She curled up against him, and he obligingly wrapped an arm around her.
“I never thought of it like that. Your English boyhood soured on you that way, didn’t it?” Because he’d traded a happy childhood, not for the grudging charity of relations, but for a war in which he had no allies.
He was quiet for a long time, while the fire settled on the andirons and Milly kept questions behind her teeth.
“I have nightmares, Milly. I thrash and mutter in my sleep. I wake up in a cold sweat, screaming obscenities in two languages. I cannot promise you would be safe, were I to waken in your embrace.”
And worse than all of it—which was awful enough—Milly sensed he was ashamed of himself for allowing his dreams to be haunted.
She shifted, so she was straddling his lap. “I cannot abide this, Sebastian.”
“I am sorry. I should have told you before we married, I know, but one doesn’t—”
Milly cradled his jaw with both hands, so he could not elude her kiss. “I cannot abide that you must suffer this way. Is it the same dream each night?”
Her kiss or her question seemed to foil his flight of self-castigation. “Often it’s the same, or it’s variations on the same theme.”
“You will tell me, please.”
“So we can share my nightmares?”
Milly brushed his hair back from his temple, where he’d turn gray and distinguished long before she would consider abandoning him to his nightmares. “So I can understand.”
He lifted her off of him, carefully, and set her on one end of the settee. Before Milly could lodge her protest, Sebastian lay down on his side, his head pillowed on her thigh. He crossed his arms over his chest, as if settling in for a nap.
“This is cozy,” Milly said, stroking his shoulder.
“You will recall I tried to spare you this recitation, Baroness.”
She fiddled with the silky dark hair at his nape. “You will recall I am your wife.”
His smile was faint, fleeting, and sad.
“At the same time it became clear to me that the English advance across Spain would not stop, and that France’s cause was doomed, a duke came into my keeping. An English duke, and a man of more mental fortitude than you will find in six lifetimes did you spend them scouring the entire earth.”
He fell silent for a time, staring at the fire while Milly traced the shape of his ear.
“My duke was the reason I could keep Anduvoir cowed, the reason the guards never rebelled, the reason the other prisoners had time to heal in body and spirit. Before I could set him free, it became the duke who tortured me, and not the other way around… The pain that man could endure would have felled all the rest of Wellington’s staff put together, and for a time, it felled me.”
“Mercia?”
“Mercia. Christian Donatus Severn. On his silence rested the safety and well-being of every Englishman, Frenchman, dog, and cat at the Château. I could not turn my back without my own guards, my own commanding officer, attempting to break him, and they all failed. Thank God, they failed, for any success on their part would have seen the end of my role as the authority over captured English officers.”
“Mercia acknowledges you.” Though it made little sense, given what Sebastian was disclosing.
“He had enemies more diabolical than a mere provincial French army colonel with a foul temper and a sharp knife, and after a time, I think Mercia understood that my intent was not to destroy him.”
“Others sought to destroy him?”
“They were not successful.”
The fire threw out a decent amount of heat, and yet Milly was chilled. As shadows danced and flickered across Sebastian’s features, she tried to grasp the delicacy of his position: the English had hated and feared him, the French had resented him and exploited him, and likely had not trusted him either. In every direction, someone had been invested in Sebastian’s failure and his disgrace.
Despite all, he’d appointed himself both tormentor and guardian of his English countrymen and somehow kept both his skin and his sanity intact.
“You knew the French cause was lost, but you did not abandon your post, because you had to protect this duke.”
“I had to protect my people, and that included Mercia and the other prisoners. What Anduvoir would have done to them defies your worst imaginings—rations grew short, tempers shorter. The prisoners were half-starved, and the soldiers treated not much better. What I did to Mercia in those months does not bear contemplation, though I often think of little else. I decorated him with scars, Milly, the way others would draw a pattern on a canvas, to the point that the knife became his comfort. And then I took that away from him, too.”
He fell silent, which was fortunate, because Milly had been ready to cover his mouth with her hand. A knife could not be a comfort, and yet, Sebastian somehow understood it as such, and the silent duke had as well. Mercia had not been Sebastian’s only prisoner, but Milly gathered His Grace had become the focus of Sebastian’s memories.
She linked her fingers with her husband’s. “I recall the day I first understood my place in Alcorn’s household. The tweenie was ill.”
Sebastian shifted, nuzzling Milly’s thigh. He did not turn loose of her hand.
“The weather was beastly, miserably cold, and sopping wet,” she went on. “We’d gone shopping, and when the maid could carry no more packages for Frieda, I was expected to carry them.”
And somehow, she was to carry them without anything getting wet, except, of course, Milly, her hems, her last good bonnet, her boots, everything.
“I did not at first understand why it was necessary for Frieda to make all those purchases on that particular day. Not until I dropped something—a parcel of pins, something small—and was stoutly cuffed for my clumsiness. She never struck me when Alcorn was about, but she clouted me soundly that day.”
Sebastian rubbed his fingers over her knuckles, else Milly would have given up the recitation. Compared to the hell Sebastian had endured, Frieda and Alcorn were trivial aggravations.
“I can’t believe your cousin stopped there.”
“She did not. When we returned home, she passed me her boots and said that in the tweenie’s absence, I would have to clean them. She spoke an apology, while rendering my status that of unpaid boot boy.” The stench of horse droppings on a wet, miserable day tried to penetrate the warmth of the sitting room. “We’d come in from the mews, and Frieda had not been careful where she stepped.”
Or she had been careful, cruelly careful.
Sebastian untangled their fingers, sat up, and produced a handkerchief. “Marriage to me is making you lachrymose. I forbid these tears, Wife.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders.
“I do not understand you,” Milly said, blotting her eyes and taking comfort from the scent of his linen. “How can you not hate, Sebastian? How can you not hate Mercia? Hate the French, Wellington, your parents, everybody, and everything? I hated my cousins. I hated them bitterly. Frieda did not have to treat me thus, and Alcorn could have put a stop to it.”
This was her wedding day, and these were not memories she wanted touching any part of her wedding day.
“Hate serves a purpose,” Sebastian said—or recited. “Hate can lend us strength, but the loan always come due eventually, and the interest is usurious. I do hate Anduvoir, though. I hate him like I’d hate a rabid dog whose illness only makes him harder to kill. He delighted in destroying the recruits, in finding excuses to flog the unwary. The entire garrison dreaded his inspections, myself and the whores included. I believe he would have cheerfully staked me out for the English to find, but I was able to negotiate ransoms for some of the British officers—contrary to all regulations—and even Henri understood the necessity for coin.”
“Coin…for him? What of the République? What of the bad rations, what of winter in the
Pyrenees?”
Sebastian’s silence was explanation enough. He might have forgiven his superior for being severe, ill-tempered, and violent, but not for stealing the windfall of an illegal ransom from his own men.
And that garrison had included women and children. Milly curled closer to her husband’s side, craving the warmth of his body. “Don’t stop hating Anduvoir, Sebastian.”
A kiss brushed her brow. They remained thus for some time, until the fire burned down and the hour grew late.
“I don’t still hate Frieda.”
“Prisoners who escape can afford to be generous regarding their incompetent captors. Mercia must be extending me the same clemency, because he alone remained silent under my tortures. Are you ready to come to bed?”
Milly bit back a comment about Mercia being generous toward a competent captor, but Mercia himself likely did not comprehend the debt he owed the ill-tempered French colonel with the sharp, clean, careful knife.
“I’m ready to come to bed.”
He scooped her up against his chest, carried her to their bed, and made love to her, sweetly, slowly, and thoroughly, before Milly fell into an exhausted slumber, her arms around her husband.
When they rose in the morning, Sebastian reported that he’d slept soundly through the night—as had Milly.
***
“You couldn’t give me a single day to enjoy wedded bliss with my bride?” St. Clair gestured with the teapot, for he and his baroness had apparently been having a late breakfast on the back terrace when their guests had arrived.
A very late breakfast.
“No thank you.” Michael extracted a silver flask from his waistcoat and arched an inquiring eye at his employer. One took only so many liberties when imposing on newlyweds if the husband could easily kill an intruder, and the wife…could slay him with a look.
Some days, Michael hated each and every detail of his tiresome, convoluted existence.
“Feel free.” His lordship, while declining the proffered flask, appeared inebriated on the sight of his wife strolling among the roses with Professor Baumgartner.
“Lady Freddy is having an at-home today.” Michael might have used the same lugubrious tone to explain that Napoleon was missing from Elba, along with a quantity of soldiers, ships, and ammunition. The last thing needed at this point was a gaggle of hens clucking and pecking about the London premises.
Though Michael well knew that normality was the surest form of camouflage.
“And you could not simply remain in your garret, writing letters home or polishing your single pair of decent boots?”
The question did not merit an answer. Across the garden, Baumgartner flashed one of his rare smiles, appearing to share in St. Clair’s besottedness with the baroness amid the sunshine and flowers.
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have peace?” Michael asked. “True peace, not this war by stealth and indirection you’ve endured since coming home.”
Which Michael had endured as well.
St. Clair stopped ogling his wife long enough to examine his guest. “You look tired, Michael.”
Marriage had done nothing to dull St. Clair’s perceptiveness, though it had apparently robbed him of his wits.
“You have a duel to the death scheduled for Tuesday next, my lord. I watch your pretty baroness inspecting your gardens, and I want to get blind drunk—or put period to your existence myself.”
His lordship sat back, looking relaxed, handsome, and not exactly well rested, but—confound the bastard—pleasantly exhausted.
“MacHugh won’t kill me,” St. Clair said gently. “He wants to teach me a lesson is all, and I am happy to be his pupil. I owe him that much reparation.”
The flask came out again, and this time Michael drained it. “Does she know?”
The baron took a sip of his tea then peered at it as if somebody had forgotten to add sugar, say, somebody too busy staring at his new wife. “Have a scone, Michael. You and Milly both prefer them with raisins.”
“Fuck the scones. You haven’t told her. The woman has married a dead man, and you did not think to warn her.”
St. Clair apparently decided to play a round of Gracious English Lord, buttering a scone, putting it on a little blue, gold, and white Sèvres plate, and passing it across the table to Michael.
“Rather than make threats upon the chastity of the breakfast pastry—or on my life—why don’t you ask me what Freddy sent you here to find out? She dispatched you both, not because she’s having an at-home—the professor gathers all manner of news at Aunt Freddy’s at-homes—but because she wanted to ensure you could separate me from my wife for the duration of one conversation, at least.”
“Or perhaps, separate your wife from you.”
Conflicting loyalties were something St. Clair had appeared to handle easily, while Michael… He took a bite of a wonderful, flaky scone and tried not to choke on homesickness.
When he could speak again, Michael addressed the twelve raisins yet visible on and in his scone. “I may have seen Anduvoir.”
St. Clair poured a cup of tea, added cream and sugar, and passed it across. “One either sees a fellow or one doesn’t, my friend.”
Michael tore off another bite of scone and paused to count the raisins remaining. “Have you ever, in any language, referred to me as your friend before?” And why in bloody hell must he do so now?
“Marriage agrees with me.” Marriage also put a smile on St. Clair’s face, the like of which Michael had not seen previously. The smile was not ironic, mocking, bemused, resigned, or any of the other sophisticated expressions St. Clair put on and off like so many masks. This smile was…sweet.
“Marriage to that woman would agree with any man who possessed a modicum of sense,” Michael said. “Though if MacHugh doesn’t kill you, and Miss Dan—your wife—learns of the duel, she likely will.”
“Women do not understand gentlemanly honor.”
Yes, they did. They understood it for the asinine display it generally was. If Michael could apologize to his family for one thing, it would be for the gentlemanly honor that had kept him from home for nearly ten years.
“If I did see Anduvoir, he’s lost weight, shaved his beard, and tried to lighten what remains of his hair.”
“Easy enough to do, and he was rather better fed than the rest of us.” Which, given the state of things when Toulouse finally fell, was reason enough to hate the man.
“He’s grown bold, if it was he. Both he and the baroness’s cousin have taken to lurking at the Jugged Hare by the hour. The patrons have confirmed that Upton’s tab is being paid by a Frenchman.”
Across the gardens, the baroness had paused by a bed of lavender. She plucked a sprig and passed it to the professor, who tucked it into his lapel.
“Do you suppose, Michael, you might have passed news of this sighting to me before I put Milly at risk by taking her to wife? Or do you forget what Anduvoir is capable of where anybody small or helpless is concerned?”
Michael had heard that same offhand, bored tone in the interrogation room after one of Anduvoir’s visits. St. Clair’s indifferent drawl hid an arctic fury.
“You’re protective of her? Married one day, and you’re protective of the lady already? I am encouraged, St. Clair. Perhaps under her good influences, you will one day soon become protective of yourself.”
Though years at the Château, fretting over the fate of the chickens and traitors in his care hadn’t done much to hone St. Clair’s instincts for self-preservation.
“And you are protective of me,” St. Clair said, “but you waited days at least, perhaps longer, to warn me of Anduvoir’s presence on my very doorstep. One wonders why.”
One would have an answer—St. Clair was a bloody genius at inspiring answers—and yet Michael hesitated.
“I wanted you to h
ave one day with her, one day to sample what life could be if matters ever came right. Your wedding day at least should not have been darkened with Anduvoir’s shadow.” Baumgartner laughed at something the baroness said, the sound hearty and startling. “I’d forgotten Baum could laugh. The Germans usually have a wonderful laugh, and they aren’t afraid to direct it at themselves.”
“Like the Scots.” St. Clair set about buttering another scone, Michael having apparently demolished his first one. “You know, I have lost the habit of thinking in French. I still turn to it for profanity, particularly if a lady is present, but my imagination now speaks English.”
When Michael said nothing, St. Clair held out the buttered scone, this time not bothering with a plate.
“Michael, you are lying to me about your reasons for withholding this information regarding Anduvoir. You wanted me to have a proper wedding day, but your sentiment has put an innocent woman at risk, and for that, you of all men need a better reason than simple tenderheartedness.”
“No more for me,” Michael said. “Too many raisins. I very much wanted you to have a proper wedding day, or wedding night. I thought she was owed that much, at least.” May God help the woman.
St. Clair took a bite of the scone. “We both enjoyed our wedding day, for which I do thank you. Should you be serving me your notice, Michael? Heading North to see all those sisters and clansmen and gillies who worried so for your continued good health? At the least, some summer leave is in order, don’t you think?”
Rather than start smashing porcelain, Michael took his flask out again and recalled too late the thing was empty. “Are you sending me away for safekeeping, or because you no longer trust me?”
“Why did you keep Anduvoir’s presence to yourself? I can understand you were not sure it was he and you did not want to believe it could be he, and yet my baroness can be used against me in a manner my aunt’s companion could not.”
“You have never once erred in your ability to identify and deal with an enemy, St. Clair, but you have far less experience with allies. I’ll not go North until the duel with MacHugh is resolved, if even then.”
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