“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.”
“Yet I’ve heard other men do so,” she said softly. “Calvary officers bragging of charges and sailors talking of battles at sea.”
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?”
He leaned forward and whispered, “Ah, this is quite the secret. Many in the army wanted to know what I did with my little kettle.”
“You’re teasing now. Tell me what you did with a kettle that was so heroic.”
He shrugged modestly. “Only fed my entire camp with rotten meal. I found that if I rinsed the meal three times and then threw it in with a kettle full of water, it made a nice soup. Of course, it was better on the days I’d caught a rabbit or squirrel.”
“How absolutely awful,” his sister said.
“You did ask.” He grinned at her. She was talking to him, and he’d bore her to death with silly stories of army life if it made her happy.
“Samuel...”
“What, dear?” His heart squeezed at her uncertain expression. She was right; they were their only family left to each other. It was important that she not grow distant. “Tell me.”
She bit her lip, and he was reminded of how young she was. “Do you think they will converse with me, all these titled English ladies?”
He wished in that moment that he could smooth the way for her, make sure that she was never hurt for the rest of her life. But he could only tell the truth. “I think most will. There’s bound to be a girl or two who will have their noses in the air, but those are the sort who aren’t worth talking to, anyway.”
“Oh, I know. It’s just that I’m so nervous. I never seem to know what to do with my hands, and I wonder if my hair has been properly done.”
“You’ve that maid Lady Emeline found for you. I’ll be there and Lady Emeline as well. She at least will not let you go out with your hair improperly done. And I think you perfect in any case.”
She blushed, her cheeks tinting a delicate pink. “Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then I shall remember that my brother was the best rotten meal soup maker in His Majesty’s army, and I shall hold my head high.”
He laughed and she grinned back. The carriage bumped over something in the road, and Sam looked out the window to see that they were crossing a narrow stone bridge, the carriage’s sides nearly scraping the walls.
Rebecca’s gaze followed his. “Are we coming to a town?”
He pushed aside the curtain to peer farther ahead. “No.” He let the curtain drop and looked at her. “But it won’t be much longer now, I think.”
“Thank goodness. I am sore.” She shifted restlessly in her seat. “It’s a pity poor Mr. Thornton could not come.”
“I don’t think he minds.”
“But...” She wrinkled her brow. “It does seem hypocritical, doesn’t it? I mean, that he’s not been invited just because he makes boots? You’re in trade, too.”
“True.”
“In the Colonies, I don’t think we would make such a fine distinction.” She frowned down at her hands.
Sam was silent. The fact was, these kinds of distinctions between men’s rank bothered him as well.
“It seems so much harder, here in England, for a man to raise himself purely by merit alone.” Rebecca was nibbling her lip now, still staring down at her hands. “Even Mr. Thornton had his father’s business, small though it might have originally been. A man who hadn’t even that—who was perhaps a servant—could he ever become respectable?”
Sam narrowed his eyes, wondering if she was thinking of a particular servant. “Perhaps. With a bit of luck and—”
“But it’s not likely, is it?” She looked up.
“No,” he said softly. “It isn’t very likely that a man who labors as a servant will become a man of means in England. Most will live and die a servant.”