Harry stopped and looked at the chairs and then at the single blanket spread on the grass. The picnic hamper had been set across one corner of it.
“Expecting a few elderly ladies with rheumatic knees, are you, Abby?” he asked with a nod of the head to the chairs.
She smiled ruefully. “I suppose you are offended by them. The chairs, I mean.”
He grinned at her. “At least you were tactful enough to have three brought out,” he said. “I suppose you fear that if I get down on the ground I will not be able to get up again. If you should prove correct, please do not summon any servants. I will crawl back to the house on my hands and knees and you may sayI told you soto your heart’s content.”
With that, he lowered himself to the blanket and moved to one side of it. It was good to see Harry recovering his sense of humor, Abigail thought as the lieutenant colonel gestured to the blanket beside Harry.
“Miss Westcott?” he said.
“Oh no,” she said, “I shall serve the food before I sit.”
She went and knelt beside the hamper and set about filling three plates with chicken and ham and bread rolls lavishly buttered, and with cheese and pickles and hard-boiled eggs out of their shells. There were currant cakes and small custard tarts and three brightly polished apples at the bottom too under a folded towel, she could see, but she left those for later. Propped against one corner of the hamper was a carefully wrapped large, meaty bone for Beauty, who was sitting beside the blanket, waiting with panting impatience.
The lieutenant colonel came down on one knee beside Abigail and poured the wine. He had large, strong hands, Abigail noticed—they would have to be, of course, for him to wield an axe the way he did and probably other weapons too. There was a faint scar across all four knuckles of one hand.
“How long have you been a military man?” she asked him.
He seemed to be doing the mental calculation. “Twenty years,” he said.
So long? “How old were you?” she asked.
“Not quite fifteen,” he said. “I lied about my age. I was impatient for adventure, and a recruiting sergeant came along and offered me just that. I took it, along with the king’s shilling.”
“A recruiting sergeant?” She paused to look at him in considerable astonishment, Harry’s plate held in her hand. “You joined as a private soldier?”
“I did,” he said, taking the plate from her hand and passing it to Harry after adding a linen napkin. He picked up his own plate with a word of thanks and moved across the blanket to leave room for her. He had balanced the glasses on a flat tray he had found against one inner side of the hamper.
To hide her surprise, Abigail turned aside to unwrap the bone, which had a great deal of meat still attached to it, and set it on the grass beside the dog. Beauty scrambled to her feet with a woof, sniffed it, and attacked it.
Returning her gaze to her companions, she decided it would be far too intimate to squeeze in beside the lieutenant colonel. But Harry had not left enough room on his other side. She took her plate and sat on one of the chairs.
“A touch of the rheumatics,” she said with a smile when Harry glanced up at her.
Lieutenant Colonel Bennington had been a private soldier. Not an officer from the start. His family had been too poor, then, to purchase a commission for him? Or... There was another explanation, especially as he had been signed up by a recruiting sergeant. Perhaps he was not a gentleman. But if he was not, how on earth had he made the jump through the ranks to become an officer? She had heard thatonly a deed of extraordinary valor made that possible. She did not ask, and he did not volunteer any further information. Instead he was listening to Harry, who was declaring how wonderful it was to be alone at last, just the three of them.
“It seems horribly disloyal to say so aloud,” he said, “when they all made a great effort to come here just for my sake and were so touchingly glad to see me back home. But... Dash it, Abby, I had forgotten just how delicious our cook’s fried chicken is.”
“She made it especially for you,” she told him. “She remembers every one of your favorite foods and just how you always liked them prepared. She has been sending a steady stream of servants to the farm and the village to gather all the ingredients she is going to need. She is quite determined to fatten you up.”
“She is likely to succeed too,” he said. “I am rediscovering my appetite.”
But as her brother expressed his pleasure, Abigail was distracted by the thought that during the past week Lieutenant Colonel Bennington had revealed almost nothing about himself though he had been in conversation a number of times with various members of her family. She knew his name and his military rank. She knew he had spent a year with the garrison on St. Helena, guarding Napoleon Bonaparte. Now she knew he had been recruited at the age of fourteen by a recruiting sergeant. And that was all. Oh, and he spoke like a gentleman and behaved like one—except when he was chopping wood, half naked beside the stables.
“I am a bit surprised actually, Abby,” Harry said, “that none of our neighbors have called even though we have both been here for more than a week. Do people forget sosoon? Or do they see us differently than they used to do? Are we pariahs?”
“I assure you we are not,” Abigail said. “When Mama and I came back here to live, we were treated as we always had been. Most people even continued to address Mama asmy lady. The neighbors were kind and attentive, and our friends were still our friends. Perhaps—”
“I believe I can throw some light upon the matter,” Lieutenant Colonel Bennington said. “Your neighbors judged that having all your family here has been enough excitement for you to contend with, Harry, much as they are eager to pay their respects to you and see for themselves that you are recovering your health. I daresay they will come flocking now that everyone has left.”
Abigail looked at him in some curiosity, but Harry merely chuckled. “And is this a guess on your part, Gil?” he asked. “Or have you been out meeting the locals during your absences from the house?”
“Not all of them,” his friend told him. “But you inevitably meet a number of people of all classes when you spend an hour or so of each day at a village tavern. Andtheymeetyouwithout any reluctance or reticence. Seeing a stranger is a rare enough event, I gather, that they will soon find ways to worm out of him his life history, his political views, and his reason for being in their neighborhood.”
“I believe you.” Harry laughed again. “Sometime when you go, Gil, perhaps I will come with you. But it is good to know that everyone has not taken a disgust of me just because I lost my title and fortune six years ago.”
“Vicars tend to grow animated and garrulous too when a stranger is discovered reading plaques on the walls inside their church on a weekday with no service scheduled,” the lieutenant colonel continued. “They tend to take hispresence as a good reason to deliver a lengthy history of the church. And then, if that stranger is lucky—I was—he gets invited into the vicarage for an excellent luncheon with the man and his wife. And he is regaled as he eats with tales of all the mischief Mr. Harry and, to a lesser degree, his sisters used to get up to when they were children here. The vicar even shed a tear as he described the consternation there was in the village when word reached here that they were like to lose Mr. Harry after Waterloo. He declares he will be the first to call upon you the very day after your good family leaves.”
