The Sergeant's Lady Read Online Free PDF

been brought up from the cradle to respect and honor women, Will had only contempt for men who ordered their wives about like slaves.
    “He doesn’t deserve her,” Will said.
    “Maybe not, but it’s still no business of yours.”
    “He doesn’t deserve her,” Will repeated. “If I had a wife like her, I’d—”
    “You’d what? Worship at her feet?”
    He ignored his friend’s sarcasm. “No. But I’d be sure to give her the consideration she deserved, and every day I’d let her know how much I valued her.”
    “I’m sure you would, Will. I’m sure you would.”
    ***
    The village where the army had stopped for the night was too small to house the entire force, but the Sixteenth had managed to commandeer a decent shopkeeper’s cottage for its officers’ billet. Those officers who were unmarried or whose wives didn’t follow the drum were piled in several to a room, sharing beds or preparing to sleep wrapped in blankets on the floor, but Anna and Sebastian had been given a small garret bedroom to themselves.
    He was seated on the narrow bed, waiting for her when she arrived. It was a tiny, spartan room, with no furniture but the bed, an olive-wood chest, their own small traveling trunks, and a rickety washstand with a chipped porcelain ewer atop it. When Sebastian stood, his head almost brushed the ceiling, and he seemed to swell to fill the entire space. Anna looked at him and the bed they would share with loathing, but she squared her shoulders and stepped across the threshold.
    “Good evening, Sebastian,” she said coolly. “Lieutenant-Colonel Kent invited us to dine with him in half an hour’s time, so I must change my dress.”
    “You must never again defy me as you did today, madam.” Each syllable cut like the lash of a whip. “I will not have it.”
    This wasn’t quite the Sebastian whom Anna had endured for the past two years. That man had been cold, distant, only occasionally overt in his anger. The new Sebastian frightened her, but she was so tired of trying to please a man who could not be appeased, so she pushed her fear aside and embraced her anger.
    “Will you not?” She tipped her head back to meet his cold, pale eyes. “I fear you are doomed to disappointment, for if I see someone in need of my help, I must do all in my power to aid them.”
    “The common rabble of the army do not need your help.”
    “Unless you propose to fight a war with nothing but officers,” she said, “the common rabble, as you call them, are necessary to the campaign and therefore, even aside from the demands of humanity itself, they are worthy of our attention.”
    “Perhaps. But their whores are not.”
    “She is not a whore! And even if she was, if a woman had no choice but to enter such a state, she would still be deserving of compassion.”
    “Of course you would have sympathy with whores, madam.”
    “I have never played you false, Sebastian, as you ought well to know by now.”
    “I know what I saw.”
    Anna gritted her teeth. This was the old argument, their oldest, and it was useless to fight it again, so she changed her tack. “Helen helped deliver the baby, too, and Alec thinks she did right.”
    “If your cousin chooses to allow his wife to help birth some Spanish whore’s mongrel whelp, that is his affair, but you shall comport yourself respectably in the future.”
    Mongrel whelp? He called that beautiful baby she’d cradled in her arms today a mongrel whelp?
    “ Damn you,” she said, swept up in a current of anger stronger than she had ever experienced. “I’m glad I’m barren, since the world is thereby spared any more of your misbegotten spawn.”
    Sebastian turned bright red. “Bitch.” Lightning-fast, his right hand flew up and he slapped her hard across the face.
    Anna staggered backward under the force of the blow and stumbled into the washstand. The ewer fell to the floor and shattered in a noisy crash. Water splashed the hem of her dress and broken pieces crunched