He lingered till the next Monday. Then, garbed in a bottle-green civilian’s coat under his old army greatcoat and armed with presents for his mysterious wife, he hired a post-chaise and made his way northward through the late-winter landscape. On the second night, he met an old Scottish soldier, a veteran of Portugal and Spain turned out of work by peace. Unemployed major-general and corporal sat up till midnight in the inn’s common room drinking ale and sharing war stories. Upon learning Macmillan had been an officer’s batman, Jack impulsively hired him as his valet.
Their progress northward was slow, for the roads were mired in the mud and slush of winter. Once they reached York and found the road north entirely snowbound, he hired a horse and rode ahead, leaving Macmillan to guard his baggage and bring it along once the roads cleared. In a valise strapped behind his saddle he carried nothing but two changes of linen and his gifts for his wife, though peace offerings would perhaps be a better term. There was a simple sapphire ring and a newly published account of travels through the Ionian Islands, and he prayed she’d like at least one of them.
He was unspeakably relieved to be able to ride again. For almost a year he’d thought he would spend the rest of his life hobbling with the aid of a cane and forced to rely upon a carriage whenever he traveled any distance.
Also, he had a much better chance of surprising Elizabeth this way than if he waited to travel with the carriage. Surprise was a great tactical advantage in dealing with an adversary—and such Elizabeth was. They were husband and wife. He wanted an heir. He was thirty-five now, which would make her thirty, certainly young enough to bear several children yet, but the sooner they began, the better.
He must simply remind her of the facts and bring her into line with his way of thinking. He’d led soldiers into battle and managed the always tricky relations between the British and their Indian allies. Surely one wife couldn’t be so much of a challenge. He pushed aside the thought that a woman stubborn and determined enough to maintain those cold, correct letters for three years might not be easily won over.
* * *
It was almost midday on a sullen February morning when he rode onto his lands for the first time in five years. Old snow lay in the shady patches of ground, half-melted and dingy, but it couldn’t hide that the land was in good heart. He smiled to see the old fortified bastle barn. It had been both house and barn for the Westerby family during the days of the border reivers, but for Jack it had been his favorite spot to play as a boy, alternately a fortress to assault as a dashing, intrepid border reiver or a hay-scented, cozy refuge where he and Giles had hunted for kittens and drank milk fresh from the cow. Beyond it stood the new stables his father had built for the Westerby Grange horses, flanked by the still newer sheepfolds Elizabeth had mentioned in her second 1813 letter. The Purvis cottage had a new roof, and the shutters and doors of the Grange itself had been freshly painted a cheery red.
Jack rode into his own stable yard, where an unfamiliar groom emerged from the stables to meet him.
The groom, a lanky lad of eighteen or so with straw-colored hair and freckles, touched his cap. “Good day, sir.”
Jack thought fast. Who had Elizabeth said she’d hired after Robin Welch had left to seek his fortune in London? “Jeremiah Sanderson!” he said. “Don’t you know me?” He recognized the boy, now that he thought of it, though old Sanderson’s youngest had been half his present size when Jack had last seen him.
Jeremiah’s face reddened. “Sir John! It’s you! I beg your pardon—didn’t recognize...” he stammered.
“And why should you?” Jack smiled in reassurance as he swung down from the saddle. “It’s been many years, after all.”
“That it has, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Here, take care of Prince,” Jack said. “He’s nowhere close to as regal as his name, but he served me well on this journey, and he’s earned a good bran mash.”
With another deferential touch of his hat, the boy took Prince by the bridle to lead him into the barn.
“Is Lady Armstrong at home?” Jack asked with careful carelessness.
“I’m right here.”
Jack spun on his heel and almost tumbled on his backside into the wintry muck. So much for the element of surprise. She’d got the advantage of him after all.
The woman who stood ten feet away at the edge of the stable yard was nothing at all like he’d spent the last five years imagining.
She’d been a plain, mousy nonentity when he’d married her, and women who weren’t beauties at five-and-twenty were rarely improved by the passage of half a decade. He’d imagined her growing ever plainer and more dowdy, dragged down by the demands of managing the Grange.
She was still no striking beauty. She had undergone no magical transformation. She was not even dressed in the height of fashion. No curling tongs had touched her straight hair, nor had her pale skin been given new color with cosmetics.
But she carried herself with confidence now, and her air of command made her seem taller than her actual height. And command was the only word for it. Jack seen the look—and its reverse—often enough in young officers as they began to rise. Some men lacked the knack. The more he asked of them, the more they bent under the weight of the responsibility. Others...grew. They looked taller. Surer. More themselves. As Elizabeth did.
And if she was no diamond of the first water, neither was she displeasing to the eye. When they had married, she’d been thinner than he liked, with an anxious, gaunt look. Now, he still wouldn’t call her buxom, but even beneath her warm, sensible brown wool dress and scarlet cloak he could see the womanly sway of her hips and the swell of her bosom. Oh, yes, she had good breasts, the kind that would fill his hands with their heavy softness when he freed them from her corset and set his mouth to them. To think he’d taken comfort in the idea that it would be dark when the two of them joined in bed! No indeed. They would leave candles burning, so his eyes as well as his hands and mouth could feast.
She cleared her throat. “Have you nothing to say to your lady wife?”
She hadn’t been like this before, had she? So assured, with that edge of sarcasm to her voice. “You are not as I remembered,” he managed.
“Nor are you,” she said coolly. Jack was suddenly conscious of how gray the hair above his ears had gone, of the silver strands threading throughout the brown, of how lined and weathered his face had grown in his years of war and pain. The years had aged him far more than they had touched her.
“It’s been a long time,” he heard himself say. This wasn’t how he’d imagined this reunion going. He hadn’t felt so out of control since his ship had got caught in a hurricane the first time he crossed the Atlantic.
Her eyebrows arched. Even at this distance Jack could see the flashes of green amid the clear light brown of her eyes. The same eyes he’d remembered as dull and muddy. “Indeed it has,” she said. “Will you come in? You’ve had a cold ride of it, I fear.”
He had, and once inside they could talk without an audience. Jeremiah still lingered outside the stable with Prince. Jack could see a pair of maids peeking out from the scullery, and he would wager a week’s pay that the remainder of the grooms and herdsmen were listening from the stable and barn doors. So he crossed the muddy space separating them and offered his wife his arm. She took it, though the pressure of her fingertips was so light he could hardly feel their touch.
Together they walked inside, handing his greatcoat and her cloak into the keeping of a gaping housemaid at the door. Elizabeth led him to the parlor, where she sat gracefully on a straight-backed chair on one side of the hearth and gestured for him to take the seat opposite.
Jack remained on his feet. He leaned against the mantel, letting the warmth of the fire soak into his chilled limbs and soothe his aching leg. The room had not changed much, though he thought Elizabeth might’ve had the sofa and chairs re-covered. Hadn’t they been a darker green? Or perhaps she’d only had them cleaned, or he was remembering another parlor altoge
ther. Good God, why was he thinking about chairs? And why was his wife poised so calmly on one? Shouldn’t she be fainting in shock at his sudden appearance, or fluttering and calling for her smelling salts? Wasn’t that what wives did, at least the pale, mousy, ladylike ones? What business had she looking in command of herself and the situation? He was the husband. He was the general, the hero of Queenston Heights.
He’d been ready for fainting and hysterics. He’d been ready for raging over his long absence. He was not ready for her calm, self-controlled reality. Abruptly he realized she’d had just as long to imagine this meeting as he had. She must have a strategy, too. Until he could get her off hers and onto his, she would occupy the high ground.
He could not comfort her, for she hadn’t broken down. He could not speak words of love and joy at seeing her again, for they would ring hollow. Damn the woman, what was she playing at?
“One of us must speak,” he ground out between gritted teeth.
“And now you have.” Was that a flicker of amusement, evanescent in those marvelous eyes? “Pray continue,” she added.
“Have you nothing to say, madam?”
“On the contrary. There is much I could say. But I am eager to hear what you have to say for yourself.”
One would almost think she was the aggrieved party. “You began this.”
“Indeed? Began what, sir?”
“That—that letter you wrote when Mama died.” He hadn’t meant to blurt out his grievance so abruptly, but Elizabeth’s icy calm threw him off balance.
She raised her eyebrows. “What of it? I informed you as quickly as I could.”
“Informed is the right word! I have never read a colder letter in my life. I would think it shameful to write so paltry a letter of condolence to the family of an officer who died under my command if I’d known him for but a single day and taken him into instant dislike. And to get such a letter from my own wife informing me of the loss of my own mother! I thought you must’ve been busy that day and grieving yourself—but nothing more for months, and then only a report on the income from the Grange?”
She didn’t look at him as he paced back and forth before the fire, instead staring fixedly at the flickering flames. “Shall I tell you whom I saw, and what I learned, on the morning your mother died?”
Her voice was careful, controlled, as if she was holding her memories and emotions back with a curb rein. Whatever she was about to tell him, it had left a scar. “Please do,” he said, though he was certain he would mislike what he heard.
“Lady Dryden had come to call,” she said in that same voice. “You remember her, I suppose.”
He nodded. How could he possibly forget? He’d never liked her, never forgiven her for how she’d cut his mother and how she and her daughters had treated him when he was little Jack Armstrong.
“You may not be aware that she has a correspondent in Montreal, a cousin who married a merchant there.”
He shook his head. He’d never troubled himself over Selina Dryden’s relations. But he had a bad feeling he knew where this was going now.
“She was most anxious that I should know the latest on-dit, the scandal of all Canada, that a certain Colonel Armstrong had made off with another man’s wife. Helen Mannering, I believe her name was.”
“Yes.”
“You do not deny it, then.” Her voice remained level, but Jack sensed her temper was beginning to rise from the flush building in her cheeks and the fact that now she looked at him. Why hadn’t he noticed, five years ago, the subtle grace and elegance of his wife’s features?
“No. But I cannot think it possible that Lady Dryden’s cousin knew the whole truth of the matter.”
“Oh? I cannot think it possible that anything could justify so reprehensible a course.”
Oh, yes, she had been anticipating this meeting and rehearsing her lines. But Elizabeth had it all wrong about Helen. “He beat her,” Jack said.
“Her husband?”
“Yes, the damned brute.”
“He beat her because she made a cuckold of him.” It was more a statement than a question.
“Would that make it acceptable?” he snapped. “If I had come home and found you in the arms of some strapping stable lad and blacked your eyes or bloodied your back for it, would you say, ‘I cannot complain. He was within his rights’?”
She blinked. “Such a thing would not have happened. I have kept my vows.”
So she wasn’t ready to yield an inch, was she? “So had Helen.”
Elizabeth snorted.
Now Jack’s anger rose. He understood now how the gossip must have wounded her, and why she had been furious enough to write such a dreadful excuse for a condolence letter. But was she this willing to doubt everything he said? “I have never been a liar. The man was a brute. He slapped her if she wore a dress he didn’t care for. He blacked her eyes for daring to dispute him over the merest trifles. She asked me for help after he almost choked her. She was afraid if she didn’t escape soon, he would kill her. Was I to leave her to her fate, simply because he was her husband and I had a wife in England?”
“But you stole her out of her house and had her in your keeping. If it was truly so innocent, was there not another way?”
“She trusted me. She wasn’t so sure about any of the respectable couples of our set. And she was only under my roof for three nights. Then—well, it’s a long story, but Mannering agreed to a separation, if she went back to England to live with her family and avoided future notoriety.”
Elizabeth bit her lip. “Did you take her to bed those three nights?”
He still didn’t like to think of that first night and what had almost happened. He had wanted Helen and, viewing himself as a gallant knight who had rescued a fair lady and earned her favors as a reward, assumed she wanted him, too. Now he shuddered at the memory and shook his head. “No.”
“You lie.” Her words were certain, implacable.
“As I already said, madam, I do not lie,” he said in the deadly quiet voice that had always terrified incompetent quartermasters and devil-may-care soldiers into submission.
His wife remained distinctly uncowed. “You had a beautiful woman in your house, one you’d rescued from mortal danger, and you expect me to believe you didn’t touch her?”
“I expect you to believe the truth. Would you like more of it? I did want her. I would have taken her to bed, but she didn’t wish it.” He had tried, sweeping her into his arms and kissing her the instant they’d reached his quarters safely. She had responded, kissing him back and winding her arms around his neck, but something had felt off. He’d broken the kiss, looked into her eyes and seen only fear and resignation where he’d expected desire. So he’d stopped, assured her she had nothing to fear from him, and given her his bed while he slept on the floor. “After what her husband did, she was terrified to have a man come near her,” he said. “So no, I didn’t bed her. You see, I am no more a rapist than I am a liar.”
Elizabeth blinked, digesting this. The faintest hint of an inward-turned smile flickered across her face. Jack would’ve missed it if he hadn’t been watching her so intently. He’d seen that look before, on card players who knew they’d been dealt an unbeatable hand. What the devil?
Her calm mask resumed. “Very well. Now that we are speaking the truth, what of your other women?”
“What do you know of them?” he asked nervously. Surely Selina Dryden’s cousin didn’t know all that had passed in Canada, and it was impossible she could know anything of Bella Liddicott.
“A great deal.”
“But...how?”
She shook her head. “Lady Dryden’s Cousin Kitty is a marvelous correspondent when she has gossip to share. I know all about how you were nursed back to health from your dreadful wounds by the most beautiful half-breed woman in all Upper Canada, and how everyone whispered you might have returned to the fray far sooner had it not been for the charms of the lovely Mrs. Boyd—”
“That’s a
lie!”
“There was no Mrs. Boyd?” Elizabeth asked sweetly.
Jack ground his teeth. Sarah Boyd had indeed kept him entertained during his long convalescence after Hannah Mackenzie had left him to marry a trapper who’d caught her fancy, but the idea that he’d shirked his duty simply to stay in her bed! “There was,” he admitted. “But from the day I could walk and sit a horse again, I tried to go back. There were those who didn’t want me to return, lest I take away their commands, and I wouldn’t put it past some of them to have encouraged the rumor that I was malingering.”
She sighed. “Do you think it matters to me, whether you were fit for duty or not, when you were cavorting with that woman?”
“It matters a great deal to me. I have always done my duty. I am a soldier, not a voluptuary. And I am never a coward.”
“No. You’re merely an adulterer.”
“What do you want?” he cried, exasperated at last beyond bearing. “Did you expect me to be celibate for the past five years?”
Her eyes flashed. “I have.” Before he could point out it was different for a woman—which would undoubtedly have been the wrong thing to say—she spoke again. “No, I didn’t expect celibacy. I only expected decency. Respect. A measure of discretion, enough to avoid making yourself fodder for common gossip.”
“I didn’t know.”
She stood and walked away from him, staring out the window. A new dusting of snow was beginning to fall. “Everywhere I go, I am the object of pity and mockery.”
He approached her and dared to lay a hand on her shoulder. “That cannot be so.”
She spun about like an unbroken colt and shoved his hand away. “It is. Even on Sundays at church I’ve heard the titters of the cruel and seen the pity in the eyes of the kind. I’m not sure which pains me more.”
She blinked and swallowed hard. Jack all at once saw how much misery lay beneath her cool, brittle exterior, and how much he had to answer for in her eyes. He hadn’t thought he behaved differently from other men in his position, but now that he saw it from her perspective, he realized he was more extravagant and prone to public display than most. He had been proud to have a woman of Hannah’s beauty and vivacity in his keeping, and bewitched by Sarah and willing to go along with all her games and flirtations, because at least she alleviated the boredom of his extended convalescence.
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