be put back on half pay once more: there would be little need for army surgeons once the war was over. But there’d be the prize money from this battle. It might even be enough to have the cottage by the sea he had promised her mother, and which her mother had not lived to see.