Nothing else happened. No attack on the French guns had been mounted. They moved down behind the safety of the hillside. Not long after, Trev had been taken in a set of light irons to join the other prisoners in the rear.

He had never heard any more of it or given the incident particular thought. There had been far more pressing concerns on his mind than some nameless British officer's decision in the heat of battle, as long as it didn't include shooting at him. He'd put the memory away along with all the other things he didn't care to dwell upon. Wellington had soundly crushed the French at Salamanca, so it made no difference to anyone, except perhaps a few French and British soldiers who would have died and hadn't.

But here and now—Trev suddenly appreciated that he had been a witness to a court-martial offense. Sturgeon had been ordered to attack, and he had acted as if he'd never received the order.

"Son of a…" Jock dropped the coffeepot with a hiss and clang, sending dark liquid over the f loor. He added several more colorful words, holding his fingers in his other hand and blowing on them. Then he looked down at his stained trousers—the fashionable yellow ones—and let out a string of expletives that would have burned the ears off a bosun's mate. "My buttercup cossacks!" Jock's deep bass cracked. He grabbed a dish towel, daubing in a frenzy of vigor.

Trev squinted one eye at the stain on Jock's billowing trousers. "I fear they're past hope," he said, heartlessly honest.

"Thirty guineas!" The valet's voice reached a pitch that Trev had not supposed it could attain.

Trev put down his cup. "Damme, you spent thirty guineas on those things?"

"Worth every groat, sir," Jock snarled.

Trev would admit that they made the big man look quite the Cossack. All he required was a saber and some tassels hanging off his ears to be fit to ravage a town. But Trev made it a strict policy never to mock his valet's sense of style. He did not care to have one of those ham-sized fists in his teeth.

"You'd better take them down to the inn directly and find out a launderer," he advised. "Perhaps they can be boiled."

"And shrink to nothin', and bleach besides," Jock mourned.

"Then you can give them to me," Trev said sooth ingly. "I'll wear them to bed, like a sultan's pajamas."

Jock made a rumbling growl, stalking toward the kitchen door.

"You're certain this doctor has our right direction?" Trev asked after him.

"No, sir, I told 'im to go to Madrid," Jock snapped, holding the door in his giant paw so that a gust of freezing wind blew in Trev's face.

"You're so fetching when you're savage," Trev murmured.