Humph. Emeline linked her arm with Rebecca and began to stroll. “I believe you said you were in trade, Mr. Thornton.”
The garden path was narrow, and the man was forced to trail behind the ladies. “Yes, I make boots.”
“Boots. Ah, I see.” Emeline didn’t bother looking around. The town house garden was mediocre, but she kept her pace slow as if she might actually be interested in dying foliage.
“Boots are very important, I’m sure,” Rebecca said, coming to Mr. Thornton’s defense, which was not at all what Emeline had intended.
“I supply them to His Majesty’s army,” Mr. Thornton called from in back.
“Quite.” It occurred to Emeline that Mr. Thornton might very well be rich. She had so little knowledge of the workings of the army, but she could imagine the piles of boots that would be ordered from Mr. Thornton.
“Are they made here in London?” Rebecca asked. She craned her neck a little to try to see him.
“Oh, yes. I have a workshop on Dover Street and employ thirty-two fellows there.”
“Then you do not make the boots yourself?” Emeline inquired sweetly.
Rebecca gasped, but Mr. Thornton replied cheerfully enough, “No, my lady. I’m afraid I wouldn’t even know where to start. Father used to, of course, when he began the business, but before long he’d hired other fellows to do the work for him. I might’ve learned when I was young, but I had a falling-out with Pater—”
“Is that why you joined the army?” Rebecca interrupted. She stopped and turned to face Mr. Thornton, and Emeline was forced to halt as well.
Mr. Thornton smiled, and Emeline realized that he was rather handsome in a bland sort of way. He wasn’t the type of man one would notice in a crowd, but perhaps that made him all the more dangerous.
“Yes, I’m afraid I took the king’s shilling in a fit of callow pique. Left Pater and my wife—”
“You’re married?” Emeline cut in.
“No.” Mr. Thornton’s expression sobered. “Poor Marie died not long after I returned home.”
“Oh! I am so sorry,” Rebecca murmured.
Emeline looked back down the path. Someone was coming.
“It was a terrible blow,” Mr. Thornton said. “She—”
“Emmie! Ah, there you are.” Jasper was striding up the path, his long, horsey face beaming.
Mr. Thornton stopped and turned at the sound of Jasper’s voice, his features going curiously blank. But Jasper wasn’t who she had expected. Confusion and a kind of disappointment shot through her, and then she saw him. Behind Jasper, Samuel followed, his eyes hooded, his expression sober.
Emeline held out her hands. “Why, Jasper, I did not expect you back until nightfall, if at all. Have you been successful in your investigations?”
Jasper took her hands and bent over them, brushing a kiss against her knuckles. “We lost the trail, alas, and went hunting Mr. Thornton instead. Except he wasn’t at his business, and we retired here in defeat only to find you have supplied the man we looked for.”
By this time, Samuel had caught up to Jasper. “Lady Emeline, Rebecca.” He nodded at them and then held out a hand to his guest. “Mr. Thornton, it is good to see you, although I confess some surprise at finding you at my house.”
Mr. Thornton grasped Samuel’s hand in both of his. “You are no more surprised than I, Mr. Hartley. I had not intended to presume upon your hospitality, but I was in the area, and my feet led me to your house whether I willed it so or not.”
“Indeed?” Samuel cocked his head, watching the other man.
“Yes. Maybe it was our reminiscences of the war the other day. I...” He hesitated a moment, looking down before raising his gaze to stare frankly in Samuel’s eyes. “You will think me an imaginative fellow, but I had the sensation when we talked that you did not think what happened at Spinner’s Falls occurred by happenstance.”
There was a silence as both men looked at each other. Samuel was fully a head taller than the other man, but there were certain similarities otherwise that were hard to overlook. They were both self-made men who worked in trade. They both carried themselves with a certain raw confidence, an ability to look a higher-born gentleman in the eye and dare him to make comment. And, Emeline sensed, to have succeeded in what they did, both men would have had to be daring. They were men who could see a chance and seize it, knowing the consequences might very well be dangerous.
At last, Samuel glanced sideways at her and Rebecca. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps if the ladies permit, we gentlemen should retire to my study inside to discuss this in private.”
Emeline arched an eyebrow. Did he really think she could be fobbed off that easily? “Oh, I’m most interested in what you have to say to Mr. Thornton. Please. Continue.”
“I say, Emmie,” Jasper began rather nervously.
She didn’t look at Jasper, her eyes holding Samuel’s gaze. “It’s the least you can do, don’t you think?”
She saw a muscle in his jaw flex, and he certainly didn’t look happy, but he nodded before turning to Mr. Thornton. “We were betrayed.”
Emeline felt a flicker of satisfaction. Samuel treated her as an equal, and that kind of trust was curiously heady.
Then Mr. Thornton blew out a breath. “I knew it.”
“Did you?” Samuel asked softly.
“At the time, no.” Mr. Thornton looked grim now. “But there were so many circumstances that had to align correctly for us to have been attacked at that point, and the fact that the Indians numbered so many”—he shook his head—“the thing must have been planned by someone.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Jasper finally spoke. “We had meant to ask you if you were certain that MacDonald and Brown were dead.”
“MacDonald?” For a moment, Mr. Thornton looked confused; then he glanced quickly at the ladies and nodded. “Oh, of course. I see where your thoughts lie, but I’m afraid both men were quite dead. I helped bury them.”
Emeline pursed her lips, wondering for a moment what the men weren’t saying about MacDonald. She’d have to ask Samuel later, in private.
“Damn,” Jasper muttered. “If it’d been MacDonald, it would’ve wrapped this up neatly. Nevertheless, we have a few more questions to make of you.”
“Perhaps we should adjourn inside,” Samuel said. He held his arm out to his sister, but Rebecca ignored it and took Mr. Thornton’s instead. Samuel’s lips thinned.
Emeline hated to see him hurt. She laid her hand on Samuel’s sleeve. “What a good idea. I’d enjoy some tea.”
Samuel glanced from her eyes to her hand and back again. His brows rose almost imperceptibly. She tilted her chin at him. But the others were moving toward the back of the town house now.
“I don’t know if I can be of any use,” Mr. Thornton was saying ahead of them. “The man you really ought to talk to is Corporal Craddock.”
“Why is that?” Samuel called to him.
Mr. Thornton looked over his shoulder. “He gathered the wounded after Spinner’s Falls, after you’d...Well, you’d run into the woods. I guess you could say he was the officer in charge.”
Emeline felt Samuel’s arm stiffen under her fingers, but he didn’t say anything.
Jasper seemed not to have noticed that Mr. Thornton had nearly called Samuel a coward to his face. “Is he here in town?”
“No. I believe he retired to the country after the war. I could be wrong, of course; one hears so many things. But I think he’s in Sussex, near Portsmouth.”
Emeline thought she hid it well, but Samuel must’ve felt her start nonetheless.
“What is it?” he murmured without taking his eyes from the path ahead.
She hesitated. She’d just sorted her stack of invitations this morning, trying to determine the social events that would be best to attend in the upcoming month.
He looked at her, his brows drawn. “Tell me.”
Really, what choice did she have? It was almost as if the Fates had arranged t
he trap, and she was the unlucky hare that had run straight into it. Was there any point in struggling at all?
“We’ve been invited to the Hasselthorpe estate in Sussex.”
“What’s this?” Jasper had halted and turned.
“Lord and Lady Hasselthorpe, dear. Remember? They invited us weeks ago, and their house isn’t far from Portsmouth.”
“Damn me, you’re right.” The furrows next to Jasper’s nose and mouth stretched into arcs as he grinned. “What a stroke of luck! We can all go to this house party and then call on Craddock. That is...” He looked worriedly at Mr. Thornton. Rebecca and Samuel were easily included in the invitation as friends of Emeline’s. A bootmaker—even a very rich one—was a different matter.
But Mr. Thornton grinned and winked. “Never fear, I can continue our inquiries here in London whilst you talk to Craddock.”
And like that, Emeline knew that it was all decided. Her breath seemed to grow short as if her chest were being squeezed. Oh, they would argue and discuss the details back and forth, and she would need to petition Lady Hasselthorpe for invitations for the Hartleys, but in the end, it would all work out. She would be attending a house party with Samuel.
She looked up, knowing that he was watching her, and as her eyes met his warm coffee-brown ones, she wondered, Did he know what went on at house parties?
Chapter Nine
Now, of all the things in the world that the king loved, he loved his daughter most of all. He so doted on her that whenever she asked for a thing, he did his utmost to see that she received it. Which is why, when Princess Solace begged the king for permission to marry her own guard, instead of being a trifle tetchy as most royal parents might, he simply sighed and nodded. And that is how Iron Heart came to marry the most beautiful maiden in the land and a princess to boot....
—from Iron Heart
“Will you be gone a very long time?” Daniel asked a week later.
He was lying on Emeline’s bed, head hanging off one end, both feet in the air, completely in the way of Harris, who was packing.
“Probably a fortnight,” Emeline said briskly. She sat at her pretty little dresser trying to decide which jewelry to bring to the Hasselthorpe house party.
“A fortnight is fourteen days. That’s a terrible long time.” Daniel swung a foot and got it tangled in the bed curtains.
“Lord Eddings!” Harris exclaimed.
Really, one ought not to miss one’s own offspring. She knew that. Many mothers of her rank hardly saw their children at all. Yet she hated leaving him. It was just so heart-wrenching to say good-bye.
“That will be all,” Emeline told her lady’s maid.
“But, my lady, I haven’t half finished.”
“I know.” Emeline smiled at Harris. “You’ve been working so hard, you must be in need of refreshment. Why don’t you take some tea in the kitchen?”
Harris pursed her lips, but she knew better than to contradict her mistress. She set down the pile of clothes she’d been holding and marched out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Emeline got up and went to the bed, shoving aside the mound of petticoats laid out on the surface to make a space. Then she sat, her back against the great oak headboard, her legs straight in front of her on the bed. “Come here.”
Daniel scrambled toward her like an eager puppy. “I don’t want you to go.”
He squirmed against her, smelling of little boy sweat, his knobby knees digging into her hip.
She stroked his blond curls. “I know, darling. But I shan’t be gone overlong, and I shall write you every day.”
More silent squirming. His face was hidden against her breast.
“Tante Cristelle will stay here with you,” Emeline whispered. “I don’t suppose you shall have any currant buns or sticky sweets or pies at all whilst I’m gone. You’ll have quite wasted away by the time I return and look like a stick boy and I shan’t recognize you.”
Breathy giggles came from her side until his blue eyes surfaced once again. “Silly. Tante will give me lots of sweets.”
Emeline feigned shock. “Do you think so? She’s very severe with me.”
“I’ll be fat when you come back.” He puffed out his cheeks to show her.
She laughed appreciatively.
“I can talk to Mr. Hartley, too,” he said.
Emeline blinked, startled. “I’m sorry, darling, but Mr. Hartley and his sister will be at the house party as well.”
Her son’s lower lip protruded.
“Have you been talking to Mr. Hartley often?”
He darted a look at her. “I talk to him over the wall, and sometimes I go to visit him in his garden. But I don’t bother him, really I don’t.”
Emeline was skeptical about this last. Right now, though, her mind was more taken up with the notion that Daniel and Samuel seemed to have formed a bond without her even knowing it. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the squirming imp beside her. “Can you sing me my song?” he asked in a small voice.
So she stroked his hair and sang “Billy Boy,” changing the name to Danny as she had since he was a baby, making it his song.
Oh, where have you been,
Danny Boy, Danny Boy?
Oh, where have you been,
Charming Danny?
And as she sang, Emeline wondered what the next fortnight would bring.
THE RENTED CARRIAGE was not as well-sprung as Lady Emeline’s vehicle, and Sam was beginning to regret deciding to ride inside with Rebecca instead of renting a horse for himself. But he and Becca had hardly talked in the week since the disastrous Westerton ball, and he’d hoped that the enforced time together would break the spell.
So far, it hadn’t.
Rebecca sat across from him and stared out the window as if the view of hedges and fields were the most fascinating in the world. Her profile wasn’t a classic one, but it was very pleasing to him. Sometimes, when he caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, he’d have a flash of recognition. She looked a little like their mother.
Sam cleared his throat. “There’ll be a dance, I think.”
Becca turned and wrinkled her brow at him. “What?”
“I say, I think there’ll be a dance. At the house party.”
“Oh, yes?” She didn’t seem particularly interested.
He’d thought she’d be delighted. “I’m sorry I ruined the last one for you.”
She blew out a breath as if exasperated. “Why didn’t you tell me, Samuel?”
He stared at her a moment, trying to understand what she meant. Then a horrible chill crept through his belly. Surely she wasn’t talking about...“Tell you what?”
“You know.” Her lips crimped in her frustration. “You never talk to me; you never—”
“We’re talking right now.”
“But you’re not saying anything!” She spoke the words too loudly and then looked chagrined. “You never say anything, even when people make terrible accusations about you. Mr. Thornton came close to calling you a coward to your face when we were in the garden last week, and you never said a word to him. Why can’t you defend yourself at least?”
He felt his lip curl. “What people like Thornton say isn’t worth replying to.”
“So you’d rather remain silent and let yourself be condemned?”
He shook his head. There was no way to explain his actions to her.
“Samuel, I’m not those people. Even if you won’t justify yourself to them, you must talk to me. We are the only family we have left. Uncle Thomas is dead, and Father and Mother died before I could ever know them. Is it so wrong that I want to be closer to you? That I want to know what my brother faced in the war?”
It was his turn to stare out the window now, and he swallowed bile. There seemed to be the smell of men’s sweat in the close carriage, but he knew that it was his brain playing abominable tricks on him. “It isn’t easy to talk of war.”
He frowned impatiently. “They’re not...”
“Not what?” She leaned forward over her knees as if she would will the words from him. “Tell me, Samuel.”
He held her gaze, although it caused him physical pain to do so. “The soldiers who have seen close action, the soldiers who have felt another man’s breath before taking it from him...” He closed his eyes. “Those soldiers hardly ever speak about it. It’s not something we want to remember. It hurts.”
There was a silence, and then she whispered, “Then what can you talk about? There must be something.”
He stared at her, and a rueful smile curved his lips at a memory. “The rain.”
“What?”
“When it rains on a march, there’s nowhere to hide. The men and their clothes and all the provisions get wet. The trail turns to mud beneath your boots, and the men begin to slip. And once one falls, it’s a rule, it seems, that half a dozen will fall next, their clothes and hair all over mud.”
“But surely you can pitch a tent when you stop for the night?”
“We can, but the tent will be wet as well by then and the ground underneath a sea of mud, and in the end, one wonders if it would be better to simply sleep in the open.”
She was smiling at him, and his heart lightened at the sight. “Poor Samuel! I never dreamed you spent so much time in the mud as a soldier. I always imagined you performing heroic feats.”
“My heroic feats mostly involved a kettle.”
“A kettle?”
He nodded, relaxing against the carriage seat now. “After a day’s march in the rain, our provisions were always wet, including the dry peas and meal.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Wet meal?”
“Wet and sticky. And sometimes we’d have to make it last another week, wet or no.”
“Wouldn’t it mold?”
“Very often. By the end of that week, the meal might be mostly green.”
“Oh.” She covered her nose as if she could smell the rotten meal. “What did you do?”