by Mary Balogh
That was an unexpected way to look at the disaster of what had happened to her. Had she not lost all her hopes and dreams?
“Let me tell you what happened to my sister Camille,” she said. “She had already made her come-out. She was betrothed to a viscount. She was a very proper lady, a very strict follower of all the rules and conventions of society. She was straitlaced and rather humorless. She was my sister and I loved her, but I do not believe she was generally well liked. Her betrothed forced an abrupt end to their engagement when the truth of her birth was revealed. She had more to suffer than the rest of us, and suffer she did. But consider her now. You saw her during the past week. She is almost unrecognizable as the Camille I remember. She is happy. She is lovable. She and Joel will probably end up with a dozen children both their own and adopted, and she will welcome each one of them with an all-embracing love. She is beautiful, but in a far different way than she was six years ago. My family still talks of what happened as the Great Catastrophe, as though the words would have to be capitalized if written down. But it was not a catastrophe for Camille. It was the best thing that ever happened to her.”
He did not take his eyes off her as she spoke with a warm sort of passion. Her cheeks had acquired a blush of color, and her eyes, large and blue, had gained depth. And he felt her perilous attraction.
“But Harry?” he said. “And you?”
They both glanced back toward the picnic site as they turned away from the trees to walk up in the direction of the stables before making their way back across the top of the lawn, just below the terrace.
“Harry,” she said, “is alive.”
“And that is enough?” he asked.
“It is always enough,” she said. “Or at least it is the main ingredient for being enough.”
“And you?” he asked again. “Is it enough that you too are alive?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly curt. “To return to your original question, I do not want to be married because of what I am, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington. At present that is the illegitimate daughter of the late Earl of Riverdale, under the determined protection of the powerful and well-connected Westcott family as well as that of the Marquess of Dorchester, my stepfather. Neither do I want to be married despite what I am. I want to be married—if I am to be married at all, that is—for who I am.”
“And who is that?” he asked. Beauty, he noticed, had tired of the stick-chasing game. She had abandoned the stick in the middle of the lawn and gone to stretch out at the foot of the blanket upon which Harry lay.
“Ah,” she said, “that is the key question.” She did not have the answer, it seemed, or if she did, she was not sharing it.
“You wish to be married for who you are,” he said. “But whom do you wish to marry, Miss Westcott?”
She turned her head to dart an appreciative look at him. “Ah,” she said, “you do understand. Most women are married. Very few, it seems to me, marry. It is always the man who begins the courtship and the man who discusses the marriage contract with another man of her family. It is the man who proposes marriage. It is the man who takes her to live with him and expects her to change not only her name but her very life to fit his. It is the woman’s part to be married and to make the best of it.”
“Should everything be reversed, then?” he asked.
“Oh, by no means.” She actually smiled for a moment and lost her look of cool beauty to become simply pretty. “That would not redress the imbalance, would it, but merely tip it the other way. I believe Camille and Joel married each other. So did my mother and Marcel. And other members of my family. You did not meet Cousin Elizabeth this week—Lady Hodges, Alexander’s sister. She is still recovering at home from a confinement. She is almost ten years older than her husband, but they married each other against all the odds. One only has to see them together for a few minutes to know that they belong together, that they are vibrantly happy.”
It was love after all, then, for which Abigail Westcott searched—and waited. But not the sort of being-in-love infatuation he had felt for Caroline when he married her. Though, truth to tell, that was a grossly oversimplified explanation of how he had felt about her and why he had wed her. Ultimately they had married because she was with child.
Miss Westcott seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Did you love your wife?” she asked.
He felt himself closing up—not that he had ever opened up to her or anyone else. He looked away as his thoughts turned to his wife. There had been lust. There had been being in love. There had been dazzlement, an incredulous sort of wonder that she could be so powerfully attracted to him when she might have had her pick of any number of handsome, wealthy, well-connected officers, all of whom were gentlemen, all of whom were clamoring for her favors. And there had been the naïveté, of course—a humiliating, disastrous abundance of it. For it was only later, after they were married, after he had taken her to his home in England, that he understood what it was about him that had attracted her—and no longer did. They were the very things that ought to have repelled her, in fact. And half of them had been imaginary. Perhaps more than half. He was not at all the person she had mistaken him for. Except in one thing. He was as far from being a gentleman as it was possible to be.
Ancient history, all of it.
Except that there was Katy.
“I married her,” he said, and he could hear the stiffness in his voice. “I cared for her in every way I knew how. She died.”
It was no answer, of course, and her silence accused him. She had been open with him. He had been the opposite with her. But to hell with it. No man enjoyed talking about feelings, for God’s sake, or about love and marriage and all the rest of it. Or about his own failed marriage, which had left pain like a raw thing ripping him apart. Or about humiliation that had torn at his very manhood. He felt suddenly irritated, perhaps the more so because he knew he was the one who had started it. She quite possibly would have been happy to discuss the weather or nothing at all during their walk.
Harry had raised himself on one elbow.
“One of these days,” he called out cheerfully as they drew within earshot, “I am going to get out of this habit of having an afternoon nap.” He laughed and pushed Beauty’s head away as she went to stand beside him and tried to lick his face.
* * *
• • •
I married her. I cared for her in every way I knew how. She died.
Lieutenant Colonel Bennington’s words played and replayed themselves in Abigail’s head far too often for her comfort during the following days. They had seemed totally devoid of emotion, a possibility that chilled her. Or perhaps they resonated with an emotion too deep to break through in words—and that was a possibility that wrenched her heart. It was impossible to know which of the two extremes had been in those words. Or perhaps neither. Perhaps he had merely been stating facts. But it seemed to Abigail that this man was unknowable and deliberately so. He was totally self-contained. Trying to know him was a bit like trying to know granite.
Not that she cared. She did not want to know him. He was Harry’s friend, but she had not warmed to him. It was not just that she had been made to look foolish during that first meeting with him—though that had not helped, she had to admit. Actually he made her feel foolish all the time.
She had been taken completely by surprise to learn that he had been married. She could not imagine it. Neither could she imagine the woman who would want to marry him. Oh, but yes, she could. What a stupid thing to think. Although she cringed inwardly at the very sight of him and was distinctly uncomfortable when forced to be close to him, she was honest enough with herself to recognize the source of what she had at first taken for revulsion.
He was disturbingly attractive in a way she could not put into words. She suspected it was something physical, but did not want to explore that possibility. She tried not to think abou
t him at all. She tried to ignore his presence at Hinsford. And it was not as difficult as it might have been. He stayed out of her way except during mealtimes and other times when the three of them were together.
She did admit, reluctantly, that his presence here was good for her brother. He did not fuss over Harry or try offering him any personal care, even an arm to lean upon. The day after everyone left, Harry sent for Mark Mitchell, the publican’s son, who had briefly been his valet before the great disaster. Since then Mark had worked with his father at the village inn. Harry offered him his old job back, and he accepted it and moved in the same day.
Lieutenant Colonel Bennington confined his role to that of companion and friend. He conversed with Harry, played chess with him, moved chairs out onto the terrace and sat there with him on a particularly warm day. He walked with him, accompanied him to the stables to look over the horses and carriages, drove him in the gig one afternoon to the village tavern and to church on Sunday morning while Abigail chose to walk. Occasionally he sat quietly reading with Harry in the library. Abigail was surprised to discover them thus employed one rainy afternoon when she went in to ask if they were ready for tea. Harry was reading one of the London papers, which had come with the post that morning, while Lieutenant Colonel Bennington was reading a book.
“You actually like books, Gil?” Harry asked, lowering his paper.
“I sometimes wish I could read faster,” the lieutenant colonel told him. “I suppose that comes with practice. But yes. Being able to read is a privilege. The vicar who taught me at a village school always said that, much to the eye-rolling disgust of all his pupils, including me. But he was right. I read now because I can.”
He was reading Tom Jones, Abigail could see. He was returning his attention to it as she withdrew to give the order for tea to be brought up. Another little fact was added to the bank of her knowledge about him. He had learned to read at a village school. He did not often read but considered it a privilege to be able to do so. He was not a fast reader.
The neighbors, as Lieutenant Colonel Bennington had predicted, came during the days after the family left. The vicar and his wife were first, as promised, and they were soon followed by others, most of whom came to pay their respects to Harry, to see for themselves that he was recovering his health and to assure themselves that he intended to remain here, at least for the foreseeable future. They came to inform him that he—and Miss Abigail, of course—would be invited to tea and to dinner and to informal parties and assemblies as soon as he was well enough and strong enough to go about. A few of the men who had been his particular friends while he was growing up, most of them now established farmers with wives and even children, promised to come again and stay longer. They hinted at fishing and shooting parties as soon as Harry was feeling up to it.
Some of Abigail’s old friends came specifically to call upon her, though most of them looked in upon Harry too, the unmarried ones perhaps to see if he was as handsome as he had given promise of being as a very young man. They were interested in the lieutenant colonel too, of course, having heard about him from the men who had met him at the tavern. But men never could remember the truly important details, they observed to Abigail. Men could never remember if a stranger was young or tall or handsome or charming or in possession of some sort of fortune.
“I was quite determined to discover that he is gorgeous,” one friend said. She was sitting in the conservatory with Abigail and another mutual friend, looking out upon rain. “Especially after the Reverend Jenkins told Mama and Papa that he is a lieutenant colonel and assured Mama he must be a single gentleman since he is apparently staying here for some length of time. I would not exactly call him gorgeous, though, now that I have seen him for myself.”
“What would you call him, then?” the other friend asked.
“He actually looks a bit frightening,” the first said. “If I were an enemy soldier, I would not want to see him coming at me with a sword. Would you?”
“I would not want to see anyone coming at me with a sword,” the other said with a deliberate shudder. “But to be perfectly frank I would not mind at all if I saw Lieutenant Colonel Bennington coming toward me to . . . ask me to dance, perhaps. What do you think of him, Abigail?”
“I think he is a good friend to Harry,” Abigail said. “And that is really all that matters.”
It irked her that she had somehow been drawn during their walk after the picnic into saying things she did not say to many people, or to any other people, in fact. She had never before openly discussed her reluctance to wed, her fear that she would never find that one special man who would want to marry her, not because of who she was or despite who she was, but because she was . . . well, herself.
And who is that? he had asked her.
She had been unable to answer. She still could not. It was a little disturbing not to know who one was deep down inside oneself. But perhaps it was not so much that she did not know as that she could find no words, even inside her head, with which to describe it.
She just was. That was all.
But how could one explain that to another person? How could she expect ever to find a man who would want to marry her just because she was? It was absurd. And she would have to return the compliment, would she not? She could not expect any man to love her that deeply if she did not also understand that he simply was, and that his wasness or isness made him forever the love of her heart. The love of her life.
Now her head was in a spin. She needed another language. The language of love, perhaps?
Her friends had looked at each other, at her, and back at each other.
“She likes him,” they said in unison, and laughed so infectiously that Abigail joined them. Let them think what they would.
Lieutenant Colonel Bennington spoke at the breakfast table one morning about his need for a horse of his own. Yes, it was all very well for Harry to invite him to take any of the horses from the stable at any time, but . . .
“I understand, Gil,” Harry said after raising one hand. “None of the horses here are really meant for riding. Besides, a man needs a horse of his own. You will not find anything suitable in the village, but it is a mere ten-mile drive to the closest market town. Why do we not go and have a look? I am itching for an outing that will take me farther than the church or the tavern. We can take the gig.”
“Perhaps,” his friend said, looking across the table at Abigail, “Miss Westcott would care for the outing too.”
Oh, she would. When she had come from London, she had brought with her neither her embroidery nor her knitting, and she was desperately missing both.
They ended up taking the old carriage that had been used for years when they were living here. It had been kept in good repair during the more than three years since Abigail had lived here last.
There was not a great deal of conversation during the journey. They were all reasonably comfortable in one another’s company, and there was always something to watch beyond the windows. But Abigail gave in to curiosity when her eyes inadvertently met those of the lieutenant colonel, who was sitting on the seat facing hers.
“What happened?” she asked, indicating her own right cheek while she looked at his. It was an abrupt and impertinent question, and she fully expected that he would dismiss it with an answer along the lines of war happened.
“What happened,” he said, “was that my officer, a young boy who ought still to have been in leading strings, took fright in his first battle when enemy cavalry decided to charge our part of the line. He ordered us to run for our lives and he put the spurs to his horse to lead the way. He was the only one with a horse.”
Harry grimaced. “Some officers are an embarrassment to themselves and a danger to the rest of us,” he said.
“Was it not good advice, then?” Abigail asked.
“A man on foot can never outrun a horse,” the lieutenant colon
el explained. “What a foot regiment in line must always do to counter a cavalry charge is form a hollow, outward-facing square of men two deep, the front row kneeling with their bayonets pointing outward, the back row firing their guns over their heads. It works every time. Horses will not charge a wall of bayonets, and men get killed by the volleys when they urge their mounts too close.”
“Horse sense,” Harry murmured.
“I bellowed at my men to form a square,” Lieutenant Colonel Bennington said. “I was their sergeant. Eventually they did, but not before far too many of them had been killed or horribly wounded. Cavalrymen stab many fleeing soldiers in the back. But what they like best is to ride past them and slash back with their great cavalry swords, blinding and maiming and killing that way.”
“That is what happened to you,” Abigail said.
“I was fortunate,” he told her. “The sword got neither my eyes nor my throat, except for one small slash. I was fortunate too not to be hated by my men. A couple of them grabbed me and dragged me into the center of the square, where I suppose they expected me to bleed out and die while they fought.”
“It is a sort of unwritten rule among officers,” Harry said, a hint of reproach in his voice, “that ladies are given no details of war.”
The lieutenant colonel looked at him and then back at Abigail. “I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “I memorized the written rules. I never did learn all the unwritten ones.”
“I did ask,” she said.
He fell silent, perhaps humiliated by Harry’s quiet rebuke, and Abigail was left to wonder again who exactly he was. Not a gentleman, almost surely. There was that village school and that recruiting sergeant. So how had he ended up an officer? A lieutenant colonel, no less.
“I suppose, Harry,” she said, “we know practically nothing of all the horrid things that happened to you during the wars. We knew only of the wounds you could not hide from us.”
He had been sent home once during the war and had arrived unexpectedly at the house in London where Alexander now lived, in such a confused mental state brought on by fever that he had thought it was still his and that he would find Mama and her and Camille there.