Entertaining Angels: A Christmas Novella
Page 3
Hollie had a cat on his chest, a daughter in his lap, and a pile of neglected harness to his hand, and a wife opposite him who was all but asleep.
It was that sort of night.
Nell was no lightweight, bless her. She was as solid and sturdy as her mam, and she spilled over Hollie’s lap, much to the cat’s consternation. She also had the habit of holding herself in place with one hand wound into his hair.
Well, he was all story-told out for the night. The house was as snug as a weevil in a barrel of flour, Henrietta was yawning fit to crack her jaw and trying to pretend that she hadn’t been up since before dawn, and it wanted but a week to Christmas.
It was a funny thing. It’d been the year of Naseby - over ten years ago this summer, which made him laugh a little wildly for he didn’t feel rising fifty - there’d been no little Nell, then, there had barely been a Joyeux, only Thomazine, and she not quite two - this very room, he had been blown in on the wings of the storm from the West Country and he had sat in this very settle and looked at two fair-haired boys curled sleeping on the parlour floor with his bright girl held safe between them. And now Luce was a barber-surgeon in his own right and living in that rambling black and white house out at Witham that had been his mother’s, with a pretty wife and a quiverfull of fair-haired brats of his own.
And Russell - odd, passionate, disfigured Russell, who’d never said much but quivered like a leashed sighthound with the ferocity of everything he wasn’t in the business of saying - dead in the battle at Dunbar, likely, was the last report from anyone who’d known him in the old days. Thomazine had been desolate, for the boy had been peculiar at best but the child had loved him with the single-minded adoration that only a five-year-old could muster.
Aye, well, so had Henrietta been fond of him, for all his funny ways. Not conformed to this world, that’d been him, all right. Without a single bone of compromise in his elegant body, and he’d had the choice of break or bend. They both had. And Hollie had bent, for love of his girls, and Russell had -
No, nothing would’ve broke Russell, he thought, smiling to himself. The lad wasn’t made so. Hollie had loved the daft bugger, too, though he’d not have said it in words. There’d been four of them, and now there was two: Luce in Witham and Hollie in White Notley, Russell dead, and Drew Venning gone respectable out at Diss, a day’s ride from here in Norfolk. (He still saw Drew, betimes, but he was different. Took to wearing one of them God-awful periwigs that made him look like the Devil crapped himself flying, and he was about the size of one of his own barrels of salt fish. He was still Drew inside, mind, even if it did take a couple of quarts of ale to get him to forget he was Sir Andrew these days.)
Hollie missed the old days, sometimes. Not the sleeping in a ditch and being shot at, but the laughs and the half-cocked stunts and the waking up in the mornings being alive, tingling-alive all the way down to your toes with the knowledge of not knowing where you’d be by this time tomorrow. Aye, well. War was a young man’s game, and he’d given it up as a fool’s labour ten years ago. Still missed Russell summat fierce, though: that dry, sardonic humour that you had to think about twice before you knew he was being funny - the way he couldn’t do anything half-cocked, from getting drunk to falling in love, he just threw himself at it grimly and set his teeth and kept on at it - the way he’d used to follow Het round the farm that summer permanently blushing like a rose and fluttering his eyelashes.
He wondered, briefly, if the lad had thrown himself at getting killed with the same zealous abandon as he’d done everything else.
And then stopped, for it hurt him, still, to wonder that.
And he was sleepily musing on the eventual and unlikely fates of his old company, when he heard the beat of galloping hooves in the yard, slipping on the cobbles, and he was struggling with the bolts on the door with his girls surging about him like the waves of the sea, not a one of them full awake but all terrified in case it was bad news -
Dark horse he didn’t know, ridden to within an inch of its life, frothing and steaming in the slice of light from the open door.
Rider dismounting with a thump, going almost to his knees on the frosty steps. Flinging his head up like a curbed horse, something about that abrupt mannerism that was tugging at Hollie’s memory. Thin. Broad in the shoulders, but his wrists - his bare wrists, white, frozen-looking fingers splayed on the cold stone, what kind of fool comes out without gloves on such a night? -all bone, his hands like bundles of knobby twigs.
Panting with his mouth open, clouds of white breath in the bitter air.
His mouth was open cockeyed, his teeth glinting like bone on one side, lip twisted awry-
“Thankful?” Het said faintly, and her fingers found Hollie’s and gripped his hand very hard. “Thankful, dear, is that really you?”
“Not,” he said, and gave a great shaky gasp, “not deserted my post. Sir.”
“Good Lord,” Hollie said, remarkably mildly, and his old lieutenant - who was not dead, but who looked as if he were considering it - looked up with the old mad, fierce intelligence in his black eyes.
Looked at Hollie for about a heartbeat, and then all the intelligence left his eyes altogether and he pitched forward onto the steps, face down, and lay still.