Lysander stopped in his tracks. She was there.

There had been a few women close to the battlefields, he knew. Officer's wives, not many, and camp followers, who provided a service for a farthing, or so Lysander had been informed.

But to work in the medical tents — God, he couldn't even imagine what she'd gone through, what she'd had to do every day. More men had been lost than healed, he knew that from experience, lost to internal damage, gangrene and the things that cannonballs and musket balls and bayonets did to fragile human flesh.

The tents were a benefit, to be sure, and Lysander didn't want to contemplate fighting a war without them. Yet he, like all the others, enlisted and officers both, had skirted those tents as if they'd held plague.

In a way, they had. Those canvas walls had contained the very mortality that no man wanted to acknowledge. It was very nearly a superstition among them all, as if to walk into the tents, one might look upon a dying man and see one's own face.

Cultured, comely Gemma Oakes had entered them day after day. She had touched the death and rot and fever, and the next day she had willingly done it again. And again.

Four years.

Bing scowled at him still, clearly waiting for a response. Lysander looked down at the shorter man, made shorter still by a bent back and a stiffened leg. "You?"

Bing rolled his eyes. "Nay, lad. I fought. Foot soldier, me. I ain't as old as I look. Eight months in, I were run right over by French horse with a sword in its belly. Silly nag bled to death and dropped right on top of me." He narrowed his eyes at Lysander. "But don't you be thinkin' I'm easy takings. The doctor patched me up and set me to work as his batman. Me, from t' whale oil docks of Whitby, orderly and aide to a Regimental Surgeon!" He puffed his chest with pride. "Took care of them both, I did, when they come back from those tents as white as ghosts, shaky in t' knees from working day and night and another day, too sickened to eat."

Bing turned away, shaking his head. "It broke him, it did. He weren't never the same after t' war. But not her. She's got a backbone of steel, that one, for all her gentle raising."

Bing stumped ahead, his head bowed, still grumbling. Lysander turned to look back at the beautiful, crumbling manor. He experienced a deep stirring in his long-benumbed curiosity. Mrs. Gemma Oakes was an anomaly, a lady misplaced. When was she widowed and how? Why had the doctor left her so reduced in circumstances?

She must have loved him a great deal to follow him to war. Did she love him still?

"Aye then, lad, didn't you wish to see your Icky horse?"