Slightly Married

by Mary Balogh

  “Yes,” he said. “Alongside two other officers. Our regimental chaplain performed the burial rites. It was a formal and dignified and proper ceremony. I was there. The grave is clearly marked and will be tended. I saw to that.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  There did not seem to be anything else to say. She did not appear to need anything material from him—or if she did, she was not going to admit it. She had her aunt to lean upon in her time of grief. There was also the young governess with the children—whomever they might belong to. She probably had friends and neighbors galore who would gather around to support her. She had no need of any further comfort from a stranger. He was no good at offering comfort anyway. He had been an officer for more than twelve years, since his eighteenth birthday. All the softer emotions that might at one time have been a part of his nature had long ago dried up from disuse.

  But he had made that solemn promise, and it had encompassed those three particularly disturbing words—no matter what. Not being able to do anything for her except to bring her the news of her brother's death would always irk him, he knew.

  “Do you have any family in England, Colonel?” she asked.

  “The Duke of Bewcastle is my brother,” he told her. “I have two other brothers and two sisters as well as other relatives.”

  “Do you have any nieces and nephews?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “None of us are married.” Freyja had come close—twice, with two brothers. One had let her down by dying, the other by marrying someone else. Freyja, according to Rannulf, who had written a long, witty letter about the latter debacle, had not been amused. That, interpreted, meant that she had been in a spitting fury.

  “You must be longing to see them all,” Miss Morris said, “and they to see you. Do you have a long leave?”

  “Two months,” he said.

  “That is so brief a time,” she said. “You must not waste any more of it on remaining here. I am truly grateful that you have given me two days.”

  It was graciously spoken, but it was a dismissal if ever he had heard one. His debt had been repaid very easily, then. Too easily. But there was nothing more he could do.

  She turned back in the direction of the house after they had circled the lily pond. All had been said. She was expecting him to leave. Mostly, he supposed, he was glad. Very glad. But also uneasy.

  If he hurried back to the Three Feathers after escorting her back to the house, there would be time to be well on his way home before dark. He was looking forward to being there, perhaps to seeing some of his family again, though they might well be in London for the Season. Bewcastle himself would undoubtedly be there since Parliament must be in session. But most of all he just wanted to be at home. It was three years since his last leave, and even that had been cut short.

  “Good-bye, Colonel.” She stopped when they reached the terrace before the house and held out a slim hand to him. “Have a safe journey home and enjoy your leave. I am sure you have earned every moment of it. Yesterday must not have been easy for you. Take my gratitude with you.”

  He took her hand and bowed over it. “Good-bye, ma'am,” he said. “Captain Morris was a great hero. May you take comfort from that fact after the rawness of your grief is over.”

  She smiled with bloodless lips and sad eyes. The dog growled halfheartedly as their hands touched. Aidan turned and strode away down the driveway, past the children and their governess. At last he could begin to enjoy his leave.

  But perhaps he would always have the niggling feeling that he had not quite fulfilled his vow. Captain Morris had been so very urgent in his request.

  Promise me you will protect her. Promise me! No matter what!

  He must surely have had something in mind.

  WILLIAM ANDREWS, AIDAN'S BATMAN, HAD BEEN with him for eight years. Through all the hardships and miseries of numerous campaigns, including the tedious advances and retreats that had made up the Peninsular Wars—rain and mud, snow and cold, sun and heat, flea-infested inns, insalubrious open-air bivouacs—through it all he had never been ill a day. Now, back in temperate England, back in the lap of luxury, so to speak, he had caught a head cold.

  When Aidan returned to the Three Feathers and summoned him to pack his bags and make arrangements to have his horse ready for travel within the hour, Andrews appeared with a red beacon of a nose, drooping eyelids, watery eyes, a nasal voice that growled somewhere low in the bass register, dragging footsteps, and a martyr's air.

  “What the devil ails you?” Aidan asked him.

  “I have a slight cold in by dose, sir,” he explained. He sniffed pathetically, then sneezed and apologized. “What bay I do for you, sir?”

  Aidan scowled, swore eloquently, and sent his man off to bed, with strict orders that he was to dose himself with something to sweat the fever out of him and not get out of bed again before morning. Although Andrews looked at him with feeble reproach and opened his mouth to protest, he thought better of arguing and shuffled mournfully off, sneezing and apologizing again before he closed the door behind him.

  And now what the devil was he supposed to do with himself? Aidan wondered. It was scarcely noon and the whole of the rest of the day yawned emptily before him. Sit in the taproom fraternizing with the locals? Explore the spacious metropolis of Heybridge? Take a brisk walk along the village street and back? That might kill ten minutes. Go for a long ride up one country lane and down another? Lie on his bed making pictures out of the stains on the ceiling?

  He was hungry, he realized suddenly. It was five hours since he had had his breakfast, and he had refused the offer of refreshments at Ringwood Manor. The taproom and dining room were all one at the Three Feathers. There was no such thing as a private dining room. He went downstairs, ordered a steak-and-kidney pie with a tankard of ale, and struck up a conversation with the innkeeper and a group of his local patrons. Anything to pass an hour or three without expiring of boredom.

  The main item of news with which the whole village was buzzing, not surprisingly, was the death of Percival Morris. They all knew that Aidan had brought the news and probed for more information without ever being impertinent enough to ask a direct question of such a grand gentleman. They had a curious way of asking the questions of one another or the empty air and then pausing for him to answer.

  “I wonder exactly 'ow young Mr. Percival died,” one of them asked of the pipe smoke above his head.

  “I wonder what them big battles against the Froggies are like,” another mused into the ale in his tankard.

  “You all knew Captain Morris?” Aidan asked after he had satisfied their curiosity by providing a few suitably gory details of the Battle of Toulouse.

  Ah, yes, indeed, they all had, though he had not been home for years.

  “Broke his father's heart, he did, running off like that to take the king's shilling,” one of them said, showing a woeful lack of understanding of how a man became a cavalry officer.

  A spirited discussion followed as to whether old man Morris had had a heart to break.

  “Look what 'e done to 'is own daughter, 'oo nursed 'im like a saint with one foot in 'eaven through all the years 'e was ill,” someone else observed.

  “Done?” Aidan repeated, his interest piqued. He did not bother to correct the man's grammar.

  “Aye,” the man said, shaking his head and sighing soulfully into his ale.

  No further explanation was forthcoming. The conversation turned toward Miss Morris herself and her saintliness, which apparently extended beyond nursing an infirm father for four or five years before his death—a father who may or may not have possessed a heart. Among other things, it seemed, she had started and financed a village school, brought in a village midwife and paid her salary, taken in two orphans to live with her when no one else wanted them, and employed an assortment of undesirable types whom no one else would have touched with a ten-foot pole—or so one of them declared, and no one rushed to contradict him. Miss Morris, it would
seem, took the Christian ideal of charity to an extreme. She also, Aidan concluded, must be very wealthy indeed.

  “Too easily taken in she is, though,” the landlord said, shaking his head and pulling out a chair to settle his large bulk at an empty table. “Too soft in the 'ead.” He tapped his own with one finger to illustrate his point. “If you 'ad a penny to sell and a sorry enough tale to tell, she would give you a guinea for it as sure as I am sitting here.”

  “Aye.” One of his listeners shook his head sadly.

  “If you was to ask me,” the landlord said, though no one had, “old man Morris done the right thing before 'e popped off. Women are too soft about th 'eart to 'ave the running of a grand place like Ringwood and to 'ave their fingers in such a deep purse as Morris's was.”

  “I was under the impression,” Aidan said, reluctantly showing open curiosity, “that Mr. Morris left Ringwood to his daughter.”

  “Ah, 'e did,” the landlord said. “But it was to go to Mr. Percival after one year. Now 'e 'as gone and got 'imself killed just before the year is up and Mr. Cecil Morris will get it all instead. I don't expect to see him in any deep mourning for 'is cousin.”

  Morris senior had left his property to his daughter for one year only? Now, since her brother was dead, it was to go to another relative? That would be unpleasant for her, Aidan thought, if she had had the running of the place since her father's demise. But at least the new owner was a relative. Doubtless she would soon adjust to the new way of things.

  But still, she had lied to him to all intents and purposes. He felt annoyed. She might at least have told him she was about to lose ownership of her home. Except, he admitted with an inward sigh, that she did not owe him that knowledge. She owed him nothing. The debt was all on the other side.

  Protection was the word Captain Morris had used. Aidan could remember the captain's hand plucking feebly at his sleeve with a dying man's last surge of energy.

  Promise me you will protect her. Promise me! No matter what!

  Damnation! Was there more to all this than was even now apparent?

  The men about him had settled into a lengthy discussion of Mr. Cecil Morris, but Aidan had not been listening.

  “What was Mr. Morris like?” he asked. He hated to pump strangers for information, but he felt the need to know more. “Captain Morris's father, I mean.”

  “Him?” one of the drinkers said. “He was no better nor any of us though he put on airs good enough for the King of England. He were a coal miner down in Wales before he married the mine owner's daughter and got rich. When the old man died, Morris sold the mine, got richer, bought the manor here, and set up as a gentleman. He had his son and daughter brought up as a gentleman and lady, but he was disappointed in them and serve him right too. Mr. Percival went off to the wars and Miss Morris wouldn't marry none of the nobs he trotted out for her inspection.”

  Ah, Aidan thought. The slight Welsh accent was explained. So was the very Welsh aunt.

  “Ah, but it were the Earl of Luff what refused to let his son marry her when Morris suggested it,” another man said after showing the innkeeper his empty tankard. “She weren't given no chance to refuse him.”

  “But she probably would 'ave,” the innkeeper said, hoisting himself to his feet. “There never was any snobbery about Miss Morris.”

  Aidan got to his feet too, nodded genially to the innkeeper and the other occupants of the taproom, and went back to his room. He was going to go out for a long ride, he decided. He was going to have to decide what to do . . . if anything. It would be ill-mannered indeed to go back to Ringwood and start probing into Miss Morris's affairs again. But—very reluctantly—he no longer felt he could simply ride for home tomorrow morning.

  CHAPTER III

  LATER THAT SAME AFTERNOON, EVE WALKED INTO THE village alone. Aunt Mari would have accompanied her if she had brought the carriage. But it was fresh air and exercise she needed more than company—except perhaps the chance to think and to plan.

  What were they all going to do? Blank terror clawed at her. She had been trying hard ever since yesterday morning to concentrate upon the only fact that was of any real significance—Percy's death. She had loved him dearly. She wanted to be able to mourn him properly. But . . .

  But he had died too soon.

  Percy had left a will, and in that will he had left Ringwood to Eve. But Ringwood had never been his. It was still Eve's until the anniversary of her father's death. Now by an irony of fate it would go to her cousin Cecil on that anniversary. Percy's will was useless. He had died too soon. As if it would have been perfectly all right for him to die later, she thought bitterly.

  In five days' time they would all be homeless. All of them. Her stomach churned with panic. If she could have focused merely upon her own predicament, she could have found a solution, employment being the most obvious. But she did not have the luxury of thinking only of herself.

  She walked onto the humpbacked stone bridge that spanned the river between Ringwood and Heybridge and paused a moment to gaze down at the gently flowing water before entering the village and approaching the vicarage. There were five days during which to make plans. She could spare today to concentrate upon Percy. He deserved that much of her.

  The Reverend Thomas Puddle was at home, Eve discovered when he answered her knock at the door himself. But his housekeeper was not, and he was a man who assiduously observed the proprieties. Instead of inviting Eve inside, he suggested that she stroll with him in the churchyard. A lanky, fresh-faced, auburn-haired young man, the vicar was always awkward and blushing with Eve—as he was with all his other young female parishioners, with many of whom he was a great favorite.

  He had been about to set out for Ringwood, he told her now, having just returned home from two days away to learn the news of her brother's tragic demise. He spent some time commiserating with her before they discussed the memorial service she had come to ask him to perform.

  “Tomorrow will suit me well enough,” she assured him after learning that he must leave again on business the day after. “I can see to it that everyone is informed. I may leave all the details of the service to you, then?”

  “You may indeed,” he assured her. “Is there anyone who would be able to deliver a eulogy for your brother, Miss Morris? I never knew him personally and could talk about him only in very general terms.”

  She thought for a while as they came to a stop beneath the shade of a beech tree.

  “I believe James Robson would be willing to do it,” she said. “He and Percy were the same age and grew up together as neighbors and friends. I will write to him as soon as I return home.”

  But the hollow sound of hooves clopping over the bridge distracted them both at that moment. Eve was surprised to see that it was Colonel Bedwyn who was riding toward them, presumably on his way to the inn at the other end of the village. Why was he still in Heybridge? She would have expected him to be several hours along on his journey home by now.

  He spotted them as his horse drew level with the beech tree and touched his whip to his hat. He did look extremely powerful on horseback, as she had expected, even though he was not wearing his uniform. He was not a man she would want to cross, she thought. He looked dour and humorless. He looked like a man who never smiled. But she must not be unkind. He had called on her twice. He had offered to help her in any way he could.

  He hesitated and then drew his horse to a halt. He turned back toward the vicarage, dismounted, looped the reins over the garden fence, and came striding into the churchyard. Eve felt both startled and dismayed. She wanted nothing more to do with him. She disliked him, though she was honest enough with herself to realize that her only reason for doing so was that he was the one who had brought her the devastating news.

  She introduced the two gentlemen.

  “It was Colonel Bedwyn,” she explained to the vicar, “who brought word of Percy's death yesterday. He was Percy's commanding officer.”

  “A tragic business,�
�� the Reverend Puddle said. “His passing is a dreadful loss for Miss Morris and for the whole neighborhood. We have been planning a memorial service for tomorrow afternoon. Will you still be here, sir?”

  “I have been delayed by the illness of my batman,” the colonel explained. “He has contracted a head cold since our return to Britain. I do not know quite when we will be on our way.”

  The vicar murmured words of sympathy. Colonel Bedwyn looked at Eve and she felt the urge to take a step back. He had a piercing, very direct gaze. She pitied his men and was glad that Percy, although his subordinate, had at least been an officer.

  “A memorial service?” he said.

  She nodded. “Unfortunately,” she said, “I do not have his body to bury. But he grew up here. Most of my neighbors and friends remember him well. He was my brother. There is a need for some ceremony, some official good-bye.”

  He nodded his understanding.

  “We have been discussing whom to ask to give the eulogy,” the vicar explained. “I came here after Captain Morris left and would not do a creditable job of it myself.”

  The colonel's black stare was still on Eve.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “it would be appropriate if I spoke a few words, ma'am. Your neighbors should know what a courageous cavalry officer the Percival Morris they remember turned into and how bravely he fought for his country.”

  “That is an extraordinarily generous offer, sir,” the Reverend Puddle said.

  “You would stay one more day?” Eve frowned. “You would do that for me, Colonel?”

  He inclined his head. “I gave my solemn word, ma'am.”

  To protect her. It had broken her heart as she lay awake last night to realize that Percy had been plagued with very justifiable fears of what his death was going to mean to her. But what had he thought Colonel Bedwyn could do for her? He had been, she supposed, beyond rational thought.