Free Come the Dawn by Christina Skye Page B

feebly to his feet. By then his jacket and boots had been stolen by battlefield scavengers, and the woman had taken him for a French officer. She had helped him back to her cart and taken him to a tumbledown farmhouse, where she had nursed him with what bits of food she had. The vegetables were fresh and the broth was nourishing, and slowly Dev had regained his strength.
    But his memory had taken months longer. He spoke French with the easy skill of a native, owing to the secret missions that had kept him among the populace in France in the uncertain days before Waterloo. As a result, the farmer and his wife had never known that he was anything but a wounded French officer.
    Nor had Dev.
    Not until the day he had seen a band of English cavalry officers riding past. The sight of their crimson coats had stirred some fragment of his shattered memory. Slowly the past had crawled back to him, piece by painful piece.
    And the first thing he had done, even before reporting to Wellington, was to look into India’s safety. But the lodgings she had held in Brussels were empty and the landlady knew nothing of her whereabouts. It was then that Wellington had come across him on the street, and their reunion had been as warm as any that the granite-eyed duke was able to give. Over claret and a warm fire, Wellington had filled Thornwood in on all that had happened since he was wounded, including the news that India Delamere was well.
    But the Iron Duke had lost most of his aides at Waterloo, and he immediately pressed Devlyn to accept one final mission of the gravest importance.
    His task was to track down a missing hoard of nearly a thousand diamonds.
    All that evening Thornwood had refused to be involved, resisting Wellington’s sharpest arguments. All he wanted was to recover and return to his Norfolk estates, where he meant to begin making a life with India. But before Thorne could act on his resolution, Wellington had brought the startling news that India had already gone.
    Disconsolate, Thorne had stayed on one day, then two, then ten. Every hour rumors of an attempt to restore Napoleon to power grew more serious. India, meanwhile, was happy and well, restored to her family and living in Norfolk. The reports tortured Thornwood, torn between loyalty to his wife and a more urgent loyalty to his country.
    After two weeks of Wellington’s unceasing pressure, Thorne finally relented. No Englishman knew France better, and he told himself that being apart from India a little longer would be best for her.
    So it was that for the next four months Dev had crisscrossed Europe from Vienna to Cadiz, secretly pursuing the hoard of priceless gems that had been stolen from the French treasury in 1792, during the darkest days of the Revolution. Many of these stones had fallen into the private coffers of Napoleon, protection against an uncertain future. Before Waterloo the emperor had traveled everywhere with a locked wooden chest under the continual guard of his two most trusted officers, and it was Wellington’s belief that this chest held the diamonds stolen from the French treasury. But no chest had ever been found after the battle nor among the emperor’s possessions at his surrender.
    And now Napoleon’s supporters were once again on the move. Whoever held those diamonds could equip an army to support the French leader and free him from confinement on the lonely island of Saint Helena. Even now Napoleon had many supporters in England, men who saw only his triumphs and ignored their cost in human blood. Princess Charlotte herself had turned a favorable ear to arguments that the general should be returned to France with honor.
    Wellington was right. Until the lost jewels were found and Napoleon’s shadowy supporters were revealed, there could be no lasting peace in Europe and no security for a war-weary England.
    Thornwood looked down at India’s pale features, his eyes filled with shadows. There was another reason that Dev had relented to