Lanterns mounted on the archways that led into the yard lit the area with an eerie yellow glow, and the lone occupant was wreathed in a cloud of smoke. True watched with interest as he emerged from the cloud like a phantom. It was Lord Drake! As recent as their acquaintance was, she could still tell him by the set of his shoulders, his halting gait, and the aureole of tawny hair that glowed golden in the light.
True touched the window, wishing against all sense, all propriety, that he was close enough that she could touch those tawny curls, run her fingers through them, feel him close again, his breath against her ear, or his lips touching hers. Reprehensible desires! She was in Hampshire to consider an honorable offer of marriage from a man of God, a good and pure man who had chosen her from all the ladies of his acquaintance as his helpmeet, his completing half, his wife.
But Mr. Bottleby had never set her afire with the merest touch of his fingers, nor had he ever let his lips do more than brush her fingertips. Cursed desires of the flesh! Surely it was not suitable for a woman almost betrothed to a vicar to be having these feelings, these wanton thoughts? Just at that moment, as though he felt the touch of her gaze, he looked up and smiled to see her tucked up in the window seat like a naughty child, or so True felt. He bowed, gesturing as though he were swishing a cockaded hat in an elegant motion.
She stifled a giggle.
His smile died, and he gestured for her to come down and join him in his restless perambulation.
No. She could not do that. She was far too fond of him already, in just one day, considering that she had an offer of marriage to think about and decide upon. No good could come of further intimacy between them, no matter how sweet the moments when they had touched had been. Until she knew her own heart and had made up her mind, she must avoid him. She shook her head and turned away from the window, slipping from the window seat, tiptoeing around the bed and sliding under the covers beside her slumbering cousin.
• • •
The ride back to Lea Park the next day was silent and uneventful. Arabella complained fretfully that she did not sleep a single second, and that her bed was musty and lumpy. True did not contradict her, though she was in a position to know from her own sleeplessness that her cousin had slept the entire night, and very deeply if the slight snuffling sound of a ladylike snore was any indication.
Drake, haggard from another restless night, glanced over at Arabella and said, “Perhaps if you ate your dinner and did not gorge on bread and jam late at night, you would have slept better.”
Arabella stiffened and shot True an annoyed look. True just shrugged, not sure if she should say that she did not tell his lordship who the bread and jam was for, and that she met him in the hall by accident; no, better to keep that part to herself. It was difficult enough to forget the intimacy of her last encounter with Lord Drake without having to explain it to Arabella.
“I say, Drake, another unchivalrous comment. If you ever had a way with ladies you have lost it.” Conroy shot him a reproving glance.
His friend was right yet again, Drake thought. It was unpardonable to take out his peevishness on Miss Swinley, and so he apologized handsomely for his ill-tempered remark and the foursome fell silent. The slight drizzle of the night before was followed by a day of dark clouds and an enervating humidity that made the air feel charged with electricity. Drake felt the weather in his aching leg, which made him even more gloomy.
It was not Miss Swinley that he was angry with, but himself, he realized. Even though he had puzzled out the plate of bread and jam Miss Becket had been carrying as Miss Swinley’s replacement for the meal she did not eat, and he did find it annoying that she should send her sweet cousin to fetch and carry for her, it was still himself and his own treatment of Miss Becket—Truelove—that was preying on his mind.
He had taken liberties, and that was likely why she had not come down to walk with him the night before, though she was evidently as sleepless as he. Or it could have simply been that she had no desire to be near him. Why should she? He would not delude himself that the kiss they had shared had meant anything more to her than a puzzling departure from courtesy by a gentleman she barely knew. He had never treated any lady of his acquaintance in that manner, though while in uniform he had had his share of relationships with women of easy virtue that included the more physical aspects of male-female interaction, the giving and taking of passion hopefully enjoyed by both parties. But a lady deserved his restraint.
He did not understand himself anymore. While still in uniform, he had seemed protected from moodiness by the exigency of his position. He had worked hard, slept soundly, and approached every fresh battle as a situation that required his full attention. Now, with the war over, his commission resigned, he had become as sour as an unripe apple.
He was never so grateful as when the river and the long lane up to Lea Park came into view. He needed time to think, and he could not do that in company.
• • •
The next week passed uneventfully, though True found her resolution to stay away from Lord Drake impossible to keep. Arabella was restless often, and Lord Conroy was best able to walk with her and show her the points of interest around Lea Park, which he was familiar with, having been a schoolmate of Drake’s and spending a good portion of his school holidays there.
This day found them determined to explore the home woods, which Conroy declared had the best hickory nuts to offer. Arabella, in a pair of stout jean half boots and with a woven basket in her hand, took his arm and they strolled off. They made a handsome pair, well matched in size, and with his dark head bent to her golden one as he listened to her prattle with mannerly indulgence.
Mid-September was a lovely time in Hampshire, True found, as she strolled in the opposite direction from her cousin, down a gentle decline into a grassy meadow with Lord Drake. Her companion was silent as he often was, though his eyes became a glowing golden as he picked a delicate pink wildflower and presented it to her with a flourish.
“Thank you, sir,” she said with a formal curtsey. “It has been a long time since a gentleman gave me a flower.”
“Since your gallant seaman fiancé was lost?” he asked, taking her arm and gazing down at her as they walked on.
Matching her gait to his, she said, “Yes. He was the last.” She held the dainty pink flower up to her nose. “My . . . my current suitor is not much for flowers.” A shudder passed through him and she glanced up at him, alarmed.
“Your current suitor?”
His voice was slightly wheezing, and True wondered if they were going too fast for his injury. She stopped and broke away from him. Why had she never mentioned Mr. Bottleby before this? Was it because the subject was private and personal, or was it more because she did not want to waste her time in Lord Drake’s company speaking of real life? It was lovely to walk with him through enchanting valleys and down wooded lanes and along verdant riverbanks, pretending that life was different, that the world was different. She could make believe that an impoverished vicar’s daughter and a future earl could meet on equal ground, and maybe even fall in love among the wildflowers. It was a fairy tale, but then she had always loved fairy tales, particularly the one of the cinder girl and her prince.
“Mr. Bottleby,” she said, determined to “put away childish things,” as admonished in Corinthians, “is, or was, my father’s curate. He has obtained a living in the north, and has asked me to go with him, as his wife.” She could not look into his eyes, and instead spread one hand out flat, running it over the tops of the long weeds around them. She watched them sway and tangle under her hand and felt the tickling sensation on her bare palm. In the last week she had come to feel much more at home, even amid such luxury, and had taken to leaving her gloves behind when walking. Nature could not be experienced with the artificial barrier of cloth.
“And you are considering it,” Drake said, in a voice curiously devoid of inflection.
“I am considering it.”
Drake picke
d up a stick and swished it through the long grass, decapitating some of the feathery daisies that grew wild. “I wish you happy, then. You will make an eminently suitable vicar’s wife.”
The way he said it made it sound like an insult, and True gazed at him in puzzlement. She did not wish to quarrel, especially when she did not know what he was angry about. “That is just what Mr. Bottleby said when he proposed marriage. He goes as vicar to a poor parish, one that needs an energetic and good man, which is what Mr. Bottleby is. He genuinely cares about the less fortunate, and I honor him for it.” Honor him, but could not love him, she added to herself. Why could she not love so good a man?
Drake stabbed his stick into the ground and kicked at it. As usual he was carelessly dressed, and his boots were already badly scuffed, so a few more scratches would not even be noticed. “Sounds like your perfect match, Miss Becket. What are you hesitating for?”
True could not answer, taken aback by the dryness of his tone and the violence of his jerky actions. They had become used to talking with a degree of comfort and amity, but at that moment she felt separated from him, in feeling as well as in actuality.
“All I have ever done with the less fortunate is kill them in battle,” he said morosely, the dark mood that was never far away descending upon him.
Ah, now this she understood. She moved back to his side and took his arm. “My lord—”
“Can you not call me something other than ‘my lord’?” he said. His eyes were dark and his expression moody. “Call me Drake, or even better, call me by my name.”
“Which is?”
“Wycliffe. My mother was used to call me ‘Wy’ when I was a boy. She said it was an appropriate name for a child who was always asking ‘why.’”
She was grateful to hear him under control of his voice again. The wry tone had returned. “We are both blessed with unusual names,” True said. “Wy and True. I shall call you Wy, but only when we are private like this. It would not be seemly in public. Will you call me True, in private?”
“I will. Though I have come to think of you as Truelove, in my mind, you know. Such a perfect name for you, I thought, the minute I met you.”
Drake covered her hand, which rested on his arm, with his other hand, and she felt the warmth of him flood her as his broad hand engulfed her small one. He gazed down at her, his eyes fixed on her lips, and for one dizzying moment she felt that he meant to kiss her again, but he did not. She should have been grateful for his restraint. He guided her to a large tree, stripped off his jacket and laid it on the ground for her to sit on.
“We ought to find the others,” True said, hesitating. “They may come back from their walk at any time.”
“We shall. Soon.”
They sat down. The grasses and wildflowers around them were tall, and it felt like they were sheltered from the world.
“Do you really see yourself that way, Wy? As a killer, and nothing more?” True shed her bonnet and drew her knees up, putting her arms around them.
Wy reclined under the tree and gazed up into the green leafy boughs, his curls tangling with the weeds around his head. “I was in the army for fourteen years. Do you know how many battles I have been in, and how many men I have killed?” A lark fluted a trilling song somewhere nearby. Stretching his full, long length out, he cupped his hands and put them behind his head. “How far away it all seems now, but it was only months ago that I was butchering men . . . men who had done nothing but take a side opposite my own. I dream about them, you know, all the dead soldiers. They howl, in my nightmares, for my blood. And then I awaken, screaming, sure that I am once more on the battlefield at Mont St. Jean, and I am dying.”
The dark subject matter was ill-suited for such a brilliant day, but True took no notice. Heartsick, she gazed down at the handsome man reclined so close to her. This explained some of the strange noises she had heard during the night on a couple of occasions in the last week, the wild keening. How she longed to gather him to her and soothe the anxious lines from his gaunt, noble face. “And so you do not sleep.”
“No. I do not sleep. Or at least I do, but only for a time. That is why I was pacing the stable yard that night at the inn. I knew I would not sleep.”
“And you dream of dying?”
He nodded. “I dream I’m back there, where I almost did die. I fell, you see, wounded by a saber cut to the thigh, given me by a gallant Frenchman whom I then slaughtered. Andromeda, my horse, was blasted by artillery fire just then and fell on top of me as I went down, and then Captain Lewis, one of my men, also fell on me, dead before he hit the ground, poor lad. The field was muddy. It had rained all night the night before, and the battlefield had been cut up by horses’ hooves. Andromeda’s weight was squeezing the life out of me, and the mud—”
He rolled onto his side and covered his eyes with one hand, but continued talking. “I knew I would die. I lost consciousness a couple of times. You cannot imagine the noise, the sound of thousands dying, horses groaning, cannonade, artillery fire, and everywhere the black pall of gunpowder burning, stinging the eyes. I don’t know how long it was that I lay there, but the fighting was over and it was beginning to get dark when I heard Horace, my batman, the most stubborn man alive; he was calling my name. I managed to cry out, and he found me.
“It is a miracle that he heard and recognized my voice, because around me hundreds were crying out for water, and moaning. I hear it still, in my sleep. I don’t remember the rest, because I blacked out again, but he pulled me out and carried me—you must see Horace to understand the ludicrous picture we must have made, for I am six foot and fourteen stone, or at least I was fourteen stone, while he is barely five foot five—he managed to pull me out from under my mare and carried me to safety. I still don’t know how he did it, but I will forever be grateful. I had been taken for dead, and would have been, if not for him.”
True swallowed back tears. He did not need her becoming a waterpot. “And you dream you are back there, and dying?”
He moved restlessly onto his back again. “That is the usual dream. It starts with faces, the faces of the dead. Those I have killed, and those who were my responsibility and died under my command. Hundreds of faces. Thousands of faces.”
It was too much for any man, and even more so for a sensitive man as Wy evidently was, True thought. He was caught reliving the past nightly, and if it did not stop it would break him, drive him mad from lack of sleep and anguish. Amazing that it had not already. He was punishing himself, she thought, punishing himself for surviving what had killed so many.
“I don’t understand why I lived,” he said, his eyes closed and his face twisted in a frown. “While so many better men, men with wives, children, died, why did I live?”
“Perhaps that is what your dream is about; it is your way of sentencing yourself to death on the battlefield, where you think you should have died. But every man has a destiny, you know. Yours was to live. You must not regret that.”
“I don’t regret it. I just don’t know how to live now, how to go on.” He opened his eyes and gazed up at her, then reached up and cradled her cheek in his warm palm. He sighed deeply. “The vicar is a very lucky man,” he said, then swung himself to his feet and limped off toward Lea Park. “Come along, Miss Becket. The others will wonder what has become of us.”
They strolled back arm in arm, with golden sun beating down on their heads. True looped her bonnet over her free arm, too entranced with the feel of sunlight on her hair to worry about her complexion becoming brown. Likewise, Wy carried his jacket. They didn’t speak, each lost in their own thoughts and completely comfortable together even in silence.
If only, True thought; if only Wy thought he was spared for something, or found something worthwhile to do with his time, he might forget the nightmares. The day they visited his estate she had met Stanley, the soldier-carpenter amputee Wy had hired to work on Thorne House. The man was openly grateful for the work and the chance to provide for his family. He was hap
py, it seemed, perhaps because he was busy and fulfilled, and had no time to brood on the war. Sometimes work healed in a way no amount of contemplation could.
Was that the answer to Wy’s pain, simple busyness, a full life? Would marriage and children heal him? Perhaps, then, marriage to Arabella would be the best thing for him. True tried to picture Bella soothing Wy’s nightmares, working at his side to refurbish Thorne House, giving him children, laughing with him, loving him. Somehow it was a picture that just would not form, but was that because it was unrealistic, or just because True did not want to believe it could work?
Chapter Seven
This matchmaking effort was not at all going as planned, Lady Leathorne thought as she politely kept her eyes trained on Arabella, who was executing a rather difficult piece on the piano. The girl was skillful and graceful, everything a future countess should be. So why did Drake not see it? Why was he not pursuing her as he had the year before?
When the young people had come back from a walk that afternoon, she had been overjoyed to see a modicum of peace on Drake’s face, his brow smoother than it had been of late. It pleased her that walking with Arabella should have that affect on her son, for she believed that marriage and family was what he needed to help him recover from the horrors he had witnessed, horrors she could only guess at, as Drake never spoke of them. If Arabella could help him find his way back to himself, to the man he used to be, they could have a good life together, Lady Leathorne was convinced of it.
But then she found that she had been mistaken. Arabella Swinley had spent the afternoon walking with Conroy, while Drake strolled in another direction with Miss Becket. If anyone was to be congratulated on her son’s more peaceful countenance, it was the vicar’s daughter. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him happier, but she wanted him happier for the right reasons.
Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) Page 7
