“I want to go home,” Isabella whined.Good girl, he thought.
“14thFoot?” Rambaudi mused. “I do not know it, but there were many of us, no? Were you with Colville?”
Nora leaned against his arm, eyes bright. Isabella whimpered.
“Er, no,” Jamie said. He shifted Isabella to his opposite shoulder. He felt pathetic using a child as a shield. “I was with Grant,” he said to close off the topic. He immediately regretted it; Grant commanded cavalry. He cursed silently.
Rambaudi looked puzzled.
“My wife and her niece need their rest, General. They have had a troubled day.” He nodded his head in a vague attempt at a bow and guided Nora toward the door with his free arm.
A tweed-covered arm reached around him to open the door. Nora walked ahead. “I think, Major,” Wentworth said before Jamie could follow her, “you didn’t fight with the any regiments of foot, did you?” Jamie didn’t stick around to give an answer.
Nora didn’t hear Wentworth’s words. She busied herself requesting their wraps and, he noted, an escort.
“I didn’t know you were at Waterloo,” Nora said. “I should have.”
“You must have been very brave,” Isabella put in with a yawn.
“I don’t talk about it,” he said, in a massive understatement. Nora and Isabella, he knew, would feel safe once they realized the conspiracy was over. He wished he felt the same.
In the end,Nora heard they had executed the conspirators. Giovanni regained consciousness only long enough for them to tie him to a post and shoot him.
“No trial, no hearings. I am horrified—or I ought to be,” Nora said for what must have been the tenth time in as many days. She still hadn’t come to terms with her own blood lust in the cellar.
“Sad,” her husband replied. “Not just the ending but what it took to get them there. Poor Luciano listened to the wrong person.” Luciano, they heard, never stopped protesting his innocence and blamed the crimes entirely on Giovanni.
“And Giovanni?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I would feel better if I knew who he reported to. Perhaps Castellimonte’s people got it out of him before they shot him.”
Nora shuddered at how that might have occurred. She continued to mend Jamie’s shirt.
“We have servants for that, you know,” he said.
“I want to mend my own husband’s shirt,” she replied tartly. “Allow me something useful to do before I bury Casa Beaumont in lace.”
Jamie smiled at that, drawing an echoing smile from Nora. He smiled less now than before. She had hoped that the great secret, the one he and Castellimonte shared about their fears for Isabella, had been the cause of his chronic sadness. That hope died within days of the execution.
Secrets, regret, and sorrow. She knew him well enough now to see them all milling around beneath the charm and disarming playfulness. Something ate at her husband.
“Wentworth says he’s invited to dine at Palazzo Savoia,” she said.
“Wentworth?” Jamie asked sharply. “When did you talk with that old windbag?”
“Odd really,” she said. “I found him talking with Mother Margarita when Wat and I went for Isabella this afternoon. I don’t think she likes him much.”
“She has good sense,” Jamie said. He looked like he had bitten into a rancid plum.
“I told him we would not be there,” she said.
“Good. We won’t.”
Jamie had warned the count in terms that brooked no contradiction that they needed time alone. Nora appreciated that, but still, she wondered at the fierceness of it. She knew the Palazzo held bad memories for both of them, yet he continued to go daily. His band of folk needing English lessons had grown.
“It has been three weeks,” she said. “Perhaps a dinner out wouldn’t go amiss.”
“No,” he said.
