by Edith Layton
12
It was a narrow street crowded with tall old houses that tipped toward each other over the cobbled road as though they yearned to lean on each other for support as they staggered under the weight of the years. Arden had been directed toward the top floor of a gray and peeling house, and as he went up the curving flights of stairs as quickly and as lightly as a lass might skim down them, he kept his hand over his waistcoat pocket. This was not so as to feel his heart, which wasn’t laboring in the least with the exertion, but to ensure that heart’s continued beating by the expedient of keeping his hand near to his pocket pistol. He didn’t know the man he had to face at the top of the stairs, but he knew enough about him to know that such a fellow would be most dangerous, if not only dangerous, if he felt he was trapped.
High up under the roof, where an artist or a stargazer would have celebrated the light or the freedom of the open sky, a deserter hid from view. Arden knew this, and yet he paused only to take in a breath before he knocked at the door. He tensed as the hesitant voice within called out a query in French, because he knew it didn’t take a brave man to protect his own life, nor did only valiant men kill those that threatened them. So he spoke his answer plain and in a calm flat voice, in English, and at once, before Lieutenant Devlin could get anxious about a second’s unexplained silence. This was no place for deception.
“It is Arden Lyons,” he said coolly. “I’ve come to talk, only to talk, with you. About Francesca Carlisle.… We must speak, she wishes it,” he added when there’d been no answer for long seconds.
The door eased open. Of course the slender gentleman with the white and strained face who stood there held a pistol, and of course it was leveled at his heart. Arden relaxed. It was all going as he’d thought it would.
“May I come in?” he asked, not so much as blinking or raising his hands a fraction from where he’d dropped them to rest at his sides.
A terse nod and a gesture with his head were the only answer he got. He strode into the room, and looked about impatiently, remembering that his security lay in his absolute confidence; unease or stealth would set this man off.
“Lieutenant Devlin?” he asked.
“Henry Durham,” the gentleman answered quickly.
“Also Lieutenant Harry Devlin,” Arden stated in flat, bored tones.
The young man hesitated. Then he asked despairingly, “She told you?”
“Scarcely needed to, I would have found out. But, yes, she did. I was sworn to secrecy, never doubt it. And,” he said loudly and immediately, seeing how the young man began to grow white about the mouth and his upper lip grew damp, “once I swear to a thing, it is unalterable. I’ve no interest in you, Devlin, beyond Francesca’s peace of mind.”
“Francesca’s peace of mind?” Harry said incredulously. “You care about that?”
“I’m scarcely after her money, all five pence of it, and her body, though entrancing, comes with too high a price on it for me to pay. No, she’s a lady, and will remain one, and I, believe it or don’t, am only after her happiness, whether I share it or not. Her father’s cut the stick, he’d gambled away everything but his teeth, and I believe he’s got a line of credit on them too. The cits who employ her won’t be happy now he’s gone, and as they’d their other eye on me and I have to return to England, her lot won’t be comfortable with them neither. So I’m taking her with me…chaperoned,” he added when he saw the look in Harry Devlin’s eyes, “though she don’t need protection from me. I know enough to keep my hands off m’ betters, mannie,” he said, touching his forehead and flashing his white teeth in a second’s perfect mockery of a groveling serf.
“I offered her marriage,” Harry said, sitting down at last, but still holding the pistol, laying it across his lap as he ran one hand through his smooth light brown hair.
Arden said nothing, but deliberately turned his back on the other man and gazed up out the skylight at the morning sky and the thin clouds scudding over it.
“I’ve funds,” Harry said. “These are only temporary lodgings. I can get better anywhere in France, here in Paris or anywhere in Europe. I offer her marriage, a home, children. Once, she loved me. I wish to speak with her,” he said with sudden resolution, rising to his feet, “now.”
“She’s an Englishwoman,” Arden said softly, “who wants to live at home.”
“A woman’s home is wherever her husband is,” Harry said defiantly as he struggled into his jacket.
“She doesn’t want to marry you,” Arden said very quietly.
“I suppose she told you so,” Harry retorted with anger.
“She allowed me to come here today to speak with you. I doubt she’d have done so if she intended marriage with you. I think,” he said reflectively, turning to face Harry, “that she’s afraid for you. Not of you. She doesn’t want to hurt you, but she don’t want to marry you, that’s certain. She wants to say good-bye. I’ve come to ask that you make it easier for her. She deserves that, at least.”
Harry Devlin stood still, head high, and stared at Arden. He was not nearly so tall as the other man, but he was slender, lithe, and attractive, the very sort of gentleman Arden had pictured Francesca marrying someday. In his red and epauletted uniform he would have been dazzling to a young girl, an agreeable sight to any man. If he’d stood half so tall on that terrible day last June, Arden thought, he might have lived to carry the day, and then the world before him. And even if not, still he’d never have had to hide his face or conceal his name. He felt pity and anger, scorn and sorrow for Devlin. All that Arden thought might have been in his face as he looked at Harry. Or perhaps it was only that Harry saw all that now in all men’s faces. For he winced, and then spoke out angrily in too shrill a voice for the distance between them,
“How easy it is for you to disdain me! How pleasant for you! But I tell you that it’s easy to be brave when you only have to think about what you might do in war. Any man can be a hero in his dreams, every man is. But sometimes,” he said, pacing, and throwing Arden a bright look as he did, “it’s braver to walk away from madness than to join in it. Sometimes, for all it looks like cowardice, sanity is the braver course. I became sane at a bad moment, when everyone around me went mad. I don’t think there’s shame in that. War is insanity. I learned that.”
“Only a madman loves war. Or a conqueror,” Arden said unemotionally, “because it is, as you say, insanity. And useless and cruel and stupid. But so is tyranny.”
“Oh, bravo!” Harry called out, slapping his hands together. “Hear, hear! Well-said! And easily said,” he added, on a sneer, “when far from the cannon’s mouth and the blood and the screams of the dying. Are you going to lecture on honor now too? That generally comes next, I believe. The generals always went on about it. Honor,” he said as though he spat the word from his mouth. “Is it an honor to be blown to bits, mutilated and left for dead? Thank you, you can have it, I am on the side of life. There’s a word with a better ring to it than ‘honor’‘
“Arden nodded, and then quoted, “‘…Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word….’”
Harry Devlin’s eyes lit and he began to smile encouragingly as Arden went on in his deep slow voice, “‘…What is that word, honor?… Everything,’” he misquoted, as Harry’s smile froze in place.
“They were true words, but you twisted them,” Harry said, his face twisting as well.
“They were written as irony, I twisted them to truth,” Arden said. “I’ve earned the right. I know them.”
“As well as you know battle, as well as you know war?” Harry challenged him.
Arden merely shrugged. This wasn’t the time to compare experiences; they were not two old veterans survived to settle into their chairs in front of the fire and relive the way they’d returned alive from the battlefield. Arden’s face remained impassive as he stared through the dirty glass skylight at an oddly stained sky in
order to avoid Harry’s eyes, for it seemed to make him more nervous if he was looked at directly.
“Only a madman doesn’t know what fear is,” Arden said evenly, “but you have to know it entirely and then embrace it and swallow it down whole in order to live with it. And sometimes you must. Still, you’ve the right of it in that the dying doesn’t take much thought, but it’s a frightening business, this living. I only think we should make it a bit easier for Francesca. Let her go, Devlin. And let her go with an easy mind. It will take bravery, a different sort of courage, but I think if you give her that, you’ll never regret it.”
“Nor will you!” Harry shouted. “Oh, I see why you’re so eager to speak to me about bravery and courage and honor, all so that you can get your great filthy hands on her. She said she disliked you. Why is she so suddenly agreeable to accompanying you? What hold have you over her?”
“It’s not necessary to love a man in order to take his advice and offer of safe conduct,” Arden said, and though the words stung, he wasn’t surprised by them. She had disliked him enormously when they’d met, after all, and even if she hadn’t, rejection never surprised him. “I’ve no hold but the sway of reason,” he added.
“Oh, likely,” Harry scoffed. “Sweet reason, is it? I can think of words far less sweet. Oh, I know about you, sir! You’ve a reputation. A dangerous man, they say, with a thousand secrets. She’ll not become one of them, not while I live!” he cried out.
“I gave you my word—” Arden began to say, but Harry was furious now and cut him off abruptly.
“Your word?” He laughed bitterly. “The word of a common sharper, a trickster, a spy, and perhaps worse? An ox with the mind of a weasel, anything for profit is your way. For all I did, I was only an Englishman who left the field. I never aided the enemy more than that!”
Arden’s face set still and cold, and it took more control than he believed he had for him to clench his teeth hard and stop after taking only one step toward Harry Devlin where he stood before him, shaking with rage as he ranted. But that step caused Harry’s eyes to widen and he took three paces back and flinched and snapped up the pistol and held it before him in trembling hands and cried out, “No further. No further or I’ll shoot you dead.”
“Devlin!” Arden said in a great and angry voice, the tone so cold that Harry shuddered back another step. “Enough! I tell you I only seek the girl’s future happiness. And I tell you I’m done with parley. Say good-bye to her decently, man, and give her a chance to build her life again. Give her a future, let the past go. We leave tomorrow and then we’re for England on the first fair tide. You know her direction. You may seek her out tonight or in the morning. But I tell you this, unlike her papa, I cover all my bets. You may not see her alone again. Good day.”
And scarcely glancing at the man, or the pistol that wavered but followed him as he strode to the door, Arden left the room and went down the stairs, never looking back. But for all his calm and seeming unconcern, his broad back tingled all the way down the long flight of stairs.
There were worse things for a young woman of quality than being penniless, losing her post, being abandoned by her rakeshame father, and then having to travel alone with two gentlemen of dubious repute and a lady of admittedly light virtue. There was, for example, Arden thought as he swung up onto his horse again, Harry Devlin.
And so he told Julian that evening as he dressed for dinner, as the light-haired viscount frowned at the telling of it.
“A dangerous man?” Julian asked when he’d done.
“The Deems clan I’ll be facing tonight frightens me more, my friend. Don’t fret, the lieutenant don’t worry me. I once lived in one of London’s finer quarters, where a room with a bottle of blue ruin, a meal, and a female to share it and your floor with you all cost a ha’penny at high tide. I saw a great many creatures like Harry Devlin there. No, he’s only dangerous to the helpless, or to any man if his exit’s blocked and he thinks you’re coming down into his burrow after him. Which I’m not about to do. Even if I strongly suspect there’s more to his story than any living being knows. It wouldn’t have been that easy leaving—you remember that night, Julian,” he said softly, as his friend did, and wished he did not.
The viscount scowled at the memory of how he and Arden had heard of the great battle and ridden all that day to arrive in the night, only just in time to aid the wounded by killing off all the scavengers, human and otherwise, and trying to cheat death by getting as many of the crippled to the surgeons in time for them to use all their insufficient arts, as well. No, he’d not likely ever forget that smoking, malodorous night of pain.
“Yet, even then,” Arden said thoughtfully, “if I did know of something more, and if I hated him for it, I can’t think of a worse fate for him than being himself. He’s bright enough to know what he’s done. His only hope lies in being a little less honest and convincing himself that he’s done right. And he’s halfway there now. Forget Lieutenant Harry Devlin—I doubt he’ll do more than say good-bye, and that, unfortunately, if he summons up enough courage or self-pity to do it, with the plea for her not to forget him that I specifically asked him not to make. Ah, but the Deemses now,” he said, shaking his head. “I missed them last night, and I must face them at dinner—now, there I tremble.”
But for once, Arden Lyons was wrong, a circumstance that his friend Julian was only too pleased to note and mention interminably afterward. For the Deemses took the word of his leaving with admirable calm, having already got wind of it from Francesca’s carefully phrased notice the night before. Although the baron’s daughter had not gone with them to dinner, her conscience had pricked her. She’d gone around to their rooms when they’d returned to them, and given in her softly phrased resignation, and the Deemses had listened closely and inferred even more from it than they had from the coincidence that both she and Arden Lyons hadn’t come to dine with them.
They’d been too busy thinking up contingency plans to upbraid her or cite her ingratitude or treachery properly. Francesca had discovered why when she’d gone to Cecily’s room next to bid her farewell.
“I’m sorry to leave you,” she’d said.
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry to see you go,” Cecily had replied, her delicate face a mirror of Francesca’s assumed distress.
“But I think I’ll fare better at home now,” Francesca assured her with a confidence she didn’t feel.
“Oh, of course, yes,” Cecily answered, much relieved, taking her cue as ever from clever Mrs. Devlin’s face and tone of voice.
“And I wish you everything that is as good and sweet as you are,” Francesca said finally, exhausted, as ever, after only a few words with Cecily, but realizing even as she touched her lips to the girl’s proffered scented cheek that there was no more harm than intelligence in the child.
“I shall have all that,” Cecily said then, shocking her onetime chaperone by saying something unsolicited, and by sounding so gay and so smug about it, “for I’ve a beau.”
Francesca’s tender heart had frozen at that, and while she thought of how she might break the news that Arden Lyons was leaving as well, Cecily, once having broken one barrier, had spoken yet again.
“I hope Mr. Lyons will not be very unhappy. He’s the kindest, most amusing gentleman, Mama says. But I like Jonathan better, even though we’ve just met, and Mama does too, for he’s a lord. I think a baron, like your papa…” She frowned, thinking, but then brightened as she added, “Papa says that taken in hand, he’ll do. Mr. Lyons, he says, could never be taken in hand. Or be a lord, actually.” She giggled. “Jonathan is splendid,” she said softly. “He’s very young. He says he adores me. He wrote me poetry.”
She slid a page of carefully written lines to Francesca, and blushed, as though the words were naughty, instead of lovely words of love.
“‘There is a garden in her face, where roses and white lilies grow, a heavenly paradise is that place, wherein all pleasant fruits do flow…” Francesca read. “Why, how
charming. It’s Thomas Campion,” she said, breaking off and smiling at Cecily.
“No,” Cecily said with a hint of truculence, “it’s Jonathan, Lord Waite, my young gentleman.”
“Cecily,” Francesca said softly, “it’s by Thomas Campion, a well-known Elizabethan poet,” but then, seeing the girl’s lower lip beginning to jut out and her lashes lowering over blue eyes now drenched with unshed tears of confusion and defiance, she went on bright, “but it’s written out beautifully. My, but he has a lovely hand, why, just see how well his letters are formed, and how…neat it all is,” she added desperately.
“So it is,” Cecily noted, relieved. “He’s remarkably educated. I noticed that at once. He had dinner with us,” she said happily, the incipient stormclouds gone from her white brow, “and Papa was quite impressed. He’s a lovely home, a mansion, near to Banbury, but some dreadful Captain Sharp cheated and won it from him in an unfair game of cards. But Papa will get it back for him,” she added, “never fear.”
