Page 48

She came into the room. "Mother’s been frantic, imagining all sorts of horrid things that might have happened to you this time. I think she feared you would do yourself harm."

"No." He squeezed the back of his neck. The glass was already over half empty, and the more Julia talked, the more he thought about pouring more.

"Or perhaps do harm to sour-faced old Lucey. That man hates you."

Alec inhaled to cool his temper. "Do you really think so? Imagine."

"He's been very cool to Mother, but I never thought he'd cut her directly. In church, too."

Alec swallowed the rest of his brandy. “Was there something you wanted, Julia?"

“Since you ask, yes.” She came to stand in front of him, arms folded. "I wanted you to stand up and refute him when he called you a traitor."

"In the middle of church?"

"What better place to tell the truth?"

Alec finally realized why his sister was so angry with him. She wanted him to fight the rumors and whispers, with passion and fearlessness and ruthless disregard for the casualties. She saw truth as a cannon, obliterating everything in its path. Alec knew it was more like a finely honed saber, capable of decapitating one opponent but insignificant against the Hydra of gossip.

He put down his glass to keep from throwing it. “It isn't that simple."

"Why, Alec?"

"I can't bloody prove it," he growled. "Not one word of it!"

She stared at him incredulously. "I didn't ask for proof!"

"But Lucey would," he retorted. "It's my word against his, against popular opinion, against Wellington's condemnation. Think for one moment what people will say if I declare I never conspired with the French. ‘Where is your proof?' they will cry.”

"Only because you were gone for so long⁠—"

"Do you think I don't realize that?"

Julia stamped her foot. “Damn you, Alec! You did do something wrong. You let us believe you were dead for five long years! Do you know what that did to Father—to Mother? To Freddie and to me?"

"I don’t need scolding about that."

"And why not?" she flung back, her voice quivering. “What have you been doing since you vanished? Since we received that short letter saying you were dead, not gloriously or bravely but lost on the battlefield after conspiring with the French? And now you’re back, but you still won’t tell us—or anyone—why, or where you were—anything at all!”

He ground the heels of his shaking hands into his eyes. “You don’t want to know.”

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t ask!” Julia cocked her head. “You didn’t want to come back at all, did you? You would have been happy leaving us to suffer the shame, while you slid away like a ghost, free of it all, wouldn’t you?”

Alec's temper finally gave way. Julia cut him more deeply than he ever could himself. “You suffered?” Before he knew what he was doing, his jacket was on the floor, then his waistcoat. “You think I wandered about with no thought of you or Mother or Father or Freddie?” With shaking hands he ripped off his cravat and yanked open the collar of his shirt. “You think I was happy?” he rasped, and pulled the shirt over his head. “I was left for dead by my regiment, forgotten by my friends, called a traitor by men I would have willingly followed to the death, unable to show my face or say my own name for years! Do not ask if I was happy when I feel the scars of those five years with every breath I take!”

His sister’s shocked eyes flitted over the long puckered tracks left by French swords that crossed his chest and abdomen. A Flemish farmwoman had stitched him back together as he lay unconscious on her hearth, without finesse or skill but just well enough to save his life. The scars twisted around his back, over his shoulder, stopping less than an inch short of his throat. Alec knew those wounds had nearly killed him, and the fever that had left him unconscious for a week ought to have finished the job. Only through some happenstance—and at times Alec thought it had been a pitilessly cruel one—had he lived, scarred and disgraced.

Julia froze. Her throat worked, her lips parted—and then she turned and fled.

Alec's anger died as quickly as it blazed up. What was he thinking to shout at Julia, when she couldn’t have known what he'd endured—precisely because he hadn’t told her? He had never wanted her to know. It was his private shame, concealed as much as possible and yet always there, contaminating every fiber of his being.

Alec felt lost again. For five years, he’d thought of Penford and his family every night, and dreamed of reuniting with them. Now here he was, home again, and he felt like a malignant intruder. He knelt to retrieve his discarded shirt and wondered for a moment if Stafford would send him to France, to the Continent, anywhere he could be unknown again. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if he really had died on that field in Belgium.

A noise made him glance up. In the doorway, staring at him with wide-eyed shock, stood Cressida Turner.

* * *

“How was the service?”