The Covert Captain, page 4
Fleming turned up a camp seat with most of its legs and canvas, after a moment’s searching, but Harriet did not take it, instead wandering the stable while he ate. His tack was hanging, clean, a bit apart from the rest; she touched over it thoughtfully and remarked, “You might have bought colonel twice over.”
“Men with no land and no club are not colonels,” laughed Fleming. “And yes. It is the terrible vice of my fathers. From birth I breathed the contagion. Malabar I bought with His Majesty’s gratuity after Orthez—and a little more besides. Well,” he excused himself. “She promised very fine, and I needed a horse.”
“She is beautiful, and I should not like to meet her in war,” said Harriet. “Is it because she proved so well that Sherry bought her colt?”
“Beg pardon?”
“You said—you called his white war-horse her son.”
“So he is.” Fleming nodded. “Poor Malabar, to have her heart stolen so by a nameless Frenchman! But Sherry did not buy him—rather I would not have bought him for Sherry, and I have been his man for horse-flesh these many years. Mesrour is strung too high. But Sherry will ever choose an idiot white horse over a dun cob who stays stuck in.”
“You made my brother a gift of that horse,” said Harriet. “You might have made two hundred guineas in Tattersall’s.”
“Oh, not so much as all that,” Fleming dismissed it. “And Sherry has given that Malabar may board here the rest of her days; call it no gift, but a bargain.” With his unencumbered hand he flicked crumbs from the napkin and folded it into the pail, took up the rosy-skinned baked apples, and pitched them gently into Malabar’s box. “Two hundred! She eats thirty guineas per annum, apples aside. When we have no errands to run for His Majesty, I cannot afford her.”
“You must have died a thousand times, to leave her in France. You speak of her so fondly.”
“I did. I am. Fond of her.” The captain cleared his throat. “She is as much my friend as Sherry, and has never cast up accounts into my bunk.”
“Do you know, I feel as if you and I might have been friends since—oh, long ago. Sherry wrote to me so often, Fleming has, and Fleming says, that now you are come to Bournebrook it seems I know you already.”
He gave a little bow and a half-quirk of his smile. “I am most honored you should say so, but terrified, madam, to think Sherry might have had my measure complete. Surely there is something of me you do not know.”
“Surely. Do you speak so much or so well on any subject but horses, for a start?”
“Ah, no. Not in company.” He made one of his queer horse-fashion tilts of the head and reached his left hand out, half toward her, as if to push aside the sudden silence. Harriet neglected to step away. “It is late—and grown cold. May I see you to the house?”
“There is no need,” said Harriet, when he did not touch her. “It is perhaps best you did not. I cannot say whether Cousin Beauchamp is abed, and her tongue will grind though we give it no grist.”
The captain reached his frock coat from a nail by Malabar’s door and settled it round Harriet. It was redolent of straw and stable, having hung since morning among the barn frocks; he winced, though Harriet did not. “Beg pardon, I ought to have thought of—I have no other.”
“I would not have you freezing for my heedlessness,” Harriet protested, and took up the well-broken lapels to return it.
With both hands, fast and firmly, Fleming did the buttons up to her throat. “Only leave it where I might find it before morning.”
Harriet nodded. A layer of black wool, glossed with wear and brushing, and a dozen indifferent pewter buttons; Sherry might have cast it in the rag-bag, and of a sudden she did not want to give it up. She had never had a thought so foolish.
“Thank you,” she said, when she remembered her manners. His hands had scarce left her. She could think of nothing else to say.
“Your servant, madam.”
“Goodnight, Captain.” She meant full well to speak more to him—something, anything—but he had stepped back into his horse’s box, singing softly, fragments of Mary Ambrey.
Chapter 6
You spy,” she hissed. “You contemptible sneak, you—” Harriet broke off, backing the captain half against the library table and cramming the manuscript into her pocket, though pages twisted and rent. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you with a table knife. You stoat.”
“For reading, madam, in a library?”
“We had no one stirring through old broadsheets before you came.” There was still a trace of murder in her expression. She re-stacked and flattened the mildewed papers, shoving them into a corner so that her own eyes watered, but the captain did not give her the satisfaction of a sneeze. “Sherry comes here not at all—and it is no matter to conceal a little new amongst so many old.”
“You are Mr. Darracott? Red Lady of Hardwick Hall, Cyprian Darracott?”
She neither blushed nor blanched, though Fleming did.
“Hellfire, where d’you get such lurid stuff?”
“Revenge plays,” shrugged Harriet. “History books. It was all such a ruin,” she went on. “I know one doesn’t speak of such things, of finances, but Sherry was out on the Peninsula and the estate was in dreadful disorder… and now he is home, and I may as well keep him comfortably.”
‘‘Your cousin—she must know? Is that why she’s such an antidote toward you?”
“Oh, no! Dorcas hates me because she is a walking, speaking gooseberry fool, and I was young enough once to tell her so. If she knew of Mr. Darracott, she’d blackmail me blind.”
“Best stow that, then,” said Fleming. He shifted to stand between Harriet and the library’s open door. “It’s only she wears such heels on her half-boots.”
Harriet spared enough silence to listen out into the corridor. In half a minute her cousin would pass into sight, and they into hers.
“You read all of it?”
“Yes, all of it.” He barely braced when she shoved him. “Meantime I had rather hide, madam, unless you see another way from here!”
“There are ways all over this house,” answered Harriet. “Sherry knows them best, but…” She considered the open door and the quick-clicking heels in the passage, and took the captain’s wrist. With his weight and hers she pressed at a worn-down bit of scrollwork along a bookcase. He found stairs, by tripping up along them; then the bookcase swung, silent, to nip at his heels, and in the dark Harriet was tugging him higher.
They came up short against the frame of an old window, all that remained, Fleming thought, of a turret room now enclosed. When he would have leant against the glass and regained a breath, Harriet scarcely paused. She opened the window, caught up her skirts, and ducked out.
The wind howled. The half-clouded afternoon was bright as rocketry after the depth-dark stair, and Fleming balked. “The roof?”
She stepped from the oak sill out onto the leads. “Indeed, unless you prefer the library, and my cousin.”
“Why is it—how is it, madam, you come over hare-brained when I must follow?”
“Must,” scoffed Harriet, and Fleming knew he had erred, height or no height to dizzy him. She stood against the embrasure nearest, though the stone was tilting and time-bitten, and did not flinch at the drop.
“Harry, mind the edge.”
“Upon my word, I mind it.” She would not regard him, but gestured out to the hills bordered dark by the sea. “This is the edge of the world, to me.”
“Would you go further, if you could?”
“By God, yes! I wish I’d been born a man. I might have taken ship and fought for England, and have at least a medal to show for my life.”
“Or nothing to show for it.” He said it reasonably, and weary.
“I’d have learned things of use, then, before dying. How to climb a rigging. How to shoot.”
“Carabine or pistol?”
“Oh, you mean to teach me!”
“If you wish.”
“It’s not so simple! If I woke tomorrow a shot like Sherry—if I learnt your manage for horses in the night—still I’d be female.”
He gazed out to the horizon, and after a moment let go his death-grip on the embrasure to take her hand.
“You write adventures well enough, female or no.”
“That’s for Sherry. For the tenants, for bread on the table. And it’s all rubbish, it’s not—you cannot understand,” fumbled Harriet, before the wind could snatch the words away. “What it is to be scorned for weakness, to be left behind—to be made invisible!”
She was not invisible now. Captain Fleming had shed his seven-league stare and looked for all the world as if he did understand; with his thumbs he brushed back the tears from Harriet’s cheeks.
A moment’s fumbling, lips against teeth, chill noses all out of place, and Captain Fleming’s fingers went loose in her hair. Harriet slid her own hand into his queued curls, rested her cheek against his and would not let him shrug away. With the second kiss he recalled the art, how two people fit and breathed together; and then he pulled back, his look when he met her eyes half daring, half stunned.
“Nathaniel.” She spoke and felt him shiver. “Again. Please.”
“That is my chair, Spaniel.”
“An excellent chair,” the captain agreed. He did not hurry out of it, nor move at all.
“That’s never my gl—”
“An excellent brandy, if you must drink your wine as sugar.”
“How much of it’s got down you, man?”
Captain Fleming appeared to calculate. In truth he was not much out of order; every hair of his queue lay in place. When he spoke, “Oh, one or five,” he was once more quiet, steady, just a touch mocking of the Major or himself. He stood, unwavering, and offered the lame man’s chair.
“And what on earth’s kept you waking?”
“Same as you, I m’n wager.” But Fleming looked to the chimneypiece clock and his eyebrows rose. “I came in to ask you the loan of your racing saddle. I fear the time escaped me.”
The last made Sherbourne bear the candle close to him. “Spaniel, you’ve come over peculiar. Have another with me, and find your bunk.”
Standing, he had gone restive; he angled himself toward the chamber door, gripped his elbows behind his back and could not still his feet. The captain did not refuse half a glass of spirits.
“Now I know you’ve gone off it,” said Sherbourne. “You’ve not taken a drop since you puked up my good stuff at Orthez.”
“Bloody hackbones drove the ball in deeper. You cast your share up when he set that leg!”
If both shivered, the wind off the water had risen to drive at Sherbourne’s windows. He filled his own glass again, and sank in his chair with the rough-set leg out before him. “Never mind what’s in your head, then, if you don’t see fit to tell me; but you can’t want that saddle now, it’s gone eleven.”
“I’d find now sufficient,” disagreed Fleming.
“And what for? Have you stolen a hot-blood from the Gypsies and hid him in my stables?”
Now, faintly, girlishly, he blushed. “I thought to ask for your Barbary roan, as well, sir. Only—only so far as the park.”
“My racing saddle, my hot-blood roan, and my park! You’ll ask for my sister next, and the tack to suit her!”
“Mmnf,” said Fleming, and his color in candlelight went extraordinary.
“Take the horse,” Sherbourne answered him. “In daylight. No man’s gotten a headstall on Harry, never mind riding—oh, be excused, Captain, before you choke on your own spittle!”
He shouted, and half got up from the chair, before the captain could flee. “That’s it, I’d wager the bloody Barbary’s four legs! Come back, you scoundrel, and let me see your face!”
“Major?”
“Must have my racing saddle, indeed! It’s a woman troubles him, Captain Fleming has found a woman! An Englishwoman, and from Bournesea village!”
“Hush, Sherry, for God’s sake.” A moan of misery escaped him; the captain hid in his hands.
“It’s above your rank to hush me, you bonny bastard. I can’t account you’ve gone mad for a woman since I stole the last one from you. Who on earth is she?”
“You did not steal Sabine!”
“There is a supper ball in three days’ time,” went on Sherbourne, though Fleming had not uncovered his face. “I gave no thought to it—Lord! Harry hates ’em—but every young woman for twenty miles will be there; surely yours will be.”
“I could not say,” answered Fleming.
“You might smile about her without foiling etiquette. Look here, are you so cross I’ve found you out?”
“Arse down on your heel,” Sherbourne bellowed, not yet come fully past the box hedge. “It’s a gun, you’re not proposing ma—Harry!”
The rifle’s stock lay steady, and Harriet did not hang fire.
“My Whitney,” he added. “How came you by it?”
She gazed back at him, over her shoulder, silent.
“As if anyone in this house heeds me.”
“It is a lovely gun, the captain gives me to understand,” Harriet said. Then she turned away from him, lowering her crouch as Sherbourne had directed. “He said it would be best.”
“Best what?” He had had time to take her measure, in boots—Captain Fleming’s boots, he thought—and breeches the worse for her kneeling on the grass, but a longer string of words he could not manage.
“…Teaching,” Harriet replied, sighted down the barrel, and fired. At the flash and recoil Sherbourne flinched harder than she did. He saw her exhale hard, but there seemed no surprise or pain in it.
“And where is the captain?”
“Gone for more powder.”
“The better I may stuff it down his shirt and light it, leaving a woman alone with a gun!”
“I asked the captain to show me.”
“Arse,” said Sherbourne, as he had said it once already. “Why not ask me?”
“You’d have refused me.” Harriet stood and pantomimed reloading, with a twist of paper cast onto the lawn and a bit of shot held in her teeth, and scoured the charge home before Sherbourne realized she was not pretending, at all.
He put his hand out for the rifle, and Harriet did not cede it. “Sister, I’ll give it back.”
“It’s my last charge,” she protested.
“It’s my bloody gun!” He lowered his voice, and did not look at her, standing as she did with grains of powder sparkling on her cheek. “Where is your target?”
“The elm—fifty yards out.”
If he shaded his eyes he could see it, a span of butcher’s paper with a broad outline in ink. The left side of the paper was blown full of holes.
“A pretty thing for you to be doing when I’ve paid twenty pounds for a supper-ball tonight. Haven’t you punch-cups to arrange? Village halls to festoon? Here.” Sherbourne pulled his handkerchief from his sleeve. “Take this out, if you please, and spare me the walk. Ninety paces past your elm.”
“Eighty yards,” Harriet calculated, and frowned at him. “Sherry—”
“D’you doubt a man of my age might make the shot?”
“I don’t doubt you, brother.” She started away, a little uncertain in the boots, and returned across the lawn to look openmouthed at Sherbourne.
He was gazing at her as if he had gone soft-witted, and he held the Whitney rifle out to her by the forestock.
“Sherry?”
“Present arms, then.”
Harriet obeyed, slowly, looking at him sidewise all the while.
“Bring on,” said Sherbourne, “and lock.” He moved behind her, without touching her or lending advice.
“Waste of a ball,” Harriet muttered. “This distance. You wish to be proven right, you wish I might look a fool—”
He laid his hand between her shoulder blades, then, and spoke low by her ear. “I don’t doubt you.”
“I have not seen the captain, Cousin. Do you suppose he means to appear?”
“He is an officer; he will be in time.” Harriet plucked at her sash, though it could not lie more smoothly, and dampened her fingers in a vase of gaudy nerines, to school her curls.
“And do you suppose he owns dancing shoes, Harriet dear? They are rather costly. But our Sherry vouches for him as an excellent dancer. Smelling of horse!”
She was in too good humor to rise to it. She went on, half dreamily, without a thought for her cousin‘s ears. “Ambergris, rather, and...himself.”
Dorcas snorted. “How you should know that, I have no wish to calculate. Dear Aunt Caro—”
“Is not here.” Not even thoughts of the dowager countess Sherbourne could make her flinch. “And what does she care for me? She has not forgiven any of us the loss of her figure. I much doubt she would notice if Captain Fleming danced, or licked Sherry‘s ear, or fell into the punch.”
“Harriet Georgiana, you are carrying on with this man to vex me!”
“Why, Dorcas! Did you want him?”
If Harriet had been a hand‘s breadth closer, her cousin might have slapped her on the cheek. “Have you utterly forgotten who you are?”
“Indeed, that is one of the nicest things about him, that for a moment I might breathe and be myself.” Harriet gave a full, sweet smile. “Is it not just so with you and Beauchamp?”
Dorcas looked as if hot ash filled her shoes. In her silence, Harriet stole away into the garden; she would pay for it later, in gossip spread or trinkets ruined, but for now she cared only for getting clean away. It was a warm night and clear, just passing eight o‘clock; in Bournesea village the linkmen were beginning to light the lamps. There was candle-gleam at Sherbourne‘s window, where to the last minute he would change one cravat-knot for another, spill scent bottles, dismiss footmen—any thing to avoid stepping foot in the landau; Captain Fleming‘s room lay dark.
