Chapter 11
She had gone to bed and she had not slept.
It was the heat, she told herself, for about a quarter of an hour, and then she gave that up as unworthy of her and lay looking at the ceiling instead, and after some time she got up and went out onto the balcony again because there was nothing else to be done with a night like that one.
He was still out there.
Not training now. He was down on his knees at the far end of the garden with something small in front of him, working at the ground with his hands, and he stayed down there long enough that she began to wonder whether something was wrong.
Then he rose and went off toward the house and came back with a can, and bent over the same patch of ground again.
Amelia watched him do it twice more.
Then she turned and looked along the east wing to Frederick's window.
Dark.
She stood there rather longer than the decision required, and then she went in and put a shawl over her nightdress and a dress over both, and went down the stairs without a candle.
The fence gap was exactly where Benjamin had described it, half-hidden between an old ash and a stand of overgrown holly, the gap wide enough to slip through sideways if she minded her skirt. She minded her skirt and went through anyway.
The garden was empty.
She stood a moment at the edge of it, listening, and heard nothing but the ordinary sounds of a hot night, and then she went along the wall to the place where he had been kneeling.
She had to crouch to see them properly.
Two roses. Small ones, no more than a foot of growth on either, set well apart from the old stock and staked with two sticks apiece and a length of twine that had been tied with a good deal more care than the job strictly wanted.
The soil around them was dark and finely worked and still damp, and somebody had built up a shallow ring of earth around each one to hold the water where it was wanted.
Amelia put two fingers against the soil.
"You do realize this is becoming a habit."
She came up off her knees so fast she nearly went over sideways, one hand flying out to catch the wall.
"Mr. Sterling! You must stop doing that."
"I have done nothing." He stepped into the moonlight, hands loose at his sides, entirely unbothered. "You are the one who keeps appearing in my garden. I am beginning to wonder if you have taken up residence somewhere in the hedges."
Amelia straightened her shawl, and got her breathing in order, and decided on the version of events she intended to stand by.
"This evening," she said, "at my own gate, you told Frederick that you meant to mend the fence, and that you owed it to me for the instructions and the men."
"I did say that."
"And it occurred to me afterward that you are the only one of us who has kept his half of anything.
" She lifted her chin. "I gave you my word that I would see this garden properly managed, under my own direction, and instead I sent you three pages under a stone like a woman posting a letter she has no intention of following up.
So. Here I am. I am inspecting your garden, as promised.
" A small pause. "Even if it is only the once, and in the dark, and at an hour when nobody sensible inspects anything. "
Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
"Then what do you make of it?"
Amelia turned back to the two small roses, and looked at them properly, and found she had to wait a moment before she said anything at all.
"This is good work."
"I had good instruction."
They stood a moment in the quiet, and Amelia, casting about for something to say that was not simply an admission that she had wanted an excuse to come, found her eyes settling on him properly for the first time.
"The men call you Captain," she said. "Even now. I have wondered about that. It is not common, for men to address their employer by a rank rather than his name."
"It is a habit they have not yet broken, and I have not much minded correcting."
"Were you? A captain, truly?"
"I was. In the army."
"Was." She tilted her head slightly. "You seem far too young to have retired from anything."
"I am aware of it." A faint, rueful edge came into his voice.
"I enlisted younger than most men do. And I had a mentor who used what standing he had to make those years count for more than they ordinarily would — combined with a few honors along the way, it was enough to see me out early.
Most men serve twice as long for half the credit. "
Something lit in her expression. "Then you must be a hero. Tell me one of your heroic actions."
"I wish I could tell you it was as simple as that.
" He was quiet a moment, and whatever had been easy in his face a moment before settled into something more guarded.
"I witnessed a great many things in that uniform.
Took part in some of them. In our country's name, and not always in ways I am proud to own.
Honorable discharge does not mean a man was good.
It generally only means he was good at his work. "
Amelia's expression shifted, the teasing gone out of it entirely.
"I am sorry," she said quietly. "That you had to go through that. I imagine war is nothing like we are taught to believe it is. Noble. Honorable."
"No. It is not." He looked out over the dark garden for a moment before he went on.
"But the men were. I saw more true courage from soldiers of every rank and background than I have seen anywhere since — men who risked what they had, and some who lost it entirely, for no better reason than that the man beside them needed saving.
I do not know that it makes them heroes, not the way a book would have it.
But it made them family. To me, at least."
"That sounds a great deal like heroism to me."
"Perhaps." A small, private smile touched his mouth.
"I have come to think the real heroism is rarely in the medals.
It is in the small things. A man giving up his ration.
Standing watch so another could sleep an hour longer.
That sort of thing does not earn a mention in any dispatch, but it is what actually kept most of us alive. "
"I imagine it is," Amelia said softly.
She studied him a moment longer, something thoughtful behind her eyes.
"You seem to care a great deal for how a garden looks," he said. "The order of it. The shape."
"I care more for what it is worth, if I am honest." She glanced sideways at him.
"A rose is a fine thing to look at. But I have little patience for beauty that serves no other purpose.
What I plant, and what I keep, I keep because it earns its place.
" She hesitated, then added, more quietly, "I make salves.
Tinctures. From what grows here, and from what I have left in my own garden.
I give them to the tenants, when they are hurt or ill and cannot afford a physician from London. "
She said it plainly, bracing slightly, the way she always did, for the response she had come to expect.
Benjamin was quiet for a moment.
"That is not a small thing," he said finally. "You understand that, I hope."
"Most do not think so."
"Most have not watched a man bleed out on frozen ground for want of anything that might have closed the wound.
" His voice had gone lower, steadier, without any theatre in it at all.
"I have. More than once. And I have watched an army surgeon — a man with a diploma and a fine coat and absolute certainty in his own training — refuse to so much as look at a poultice offered by a prisoner, because it did not come from a proper apothecary. "
Amelia turned to face him fully.
"What happened?"
"The prisoner made it anyway. Without asking. Packed it onto a wound the surgeon had already given up on." Benjamin's mouth curved, faint and without humor. "Three days later the man was walking. The surgeon called it luck. I did not think it was luck."
"What was in it?"
"I never learned all of it. Something with willow bark, I think, and something else I could not name — the man who made it would not say more than that, and I did not press him.
" He looked at her, something steady and entirely without irony in his expression.
"But I learned something else that day, which mattered rather more to me than the recipe.
That the people who had spent their whole lives being told their knowledge did not count were often the ones who knew the most worth knowing. "
Amelia did not answer at once.
"Nobody has ever said that to me," she said finally. "Not about what I do. Only that it is unbecoming, or that I ought to leave it to men with proper training."
"I believe people are grateful for what you do."
Amelia looked up.
"I remember seeing you clean that boy's arm after I had finished the stitches," Benjamin said. "And then you put something on it, and the bleeding at the edges stopped inside a few seconds. I have not seen anything work that fast in my life."
"It helps with infection as well. That was rather more the point of it. Comfrey, and—"
"You did it while nobody was looking."
She stopped.
"I caught it out of the corner of my eye," he said. "The mother was at the door and the father was in the front room and every one of them had their backs to you, and you waited for that. You had the jar open before they turned round and it was gone before they turned back."
"I had my reasons."
"I do not doubt it."
Amelia turned the empty glove over in her hands.
"The daughter of a Baron," Benjamin said, "with her hands in soil and salves and another person's blood. In front of the whole village." He said it without any weight at all, as a plain statement of the case against her. "I understand. It is unheard of woman of your station to do this."
"Yes." Her face had gone still. "It is."