“So soon?” Her smile was still a bit lazy, but she did not immediately protest that Friday would be fartoosoon.
“Or,” he said, twining the fingers of his free hand with hers, “we could announce our marriage at the ball.”
Her smile was arrested. Her eyes narrowed. “What?” She frowned.
“We could get married,” he said. “On Friday morning. And announce our marriage at the ball.”
She sat up slowly on his lap and continued to gaze narrow-eyed at him.“What?”she said. “This is Monday. Friday isfour daysfrom now.”
“I could shoot up to London tomorrow for a special license,” he said, “and be back before Wednesday evening. I could have a word with the Reverend Bailey before I go. We could pick out two witnesses and ask them—Mrs. Bailey, perhaps. And maybe Gil—Gil Bennington, my brother-in-law.”
“And no one else?” she said. “Harry, are youmad?”
He thought about it. “Possibly,” he conceded. “It is just that I can remember Abby and Gil’s wedding here, Lydia. Just the two of them and the vicar and two witnesses—I was one—and I have always considered it the perfect wedding. If we tell my family, there will be a fuss to end fusses. And we would not be able to do it on Friday because there would be all of them here but not a single person from your family. That would be unthinkable. I cannot bear to wait, though. For everyone would stillfuss.And would they all stay here while plans were being made and your family was being summoned? Or would they all go home and plan from afar and try luring us to a different location for the wedding? I— Lydia, I just want to marry you. Now. Sooner. Even Friday seems too far off.”
“Harry.” She wasstillfrowning. “Is this the protective male in you speaking? Are you intent upon protecting me from all this stupid gossip?”
“I have not given it a single thought since you said yes out there by the fence,” he said quite truthfully. “No, my love. It is the deep-in-love and admittedly deep-in-lust male in me speaking. Lydia, I—”
But she had set her hands on his cheeks, cupping his face, and her eyes were suspiciously bright. “Youaremad,” she said. “This Friday? On your birthday? Just the two of us and the vicar and two witnesses? Oh, Harry …”
She kissed him.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” he said against her lips. “Early. I’ll have a word with the Reverend Bailey now before I go home and with Gil this evening. And on Friday morning, while everyone is busy with preparations for the ball, we will go to church, you and I, and get married. Will we? Say yes again, Lydia. Say it. Please say yes.”
“Yes, then,” she said, breathing the words into his mouth. “If I am to have a mad husband, I might as well be mad too, I suppose.”
“But a mad husband youtrust,” he said.
“Yes.”
She settled her head on his shoulder again after kissing him and sighed. “Wearemad.” She laughed softly.
Good God, they were. He wasnotgoing to be popular with his family on Friday evening.
“Harry,” she said after they had been quiet for a few minutes, “are your nightmares still bad?”
“Nightmares by very definition are bad,” he said after thinking about it. “Mine come less frequently as time goes by unless something happens to provoke them. Then they come in clusters. I do not suppose they will ever go away entirely. And perhaps that is as it ought to be. I see endless lines of faceless soldiers coming at me—not to kill me so much as to be killed.Cannon fodder, they were sometimes called. It is how Wellington referred to our own side. Men. Human beings. As human as you or me. I am responsible for hundreds of their deaths.” He was quiet for a minute. “There are all sorts of perfectly sound arguments, of course, to convince military men that they are not, in fact, murderers. Nevertheless, I am responsible. And if the only way I can pay homage to the humanness of those French soldiers, the vast majority of whom had no choice but to be there, is to have nightmares about them, then I will suffer them. Thoughnotgladly.”
She touched her fingertips to his cheek and kissed him. “Tell me,” she said softly. “It took you two years of recovery after the Battle of Waterloo even before you came home, and then another year or more here. I can remember that when I first came here with Isaiah you were thin and pale.”
He tried not even to think about it. It was in the past. Another lifetime. But his life belonged to her too now. All of it, even the past. Just as her life belonged to him— including the terrible pain of her first marriage, which she had confided to him earlier.
“Joining the military seemed to me the obvious thing to do after I lost everything that had given shape and meaning to my life,” he said. “I hated it from the first moment—or perhaps my life was such at that time that anything would have seemed hateful. I wrote cheerful letters home from the Peninsula, telling everyone what a lark and a jolly good time it all was. It was death and blood and mud and mayhem, Lydia. It was dehumanizing. One had to fight constantly to retain one’s humanity. Sometimes it was impossible. It would have been impossible to fight in any pitched battle if one did not allow the energy of the moment to convert one into a savage whose only instinct was to slaughter the enemy. I beg your pardon. This is not the sort of conversation—”
She set three fingers lightly across his lips. “I asked,” she said. “Tell.”
“I was wounded more times than I can recount,” he said. “I suppose I ought not even to have been fighting at Waterloo. How I survived it the Lord only knows. I fell from my horse in the end, and the horse fell on me. I had numerous saber cuts and three bullet wounds—one bullet was lodged below my shoulder, close to my heart, and remained there for longer than a year before a surgeon dug it out. I had one broken leg and internal injuries that were probably never fully diagnosed or treated. I knocked myself senseless and had memory lapses for a few years. I had an almost constant fever. Perhaps what made everything worse than it might have been was the treatment. The favorite was bleeding to reduce the fever. Over the two years I spent in hospital I must have had enough blood removed to keep ten men alive. The other favorite was to keep me in bed in a darkened room, feeding on thin gruels and jellies. I would have died there in Paris if I had not eventually insisted upon coming home—and if Gil had not been there to insist for me, and if Avery and Alexander had not come to bring me.”
One of her hands was smoothing back his hair. She was kissing the underside of his chin.
“The very worst of it, though,” he said, “was the hopelessness, the lethargy, the conviction that I would never be myself again. The bone-wearying depression. And the memories and the guilt. And the lingering resentment over all that had happened to expose me to the hell of those years. The lingering … hatred. Of my father. And of Alexander and Anna. Even sometimes of my mother. But then, after I had been here awhile, I somehow found the will to get better, tomakemyself better. And the time came, Lydia, when I understood the full miracle of what had happened to me. For somehow, without my even realizing it, Hinsford seeped into my bones. Not just as my home. But as … the peace that became the heart of me. The understanding that this—not just this place, but this … life—is who I am, who I was always supposed to be. It is hard to put into words. Nothing is static, of course. Lately I have known that peace and contentment, wondrous as they have been, are not sufficient. I have known that I needed something more vivid.Someone.You, in fact.”
He turned his head to look into her face. She was gazing back.
“So you see,” he said, “why the nightmares, horrible as they are, are somehow necessary. They are a reminder that I must not live in a cocoon of contentment without remembering the journey that has brought me here. Peace is hard won, and the effort to keep it is ongoing. We must never become complacent in life. We must never feel we havearrivedand there is nothing left to do but enjoy.”
“You have the Earl of Riverdale and the Duchess of Netherby here with you now,” she said, her smile almost mischievous, “as a constant reminder of all you have gone through.”
