The Covert Captain, page 12
“I have never seen them; Sherry does not care for rockets.” Thousands of wax-lamps burned all round them, throwing silver upon every face that passed, but by the press of her arm Harriet led them down toward narrower, darker lanes.
“And you do not care for the lights?”
“I care chiefly to get away. To be no one’s daughter, to do what every soul comes here to do.”
“You are sure?” They had left the lamps all behind; ahead the darkness was held and twisted by untended trees. Voices carried to where they stood, from within, but the sounds were spare of words.
“Why, by God, must you be twice the gentleman of any man alive?”
“It is only—they have a reputation, the dark walks.”
“Then you had better accompany me, and save my name,” laughed Harriet, “As you dare do no worse than watch the rockets go up.”
“Harry…”
“Oh, come, Captain Fleming. Boney is locked up at Longwood; come.” Harriet entreated, both hands coaxing at Eleanor’s velvet sleeves. “I give you my promise, nothing’s to fear in the dark.”
When first the fireworks whistled, Eleanor shivered; the sky above the trees’ enclosing black bloomed red and blue, and her tremor carried down Harriet’s arm.
“’s well,” she said, through her teeth, when Harriet hushed her.
Harriet shifted and sent them off the path, out of the glare of falling embers. Eleanor, with Harriet’s weight upon her, found her back pressed to the bole of an elm.
“At ease, Captain,” said Harriet, so Eleanor must breathe at least enough to laugh. Even then she stood stiff in the stiff evening coat, and the slide of Harriet’s glove over cheekbone and throat did not still Eleanor’s shaking.
“I meant only to give you fair wages for your conduct in that cab,” Harriet whispered.
“…But?”
“Stay with me. Nora.” Harriet kissed her, once, slowly. She cast her gloves away and then, in the dark, she went to her knees.
Eleanor was not armed; her front fall was no matter, and trousers of superfine had more pleasure to offer than riding nankeens. Harriet rested her hands a moment on Eleanor’s hips. Through the fabric she could trace the pulse in Eleanor’s thigh, and beneath her left thumb was the indent of a scar she did not know.
She leant and kissed it, to learn it the better, and Eleanor moaned.
At the first press of Harriet’s fingers she forgot herself. She was half biting against her own hand, but no man in England sighed and breathed please like that. More and harder Harriet gave, when Eleanor asked it, and shifted to take Eleanor into her mouth.
“Harry, oh God,” and all Eleanor’s weight was braced down in her boots and at Harriet’s left hand, and still with her left thumb Harry circled the unfamiliar scar. After some time she felt Eleanor’s fingers drift from her hair; she stood, shook off leaves, and let Eleanor stroke where a bramble had scratched her cheek.
She plucked the handkerchief from Fleming’s sleeve and patted her lips, as if she had been careless with an oyster. Then Harriet reached to gather back Eleanor’s hair and was herself swept up, slippers clean off the ground, Nora’s voice ragged beside her ear.
“To home,” she begged, “And t’hell with anyone who sees.”
“No. My rooms. My bed. Mine.” Harriet insisted with kisses still salt-edged.
“And if thy mother should spy us?”
“With a man, this time! Why, she’d be dead of joy.”
Harriet’s bed in her brother’s town house was not so warm as Eleanor’s, nor broad enough for two, but they had gotten some use from it. Eleanor’s head rested on Harriet’s shoulder; her borrowed silk shirt and her stable-scarred hands were against Harriet’s bare skin. Until Harriet reached for a new book, she was asleep.
“Be still, Captain, it is not your watch.”
Unpossessed of words yet, Eleanor lifted a brow toward the fresh novel, the half-burnt candle.
“I do not sleep with Mother in the house.”
Nora shivered awake, stretched, got half Harriet’s hair under her elbow and dented her hand on the bedstead. “Wish you’d told me. You know I’d have sat with ’ee.”
“I know.” Harriet’s kiss was more fondness than desire. “I have now had it from two persons that something troubles your sleep,” she continued, light as air. “I fear I must mistrust them, and one my own brother! Madam, you lie like a stone.”
“That is—not usual. The dreams,” she said, and would have turned away, but there was nowhere to look but the hangings or the ceiling. Her breath began to choke in every pause. “For years, until you, and this—the most terrible dreams.”
“What do you dream of?”
“Bayonets.” She drew back from Harriet’s touch, as far as she could without falling from the bed. Harriet took hold of Eleanor’s shoulders, making stubbornness serve where her strength was less.
“It was dark, dead dark, but for the guns. My men were—we were cut to ribbons, we were fucked, and instead of turn about, it was hard again. Those bayonets, in that dark!”
“But you led them,” said Harriet.
“I led them to die!”
“I have seen drill enough to comprehend that a captain is well-placed to die.”
“You asked of my dreams,” the captain said. “Ten times a night I refuse the honor of the charge.”
“You’d have been shot.”
“If our places were exchanged, and you knew by your own life you might spare eighty—eighty, what should you have done? Or are you too much a lady to call me coward?”
“If I thought you a coward, Captain, I do not suppose you would know my Christian name.” Harriet withdrew her embrace. “Say you had deserted; ten minutes later some other fool would have taken the field with your men, and they should all be dead for want of your common sense.”
Eleanor was so still that Harriet could touch the marks of sun and wind at the corner of her eye. She kissed lightly as breathing where her fingertips had brushed. “And my heart should have broken on the moment, I am sure of it.”
Chapter 16
Fleming came whistling into Sherbourne’s breakfast-room. He was reading a sheet from Ackerman’s with his boots upon the table and his chair keeled dangerously back; when he spied Eleanor there was a sudden series of thumps.
“Have you had your hair in curl papers, man?”
“We can’t all have bonnie barley-curls like you, Sherry. I thought it proper to lay on the comme il faut, since you have invited the entire regiment this evening.”
“Paget and Wellesley—his grace Wellington, besides, and the King’s Own, and the Greys, and a deuced number of the Ninety-Fifth on account of Beauchamp,” Sherbourne agreed. “Give you good morning. Have—have your eyes been like that always?”
“Blue?” Fleming laughed.
“Blue fiddlesticks. Sparkling, like.”
“Sherry, have you been dipping into the punch?”
“If I have it is my punch, but upon my word, only coffee, and that while waiting for you. What kept you? Your lady wife, as will be, is away to your house in your absence, likely shoveling the lot on a bonfire.”
“Threadneedle Street,” said Fleming. She dipped into her waistcoat and tossed a blue velvet bag onto Sherbourne’s bread plate.
“Christ Jesus, moonstones!”
“I was ever Grandmamma’s favorite.” Eleanor looked wry. “Do you think they will suit her? And do you mean to ask me to breakfast?”
“Suit Harriet? Spaniel, I thought you meant me to sell them and finance tonight’s crush.” Sherbourne waved at the covers upon the table. “Ask you to breakfast. You never asked for my fry-up at Spain, just stuck your miserable fingers in. Don’t let it differ now you’re to be my brother!” With a last look into the velvet bag, he returned it to Fleming and helped himself to bacon.
There was a letter propped against the coffeepot, Captain Nathaniel Jas. Fleming 7th Queens Own, in a hand Eleanor did not know, sealed with a pale-blue wafer.
“Oh,” said Sherbourne. “You’ll want to look at that.”
Her pulse crept up to the back of her mouth, and her empty stomach knotted. She thought of discovery, of blackmail, of some ’listed man in Bournesea who had heard the banns and somehow—how, by God?—knew the secret. She cracked the wafer and closed her eyes.
It was a note on Sherbourne’s bank for three hundred pounds.
“What’s this?”
“Money, Fleming. Buys things.”
“Sherry—”
“It is a wedding-present, damn you, and you’ll draw it tomorrow. A woman’s tack is a deuced expensive thing, and I guess she will want a new costume to be wed in. They’re silk, generally. You might see to your own turnout—I believe you stole those gloves from a Spaniard at Badajoz. And for God’s sake, you may wed in regimentals and a shako, but spare the honey-moon the sight of your grandfather’s hat.”
He went on, through the platter of buttered eggs, the ham, the coffee and sugar, and the apple-pie dish. “If there is any over, call it her allowance for the annum. I’ll keep it up—and if she gets you an heir, I’ll double it. But I hope, lad—” Sherbourne looked as if he had bitten a hornet in his egg-yolk. “I hope before God she does not. None of the girls out of Mother have shown up to breeding.”
Sherbourne drove his spoon into his apple pie so that the plate clinked, making an end to the subject. “Any road, Fleming, we must drink to your last hours as a free man. It is only brandy; I promise not to get you foxed and spoil your curls.”
Harriet was beautiful. Eleanor did not find it indulgent to think so, as that lady stood by in white mull shot through with silver tinsel; she had said nonsense to silks in seven colors, and made threat to cry in the middle of the modiste’s, until she carried the day. She had spent almost more on the shoulder-gloves of snowy kid, the better, she said, to show up Fleming’s white facings. Would they not stand all the evening arm in arm? The Moorlowe opals, in their old, old setting of silver, Harriet had sponged for an hour before letting Eleanor fasten them round her neck.
“They are your inheritance,” Harriet had said. “It is a pity I cannot see you wear them.”
Eleanor, a smudge of bootblack on her nose and her white sash open at the waist, had laughed at their reflection in Harriet’s glass. “They do not suit with my dolman. But…” She had given her whispered promise to wear them, if Harry so wished it, as soon as night found them alone.
The memory warmed Harriet more than the three dozen candles Sherbourne had spent on the room. There was no trace of bootblack about Eleanor now; her turnout was flawless, bold white and blue, and her dress sword bore a better gloss than Viscount Colonel Beauchamp’s. She looked, in the candlelight, younger than Harriet could ever have imagined her, and she was ever smiling when Harriet found her glance.
“My lord Captain, you look a dashing figure.”
Eleanor bowed, smothering her grin behind her glove. “You will insist on calling me that?”
“I will, because you like it.” Harriet rose out of her slippers to lay a kiss on Eleanor’s cheek. “For my part, I mislike your dress boots make you so much taller. It pleases me to regard you eye to eye.”
“I mislike the dress boots,” Eleanor assured her.
“Thank you, for this,” said Harriet, suddenly nervous. “For…for going on display. For my sake, for the party. It is a foolish fancy of Sherbourne’s that I should want—”
“That you should want, for once, what your sisters had? That all the ton should look at Harriet Gresham and know she is not lacking?”
Harriet swallowed, and pressed Eleanor’s hand. “I forgot you should understand,” she admitted, low. “And I did not suppose you knew my surname.”
“We are to be married.”
“We are to be married,” Harriet agreed. She could not help breaking into a smile herself.
“Oh,” Fleming said. “Oh, damn.” She struck at her chest, looked lost a moment, then gripped the fingers of her right glove in her teeth to pull her hand free. She fumbled at torturous angles beneath her pelisse and the stiff dress dolman as if a spider had dropped down her neck.
“Nora?”
“Moment,” she replied, most anguished. With one last squirm Eleanor righted her uniform, rescued her glove, and showed upon the palm of her hand a small gold ring, crimson-set.
Harriet drew in her breath. “Oh—oh, Nora, I am too old for rubies!”
“You are not. You deserve them, if you will accept it.”
“You are too generous.”
“Not I. Sherbourne bought this. Against your happiness to come, as I remember, in case he should not be here to assure himself of it.”
“He never waxed so sentimental ’pon my sisters!”
“Madam, I believe you may be something of his favorite.”
Harriet came to herself with a laugh. The ring was bright and pretty and fitting, and she ventured it would fit. “I beg your pardon for all this speech of my brother. You perhaps have other things to say.”
“Nothing you have not heard,” answered Eleanor, “but for accept it, please.”
“Madam.” The speaker had pitched his voice low, as if he wished only Captain Fleming to hear him above the bright chatter of the room. No woman was by—only men of the regiment—but he followed this address with a hand on the captain’s sleeve.
Eleanor turned as slowly and coolly as if he had set a knife-point to her back. The voice she had known, but the face was near ten years distant in her memory, and she had never seen it clean of other men’s blood. His spectacles were over on one side, just as she remembered, and his long, fine fingers had moved to her wrist and held firm. His name, she was sure, had not been put to the evening’s invitations; he was the Seventh’s best surgeon, and he had left Sherbourne lame.
“Mr. Callander?” The captain’s voice was startled, perhaps, at the touch of another man’s hand, but very correct. “What is this?”
“Madam, I had the honor of your care at Orthez.”
“The devil you did!” Eleanor shook herself free.
“You do not now remember.”
“I do not give it credit,” she retorted, finding her full height and addressing the Seventh’s surgeon afresh. “What on earth do you mean, sir?”
“You were most grievous hurt in the charge. Took a ball in the shoulder—”
“By grace I do remember that, sir.”
“—and went over your charger’s ears and into the ditch. You were sent to the rear quite witless.”
“So were a thousand.”
“You, madam, I remarked. You were distressing young, and—h-handsome. And your valet would not allow that I undressed you.”
“No doubt he thought it best, handsome as you found me.” Eleanor watched him die, a little, and died for her part. On a moment she wished, most desperately, never to have said it; she knew now that Callander would strike first.
“I—gave myself to forget,” Callander said. “Until my summons came to this—this outrage upon the Regiment. I have kept your secret this long time, Captain, but you must not go on with this. To so dishonor the Regiment—to make such attempts upon the sister of a peer—” the surgeon reached out, catching Eleanor in the chest. “I cannot let this be.”
“Remove your hand, Callander, or I will call for powder and shot.”
Something in her countenance froze him; he drew away, dropping his gaze. “M-madam, I assure you, I speak because I do not wish to see you hang. If this were to come out, you know all honor—all bravery—your name and all your deeds should be as nothing. Your suit cannot go forward. It must not.”
“I will consider you have been drinking, James,” said Fleming very slowly, hard as flint. “The Major stocks a cellar exceeding fine. I am not going to call out a man in his cups, because I will not see my fiancée’s evening spoiled.”
Callander’s throat bobbed beneath his tight old-fashioned stock. “Good God,” he whispered. “Good God. Does she know? Is she complicit? Madam, what have you done?”
Harriet, breathtaking and smiling and not fooled for a moment, appeared at Eleanor’s side and stepped half between them. “Oh, Mr. Callander, how good of you to come! My lord Captain speaks most highly of you. Is not the Lord Uxbridge bearing up wonderfully well in spite of his leg? I thought I heard him inquire for you, not ten minutes since…”
She gave quite a pretty shake of her curls, so that the opal earrings shot color; she looked up at Fleming so besotted that Callander was obliged to bow and leave them be.
Harriet blinked off the vapid cast of her features, and leaned gently upon Eleanor’s shoulder. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe, dearest. I thought you would kill him!”
“I fear I must, Harry.”
“Nora, it isn’t funny when you look so—”
“He knows, Harry. He knows everything, and has known, and will see us ruined.”
“Lord God.” Harriet paled. “Must you go after him, Nora? I should—I should not have come between you. I saw him touch you and I thought—”
“No, you had the right of it.” Eleanor swallowed. “I cannot meet James Callander. He is an old man; his war was hard. If he spoke truth, he has held his peace these ten years.”
“Nora—”
“We must hope he meant only to bluff me.”
“Nora, he’s gone. I fobbed him upon Paget, and there Paget be; Mr. Callander is gone right out of the room.” She did not say it with relief at all.
“Gone out of the room? How can he?” They stood at the very top of the room, the better to be well-wished and courtesied. They might as well have stood guard upon the doors. Harriet let go Eleanor’s arm and pointed, openly as she dared.
“There,” she mouthed, toward a baize hanging between the book-cases. It swung a little still, as though someone had brushed it.
“What’s there, dearest?” Eleanor willed her voice level. Every nerve sobbed panic and stole her breath.
“My lord the Earl of Sherbourne’s study,” Harriet answered, gone whiter than her gown.
