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“In the attics,” she said, her voice rising in surprise at his urgency. “Why?”

He pushed past her into the music room and came out a moment later holding a lit lamp. “Show me.”

Julia glanced at Cressida, who must look as astonished as Julia did at this command. “It will be as black as Hades in there, and filthy, too. What do you need so desperately?”

He closed his eyes and took a shuddering breath. When he opened them he looked at Cressida. “I need to find my trunk,” he said, a little more calmly. “Now.”

Slowly Julia nodded. Without another word she led the way through the house, up the stairs and through a series of corridors to a heavy door. Alec pulled back the bolt that held it closed, and then heaved it open with a screech of hinges.

The other side was indeed as black as Hades, the air hot and thick with dust. Julia picked up a lantern left at the top of the stairs and lit it. Cressida stepped carefully, staying close behind Alec as they followed Julia past old furniture, trunks, heaps of discarded clothing and other detritus accumulated by the Hayes family over the decades. She stumbled into him when he stopped abruptly, and he took her hand in his for a moment and gave it a quick squeeze. Just that touch gave her heart. Whatever he sought, and whatever connection it might have to her father’s journal, he wasn’t blaming her.

Yet.

Chapter Thirty

“It should be here somewhere.” Julia held the lantern high and turned in a circle. “No one will have touched it since then, so we may have to—” She broke off with a gasp as Alec heaved a trunk over onto its end and bent down to examine the one beneath it. The crash shook the floorboards.

“What did they send back? My campaign trunk, the small brown one, or just the larger one?” Alec was fighting the urge to toss over everything in the attic until he found his trunks—if they were even here. Most of his baggage had been left in quarters in Brussels before the battle. Only his campaign trunk had been near the battlefield, carried along with the other officers’ private belongings. That trunk might have been lost, or looted, or simply forgotten in the confusion.

But George Turner’s words, leaping off the page in Cressida’s neat writing, had finally illuminated the accusations of treason that had dogged him since Waterloo.

Turner didn’t name his British officer, but he described him. With a mixture of elation and horror, Alec recognized the man in Turner’s account. He didn’t want to, but he did—and the sickening feeling jarred a recollection from the crevices of his memory. The night before the main battle, he and Will Lucey had huddled together in the rain and shared a smoke, trying to keep warm and talking of what the morning would bring, not knowing it was the last time they would ever see each other. At the end, Will had given him some letters to family, a common practice among soldiers before a battle. No doubt someone had sent Alec’s mother the letter he’d written for her in the event of his death.

But Will's letters. . . With unnerving clarity, he remembered taking them and promising to see to it. Of course he hadn’t been able to, but those letters. . . Those letters might still be in his things. One way or another, it could answer his questions. It also might not, but he had to know.

Julia, though, knew none of that, and Alec was too wild with impatience to explain. “Stop it,” she exclaimed as he shoved aside a stack of hatboxes. “What are you doing?”

“Julia,” he said, practically vibrating with the need for action, “I need to find that trunk. Now.”

A hand enveloped his. “We’ll look over here.” Cressida took the lamp from him and pointed. “Julia, perhaps you could look over there.”

Alec sucked in a deep breath to get a better grip on himself. “Yes, Julia, please.”

His sister still stared at him aghast, but at Cressida’s suggestion she slowly nodded. “All right.” The room grew darker as she moved off with the lantern.

“What does it look like?” Cressida tucked her hair behind her ears and looked around the circle of light they stood in. “Goodness, there are a lot of trunks in here.”

Alec looked at her, standing in the middle of the stifling attic with cobwebs in her hair and dust streaking her dress, not questioning his urgency or purpose, but ready to help—and felt his chest tighten. There wasn’t another woman in the world like her. He had fallen, completely and irrevocably.

“It’s leather,” he said. “Reddish brown, about so large, with my name painted on it.”

She glanced at the dimensions he sketched with his hands. “Officers take a lot of baggage,” was her only reply before she turned and started poking through the piles of stuff behind her. Incredibly, Alec felt a small smile cross his face, and then he joined her, borrowing the lamp from time to time to get a better look in a shadowed corner.

After some twenty minutes, Julia called out from the far eaves, “I’ve found it.” She sneezed, the sound muffled in the cluttered room. “I think.”

Alec wound his way through the attic to her, Cressida close behind him. His heart seemed to freeze in his chest as he raised his candle over a small, grimy trunk, darkened with dust but very definitely his old campaign trunk. He had carted it across Spain, Portugal, and into Belgium, learning to send most of his baggage ahead with a servant while keeping the most necessary items with him in this trunk, which was small enough to carry over one shoulder or on the back of a saddle.

He knelt in front of it, jiggling the latch out of instinctive habit more than conscious memory. It had been dropped in a river outside Oporto, he recalled suddenly, and the latch had stuck ever since. For a moment the intervening decade fell away, and he felt again the relief at opening the trunk to see his things safe after all. Just as he hoped they would be now. Julia and Cressida huddled behind him, holding the lamp up to illuminate the contents as he lifted the lid.

It had been packed in a hurry and clearly not disturbed since. His writing case, the red leather dry and cracked, lay on top of a crumpled shirt. He opened it and saw it was empty—as he’d known it would be. Breathing harder, he set it aside and pulled out the shirt to reveal the rest of the contents all a-jumble, dumped inside without care. No one wanted to waste time packing up a traitor’s effects, he thought, lifting out his toilet kit, extra stockings, a dented flask, spare gloves. He took out a small tin lantern, useful for checking on his horse in rainy weather, and lit it, leaving the shutters wide open for more light.

“What are you looking for?” Julia whispered. Cressida murmured something to her, and she didn’t ask again. Alec ignored them both, too concentrated on his task.

He set everything aside in a growing pile on the floor. With increasing urgency he dug past candle stubs and an empty ink bottle and dirty linens, stiff and musty. It wasn’t here. It must have been forgotten or misplaced, even stolen—and then all would be lost⁠—

He lifted a wadded-up red sash and froze. In the bottom of the trunk lay a small book, partially wrapped in oilcloth. Slowly he reached in and took it out, and behind him Cressida gasped. No wonder. It was his journal, very like the one she’d been decoding. Neither she nor Julia said anything as Alec flipped open the cover.

For a few minutes he paged through the book. Unlike George Turner, he hadn’t recorded many day-to-day happenings. His journal was filled with reminders of tasks to be done, supplies needed, and notes on the terrain they were traversing. He flipped past some sketches and the occasional column of numbers. Once a dried flower fell out, still vivid red. Carnations were everywhere in Andalusia. Gently Alec picked it up and tucked it back into the book before turning more pages.