Chapter Six
“No. No—hold the line—hold the line—”
Dominic woke with William’s name on his lips and the taste of gunpowder in his throat.
For a moment, he did not know where he was.
The darkness pressed in, thick and absolute, and he was back in the ravine—the shouting, the musket fire, the heat of blood soaking through his coat.
William’s weight in his arms. His mouth moving, words lost to the din.
The sickening, metallic scent of it all.
Take care of him. Promise me.
He lurched upright, gasping, his hand striking out blindly for something solid. His fingers closed around the candlestick. Cold metal. Real.
Here.
Yorkshire, not Spain. Rovewood Hall, not Badajoz.
He was home. He was safe.
He was alone.
The nightmare clung to him as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, head bowed, waiting for his pulse to steady. Four years, and still the dreams came. Four years, and still he woke reaching for men who were long since dead.
The physicians had assured him it would lessen with time. That such disturbances were temporary. That the mind, like the body, might recover if given sufficient rest. They spoke of time as though it were a remedy, as though grief and guilt might be eased by the mere passing of days.
They had not accounted for wounds that did not mend.
Dominic had ceased to expect peace somewhere in the darkness of that Spanish ravine. He had learned, instead, to endure.
He reached for his pocket watch on the nightstand and tilted it toward the faint moonlight filtering through the curtains.
Half past two. He had slept for perhaps three hours—longer than usual, which meant the nightmare had had more time to build, to elaborate, to show him new variations on the same terrible theme.
Dominic rose at once, as though he might outrun the image. He dragged on his dressing gown and thrust his feet into slippers. Sleep would not return—not tonight. It never did, once the dreams had him.
The whisky would be waiting.
It always was.
He hesitated. Lately, he had begun to notice things—the level in the decanter falling faster than it ought, Graves’s quiet watchfulness, Mrs Potter’s disapproving silence. He was not yet lost to it. Not yet.
The library, then.
Books demanded nothing.
He took up a candle and stepped into the corridor.
***
Rovewood Hall at night was a different creature. The shadows lay deeper, the silence heavier, the past pressing close from every portrait and panel. He had once known these corridors intimately—had raced through them as a boy, unthinking, unafraid.
Now he moved through them like a stranger, a ghost haunting his own inheritance.
The library stood at the far end of the east wing. He pushed open the door, expecting darkness.
He found light.
A fire burned low upon the hearth. A lamp glowed beside the leather armchair—his armchair—casting a warm circle upon the floor.
And within that circle sat Miss Weston.
She was curled into the chair, a book resting open in her lap, a shawl drawn about her shoulders. Her hair had come loose, falling in soft waves that caught the firelight. One bare foot was tucked beneath her, the other just visible beneath the hem of her gown. There was ink upon her hand.
She looked, Dominic thought with a jolt he did not examine, as though she belonged.
“Your Grace.” She started, setting aside her book, reaching instinctively for her slippers. “Forgive me, I did not expect—”
“Do not rise.” The words came too quickly. He forced himself to soften them. “Pray do not trouble yourself. I merely—could not sleep.”
She settled again, though she remained watchful. “Nor could I, it seems. I hope I am not intruding. Mrs Potter informed me the library was open to the household in the evenings.”
“It is. You are not intruding.” He stepped further into the room, conscious of his disordered state—his uncombed hair, his rumpled clothes, the fatigue he could not conceal. “I did not expect to find it occupied at this hour.”
“I often read late.” She glanced down at the volume in her lap. “It quiets the mind. When it refuses to be quiet of its own accord.”
He remembered her voice in the darkness, that night of Thomas’s nightmare. Dreams can be very cruel. They bring back what we have lost, and make us lose it all over again. He had stood in the shadows and heard her say it, and had recognised the truth of it in his own bones.
“What are you reading?” he asked, partly because he was curious and partly because he needed something to say that wasn’t why are you sitting in my chair looking like you belong there or how do you know what it’s like when the quiet is too loud.
She turned the book slightly. “Marmion. Sir Walter Scott. I could not resist it.”
“You care for poetry?”
“I care for language, Your Grace. Especially when it is well employed.” A faint smile touched her lips. “My father used to read aloud in the evenings. Scott, Byron, Wordsworth. He believed such things improved the spirit.”
Dominic moved toward the sideboard, where a decanter of brandy stood. He poured two glasses before considering the impropriety.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I did not mean to assume—”
“Yes.” The answer came swiftly, almost before he had finished. “Thank you.”
He handed her the glass and took the opposite chair—the less comfortable one, seldom used. The leather was cold. He welcomed it.
“Your father,” he said, after a moment. “A literary man?”
“A country gentleman with literary inclinations.” She sipped the brandy, her appreciation evident. “We had a small estate in Hampshire. Books were his chief indulgence. My mother despaired of it.” A shadow passed over her expression. “She died when I was twelve. He followed some years later.”
“I am sorry.”
“Do not be.” She shook her head lightly. “I am grateful for the years I had with him. That is more than many can say.”
Dominic thought of his own father—cold, distant, perpetually disappointed in a son who never seemed to meet the measure set before him. The old Duke had never known how to love anything except the estate, and Dominic had spent most of his childhood striving for an approval that was never offered.
“Indeed,” he said quietly.
She studied him over the rim of her glass, and he felt, not for the first time, that she saw more than was comfortable.
“May I ask you something, Your Grace?”
“You may ask. I make no promise to answer.”
A faint curve of her mouth. “That seems fair.” She drew the shawl more closely about her shoulders. “Yesterday morning. With Thomas. Why did you come?”
He had expected questions of a different sort—of war, of William, of the past he refused to name. This—simple, direct—caught him unprepared.
“I heard him,” he said. “That night. The nightmare.”
“I know. I felt you watching from the doorway.”
Of course she did.
“I wished to go to him.” The words came with difficulty. “I stood there, and I wished to go to him—and I could not.” He drew a breath. “I thought that, in daylight, it might be… easier.”
“Was it?”
“No.” A short, humourless laugh escaped him. “It was intolerable. He looked at me as though I might harm him. I could think of nothing to say beyond kestrels.”
“The kestrels were well chosen,” she said gently. “You spoke to him of something he loves. That is more than most would bother to do.”
“It was not enough.”
“It was a beginning.” She leaned forward slightly, the firelight catching in her hair, in the shifting blue-green of her eyes. “Your Grace, may I speak plainly?”
“You appear to do so whether permitted or not.”
“True.” That brief, bright smile—gone almost at once.
“Thomas is afraid of you. Not because you have been unkind—you have not—but because you are absent. To him, you are a shadow in the corridor. A closed door. He does not understand you, and so he has made you into something to be feared. Children do that.”
The words settled, heavy with truth.
“I do not know how to be what he requires,” Dominic said quietly. “I cannot look at him without seeing—” He broke off, the words catching.
“His father.”
He closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“Tell me about him.” Her voice softened, inviting rather than pressing. “Not the battle. Not the end. Tell me who he was.”
For a long moment, Dominic said nothing. The fire shifted. The wind pressed faintly at the windows. And she waited.
“He was my friend,” he said at last. “My closest friend, in Spain. We rose through the ranks at much the same time—he with the infantry, I with the rifles—but we were often thrown together. He had the most appalling laugh…” The corner of his mouth moved, almost against his will.
“The men used to wager upon what would set him off.”
“And what did?”
“Anything. Everything. He found amusement where the rest of us found none. Even in the worst of it… he would laugh.” Dominic’s gaze fixed upon the fire. “He was the best of us. And I got him killed.”
The words fell between them, stark and unadorned. He had never said them aloud before. Had carried them inside him for four years, a stone in his chest, and now they sat between him and this woman like an offering or a confession.
“You led an ambush,” Lorraine said quietly. “Mrs Potter told me something of it, though she knew little of the particulars.”
“I hesitated.” His voice roughened. “When the firing began—when it all came apart—I froze. A few seconds only, but enough. By the time I acted…” He exhaled. “Men were already dying.” He looked at her then. “If I had moved sooner—”
“You cannot know what might have been,” she said. “You never will.”
“I know what was. I know he died in my arms, asking me to care for his son. And I know I have failed that charge every day since Thomas came under my roof.”
“Then do not fail him tomorrow.”
He stared at her. “I beg your pardon?”
“Begin again.” Her gaze did not waver. “I do not pretend it is simple. But the child is here. He needs you—not the man you think you ought to be, but the man who stands before me now. Present. Trying.”
“And if that is not enough?”
“What if it is?” She set aside her glass and rose. The firelight outlined her, lending her a quiet intensity that held him fast. “Children do not require perfection, Your Grace. Only constancy. Only the knowledge that someone will come when they call.”
He rose as well, though he did not recall deciding to do so. They stood facing one another, the hearth between them.
“You make it sound straightforward.”
“It is not. Nothing worth having ever is.” A faint smile touched her lips. “But you came to breakfast. That mattered. Tomorrow, you might read to him. Or walk with him in the garden. Small things. They amount to more than you think.”
“You speak from experience.”
“I speak from determination.” The smile lingered, just a moment longer. “I am unwilling to believe that anyone is beyond mending. It may be a flaw.”
He almost smiled. He felt it—unexpected, unfamiliar—and checked it at once.
But she noticed. Of course she noticed. Her gaze lingered a fraction too long, and something in her expression softened—quiet, unguarded, and gone again before he could be certain of it.
“You should allow yourself that more often,” she said softly. “The smile. It becomes you.”
“I have had little cause to smile. These past years.”
“Perhaps that is changing.”
The fire shifted; a log settled, sending a brief shower of sparks upward. And Dominic found himself standing in his library in the small hours, facing a woman who had, in the space of a fortnight, unsettled a solitude he had believed unassailable.
He ought to withdraw. Ought to remember what she was to him, and what he must remain to her.
“It grows late,” he said instead. “You should rest. The boy will expect you early.”
“Yes.” She gathered her book and drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders, though she did not immediately move away. “Your Grace—Dominic—”
His name, spoken thus, struck him like a physical thing.
“Forgive me,” she said at once, colour rising in her cheeks. “That was… ill-judged.”
“No.” His voice was low. “It was not.”
She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she dipped a curtsy—small, almost careless—and turned toward the door.
“Good night, Your Grace.”
“Good night, Miss Weston.”
She paused upon the threshold. “Lorraine,” she said, without looking back. “If we are to work together for Thomas’s sake… You may call me Lorraine.”
And then she was gone.
Dominic remained where he was, the room altered by her absence. The fire burned low. The lamp flickered.
After a time, he crossed to the chair she had occupied and sat. The leather still held a trace of warmth.
“Lorraine,” he said aloud, softly, as though testing the shape of it.
It sat strangely upon his tongue. Like something long forgotten.
He did not return to bed. He remained there as the fire sank to embers and the first pale light of morning crept across the shelves.
And for the first time in many years, he did not dread the coming day.