Harriet nodded.
“My brother was a soldier.”
Harriet nodded again. “In the 19th.”
Miss Wraxhall’s eye had an edge now. “You knew him?”
What could Harriet possibly say to that? After Harriet was widowed, in the worst month of her life, a stranger—her brother—had saved her and her friends. He’d been honest, brave, and kind, even when everything around them was mud and blood and disaster. He’d cheered them all with an ease that still left Harriet breathless—then he’d died uselessly in anguish from an ugly disease, and been buried in a sullen little plot of land on the other side of the world.
The best man she’d ever met had described his sister—this sister—as the best woman he’d ever known. What could you even say to a person like that, about such an irreplaceable loss?
“I knew him,” Harriet could only reply.
Miss Wraxhall waited a moment, then seemed to realize Harriet was not going to elaborate. “Did you meet him through Lady Eccleston?”
“No—my husband was in the 19th. He was killed at Alma.” While Harriet had been on a ship moored miles away. The ball of ice in her chest was rising now, rolling, climbing into her throat and choking off her words. “I met Lady Eccleston in Scutari.”
“At the hospital.”
Harriet nodded. That had been—after. After John’s death, after Marwood’s, after Peter’s. When the army had decreed the widows must go home, and sent their little group back to Scutari with the wounded. Harriet had a letter of introduction, written by Peter to Lady Eccleston, who was a volunteer nurse there—she’d helped them find lodging, and food. And then that lady had fallen sick herself, and died despite all Harriet and her friends’ desperate care. Mr. Dixit had drawn up her will in that final fever, and had it witnessed by two of the officers.
And they’d all shipped back to England. Where the survivors had found a fortune and a manor and a world that was so unchanged by war that they could not recognize their place in it. It was a dream, a fairy story they were walking through but never really a part of.
Except every now and then—when the rains blurred out the woods or when the snow fell thick and cold and made everything a sea of empty white. Like now. Then in Harriet’s heart everything became low plains, flattened by too many marching feet and iced by the world’s indifference. As though the nightmare landscape of war had followed her home and imposed itself on the growing green of England.
She took a sip of tea, desperate for the heat. Her throat creaked with it. “Your brother was a good soldier,” she said to Miss Wraxhall. “But more than that: he was a good man. You should be proud of him.”
“I am.” The reply came so swiftly Harriet blinked at little. Miss Wraxhall was almost glaring at her, fierce as one of her little hens. “I am very proud of my brother,” she said again. Almost angrily.
Almost as if…
Harriet’s interest prickled. Peter had been the very picture of ideal young English manhood: handsome, energetic, and virtuous—except for one thing.
He’d loved Captain Marwood. Deeply, passionately, and—important when you sprang from English soil—outside what the laws permitted.
And Harriet had the sudden strong impression that Miss Wraxhall knew it.
Something about the defensiveness, the defiance. Harriet had heard it so many times, from so many people. From her own lips, before she’d gone to the Crimea and the kind of laws that felt so all-important at home ceased to have any real meaning.
In war, the only law was power. And power knew no civilians—you were either a combatant or a victim.
Harriet had seen people do terrible things. Theft, rape, all manner of abuses. Two men falling in love didn’t even make the list of things she cared to condemn.
“I did not know your brother long,” she said again. Hoping the repetition would get the message through in code, if not in concrete words. And then she remembered something. “But I know one thing you don’t: Peter Wraxhall did steal chickens.”
Mrs. Boyne was a puzzle.
She’d barely introduced herself before accusing Lydia of trespassing and insisting on her rights to the long-lost Bickerton Greys. She’d vanished and then reappeared bearing more food than Lydia could eat in a week, like a confused Valkyrie who’d tired of carrying off the souls of the slain and wanted to bring Valhalla’s feast down to earth instead. She’d shocked Lydia by mentioning Peter, and her face whenever she talked about the Crimea had sent shivers down Lydia’s spine.
And then, out of nowhere, she had smiled.
That berry mouth had curved, and widened, going from a sharp line in a sharp face to something lush and sly and knowing. If all the snow in the Abbey ruins had melted, Lydia wouldn’t have been surprised. She was still melting a little herself.
And now she was saying Peter was a thief.
“This was just after Alma,” Mrs. Boyne was saying, an echo of that smile lingering on her lips. “Mrs. Marwood and I were still on board the Shooting Star as the army moved south toward Sebastopol. Your Peter, my husband John, and Captain Marwood were with them—the captain had been wounded in the arm, and Peter got it in his head nothing would do but a bowl of chicken soup to speed his recovery. Every farmhouse and cottage for miles around had been stripped clean of foodstuffs by the Russian soldiers—and anything they hadn’t found our men quickly seized. But the city road was also lined with summer villas that belonged to the wealthy lords and ladies of Sebastopol. Our men fell on these like hard-won prizes, carrying off bedding and furnishings and anything small and shiny. They’d have taken the pianos and chandeliers too, if they’d had a way to carry them.”
She cut a glance Lydia’s way, so Lydia offered an encouraging nod.
