Miss Abigail Westcott was standing on Harry’s other side. She was not hurrying toward any of the carriages. Neither was she dressed for travel. Her flimsy muslin dress was fluttering about her legs. She wore no bonnet. Beautywas seated beside her, looking silly with bliss because she was lightly scratching the dog’s head.
What the devil?
“You are not leaving, Miss Westcott?” he asked.
“Oh no,” she said. “I am staying.”
What in thunder...?For how long?
She partially answered his unspoken question before the first carriage rolled into motion and the others followed it down the drive.
“Harry’s coming home has made it possible for me to come home too,” she said.
When there was still half the social Season to be enjoyed in London? And a stepsister and stepbrother and cousins and other relatives to enjoy it with? And nothing but a country home and a sleepy country neighborhood and an ailing brother for entertainment here?
Harry and his sister stood waving until the last of the carriages disappeared from sight.
“They are a good lot, Abby,” Harry said. “We are very fortunate to be a part of such a family.”
“The only bad egg in the lot of them,” she said, “was our father. How could he have been so very different?”
“There is one consolation,” he said. “If he had not married Mama, bigamously or otherwise, we would never have been born. And I do not believe I would have liked that one little bit. Would you?”
She laughed, an attractive little gurgle of merriment Gil had not heard from her before. “I suppose I would not have been in a position either to like or to dislike it,” she said. “I would not have been. There would have been no I. Or you. It is hard to imagine total nothingness, is it not? But ought you to be standing out here this long?”
“If you intend to fuss me, Abby,” he grumbled, “I’ll sendyou back to London on the next stage.” But there was no real irritation in his voice.
Again that gurgle of laughter. “Very well, then,” she said, linking an arm through her brother’s. “Let us take a walk along the terrace. Could the day possibly be more perfect?”
“It could not,” he agreed, “simply because I am living and breathing in it. It is also a lovely day.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Bennington,” she said politely, “would you care to join us?”
The perfect hostess. A woman at home with her brother. Making their guest into a stranger by the very courtesy of her invitation. Good God, why had someone nottoldhim? Why had Harry not mentioned it?Oh, by the way, my sister is remaining here indefinitely to ruin our peace.
He fell into step beside them as they made a slow progress along the terrace. Gil remembered how Harry always used to stride everywhere, eager and full of energy, impatient to get where he was going.
“Lieutenant Colonel,” Miss Westcott said, “you must be eager to go home yourself.”
Ah. She was wondering when he intended to leave, was she? And hinting that perhaps it ought to be soon?
It was surprising the question had not come up more than it had during the past week. Harry’s grandmother from Bath had asked him one day at luncheon if he was one of the Somersetshire Benningtons, but when he had said no, he was not, and had not immediately gone on to explain which Benningtons hewasone of, she had not pursued the matter. Neither had anyone else. Perhaps there had been something in his voice that had deterred further questioning.
None of them had discovered that he was not a gentleman, even less of a one than Harry, in fact. Far less. At leastHarry had been brought up as a gentleman in the aristocratic home of an earl and his apparent countess. He had been educated and groomed as his father’s successor. Gil had been brought up in what had been little more than a hovel by a mother who was the unmarried daughter of a blacksmith. He could read and write and figure only because his mother had insisted that he attend the village school, which he had hated with a passion despite the long-suffering patience of the vicar who had taught it.
“He will be staying for a while,” Harry said before Gil could respond to the question himself. “For a good long while, I hope. I donotneed a nurse. I have had plenty of those and physicians and surgeons too for the past two years, and look where they have got me. Oh, they kept me alive. I give them their due and all my gratitude on that. But they also kept me only barely alive. No daylight allowed, no fresh air, almost no solid food, no exercise—and enough blood taken from me when I had the fever to give life to an army of empty bodies. There will be no more nurses. A good friend and comrade will do very nicely instead. And a sister, of course.”
Gil watched Beauty wander along down by the trees, sniffing the trunks where they met the ground.
Three wounded souls. That was what they were. Though where that thought had come from he did not know.
But was Harry’ssoulas well as his body wounded by what had happened to him in battle, and in London six years ago when he was stripped of his title and fortune and everything for which he had been raised? He had never talked about it beyond the bare facts. There had been no more cheerful officer in their regiment than Major Harry Westcott.
And had Miss Westcott’s soul been wounded by those same events? It was perhaps significant that she was stillunmarried several years later and apparently not even looking for a husband in the great marriage mart that was the London Season.
Washewounded? By... life? By what Caroline had done to him? But was it fair to blame her or anyone else for the state of his soul? And where the devil were these thoughts coming from anyway?
Life was a challenge. One big challenge forever splintering into smaller ones, just like a felled tree trunk under the axe. And if one got wounded, one licked the wound, applied a bandage if it would not stop bleeding, and kept reducing that trunk to logs and sticks of firewood and kindling—until the next one came crashing down and one had to start all over again.
