by Jaima Fixsen
He smiled weakly.
In crisp words, she told him what had befallen his brother. “Are you not concerned?” she asked.
“Of course I am!” Cyril set down the cue and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “It grieves me more than I can say. All my thoughts and prayers are bent on his safety and recovery.”
Georgiana snorted. He should have known better than to tack on the last bit. Prayers indeed! She’d always known Cyril for a wastrel, but she hadn’t expected him to prove entirely useless in this moment of crisis—it was the fault of his father’s stock, no doubt. Her people were made of sterner stuff. “Prayers are very nice, I’m sure, but I’m more interested in learning when you depart.”
“Depart?” Cyril looked at her in surprise. He gave an uneasy laugh. “Just what do you think my going to Spain will do?”
She stared at him until he dropped his eyes. “For one thing, if you bestir yourself, you can ensure your brother’s intended bride does not travel wholly unprotected. I expect you’re useless in the sickroom, but if the worst happened, you could at least bring home your brother’s remains.”
Cyril shuddered. “Surely not. A tasteful plaque, in the family chapel . . . . ”
She slammed the flat of her hand onto the billiard table with enough force that the balls jumped. “You would leave him feverish and suffering, with only that ruffian Griggs to attend him?” She leaned closer. Overriding Cyril’s protests that Griggs was a frighteningly capable fellow, she backed him to the opposite end of the table, punctuating her opinions of Cyril, his ancestors and what he deserved with an emphatic forefinger.
“You are a sorry, weak, addle-brained excuse for a man, who ought to be strung up by his heels and beaten. I’d like to think the experience would cram some sense into your head, but I own to few hopes. You would get what you deserve at least, and we needn’t fear damaging your faculties, such as they are.” He opened his mouth to protest as she drew breath, but she jabbed her finger an inch closer, silencing him. “You will cease your depredations on the family fortune. You will give up these ridiculous waistcoats and that atrocity you attempted to hide in your pocket. And you will arrange forthwith to help your brother, or God help me, I’ll administer the beating myself!”
Immediately he began struggling out of his jacket. “Not here, you imbecile!” she shrieked, flinging up a hand to shield her eyes, realizing he intended to remove the offending waistcoat. “If you think I will stand the sight of you in your shirt sleeves, you are greatly mistaken.”
“But—”
“For goodness’ sake!” Georgiana snapped. “Stop gaping at me and do something! Anna and her son are already on their way to Portsmouth—halfway to the coast by now if they took seats on the Mail! Her father is too old to make the journey and she must have some male to accompany her. If Alistair dies, and there’s a very good chance he will, someone must marry her and bring her home! She’ll lose her son otherwise. You’ll have a devil of a time, persuading her to take you, but I’m sure, when you explain—”
He wasn’t catching on. Slowly, as patiently as she could, she explained that dragging Henry to Spain was an excellent excuse to remove Henry from Anna’s care, and Frederick Morris was not the kind of fool to pass up such a chance. If Anna couldn’t have Alistair, she must have a husband. Cyril was weak, but he would do.
“You’d have her become Lady Ruffington?”
“Yes, and you would thank your stars for it! You’d never get a lady of her mettle unless she was forced to it.” She hadn’t been nearly as good to Anna as she should have been. Cyril was a poor way of making amends, but it was the best she could do.
“Yes, but I’ve no notion how to get to Ciudad Diego,” he protested.
“Rodrigo! It’s Ciudad Rodrigo, you half-wit! If you can’t prove as resourceful as that minx towing her child, you should be shot!”
“I’ll go. This instant,” Cyril said, backing towards the door as if he feared she might produce a pistol from her person any moment.
“Do,” Georgiana said, impressively cool considering she was vexed beyond measure. Cyril’s shortcomings defied her vocabulary. Unless she was willing to demean herself and swear like a trooper—and she was not—there were no words strong enough for such selfish idiocy.
“You may report to me once you are decently attired, with your travel arrangements in order. An hour should suffice. Since this is a case of some urgency, I will wait in the drawing room. You may send your butler to me, so I may have some refreshment.”
It didn’t fix anything, of course, but the general outlook always improved when she had her own way. As Cyril fled the room, she was almost smiling.
*****
Everyone in his family—well, everyone but his mother, really—always gave him a hard time. Aunt Georgiana was horribly unjust. He was worried about his brother, damn it.
Still, as he rattled out of London in a post chaise, Cyril was mainly wishing his aunt to perdition, not fretting over his brother’s precarious existence. The day only got worse: innumerable stops and changes, with indifferent food brought out by smarmy innkeepers. None of it was good, but the mushroom fritters were egregious and made him sick enough to forswear food entirely. Like his aunt, Cyril didn’t care for carriage journeys. A sea voyage might just kill him.
Sipping cautiously from his flask, he made it to Portsmouth, surprised he was able to force himself to stand. It felt like he was permanently mangled. Tottering gratefully to the nearest tap room, he recovered there for a good long while. By this time it was well past dark—too late to chase after Mrs. Morris. Cyril put himself to bed, gingerly inserting himself between the sheets, dubious despite the assurances of the innkeeper. His valet, damn his eyes, was still in London. He’d threatened to give notice when Cyril ordered him to come along. An impertinence, but no one else could produce such a miraculous shine on his boots. At the time, Cyril thought he’d be able to manage.
He woke in the morning, repenting this error. It took an age to wrestle his way into his clothes—the thatch-haired lackwit the inn sent him was worse than no help at all. After hours trawling the docks and waterfront taverns he finally found word of Mrs. Morris, who’d sailed already on the supply ship Gloriana.
“Quiet lass,” put in his informant, whose Irish brogue rendered him almost unintelligible. “Boy’s a regular scamp. Off to join her husband. Some do, though I can’t think why.”
Enunciating his words carefully—reinforcing the way English was supposed to sound—Cyril inquired when the next ship to Oporto might be.
“The Viper sails tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Depends.”
“Would you direct me to the captain?”
This was arranged. The captain, a heron-like man with ginger hair and an excruciatingly loud speaking voice, happily agreed to take Cyril on board. The price seemed high for something Cyril knew he would only regret, but there was no help for it.
“You’ll want to change those,” the captain said, nodding at Cyril’s roll of bills. “Spaniards don’t take paper. Only gold.”
Naturally, the Portsmouth banking establishments exacted a ruinous rate of exchange. Grumbling over their avarice and the stupidity of the Spanish nation—he was not sure they couldn’t be blamed for his current situation—Cyril stumped back to his lodging, too sour to linger in the tap room. Dinner, taken in his rooms, was excellent, but only a temporary consolation. A couple on their honeymoon had taken the room beside him.
He sailed two days later, leaving behind an acid note for Next Door—if he hadn’t impregnated his wife by this time, there was surely no point trying.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Discipline
Henry was a proper sailor, just as her father and brother had been. Untroubled by wind or tumult, he spent every moment he could on deck. Anna didn’t mind. Except in the worst weather, it was much nicer than their snuff-box-sized cabin, whose best feature was the door. It only fully opened when she piled their boxes onto the bunk, but there wer
e advantages to snug quarters—every night she slept with Henry curled against her stomach, his fingers wrapped tight in the folds of her nightdress. Henry was alarmingly well-behaved, so fascinated by the captain (who had a stump for one arm and a whip-crack voice) that he followed his instructions to the letter, even the one Anna had worried about most.
“Mind your mother!” the captain snapped, just once. Henry might have looked at her sideways a time or two since, but mind her he did. His interest in the captain was nothing to his obsession with the ship.
“Intent as a wolf watching a flock of sheep!” said the lieutenant, smiling at Anna over Henry’s head as he passed them on his way below. “Studies everything, doesn’t he? Has he figured out how to fix a position yet?”
Not that she knew, but Henry had learned plenty. He stored up everything he saw, narrowing his eyes with concentration each time he brought out a new word—top gallants, fo’c’sle, oakum—which was probably his favorite, since he seemed compelled to repeat it over and over in a sing-song voice. Also weevil. She wished he’d never learned that one, or discovered (and devoured!) his first specimen with such glee. But he was happy, and she could only be glad of that. It cheered her—not enough to forget the reason for their journey, but enough to lesson her worries about what they might find at the end of it. Alistair might even be well by then. She’d look a proper fool, journeying to him in such haste . . . but Griggs wouldn’t have written if he hadn’t been desperate.
When Henry was sleeping, it was harder to hope, or ignore visions of Alistair in a crowded hospital, lying in dirty straw, his skin fiery, his wound festering. She tried not to let herself think that he might already be dead, but the possibility felt as near as her own shadow.
The only remedy was to think of his letter, telling herself she would find him—hale or already dead or still fevered. It was the only thing to do. If he was mad enough to marry a portionless nobody and raise another man’s son, her own lunacy—fleeing London, taking passage to Spain, passing herself off as his wife—wasn’t so very bad. Even if it was, she couldn’t make herself care. This was her chance at happiness. If all she achieved was a trip to his grave, she would have it. She would weep and curse and tell him the truth—that she loved him, that he was a fool for leaving her and for loving her in the first place.
She’d explained to the captain and to the few that asked that her husband was wounded and needed tending. Seeing that she worried, they didn’t ply her with questions. Occasionally they offered hearty assurances which she smiled at—the bluff words were meaningless but kind.
“You can go out with one of the wagon trains,” the captain said to her when they were a day out of Oporto. “Quartermaster will help you arrange things.”
“Only if they leave on the morrow,” Anna said, smiling thinly. “I would have to possess unbelievable luck to manage that, Captain, and I think I used it all up finding you.” Besides, if she attached herself to an Army wagon train, she’d eventually cross paths with someone who knew Captain Beaumaris, and that he wasn’t married—yet.
The captain blustered, of course, but she was adamant. There was no time to waste. “Perhaps you could help me by putting me in the way of a guide. And some mules. I’m afraid I haven’t made friends with horses.” Mules made her uneasy too, but her hasty enquiries had revealed that carriage travel through Spain was both difficult and slow.
Mules would be costly, given the shortages that accompanied war, but her money should stretch far enough to get her to Ciudad Rodrigo—though it might be a push if she had to get herself back to England again.
The purchase of three mules and the hiring of a guide emptied her purse of nearly half her store of gold, but she could sell Anthony’s ring if they got desperate. She wouldn’t miss it.
No turning to a watering pot now, she scolded herself. The trick, her father said, to finding your way in strange places was caution and a hearty belief in your own competence. Get yourself in a dither and you were lost. Keep your head, and you’d probably be alright. Anna, gripping Henry’s hand tight in her own, watched the scaff and raff of Oporto stream by: men in fraying coats, bellowing foremen, loose-jointed sailors off on a spree. The chatter of languages and the creak of cable muted as she gathered her courage. She just had to keep her head. Doubting wasn’t allowed.
In spite of Anna’s resolve not to worry, her anguish worsened all the way through Portugal and into Spain, urging her on. Not until they reached Ciudad Rodrigo did fear immobilize her, anchoring her in the middle of the street, hidden by the evening shadows. All she could do was stare blankly at the house that held him. It was small, square and crumbling, wedged between two buildings in slightly better repair but of the same dusty stone. The windows that had shutters—rickety paint-peeled slabs—were closed, only a few of them leaking light into the street, giving the house a wary appearance that seemed typical in this town. Scars of French and Allied sieges marked the citizens and much of the stonework of Ciudad Rodrigo. Everywhere she looked she saw torn up earth, hastily repaired walls, lean faces and unnaturally still streets.
Behind her, the tavern on the corner was lavishing light on its sparsely filled taproom, the excess pouring invitingly into the square, but so far she and her little band were the only wanderers who’d been lured inside. She’d left Henry and Bartolome, their guide, polishing off dinner under the benevolent watch of the innkeep’s wife. Anna wasn’t hungry. Most of Bartolome’s conversation with the innkeeper had flown past her ears, but the sympathetic smiles she’d understood. Alistair was here, and still alive.
She’d meant to rush across the street immediately, but couldn’t somehow, a strange circumstance after five days of hard travel over a hundred and fifty miles. All throughout the journey, she’d felt threads of worry fastening round her. Now, here she was, fifty yards from Alistair and unable to move, pinned down by ten thousand Lilliputian doubts.
She tried to recall his letter, but the fervent ink couldn’t free her feet, though it had hurried her on from London and Oporto, upriver and over mountains, steeling her against chill wind, thirst, and the most terrifying lodgings she’d ever come across. She knew the feel of her pistol perfectly now, and the bruises on her bottom too.
Despite his protestations of love, the warming words, the plea—no, the command that she marry him, he hadn’t sent that letter. That had been Griggs. Chances were her coming would surprise him. Until this moment, she’d never considered the surprise might be unwelcome.
What are you going to do? Go back?
No. That would be ridiculous. And she’d have to think of excuses to give to Henry and Bartolome. It was a miracle Henry hadn’t finished his supper already and come chasing after her—a circumstance she could only attribute to the late hour and the long day’s ride. She’d imagined this meeting with Alistair hundreds of times and was sure of one thing only—she wasn’t going to do it with Henry clutching her skirts.
She hurried across the street and pounded on the tired-looking door. Before her heart could slow, the door yawned wide, coughing up a stooped figure gowned in grey and black who waved a candle in her face.
“Captain Beaumaris?” Anna asked, flinching away from the light. It dipped as the grey vulture in front of her conducted a scrutiny, protesting in voluble Spanish.
“I must see him,” Anna said, trying to edge her way around the knobby veined hand barring her way.
The protestations grew louder and sharper, words Anna suspected were neither polite or kind, but she firmed her chin.
“I’m English!” Anna snapped, pushing the woman out of the way and snatching the light from her hand. It flickered, making their shadows dance like demons against the plastered walls, slopping wax onto Anna’s hand and making her draw breath in a tight hiss.
“Estupido!” she spat, plowing her way to the stairs. She wasn’t as quick as Henry, but she’d gathered a few words. Fury mounting as she climbed the stairs, chased by the wailing lamentations of the landlady, Anna nearly stumbled
into a full-moon face that appeared suddenly in her pool of light. His eyebrows shot to the ceiling as he leapt back, untangling their elbows before the candle could set her gown on fire.
“Griggs!”
“Mrs. Morris!”
“Where is he?”
Griggs jerked his head up the stairs, pressing himself against the wall so she could pass. As she marched up the remaining steps in a torrent of swirling skirts, Griggs called down a few laconic Spanish words, stopping the woeful moaning from downstairs.
“Thank you,” Anna threw back at him, as she crossed the upstairs landing and sailed through the open door.
“What the devil—” Alistair stopped. Anna froze too. His thin cheeks, pale under a few days worth of beard, the insufficiently stuffed pillows compressing as he struggled to push himself upright, his rough, tumbled hair—these details flew past her, scarcely heeded. Anna’s attention was stuck on the hollow under the sheets, as deformed and jarring as a sunken furrow of lips without teeth.
His face twitched, going even whiter. “Sawbones lopped it off below the knee,” he said finally, with painful bravado.
“I see.” Her hands banded together. She couldn’t make this worse by reaching out to steady herself on the nearby ladder-backed chair. And her face—she must do something with it, find a better expression than paralysis. Anna struggled for a moment, then gave up. Impossible to hide her shock. She had to speak. “Griggs wrote that you were ill, so—”
Alistair relieved her. “I certainly was. But they managed to save most of me. Don’t know what they did with the rest, though—” he huffed a silent laugh. “I was going to say part of me wonders where they put the trimmings. How apt.”
Anna pressed down on her unsteady lower lip and dropped herself onto the edge of the bed. She took up his hand, turning it over in her own, as if she were just discovering his elegantly formed fingers. The tip of one pressed softly, almost unnoticeably, against the inside of her wrist before he deftly slid his hand away, hiding it under the sheet.