As the ship docked in Lisbon, Elizabeth looked over the railing at the spring sunshine in wonder. She reflected in wonder that her first Easter spent from home would be spent in a foreign land. She occasionally wondered at what was happening at home. Had Mr. Collins found a victim for his matrimonial ambitions? Had Mr. Darcy abandoned Hertfordshire altogether? Did he keep company with her father? Was he at that moment visiting with his Aunt? He had mentioned he usually visited her at Easter, so it was comforting in a way to think of him ensconced in the home of the £800 windows. She wondered how much the glazing cost at Pemberley. For the first few months she had felt the most acute homesickness, but by the time she got to Lisbon, those feelings were mostly confined to the occasional middle of the night.
The past months had been more difficult than all the months that had preceded it in many ways, but in others they were easier. The difficulty was learning how to be a useful, productive member of society. She had been trained to be wife, mother, mistress of an estate. Finding it necessary to redirect her life had required certain adjustments, and not all the parts of her new life were as pleasant as some of the parts of her old life.
On the other hand, it was liberating to be useful, to be someone that people relied on, to do something that mattered. Men might live or die by her hand, and the responsibility was quite heady in a way. She could be important… at least to the soldiers under her care.
Elizabeth was better educated and better informed than most of her previous compatriots, but still found the gap between what she knew and what there was to know to be enormous. Her country was at war, and she was contributing to that effort, which gave her some pride in her accomplishments. She had never felt that level of pride before, and she found she was loathe to give up. She wondered what the forge of war would do to her. Would it harden her, temper her or do something completely unexpected? Would she emerge the better or worse for her experience… or considering the amount of disease that followed any army, would she emerge at all?
There was also the somewhat unpleasant matter that it was going to get much worse before it got better. Most of her work and training so far was dealing with armed men in training. They got their share of camp fever and ordinary illness, plus the numerous training accidents that accompanied trying to turn rabble into soldiers, and everything in between. She had learned how to keep herself safe from the men when she was surrounded by them all the time and was somewhat heartened to see that among the officers and the ordinary enlisted men there were quite some number who realized being on a nurse's good side might be the difference between life and death one day. A few of the men would put a hand where it did not belong or say something that should not be said from time to time. Most often though, one of the nurses would be treating them for cuts and bruises the next day.
The trip across the channel had also taught her everything she ever wanted to know about seasickness, which consisted of two important facts. The first was that she was completely impervious to its effects and could go anywhere she wanted to go at any time on a ship. The other was that quite a number of the men were not impervious, and the difference between a soldier suffering from seasickness and a colicky and badly tempered baby was difficult to distinguish. She did what she could for the poor souls, but that amounted to just about nothing.
Lisbon was a bustling port, full of noise and activity. She could hear what must have been every language known to man on the docks, and see ships coming in from all the far-flung parts of the world, carrying spices, food, trade goods and every other thing her imagination could conjure. She thought that certainly this must be the beginning of the biggest adventure of her life.
The first few weeks in the camps in Portugal were spent doing just about the same thing she had been doing in England, but they also acquainted her with some quite uncomfortable truths. Through listening carefully to what was said, and what was not said, she came to understand that the British army was not entirely full of upright and upstanding gentlemen. In fact, some large parts of it were nothing more than common rabble, and the commanders had an impossible time keeping their behavior in any even reasonable approximation of civilized. She learned that it was not at all uncommon for soldiers to spend a lot of time in the pillory or the stockade, or a very short time at the end of a rope, but in between fighting, the men still did many things that were reprehensible. Was this the way of all fighting armies?
She learned that she just barely missed some of the bloodiest battles of the campaign so far. Right about the time she was talking to Miss Darcy in Hyde Park, the allied army had fought extremely bloody battles in Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, accounting for over 5,000 casualties, followed by some absolutely appalling behavior by the Allied Forces on the civilians of the towns that absolutely turned her stomach.
She spent several months being shuffled among various spots in Portugal as the forces continued minor and major attacks in Spain. Their position in Portugal was relatively secure, but they were having a difficult time trying to secure enough of Spain to make a route to attack the Grande Armée in France.
One day she was in the surgery wrapping up some cleaned bandages when she was suddenly accosted by an officer in a very mart looking uniform, who began without preamble.
"Nurse, I will need you to get this bloody thing out of me."
The times when mild curing bothered her were long past, so she gave the obviously important officer an exaggerated curtsy, and then looked at the professed injury. She almost managed to stifle a giggle, but not quite, which did not endear her to the officer.
"Please, sit there, General. Shall I get the surgeon, or just hack away at it myself."
"None of your impertinence… just get on with it."
"Yes, Sir!"
Humming in mild amusement and to keep her concentration, Elizabeth started in on the injury, which amounted to a two-inch-long sliver driven into the back of the officer's thigh. By the standards of Elizabeth's earlier life, it hardly qualified as an injury at all, but perhaps not all the officers were as tough as they pretended.
A few minutes with a razor-sharp scalpel and tweezers had the offending wood out, and a few more minutes had the injury salved and bandaged.
"There you are, your exaltedness. I would ask you to have your batman keep it clean and change the bandage over the next few days."
The words were barely out of her mouth before she regretted him. The man was obviously of some import, and why he had not had his batman take care of the problem in the first place was a real mystery.
"I apologize, General. That was terribly impolite."
She was by then completely mortified and staring at the ground.
The General just laughed heartily, nearly rolling on the ground, saying, "I like you, Miss…?"
"Dashwood, Sir"
The General gave a little bow, and said, "A pleasure, Nurse Dashwood. As I was saying, nobody ever talks to me that way. I order you to keep it up."
Elizabeth perked up, and asked, "Very well, General. May I have the pleasure of knowing your name? It will establish bragging rights when I embellish the story of my heroism to everyone I know. I will try to at least keep you alive in the retelling, though."
The General laughed again, and replied, "I appreciate that. Arthur Wellesley, at your service. It is a pleasure, Miss Dashwood."
Elizabeth gulped, and turned even redder than the first time, since she had just been extremely impertinent to the Allied Commander, in charge of 120,000 men… and her.
"Do you mean Viscount Wellington, Sir?"
The general just chuckled and said, "None of that, Miss Dashwood. I find little enough impertinence as it is. You cannot imagine the fawning I endure. I would prefer not to stamp it out by my mere presence."
"Very well, General. May I ask an impertinent question?"
"Consider it your patriotic duty, Miss Dashwood?"
"It is a relatively minor injury, General. Why not just have your batman fix it?"
"Because he a gossip of the worst order, and the manner of acquiring the wound is… let us just say I would prefer this remain between us."
Elizabeth laughed, and said, "I shall take it to the grave, Sir. I feel like a spy. Come back tomorrow and I shall see to it, General."
The general laughed, and said, "We are going back to Spain, Nurse Dashwood. You should come with us."
"I go where I am ordered, General."
He nodded, and said, "I shall see to it."