Chapter Thirteen
“I leave in the morning.”
Julian stood in the doorway of the study, impeccably dressed as always. Dominic looked up from the estate papers he had been using as a barricade against thought, and found his friend watching him with an expression stripped of its customary ease.
“Safe travels,” Dominic said with measured civility. “I trust the roads will prove passable.”
“Don’t do that.” Julian stepped inside and shut the door with deliberate care. “Do not put on your ducal voice with me. Not now.”
“I have not the faintest notion of what you mean.”
“You know perfectly well.” Julian crossed to the window and stood for a moment, gazing out upon the grey afternoon. When he turned back, the charm had fallen from his face, leaving something Dominic seldom saw there—earnestness, stark and unguarded.
“I came here because I feared for you,” Julian said.
“I expected to find you drowning. Instead, I found you half-rescued. And now I watch you strike out again for deeper waters, and I cannot—” He broke off, dragging a hand through his hair.
“Dom, listen. I am about to say something you will despise. You must hear it nonetheless.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened. “Julian—”
“You are being a coward.”
The word struck like a blow. Dominic’s hands curled into fists upon the desk, and for a moment the old fury surged—the cold, defensive rage that had held the world at arm’s length for four long years.
“Do not,” he said quietly.
“A coward,” Julian repeated, unflinching.
“Not in war. Never that—you were the bravest man I knew in Spain, and I would challenge any man who dared suggest otherwise. But in this. In her. In that boy upstairs who looks at you as though you hung the very stars, and the woman down the hall who loves you. In this, you are a coward. And if William stood here now, he would say the same.”
“Do not bring William into this.”
“William is already here. He is the reason Thomas is under your roof. He is the reason you cannot meet that boy’s eyes without drowning in guilt. And he is the reason you deny yourself what stands plainly before you.”
Dominic rose abruptly, his chair scraping harshly against the floor. “You do not know what you are saying.”
“I know that William Harding possessed the most generous soul a man could have, and if he could see you now—rigid, miserable, turning away the two people who love you most—he would seize you by the collar and shake you senseless.” Julian’s voice faltered.
“I know it, because it is precisely what I wish to do—and I am but a poor shadow of the man he was.”
Silence fell, thick and suffocating. Dominic stood behind his desk, breathing hard, his entire frame taut with the effort of holding himself together.
“What would you have me do?” The words emerged raw, fractured. “What is it you want of me, Julian?”
“I want you to tell her the truth. All of it. The part you have never spoken aloud. The part that visits you in the small hours, when no one sees.”
Dominic’s blood ran cold. “How do you know I have not—”
“Because I know you. You reveal just enough to seem honest, while never allowing yourself true vulnerability. You told her of William. Of your hesitation. Of your guilt. But not of the sounds, did you? The ones that return when you close your eyes. Not of the dreams—the ones in which you might save them, if only you moved more swiftly. And not of the letters.”
The room seemed to tilt. Dominic’s hand tightened on the edge of the desk.
“What letters?” he asked, though the words scarcely rose above a whisper.
“The letters you write. To the families of the fallen.” Julian’s gaze burned. “Do not look so astonished—I saw them two years ago, the last time you allowed me past your door. You write each year, upon the anniversary. One-and-twenty letters. And you send none of them.”
Dominic closed his eyes. The secret—one of many, and among the heaviest—lay exposed between them like a wound laid bare.
“I cannot send them,” he said. “What would I write? That their husbands died because I faltered? That their sons never came home because I was not strong enough?”
“You would write that you remember them. That their sacrifice endures. That there is a man who still carries their names.” Julian crossed the room and seized Dominic’s shoulder—hard, as he once had before battle, when fear pressed too close to be borne.
“But that is not the point. You carry all of this alone. You always have. And there is a woman in this house strong enough to help you bear it—if only you would permit it.”
“She has endured enough. Her own losses—”
“Are hers to reckon. Not yours.” Julian released him.
“Tell her, Dom. Tell her everything. Not because she will mend you—she cannot, nor should she—but because this solitary burden is destroying you, and she deserves to know the man she is falling in love with. All of him. Not merely the fragments you deem acceptable.”
Dominic could not speak. His throat closed, his vision blurred, his entire body trembling beneath the force of emotions long suppressed.
Julian stepped back. “I shall say my goodbyes to Thomas and Miss Weston this evening. Then, in the morning, I will go, and you will be alone with them once more. What you make of that is yours to decide.” He paused at the door.
“But for goodness sake, Dom—choose the living over the dead. Only this once.”
The door shut softly behind him.
Dominic stood alone in the lamplight, shaking.
***
Julian departed the following morning in a flurry of warmth and noise, as was ever his way.
He embraced Thomas—who had formed a swift and ardent attachment to the golden-haired lord—and promised to return bearing a book upon foxes.
He kissed Mrs Potter’s hand, setting her to blush like a girl newly come out.
He clasped Graves’s hand with genuine respect and praised the excellence of the game pie to the staff.
And he took Lorraine’s hand, holding it a moment longer than courtesy required, his gaze fixed upon her with an expression entirely devoid of flirtation—sincere, steady.
“Take care of them, Miss Weston,” he said softly. “Both of them. They have greater need of you than they yet perceive.”
“My lord—”
“Julian. If Dom may be Dominic, I insist upon being Julian.” He released her hand with a grin, his charm snapping back into place as though it had never been absent. “I expect an invitation to the wedding.”
“There is no—”
But he was already out the door, laughing over his shoulder as he mounted the carriage, his voice trailing behind him as the wheels crunched over the gravel drive.
Dominic watched from the entrance hall, one hand braced against the doorframe, and felt the house settle into silence around him—the familiar, pressing quiet of Rovewood without Julian’s irrepressible presence.
The silence that had once felt like safety now felt like suffocation.
***
He found her in the library.
Of course she was in the library. It was half past eleven, and Lorraine Weston sat in his chair—his sanctuary—wrapped in a grey shawl over a simple white nightgown, reading by the fire’s glow, her auburn hair unbound about her shoulders.
The house still held the faint echo of morning’s departure—the residual hush left in the wake of Julian’s absence.
She looked up when he entered. Her eyes—grey-green in the low light, deepening toward blue where the firelight touched them—widened slightly, then settled into something calm and expectant.
As though she had been waiting.
Perhaps she had.
“I must tell you something,” he said from the doorway. His voice sounded strange to his own ears—thin, unsteady, nothing like the controlled instrument he ordinarily wielded. “And you must hear it without… without attempting to mend it. Can you do that?”
She set aside her book. “Yes.”
He crossed the room and took the opposite chair—not so near as to touch her, yet near enough to see her face clearly in the firelight. Near enough that she could see his.
“You know of the ambush,” he began. “I told you—in this room, weeks ago. Of the hesitation. Of William. Of the men who died.”
“Yes.”
“I did not tell you everything.”
She did not speak. She simply waited, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze steady upon his face.
Dominic drew in a breath that burned like swallowed glass.
“It was October. The twenty-third. Four years ago.” His voice flattened, distant—the tone of a man reciting a report.
It was the only way he could force the words free.
“We received intelligence of an enemy position near the San Cristóbal fort. My commanding officer ordered a night reconnaissance. I was to lead two-and-thirty men into the ravine to assess their strength.”
He paused. The fire gave a soft crackle. Lorraine did not move.
“I knew something was amiss. The intelligence felt… wrong. Too convenient. Too neat. I said as much, and was told I erred on the side of caution—that the reports had been corroborated. I was ordered to proceed.”
“And you obeyed.”
“I obeyed. Because that is what soldiers do—even when instinct tells them they walk into a trap.” He leaned forward, bracing his elbows upon his knees, his gaze fixed upon his scarred hands.
“We set out at midnight. No moon. The ravine was narrow—scarcely wide enough for three men abreast. I placed William on the left flank. Took the lead myself. Standard formation.”
“Dominic.” Her voice was soft as breath. “You need not—”
“I do.” He swallowed hard. “I must. I have never—” His voice faltered. “I have never told anyone the whole of it. Not Julian. Not the physicians. Not the officers who wrote the official report. I have carried it alone for four years, and Julian is right—it is killing me. So please. Let me finish.”
Silence. Then, softly: “I am listening.”
He closed his eyes, and the darkness behind them became the darkness of the ravine.