Andrew pushed himself upright.“I need cleaning?”
“‘Spose not.You’re fastidious enough.Meant this place.”He waved an unsteady hand in a gesture that encompassed the entire room.
“No clutter here but my papers.A man needs something to work on.”
“Scholar like your father?Are you going to tutor the careless sons of privilege, browbeat ‘em into learning like he tried to do to me?Write pretty poetry?What?”
Andrew shrugged into the dressing gown.“The world has enough bad poetry.It isn’t my gift, and I haven’t the patience for teaching.I’ve a notion to try my hand at translating, just something to keep my mind and hands busy.”
Andrew kept his need to create something clean and good after eleven years of war to himself.Guilt regarding his father crippled him as effectively as his scars.He couldn’t explain his driving need to do something–anything–the old man would have been proud of, noteven to Jamie.
“Sounds deadly dull to me.If a woman can’t clean you up, she might cheer you up.Visiting you is like visiting a mausoleum.Find some jolly girl with laughing eyes.”
“Her eyes wouldn’t laugh at the sight of me.”A subtle but unmistakable change transformed Andrew’s tone.
“That’s it then?The face?Don’t bother me none.Would think some kinds of women would find it romantic.”
Andrew thought Jamie believed what he said.The line that sliced Andrew’s face in two didn’t revolt him as it did others.Jamie looked Andrew directly in the face, but few respectable women did the same.He knew his features attracted women before; not so now.The revulsion, the swift look away, told him what he needed to know.Then again, when Jamie suggested a woman, he probably didn’t mean the respectable kind.
“I’m surprised half the unmarried women in Cambridge aren’t here already,” Jamie went on, “bringing calves’ foot jelly and tisanes to cheer you.Most of the married ones, too.”
“They can keep their pity.Think what would happen if they got past my face.They’d have to see the rest of me.”He didn’t want to find out what it would feel like to see revulsion on a woman’s face at an intimate moment.He limped into the study and dropped into a soft armchair with a loud groan.
“You walk a far sight better than you did right after Waterloo.I thought the fancy physician Richard found fixed you right and tight.”
“He helped.I’m on my feet at least, but army surgeons set the left leg badly to begin with and not quite even with the right.Richard tried to send me on to a surgeon in Edinburgh, but I preferred to come home.”
“Richard let you come?He’s like a dog with a bone.If he thought you needed more?—”
“Even Richard Hayden—exalted damn Marquess of Glenaire—can’t keep an Englishman from his home if he wishes to be there.”Particularly one who missed his own father’s funeral.
When no reply came from the other chair, Andrew grumbled.“He may have been right, though.Damn him.”
“Isn’t he always?”The slurred words faded out at the end.
Andrew continued as if Jamie hadn’t spoken.“Something isn’t healing.When I move the wrong way, it still feels like the very devil.”
Silence greeted that statement.Andrew reached over and removed the glass that dangled precariously from Jamie’s hand.The man was dead asleep.
Andrew sunk deeper into the soft leather and looked up at the beams of his ceiling.His study—he still thought of it as his father’s study—provided his only sense of home.Books lined the walls.Bookshelves ran over doorjambs and around the diamond-paned casement window that opened over the lane below.Books filled small stands, ingeniously wheeled so they could be pulled up to the worktable or pushed back for space.He came here for healing and to pick up the strands of his disjointed life, but today contentment eluded him.
Jamie’s talk of women and Richard Hayden raised unsettling memories.The confrontation at the bookseller’s raised even more.Images and voices swirled up from dark places where he locked them away—a broad flagstone terrace stretching out to a garden filled with the scent of lilacs and the deep darkness of a moonless night.For a moment he hovered there in the April night, a woman warm in his arms—Georgiana Hayden, young and shy, responsive beyond his boyish dreams.
Then there was Georgiana today.He rammed a fist down on the arm of the chair to stifle the memory.What was the blasted woman doing in Groghan’s bookstore?Groghan catered to the Cambridge elite, the fusty crowd of male scholarship and ego.What misbegotten quirk of fate sent her there the one time I decide to pick up my own orders?
“Some’un sent a message.”Harley’s growl startled him, but he welcomed the distraction.
“Bring it then.”He reached for the thick package of folded vellum sealed with the Hayden family crest.Painfully familiar handwriting covered it, and it smelled of lilacs.Hell and damnation.Andrew Mallet harbored many nightmares.The memory of sweetness and lilacs caused misery to well up in him as violently as other buried memories: a French prison cell or the noise and blood of Waterloo.
She had risen up today at Groghan’s, filled with aristocratic outrage, and demanded service from a business that rarely saw a woman cross its threshold much less expect to order books.The sight pole-axed him.Really, Georgiana, Greek?Old Groghan about had apoplexy, and for a moment, Andrew thought he would refuse to hand over the books she requested.He took her coin, however.
When the woman turned and faced Andrew, his mind had fogged at the sight of her.In shock and unable to think, he pretended he didn’t know her.Damned fool!I ought to have guessed she wouldn’t let it be.
Jamie snored loudly, oblivious to what had been happening around him.Andrew let out a long breath and tore the message open.
Dear Mr.Mallet,
It has come to my attention that you suffered the loss of your father some time ago.I regret that I was unable to express proper sympathy at the appropriate time and wish to extend my condolences now.
