Chapter Four
The same morning, across town, the sun barely pierced the lingering mist. Quinton stood motionless, on the narrow gravel path outside Barrington’s house, Sommer Chase, not far from the stables.
A fine dew coated everything in silver, quieting the world.
The smell of the sea drifted on the breeze, briny and cool.
He took a breath, slow and deliberate, and let it burn its way down into his chest. He wasn’t sure what unsettled him more, that he’d survived or that he sometimes wished he hadn’t.
Sommer-by-the-Sea. It looked just as he remembered. But he was not the same man.
The door behind him creaked, and Barrington’s voice followed. “You’ll catch a chill standing out here like that.”
“I’ve been colder,” Quinton said without turning.
Barrington joined him on the path and offered him a mug of coffee. “Kenworth tells me you didn’t sleep.”
“I’m not used to beds.” He took a sip of the hot brew.
Barrington raised a brow. “Luxury clearly doesn’t suit you.”
Quinton shrugged. “Turns out, civilian linens are more cunning than French scouts.”
Barrington didn’t smile, though the corners of his mouth twitched. “You don’t have to talk about it, you know.”
“I know,” Quinton said quietly. “But I probably should.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, the gravel crunching underfoot.
Barrington didn’t press. Quinton could feel the man’s patience, honed like a blade over years of command.
It should’ve grated, but instead, it settled like a cloak across his shoulders.
The kind of silence only a friend could offer.
“The gravel’s too tidy,” Quinton muttered. “Makes a man uneasy.”
Barrington arched a brow. “Kenworth considers it a matter of honor.”
“That explains the perfectly aligned rosebushes. My prison was more forgiving.” The smile on Quinton’s face faded.
Quinton’s coat was too thin, but he welcomed the bite of the morning air.
“I was scouting with a small unit of six men. We were to observe a suspected supply line east of Badajoz,” he began, his voice low and steady. “But someone was waiting for us. They knew our route. Our timing. Everything.”
Barrington’s brow furrowed. “An informant?”
“I thought so. Still do. We walked right into it. Three men were slain where they stood. Two more died later from their wounds.” He paused. “They took me alive. Bound, gagged, blindfolded. And then… nothing for days.”
Barrington was silent.
“They didn’t wear uniforms. They spoke French sometimes. English more often. One of them even had a London accent. They weren’t regular soldiers. I never saw a flag or heard an official name.”
“That’s not a French prison,” Barrington said.
“No. It was a house, secluded, rural, like something forgotten. The windows were shuttered, and the rooms were dim. I saw trees once. And a hedge maze, overgrown and still, as though no one had walked its paths in years.”
“No guards. No interrogations. Just silence.”
He didn’t say the rest aloud. No sounds of life. No bells, no footsteps outside, not even birdsong. Only the creak of the floorboards and the sound of his own breath. The hedge maze he glimpsed once through a cracked shutter had looked overgrown, like something forgotten. Like him.
He could remember watching the leaves turn brown, wondering how many seasons had passed. The image still haunted him, tangled vines, narrowing paths, no clear exit, just like the feeling that hadn’t yet left him.
“Why did they keep you alive?”
Quinton shook his head. “I’ve thought about that every day.”
Barrington looked at him, his gaze sharp. “Did they question you?”
“Rarely. And when they did, they asked me odd questions. Not about military tactics. Nothing about troop movement. They asked about… people. Names. Locations.”
Barrington swore under his breath and stiffened, his fingers tapping once against the mug. His eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn’t speak. Not yet.
“I thought I was going mad,” Quinton admitted. “But I held on to one thing.”
Barrington waited.
“Mary-Ann.”
The name settled between them like a dropped coin. Her name hadn’t passed his lips in over three years. Just the sound of it again grounded him, as if memory and breath could become the same thing.
“I remembered the way she laughed when I told her the stars were brighter in Portugal. I remembered how she used to lean over my shoulder to correct my accounts.” He paused, the memories catching in his throat.
“I used to imagine her voice, what she’d say if she were there.
I’d make up conversations just to hear something human.
When it got really bad, I’d see her face in the dark, clear as candlelight.
I think I clung to those thoughts because they were the only things that still felt real.
I could forget who I was, what day it was,” he turned to Barrington. “But never her.”
He looked down at his coffee, fingers tightening slightly around the mug. “Even after the letters stopped coming, I kept reciting the ones I had in my head. Every word. Every line. I must have repeated them a thousand times.”
Barrington took a deep breath and spoke quietly. “You’re not the only one who couldn’t forget. She waited longer than most would have,” Barrington added. “Longer than some thought wise. She never stopped asking if we’d heard anything.”
Barrington’s voice softened. “She wrote letters to me, to my brother Edward, and to anyone she thought might know something, anyone who would listen. She traveled to London more than once to meet with officials at the War Office. When no one responded, she started copying every letter twice, sending one to the regiment and one to the Admiralty, just in case. She kept a map in her father’s study with pins marking every place the brigade might’ve passed through.
And every time she thought she was a nuisance, she apologized. But she never gave up.”
Quinton stared at the mist curling along the fence posts. “I hoped,” he said, at last, his voice low. “Even when the silence stretched on for months… I told myself she was still out there. Still fighting.”
His hand tightened on the cooling mug. “There were nights when everything else slipped away except her. Her voice. Her letters, even if I never saw them. I made them up in my mind, imagined what she might say, just to hold on a little longer.”
Quinton was quiet for a long moment. The coffee in his hand had gone cold. “I didn’t know,” he said finally. “I thought…when the letters stopped…”
“They didn’t stop,” Barrington said gently. “They weren’t given to you.”
He swallowed hard. “I didn’t know what she was doing. But I knew who she was. That was enough to keep breathing.”
Barrington nodded, then added, “She’d be glad to hear that.”
Quinton looked back toward the house. “I need to tell her someday. That she saved me.” He looked away, his jaw tightening slightly. “She’s engaged to another man. I should be glad for her,” he said, though the words tasted foreign. “But…”
“Wilkinson,” Barrington said.
Quinton’s mouth curved, not quite in a smile. “We weren’t friends. Not truly. But I knew him.”
Barrington said nothing.
Quinton took another sip of coffee. “He seemed very composed yesterday. Polite. Comfortable.”
“He has a talent for blending in,” Barrington said carefully.
A silence stretched between them, not uncomfortable but full of things left unsaid. Of names, of suspicions, of roads not yet taken.
“Do you trust him?” Quinton asked.
Barrington didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t distrust him. But I trust you, Quinton. And I know that look in your eyes.”
Quinton nodded once. “I’m not done yet.” His voice had steadied. It was low and certain, like a soldier choosing his ground. “Not with Mary-Ann. And not with what happened to me.”
From the stables, the soft nicker of a horse broke the stillness.
“Kenworth will have breakfast ready,” Barrington said. “Come in before you catch a chill.”
Quinton didn’t move right away. His gaze swept the misted fields, then lifted toward the cliffs where the sea met the sky like a dare.
Barrington paused at the door. “When you decide what comes next,” he said quietly, “you won’t be alone.”
Quinton met his gaze. For the first time, he didn’t feel like a ghost in borrowed clothes.
“I need to know why they let me live,” he murmured.
He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Listen to me. Brooding on a cliffside. I sound like a gothic novel.”
Barrington didn’t reply. He only gave a dry snort, the kind that might mean agreement or amusement, and stepped inside.
Quinton glanced toward the house. He hadn’t expected to find comfort in a valet with the sharp tongue of a field sergeant, but Kenworth had a way of making things feel… normal. Kenworth was already waiting just beyond the threshold, a towel draped over one arm.
“The coffee’s only marginally improved from yesterday,” he said. “But there’s a lemon tart left over. If you need a reason to go on living, my lord, that might suffice.”
Quinton gave a soft laugh. It surprised even him.
“I heard the staff mention that they were reserved for brides threatening elopement?”
Kenworth opened the door wider. “Not these. Come in. Let the sea keep its chill.”