by Mary Balogh
She would not allow herself.
The horses were saddled and ready in the stable yard. Even so, both men checked everything for themselves. Lieutenant Colonel Bennington mounted and rode to the gateway where Abigail stood watching. He gazed down at her, and she raised her eyes unwillingly to his. He looked extremely powerful on horseback. Also grim. Always grim.
“He is ready for this,” he told her quietly so that Harry would not hear.
“Yes,” she said. “I am sure he is.”
He was telling her, she realized, that he would look after Harry and make sure no harm came to him. He knew she was worrying though she had said nothing. These two men had ridden across Spain and Portugal together, she reminded herself, and across the Pyrenees into France. They had fought together in fierce and bloody battles and skirmishes she had known nothing about until months later. They had fought together at Waterloo. Of course he would watch out for Harry, just as Harry would watch out for him if the situation were reversed.
“Thank you,” she added.
Harry rode up at that moment, looking slender and boyish and eager. Almost—ah, almost like his old self.
“You ought to come too, Abby,” he said.
She had thought about it. “Not today,” she said, smiling at him. “I have other things to do.”
They both tipped their hats to her with their riding whips and rode off in the direction of the drive.
She spent the next hour in the morning room, writing letters to Camille and her mother, raising her head at the slightest sound to look through the window to see if they were returning. She looked up sharply when she heard at last the sound of horses’ hooves clopping up the drive. They were back. She blotted her letter to her mother, cleaned her pen hastily, and hurried out to the stables to be there when they dismounted.
“Here we are, Abby,” Harry called cheerfully. “Both of us in one piece. You need not have worried.”
“Who said I was worried?” she retorted. “I had better things to do than worry about you. I have written to Camille and Mama.”
“And that is why you are out here almost before us, I suppose?” he said as he dismounted.
He did not insist upon unsaddling his horse as Lieutenant Colonel Bennington was doing, she noticed. A groom was doing it for him.
“It felt good to ride again?” she asked.
“It is the best feeling in the world, Abby,” he said. “You really ought to have come with us. Send my love to Mama, will you? You have not sealed the letter yet?”
“No,” she said.
“Then if you mentioned that I had gone riding,” he said, “add a postscript to assure her that Gil brought me home safely, not a scratch upon my person.”
“I will,” she said. “I am not spying upon you on Mama’s behalf, you know, Harry. Or spying at all, in fact. But you cannot stop us from being concerned.”
“I know.” He grinned. “And I appreciate that you are. I am going to put my feet up for a while before luncheon. You do not need to walk me back to the house. Stay and have a word with Gil. I am sure you are itching to ask him how I really fared.”
She was not itching for any such thing. But Lieutenant Colonel Bennington had heard, so she waited politely for him to be finished with what he was doing while Harry set out alone for the house.
“I steered him clear of all six-foot hedges,” he told her when he joined her in the stable yard doorway a few minutes later. “It was a very sedate ride, Miss Westcott, and he was a bit frustrated by that very fact. He has always been a neck-or-nothing rider, as I daresay you know. But he has surmounted another hurdle in his recovery.”
“I really did not need a full report,” she said, flushing. “I do try not to fuss over him.” He smelled of leather and horse, as Harry had. It was not an unpleasant smell. “It is just that . . . Well, we spent years worrying, as thousands of mothers and sisters and wives did, and then months on end preparing ourselves for what seemed his certain death. He is precious to us.”
“He will do,” he said. “He will do very well indeed. I have never known a tougher soldier than Harry Westcott.”
She nodded and turned to make her way back to the house. She had never thought of Harry as tough when he was a boy or very young man. In many ways he seemed the same now as he had ever been. But he was not, was he? He had lived through six years that might have broken him or toughened him. Just as she had lived through the same years, grappling with them in her own way.
She hoped that Lieutenant Colonel Bennington would stay in the stables for a while after having a word with her. He had not been avoiding her during the last few days any more than she had avoided him, but he had not sought her company either. But he fell into step beside her now, a silent presence on her right side. She kept her hands clasped firmly at her waist while he held his behind his back. He was the one who broke the silence.
“I believe, Miss Westcott,” he said, “I owe you an apology.”
“Oh? For what?” she asked foolishly, turning her head to look up at him.
“For kissing you,” he said. “It was unpardonable.”
“Yet you ask my pardon?” she said.
“I do.”
She wondered, as she had done surely a hundred times since it had happened, why he had done it. And why she had allowed it. It was nothing, she was on the verge of saying now. But it had been something. Of course it had. She had slept badly since. She had found herself reliving the kiss and feeling guilty about doing so. As though she sought some thrill in what had not been thrilling. Or ought not to have been.
“Then you have my forgiveness,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Had this not happened before? Ah yes, out in the woods when he had apologized for misleading her into thinking him a servant. And in the process of speaking to each other now, they had somehow stopped walking—in the gap between the stables and the house, the very place where she had stopped walking on that day she had watched him chopping wood. There was another pile of wood there now, she could see.
“When do you expect to hear from your lawyer again?” she asked. Silly question. It was only three days since he had received the last letter.
“I have no idea,” he said. “This is an eternal waiting game, Miss Westcott. The sort of thing I am least suited for. But I will not wait him out here for much longer. I can promise you that. I will stay long enough to be sure that Harry feels perfectly comfortable in the saddle, perhaps another week, and then I will be off.”
“To your home?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Would you be thinking of leaving,” she asked him, “if I were not here?” She could have bitten out her tongue, but the question had been asked.
There was a lengthy silence, during which time they stood where they were.
“The thing is,” he said at last, “that procrastination can become a way of life. Waiting can become total inaction. I came here because I was needed—and because I could not bear the thought of going home alone. I have been here several weeks and will be needed for perhaps another one. Harry is growing stronger by the day. He will have you for company after I am gone and numerous friends and friendly neighbors close by. I would be deluding myself if I stayed here after next week because I thought my presence indispensable.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “Sometimes one does wonder if one lives quietly from choice or if in reality one is merely waiting for something that may never come.”
She could almost read his thoughts. It was a woman’s place to wait and a man’s place to do. And why were they standing here? She had a letter to finish and a postscript to add. And what had made her suddenly fear that she was wasting her life? Was she at peace here? Or was she merely waiting endlessly?
“You could come with me,” he said.
She whipped her head about to look up at
him, her eyes wide.
“What?”
“The devil!” he said. “What is it about you, Miss Westcott? We have already quite firmly agreed that Harry’s suggestion was outrageous. Shall we—” He was gesturing ahead along the terrace.
“To your home?” she said. “As your wife?”
“At the risk of repeating myself rather too often,” he said, “I beg to apologize.”
“Did we agree?” she asked. They probably had. She could not remember. “It was not an outrageous suggestion.”
“I am a guttersnipe,” he said, and he turned his head to look about them. “Oh, for God’s sake. We cannot stand here forever. Take a turn about the lawn with me.”
But they went only partly across it before Abigail stopped again. “I cannot keep up with your pace,” she said.
He stopped and took a step closer to her.
“Guttersnipe is merely a word,” she said. “An ugly one I suppose you have decided to attach to yourself so that no one can hurt you by insulting your origins. You already accept the worst anyone can say about you. But what does it mean? That you grew up very poor in a household with only your mother? That you were rejected by all her family members you never knew and despised by all the so-called respectable folk among whom you lived? You learned to read and write, thanks, I daresay, to your mother and a vicar who did not turn you away from his school. You enlisted with a recruiting sergeant and made your way up through the ranks to become a sergeant yourself. After your father purchased a commission for you and then a promotion, you rose through your own efforts to the rank of captain, then major, and eventually lieutenant colonel. You must have worked hard to speak and behave like a gentleman in a gentlemen’s army. You have a home that is larger than a cottage. You have money. Is it time, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington, to stop calling yourself a guttersnipe?”
“It is what I would be called—among other things—if I tried to marry a lady,” he said.
“Is that what happened when you married the general’s daughter?” she asked. “Was she of age? Why did he not stop you if he despised your origins so much?”
“She was increasing,” he said.
“Oh.” She could feel her cheeks grow hot.
“Forget I suggested you come with me when I leave here,” he said. “I rescind the offer.”
“Was it an offer?” she asked him. “Or merely a suggestion?”
“Forget it,” he said, “whatever it was.”
And they walked on, though she noticed that he shortened his stride to accommodate hers. She did not know where they were going. They were headed toward the trees, but he turned before they were among them, to walk along the bottom of the lawn in the direction of the place where they had had a picnic the day her family left.
It seemed he had no more to say.
“Who is your father?” she asked him.
She did not expect him to answer. He did not for a long while.
“Viscount Dirkson,” he said curtly.
A viscount. She had not expected that. She had thought perhaps some wealthy farmer or businessman. The name sounded vaguely familiar, though she was sure she did not know the man. How could she? She had never mingled with the ton. He had been one of her father’s crowd, perhaps? That would not be a strong recommendation.
“I know nothing more about him than his name,” he said. “I did not know even that before he purchased my commission. My mother never spoke of him, even when I was at the stage of boyhood when I pestered her for information. I merely got cuffed about the ears for my pains. Later I did not want to know. And after I did know, I was neither interested in learning more nor desirous of taking advantage of his sudden wish to be my benefactor.”
It was understandable, she supposed. Even commendable.
“Have you decided,” he asked her as they turned just before reaching the drive to make their way up the lawn toward the house, “who you are?”
“Who . . . ?” She looked at him blankly.
“You told me once that if you ever married,” he said, “it must be because of who you are rather than what. By what I took you to mean the illegitimate daughter of a former Earl of Riverdale. But when I asked what you meant by who, you said something like that being the key question. You also said that if you ever wed, you wanted both to marry and to be married. Meaning, I believe, that you wanted it to be a mutual choice and decision of both partners. You did not want to be the passive recipient of a wooing and a marriage proposal.”
“Did I indeed say all that?” she asked him. “How embarrassing. It sounds as though I was barely coherent. At the picnic, was it, after everyone had left? But I believe you must have rightly interpreted what I was trying to say. I am not the illegitimate daughter of an earl. Or, rather, I am. But I am not defined by that identity. Or by the fact that I am a Westcott on my father’s side and a Kingsley on my mother’s. I am not defined by my education and upbringing. I would never be defined by the fact that I was someone’s wife or someone’s mother. Or by any other label.”
“Who, then, are you?” he asked.
“The bottom fell out of my world six years ago, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington,” she said. “That is a phrase often used carelessly to describe some minor upset. For me it felt frighteningly real. For a while I was careful to behave with quiet decorum as though by doing so I could hold my world together. In reality there was a yawning black hole inside me that stretched to infinity. I did not know who I was. I did not even know if I could lay claim to my last name—Westcott. My mother changed hers to Kingsley, but it had been her name before she married. It had never been my name. I survived by learning to embrace that black emptiness, and I discovered that actually it was an infinity of light and possibility. I learned that my real self is inner and infinite and indestructible and quite independent of circumstances or labels.”
They stepped in silence onto the terrace a short distance from the front doors.
“I also learned,” she added, “never to try to describe all that to anyone else lest they think me mad. I suppose you think me mad.”
“I do not,” he said. “I believe I even almost understand.”
“Almost?”
He stopped walking and tapped his right temple with his forefinger. “Not here,” he said. “It makes no sense at all here. But . . . yes, I understand. One is not defined by the circumstances of one’s life even though they shape one’s destiny and character and give one a place in the world. They shape how other people see one. Other people never see the real person.”
“Ah,” she said, smiling warmly at him and forgetting entirely for the moment that he was someone she found both unapproachable and strangely attractive. “I have always longed to meet someone who understands. And someone I can understand.”
He gazed back at her with dark, inscrutable eyes and a bearing so military that he might almost have been on parade. And she wished the terrace could open up and swallow her. He could not possibly understand. She barely understood herself.
“I believe,” she said, “that if your suggestion that I go with you was a firm invitation, and if I wanted to go, I would defy the whole world in order to do it. The world—the world of people and society, I mean—really means nothing to me any longer. But they are two very hypothetical ifs, Lieutenant Colonel. Now, if Harry knows we are still out here, he will be thinking you are telling terrible tales about his physical weakness and his poor horsemanship.”
They walked the short distance to the door without speaking.
“Damn Harry and his bright ideas,” he said as they made their way up the steps.
Abigail blinked at his choice of language.
Twelve
Over the next week Miss Westcott was invited a few times to take tea with friends and neighbors. Once she was asked out to dine and was escorted home late in the evening by the husband of the friend who had invit
ed her. Gil too went visiting a few times with Harry. It was clear to him that the family had been well liked when they lived here years ago. Their change in status appeared to have made little or no difference to the respect and affection in which they were held. The late Earl of Riverdale, on the other hand, had not been well liked, Gil understood. Neither had he spent much time at Hinsford.
Harry was getting noticeably stronger, and he seemed happy enough at least for now to be here at his old home. He was comfortable being waited upon by servants, most of whom were old retainers, with his personal needs served by an excellent valet, whom he had known all his life. He was surrounded by neighbors and old friends. He was beginning to take an active interest in the running of the home farm and in the life of the neighborhood.
Gil could see clearly that Harry no longer needed him. It was time to go. Especially as he had almost invited Abigail Westcott to go with him and she had almost accepted and it would be a disaster for both of them if that happened. How could he even be thinking of it—except that Harry had put the idea into his head, and hers too, and he could not seem to dislodge it. It was utter insanity and must be put to rout in the only truly decisive way. He must leave.
Then came another letter from his lawyer, a little more than a week after the first. Nothing more had been said about charging Lieutenant Colonel Bennington with assault, Grimes reported, and he had made no further threat about charging General Sir Edward and Lady Pascoe with unlawful confinement of Miss Katherine Bennington. The general’s lawyer, on behalf of his clients, seemed rather to be pushing for an early court date in which a judge would decide the child’s fate. Since they seemed determined to keep her and raise her themselves, it would appear they were confident of winning such a case without going the ugly length of charging the child’s father with a crime.