Charlotte Louise Dolan (10 page)

* * * *

“We leave tomorrow at first light.”

Munke stared at him in amazement. “Leave for where? Why?”

“For London.”

“Have you heard from the War Office, then?”

“No, but that is what I intend to tell everyone.” Darius rustled through the papers in his leather dispatch case until he found an old letter that looked suitably official. “If anyone should question you, which I doubt they will, you will say that a messenger brought you this while we were all at the wassail party.”

Holding the letter prominently displayed, he stalked through the connecting door into his wife’s room, this time not bothering to keep a suitably pleasant expression on his face. “I have received word from the War Office. I leave for London tomorrow.”

She turned white as a sheet, and the brush she had been using fell from her hand. “No,” she murmured under her breath.

Then recovering, she said more strongly, “Can you not even remain until Christmas?”

“Have you never any thoughts for anyone except yourself? I am a soldier,” he said curtly. “I obey my orders. Would you have me court-martialed, then, rather than forgo your own pleasures?”

“Darius ...” She rose from where she was sitting and took a step toward him. “That wasn’t—”

“I bid you good night, madam. I regret that I cannot fulfill my duties as a husband on this occasion, but I must save my energies for the ride to London.”

She blanched, as if he had struck her, and the scar stood out as a thin red line on her face. She was a pitiable figure swaying there, but he felt no sympathy for her. She deserved none after what she had done, and it required no effort to harden his heart against her.

She took another faltering step in his direction, but he at once turned and stalked back into his own room, shutting and locking the door behind him.

His temper was barely kept in check—he was, in fact, spoiling for a fight. He watched Munke move around the room, carefully folding clothes and packing them in the saddlebags, but his batman was too experienced to say or do anything to provoke him, and so he was left to seethe in unrelieved temper through a good part of the night.

* * * *

He came to her with the light of the sun, or perhaps he was her sun. She kissed him and begged for his forgiveness, but he said nothing. Then she noticed he was bleeding from a gaping wound in his chest. Desperately she tried to stanch the blood, but other wounds appeared on his face and body. “A St. John never gives up,” she cried over and over like a litany. “Don’t die!” Even while she tried to hold him to her breast, tried to kiss him one last time, he dissolved into cold mist in her arms.

Elizabeth woke up with tears on her face, her heart pounding and her body trembling all over. It was still dark, but she could hear faint sounds coming from the next room, and she tried to calm down by reminding herself it had only been a nightmare.

But the little voice in the back of her mind kept repeating,
But it is a nightmare that could come true.
All the fears for her husband’s safety, which she had been trying to ignore for months, now beat at her mind, demanding to be acknowledged, to be accepted as real, but ruthlessly she shoved them away.

“A St. John does not quail before dangers, real or imaginary,” she whispered aloud, and got out of bed. Her knees threatened to buckle under her, and she ordered them to behave. “Remember, you are now the knees of a St. John,” she said with a giggle, then she had to bite her lip to keep the giggle from becoming an hysterical laugh.

If her husband found death on some faraway Spanish battlefield, she would be as brave as she had to be, but right now she could not face the thought of his leaving her again for months with this coldness between them.

Hurriedly she dressed herself, finishing just as she heard her husband open the door to his room. Grabbing a branch of candles, she dashed out to the hallway herself.

He must have heard some noise she made, or perhaps it was the light she brought with her, for he stopped several yards away and turned to face her. He was again the emotionless man of marble he had been when he left her after his cousin’s wedding.

She had to speak, had to make him understand that she had not been seriously suggesting he disobey his orders. “Please forgive me—”

“You are forgiven,” he replied before she could continue. He turned and strode down the hallway, the darkness swallowing him up so quickly it was as if he had never really been there.

“Beth? What on earth is going on out here? It’s the middle of the night.”

Elizabeth turned to see her cousin standing in the doorway of her room rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

“Oh, Dorie, Darius has received his orders to return to London. He is leaving at this very moment.”

“But he can’t,” the young girl said sleepily. “I haven’t given him my present yet. Make him wait.” She yawned and then disappeared back into her room.

Her word galvanized Elizabeth into action. She hurried back into her own room and excavated the presents for her husband from where she had hidden them at the back of her wardrobe.

At the last moment she also grabbed her cloak and pulled it about her shoulders.

She stopped only long enough to add Dorie’s offerings to the ones she was clutching in her arms, then hurried through the darkness, her steps made confident by years of familiarity with these hallways.

Hearing hoofbeats outside, she altered her course and made directly for the front of the house. She was forced to lay the presents on a small table, so that she could use both hands to open the massive door.

The horizon was touched by the palest rosy glow, and there was just sufficient light to see the black silhouette of a horse and rider rapidly disappearing down the driveway.

Elizabeth moved out onto the steps and uttered every curse she had ever heard. “And don’t anyone try to make me believe a St. John never swears,” she added vehemently.

“Nay, that’s too big a fib even for me to attempt,” a voice spoke from the shadows beside the drive.

“Munke! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with the captain?” Luckily the darkness hid the fact that she was blushing all over at the thought of the oaths she had just spoken—oaths she had incorrectly assumed no one was around to hear.

The burly shape of the batman moved up the steps to stand beside her. “I have no great fondness for starting a journey on an empty stomach. Withal, there’s no keeping up with the capt’n when the devil drives him, and well he knows it. He’ll not be expecting to see me before London.”

Elizabeth wanted to ask this man, who undoubtedly knew her husband better than she did, what devil it was that drove Darius, but she could not bring herself to gossip about him with a servant. Turning to go back into the house, she merely said, “Well, I, for one, am happy that you are still here because I have a commission for you.”

Darius stood staring out the window at a street virtually devoid of people. It would appear that even the least fortunate Londoner had someplace to go on Christmas Day and someone to share a bit of Yuletide cheer with.

He turned back to face his sitting room, which had never seemed so bleak to him before. Although he paid a woman to come in and clean his rooms once a month, they still had a subtle air of neglect and abandonment.

If only he were back in Spain ... At least there he could be better occupied trying to cheer up his men, rather than wallowing in self-pity like this.

But it was hard not to feel sorry for himself. He hadn’t had this lonely a Christmas since before he had gone to live with his cousin Algernon.
Damn you for dying on me, Algy
.

Throwing himself down onto a chair in front of the fire, Darius tried to get his mind off the grief that stabbed at him each time he thought of his cousin’s death, but his efforts only brought back more memories of how miserable his holidays had been before he had gone to live at Colthurst Hall.

Invariably he had spent Christmas Day alone, his mother much preferring to be part of some convivial house party, and the servants in her absence ignoring him. He could remember huddling for hours in a corner of the back stairway, listening to them celebrating in the servants’ hall and wishing he were a scullery lad or a lowly stable boy, so he might be a part of their merriment.

He had not been entirely forgotten, of course. At some point in the day, a maid or a footman had always appeared and thrust a pile of packages into his arms. The presents were ostensibly from his mother, but at an early age he had known they were picked out by one or the other of the servants. Opening them in his room, all alone, with no one to share the anticipation and pleasure, the gifts had brought him no joy, no excitement, no share of the holiday spirit.

“Excuse me, Capt’n. Mrs. St. John asked me to give you these.”

Darius looked up to see Munke holding a small pile of neatly wrapped packages. The irony of it struck him—that he had come full circle to this, a servant once again handing him the presents from the woman in his life—and he wavered a moment between anger and amusement.

In the end, the humor of the situation won out, and he laughed briefly, albeit with a touch of bitterness. Ignoring the packages his batman was holding out, he asked instead, “Why do they do it, Munke? What drives women to do the things they do?”

Munke placed the rejected packages on a small table nearby; then, with the familiarity of a long-time companion, he settled himself in the adjacent chair. Staring into the fire, he pondered the question. “I ain’t much of a philosopher, Capt’n, so ifn you’re asking about a specific case, then you’ll have to tell me which woman did what. Even then I don’t guarantee to have an answer for you, women being rather strange creatures, and it not being given to most men to understand their ways.”

“All right, I’ll give you specifics. Why did my wife find it necessary to tell everyone in Somerset what a despicable cad I am?”

“Oh, she didn’t do that.” Munke stretched out his legs toward the fire, linked his hands across his stomach, and yawned. “That was mainly the postman.”

“The postman? How on earth did he get involved?”

“ ‘Cause she was waiting every day by the gate for the mail.”

“So she complained to the postman?”

“No, she never said nary a word to him, other than the usual ‘good afternoon’ and ‘nice weather we’ve been having,’ that kind of thing. But he could tell how unhappy she was.” He yawned again, and his eyes started drifting shut.

“Munke, if I didn’t know better, I should wonder about your masculinity. You’re making no more sense right now than a woman.”

At that insult Munke’s eyes snapped open and he turned to face his employer. “Me? What’s to understand? It’s as simple as the nose on your face. You never wrote your wife not one single letter, not in all the months you’ve been married, whilst she wrote you faithfully twice a week.”

Darius looked at his batman in disbelief.

“At first the villagers and servants made excuses for you, figuring you must be too busy soldiering to write. But then Nicholas went off to war and
he
started sending home letters regular like, so they all figured you was just some kind of b— some kind of a damn fool what didn’t deserve a sweet wife like you got.”

“Where on earth did you get such a preposterous notion?”

Munke rose to his feet and stood looking down at him, his face bearing a remarkable similarity to that of a headmaster Darius had once had a slight contretemps with.

“It ain’t preposterous. And I got it first from Maggie. And don’t you start belittling her, neither, ‘cause she’s got uncommon good sense for a woman. And after she told me, I sort of asked around belowstairs and in the village, and they’re all agreed—hanging’s too good for a wretch like you, what makes Mrs. St. John soak her pillow with tears more nights than not. And I’m inclined to agree with ‘em.”

His voice became more heated as he continued. “I can’t believe you made us give up roast goose with oyster stuffing and a plum pudding twice the size of your head, just on account of some crack-brained notion you got that your wife was gossiping ‘bout you. For your information, she don’t gossip ‘bout nobody, and she don’t try real sneaky like to pry information out of other folk, neither. Why, when you rode away all hot under the collar like that, I could tell she was dying to ask me all manner of questions ‘bout you, but she’s too much of a lady to do that. Why, I reckon even if I’d started telling her tales ‘bout things you’ve done, she’d have stopped me.”

“Oyster stuffing?”

“Oyster stuffing. And ‘stead of that, we’ve got naught to eat here but bread and cheese.”

“Unless one of these packages contains another attempt to fatten me up.” Darius seized the first one and ripped off the gilt paper. It was the monogrammed handkerchiefs from Dorie. Next were several pairs of knitted socks from his wife, a wool scarf, some leather gloves, and a pocket-sized memorandum book for the coming year. All very neat and eminently suitable for a soldier, but at this moment he could not keep from wishing one of the presents had been edible.

“Here’s a little package you missed, Capt’n.”

If it was something to eat, then it was only big enough to make one mouthful, Darius thought as he unwrapped it.

It was a miniature of his wife. He looked down at her lovely face and admitted to himself for the first time that the blame was all his.

“May I, Capt’n?”

Wordlessly Darius handed over the portrait.

“It’s the spitting image. Even got the scar just right.”

“Let me see that again.” Darius took back the painting. What an unusual woman his wife was. Most miniaturist were carefully instructed by their subjects in how to paint lies—how to smooth out wrinkles, remove freckles, restructure prominent noses and receding chins ...

And yet in this case the scar was definitely there, a thin mark stretching down his wife’s cheek.

It did not make her less beautiful or less appealing, and Darius had a vivid memory of how she had looked by candlelight, smiling up at him and holding out her arms to welcome him. He could almost smell the lavender scent she normally used, almost feel her soft curves, almost taste the womanly flavor of her lips ...