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the other startlingly naked in contrast.
    "Lord love us," Phyllis said, her eyes alighting on Sergeant Strickland, "a one-eyed giant and I am the only one available."
    "Rachel is with him," Bridget pointed out. "My love, what is this? Did you run into trouble? She did not mean any harm, soldier. She was just-"
    "Oh, Bridget, Phyllis," Rachel said all in a rush, "I was searching through the forest, and I came across this man on the stretcher here. I thought he was dead, but then I touched him and realized he was still alive, but he had been shot in the leg and had a horrible head wound. I called to all the men passing on the road, but no one took any notice until I cried that he was alive and was my husband. Then Sergeant Strickland came and helped me and carried the man to a wagon. And after we had arrived back in Brussels and a surgeon had tended him, the sergeant found these men with their stretcher and asked me where they could bring the wounded man. I could think of nowhere but here. I am so sorry. I-"
    "He is not your man, missus?" Sergeant Strickland asked, eyeing Bridget with suspicious fascination.
    The two private soldiers were leering and grinning.
    "Did you find anything on him?" Bridget asked, looking at Rachel from her grotesquely mismatched eyes.
    "Nothing." Rachel felt horribly guilty then. Not only had she not collected any loot, but she had also burdened her friends with another mouth to feed-if he ever regained consciousness to eat, that was. "He had been stripped."
    "Of everything?" Bridget stepped closer to the stretcher and lifted one corner of the blanket. "Oh, my."
    "You look as if you are about to pass out yourself, Sergeant," Phyllis said, wiping floury hands on her large apron.
    He had lost an eye. For the first time Rachel looked closely at him, ashamed that she had virtually ignored his plight in her anxiety over the other man. He was indeed looking pasty.
    "That is not blood on your bandage by any chance, is it?" Phyllis asked. "If it is, I am about to faint."
    "Where are we to put 'im, Sarge?" one of the private soldiers asked.
    "You did the right thing, Rachel, my love," Bridget said. "Now where shall we put him, poor man? He looks more than half dead."
    Apart from a few small attic rooms designed for servants, there were no spare bedchambers-Rachel had been given the last one just the day before.
    "My room," she said. "We will put him in there, and I shall sleep in the attic."
    The private soldiers carried the stretcher upstairs while Rachel led the way to her room to fold back the bedcovers so that the wounded man could be lifted straight onto the bed she had never yet slept on herself. She could hear Phyllis behind her in the hallway.
    "If you don't have anywhere else to go, Sergeant," she was saying, "and I daresay you do not, we will put you to bed in one of the attic rooms. I'll make you some tea and some broth. No, you must not argue. You look dead on your feet. Just don't ever ask me to change that bandage. That's all I ask."
    "What exactly is this place?" Rachel heard the sergeant ask. "Is it by any chance-"
    "Lord love us," Phyllis said. "You must be more than half blind if you have to ask that question. Of course it is."
     
    O NCE SERGEANT STRICKLAND GAVE IN TO PHYLLIS'S insistence that he lie down and allow himself to be nursed, he became really very ill indeed, with a crashing headache and a mounting fever. Despite his feeble protests, Phyllis and Rachel went up and down stairs to him several times for the rest of the day, as did Bridget after her appointment with Mr. Hawkins was over.
    It surprised Rachel to realize that she felt nothing at all-no shock, no embarrassment, no revulsion-to know that she was sharing a house with a whore who was in the very act of plying her trade. There were more important things to think about.
    She spent most of the afternoon and evening in her own room, seated at the bedside of the unknown man, whose identity she might never know, she realized. He