“It is what my lawyer assures me is happening,” he said, “so that they can proceed to negotiate from a position of mutual strength. In my opinion he is an ass. Ah, the devil! Forgive me. For both words. I am more accustomed to conversing with men than with ladies.”
She waved away his apology. “Give him time, then,” she said, “unless he has informed you that there is nothing more he can do for you. But it does not sound as if he has said that. Stay here. Let the lawyers do their work and trust that yours really is the best.”
Lieutenant Colonel Bennington must not despair, Grimes had assured him in this morning’s letter, despite the assault charge that had been threatened. The lawyer had had his military record investigated and had found it impressive and impeccable. He advised patience. Such cases took time to resolve.
The eternal lawyerly answer.
And Miss Westcott’s answer too. It was no answer at all.
But that was unfair. She had urged him to stay when she might just as easily have urged him to leave, knowing that trouble and scandal might be brewing and that her fragile reputation and Harry’s might suffer as a result. She might have used this revelation of his as an excuse to be rid of a man she had learned recently was not a gentleman. Very far from it, in fact.
“I will leave you in peace,” he said, having thoroughly disturbed her. “And I will think about staying longer.”
But what hedidthink about on the way back to the house was the fact that he had unburdened himself to her. He had told her about Caroline’s leaving him. He had told her about Katy, about his frantic, totally rash behavior when he had been refused admission to his mother-in-law’s house even though his daughter was there. He had told her— Ah, he had told her about that worst of all moments in his life when he had heard his baby crying upstairs and had been unable to go to her without knocking Lady Pascoe out of his way. He had told Miss Westcott of his present predicament. Drop the claim, General and Lady Pascoe were warning him through that threatened criminal charge, or end up with a long jail term or a court-martialanda lengthy prison term, perhaps even a firing squad, for assaulting his wife and threatening his mother-in-law. The wife of a general, no less. That second charge was the moreserious. A man, bizarrely, had the right to beat his own wife.
He had told Miss Westcott almost everything. A woman he scarcely knew and with whom he had never been comfortable. Yet, rather than shrink from him, she had urged him to stay. As though somehow she understood.No onecould understand what it felt like... He had spent almost two years hearing a baby cry in his nightmares while he found it impossible to reach her.
His throat felt sore as well as his chest and he realized in some alarm—and no small embarrassment—that he was on the verge of tears. Beauty, trotting along at his side, was pushing her nose into his hand again.
Dogs, he had learned a number of times since Waterloo—thisdog anyway—had an uncanny gift of empathy. It was as though they possessed more senses than people had. So much for the superiority of the human species.
Beauty was a gift given to him in the form of an ugly, scruffy, hungry puppy when the battle rage had scarcely seeped out of his blood and in England Caroline was fleeing after leaving their daughter and a false explanatory story about him with her mother.
He stepped out onto the lawn below the house and saw that Harry was on the terrace, walking from the direction of the stables.
“I have the best-groomed horse in England,” he called out cheerfully.
“It is probably time you thought about riding him, then,” Gil called back.
“I have been thinking of little else for the last two days,” Harry said. “Were you afraid I would beat you at billiards, by the way?”
“Mortally,” Gil told him.
•••
It was a long time before Abigail left her refuge beneath the weeping willow. She rested her chin on her updrawn knees and gazed across the lake without really seeing anything. Her letters lay beside her, forgotten.
She never would have guessed after her first encounter with Lieutenant Colonel Bennington that he was a man of such complexities. A man so filled with pain. Her heart ached because he had entrusted her with the dark secrets he had kept from almost everyone else, even Harry. Why her? Just because she was here when he had needed to unburden himself? If he had not seen her, or rather if his dog had not led him to her, would he have gone home and told it all to Harry instead?
For some reason she could not explain to herself she doubted it.
Which meant—
Whatdidit mean? Was there some sort of connection between them? But how could there be?
He had a daughter.
He was a father, denied access to his child. She had no children of her own, but even she could not imagine anything worse than being kept from one’s own baby.
Her new knowledge added poignancy to the memories of him with the children of her own family. He had taken baby Sam from Camille one afternoon when she had needed two hands to retie the bow at the back of Alice’s sash before the child tripped over it. Sam, half asleep after a recent feed, had gurgled up at him, and he had looked back at the baby with an expression that was not really a smile but... Well, it had seemed to Abigail that perhaps he was smiling inside.
Had his heart also been aching with the memory of holding his own baby and breaking at the knowledge that he might never do so again? It was a thought too hard to bear.
His daughter was in the care of her grandparents. And now there was an ugly legal custody battle looming. But surely a father had the right to custody of his child. There should be nothing to be settled. But he had behaved in a threatening manner when he was at the home of his parents-in-law. He had written threatening letters. Worst of all, perhaps, his wife had told her mother he had physically abused her. And he was a battle-hardened soldier of brutal looks and lowly origins.Verylowly. No, it was not going to be easy for him to win.
Katy.
He had called the childKaty.
