She refused to look at him yet.
“I would have intervened if I’d objected to the direction of your conversation,” he assured quietly, after a moment.
She exhaled. “All right.”
They rolled along in silence for a time.
He cleared his throat. “I’m grateful that Mrs. Scofield took me in from the potato sack. I get enormous satisfaction from knowing that I have the means to look after her. I would take no pleasure in knowing she was suffering any sort of penury in her retirement. And I did it because I liked knowing that I had an anchor in the world, after a fashion—a place I could point to and say, ‘I started there.’ Having someone to look after is sort of an anchor, too. And for what it’s worth, my sense of duty is, I’m afraid, rather cast-iron.”
She turned to study him.
Her eyes were somber, soft, and a little too searching. And as lovely as they were, he found he needed to turn away.
She was dutiful, too.
“I see how far I’ve come when I visit her,” he said shortly. “And I like the reminder.”
“So that’s why you learned to shoot. I should say she was a marvelous incentive to improve your aim to get out of there.”
He gave a short, not entirely amused laugh at her astuteness.
“She mentioned that you won a competition?” she prompted.
He nodded. “The master of the house, The Honorable John Coopersmith, began taking me out with him to the country on grouse hunts to carry things for him. I think he viewed me as a sort of useful pack animal. But he discovered I wasn’t a dolt. Taught me to shoot both pistols and muskets. And...” He smiled slightly. “I became very good at it. And then he taught me to read, because it amused him and he thought I would be useful to him that way, too. I was about twelve years old, then. Once I was able to read and write I assisted him with some of his correspondence. I had a sleeping mat in the scullery and I was fed, but I learned to forage, too, and I did odd jobs in exchange for more food. I owe Coopersmith a good deal. He died during my second year in the army.”
“I wish he could have lived to see the city erect a statue of you on a horse.”
“So do I.”
She was quiet a moment.
“They could have at least given you a bed.”
He smiled slightly. “I was a superfluous household expense. A big, hungry one.”
Alexandra shook her head again, roughly, shaking off this rationale. But she knew that was the lot of many servants, especially children. And that’s what he’d been.
A decade ago, she might have been outraged if anyone had suggested she would ever marry a former servant.
Her fingers curled into involuntary fists when she thought of Molly the servant girl’s cruelty. “Satyr” wasn’t at all the right word for him. But comparing him to a demigod was, surprisingly, not outlandish at all. Mrs. Scofield had no idea, no idea at all, what she’d helped wrought. Perhaps she did bear some responsibility for the extraordinary person he became.
“How did the shooting contest come about?”
“Every year a local squire—not Coopersmith—who had more money than sense would hold a shooting competition. Men would come from miles around to participate. Hundreds of them. I didn’t have my own gun, so it took all of my nerve to ask whether I could borrow Coopersmith’s musket. He loaned me the shot, too.” He paused. “And I won.” He smiled faintly. “And I don’t mind telling you, Alexandra, that sometimes I wonder if there wasn’t more satisfaction in that win than in beating the French.”
She smiled softly at that.
“That was the day I vowed that never again would a rich, indolent man compel me to perform tricks for money. And from that moment I determined I would be wealthier by far than he was. And I am. I bought an ensign’s commission with my prize winnings.”
She knew that the price of a military commission was entirely out of reach for the average servant, let alone one who slept in the scullery.
“I have always done my best to recommend men for promotions through the ranks basedon talent and performance, because I know how much men who come from circumstances like my own have to prove, and how hard they’re willing to work. I think some of my best strategic choices had to do with promoting some men and demoting others for this reason.”
She didn’t ask him why he’d taken her to meet Mrs. Scofield. She wasn’t entirely certain. But she thought perhaps she knew.
Because he wasn’t a man who did things on a whim.
Perhaps it was as simple as this: he wanted that harridan to see that he had indeed gotten himself a pretty wife. Even if that wife had promptly been faithless.
