Suzanne Robinson by Lady Hellfire

lack of food and medical supplies. Alexis and his fellow cavalry officers of the Heavy Brigade had tried to supply their men out of their own pockets, but there was little food or medicine to be bought. Cholera and dysentery rampaged. By winter, men would be walking in the snow barefoot. After Balaclava, the wounded lay for hours alongside the dead without medical aid, without water.
    It was at Balaclava that Val and the Light Brigade were destroyed by a bungled order that sent the cavalry charging a battery of Russian guns. They rode one and a half miles down a valley under fire from the hills to either side. Alexis could still remember the consternation among hiscomrades in the Heavy Brigade as they watched the suicidal charge.
    Over six hundred men began the attack. Less than three hundred returned. In the confusion that followed the slaughter, Alexis searched for Val. He found his friend half buried under the body of a headless horse. His uniform was wet with blood and draped in the entrails of men and horses. He pulled Val from under the carcass and onto his own horse and rode for safety, only to get in the way of debris from an artillery blast himself. At least he’d been able to ride in spite of the holes in his shoulder and arm.
    That was in October. Two months of horror followed. He had Val transferred to his own yacht along with as many men as it would hold, and turned the craft into a hospital. If he hadn’t been wounded himself, he’d still be there watching men die because of the stupidity of fools like Val’s commander, the Earl of Cardigan.
    He’d been home since January, and Val had come with him since Val’s father was too old and uninterested to care for him. Not that Alexis would have allowed his friend to be under anyone else’s care. It was only in March that the doctors assured him that Val would live. Alexis’s happiness at the news soon turned to apprehension, for the atrocities Val had endured wounded his soul far more than his body.
    Inside the Dower House Alexis walked past rows of beds containing injured men. It had all started with his yacht full of wounded. Most of the men couldn’t afford good medical treatment, not the kind that would get them well instead of kill them. After the Crimea, Alexis hadn’t trusted the government to take care of them, so he’d brought them home. His fellow officers had heard about the Dower House, and begged to send their own wounded.
    Soon Alexis was hiring doctors and attendants, cooks and household staff. He wrote to Miss Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, and kept writing when her letters returnedprecious, hardheaded advice. He needed an administrator, and he needed more room. The newest invalids were housed in the cellar.
    Climbing down into that candle-lit room, Alexis stumbled over the bed of an infantryman. The man was unconscious, and a doctor was bending over him. As Alexis straightened up, he saw the physician pull a sheet over the man’s head and rise from his chair.
    “Gone, my lord. We got him too late to do any good.”
    “I only wish his last days had been spent in sunlight,” Alexis said.
    “He wouldn’t have known. But we do need room.”
    “I can add on to the house,” Alexis said. “But it will take so long, and the noise and mess would be unpleasant for the men. I need a bigger house. All these candles and lamps are dangerous. There was a fire last night.” He stopped, remembering Ophelia and her burned house. “Maitland House.”
    “My lord?”
    “I know where I can get a larger house. Excuse me, doctor.”
    He cut short his visit and hastened back to the castle. As his carriage clattered over the permanently lowered drawbridge, he calculated what amount to offer Miss Grey for Maitland House. He might as well offer for the whole estate, if she owned all the land. He would get the Tower back too. Then he wouldn’t have a hole in his lands anymore, and he’d rid himself of mountain goats. He wished her solicitor hadn’t