Chapter Eight
Courage, Susan, she told herself as she paused outside the sitting room door. She missed the security of the heavy tea tray, but it was too early after luncheon for tea. And while Emma had seemed such a brilliant idea in her bedroom, the book was small protection now, even hugged to her chest. As she raised her hand to knock, she thought about praying, then dismissed the idea. God had not heard from her lately; Susan chose not to add hypocrisy to her faults. She knocked.
“Come.”
Was there a longish pause between the knock and the acknowledgment? Was it too quick? Had she knocked firmly enough, or would Lady Bushnell think she was a forward piece? Susan took a deep breath. You are an idiot if you read malice in every word, she scolded herself. She opened the door and found herself immediately under Lady Bushnell’s scrutiny. She dropped what she hoped was a graceful curtsy and started on her journey across the room, which seemed miles wide. She thought briefly of Emily balancing books on her head in the hope of achieving some dignity, and thanked God for good posture and gentle bearing.
Then she stood in front of her employer, much closer than the day before. If she had not been so terrified, she would have taken a long look. As it was, she could only see those marvelous, hooded eyes and a firm mouth. Everything about the woman seated before her spoke of a person who did not suffer fools gladly. And she already knows I am a Hampton, a family name synonymous with fools, Susan thought in a panic. For one wild moment she considered picking up her borrowed skirt and running from the room. I could be in Quilling in an hour, she thought as she managed what must have looked like a ghastly smile and even bunched the material of the skirt in her hand.
She didn’t run. As she quaked inwardly before her employer, she pressed the book against her stomach to stop its quivering and released her death grip on her skirt. She knew her appearance was nothing to disgust her employer; now if only her voice would not tremble, or her words would not come out in a breathless rush.
“Good afternoon, Lady Bushnell.” That was easy enough. Her voice did not sound strange to her ears.
Lady Bushnell nodded, and her eyes went from Susan’s face to the dress. “It fits?” she asked.
“Pretty well, my lady,” Susan replied. “It is a trifle long, but then, I am a trifle short.”
It was the smallest of jokes. It may have been Susan’s imagination, but Lady Bushnell appeared to smile slightly in return. It came and went so quickly that Susan decided it must have been a trick of the light.
“You are more deep-breasted than my daughter,” Lady Bushnell commented, “so you may wish to set the buttons over to give yourself more room. Certainly you may hem the dress, if you think you will be around for at least the length of a probation.”
“I shall, my lady,” Susan replied, gratified.
Exhausted, the subject wilted. Silence settled around the room like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. Lady Bushnell looked out the window for a lengthy time, sighed, and then turned to face Susan again. She seemed chagrined that Susan was still there.
“What is it that you wish of me, Miss Hampton?” she asked, and there was resignation in her tones. “What do you propose to do?”
“Why, earn my salary, ma’am,” Susan said, unable to keep all the surprise from her voice.
There was another brief flicker of amusement in Lady Bushnell’s eyes. Green eyes, Susan observed, and such a wonderful, unfaded green.
“Then you will be the first one.” Lady B said, with just a touch of asperity.
“I have already told Cora that I am to be the last one, Lady Bushnell,” Susan said with a firmness she did not feel.
Lady Bushnell directed her gaze out the window again. Susan’s heart sank, and she mentally kicked herself. Why can I not just say “Yes, my lady,” or “No, my lady” and leave the windy treatises to others? She waited to be dismissed again.
“How do you propose to do this?” came the question. Lady Bushnell continued to regard the view beyond the window. “If you plan to cheer me up, it’s already been tried. If it is to be a needlework project, don’t bother. I have a drawer full of unfinished doilies and china paintings. If you wish to chat, I doubt we have much in common.”
“Mr. Wiggins allows that we do,” Susan said suddenly, then hesitated. “Although I cannot see it, either,’’ she concluded in a rush when Lady Bushnell turned quickly to look at her.
“I have never questioned my bailiff’s skills of observation,” Lady Bushnell commented, “but I do not think he is overacquainted with the gentry. We share this room and we are women, but I do not think our similarities extend much beyond that. What do you propose to do with me?” she asked, her voice heavy with sarcasm.
“I intend to read to you.”
“Read to me?” the widow repeated, and her voice rose for the first time. “Read to me like a bedridden pensioner whose wits are too twaddled for anything else?”
Susan winced but did not falter. “No! I do not see it that way.” Without an invitation, she sat in the chair opposite the dowager. ‘David ... Mr. Wiggins asked me what I used to like to have done to me, and the second thing was to have someone read to me. It’s a pleasure.”
Again there was that twitch of the lip and slight flicker of the eye that lasted no more than a millisecond. “Do enlighten me what the first thing was on your list?” she asked, but it sounded more like a command.
“Mama brushed my hair. I liked the way it felt,” she said simply. Lady Bushnell was not someone to bamboozle with an elaborate answer. “I did not think you wanted me to brush your hair.”
“No. I’m quite capable of that; always have been. You do not think I have the wits left to read to myself?” she asked, indicating the open book on her lap.
“You misunderstand me, my lady,” Susan said in earnest. “I always thought it the height of comfort to have someone read to me. I could close my eyes and just let the words wander through my mind. I...” She paused. I am making a fool of myself, she thought miserably. Please, Lady Bushnell.
“If you must, you must,” the woman said finally. “I suppose if I do not allow you to read to me, then I will be forced into needlework, or some other project for my own good.”
Susan smiled. “Never that! I’m an indifferent needlewoman myself, so you need not fear that I will trap you in a daisy chain, or force a French knot on you.”
Lady Bushnell put her hand to her mouth and coughed, or at least it sounded like a cough to Susan. “What a relief to know that I am safe from the dreaded feather stitch. Now, set my mind at rest and assure me that I will not be forced to tat against my will.”
“Never!” Susan replied, unable to keep the laughter from her voice. “And I will never inflict crewel punishment.”
Lady Bushnell coughed again. Susan wondered if she should suggest a seat farther from the window, then decided that her courage did not extend that far. The widow closed the book in her lap, not even marking the page, and set it aside. Perhaps David right, Susan thought. Perhaps she would like to read, but can’t anymore. You are a proud old thing, Lady Bushnell, and I hope am just like you when I reach sixty-five. I doubt I will have any more family around me than you do, she considered. She took heart and opened the book.
“I would like to read Emma , my lady,” she said. “It’s rather modern, but it makes me laugh.” She leaned forward. “Emma is not exactly a pattern card of perfection, such as one finds in some novels, my lady.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Lady Bushnell cut in. “I never read novels.”
“Oh, I do!” Susan said, choosing not to accept the rebuff. “Sometimes nothing is better than a romance where events resolve themselves to everyone’s satisfaction.” She noticed the set look return to the widow’s eyes. “I know it seldom happens in real life, but there is nothing wrong with the occasional happy ending,” Susan added gently.
“I wouldn’t know,” the widow repeated, but her voice was softer this time.
There was nothing in Lady Bushnell’s demeanor that encouraged it, but Susan leaned forward impulsively and touched the woman’s knee. She regretted the gesture almost the moment she made it, but Lady Bushnell did not draw away. Instead, she sighed and folded her hands in her lap. “Well, then, if you must read, let us get on with it,” she said, as though humoring a puppy leaping about and growling at the hem of her dress.
This is one fool you are forced to suffer, Lady Bushnell, Susan thought, at least until I have failed whatever probation you permit me. I fear it will not be long.
She turned to the first chapter and cleared her throat. ‘“Volume One, Chapter One. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years it the world with very little to vex or distress her.’”
The afternoon sun had changed the look of the sitting room when Cora Skerlong came in with a tea tray. Susan looked up from the book with a quick glance at Lady Bushnell, one of a series of darting glances she had made all afternoon. Early in the first chapter, Lady Bushnell had closed her eyes, which made Susan open her own eyes wider and wonder if she was listening at all, or merely suffering her presence until some interruption like a tea tray could relieve her.
Susan marked her place and put aside the book. I wonder if I should have chosen something more serious, like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , or Fox’s Book of Martyrs , she thought, then shook her head. Then I would have trouble staying awake. She smiled at the thought of falling asleep until the book tumbled from her hands and she pitched forward to lie snoring in Lady Bushell’s lap. No, she decided, no Book of Martyrs for me.
She looked at Lady Bushnell, who was indicating that Cora set down the heavy tray. I think there have been too many martyrs for Lady Bushnell’s peace of mind, as it is.
Cora left the room, pausing just out of Lady Bushnell’s vision to blow a quick kiss to Susan, her eyes merry. Susan found herself wishing for escape, too, and a return to the kitchen and the comfort of soup, or stew, or whatever it was she had been smelling this past hour and more. She picked up a cup and saucer and poured tea for Lady Bushnell.
“Thank you.”
That was all. There was no offer that Susan take up the other cup and pour for herself, too, so she did not, even though she was as dry as a hay sprig from reading.
Cora had left the day’s mail on the tray. As soon as Lady Bushnell had taken several sips, Susan handed the letters and a small package to her.
“There is a letter opener on my desk.”
Susan rose, grateful to move again, and went to the desk, which was covered with letters brittle and yellow, the ink faded. The dates were two decades gone now. She moved the letters aside, but not before her eyes caught several of the salutations. “Beloved Lydia.” “My darling wife.” “Sweetheart.” Susan sighed, marveling how it must feel to receive letters addressed like that. She returned to her seat by the window and took the letters which Lady Bushnell extended to her, slitting them open. The widow took them back and indicated with her head the package on the tray.
“That is for Mr. Wiggins. See that he gets it.”
“Very well, my lady.” Susan picked up the items. Should I offer to read her correspondence to her? she questioned herself. Can she manage? Do I dare attempt to remove such autonomy from her? A moment’s reflection told her that she did not dare. She picked up her book. “Will you be needing. . .”
“No,” the widow interrupted. There was no disguising her eagerness to see Susan gone. “That will be quite all.”
Susan hesitated at the door. “I could return after din ...”
“No need.”
She was absurdly close to tears but she forced them back and squared her shoulders. “I will return tomorrow for Chapter Seven,” she said, hoping she sounded confident.
“You will not,” Lady Bushnell contradicted as she reached for a macaroon. She took a good look at Susan, one that measure her up and down. “I believe we were on Chapter Six, Miss Hampton, and not Seven. Tomorrow then. Don’t forget Mr. Wiggins’ package.”
Susan paused outside the sitting room door and leaned against it, relieved beyond all measure. I have survived one afternoon, she told herself. I refuse to allow myself any wild flights of fancy, such as are common to Hamptons, but I will permit myself the luxury of hope. She looked down at the book she clutched so tightly. “Thank you, Jane Austen,” she whispered, and never meant anything more.
She went down the hall to the kitchen, where she surprised Mrs. Skeriong, dozing in her chair. The cat leaped off the house keeper’s lap, twined itself around Susan’s ankles, then returned to the housekeeper, satisfied with ownership in the newest human. Another leap, this one more dignified, landed him back in Mrs. Skerlong’s lap.
Susan set the book and package on the table. “Is Mr. Wiggin about?” she asked. “There is this package for him.”
“He has gone to choir practice,” the housekeeper replied. “Would you mind stirring that pot on the stove?”
“With pleasure, provided I can lick the spoon. Choir practice?”
Mrs. Skerlong settled herself more comfortably in the chair “You don’t think any self-respecting curate would permit a Welsh bass to live unmolested within parish boundaries, do you?”
Susan laughed as she stirred the stew. “I wasn’t aware of Mr. Wiggins’s considerable talents before.”
“Then you’ll be the first lady’s companion who isn’t!” Mrs. Skerlong replied, amusement evident in her voice.
“Really, Mrs. Skerlong!” Susan protested as she felt herself blushing.
“Yes, really!” The housekeeper smiled and turned her attention to the cat, who was kneading her stomach. “They’ve all looked him over, but I don’t know that it did any of them much good. Of course, I suppose your being of the gentry yourself will make you less liable.”
“Of course,” Susan agreed as she poured herself some tea and at down to resume polishing silverware from her morning task. She looked around for Mrs. Skerlong’s daughter. “Did Cora go to choir practice, too?”
“She did. There is a tenor she is fond of.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Skerlong, if David is a Welshman, how did he come by a name like Wiggins?” Susan asked, concentrating on the intricate pattern of Lady Bushnell’s best table knives.
“I think it had something to do with what hurried him from Wales in the first place, Susan.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice some more. “Poaching.”
Susan’s eyes widened. “My goodness, but he’s a resourceful man. So he thought it best to revise his name?”
“Happens there is a village name of Wiggins just this side of the border,” Mrs. Skerlong explained. She shook her head. “I expect he’s not the first Welshman to decide on a name change, considering what hotheaded, impulsive works of nature most of them are. And it was probably one of those silly names with loads of l’s and y’s that decent folk can’t pronounce.”
“And then he took the king’s shilling and went to war?”
“It would appeal to a Welshman,” Mrs. Skerlong said. “When you’re done polishing, there’s plenty of nice warm water on the Rumford for rinsing.”
When the last piece of silverware was polished, washed, and returned to its felt-lined case, Susan sat down with Mrs. Skerlong for a bowl of mutton stew and brown bread good enough to exclaim over.
“On Thursday nights, I just leave the pot on the hob and everyone helps himself,” she said as they pushed away from the table. “Cora always seems to find the longest way home, usually dragging a tenor behind her.”
Susan went to the sink to help with dishes. “I should want a shortcut, on these cold winter nights!”
“Well, then, you’re not in love, are you now?” The housekeeper said as she handed Susan a bowl to dry.
No, I am not, Susan thought, and felt a momentary pang for Cora and her singer. I think I would like to be, however. It was a pleasant notion, and one that nourished her through another slice of bread and cup of tea. She listened to the clock tick and the cat purr, and felt content. Last week I was stewing and fretting at Aunt Louisa’s, Susan reflected as she picked up her book and Mr. Wiggins’s package. Now I am happy enough to polish silver and eat in a kitchen. I am thinking that good breeding may be just veneer among the Hamptons. Aunt Louisa would be flabbergasted. Susan nodded to the housekeeper, who was preparing Lady Bushnell’s dinner tray, and went upstairs.
There was another dress on her bed, this one a dusty rose, soft from much wear. She sniffed the fabric, breathing in the faint fragrance of cloves. “Packed away in cloves and tissue,” she murmured, holding the dress up to her and admiring it in the mirror. “Lady Elizabeth, your taste was impeccable.”
Susan sat on the bed, running her hand lightly over the material, thinking of ladies and officers, battle and bivouac. Such a strange life for a lady, to follow the drum. I wonder if could ever love someone enough to give up comfort and ease, to ride a horse, sleep in tents, and abandon my privacy, she asked herself. I think I do not know much about love. She thought of Elizabeth following her father through all of Spain and Portugal, and realized with pain that she would not follow Sir Rodney Hampton across the street. “Why ever should I?” she said suddenly, her words a rebuke in the quiet room. She covered her mouth and looked around; she hadn’t meant to be so loud.
Lady Bushnell had also left scissors, needle, and thread on the bed, so Susan removed her dress, put on one of her own simple frocks, and cut the buttons off the dress she had been wearing. “Lady Elizabeth, you had a neater figure than mine,” she said, as she realigned the buttons to allow herself more room.
Evening came quickly, and she lit a lamp to complete the work, humming to herself and looking out at the snow. It was melting now, exposing dark patches of earth. She willed spring to come even as she sighed and watched clouds weighed down with snow boil up again from the northwest. She snipped the thread tail of the button and leaned back in her chair, her eyes on the road from Quilling. The room was warm and her eyes closed.
“Susan? Susan?”
She opened her eyes slowly, reluctant to surrender her peace, to see someone of familiar height and bulk standing in the open doorway. It was full dark outside, and the coals in the hearth had settled into a compact glow. She sat up and turned the lamp higher. “Someone wants me? Lady Bushnell?’’ she asked him.
“No. Just me,” the bailiff said, apology at disturbing her evident in his voice. “I knocked, but you were sunk pretty deep.” His eyes went to the rose wool dress on the bed. “I remember that dress.”
Susan indicated the other chair in the room. Leaving the door open, he crossed to the hearth, squatted down to add some more coal, then sat in the chair.
“Was she pretty?” Susan asked, looking at the dress, too.
He rested casually in the chair, his boots propped on the fireplace fender, making himself entirely at home, to her amusement. “Oh, something like,” he said, his voice warm now with reminiscence. “Her hair wasn’t as dark as yours, and her eyes were green like her mother’s. She was a bit of a flirt, with a quick temper.” He folded his hands across his stomach, more completely relaxed than Susan had seen him yet. He looked at her. “You’d probably have found her an ignorant puss—Lady Bushnell could never interest her in books or theorems—but she knew tactics and strategy as well as the rest of us, and much better than the little lordlings with purchased commissions.”
I believe I could listen to a Welshman all day, Susan thought, making herself more comfortable. I love the way his voice lifts like a question at the end of his sentences. “Would I have liked her?” she asked, wanting him to speak.
He considered the question a moment. “I doubt it,” he said honestly. “She was an imperious baggage, quite proud of her horsemanship and her command over the men of the regiment.” He sighed and looked at the fire again.
“Were you in love with her?”
He chuckled, but did not look at her. “We all were,” he said softly. “It wasn’t so much that she was pretty—offhand, I think you’re more attractive than she was—but she was there .” He spread his hands palms up in his lap, his eyes still on the fire. “You can’t have any conception how nice it was to just pass by Lady Elizabeth on the quick march and smell her. By God, we stunk the length and breadth of Spain, but she always smelled so sweet.” He reached behind him and fingered the dress on the bed. “Of cloves.”
Do you think me attractive? she thought. Too bad one of my own kind never did. “How sad that she died,” Susan murmured.
“Yes. Did you know, she was just newly engaged to one of the officers of the regiment?” the bailiff commented, taking his booted feet off the fender and sitting up straighter.
“How tragic!”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, not really. Her fiance died at Waterloo.” He looked at her then. “She would have been a widow like her mother and sister-in-law. My God, there is a whole generation of young widows. Can I tell you how much I hate war?”
His words hung in the air, and she could think of nothing to say. After a moment, she picked up the blue dress again and sewed on another button while the bailiff returned his gaze to the flames. She watched his profile, dark and intent, his shoulders tense, and half rose from her chair, her hand extended to touch him.
Reason prevailed; she put down her hand. But the bailiff had turned slightly when she rose, so she could not sit down like an idiot, with no explanation of her sudden movement. She remembered the package on the bureau and crossed in front of him, her skirts brushing his legs. She handed it to him. “Forgive my manners. Did you come for this package? I don’t know why I didn’t just leave it on the kitchen table.”
He looked at her in surprise, as if wondering why he had come at all. “Why, yes, I did,” he said smoothly, then laughed. “What a bumbler I am!” He opened the package and pulled out two letters. “One to you and one to me.”
‘To me?” she asked, accepting the folded sheet with her name clearly written on it.
He nodded and then laughed again, less self-consciously, as he pulled a glove from the package. “And a present from our friend Joel Steinman.”
Susan put down her letter unread and pulled her chair up before the fire and beside the bailiff. “What kind of joke is this?” she asked, grateful that his mood had changed.
He laid the glove across his leg and opened his letter. “No joke, Susan. My chief shepherd lost his left hand in a shearing accident a few years back. I wrote to Joel about it, and now he sends the right glove that he has no use for, every time he buys a new pair.”
“The two of you are so clever,” Susan commented, picking up the glove.
“It’s a small thing, but just what old Ben Rich needed to get himself over the melancholy of it all,” the bailiff explained. He smiled again in that oblique way that she was beginning to recognize as shyness. “I don’t think any old Waterloo shades would rise and haunt me if I fibbed and told the old fellow that Steinman was a war hero. It seemed to help.”
“I think you were all heroes,” she said softly, shy herself now as she returned the glove to his leg.
“Not all,” he said, his voice intense again, with no lilt to it. “Not all,” he repeated, leaning back again. “I could tell you...”
He paused. “Except that I won’t.” He picked up the note from the employment agent, and his face relaxed as he continued reading. “Oh, this is good, Susan. ‘David, here is another glove for Ben Rich from his Jewish Waterloo hero, Steinman the Magnificent.’” He looked at Susan, then back at the letter. “Except that I don’t understand this part,” he commented, holding the paper closer to the fire. ‘“Remember the debt I said I could never pay? Have I paid it now? Let me know what you think. Your Waterloo albatross, Joel.’” he crumpled the letter and overhanded it into the fireplace. “Joel is, at times, inscrutable.”
“Waterloo albatross?” Susan asked. She hitched her chair closer. “I have been wondering how you know Mr. Steinman. And what is this debt? And I wish I knew why he was so keen to send me here, considering that Lady Bushnell is a bit of an ogre,” she grumbled, folding the blue dress and putting it on the bureau.
The bailiff looked up from the little blaze from the burning paper and gave her his full attention. His frown turned into a modest smile, and then a grin that went all the way to his eyes. She gazed back at him, pleased that he was gone from gloomy to elated in so short a time, and unable to resist smiling at him, too. What a good thing that my social class makes me impervious to bailiffs with shady backgrounds, she told herself. All of a sudden she didn’t know what to do with her hands. As David Wiggins continued to smile at her, she put them behind her back. Welshmen are so changeable, she thought. I wonder what is on his mind?
“I’m glad you’re feeling cheerful again, but I am just nosy enough to want to know how you became friends with a Jewish employment agent, and at Waterloo yet? I would not have thought Mr. Steinman to be soldier material. That is, if you don’t mind telling me,” she asked, wondering why it was she had a marked tendency to babble in front of the bailiff.
“Oh my word,” David said, still regarding her with an expression that was beginning to make her stomach feel warm. “I suppose I saved his life, and he decided to become my burden. He swore he would do me a good deed that would fulfill his obligation.”
“And did he?” she asked. “From that letter, he seems to think so. Do you?”
“I think he has,” the bailiff replied after another moment of regard in her general direction. He patted the chair she had vacated. “Sit and I’ll tell you. It’s not a long story.”
She did as he said, thinking about Aunt Louisa and propriety, then tucked her feet up under her to be more comfortable. It would be rude for me to tell him that ladies did not listen to war stories, but who is to say that I am still a lady, anyway? she reasoned. There was nothing proper about having this man in her room, and so late at night, except that it felt right. Somehow, I must learn to trust my own judgment, she told herself.
“It’s a tame enough story, Susan. Joel Steinman was a purchasing agent with the army at Ostend, on the coast,” David began.
“You knew him then?”
He shook his head. “No. Our acquaintance was one of those sudden war things. He and others in the commissary went to Mont St. Jean to witness the battle from its height, so he told me later. The Fifth formed one of the squares on the battle line above the farmhouse called La Haye Sainte.”
“Wheat fields?”
“Yeah,” he said simply, and for a moment his eyes saw something far away. “By late afternoon it was not much of a square, what with Boney’s lovely daughters pounding away, and the chasseurs riding at us when the guns were silent.” He looked at her. “Have you ever been in a situation that you thought would never end?”
She decided it would be fatuous to compare endlessly waiting for her London Season to something as desperate as that battle, so she shook her head.
“It was the longest day of my life, and the shortest,” he said simply. “Time passed so strangely. It was during one of those intervals when the chasseurs were retiring down the hill and our own gunners were running from the protection of our squares back into the firing lines, when someone in the rear decided that we might—just might—be low on ordnance. Some of the non-combatants watching the fight were pressed into service. Joel was one of them.” The bailiff closed his eyes as if to aid his memory. “He leaped off the cart and tugged out two or three boxes of cartridges before we noticed that the chasseurs were returning, and the cart and driver had fled the front lines.”
“So there he stayed and fought?” Susan asked when the bailiff’s silence continued.
He opened his eyes. “No. There he stayed in time for a shell to crash into his arm. It must have been one of the last shells, before the cavalry was on us again. I was the closest man to him not otherwise occupied, or not wounded too seriously, so I ran to help.”
“No wonder he feels under obligation to you. How good that you were quick enough.”
To her surprise, he shook his head. “I was one of two sergeants still alive, and I left my position beside Lord Bushnell.” His voice shook, and his hand knotted into a fist as it rested on the arm of the chair. He looked at her again, as if asking for judgment. “What could I do? My duty was to stay by my commander, and here was this man screaming in agony. I went to him, jerked on a tourniquet, but after the next charge, Lord Bushnell was dead.”
Susan rested her hand on his arm. “What could you have done differently?”
She removed her hand when he looked at it. “I should have let Joel die, and stayed by my commander, as I had done in all battles since Talavera, serving both father and son.”
She watched his face in the gentle glow of the fireplace and lamp. He seemed not so much troubled by what he was saying, as thoughtful. I suppose you have had years to revisit this strange, weird landscape over and over in your mind, she considered. “I’m sure the men of the regiment who survived do not blame you for what happened. How could anyone be everywhere?” she asked.
He touched her hand. “I don’t know why I am telling you this. Susan, as soon as I left Lord Bushnell’s side, he was shot by one of his own men. I had been protecting a coward from his own regiment.”