“Why did they keep you alive?”
Quinton shook his head. “I’ve thought about that every day.”
Barrington looked at him, his gaze sharp. “Did they question you?”
“Rarely. And when they did, they asked me odd questions. Not about military tactics. Nothing about troop movement. They asked about… people. Names. Locations.”
Barrington swore under his breath and stiffened, his fingers tapping once against the mug. His eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn’t speak. Not yet.
“I thought I was going mad,” Quinton admitted. “But I held on to one thing.”
Barrington waited.
“Mary-Ann.”
The name settled between them like a dropped coin. Her name hadn’t passed his lips in over three years. Just the sound of it again grounded him, as if memory and breath could become the same thing.
“I remembered the way she laughed when I told her the stars were brighter in Portugal. I remembered how she used to lean over my shoulder to correct my accounts.” He paused, the memories catching in his throat. “I used to imagine her voice, what she’d say if she were there. I’d make up conversations just to hear something human. When it got really bad, I’d see her face in the dark, clear as candlelight. I think I clung to those thoughts because they were the only things that still felt real. I couldforget who I was, what day it was,” he turned to Barrington. “But never her.”
He looked down at his coffee, fingers tightening slightly around the mug. “Even after the letters stopped coming, I kept reciting the ones I had in my head. Every word. Every line. I must have repeated them a thousand times.”
Barrington took a deep breath and spoke quietly. “You’re not the only one who couldn’t forget. She waited longer than most would have,” Barrington added. “Longer than some thought wise. She never stopped asking if we’d heard anything.”
Barrington’s voice softened. “She wrote letters to me, to my brother Edward, and to anyone she thought might know something, anyone who would listen. She traveled to London more than once to meet with officials at the War Office. When no one responded, she started copying every letter twice, sending one to the regiment and one to the Admiralty, just in case. She kept a map in her father’s study with pins marking every place the brigade might’ve passed through. And every time she thought she was a nuisance, she apologized. But she never gave up.”
Quinton stared at the mist curling along the fence posts. “I hoped,” he said, at last, his voice low. “Even when the silence stretched on for months… I told myself she was still out there. Still fighting.”
His hand tightened on the cooling mug. “There were nights when everything else slipped away except her. Her voice. Her letters, even if I never saw them. I made them up in my mind, imagined what she might say, just to hold on a little longer.”
Quinton was quiet for a long moment. The coffee in his hand had gone cold. “I didn’t know,” he said finally. “I thought…when the letters stopped…”
“They didn’t stop,” Barrington said gently. “They weren’t given to you.”
He swallowed hard. “I didn’t know what she was doing. But I knew who she was. That was enough to keep breathing.”
Barrington nodded, then added, “She’d be glad to hear that.”
Quinton looked back toward the house. “I need to tell her someday. That she saved me.” He looked away, his jaw tightening slightly. “She’s engaged to another man. I should be glad for her,” he said, though the words tasted foreign. “But…”
“Wilkinson,” Barrington said.
Quinton’s mouth curved, not quite in a smile. “We weren’t friends. Not truly. But I knew him.”
Barrington said nothing.
Quinton took another sip of coffee. “He seemed very composed yesterday. Polite. Comfortable.”
“He has a talent for blending in,” Barrington said carefully.
A silence stretched between them, not uncomfortable but full of things left unsaid. Of names, of suspicions, of roads not yet taken.
“Do you trust him?” Quinton asked.
Barrington didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t distrust him. But I trust you, Quinton. And I know that look in your eyes.”
Quinton nodded once. “I’m not done yet.” His voice had steadied. It was low and certain, like a soldier choosing his ground. “Not with Mary-Ann. And not with what happened to me.”
From the stables, the soft nicker of a horse broke the stillness.
