Chapter 1 #2
Carstairs took another abstemious sip of his toddy, and I realized when he’d asked for a hot drink, he’d been anticipating tea, cocoa, or coffee rather than anything stronger. Did he not trust himself to consume strong spirits?
“I am exiled and banished,” he said, setting the glass down. “Caldicott, I have been banished from the family seat, and I don’t know why or by whom or if my sentence will ever be commuted. I want…”
He stared hard at the fire. “I want to go home. Caldicott, I am weary and sad and exhausted. I am sick of wandering the woods and fens, of staring at pages of verse until I fall into sleep that does not refresh. Of killing game that seeks only to grow old in a peaceful procession of seasons. All I want, all I long for, is to go home.”
His voice broke on the last word, which doubtless mortified him as much as it did me.
I too found it necessary to minutely inspect the dancing flames. “I need details, Carstairs. You can hold nothing back, not for the sake of boyhood confidences, not for family honor, not for God and country. You tell me all you know, and I do mean all, or resign yourself to the life of an outcast.”
I half-hoped this condition would deter him from involving me.
I half-hoped he’d accept the challenge. I’d known the horror of being imprisoned in cold and darkness by an enemy I’d seen and wished dead.
Carstairs was incarcerated just as miserably, apparently by a foe who refused to come into the light.
An injustice of that magnitude was intolerable to me.
I was prepared to take on the fight rather than endure more weeks of tipsy servants at the Hall and short notes from my dear Perry.
I had to know first, though, that Carstairs would give me every possible weapon with which to wade into the affray.
And foremost among those weapons was truth itself.
He lifted his glass, examined the contents, set it down untasted, then fished a folded piece of paper from an inside pocket.
“This is the latest epistle. I never know when they are coming or who writes them.”
I unfolded the note: You may have five days after the new year. Five days and not one jot or tittle more. I know what you did.
The hand was a perfect, flowing script such as professional clerks and well educated young ladies prided themselves on.
The paper was foolscap—cheap, plentiful, unremarkable.
Conventional spelling, though the language was bit high flown.
I knew jot to be the anglicized version of the Greek term iota, and tittle in English usually referred to the dot over a minuscule i, or perhaps an apostrophe indicating missing letters.
A tiny mark that barely impacted meaning.
Headmistresses and tutors scolded in such terms, though Carstairs was not merely being scolded, he was being threatened.
“I know what you did. So what did you do, Carstairs? And please recall that most of my former fellow officers believe I bought my freedom from the French by betraying my brother and my command. Having myself been tried and convicted on the basis of gossip, I have no enthusiasm for judging anybody’s conduct, in uniform or otherwise. ”
To his credit, Carstairs did not pry. Though I could have given him few answers if he had.
I honestly did not know what had happened to Harry after our French captors separated us.
I assumed that the same measures the French interrogators had applied to me had proven lethal in Harry’s case.
He’d been fit and battle ready, but not to the degree that a reconnaissance officer must be.
Then too, Harry had had a temper that could blaze up without warning. A nasty, foolish temper that had landed him trouble more than once.
Perhaps Carstairs had a similar failing.
“What did I do?” Carstairs mused. “I shot where I was told to aim, of course. We all did, or claimed we did. On many occasions, I and my fellow Rifles missed the rider and felled the horse instead, but that’s simply because a horse is a much larger target.”
Infantrymen in their thousands had been guilty of the same purposeful inaccuracy. “You have been kept from your family home for more than two years, and you haven’t any idea why?”
He took a bite of his second cheese tart. “No clue. I have taken many lives, my lord. I have gone foraging and failed to mention that I met a French soldier doing likewise. I have committed the usual wrongs soldiers commit, though not in any notable excess.”
“Rape?”
He shook his head. “The Rifles were not generally involved in the worst parts of siege breaking, thank the immortal powers.”
“Plunder?”
“Wellington hung thieves. I’d no wish to hang.”
What did that leave? “Did you ever shoot the man when ordered to drop the horse?”
“Not that I can think of, and my lord, I have wracked my brains, pondered, re-read old letters, consulted with former comrades. One usually recalls all too vividly wrongs one has committed, but my memory yields nothing worth this sort of penance.”
I swirled my toddy and considered the man in the opposite chair. He was haunted, but by what or whom? The past, the banishment, guilt over his younger brother’s passing?
“You’ve been looking in the wrong place,” I said slowly. “Whoever is threatening you knows that you long to go home, to rejoin your family at your place of birth, and they know that allowing you only a few days of that dream will torment you afresh.”
“You are saying I did not commit a wartime offense? What is worse than snuffing out the life of some fellow who never did me an ill turn?”
Betraying your own brother? Betraying your command? “Let us save for another time the philosophies justifying national defense, and focus on your dilemma. You can think of no bad act, no lapse in judgment, no university prank, no drunken foolishness that resulted in harm to another?”
For the first time, I saw something like temper in his expression.
“I am human. I make mistakes. I kissed women I probably should not have and got slapped for my presumption. I borrowed from my brother’s coin collection to buy sweets for one of those girls and spent some precious old penny in the process.
I still regret that, and… I cannot think of any act or omission of sufficient seriousness to inspire anybody’s hatred. ”
For a time, I had been an object of hatred.
If a patrol had been ambushed on the slopes of the Pyrenees, then Lord Julian Caldicott must have given the French the details necessary to effect the slaughter.
If rations intended for a particular regiment had been plundered by thieves, then Lord Julian Caldicott took coin for colluding with the bandits.
Wellington’s quiet defense of my character had scotched many of the rumors, but soldiers fared better when they had enemies to despise and destroy. And as surely as winter cold could kill, Carstairs had made at least one very determined enemy.
“We’re off to Hampshire after the new year,” I said. “We’ve some work to do before then. You will make the journey with me, and before we climb out of His Grace’s traveling coach, I will know your past more thoroughly than you know it yourself.”
I’d know his family, his friends, and—if luck was with us—his foes as well.