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“Daniel,” she said with quiet firmness, “you’ve not been telling me the truth about the baby. It cannot be good news, else you would have been full of it but I must know. You’d best tell me the whole.”
    “There’s no news atall, miss and that’s the truth.”
    “Daniel?” Julia chided gently. Miracle or tragedy, she had to know. No child could have survived…and yet, surely somewhere in the prolonged nightmare of the last few weeks there had to be room for one small glimmer of light?
    What she had seen on the highest point of that bleak snow swept pass through the mountains had been the single most horror-filled moment of her life. By day, as well as by night, Julia could not escape the haunting vision. The weary, snow-deadened tramp of boots and hooves, the jingle of harness, the labored breathing of Britain’s army running for its life. Hovering darkness…driving sleet…and then…a mewling cry…
     
    The icy wind tore down the slope of Monte del Cabiero, cutting through Julia’s many layers of clothing. Swirling, stinging crystals of snow and ice obscured her vision and clung to her face. Head bent, her mind as numb as the fingers gripping the reins of her horse, she had no thought left but the dogged determination to follow the struggling shadows in front of her.
    Rocky cliffs towered on either side of the straggling line of the retreating British army. Infantry, cavalry, riflemen, horses, mules, wagons, heavy artillery. And, straggling at the end of the long line, the women who followed them to war. They were all trapped in the never-ending white nightmare of the high pass they must traverse. Or die.
    A sound pierced Julia’s armor of bone-weary exhaustion. Nearly obscured by the lowering dusk and blowing snow, an oxcart lay to the side of the trail, one shattered wheel resting at a crazy angle against the boulder which had brought it to a final halt. The cart was just one more fragment of a rapidly disintegrating army. Julia would have passed by without a glance but the unexpected sound penetrated the snow-deadened tramp of boots and hooves, the jingle of harness, the labored breathing of Britain’s army running for its life.
    The wail of a baby. A tiny baby.
    “Bloody hell! Beggin’ your pardon, miss!” Daniel Runyon woke from his own fog of weariness into instant awareness. Daniel had long since designated himself Julia Litchfield’s protector during the long marches when the women struggled at the tail of the army, separated from their men. He had been trudging up the mountain pass, clinging doggedly to Astarte’s stirrup. When the horse came to an abrupt halt, sliding sideways on the icy track, Daniel Runyon came close to ending his life there and then. It was perhaps more that his hand was frozen to the stirrup than fast reflexes which saved him from going down under Astarte’s hooves.
    “Y’ can’t stop here, miss,” he bawled. Ye’ll be holdin’ up the line.” Julia paid no mind. Scarce an unusual occurrence, Runyon thought sourly. “Stay where you are, miss,” he ordered, for all the world as if he were the officer and not the servant. “I’ll see to it.”
    As he dragged himself up over the low open back of the wooden cart, Daniel thought of the days, only weeks earlier, when he would have vaulted into the cart with ease. One look at the sight before him and he crossed himself before biting his knuckles to stop a moan of anguish.
    From the vantage point of Astarte’s back, Julia could see the contents of the cart almost as well as Daniel. A tiny newborn baby was sprawled in a wriggling tangle of red arms and legs across the bare breast of a young woman frozen into ice-blue stiffness, her black hair flowing about her. The baby, wailing in high thin hiccups, instinctively, frantically, searched for food from nipples whose milk would never flow.
    In the past weeks Julia thought she had finally become inured to horror and death. She had been wrong. She reached out her arms,