One Night with the Major

by Bronwyn Scott

  * * *

  Pavia hadn’t meant to sleep. She hadn’t meant to linger after midnight. But when she woke, it was clear she’d done both. The window showed grey shadows of coming dawn and she knew a moment’s panic. She’d slept the night away! Beside her, her nameless lover slept unbothered, his sleeping countenance as handsome as it had been the night before. She had to hurry—hurry to get out of this room before he awoke, hurry to get back to the inn before her maid realised she was missing.

  Pavia slid out of bed, wincing at her sore muscles—another surprise. She hastily gathered her veils, quietly retrieving her jingly gold belt. She’d been counting on the darkness to make her less conspicuous walking back. Now that advantage was gone, too, yet another reason to hurry. A girl wearing nothing but veils walking through the morning streets was bound to stand out. She did not want to be remembered. The cloak she’d worn the night before had been left behind in the kitchen. She took a final look at the man in the bed and slipped out of the room, closing the door softly on her one adventure. In the dim hall, Pavia squared her shoulders, warding off a sense of melancholy as she left the room and its occupant behind.

  She ought to be pleased. Her quest had been irrevocably successful and now it was time to go forward into the future she’d chosen for herself; a future that would be somewhat uncertain at the outset and most definitely rocky. Her father would be furious once she announced she no longer met Wenderly’s marital criteria. That was a given. But what he would do was not as obvious. Would he banish her to the countryside? Force her into seclusion? Would he send her back to India and be done with her? She’d prefer the latter. Her uncle would take her in, she was sure of it. Perhaps her mother would come with her and they could both be free. She would hold on to that hope through the difficult times that would come first. If there was one certainty at the moment, it was this: things would likely get worse before they got better. But they would get better, Pavia reasoned, a little smile teasing her mouth as she walked. It was already better. She wasn’t going to marry Wenderly. She couldn’t. It was now impossible. She was completely and thoroughly ruined.

  Chapter Three

  For the first time in the months since Balaclava, Cam slept. Thoroughly, completely. And, damn it, the price for that sleep was too high. Cam knew before he opened his eyes that she was gone. The room felt different, smelt different; it lacked a certain vibrancy.

  Cam gave a groan and opened one eye, hoping his other senses were wrong. But sight only confirmed his disappointment. Her veils were gone. Except for the last mementos of scent, she had vanished with the night. Not that he hadn’t expected as much. She’d made it clear there’d be nothing between them beyond the night. Yet, it would have been nice to wake up to her; to the curve of her derrière tucked against him, to perhaps take her gently from behind as she woke, a chance to redeem himself as a lover.

  She’d not been with him when release had claimed him alone. Her pleasure had waited until he’d taken her with his mouth, determined that she know the joy of release with him. It was a point of pride that his lovers found their pleasure, too. That the pleasure had initially eluded her had come as something of a surprise to Cam. He’d not been prepared for that. Everything leading up to his climax had suggested that moment would be jointly shared. Except for her eyes. Damn it, he should have put more credence in her eyes.

  Even now in the grey coolness of morning, the heat of the night was etched on his mind with startling clarity. Her body had welcomed him eagerly, but her eyes had been dark and knowing, and not nearly as pliant, or as hot, as the rest of her. There’d been reserve in her gaze, a piece of her that she’d held back. And in the heat of the moment, Cam had wanted to claim it. Even now, he could recall that fierce surge of possession with warrior-like sharpness. He’d wanted that one piece of her, wanted to know what it was that she held back and why. And he’d set out to conquer it, driving himself into the oblivion of lovemaking, urged there by the arch of her body, the sounds of her mouth as he thrust into the tight, wet heat of her. The tightness had been exquisite, shaping itself around him as he moved within her. But despite his intent to conquer, to claim, that one piece had remained in abeyance, reserved from the encounter. For all his skill, he’d not been able to coax it forward. Despite the encouraging mewls and the subtle urgings of her body, he was alone when his release had come, pulsing, hard and sweeping, leaving him spent and, for a precious amount of time, too replete to think of the world beyond their bed, too replete to worry over what had gone amiss.

  This morning, he still felt too replete to worry over her flight from his bed. Why had she flown? Had she taken anything with her? He wondered vaguely if she’d robbed him while he’d slept and Cam found he didn’t care. He had few items of worth on his person save his ring, a watch and his officer’s gorget. He had his sword, of course, which would fetch a good amount. He rather hoped she hadn’t taken that. It would be hard to explain how he’d lost it. He had a money clip in a pocket of his coat. But money was replaceable.

  Cam reached a long arm out and lifted his coat from the floor, feeling for the money clip, half-hoping it was gone. At least then he’d know she would be able to purchase some security, pay rent, buy food, buy clothes if she needed them. Perhaps she would not have to dance in taverns where men tupped her with their eyes. His hand closed disappointingly around the clip. All was intact.

  Cam sighed, questions filling his head. Where would she go? What would she do? Would she be safe? These were new questions. He’d never given much thought before about such things. Then again, he was not inclined towards lightskirts as lovers in general. Continental widows who loved their freedom were more to his taste when it came to assuaging physical need. But last night had somehow transcended the usual satisfying of his carnal appetites. Worrying over his absent lover was a distraction he needed to set aside. He could do nothing for her and other business called today.

  He squinted towards the window, testing the brightness. It was well past dawn. Past time to get on with the day and the unpleasantness that waited. Cam threw back the covers and swung his legs out of bed. He stretched, arms over his head, rotating side to side from the waist. He rotated to his left side, then to his right, then halt—what was that on the bed, revealed only when he’d thrown back the covers? The pale stains of sex and blood on the sheets were unmistakable. He’d bedded enough women and seen enough blood to know. There were only two conclusions he could draw from that and one of them seemed too far-fetched to even consider: his dancer had been a virgin. Virgins didn’t dance in taverns, didn’t take arbitrary strangers upstairs for the night. Yet his body remembered the exquisite tightness of her, the hesitation before her hips had taken up the rhythm of his. He remembered, too, the provocative shyness of her when she’d stood before him naked, perhaps defiant instead of bold. Then, there had been her one hand, protective and shielding, giving her the air of innocence.

  It had been coyly done, but even now with blood on the sheets, he couldn’t quite convince himself it was more than an act simply because it didn’t make sense. What did make sense was the other, more practical conclusion. She’d got her menses in the night. Not that it mattered. She had vanished completely. He would never see her again, even if he wanted to. To his surprise, he did want to. She’d captivated him with her passion, her beauty, with the concern he’d seen in her eyes, as if he wasn’t just another customer. ‘You are hurting, in here.’ Cam’s eyes quartered the room looking for a token of her presence, a scarf left behind, a coin dropped from her belt. Anything that offered insight into her identity. But there would be no glass slipper for him, no way to trace her.

  Just as well. What would he do anyway if he found her? He was here on leave. He had duties to carry out. He would go back to Sevastopol as soon as his leave was up in August. It was time to get on with those duties. Cam mapped out the day in his head. He would send for his batman, who had chosen to bed down in the stables, eat breakfas
t, shave, dress and then, when the hour was decent and he could put it off no longer, he would call on the Duke of Cowden.

  * * *

  ‘Fortis is dead, Your Grace.’ As it turned out, there was no decent hour at which to tell an ageing man his son had been killed. Cam stood ramrod-straight at attention, bringing all his sense of military ceremony to the announcement. Cam would honour his fallen friend with every ounce of pomp and pride in him. Fortis’s family deserved as much and Cam had promised. It was not a promise he’d ever thought to keep. They’d been half-drunk the night he’d made the pledge years ago in India on their first posting. They’d been immortal then.

  The Duke of Cowden received the news with as much aplomb as it was delivered with, but it was a Herculean task for them both to maintain the stiff upper lip demanded by social etiquette—an etiquette that maintained a man did not fall apart over loss: loss of money, loss of life, the loss of a child. A man carried on.

  ‘Will you join me in a drink to him, then?’ Cowden moved to the side board holding a cut-crystal decanter full of brandy. His hand trembled as he poured. Cam moved to take the tumbler before the older man could drop it. He’d not seen Cowden in nearly eight years, not since Fortis’s hasty wedding to Avaline Panshawe, a marriage Fortis barely acknowledged. Cowden’s hair was white and his face was lined, although his back was straight. He was still a tall, commanding man if one did not look too closely, but the age was showing in small ways: the shaking hand, the long pauses before he spoke.

  Cowden raised his glass, his voice firm. ‘To my son, Fortis, who lived as he wanted and died as he wished.’ They drank, long, deep swallows to cover the emotion. It was exactly how Fortis had wished to die: in the saddle, in the heat of battle, exhilaration thrumming through his veins. Cam hoped it had lived up to Fortis’s expectations.

  Cowden refilled his glass and gestured to a chair, his tone shifting. ‘There, now that’s done. We’ve fulfilled our social obligations. Perhaps you would sit and tell me the details, tell an old man about the last moments of his son’s life?’ Grey eyebrows lifted at the request, his blue eyes not as sharp as Cam remembered them. The Duke had always been a formidable figure to him, but a friendly one. Cowden was older than Cam’s father, but younger than his grandfather. He’d been a happy medium in Cam’s life while he was growing up. He’d always been welcome at Fortis’s home. He’d never thought he’d have to repay those years of kindnesses like this.

  ‘Should we call the others?’ Cam made a gesture towards the door of Cowden’s study. ‘Should we include them?’

  Cowden shook his head. ‘Let them think Fortis is alive awhile longer. Besides, you needn’t sanitise the details with me,’ he offered knowingly. ‘The news will be upsetting enough as it is.’ The whole Cowden crew was in town at the moment even though the Season would not be fully under way for a few weeks yet: Frederick, the heir, who had always been so jealous of Fortis’s freedom to serve his country; Helena, his wife, and their five boys; Ferris, his wife, Anne, and new baby, and Avaline, Fortis’s widow—a woman Fortis had spent only three weeks of married life with before he’d returned to his troops. Had he loved Avaline? Had Avaline loved him? Fortis had said little of his marriage. But Cam knew she had written to him dutifully for seven years. Cam did not relish telling her the news.

  He sat, thankful for Cowden’s offer of informality. He could be himself here. He could be a friend, talking to another about a mutual friend instead of being the officer. He would return the Duke’s gift with the very best of Fortis: stories of Fortis in camp, how well his men liked him, how well the other officers respected him, the brilliance of his strategies, the successes of his warcraft, his daring in the Battle of Alma, the one preceding Balaclava. No father could be prouder. No friend could be luckier than to have Fortis by his side. In truth, it felt good to reminisce this way, to remember Fortis as he’d been in life with someone who knew him well.

  ‘And at Balaclava?’ the Duke asked at last, too sharp to overlook the one omission in the tales Cam had so carefully chosen. Some of the elation the stories had created ebbed from the room. ‘All that brilliance, all that courage, could not save him?’

  Cam shook his head ruefully. ‘It was a series of missteps from the beginning. Raglan should have been using the cavalry to cut off the Russians at the Causeway, but he refused to take action.’ Fortis had been furious at the Lieutenant General’s refusal to put the Light Brigade into play. ‘Major General Cardigan was angry by the time he saw the Russians going after our cannon. He might have stood around all day while others saw action, but he would be damned if he would hold back his troops while the Russians stole our guns off the ridge.’ There had been other mistakes, too. Like sending the note for permission to strike with a messenger who believed too heartily in what a mounted cavalry could do and there’d been a mistake in the route Cardigan used. They should not have cut through the valley. That route had drawn the fire of the entire Russian army. ‘Fortis was ready for the charge. He was magnificent on that stallion of his, his sabre overhead as he called his troops to him. We were the right flank, the second line.’ Cam let the euphoria of battle fill him as he told the tale, how they’d driven through the Russian artillery, how they’d persisted, meeting the Russian cavalry in combat, pushing them back. There had been heady moments, glorious moments! He would not forget how gallant, how fearless his friend had looked. But they hadn’t the strength or numbers to hold the position. They’d been forced to withdraw.

  Some of the euphoria let him. ‘We took the worst of it in retreat, in my opinion. We couldn’t withdraw to safety. That’s when Fortis fell.’ When had Fortis realised they’d crossed the valley of death? That the mission was impossible? That they might have achieved smashing through the lines, but that victory was their very downfall. They were exposed with no hope of shelter.

  ‘The papers said only one hundred and ninety-three returned,’ Cowden said quietly, reverently. ‘That fifty-five of the Fourth’s regiment were killed and four officers.’ But not Lieutenant Colonel Lord George Paget, or Major Camden Lithgow. Guilt swamped him for having survived.

  ‘Yes,’ Cam replied sombrely. Six-hundred-and-seventy-three men had charged the valley. He’d been one of the one hundred and ninety-three. He still grappled with that reality. How was it that he’d emerged unscathed while those around him fell—officers, good men who knew how to handle themselves in battle—cut down while he had not a scratch? No one could explain it, not the generals who had sent him home, not the priests who’d prayed with him over the dead and now he had to explain to the Duke of Cowden. Why had he lived when Fortis had fallen?

  The Duke shook his head and put a fatherly hand on his leg. ‘No, don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself for being spared. At least one of you lived to come home and tell the tales. Fortis was a soldier. He knew the risks. He embraced them.’

  Cowden drew a breath to ask the only question that remained. ‘Did you see the body?’

  ‘I saw him fall. He was only a few yards away from me. Khan, his big black, went down. The Russians shot his horse out from under him.’ Perhaps a horse had made a difference. Perhaps that was why he’d survived. Cam and his strong grey stallion, Hengroen, had both remained miraculously intact. ‘I pushed towards Fortis the moment I saw.’ Cam remembered turning Hengroen towards the fallen Khan, but he couldn’t get close; it was an impossible horizontal movement in a vertical charge. All around him, men and horses were falling, blocking his way. He could do nothing but push forward.

  ‘And afterwards? Did you see his body then?’ Cowden pressed. It was the question Cam didn’t want to answer, a question that raised all his old hopes and fears when it came to Fortis—that somehow Fortis had survived, that he wasn’t dead.

  ‘No, Your Grace, I did not. I had orders to carry out and there was...difficulty, shall we say? Afterwards. The British army does not accept defeat without placing blame.’

  A little
light of misguided hope flared in Cowden’s eyes. Cam had been prepared for this even before Cowden uttered the words, ‘Do you think there’s a chance...?’ He let the words drift off.

  ‘No, Your Grace, I do not. Four hundred men and horses were slaughtered. I saw him go down in impossible circumstances.’ Cam looked down at his hands and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. ‘I know what you’re thinking. That Fortis was strong enough, canny enough to survive. I thought it, too. For months I hoped. When things settled, I scoured the countryside every chance I got. It was winter, it was cold. I asked at huts and in little villages if anyone had nursed a wounded man.’ He paused, remembering the desperate months of searching, of hoping and all the emotions that went with alternately experiencing intense hope followed by the intense grief of disappointment. There’d be a possible story in a village that only turned out to be someone else. Towards the end, he’d been drunk quite a bit of the time and bitter. It was not the proudest chapter in his life. He still cringed to think about it, embarrassed by his grief and his inability to manage it. The army had been embarrassed, too. He knew why he’d been sent home. In their opinion, he’d become a danger to himself and perhaps to others. He did not want to fuel such a disastrous hope for the Duke.

  ‘It’s been seven months, Your Grace. If I thought there was any hope left I would not have come home.’ He would have found a way even if it meant desertion. The army had wanted him to go home sooner, but he’d refused, citing the difficulties of winter travels. He’d bought himself a little more time until finally the Major General had insisted he go home and recover before he shot someone by accident or himself on purpose. The latter was more likely. He’d got the gun as far as his head on two occasions.