by Julia Quinn
He smiled, then touched her chin, tipping her face up toward his. “Oh yes. I would show you now, but I think you need some rest. Sleep,” he said. “It will all seem clearer in the morning.”
It wouldn’t. But she slept, anyway.
Chapter 15
A thousand apologies. I have not written in over a month, but in truth there was little to write about. Everything is boredom or battle, and I do not wish to write about either. We arrived in Newport yesterday, though, and after a good meal and a bath, I am feeling more like myself.
—from Thomas Harcourt to his sister Cecilia
Dear Miss Harcourt,
Thank you for your kind note. The weather has begun to take a chill again, and by the time you receive this, I suspect we will be glad for our woolen coats. Newport is more of a town than we have seen in some time, and we are both enjoying its comforts. Thomas and I have been given rooms in a private home, but our men have been billeted in houses of worship, half in a church and half in a synagogue. Several of our men were fearful that they would be smote by God for sleeping in an unholy house. I do not see how it is more unholy than the tavern they visited the night before. But it is not my job to provide religious counsel. Speaking of which, I do hope your Mrs. Pentwhistle has not been back in the wine. Although I must confess, I did enjoy your story about the “psalm that went horribly awry.”
And because I know you will ask, I have never visited a synagogue before; it looks rather like a church, to be frank.
—from Edward Rokesby to Cecilia Harcourt, enclosed within the letter from her brother
As usual, Edward woke before Cecilia the following morning. She did not stir as he eased himself from the bed, attesting to her exceptional fatigue.
He smiled. He was happy to take credit for her fatigue.
She’d be hungry, too. She generally ate her biggest meal of the day at breakfast, and though the Devil’s Head always had eggs due to the chickens they kept in the back, Edward thought a treat might be in order. Something sweet. Chelsea buns, maybe. Or speculaas.
Or both. Why not both?
After dressing, he jotted a quick note and left it on the table, informing her that he would be back soon. It wasn’t far to the two bakeries. He could be there and back in under an hour if he did not run into anyone he knew.
Rooijakkers was closer, so he walked there first, smiling to himself as the bell jangled over his head, alerting the proprietor to his presence. It wasn’t Mr. Rooijakkers tending to the shop, though, but his red-haired daughter, the one Cecilia said she had befriended. Edward recalled meeting her himself, back before he’d gone to Connecticut. He and Thomas had both preferred the Dutch bakery to the English one around the corner.
Edward felt his smile grow wistful. Thomas had quite the sweet tooth. Much like his sister.
“Good morning, sir,” the lady called out. She wiped her floury hands on her apron as she came out from the back room.
“Ma’am,” Edward said with a small bow of his chin. He wished he could remember her name. But at least this time, he came by his lapse honestly. Whatever her name was, it wasn’t hiding out in the blackened portion of his memory. He’d always been bad with names.
“How nice to see you again, sir,” the lady said. “You haven’t been in in a very long time.”
“Months,” he confirmed. “I’ve been out of town.”
She nodded, giving him a jaunty smile as she said, “Makes it hard for us to have regular customers, what with the army sending you here, there, and everywhere.”
“Just to Connecticut,” he said.
She chuckled at that. “And how is your friend?”
“My friend?” Edward echoed, even though he knew very well that she must be talking about Thomas. Still, it was disquieting. No one asked about him anymore, or if they did, it was with hushed, somber voices.
“I haven’t seen him in some time, actually,” Edward said.
“That’s a shame.” She cocked her head to the side in a friendly gesture. “For the both of us. He was one of my best customers. He had quite the love of sweets.”
“His sister as well,” Edward murmured.
She looked at him curiously.
“I married his sister,” he explained, wondering why he was telling her this. Probably just because it made him happy to say it. He’d married Cecilia. Well. He’d really married her now.
Mr. Rooijakkers’s daughter went still for a moment, her gingery eyebrows drawing together before she said, “I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I can’t recall your name . . .”
“Captain Edward Rokesby, ma’am. And yes, you’ve met my new wife. Cecilia.”
“Of course. I’m sorry, I did not put it together when she said her name earlier. She looks rather like her brother, doesn’t she? Not in the features so much but—”
“The expressions, yes,” Edward finished for her.
She grinned. “You must want speculaas, then.”
“Indeed. A dozen, if you will.”
“We have probably never been introduced,” she said as she bent down to retrieve a platter of biscuits from a low shelf. “I am Mrs. Beatrix Leverett.”
“Cecilia has spoken most fondly of you.” He waited patiently as Mrs. Leverett counted out the biscuits. He was rather looking forward to Cecilia’s reaction when he brought her breakfast in bed. Well, biscuits in bed, which might be even better.
Except for the crumbs. That might present a problem.
“Is Mrs. Rokesby’s brother still in Connecticut?”
Edward’s lovely imaginings came to a halt. “I beg your pardon?”
“Mrs. Rokesby’s brother,” she repeated, looking up from her task. “I thought he went with you to Connecticut.”
Edward went very still. “You know about that?”
“Should I not?”
“Thomas was with me in Connecticut,” he said. His voice was soft, almost as if he were testing out the statement, trying it on like a new coat.
Did it fit?
“Wasn’t he?” Mrs. Leverett asked.
“I . . .” Hell, what was he to say? He didn’t particularly wish to share the details of his condition with a near stranger, but if she had information about Thomas . . .
“I have been having difficulty remembering a few things,” he finally said. He touched his scalp, just under the brim of his hat. The bump was much smaller now, but the skin was still tender. “I was hit on the head.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Her eyes filled with compassion. “That must be terribly frustrating.”
“Yes,” he said, but his injury was not what he wished to discuss. He looked at her directly, eyes set squarely on hers. “You were telling me about Captain Harcourt.”
Her shoulders rose in a tiny shrug. “I don’t really know anything. Just that the both of you went to Connecticut several months ago. You came in just before you left. For provisions.”
“Provisions,” Edward echoed.
“You bought bread,” she said with a little chuckle. “Your friend has a sweet tooth. I told him—”
“—that the speculaas would not travel well,” he finished for her.
“Yes,” she said. “They crumble too easily.”
“They did,” Edward said softly. “Every last one of them.”
And then it all came flooding back.
“Stubbs!”
The colonel looked up from his desk, visibly startled by Edward’s furious bark.
“Captain Rokesby. What on earth is the matter?”
What was the matter? What was the matter? Edward fought to keep his fury under control. He’d stormed out of the Dutch bakery without his purchases, practically ran through the streets of New York to get here, to Colonel Stubbs’s office at the building currently being used as British headquarters. His hands were fisted, his blood was pounding through his brain like he’d been in battle, and by God, the only thing that was keeping him from assaulting his superior officer was the threat of a court-martial.
&nb
sp; “You knew,” Edward said, his voice shaking with rage. “You knew about Thomas Harcourt.”
Stubbs stood slowly, and his skin flushed red under his whiskers. “To what, precisely, do you refer?”
“He went to Connecticut with me. Why the hell didn’t you say so?”
“I told you,” Stubbs said in a stiff voice, “I could not take the risk of influencing your memories.”
“That’s shite and you know it,” Edward spat. “Tell me the truth.”
“It is the truth,” Stubbs hissed, stalking around Edward to slam the door to his office shut. “Do you think I liked lying to your wife?”
“My wife,” Edward repeated. He had remembered that, too. He wouldn’t say that his memory was completely restored, but it was mostly all there, and he was fully certain that he had not participated in a proxy wedding ceremony. Nor had Thomas ever asked him to.
Edward couldn’t imagine what had led Cecilia to such a deception, but he could only deal with one cocked-up disaster at a time. His eyes landed on Stubbs’s with barely contained fury. “You have ten seconds to explain to me why you lied about Thomas Harcourt.”
“For the love of God, Rokesby,” the colonel said, raking his hand through his thinning hair, “I’m not a monster. The last thing I wanted was to give her false hope.”
Edward froze. “False hope?”
Stubbs stared at him. “You don’t know.” It wasn’t quite a question.
“I believe we have already ascertained that there is a lot I don’t know,” Edward said, his voice clipped with tightly wound emotion. “So please, enlighten me.”
“Captain Harcourt is dead,” the colonel said. He shook his head, and with honest sorrow said, “He took a shot to the gut. I’m sorry.”
“What?” Edward stumbled back, his legs somehow finding a chair for him to sink into. “How? When?”
“Back in March,” Stubbs said. He crossed the room and yanked open a cabinet, pulling out a decanter of brandy. “It wasn’t even a week after you left. He sent word to meet him up at New Rochelle.”
Edward watched the colonel’s unsteady hands as he sloshed amber liquid into two glasses. “Who went?”
“Just me.”
“You went alone,” Edward said, his tone making it clear that he found this difficult to believe.
Stubbs held forth a glass. “It was what had to be done.”
Edward exhaled as memories—strangely fresh and stale at the same time—unrolled through his mind. He and Thomas had gone to Connecticut together, entrusted with the task of assessing the viability of a naval attack on the waterfront. The command had come from Governor Tryon himself. He’d chosen Edward, he’d said, because he needed someone he could trust implicitly. Edward had chosen Thomas for the very same reason.
But the two of them had traveled together for only a few days before Thomas had headed back to New York with the information they’d gathered about Norwalk. Edward had continued east, toward New Haven.
And that was the last he’d seen of him.
Edward took the glass of brandy and downed it in a single shot.
Stubbs did the same, then said, “I take it this means you have recovered your memory.”
Edward gave him a sharp nod. The colonel would want to question him immediately, he knew that, but he would say nothing until he got some answers about Thomas. “Why did you have General Garth send a letter to his family that he was only wounded?”
“He was only wounded when we sent that,” the colonel replied. “He was shot twice, several days apart.”
“What?” Edward tried to make sense of this. “What the hell happened?”
Stubbs groaned and seemed to deflate as he leaned against his desk. “I couldn’t bring him back here. Not when I wasn’t sure of his loyalties.”
“Thomas Harcourt was no traitor,” Edward spat.
“There was no way to know that for certain,” Stubbs shot back. “What the hell was I supposed to think? I got up to New Rochelle, just as he’d specified, and then before he can say anything other than my name people start shooting at me.”
“At him,” Edward corrected. After all, Thomas was the one who’d been shot.
Stubbs downed his brandy—his second glass by now—and went back for another. “I don’t know who the hell they were shooting at. For all I know, I was the target and they missed. You know most of the colonials are an untrained rabble. Half can’t hit the side of the wall.”
Edward took a moment to absorb this. He knew in his bones that Thomas was no traitor, but he could see how Colonel Stubbs—who did not know him well—could have had doubts.
“Captain Harcourt was hit in the shoulder,” Stubbs said grimly. “The bullet went clean through. It wasn’t that hard to get the bleeding stopped, but he was in a lot of pain.”
Edward closed his eyes and took a breath, but it didn’t steady him. He’d seen far too many men with gunshot wounds.
“I took him to Dobbs Ferry,” Stubbs continued. “We have a small outpost near the river. It’s not quite behind enemy lines, but close.”
Edward knew Dobbs Ferry well. The British had used it as a rendezvous point ever since the Battle of White Plains nearly three years earlier. “What happened then?” he asked.
Colonel Stubbs looked at him with a flat expression. “I returned here.”
“You left him there,” Edward said disgustedly. What sort of man left a wounded soldier in the middle of the wilderness?
“He was not alone. I had three men guarding him.”
“You held him as a prisoner?”
“It was for his own safety as much as anything else. I didn’t know if we were keeping him from escaping, or keeping the rebels from killing him.” Stubbs eyed Edward with increasing impatience. “For God’s sake, Rokesby, I am not the enemy here.”
Edward held his tongue.
“He could not have made the trip back to New York in any case,” Stubbs said with a shake of his head. “He was in far too much pain.”
“You could have stayed.”
“No, I could not,” Stubbs retorted. “I had to return to headquarters. I was expected. No one even knew I’d slipped away. Believe me, as soon as I came up with an excuse I went back to fetch him. It was only two days.” He swallowed, and for the first time since Edward’s arrival, he actually went pale. “But when I got there, they were dead.”
“They?”
“Harcourt, the three men holding him. All of them.”
Edward looked at the glass in his hand. He’d forgotten he was holding it. He watched his hand as he set it down, almost as if this might somehow stem the shaking of his fingers. “What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Stubbs closed his eyes, his face replete with agonized memory as he whispered, “They’d all been shot.”
Bile rose up in Edward’s stomach. “Was it an execution?”
“No.” Stubbs shook his head. “There had been a fight.”
“Even Thomas? Wasn’t he under guard?”
“We had not bound him. It was clear that he had been fighting too, even with his injury. But . . .” Stubbs swallowed. Turned away.
“But what?”
“It was impossible to tell which side he’d been fighting for.”
“You knew him better than that,” Edward said in a low voice.
“Did I? Did you?”
“Yes, goddamn it, I did!” The words erupted from him in a roar, and this time Edward shot to his feet.
“Well, I didn’t,” Stubbs returned. “And it’s my bloody job to be suspicious of everyone.” He grabbed his forehead, his thumb and middle finger pressing hard into his temples. “I’m just so sick of it all.”
Edward took a step back. He’d never seen the colonel like this. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone like this.
“Do you know what it does to a man?” Stubbs asked, his voice only just louder than a whisper. “To trust no one?”
Edward did not speak. He was still so angry, so fu
ll of rage and fury, but he no longer knew where to direct it. Not at Stubbs, though. He took the brandy glass from the colonel’s trembling hand and walked over to the decanter, where he poured them each another. He did not care if it was barely eight in the morning. Neither of them needed a clear head.
He suspected neither of them wanted a clear head.
“What happened to the bodies?” Edward asked in a low voice.
“I buried them.”
“All of them?”
The colonel closed his eyes. “It was not a pleasant day.”
“Have you any witnesses?”
Stubbs looked up sharply. “You do not trust me?”
“Forgive me,” Edward said, because he did trust Stubbs. In this . . . in everything, he supposed. He did not know how the man had kept this to himself. It must have burned a hole in his gut.
“I got help for the graves,” Stubbs said. He sounded exhausted. He sounded spent. “I will give you the names of the men who aided me if you so require.”
Edward looked at him for a long moment before answering, “I do not.” But then he gave his head a little shake, almost as if he were trying to jostle his thoughts into place. “Why did you send that letter?”
Stubbs blinked. “What letter?”
“The one from General Garth. Saying that Thomas had been injured. I assume he did so at your request.”
“It was true when we sent it,” the colonel answered. “I’d wanted to notify his family with all due haste. There was a ship leaving the harbor the morning after I left him in Dobbs Ferry. When I think about it now . . .” He raked his hand through his thinning hair, and his body seemed to deflate as he sighed. “I was so pleased I’d managed to dispatch it so quickly.”
“You never thought to correct your error and send another?”
“There were too many unanswered questions.”
“To notify his family?” Edward asked in disbelief.
“I planned to send a letter once we had answers,” Stubbs said stiffly. “I certainly didn’t think his sister would cross the Atlantic for him. Although, I don’t know, maybe she came for you.”