Chapter Three
Winifred was somewhat dismayed that Colonel Ware had found a small table not yet occupied by anyone else and promptly seated her at it.
She would far prefer to be sitting at the long dining table, preferably close to Papa or Bertrand or Owen.
Conversation was already lively there, as well as laughter.
She was not at all sure she liked Colonel Ware.
Indeed, she was almost sure she did not.
He made her uncomfortable. She felt at every moment that he was looking at her from his superior age and life experience, not to mention personal attractions, and finding her wanting.
It did not help that he had a commanding presence and a magnetic personality.
She had seen both in the occasional glances she had cast his way during the ball so far.
All attention somehow focused upon him whenever he joined a group.
He had danced with the most beautiful women, all of whom had looked slightly dazzled, as though he were paying them an extraordinary compliment simply by choosing them.
Though that harsh judgment on her part was perhaps a bit unfair to him. He did not seem conceited.
She felt stifled anyway. He was not her commanding officer, yet she had followed him meekly when she might have expressed a preference for sitting with a group at the main table.
Why had he even asked her to dance anyway?
Because she was the guest of honor and he felt it was expected of him?
Because he really had set himself the task of interrogating her over her relationship with his younger brother?
Was he afraid it was more than a friendship?
What Owen did with his life was surely none of his business.
He was not even the eldest of the Ware brothers.
He was not the Earl of Stratton. She wished it were Owen sitting across from her.
She felt thoroughly comfortable with him.
She never had to think about what she would say next.
Conversation flowed naturally between them.
She cast her eyes yearningly to where he sat with a group of young people on the far side of the long table.
“Because I am a friend of your brother’s perhaps?” she said in answer to Colonel Ware’s question when his silence told her that it had not been rhetorical.
“Ah,” he said after allowing a servant to fill his wineglass and she had set a hand over the top of hers and shaken her head. “And I am playing the part of heavy-handed elder brother, am I, checking your credentials?”
“Are you?” she asked.
He smiled at her, and she saw that there was more to him than the hard-jawed, taciturn military officer whom she had described to herself—and to him—as cruel.
Now she could see firsthand the charm that made him quite irresistibly attractive to women.
He was a practiced slayer of hearts, she guessed. Though not of hers.
“Tell me about yourself, Miss Cunningham,” he said. “Are you really the Duchess of Netherby’s niece?”
“I am,” she said. “My mother is her half sister. I grew to the age of nine at the orphanage in Bath where Aunt Anna grew up—and my papa. He was a volunteer art teacher in the school there when I was a child and Aunt Anna taught there. So did my mother after Aunt Anna was discovered to be Lady Anastasia Westcott, only legitimate daughter of the late Earl of Riverdale, who was an unbelievably wicked man. He hid her away at the orphanage so he could marry my grandmother before his lawful wife died and thus solve his financial woes with her fortune. My grandmother and Mama lost their titles and everything else, as did my uncle and aunt. It is complicated,” she added weakly before she could launch into a full explanation.
“Mama and Papa ended up marrying, and they asked me to go with them as their adopted daughter.”
He looked steadily across the table at her while they both leaned back to give room to a couple of servants who bore platters of sweet and savory foods to set between them, and another who came to pour their tea.
“A very tangled web,” he said then. “Do you know who your real parents were or are?”
“No,” she said. “And I never will. I was left in a basket on the doorstep of the orphanage.”
His eyebrows rose. “Does that fact bother you?” he asked.
“No,” she said firmly. “Mama and Papa are my parents. My family is the children they had together and the others they adopted. I love them all very dearly.”
It was true. She did not need or even want to know where she came from or what, if anything, she had been named before she became Winifred Hamlin after being dropped off at the orphanage.
She had endured nine years of anxiety after she had been found and taken in, though she had not realized it at the time.
She had tried ceaselessly to establish an identity, to be liked and even loved.
She had made a constant effort to be good in the hope of winning the approval of the adults who could decide her future.
She had tried to be pious for the same reason.
Her efforts had often had the opposite effect of what she had hoped to achieve, however.
She had never felt truly liked by the staff or her fellow orphans.
Until, that was, Mama adopted her and made it clear she did so purely out of love. Papa had added his assurances to hers. Winifred had never doubted them in all the years since.
Oh yes, they were her true parents.
“And what do you do in Bath?” Colonel Ware asked as she selected a few items of food and set them on her plate and he followed suit. “I thought that these days it was overrun by septuagenarians taking the waters in the hope of finding a cure for all their ills.”
“We live in a large house in the hills above Bath,” she said.
“It is used for workshops and retreats and conferences for writers and artists and musicians. The children of the orphanage use it for concerts and dramas and sometimes simply for picnics or indoor parties. It is always busy. I am always busy—when I am not dancing at ton balls in London, that is.”
“Your tone of voice tells me you would rather be there,” he said.
“I feel useful there,” she said. “But I was designated to come here as support for Papa, who has been engaged to paint Lady Jewell’s portrait. And to enjoy myself.”
She grimaced and he laughed.
“Mother’s orders?” he said. “And are you enjoying yourself?”
She thought about it. “Yes,” she said. “I will never forget that I have seen the king—is he not enormous?—and watched all the splendor of Trooping the Colour.”
“You were dazzled by a display of Britain’s military might, then, were you?” he asked her.
“I was dazzled by all the color of the uniforms and flags and by the music and the precision with which the regiments marched,” she said. “I was not impressed by the display of military might. Quite the contrary. I am a firm believer in peace.”
It was not entirely true. She knew life was not so simple. But his assumption was inaccurate enough to be an insult to her sensibilities—and her good sense.
He raised his eyebrows.
“It occurred to me during the parade that every one of those men was a killer,” she said after waiting for a particularly gusty burst of laughter from the table right beside them to subside.
“It occurred to me that every one of them had been trained to kill. That killing was their job. It was an appalling realization.”
And this was an appalling conversation to be holding under the circumstances.
Goodness, but the sounds of merriment all around them were growing louder, if that was possible.
She doubted anyone else in the room had entertained a serious thought since coming in here. He must consider her very odd indeed.
But he smiled at her. Was he laughing at her? At her na?veté? She raised her chin and took a bite of a lobster patty, her very favorite savory delicacy.
“There are other responsibilities of the job apart from killing,” he said.
“Protecting civilian populations in war-torn countries against marauding hordes, for example. We are fortunate here in Britain never to have suffered an invading army—not for several centuries anyway. I suppose the Vikings were the last. Unfortunately, killing becomes necessary when a polite request that invaders remove themselves from someone else’s country is ignored. ”
“But violence merely breeds violence,” she said.
“If the answer to a country’s problems is simply to kill and overwhelm, then nothing will ever change.
It is not the answer to individual problems either for that matter.
All too often people who have been provoked by the silliest things raise their fists or wield a knife or a gun. ”
“When they should sit down and discuss their differences like civilized beings?” he said. His eyes were twinkling. He was laughing at her.
“They could at least try,” she said. “Or simply turn their backs on the provocation.”
“And when during the parade did this realization come to you?” he asked her. “When you noticed the cruelty of my face?”
It was precisely at that moment, in fact.
“I could not even see your face,” she said. “Except for your mouth.”
“A cruel mouth,” he said. “Alas, to be judged on one’s mouth.”
“And your jaw and chin,” she said. Oh, how had she got trapped in this ridiculousness? “But is this not an inappropriate occasion to be discussing such a subject?”
He laughed outright. “It is even more inappropriate for me to be discussing it with a lady,” he said. “Owen told me you are an interesting person to talk to.”
They had talked about her, then?
“But he did not tell me you sometimes talk in platitudes,” he said.
She finished chewing the second half of the patty. That was a setdown if ever she had heard one. Platitudes?
“You are proud of being a killer, then?” she said. “You consider it a worthy way of using your life?”