Chapter 2
They ushered him inside, through a narrow corridor into a small drawing room. The hearth was already lit against the morning chill. The air smelled of old wood and chamomile.
"Sit down," Mrs. Miller said. "Sit down, sit down—"
"He has only just come through the door, woman."
"He will sit."
Benjamin sat, and she stood in front of him and looked at him for a moment with her hands pressed together in front of her mouth, as though she still could not entirely account for him being in the room. Then she seemed to arrive at a decision.
"Come with me."
"Alice—"
"He will want to see it. Come."
She took his wrist and drew him back up out of the chair and along the passage to the small back room, and there, hanging above the mantel in a plain frame that was clearly not the one it had been made for, was the painting.
Benjamin stopped in the doorway.
Anthony Russell, Duke of Beaumont, standing straight and unsmiling with one hand at his coat. Claire beside him, chin lifted, that faint knowing look about her mouth. And between them, seated, a boy of perhaps seven with his hair combed flat against his will.
The varnish had darkened. The faces beneath it had not.
He looked at it for a long time, and then, slowly, he smiled.
"We saved it," Mrs. Miller said.
"We stole it," said her husband, from behind them.
"Let us be accurate about the thing. When word came what they meant to do — that every stick and stitch of the estate was to be taken up for the Crown — she went into the long gallery and took it off the wall and walked out of the servants' door with it under her skirts. "
"Nobody looks at a housekeeper," Mrs. Miller said serenely.
"All those years, that has been in this house. Under floors. In chimneys. Inside a mattress, one winter." Mr. Miller's voice roughened slightly. "She would not sell it. Not the year we had nothing. Not the year after, either, and that was worse."
"It was not ours to sell."
Benjamin did not take his eyes from his mother's face.
"Thank you," he said. "For keeping it safe."
"Well." Mr. Miller cleared his throat and folded his arms. "You are back now, are you not. Grown, and by the look of you not a man anyone troubles lightly. It should go with you. It is yours. It always was."
"Maybe one day I will take it."
He turned then, and there was something apologetic in it.
"Not yet. I am going to a ruin with no roof and no lock worth the name, and there are men in this country who would like very much to know what I care about and where I keep it.
" He shook his head. "It has been safe here for twenty-three years.
Until I can promise it better, I must ask you to protect it a while longer. "
"We will treasure it, Your Grace."
Benjamin let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"I have told you. I am no Duke."
"You are so."
"Mrs. Miller." He said it gently. "I am a captain. I have been a captain for a long while, and I expect I shall be more of one than I will ever be a duke."
Mrs. Miller looked up at him with her chin set.
"Captain or not," she said, "you are still the small boy we chased round that house at hide-and-seek. You used to get behind the tapestry in the long gallery and stand quite still and be entirely convinced we could not see your boots."
Something moved across his face.
"I do not know that I am my parents' son any longer," he said quietly. "I do not know that I ever will be again."
Nobody answered that immediately.
Mr. Miller came and stood beside him, and they both looked up at the painting.
"They took everything from you," the old man said at last. "Your name. Your house. Your father's name after him, and everything that was to come down to you." He shook his head slowly. "I cannot imagine what has been done to you, Your Grace. I will not pretend I can."
"Thank you," Benjamin said, "for not asking."
He was quiet a moment longer.
"But you have a right to know. Come and sit. I will tell you."
The tea went cold in front of them.
"They kept me at the palace two years," he said. "In a cell. I do not know why so long — I do not think anyone knew what I was for. Then a man came and signed a paper and I was put in a wagon and sent north to a training camp, and an officer read the order out to me at the gate."
"Service for life. That was the wording. Not a sentence, you understand. A courtesy. The Crown had graciously spared the traitor's son and found him a use."
Mrs. Miller made a small sound.
"I was fourteen," Benjamin said.
"A boy," she whispered. "A young boy, growing up in a soldiers' camp. My boy—"
Her eyes had gone wet. Benjamin reached across and took her hand.
"It was not as bad as you are imagining."
"Do not," she said. "Do not do that. You have been doing it since you sat down."
He let that pass, but he did not let go of her hand.
Mr. Miller leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. "Still. That name of yours must have brought you trouble in a place like that. Every day of it."
"Every day."
"Then how did you survive it?" The old man's brow drew down. "How are you sitting in my parlor?"
"I had help," Benjamin said.
He looked into the fire for a moment.
"There was a commander at that camp. Aldric.
" The name came out differently from the rest. "He was not kind.
I want to be clear about that — he was the hardest man I have ever served under and he never once spared me anything.
But when the other boys came for me in the yard, he came into the yard.
And when an officer wanted the traitor's son broken on principle, that officer discovered he had business elsewhere. "
"He protected you."
"He made me worth protecting. There is a difference, and he insisted on it.
" Something almost like fondness crossed Benjamin's face.
"He is a general now. And in all the years I served under him he never once told me I should stay.
He told me the opposite. That the camp was where they had put me, and that a man is not obliged to die where he was put. "
"And he let you go?"
"He arranged it." Benjamin's mouth twitched. "Officially, I was wounded in the field in a manner that has not fully mended, and I have been granted honorable leave on grounds of injury." He spread his hands slightly. "There will be no medals for it. You understand."
Mr. Miller barked a laugh. "Forged, then."
"I would not use that word in front of a magistrate."
"No," the old man agreed, delighted. "No, you would not."
"So." Mrs. Miller had recovered herself somewhat, and was pouring fresh tea nobody had asked for. "What now? Where does a man go, in your position?"
"Ashcombe."
Her hand stopped.
"The Crown took everything," Benjamin said. "The lands. The London house. The tenancies, the plate, the horses, the lot of it — all of it went up for the Treasury." He watched the steam come off the cup. "All but one."
Mr. Miller looked up sharply. "All but one?"
"Russell Hall."
Mrs. Miller set down the pot.
"They left it," Benjamin said. "It came to my mother from her own side, and it was hers, not my father's.
I expect that made it awkward enough on paper that some clerk decided it was easier to leave it than to argue about it.
" He turned the cup a quarter turn. "The Queen's mercy, entered in a ledger somewhere.
A boy of fourteen and a house nobody wanted the trouble of. "
"Her summer house," Mrs. Miller said quietly. "She loved that house."
"She made my father take us there every year. She used to say the great house was a monument and that one was a home." Something moved briefly at the corner of his mouth. "She was right, as it happens."
Mr. Miller shook his head slowly. "Twenty-three years standing empty."
"Twenty-three years with no one in it and nothing spent on it. I do not know the state of it. But I imagine the roof must have gone in places. Floors rotted through. Ivy into the stonework. I shall have to go and see for myself." Benjamin's jaw tightened.
"And then?"
He looked up, and for the first time since he had come through the door there was something hard and bright behind his eyes.
"Then I put a roof back on it."
The fire settled.
"I go there in a fortnight," he said. "I intend to restore that house to what it was.
Every stone of it. And I intend to do it slowly, and openly, and in full view of every man in that county — so that they may all watch a man rebuild his mother's home and decide for themselves what they think about it. "
Mr. Miller studied him for a long moment.
"They will not like that."
"No," Benjamin agreed. "They will not."
"And when the first man asks your name at a gate." The old man said it without any particular weight. "With nobody standing behind you, and it costing you something to answer."
"Then I shall answer accordingly."
"Mm," said Mr. Miller, and did not agree with him, and let it go.
"I will need help," Benjamin continued. "Both of you. And I am afraid the first thing I must ask is that you part for a time. I need someone in London I can trust, and I need Mrs. Miller in Ashcombe, where a house cannot run itself."
Mrs. Miller's hand went still on the pot.
"Part," she said.
"For a time."
"Your Grace, we have not been above a fortnight apart in forty-one years." She said it evenly enough, but the pot did not move. "Not when his mother was dying. Not the winter I had the fever. Forty-one years."
"I know it. I would not ask if there were another way to—"
"She will go," Mr. Miller said.
Mrs. Miller turned and looked at her husband.
"She will go," he said again, to the room rather than to her, "because there is nobody else living who knows how that house runs, and because if she stays here she will spend the whole of it sitting in that chair wondering what he is eating.
" He looked at his wife then. "And I shall be perfectly well, and you know it, and I have no intention of arguing about it in front of the boy. "
Mrs. Miller was quiet a moment.
"You will burn the house down," she said.
"Almost certainly."
"You will not eat properly."
"Not once."
She turned back to the pot and poured the tea nobody had asked for, and her hand was not entirely steady doing it.
"Well," she said. "Then I shall have to come back and see to you, shall I not."
Benjamin set down the cup, and reached inside his coat, and drew out a leather portfolio, worn soft at the corners and tied with a cord that had been retied a great many times.
He held it a moment before he put it into Mr. Miller's hands.
"Everything I have been able to get hold of," he said.
"Copies of what was entered against him, where copies could be had.
Two letters in his own hand that do not say what they were said to say.
The names of four men who sat in that courtroom and are still living.
" He paused. "It is not enough. I know that. It has never once been enough."
Mr. Miller looked down at the portfolio in his lap and did not open it. Beside him, his wife had gone very still.
"What is it you want done with it?"
"There are men in London who could look at that and know within a quarter of an hour whether there is anything in it at all.
Solicitors. One or two clerks who have been about the courts long enough to remember the year.
" Benjamin's mouth flattened. "None of them will see me.
A man with my name walks into an office and the office discovers it is suddenly very busy.
But an old servant, asking a favor on behalf of nobody in particular — that door opens a good deal further than mine ever will. "
"Then I shall knock until it does."
"You will be turned away. Repeatedly, and rudely, and by men who will not trouble themselves to be kind about it."
"I have been turned away by better men than solicitors, Your Grace.
" Mr. Miller's hands closed over the portfolio and stayed there.
"I watched them hang a man I was not permitted to grieve for, and I went back to work the following morning because there was nothing else to be done. I daresay I can stand on a doorstep."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Thank you," Benjamin said.
"Do not thank me yet." Mr. Miller cleared his throat, and shifted the portfolio to one side, and looked up with something dry coming back into his face.
"Though I confess I had hoped, when you said you needed a man in London, that you meant to leave me here in comfortable lodgings with a young and beautiful maid to see to my dinners. "
"Thomas Miller."
"A man may hope."
"I am afraid I am poor company for that particular hope," Benjamin said. "My circle these twenty years has consisted of hardened men in cold places, most of whom had not washed since Tuesday. Beautiful maids were not among the provisions."
Mrs. Miller set down the pot.
"So you have had no woman at all," she said. "In all that time. Not one."
"No." He looked at the half empty cup. "There was never room for it."
"Then perhaps it is time."
"I am five and thirty, Mrs. Miller. I have a ruined house, no name, and a bad knee."
"That was very funny," she said, "and I am not laughing, and you will notice I have not looked away."
He looked at the fire instead.
"I do not know how a man begins that," he said. "Truthfully. I have never seen it done by anybody I trusted."
"No. You have not, because they took away the person who should have taught you that. Your father used to carry your mother's basket round that garden for her, and every man on the staff thought he had lost his senses."
Mr. Miller snorted. "With that jaw and that coat? You will do well enough. Only do not open with my parents were executed for treason. That tends to sour a courtship." He settled back. "Tell them you are a hero. It has always answered for me."
"You told me you were a stable master."
"I told you I was in service to a Duke who prefers battlefields over drawing rooms," said Mr. Miller, with enormous dignity. "The lady drew her own conclusions and I saw no reason to trouble her with corrections."
Mrs. Miller closed her eyes briefly, the way a woman does when she has heard a thing four hundred times.
"You are unbelievable." Then her tone softened as she turned back to Benjamin. "I did not mean dalliances. I meant a family. A home. A future."
Benjamin looked at them both — the last two people alive who had known him before.
"You are my family," he said. "And I intend to protect what is left of it."
She could not answer that at all.
Benjamin stood and adjusted his coat, and paused in the doorway of the little room to look once more down the passage, to where his mother went on looking out of the frame with her chin lifted at nothing.