Chapter Two

They embarked from Antwerp on November 5, sailing down the majestic River Scheldt to its salty, wide mouth that emptied them into the North Sea, and then across the English Channel.

It was a stormy crossing, with Surgeon Frost, two other surgeons and assorted stewards in charge of the remaining soldiers from the Brussels hospitals who were probably as fit as they were going to be, considering. It chafed him to also escort Captain Baldwin, who was more robust than nearly anyone on board, including the doctors. The only thing that made Baldwin’s stifling presence endurable was that the medical crew knew his complaints and groans were fictitious.

“Sir, if he says, ‘When you get a moment, please bring me a headache powder,’ one more time, I swear I will carry him across the deck and toss him overboard,” Jake’s favorite hospital steward said. The man wasn’t many inches beyond five feet, but Jake understood the desperation in his voice, and thought perhaps he could do it.

“Patience, Douglas,” was his only comment. “Remember that you are heading soon to Canada with fellow hospital stewards. I still have to lug this…this boat anchor home to Yorkshire. I must admit I envy your destination.”

“I thank you for your endorsement, sir,” Douglas said. “I wish you could come along.”

Y ou have no idea , Jake thought. “Someone has to get Captain Baldwin to Brierton,” he said, striving for serenity.

Thanks to a strong stomach, Jake had no mal de mer . Neither did Captain Baldwin, except that the man moaned and tossed his head when anyone came within earshot, stretching out a feeble hand and weakly asking for a basin. “You have deserted me,” he managed to gasp when Jake came near. “I am sinking.”

I f only, Jake thought, tired of the man. “It’s no desertion. There is a more sick man than you are on board, a corporal in your own Fifth Foot.”

“You mean you are truly abandoning me?” the captain asked, nothing in his voice sounding weak now. His eyes narrowed into mean little slits. “For a corporal?”

D eep breath, Jake , he told himself. Deep breath . “No, sir. I am merely assisting someone far more ill than you are. Look around you. There is a basin to puke in. Over there is water, wine, and crackers suitable for someone troubled with sea sickness.”

“But I require beef roast with drippings and potatoes,” Captain Baldwin tried again. “You know how I like it, lightly seared, then allowed to stew in its juice.”

“Excuse me, please. There is someone actually sick,” Jake said and left the captain to stew in his juice.

He spent most of the short crossing with the corporal, who never complained of his festering leg wound that never healed, then had never complained when Jake was forced to amputate higher up a month ago. During the crossing, Jake stayed at his side, sleep a distant goal never reached. With the help of his steward, the two of them carried the corporal on deck as the white cliffs of Dover came into sharp relief at last. The railing was lined with ambulatory patients eager for that look at home.

“I wanted to see it one last time,” the soldier told him. “Thank you.” It was his final conversation as he looked, shuddered, then died as quietly and bravely as he had lived.

Jake had thought he was immune to death. The corporal’s quiet request for one glimpse of home touched something deep inside, that war and tumult and Waterloo had not been able to extinguish. He didn’t close the dead man’s eyes until some moments had passed, preferring to hold him, slightly raised, for whatever view remained in those now-peaceful eyes.

“I am so tired,” he whispered to his last actual patient of Waterloo. He knew the others would make it to hospitals in England, and ultimate discharge. “I have done my duty by you, corporal. You were worth ten thousand Captain Baldwins.”

It still remained to get the captain to Brierton. Baldwin sulked through disembarkation in Plymouth, and a brief stay in Stonehouse Naval Hospital, where other medical men shook their heads over him and out of his hearing gave their condolences to Jake Frost, tasked with getting this useless hunk of carbon to Yorkshire.

Then at last––at last! The matter became magic. Like the sorriest nag who raises his head and sniffs water and the stables, Captain Baldwin roused himself from his self-induced stupor to engage a post chaise. Insisting on crutches––he didn’t need even a cane––the captain made his fictionally painful way to a popular counting house and fortified himself with money. He managed a graceful collapse in the foyer of Carter and Brustein’s firm which gave him the sympathy and adulation for a wounded warrior that the man craved.

When he was carried by some of the staff to the waiting post chaise, Captain Baldwin glared at Jake. “You are a miserable disgrace of a surgeon,” he said.

How much can one man take? Jake managed a serene smile. He had his letter of release from Wellington himself, grudgingly also signed by General Sir David Baldwin. He was on English soil now and no longer connected to the British Army Medical Corps, except that he was bound now by honor, since he had given his word to the general. Still…

“Au contraire, Captain Baldwin,” he said. “I prevented your death on so many occasions in Brussels.”

“That’s impossible,” his boat anchor and millstone sputtered. “There was no enemy in Brussels!”

“I can name you any number of physicians, surgeons, and stewards––maybe even a few nuns––who would happily have killed you,” he replied, his voice even, his mind clear because he had to get this man to Yorkshire. “You demanded services for an almost non-existent wound and robbed our time to work among the truly suffering.”

“I could have died at Waterloo,” Captain Baldwin insisted.

“Unlikely, since you were either hiding in the center when the regiment formed squares, or seeing how fast you could get there.”

They stared at each other. The captain looked away first and silence reigned. The act continued when they stopped that first night, with Baldwin bamboozling the innkeep and his wife, who probably didn’t know the difference between a hangnail and sepsis, and cosseted this self-proclaimed Waterloo hero.

Jake took a long walk that night. He argued with himself that he could abandon Captain Baldwin the moment they arrived at the family estate, and yet he couldn’t, because in a weak moment he had, indeed, promised General Sir David Baldwin that he would stay by his son’s side until the general arrived before Christmas.

As he crunched through snow, Jake reminded himself that anyone could get through a month, and then a year, then several years, until it all jumbled together: battles, aid stations, grievous wounds, and recuperation. That had been his life from 1809 to 1815, and he was no more special than other doctors who had done the same.

“Less than a month,” he told a Jersey in a nearby field, placidly nosing through the snow for a little more roughage. “I know I have been saying it for six years, but I can stand anything for that long. See here, Bossy? I am living proof.”

Only hours from their arrival at the Baldwin estate, something cheerfully called Summer’s Edge, Captain Baldwin deigned to speak to Jake again. “There is a chamber next to mine where you will be installed, so no worries about staying belowstairs.”

A nd that is supposed to placate me? Jake thought, wondering when he had ever been lumped in with the hired help. “Why, thank you, sir,” he said, well aware that Captain Baldwin had no comprehension of sarcasm.

“You’re welcome,” the man said serenely. “I will even let you accompany me to the neighboring estate, where my fiancée resides.”

“Such an honor,” Jake murmured. His head began to ache.

“As soon as I am comfortable in bed and reasonably out of pain, I will send her a note,” Baldwin continued. He sounded less petulant than usual, because he really didn’t understand sarcasm. Ah, here it came: “ She will at least take some pity on me.”

“You have a fiancée?” Jake couched it in conversational terms, and not in hair pulling, Good-God-there-is-someone-on-this-planet-who-can-tolerate-you terms. It’s only a month more, it’s only a month more , he repeated in his tired brain.

“Yes, of course,” Baldwin replied, continuing in that irritating complacency that made Jake want to shake him. “I will admit she isn’t much to look at, but her family is wealthy, and that can make the oddest woman beautiful, don’t you think?”

There was no answer required beyond, “Most certainly,” to remain in the gentrified world Jake inhabited, considering that his father was a vicar. Jake knew he could have entered that tepid, vicarish world, too, except that he was a hands-on sort of chap who had always wanted to know how things worked, in his case, the human body. The Frosts had eventually resigned themselves to his eccentricity. Who was he to complain about odd-looking?

Still, odd-looking? Gad, what a callous man.