Star Crossed Seduction Read Free

English and damned their cowardly foes, bringing alive the clash of swords and the roar of the cannon—battle as it had always been presented to folk at home. But it was hard to tell which battle the man was romancing. He might have been describing any from the Crécy to Waterloo. The English were brave, the foe craven. And no ballad told of the screams of the dying or the stench of intestines slashed through and exposed to the sun.
    “It appears you’re being honored,” Major Stanley said.
    “Me?”
    “Didn’t you hear him mention the Pindaris? He’s singing up your battle, Trev. Puff out your chest, man. You’re the hero of the day.”
    Trev’s ears perked up. It was, indeed, his battle the man was offering up as entertainment to his audience with his garbled account of Baji Rao’s treachery and the rout of the Pindaris, though in the ballad singer’s version, those brave Maratha warriors were reduced to brigands no different from the highwaymen who infested Hounslow Heath.
    The singer dwelled with relish on the numbers who had died on either side, and the crowd roared their approval upon hearing how the eight hundred Europeans and their native allies had held off eighteen thousand enemy horse with only eighty-six men killed or wounded on the English side.
    It was glorious indeed. So very glorious. But as the man’s chanted flow of stanzas drew toward the end of the story, Trev braced himself, knowing as the crowd did not, what had come next: the rest of the deaths, the ones that had not been added into that paltry eighty-six: the deaths of the wives of their native allies, the sepoys, the innocent women who’d been raped and murdered by a troop of enemy raiders just as the armies had massed for the final battle.
    He fought down the memory of the bloodied saris, the babies’ brains spattered against the rocks. It had been a necessary sacrifice. Had they ordered the women’s camp to be moved somewhere safer, it would have given away their battle plan. But still, his stomach clenched, and he tasted a sour taste that was not entirely due to the major’s cheap wine.
    Sensing his thoughts, the major tugged on his arm and tried to draw him from the crowd. He knew the whole story. Trev had told him the gist of it, late one night on shipboard when, unable to sleep, he’d sat up on deck the whole night, watching the Southern Cross wheel across the sky.
    But Trev wasn’t going to let the ballad singer’s chant drive him away. He would not give in to weakness. The thing had happened, and he could do nothing about it now. He’d be worthless as a commander if he let a memory unman him. War was glorious only in verses of the Fleet Street hacks whose words this ballad singer chanted. Every soldier knew that the reality was different, and that the bravest thing many a soldier would do was to keep on living after the battle was over, knowing his victory’s true cost.
    As he must.
    He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes for a moment, forcing his mind to concentrate on the workmen who were pressed up against him, making himself inhale their stench, and hoping the reek of onions and unwashed bodies would drag him back to the present. When at length he opened his eyes, he startled.
    A woman was staring at him. The woman in black.
    Her eyes, which had sparkled so when she’d brought the crossing boy his dinner, were hard now, and glowed with what looked like contempt. The kindness he’d seen in them was gone. Her reproachful glare was the look he saw in the eyes of the sepoys’ women when they came back to him in dreams to rail at him for his failure to protect them.
    Her gaze pierced through him, relentless and unforgiving. She had caught him in a moment of naked suffering, judged him, and condemned him.
    As he tore his eyes away from hers, she vanished. Her disappearance left him bereft.
    Why should it matter? She was no one. A stranger he’d never see again. It had only been a whim that set him chasing after her. But,