Chapter 11 #2
"It is also noble work, done well, by somebody who is good at it." He let that sit a moment. "I would not stop, if I were you. Whatever they tell you about it. You are helping people, and I do not see that there is anything in that for you to be ashamed of."
Something in her chest, warm and unguarded, made her look away first.
"You should not say things like that," she said, though there was no real reproach in it.
"Why not?"
"Because I am not entirely certain what to do with them."
He laughed at that — quiet, real, the sound of it settling easily into the still garden air — and after a moment, despite herself, so did she.
It was as the laugh faded that she noticed the heap.
It sat along the base of the far wall, well clear of anything growing — cut briar and bindweed and the long white roots of ground elder, all of it pulled and stacked and left to dry rather than turned back into the bed.
Somebody had gone through it since, too.
The elder had been picked out and put in a separate pile of its own.
"You have done as well with what came out," she said, "as with what stayed in. Which is the harder half, and nobody ever gets credit for it."
"I followed your instructions." He said it plainly, though there was something almost sheepish in it.
"Let us have a look at the rest of the garden, then. I should like to see how faithfully you have followed them."
They crossed the garden together, and Amelia knelt beside the flowerbed, running her fingers lightly along a stem, checking the depth of the staking, the spacing, the way the soil had been worked round the base without disturbing the roots.
It was good work. Careful. She said as much, and something in his posture eased at the hearing of it.
"You take this seriously," she said, glancing up at him. "More seriously than most men would, for something they cannot eat and cannot sell."
"I take most things seriously that I have agreed to do." He crouched beside her, forearms resting on his knees. "Strength is a fine thing. It builds walls. It gets a roof back over a house that has none. But I have come to think it is not, by itself, what makes anything actually grow."
Amelia sat back on her heels and considered that.
"I agree with you," she said. "As far as it goes.
Strength matters. Discipline matters. Even love, whatever anyone means by it, matters.
" She rose, brushing the soil from her hands, and looked round at the poppies further along the flowerbed, their green shoots trembling faintly in the night air.
"But if you ask me what matters most — for anything that hopes to actually live, and not merely survive — it is freedom. "
Benjamin tilted his head. "Freedom?"
"You can water a flower every day. Speak to it.
Shelter it from the sun and the frost both.
" She touched one of the taller stems, her fingers light against the leaves.
"But if you plant it too close to the stone, or press the soil too tightly round its roots, it will not matter how well you tend it. It will suffocate all the same."
Her voice softened, though the edge beneath it did not.
"Everything needs space to grow. Even people."
Benjamin said nothing for a long moment, only looked at her — not, she thought, the way most men looked at a young woman standing alone with them in a garden at night, but the way a man looks at something he had not expected to find and was still working out how to hold.
"I enjoyed speaking with you tonight, Captain Sterling," she said at last, with a faint smile that did not quite reach the seriousness still sitting behind her eyes. "I always do."
Then, before he could answer, she turned, her skirt catching the breeze as she made her way back toward the gap in the fence, the pale shape of her slipping into the dark hedges and gone.
◆◆◆
Benjamin woke to full daylight and the sound of hammers already at work below.
He was on his feet before the fact had properly settled — later than he had meant to sleep by a wide margin, the sun already well clear of the trees, the workers already at their posts without him standing among them.
He dressed in under a minute and went down the stairs two at a time, jaw tight with something close to shame.
If you wake with the sun, you have already failed the day. The old voice had never entirely left him, and this morning it had cause.
He went out through the back door first, the watering can still sitting where he had left it, and crossed to the roses in three long strides.
He gave them what water they wanted — quick, efficient, no ceremony to it this morning — and only then let his eyes move to the gap in the fence a few yards further on.
It stood exactly as it had the night before. Open. Unhidden.
He crouched, and drew a low tangle of ivy across the worst of it, not enough to conceal that a gap existed at all — a man walking the line would still see it plainly — but enough that it no longer stood out quite so clearly to anyone glancing this way from a distance.
He told himself it was only tidiness. He did not entirely believe himself.
He straightened, looked once toward the roofline of Russell Hall where the men were already moving against the sky, and then down at the roses.
"I will grant you as much freedom as I can," he said, low, half to himself and half to the flowers, and did not examine the words too closely before he turned and went to work.
He came out into the yard already reaching for a hammer, and worked through the first hour faster than the work strictly required, driving nails with more force than was needed, correcting himself twice for it and doing it again anyway. Nobody remarked on his lateness. That, somehow, made it worse.
He had just set a beam true when Jacob came up beside him, hesitating at the edge of his focus.
"Captain. May I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Do they have good doctors in the army? Proper ones, I mean."
"The best there are." Benjamin did not look up from the beam. "Men who have spent their lives closing wounds, rather than reading about them in a book. There is no better training for it than a field full of dying men who need saving quickly or not at all."
"Do you think — if I enlisted — they might help with my mother's illness?"
Benjamin set the hammer down and gave him his full attention.
"Ordinarily, no," he said. "They will not trouble themselves. You are an asset to them. An instrument of warfare, kept alive and fed because a live soldier is worth more than a dead one. What happens to your family is not their concern, and they will not pretend otherwise."
Jacob's face fell.
"That is fair enough, I suppose," he said quietly. "Why would they care."
"But I care." Benjamin said it plainly, without softening it into sentiment. "And the best men I have ever known are inside those training camps right now. They will care too — but they need the right push, from someone they already respect. I can be that push."
Jacob's eyes lit. "You mean—"
"How sick is she," Benjamin cut in. "Your mother. What is her condition?"
The boy's excitement dimmed into something more careful. "Tired, all the time. Weak. We tried Lady Amelia's salves — she was good enough to send some down — but nothing has helped much. We do not know what it is."
"What is your own assessment? Is it critical?"
"I hope not." Jacob's throat worked. "I cannot think about losing her, sir."
Benjamin looked at him for a long moment.
"You should—" he started, and then stopped himself entirely, the rest of the sentence swallowed before it could do any harm. He shook his head once. "Never mind that. If you still wish to go, once the work here is finished, I will see to it the right men hear your story."
"Thank you, Captain."
"But if she takes a turn for the worse before then," Benjamin went on, "you will tell me. I will take her to London myself."
Jacob's eyes widened. "No, sir — you do not have to do that—"
"If she is half as strong as you," Benjamin said, cutting him off a second time, "she will not need my help at all."
"She is stronger than me."
"Good." Something eased slightly in Benjamin's face. "Then we have an understanding."
"Yes, sir." Jacob hesitated. "Though I have nothing to offer you in return. I could work without pay, if that would—"
"That is out of the question." Benjamin considered a moment. "But you can pay me in information, if you like."
"Of course. What do you want to know?"
"Tell me about the Baron. What sort of man is he?"
Jacob thought about it seriously, the way a man weighs an honest answer rather than a quick one.
"He walks proud," he said finally. "Always reminds you of the difference between you and him, even when he does not mean to — it is just in how he stands, how he talks.
Cares a great deal what people think of him.
Rank, wealth, how the estate looks to the county.
All of that matters to him." He paused. "But he is not unkind, underneath it.
My uncle works his land, and he says the Baron forgave a season's rent once, after a bad harvest, and never once mentioned it again — did not want the man thanking him for it in front of others.
And he loves his daughter more than anything living, I would wager.
You can see it plain, even when he is being hard on her.
" Jacob shrugged. "I think he cares more about this place, and the people on it, than he would ever let on.
He is just too proud to show it plainly.
Easier to talk about reputation than to say he is frightened of losing what he has. "
Benjamin was quiet for a moment, turning that over.
"That is useful," he said at last. "Thank you, Jacob."
"That is all?" Jacob managed a small grin. "I feel I have gotten the better end of this bargain, Captain."
"Do not tell the others," Benjamin said, picking his hammer back up. "I have a reputation to maintain as well."