Free Written in My Heart by Caroline Linden Page B

to her chair in its new position. Puck followed her, but paused a few feet away, his head cocked to one side so that his bitten ear stood upright. It made him look quaintly puzzled, as if his ragged ear were listening particularly hard for something. Jane smiled and fished a small chunk of bacon from her pocket. Puck trotted right up, his tail wagging; he knew all about the little oilcloth that held the bacon in her pocket. He nipped the meat delicately from her fingertips and then crawled under her chair and settled down with a satisfied grunt. She shook her head fondly as she wiped her hands clean, then picked up a pale primrose sleeve and set to work on piping the edges of the slashes, so the undersleeve of white crepe would show through.
    Puck wasn’t her dog, of course. Everyone in Caxby seemed to think he was, but in her heart Jane knew he was still Ethan’s. Ethan had been riding home from Bristol when he came across a group of boys tormenting a small, ragged dog with sticks. When he’d yelled at them, they said they were only training him to attack; they meant to fight him for money. Ethan gave them a shilling and the promise of a beating if he ever caught them thrashing a dog again, and brought the shivering puppy home in the pocket of his greatcoat. From the moment his wounds healed, Puck had been Ethan’s loyal shadow, following him everywhere. When Ethan joined the regiment and went off to war, Mr. Campbell had had to shut the dog up in the kitchen to keep him from following Ethan all the way to Spain.
    But Ethan had been gone three years. When Mr. Campbell had fallen ill with an ague last winter, he’d asked her to take the dog for him. “The poor beast has got peaked with only me for company,” he’d told her when she visited him. “Ethan would approve.” So Jane took the dog. She was only minding him until Ethan came home, after all, and her mother had agreed Puck could sleep in her room as long as she took him with her during the day. Mrs. Lynch had reluctantly allowed the dog into her workroom, but the seamstresses loved him. Tamsin had been known to bring bones from her father’s butcher shop for Puck, and Millie was always ready and eager to take him out for a walk.
    All that would change, though, when Ethan came home—hopefully soon. Jane’s eyes drifted toward the window, even though she knew there was no chance at all his tall, broad-shouldered figure would be walking in the street below. He was in Belgium, by last report, and probably would be there for some time still. She told herself she would be an idiot to expect any word at all, either about him or from him, for a month at the earliest.
    It would just be a very, very long month.

Chapter Two
    Ethan Campbell had had enough of war.
    It wasn’t just because he had recently survived a battle more bloody and hard-fought than anything he had ever imagined, or ever wanted to experience again. It wasn’t just because he had survived only through a combination of mischance, neglectful officers, and pure dumb luck. It wasn’t even just because he had never been colder, wetter, hungrier, or more miserable in his entire life, despite his deep gratitude at still being alive to suffer those miseries.
    No, he realized he was done with it all when he staggered back to his regiment’s baggage train, somehow managed to unearth his own rucksack from the indescribable chaos that reigned over the battlefield outside Waterloo and all the ground surrounding it, and discovered that his modest collection of personal possessions had been dropped into a river and thrown back into the wagons soaking wet. When he opened it, he almost dropped it from the stench of wet, mildewed wool and the trickle of brackish water that seeped out.
    For a moment he just stared into the dark, ominous depths, despite the smell. Almost everything inside the rucksack could be replaced; one learned early not to leave valuable possessions in the baggage train. But a soldier