“I thought to see the parlor piled to the ceiling with all your purchases, Abby,” he said, sinking into an armchair, resting his head against the back of it, and closing his eyes.
“Well, that was it, you see,” she said, laughing. “There were too many to carry, and a few of them are quite bulky. I thought perhaps the carriage could stop outside the shop when we leave here and I can just run in and get them.”
“I shall go and fetch them for you now if you will give me the direction,” Gil offered.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, flushing. “That is very good of you. But luncheon—”
“I for one could not eat a thing just yet,” Harry said. “Give me a short time to rest while Gil goes for your things.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “I am afraid you would not have enough arms or hands, Lieutenant Colonel. You wouldneed to be an octopus. In the coming weeks I expect to have some time on my hands for plying my needle, and I like some variety. I am afraid I got carried away somewhat and purchased enough to keep me occupied for a year. I was quite embarrassed when I saw the pile I had had the shopkeeper set aside for me. I shall come with you.” She got to her feet and donned her bonnet and gloves.
Gil offered his arm when they stepped out of the inn. It was not something he would feel obliged to do in the country, but it seemed the gentlemanly thing to do on the streets of a market town. She hesitated a moment but then slipped her hand through his arm and he got a whiff of her scent. It was not a powerful perfume. Perhaps it was no more than the soap with which she had washed her face or her hair. It was delicate. And feminine—as was she.
“You did not try to discourage Harry from purchasing a horse of his own?” she asked him.
“It was not my place to do any such thing,” he said. “Having a horse he wishes desperately to ride will spur him on—ah! Pun not intended. It will perhaps give him an extra incentive to regain his strength. Seeing me go out riding will make him even more determined.”
“I constantly tell myself that I must not coddle him,” she said, sounding a bit rueful. “Unfortunately my instinct urges me to do just that. But you are right, and Iwillcurb the instinct. It is not easy, Lieutenant Colonel, to have a man one loves very dearly away at war, to have no news of him for weeks, sometimes months on end, and to await that news with trepidation, not knowing what it may be.”
A man one loves very dearly.Caroline had not even awaited news of him after Waterloo. She had left for her house party, he had discovered afterward, at almost the exact time the battle was being fought.
It was as if Miss Westcott had read his thoughts again. “Who awaited news of you?” she asked. “Was your wife still alive when you were fighting? And who else?”
“No one,” he said, speaking more harshly than he intended as he drew her to one side of the pavement to allow a woman with a laden basket over her arm to pass in the opposite direction. “My mother died when I was still in India. I suppose there are uncles and aunts and cousins galore not twenty miles from where I grew up. Perhaps even grandparents. I would not know. I never met them. They turned my mother off when it became obvious that she was expecting me. As for my father, I have never met him. I did not even know who he was until in a burst of paternal concern for my well-being he purchased my ensign’s commission after he had learned of my mother’s death and discovered my whereabouts. He also purchased my lieutenancy, after which I wrote to inform him that if he secured a captaincy for me it would be refused. I have not heard from him since. I doubt he sought news of me after the various battles and skirmishes of the wars.”
Before he could fathom what the devil had prompted that outburst, she had stopped walking and so had he. Well, at least now she would know with whom she walked—and with whom she shared a house at Hinsford.
“I am sorry,” she said, and she sounded as though she really was. Her head was tipped a little to one side, and her eyes were large and unblinking. “I can tell from your voice that you believe me to have been unpardonably inquisitive. You are right. I have been. Forgive me, if you please. This is the shop.”
She signaled to the building beside them and turned to enter it. He followed her inside—and felt immediately like the proverbial bull in a china shop. There were severalladies fingering bolts of cloth or examining cards of lace or rummaging through bins of ribbons and buttons and other objects. The shopkeeper behind the counter was showing a length of velvet fabric to a buxom older lady and a thin young one. All of them abruptly stopped what they were doing—or so it seemed to Gil—to look at the new arrivals and then to gawk some more at him while he drew himself up to his full height, clasped his hands at his back, and tried to look at ease.
“Ah, Miss Westcott,” the shopkeeper said. “You have come for your purchases, have you?”
“Yes, please,” she said. “Lieutenant Colonel Bennington has kindly offered to help me carry them to the inn.”
Everyone gawked a bit more and then returned to their former activities. The large lady at the counter shook her head in rejection of the velvet while her young companion looked relieved, and the shopkeeper abandoned them in order to titter and twitter her way to the back of the shop, where there was a mound of packages neatly wrapped and tied up with string.
Miss Westcott had not exaggerated. If all these were supplies for her needlework projects, she must be a prodigious needlewoman. Caroline had despised embroidery—as well as watercolor painting and playing the pianoforte and letter writing and flower arranging and all the feminine accomplishments she complained her various governesses and finishing school teachers had tried to foist upon her, ruining her girlhood in the process. She did not intend to have her adulthood spoiled too, she had declared to him the very first time they met soon after she arrived in the Peninsula with her mother to spend some time with the general, her father. She intended to befree. She had plied a fan before her face as she said it and favored him with one of her brightest, most alluring smiles.
He ought to have known at that very moment that she was a woman to be avoided at all costs. That she wastrouble, in other words. Instead he had been utterly dazzled, poor idiot that he had been, because the whole of her attention and the full force of that smile had been focused upon him. Gil Bennington, bastard son of a washerwoman.
“Right,” he said now, looking at the bundles. “Which is the lightest of them?”
“Oh, that is easy,” Miss Westcott said, pointing to a bulky, largish package. “That wool weighs almost nothing at all. It just takes up a lot of space.”
“Perhaps you can carry that, then,” he said. “I will manage the rest.”
“Oh, I can take something else too,” she said.
“I am sure you can,” he said, turning his eyes upon her. “But you will not.”
Their eyes tangled for a moment.
The shopkeeper tittered. “I can see it would be unwise to argue with an officer when he uses that tone of voice, dear Miss Westcott,” she said.
Whattone of voice?
For a moment he thought Miss Westcott was going to argue nonetheless, but she merely bent to pick up the wool. “Thank you,” she said.
