The Covert Captain, page 5
He leant against the hayfield‘s boundary oak, somewhat twisted so braid and bark would not snag together. His dancing shoes had once been very fine; made for him—without boots, he had feet uncommon small—and all pale silk, with starry clocks picked out in blue, so that they matched the Seventh‘s regimentals.
“I despaired,” Nathaniel whispered, and then he took her hand. “They have seen to the harnesses half an hour since.”
“Do you mind so very much, then, being late?” Harriet drew close enough, in the shadows, to touch the captain‘s collar and trace her fingers against his cheek.
“Madam, I have no chronometer to speak of.” For half a minute Captain Fleming stood scarcely breathing, content to rest his gloved hand on her arm, perhaps, her shoulder; then Harriet made some small sound, and the gap between them closed. He kissed her like a man home from the war.
“It is curious,” remarked Harriet. “Sherry used always to dance, on home leave. I cannot think his leg pains him enough to keep him from it now.”
Captain Fleming studied his cup of punch, looking neither to Harriet nor Sherbourne, who was across the room from the musicians and looked to have swallowed a storm cloud.
“Were you there, sir, when he was injured?”
“Quite so,” said Fleming, at last. He might have been waiting for a dip in the music. “His Kestrel—his horse, madam—was killed under him at Genappe. He could not get clear in time.”
“How appalling,” said Harriet. “When he wrote from Brussels, he said only that his leg was broken. He might have had an accident in the street!”
The captain studied a threadbare patch on his dancing shoe. Fleming had sent that letter, over Sherbourne’s faltering mark; it had not told one tithe the truth. “It is a soldier’s habit, I am afraid, to make little of what those at home might deem great; certainly Sherry never expected to make old bones.”
“Do you think he suffers the nostalgia? One reads that some men caught it, in the war.”
“No, madam, and I do not think it catching, like the measles. I think it lives in the souls of fighting men, and memory brings it out.”
Harriet’s satin-gloved hand brushed the sleeve of Fleming’s coat and was gone, before anyone might remark.
“Will you not dance, lady?”
“Yes, in half a moment,” answered Harriet, “but I like to hear you talk of my brother.” She went on, half to herself, “he is much changed.”
The musicians had struck up a sauteuse, nearly all at once and in time; the din and whirl and the clap of dancing-shoes on the boards grew so much greater that Fleming had to lean down to her, when she spoke again.
“…something, Captain, in your confidence?”
“Upon my honor, madam.”
“Did my brother have a woman at Paris?”
Fleming did not spray his punch upon the room. He passed his hand over his eyes a moment, and set the little cup carefully aside. “I rather think we should dance.”
“But I am forever turning my ankles at this one. Might you induce Sherry to do so? It is a gentleman’s duty to look to the wallflowers.”
“Madam, I fear I am not fetching in slippers and a skirt.”
Harriet laughed. “Then I will leave him to his devices for tonight, but Captain, I do not excuse you from my question.”
“I will trade an answer for the slow waltz,” said Fleming solemnly.
“Surely, and the quadrille, and Roger de Coverley, if you are not promised.”
“Unless you would rather I dance with Sherry…?”
As it was Michaelmas, they were obliged to wait through John Barleycorn; the captain offered for Harriet’s arm, but she stayed seated. “I shan’t waste the set on a song I mislike,” said Harriet. “And do you wait and see if anyone else offers it me!”
No one did. There were not so many genteel families between Thaxted and the sea as to provide dancing-partners for spinsters, Fleming supposed, though there was not a lovelier woman in the room.
“Were it Sherry’s own ball, of course, someone would fall on his sword, but here they have all grown used to my waiting. The young men all want young wives, and the married men all want…”
“A night with your cousin?”
Harriet laughed. Her gown was white as any girl’s, but her sash and bandeau were of an evening-primrose silk that Viscountess Beauchamp had brought from Town; Fleming had witnessed the disorder, that afternoon, when the new colour made the Viscountess look like a waxwork whose liver was poorly. Now she tripped through the set in the scarlet trimmings bullied from Harriet, all trace of vexation subdued with talcum heavily applied, and beguiled four men to whom she was not wed.
“John Barleycorn must die,” Harriet murmured. “It is as well. There is Sergeant Cooper with her, of the Ninety-Fifth; she has two children already by the Rifles. That is quite like fidelity, with Dorcas.”
“Madam, your waltz,” said Fleming, and bowed, and looked much relieved that the music excused his saying more.
“Charmed, Captain.”
“Outside…or center?”
“Oh, Captain, why should we not take the center? It will entertain Bournesea village for simply weeks.”
“We were three years at Paris to keep the peace,” said Fleming, as they turned in careful orbits round the floor. “Sherry much felt the loss of his men. Indeed he may have…dallied."
“I believe it must have been more than that. Beauchamp said, this morning, that the women of France were all…”
“Whores,” suggested Fleming.
“You need not blush, sir. I have heard my brother use the very word in company. But Sherry looked ready to call Beauchamp out. He da’sn’t—Beauchamp is swimming in the ready, and God knows we are not; he would only bring suit, if Sherry tried it.”
“I should quite like to see a suit brought by a dead man.” Fleming smiled. It was not a friendly one.
“Oh! Beauchamp would simply make the Recording Angel his man of business. But the whole affair—it made me think, sir. Something must have happened to stir Sherbourne’s feeling.”
“There was a woman,” said Fleming, keeping note of Harriet’s countenance. He was exceeding careful with his next words. “I believe Sherbourne would have made her his wife. I dare say I believe they should have been happy.”
“Why did he not marry her?”
“She had been—ah—one of the prime articles of the Imperial Guard, before we gave them the rout.”
“If Sherry gave two figs for that, I should love him the less!”
“Upon my word, he pressed his case with her. She said she would not let him shame himself at home. He was the Earl by then, madam.”
“The more reason he should have married her, if Father were not alive to preach at him!”
“That is not mine to say, madam, but he cannot now marry her. She is dead.”
Chapter 7
The night air and the dancing ought to have driven her to sleep with the rest of Sherbourne’s household, but The Mysteries of Udolpho, and mares’ heads lowering over the cliffs, had acted the opposite. Thoughts of Captain Fleming in the part of Valancourt did not quite balance with brigands in the clothes-press and silver daggers in every flash of lightning. Harriet passed perhaps half an hour past two o’clock clutching her bed-hangings shut; then she gave it up, called herself an idiot blithering whining flinching girl, took a candle and a shawl and quit the room.
The rain was loud enough to keep every sound from her, save for a moment’s sharp snore when she passed Sherbourne’s rooms, but when the slap of water and the wind off the sea subsided a moment, Harriet heard something below. Not brigands, surely— if someone had come to rob Bournebrook in dead of night, they would have brought a lantern, and Harriet wanted more than her small light to make her way to the first floor. The drawing-room door was open, but only the last of the firelight, lighter gray in the rain-muffled dark, showed out to where Harriet stood. She went up to the threshold and no one hailed her, dead or living; no one within was rifling the whatnots or knocking over urns. She was about to close the door and count herself a fool again when someone sobbed, very low.
“What on earth!”
Fleming sat in the window-seat, turned so that he must face the storm. His knees were pulled to his chest, his arms were locked round his knees, and his face was hidden. In his plain shirt and buff breeches and stockings, he gleamed white as any ghost by Harriet’s candle.
“Nathaniel?”
He did not lift his head. Close to, she saw his arms and back all trembling, and when Harriet touched his shoulder he cried out.
“Captain!”
Fleming had been weeping, as Harriet had not known men wept, and his voice was raw with tears. “Please, I pray—I beg you leave me.”
Harriet went only far enough to light half a dozen candles, and tip half a day’s coal over the fender to liven the fire. “I shall, if you like, now that you do not freeze in the dark.”
“What care I for that, when my men are all out in the rain?” He did not adorn it with politeness. His voice soared up and cracked. She might have gone, then, but in the next lightning-flash, she saw his eyes.
“You ought not sit up alone.” Harriet climbed into the window-seat, decent far from him; she tucked her nightclothes round her feet, and cast her shawl over Fleming. The captain flinched. His shoulders rose, his back rounded, and then, as he could not get further away, he fell still.
Harriet had not thought to light a marked candle. It seemed an hour they sat in vigil, not quite touching, never speaking. The rain rattled like shot at the windows, and the thunder could not seem to spend itself. Fleming stared through the dark without respite.
The first of the candles had guttered, and the fire was giving way at the window to creeping cold, when she dared address him again.
“Will you look at me, Nathaniel, and not the dead?”
He unfolded, at last, and faced her; his hand closed upon hers and he drew breath almost calmly, as if he would speak. But no words came aloud, and the only word Harriet knew for his countenance was pain. It showed on him like blood from a wound.
“Hush,” said Harriet, put her arms round his neck, and kissed him.
The village below was snarled with French dragoons, and Major Hodge’s squadron had gone forward and not returned. Now the Seventh was all called to saddle, straining for sight down a narrow farm lane banked with hills, down toward a foe they could not see. Arrayed for the charge, columns tight, the men waited and watched the smoke rise from below.
“Orders, Major?” Eleanor had given her company leave to drop pelisses, in this swelter; she could hear them chafing and muttering behind her, and Malabar’s head was low. In an hour it might rain, but for now it was three o’ the clock in the middle of June, and the dust of the road made the men squint and cough.
Sherbourne squinted down the road through the defile. “My lord Uxbridge has honored us with the charge, so I suppose we must not refuse it. I will not wait upon Hodge any longer. Fraser, harry them ’pon the right, and Gordon, Peters, do you take the left.”
The din of Fraser’s bugler sounded limp in the steaming air. Eleanor put a hand up to shield her ear, and flick her queue off her neck.
“Fleming,” came Sherbourne’s call. “Be my eyes; take ’em front. I shan’t loiter!”
She nodded, and signaled her company from the column. They were better-drilled than some, but it took time for them to absorb the signal, to close canteens and check sabre-grips. Sherbourne came close by her mount while she waited and reached out, not to offer a touch for luck but to grip her elbow, hard.
“’Thaniel,” he said, very low. “It is as likely Hodge is dead, and his squadron with him.”
“I know, Major.”
“It don’t sit well with me, sending the men down the neck of a bottle to—” Sherbourne was compelled to pause, as of a sudden the dust made his voice thick. “If the wind blows ill, look after my sister.”
“Aye, Major!” She said aloud, as she might answer any command, for the major’s comfort and the men’s. She drew her sabre and tapped Sherbourne’s hilts, then held the steel aloft to catch the sun. Behind her the company was still, waiting for her sabre’s forward fall.
“The Seventh will advance!” Sherbourne stood to full height in the saddle and bellowed the order. “Oh, and Fleming! Break them.”
“Company, advance!” She shouted at her lungs’ reach, with courage all unfelt. Sherbourne shouted something after her, about an errand, but Eleanor had passed too far ahead to make any reply. Her left hand went into Malabar’s mane, and she was grateful beyond all things that no one could see her face. She had not the first idea what to do. Break a line of cuirassiers, she supposed, with ninety men!
There was little time enough for thinking. Her light-stepping grey was the sharp point of an arrow flying fast; just behind, her young lieutenants whipped the dust up in the road. Round a curve she could suddenly see the French troops arraying, not cuirassiers but lancers—bloody lancers!
The air was rent with whistling, sour with smoke. A shower of rockets—English rockets, God bless Sherbourne, that had been his errand—sprayed with pops and shrieks upon the lancers’ line.
“Lovely weather, is it not!” Sherbourne was laughing, as he came along her company’s column, his white Kestrel swift as any bullet; the rest of the squadron held to his wake, and Fleming was not alone. “I told you I’d not loiter!”
She gave him a nod.
“Don’t be cross, ’Thaniel! Give Fraser’s lads a moment to work, and we’ll take ’em at the jump!” Kestrel thundered into step with Malabar, and Sherbourne was near enough for her to take his measure. He was iron sober, his grin gone fierce; he meant indeed to face the lancers at the jump.
The uhlans blocked the road ahead, peppered as they were with falling flame; the ground, the seconds, Eleanor’s breath fell away as she realized it was all going to go wrong. The enemy line was like iron, lances down and fixed. No Englishmen stung them upon the left or right.
“Fraser, where is Fraser,” she called across to Sherbourne.
“Almighty God,” Eleanor heard him say, and then—
Someone’s hand was tight across her mouth. Eleanor struggled and struck out.
“Captain!” Harriet was close by her, rough-whispered as though she had started out of sleep. “Oh, hush!”
Fleming stared up at her, bleary, heart thudding away like hooves.
“You shouted,” Harriet explained. “I’m sorry—I did not intend—it is morning,” she finished, her countenance all dread. “I feared…”
“Did I strike you?”
“You missed,” shrugged Harriet. The drawing-room was cold, dark except for the white-edged gray of dawn at the windows. When Fleming moved, he tumbled from the window-seat with a thump.
“Someone is above.” He thrust Harriet’s shawl up toward her, sparing a hand to rub his head where it had met the floor. “Stay here, and if anyone questions, you may say you nodded off reading.”
“What on earth will you do?”
“Flee by the window, madam.”
She could not help smiling at him when he smiled so. “Give you good morning, Nathaniel,” Harriet whispered, as he pulled on his boots and climbed again to the window-seat.
“Servant, Harry.”
Chapter 8
Fleming found her in the long gallery, when she did not come to breakfast, and approached softly in hope that it would seem he did not seek her at all. When he knew the game was up he slouched his weight in his boots, making them echo upon the parquet, and made a show of whistling Lilibullero. He had kept pace to a drum for a good many years; it helped him keep a measured step now, when he saw she had been crying.
“Good morning, madam.”
“Good morning,” Harriet answered, blotting her cheek with her shawl. “Pray excuse my countenance, Captain. I have only been in discourse with Cousin Beauchamp again.”
Fleming drew back. “Is she about? Would you have me ring for a chaperone?”
“She never comes here.” Harriet sounded weary. Her shawl of undyed wool, her hair still caught up in a cap, and—somehow—the proud set of her shoulders made her seem diminished. Fleming thought of keeping his peace.
“If we were men, I should call her out! It is damned unfair.” Harriet stood up straighter, propped by anger; she seemed to return to herself again. “But you have come round out of the way to speak to me, Captain.”
“I meant only to say, madam, that I must leave for London upon the midday mail.”
“Leave Bournebrook! So soon! Does Sherry know you mean to leave us?”
“I have mentioned it to him, madam, and I hope conveyed my thanks.”
“We—Sherry will miss you terribly.” Harriet paused, and her eyes narrowed. “Please, tell me no one dressed as a gentlewoman has accused you of riding Sherry's coat-sleeves, or—”
“No! I wish it were so easily ignored. Matter of a roof; of weather, rather. My sister has given me the freedom of her house in Town, and I must have it looked over. It has not been repaired or refitted since Napoleon left Elba; I have had notice it’s half under water, and likely even the mice have given it quits.”
“Then you will be in Town Christmastide, and New Year’s,” said Harriet. “You must stop with us a while at Sherry’s house. Cousin Beauchamp’s musicales never have ballads! You will write to m—my brother, in the meantime?”
“As often as I may, madam, and Sherbourne has my direction.”
Harriet smiled at him, briefly. The long gallery, its narrow windows crowded about with portraiture, was very chill; at the far end of the room were the doors to the shut-up west wing, and draught and darkness seemed to creep round their edges. Fleming offered for Harriet’s arm, and she took his in a tight clasp. Under her ancestors’ watch, Harriet shivered.
“I hope there is not a ghost at Bournebrook, madam?”
“There ought to be many.” Harriet said. “The Earls have given much for king and country, but the second sons have always been wreckers. My grandsire was said to have been a most lawless man.”
