Hawkes regarded him coolly.Get one.He made it sound like women were cheroots. Or perhaps that shiny porcelain vase currently winking at him.
Brundage, that rank amateur, was trying to elicit a show of tortured envy from him. He wanted some evidence of the suffering that years of confinement and enforced celibacy had taken.
Hawkes could not oblige him.
He was conscious of no emotion apart from that cold, subterranean fury. He supposed it was possible that survival for the last three years had required such contortions of spirit, such superhuman suppression, that the circulation of spontaneous feeling had been stopped, like a limb that had gone to sleep. He didn’t know how or in which order they would return to him.
Or perhaps prison had done to his soul what an invading army does to an enemy village: The crops burnt. The ground salted.
Perhaps that was a mercy.
“Your ash, Brundage,” Hawkes said politely. “It’s about to fall.”
Brundage was typically obsessively tidy.
Brundage roughly tapped his ash into a bowl on the little game table between them. Chinese, from the looks of it. Quite fancy for an ash bowl.
Hawkes’s cynicism told him Brundage’s distraction wasn’t merely due to racking concern for Aurelie. He would not risk involving Hawkes for that reason alone. He was biding his time for the moment of discovery.
“Is there anything else notable about her character that might help someone distinguish Lady Aurelie from any other young, beautiful, sheltered, runaway French noblewoman?” Hawkes asked.
“About her character?” Brundage’s brow furrowed, as if the word confused him. He pressed his lips together. “Well, she has considerable charm, if that’s what you mean. She has an... ah... pretty laugh”—he gave his hand an irritable flick, as though the need to describe her thusly embarrassed him—“and graceful manners, because she was exquisitely well-bred, of course. And she has opinions about things, and what woman of twenty-one years has an opinion worth a damn? Or knows her own mind? Nevertheless, I’ve indulged this perhaps too much, as one does when one is smitten. She’s perhaps a bit too clever for her own good, but she seems to revel in male attention, as any pretty girl would, and can be a bit of a... a bit of a flirt.”
Brundage said this last word tonelessly and turned his gaze toward the fire.
There ensued a peculiarly long silence.
Hawkes noted that a muscle in Brundage’s jaw was ticking.
“But I never viewed these as the sorts of flaws marriage and babies wouldn’t cure her of,” Brundage added tersely.
Hawkes wondered if Lady Aurelie thought she needed “curing.”
“I’ve never heard marriage prescribed as a cure for character flaws,” Hawkes said conversationally. “I’ve always thought it was the best way to discover them.”
This surprised a faint smile from Brundage.
Hawkes had, in fact, observed enough marriages over the years to conclude that what people liked tocall “love” was in truth just like justice: It was for sale. It was the name given to a transaction between a man and a woman, each of whom had something to gain. He wasn’t certain he believed in it.
“In short,” Brundage said, “marriage would be the best thing for Aurelie. I’ve long suspected an impulse to flightiness in her curbed only by the presence of her guardian. Unfortunately, it looks as though my suspicions have been borne out. You know how dramatic young women can be.”
“Of course,” Hawkes said.
He didn’t. But Hawkes knew how most people could be. Which meant he knew the words Brundage used to describe his fiancée revealed more about his own character than Aurelie’s.
And Hawkes thought he knew Brundage’s character very well indeed.
Hawkes had always addressed young women like Lady Aurelie with the careful solicitousness with which he might restore a fallen baby bird to its nest. He wielded his charisma with a certain tender mercy when he danced with them, and he was flattered and amused by their blushes. But as the war bore on and his career engulfed him, the more they seemed like a different species from a different land, one which spoke a language he could no longer speak, or perhaps was no longer entitled to speak. He supposed he might call that language Innocence.
When opportunity and lust aligned, he found himself in the beds of women whose morals were as labyrinthine as his own had become in the name of duty. Like Therese d’Artois.
Hawkes realized he’d been holding the miniature of Aurelie so long it had pressed a little ridge into his palm.
He gently placed it down on the table between them.
Brundage flicked a dispassionate glance at it. But he didn’t take it up. It was as if he were punishing her for being gone. “I suppose you may take that with you.” He gestured to the miniature vaguely with his chin. “If you agree to help me find her.”
Hawkes felt himself go rigid.
