Chapter 30
The nursery was loud with Henry Thomas’s laughter. He scrambled up Maida’s sleek side, burying his small fists in her hide. Freed at last from the muzzle, the hound bore it patiently, steadying him with a shift of her great shoulder until he tottered forward again in squealing triumph.
Lydia clapped from the rug. “Bravely done, Sir Henry Thomas! Again, my knight!” Maida groaned, lowered herself, and bore the boy’s tumble once more.
A movement at the door checked her mirth. Duval stood in the threshold, neat cap, grey gown, hands folded as though she had stumbled into church. Behind her loomed Ron, immovable as the lintel itself.
“You should not be here,” Lydia told Duval, sharp as the snap of a twig. “This is the nursery. Your place is in my chambers.”
Duval inclined her head. “I thought—”
“You thought wrongly. You are charged with my linens, my gowns, my hair. My well-being lies under other eyes.” She tipped her chin towards the door. “His.”
Only then did Duval’s gaze shift fully to Ron. She had to tilt her head back to take in his breadth, his height, the sheer stillness of him. Something flickered across her face—amazement or unease—before she dipped a curtsey.
Ron said nothing, only folded his arms. The gesture was dismissal enough.
Lydia bit back a laugh. It pleased her, to see the elegant French girl made small before the sentinel. She stroked Maida’s ear, triumphant.
“You will attend me in my proper rooms,” Lydia continued, her voice all hauteur. “Not here. And tomorrow, you will come to the stables. If you mean to serve me, you must learn where I spend my days.”
Duval’s brows twitched. “The… stables, my lady?”
“Yes,” Lydia said, already imagining it. Bill would take the starch from her. He always did. “Bill will show you what true service looks like. And we shall see how well your cap and apron endure horsehair.”
Henry Thomas shrieked with laughter, Maida gave a great huffing sigh, and Lydia smiled inwardly, already savouring the prospect.
* * *
Lydia tugged Duval along the path to the stable-yard, Maida padding content at her side. “Come,” she said airily. “If you mean to follow me everywhere, you may as well see what fills my hours.”
The French girl hesitated, her cap trembling with each step.
The smell of horse and hay thickened as they drew nearer, and Lydia could see her wrinkle her nose.
Bill emerged from the gloom of the tack room, sleeves rolled, brush in hand.
His bulk filled the doorway, scarred face set in its usual stony lines.
Duval stopped dead. Her eyes widened. “Mon Dieu,” she breathed, fingers flying up to cross herself. She took a single step back, then another, before fleeing outright, skirts gathered in her hands as she vanished down the yard.
Lydia laughed inwardly, satisfaction blooming. Bill had not spoken a word, yet Duval had scattered like a sparrow before a hawk.
Lydia’s satisfaction curdled almost at once. She would see the girl again—and then what?
Bill did not look at her. He turned back into the stable, slow and deliberate. Something uneasy stirred in Lydia’s chest. She followed, her steps softer now.
Inside the dimness he leant on the stall door, the roan shifting quietly behind him.
His voice was low, almost grudging. “I seen this once before. The earl used me—me face, me scars—to force a woman to confess her lies. I did it. Stood there and let her quake. Thought it served her. But it sat foul with me after.”
Lydia’s chin lifted, though her stomach knotted. “Why are you telling me this?”
Bill’s eyes met hers, steady as stone. “Because the Colonel is the finest man I ever served. And he never did such things. Not once.”
Her breath caught. She looked up into his worn, scarred face, and her pride cracked. Her eyes stung, welled. “Please forgive me. I vow never to do so again. With anyone.”
Bill gave one short nod, then turned back into the dark of the stable, the scrape of his boots fading.
Lydia turned—and froze. Her father stood at the edge of the yard, half-in shadow, his expression unreadable.
“A hard lesson, daughter,” he said quietly.
She swallowed, nodded. “The hardest.”
His gaze did not waver. “If you do not respect those who attend us, you may as well dismiss them. It would be better for you.”
* * *
The week after her humiliation in the stable, Lydia moved with unusual quiet. She still ran Maida in the meadow, still pestered Bill with questions, but her laughter came muted, her temper checked. Her father had not spoken of that afternoon again, but his words lingered like an iron weight.
When Clarke summoned her to the blue parlour, she expected another scolding. Ron shadowed her as always; Duval trailed half a step behind.
Inside, her grandmother and mother sat with tea untouched. Her father stood by the hearth, his arms folded. Opposite him, in a straight-backed chair, sat a woman Lydia had never seen before.
She was plainly dressed, her hair dark streaked with iron grey, her face lean and weathered. Her hands—broad, square, competent—rested atop a leather satchel that bulged with linen rolls and instruments.
Her father’s eyes softened. “Mrs Bessette.”
The woman inclined her head. “Colonel Fitzwilliam.”
He gestured towards Lydia. “And this is my daughter.”
“The countess’s eyes.” Mrs Bessette’s gaze fixed on her—not unkind, but sharp as a scalpel. “Your father’s brow.”
She straightened. “Is she truly your daughter, Colonel?”
“She is,” he said with quiet weight.
The woman nodded. “Then we must begin without delay.”
Lydia stiffened. “Begin what, exactly? Am I to sit here like a piece of furniture while you discuss me?”
Her father’s brow rose. “Lydia.”
Mrs Bessette smiled faintly, as if Lydia’s protest were no more than the creak of a cart’s wheel. “They always bridle at first.”
She drew her satchel forward, unbuckled it, revealing folded bandages, glass vials, a steel probe. Lydia’s stomach turned.
“I am engaged,” the woman said simply, “to oversee your health. To teach you what your body cannot tell you. If you cut, you will bind it. If you bleed, you will measure it. If you stumble, you will know whether to stand or to call for aid. No coddling. No pity. Only instruction.”
She snapped the satchel closed.
“Today,” she said, “you begin to care for yourself.”
* * *
The corridor outside her parents’ sitting room was hushed, save for the faint tick of a clock somewhere down the hall. Lydia raised her hand, hesitated, then tapped once against the door.
“Enter,” came her father’s voice.
She pushed it open. The room was warm, lamplight pooling across the carpet, but her mother’s chair stood empty, a half-sewn length of muslin folded on the arm. Only her father sat there, long legs stretched, a volume closed upon his knee. He looked up at her, brows lifting.
“Not your mother tonight,” he said. “She is with Henry Thomas.”
“I… I desire a word with you.” Lydia slipped inside, shutting the door softly. She twisted the fringe of her sleeve. “Alone, if I may.”
He inclined his head. “Very well.”
The words tumbled before she could stop them. “I have no time—none at all. Lessons without end, Mr Burton’s drills, fittings upon fittings, Nurse marking how I hold a quill.”
She clasped her hands together. “When am I myself? Have I any life of my own?”
Her father stood, slow and deliberate, and crossed to her. He extended his hand. After a long moment, she laid hers in his—the left, the one marked with the faint scars of the fork.
He turned it over, thumb tracing the indentations almost reverently. “This is where you began,” he murmured. Then he flipped it palm up, studying the tine-holes, now faded near complete. “And this is where you continue.”
Her chest tightened.
“You find it difficult,” he said softly. “It is. You are starting a decade later than I did. But, Lydia, it is necessary. Each lesson you resent is but another stone in the wall that may one day preserve you.”
She jerked her hand back, voice sharp. “You were a soldier. I am a girl. Soon I shall be a woman. Am I to live forever as though the next injury lurks behind every door?”
“Yes.” His answer was plain.
Her eyes flashed. “What danger lies there? That the seamstress should prick me to death with her pins?”
The corner of his mouth curved, but it did not reach his eyes.
“Pins are nothing. The competition you will soon face—those girls and their mothers at Court, the matrons of the Season—they will cut far deeper. Their weapons will not draw blood, but their wounds may yet undo you. If you falter, they will not forgive.”
She stared at him, heat rising in her cheeks, her lips parting as though to protest, then closing again in reluctant silence.
He set his hands on her shoulders, steady, protective. “The world is no gentler to you than it was to me. If found wanting, you will be ground down.”
His voice dropped. “And I will not see that happen.”
Her breath hitched. “You say that I must live always as though—”
“—as though the next blow might end you.” His grip tightened. “Yes. And so, you will learn to stand, to bind, to endure. Not because you are weak. Because you are my progeny.”
“What does that signify? I am suffered nothing.” She shook her head. “What have you wrought that makes me a prisoner?”
Her father’s face lost the little expression it had displayed. A stillness settled, pressing the room close. Lydia’s curiosity flared. “Tell me of Badajoz.”
“You ask for what no lady should hear.”
“We share a like condition. I am your daughter. There are no ladies like me.”
He drew a slow breath. “I was taken prisoner by the French. They felled me from my horse during a reconnaissance ride.”
“You were knocked from your horse?” Lydia was incredulous. No living person sat more firmly than her father.
“The percussion wave following a cannon shot. I awakened in chains.”
Lydia bit her bottom lip.
“The French tortured me for three days. I remember little. Of course, I felt none of it.”
“Yet you escaped,” she whispered.
“In his arrogance, the officer leant in too close.”
Lydia felt a chill creep over her skin. She shivered. “What did you do?”
Her father did not smile. “I used what I had left.”
Lydia opened her mouth, but words eluded her. “Papa,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“It was no gallant deed, Lydia.” His gaze fixed on hers, steady and unyielding. “It was survival.”
“Survival, Papa?” She scarcely breathed the word.
His eyes held her, and when his mouth curved at last, the smile was all teeth—feral, terrible, as though some beast within him had stirred.
Lydia’s stomach lurched. The room seemed to tilt, the lamplight smearing at its edges. She tasted bile.
She realised then that survival was not a story told afterward.
It was a condition you lived inside.