Marjie pulled on his hand—his left, thankfully—and he followed automatically to the bench and sat awkwardly. She sat beside him. He could feel her eyes on his face but couldn’t bring himself to look at her when speaking of dark times he’d rather forget.
“So I started sending letters. I’d try to think of something to say, a memory of that family’s loved one, something the other men admired about him. Little things I thought would help.” Stanley swallowed against the narrowing of his throat. “It sounds pretty arrogant, I suppose, thinking that anything I wrote would help.” He couldn’t stop the groan deep in his throat as the next thought formed the instant before he spoke. “There were so many after Waterloo. But I couldn’t write the letters.”
“Was it too difficult?” Marjie asked, and he knew she referred to the emotional toll. That certainly had been a factor but not what he’d meant.
“I couldn’t write them,” Stanley repeated. “I wasn’t physically able to.” He looked into her eyes for the first time since beginning his rather unspecific explanation. “Though I thought of writing to you, I couldn’t.”
He watched as Marjie’s eyes dropped to his right hand, gloved and resting on his lap.
“I have noticed you do not use your right hand,” Marjie said. “It seems to pain you.”
“I was injured.” Please do not ask more. Let that be enough.
She didn’t press. She didn’t speak at all. Marjie took his right hand in hers, holding it so gently she might very well have been the angel he’d always thought her to be. Stanley stiffened as she tugged lightly on the smallest finger of his glove.
“Marjie, please don’t.” He knew what she would see.
She looked up at him, and to Stanley’s surprise, some of the anguish had left her eyes. She touched his face and smiled ever so slightly before returning to his glove. Slowly, gently, she pulled it off.
As his hand slipped free, the feeling of relief he looked forward to every night rushed through him. With his glove removed, the leather and sweat and rubbing no longer irritated his wounds. But the sight of his gnarled hand required it remain covered during the day and that he endure the discomfort of doing so.
Marjie’s eyes hadn’t lifted from his hand. The splotches of deep black were still there, and the melted, twisted skin and puffy red sores had not miraculously healed nor grown even more horrendous. As always, he could smell the battlefield again, could see the horror on Pluck’s face as the fire drew closer to him. He swallowed against a surge of bile. He tried to pull his hand away, but Marjie had a surprisingly firm grip.
“Is it a burn?” She spoke as calmly as one would when inquiring whether he cared for sugar in his tea.
“Yes.” He couldn’t manage more than the single syllable. He fought every moment against the memories that flooded over him. In his mind, he could hear the sounds of men crying out in agony and guns pounding the air.
“It continues beyond your cuff.” Marjie was unexpectedly calm. She did not fuss, nor sob inconsolably, nor run from the room in horror.
The sound of her voice tugged at him, pulling him momentarily from his thoughts, freeing him for an instant from the memories he could never seem to escape on his own. He nodded in response to her observation. The burn reached nearly to his elbow.
“Your glove irritates it, Stanley. You simply must allow it relief from the constant rubbing. Sorrel had to do that while her leg was healing the first time. Absolutely nothing touching it but air and a very soothing salve.”
Stanley sat silently for a moment. She had not asked for a detailed explanation or insisted she be told the difficult details. The assault of unwanted memory eased, and her face refocused.
She looked up at him. “Thank you for telling me.”
She was thanking him for exposing her to this? A gently bred young lady was meant to be sheltered from the grotesqueness and unpleasantness found in the world.
“When you didn’t write, I worried that you had forgotten all about me.”
Stanley shook his head. “Never that.”
“I think I will go give Cook the recipe for that salve.” Marjie rose to her feet. “Perhaps it will help.”
“Perhaps.”
She smiled at him, and much of the tension drained from his body. Memories of that smile had, at times, been his only grip on his sanity.
In a movement so quick and so fluid he hardly realized what she was doing, Marjie leaned toward him and placed a brief, feather-light kiss on his cheek. It was precisely the sort of kiss one received from one’s mother while still in leading strings, and yet it set his heart to pounding once more.
She flitted from the room with her characteristic cheer. He smiled. He had just ungloved his mangled hand and, to a degree he usually avoided, relived a piece of Waterloo, and still he smiled.
His angel, it seemed, was a miracle worker.
Chapter Thirteen
Mr. Harold Jonquil, the next-to-youngest Jonquil brother, had joined the family for dinner at Lampton Park that night. With a man of the church in the house, Marjie ought to have felt more guilty about slipping from the drawing room in order to undertake a series of petty thefts. “Holy Harry,” as Marjie had heard the older Jonquils refer to their very clerical brother, would likely not approve. He could be overwhelmingly pious.
Marjie, however, was determined. The idea had occurred to her only moments into the evening meal as she’d watched Stanley eat. She doubted she would ever forget how painful his hand had looked earlier that evening in the conservatory. She could not even imagine the circumstances under which it could have been so horribly burned but had sensed immediately that he was not at a point where he could talk about the experience.
She had made up her mind and firmed up her plan by the time Sorrel had indicated the ladies were to withdraw and leave the gentlemen to their customary after-dinner port. Not ten minutes later, Marjie had reached her intended destination. She would have to add “being in a gentleman’s bedchamber” to that evening’s list of broken rules. It was one she had broken before—recently, in fact—with Stanley present and no one else to lend a degree of propriety. Though she entered the bedchamber alone this time, she had come with the sole purpose of making off with a few of his personal items, which made her presence almost as unacceptable.
She glanced around the room, trying to decide the most likely place Stanley might keep what she was attempting to pilfer. A drawer seemed the most fitting location. She crossed to a chestnut tallboy and began pulling the drawers open one at a time. Three drawers into the endeavor, she was absolutely certain she had turned a deep, telling shade of red from hairline to toes. She ought to have realized his more personal items of clothing would be kept in the chest of drawers.
“Up to yer elbows in the Cap’n’s smallclothes, are ye?”
Marjie spun at the unexpected voice, her heart thudding in her throat. Stanley’s valet stood just inside the door, watching her with a cheeky grin. Her face burned with embarrassment. How had she overlooked the possibility that a servant might wander in? She had thought only of the fact that the family would be occupied.
“I can tell ye where he keeps his handkerchiefs iffen ye’re after a keepsake. I hear ladies like that sorta thing.”
A keepsake? Her mission was far more essential than that! Marjie squared her shoulders. “I’ve come to rob him.” She spoke with what she felt was admirable conviction.
Pluck’s eyes lit with laughter. “A regular sneakthief, are ye? What would ye be makin’ off with, then?”
“Couldn’t you just pretend you didn’t see me in here and leave for a few minutes until I’m done?”
“C’mon now, Miss Kendrick.” Pluck moved closer. “A hardened criminal cain’t be beggin’ and lookin’ all mournful. If ye’re gonna pull the slip on some nob, ye gotta be unrepentant. And, laws a mercy, ye gotta be quick about it.”
“Well, I am new at this.”
“So what is it ye’re trying to slip off with?” He seemed
far too comfortable with the situation.
“Do you usually assist people who are stealing things from Captain Jonquil?”
Pluck’s grin grew positively mischievous. “I’ve a feeling he wouldn’t begrudge ye anything ye wanted to carry off.”
Marjie wasn’t so certain. “Actually, I think he may be quite upset.”
Pluck lifted an eyebrow, looking curious but disbelieving.
“Are you willing to aid and abet a criminal, Pluck?” She needed an accomplice. Otherwise, she’d be mortified by the time she finished digging through drawer upon drawer of Stanley’s most private belongings.
“I could give it a go.”
Marjie faced him with all the determination she could muster. “I have come to steal his gloves.”
“His gloves?” Pluck clearly hadn’t been expecting that.
“Only the right ones. But the right glove from every pair he has. I am also planning to slip off with”—she thought that was the phrase Pluck had used—“several of his buttons.”
“Which buttons?” Pluck spoke as though he had a firm idea.
“From the cuffs of all of his sleeves and jackets.”
“Would those be the right cuffs, Miss Kendrick?”
Marjie nodded.
“Ye know about his hand, then?”
She nodded again. “He showed me.”
Pluck’s eyes flew wide open, a look of absolute shock on his face. “He let ye see his hand? All uncovered and laid bare?”
“It needs a chance to heal without being rubbed raw day after day. I realize he cannot walk around without a shirt on.” An embarrassing blush slid across her features. Again. Marjie pressed on. “But having his sleeves a little looser would have to help, I would think. I told him so this afternoon, but I noticed he had his gloves on again at dinner, and his sleeves very tightly buttoned.”
“Aye.” Pluck nodded. “He don’t like people seeing his wounds. Sorta embarrassed, I think. He also don’t like talking about ’em or thinking about ’em. Don’t like the reminder.”
Would she be causing Stanley more suffering by forcing him to expose at least one of his injuries to the eyes of the world? She simply had to. It would never get well if he didn’t. Infection had been Sorrel’s greatest enemy after her accident. She knew that until Stanley’s burn healed more fully, he remained at very high risk of losing his hand, or worse.
“That is why he must have no choice. I am stealing his gloves.” Would Pluck assist her? She likely could not manage the trick if he intended to thwart her efforts.
“If I give ye his shirts and jackets, can ye get the buttons off?” Pluck asked. His eager agreement set Marjie’s mind at ease.
She pulled out of her reticule the small sewing scissors she had retrieved from her room on her way to Stanley’s bedchamber.
“And while ye pocket his buttons, I’ll grab his gloves.”
She had a sizable stack of shirtsleeves and jackets in a very short amount of time. Marjie sat in the armchair she’d occupied on several occasions while Stanley had been on the Continent. Pluck knelt in front of the tallboy, pulling a pile of gloves from a low drawer Marjie had not yet checked.
She snipped threads and removed buttons quickly and efficiently. “He did not say specifically how he injured his hand,” she said to Pluck as they went about their ethically questionable task, “but I believe it occurred at Waterloo.”
She glanced at Pluck, where he sat sorting through gloves. He looked even younger than usual, sprawled on the floor that way.
“Ay. An’ he’d prob’bly skin me alive fer tellin’ ye, but iffen he’s showing ye his hand, I figure ye’ve a right to know how it happened. ’Specially seeing as how ye seem determined to help him.”
“I would do anything to help Stanley,” Marjie insisted.
“Laws, don’t stop snippin’,” he said. “We ain’t got a lot of time.”
Marjie set back to work, and Pluck talked while he placed one half of each pair of gloves into a pile.
“I fought with the artillery at Waterloo,” he said. “It’s where no-accounts like me get put when we run off to the army. Artillery or infantry. There was a fire. Enemy guns hit a little too close. We was trying to save the ammunition before it exploded.”
“Exploded?”
“Took out two of the horses and three of our men. Fire just kept spreadin’. We got the balls moved, but the fire was too big, and I couldn’t get out.”
Merciful heavens. “You were trapped?”
“Figured I was gonna die there.” He spoke with a dismissal that didn’t ring at all true. “Then in comes this Blue on horseback; keeps his big gray under control in the madness. He holds his hand out, right into the flames, and yells, ‘Grab hold.’ Pulled me out, he did, and rides off with me, dropping me at the rear of an infantry square. Didn’t realize till later he’d spent the ride trying to put out the fire what was burning up his arm and hand.”
Marjie closed her eyes, trying to push out the sudden vision of Stanley on fire. “He saved your life.”
“Aye,” Pluck said, his voice gruff and quiet. “A regular Good Samaritan, he was. There were others who rode past the fire, shoutin’ they was sorry but couldn’t help.”
“But he stopped.” She would have expected nothing less from Stanley. His compassion had drawn her to him when they’d first met.
“He don’t like to talk about it, but I asked him once why he did it.” Pluck stuffed a handful of gloves back in their drawer and rose, holding the remaining half of each pair. “Cap’n just said he didn’t want to see anyone die without hope again.”
“Again?”
Pluck dropped the gloves on the table next to Marjie and grabbed a couple of jackets. Between sentences, he pulled buttons off the right cuffs. “Do ye know what a forlorn hope is, Miss Kendrick?”
She shook her head. “It has a very poetic name though.”
“That’s what ye fancy folks would call ‘ironic.’ A forlorn hope is the first wave of men who attack an enemy stronghold. They are the first group to rush the enemy line. Ain’t no defenses, no smoke cover. They make deuced good targets, actually.”
“How in the world could anyone survive such a thing?” Marjie’s stomach dropped at the thought.
“Most of ’em don’t.” Pluck’s eyes remained focused on his task. His posture had lost its casualness. “It’s always volunteers that take on the forlorn hope—men that need the prize money or are lookin’ for a promotion. ’Course, they have to live through it first.”
Marjie shuddered. A person would have to be very brave or very foolish to undertake such a thing. A soldier volunteering for such a mission would have to be reconciled to the very real possibility of death.
“Cap’n—he was a lieutenant then—went in with the forlorn hope at Orthez.”
“He did what?” Stanley had volunteered for the forlorn hope, for a suicide mission?
“The men what volunteer for that don’t have much of a chance of coming out alive. I guess Cap’n thought I deserved more of a chance than those soldiers had.”
“Philip never said anything about Stanley being part of a forlorn hope.” Marjie searched her memory but knew nothing of the sort had ever been mentioned. Stanley certainly hadn’t related that experience.
“His High and Mighty Lordship prob’bly don’t know.” Pluck shook his collection of buttons in his closed hand. “Cap’n lived through it but took a shot in the shoulder.”
Marjie nodded. She knew Stanley had returned to England after Orthez to recover from a wound.
“Army made him a cap’n after that.”
“A promotion for surviving,” Marjie said.
“Aye, but it weren’t what he wanted from the forlorn hope.”
“Isn’t that the reason for volunteering?”
“It’s one reason,” Pluck said.
What else had Pluck said? “He wanted the money, then.”
“Cap’n comes from a well-to-do family,” Pluck said. “Don
’t think he needed the money.”
“What other reason could there be?”
Pluck shook his head and started hanging up Stanley’s jackets—those with removed buttons—in the armoire.
“That is part of the puzzle, isn’t it?” Marjie snipped off the last button.
“Puzzle?” Pluck offered that same faux innocence he’d used before.
“He has changed, Pluck. He is unhappy, and it is torturous to see. Please help me help him.”
“There’re some things I was told in confidence, Miss Kendrick,” Pluck said. “That man saved my worthless, miserable life. I’ll not break my word to him.”
“Can you at least tell me what happened to his leg? He won’t discuss it with anyone.”
“No.” He spoke firmly, instantly, forcefully.
Whatever had happened to Stanley’s leg, then, was crucial to discovering why he was suffering so much.
“Did the doctors say whether or not they think his hand will heal?” she asked.
“They wasn’t exactly thinking so far down the road,” Pluck said. “After everything that happened to him at Waterloo, they didn’t really figure he’d live long.”
His words robbed her of breath, almost of thought. “They expected him to die?”
“It was a near-run thing. In the end, though, I think he wanted to see his loved ones again more than he wanted to die.”
“But he does not seem very happy to be here among his loved ones.”
“It’s hard for men like him who are just good, ye know—the kinda men who, if they weren’t fighting a war, would be living quiet lives, helping people, and doin’ good works, and bein’ regular saints, and all—to do and see the kind of things soldiers have to do and see.” Pluck rubbed at the back of his neck. “It eats at ’em, makes ’em question what kinda person they really are. Their lives get too dark, and there ain’t no . . . no . . .”
For Love or Honor Page 10
