Chapter 12 #2
The Baron, satisfied, guided the conversation elsewhere — the coming assizes, a mutual acquaintance in Reading — and Amelia sat through the rest of it with her cup going cold in her hand, saying what was expected of her and hearing almost none of it, her whole mind fixed on a name she had thought she knew and did not, not really, not at all.
◆◆◆
Jacob had never seen a man move the way Benjamin Sterling moved on a roof.
He watched from below, hammer forgotten in his hand, as the Captain went up the scaffolding two rungs at a time and out onto the exposed beams as though the drop beneath them meant nothing at all — testing each joist with his weight before trusting it fully, quick and sure-footed, correcting his balance without seeming to think about it.
It should have looked reckless. It did not.
It looked like a man who had walked far more dangerous ground than a half-finished roof and had simply never unlearned how to do it well.
By the time Benjamin came back down, sweat-dark through his shirt, Jacob had abandoned any pretense of working and was simply standing there watching.
"Have you fought in a war, sir?"
Thomas, coiling a length of rope nearby, snorted. "With the way he climbed that roof, lad, I would wager a great deal more than that."
Benjamin glanced up at the ridge line, still catching his breath. "I could not let you go up there if I had not gone myself first, to be certain it would hold. That is how I was taught to do things."
He sat down on an overturned crate near the fire they had going for their midday tea, and Jacob, hesitating only a moment, sat near him.
"I saw a carriage this morning, on my way here," Jacob said, more to have something to say than anything else. "Black. Ornate. Cost more than my whole house put together, I would wager. Stopped at Whitfield Manor. Someone important, I expect."
Something flickered briefly across Benjamin's face — there and gone before Jacob could name it.
"Thank you for telling me."
"It is my duty, after all." Jacob said it with mock solemnity, and Benjamin laughed, a real one, low and unguarded.
"Is that so?"
"Someone has to keep our Captain informed."
"Then I am well served." Benjamin took the mug of water Thomas passed him and drank half of it before he spoke again. "You asked about war."
Jacob straightened.
"What you hear of it and what it actually is are rarely the same thing," Benjamin said.
"I have been on a great many missions — not always open war, more often the smaller, quieter sort of work.
And I can tell you this much for certain: the men who mattered most in those groups were never the fastest, or the strongest, or the ones who could climb highest or run longest. Every one of those things can be trained into a man in a matter of months.
" He turned the mug slowly in his hands.
"The men who mattered were the ones who would die for the man beside them without a moment's hesitation, and never once make him feel the debt of it afterward.
War is a matter of character, Jacob. Not strength.
Remember that, whatever else you forget. "
Thomas nodded slowly, setting the coiled rope aside.
"I would go so far as to say that holds true for a great deal more than war, Captain.
" He wiped his hands on his trousers. "I try to tell my own boy something of the sort, now and again.
He is at the age where he thinks only of who can throw a punch hardest and who can outrun who down the lane.
Ordinary enough, at his years." He looked at Benjamin with something thoughtful in his expression.
"You seem to have outgrown that thinking a good deal faster than most men manage.
Though I imagine you did not exactly have an ordinary life to grow up in. "
Something quiet passed behind Benjamin's eyes.
"My life has been far from ordinary," he said simply, and did not elaborate, and Thomas, wisely, did not press him for more.
The sun had climbed high and hard by then, beating down without mercy on the scaffolding and the bare stone, and Benjamin looked up at it and set his mug down.
"That is enough for today," he said. "You have done what was needed and more. Go home, all of you. It is too hot to keep on."
Jacob straightened at once. "I can still work, sir, under the sun or not—"
"Never decline a courtesy given in good will, lad.
" Thomas clapped him on the shoulder before Benjamin could answer.
"And besides — I am certain the Captain will agree that one of the most valuable lessons a man can learn is when to pick his battles.
Nobody yet has won a fight against the blazing sun, and I do not intend for us to be the first fools who try. "
Benjamin smiled, something proud and easy in it. "I could not have put it better myself."
The men began gathering their tools, calling their goodbyes across the yard, and as Jacob turned to go, Thomas lingered a moment behind the rest, looking back at Benjamin.
"Thank you," he said. "You are the first man in my years of this work who has treated us as equals rather than hands to be hired."
"We all bleed the same, when we are cut." Benjamin said it plainly, without any weight put on it at all, though it settled somewhere in Jacob's chest all the same. "See that Jacob gets home safely. And that he is back here tomorrow morning, in one piece."
Thomas grinned, and clapped Jacob on the back hard enough to stagger him.
"I will see to it, Captain."
And with that, the two of them turned and started down the drive together, the sound of the workers' voices fading slowly behind them into the hot, still afternoon.
◆◆◆
Somerset found Harrington by the window of the drawing room they had been given before dinner, watching the last of the light go out of the sky over the eastern fields.
"You did not want to call on him today," Somerset said. "I confess I do not entirely follow your reasoning."
"If we went to him today, unannounced, he would know within the hour that we had come looking.
" Harrington did not turn from the window.
"A man like that does not stay hidden for twenty years by being careless.
He would understand exactly what our visit meant, and by morning he would be gone — vanished as thoroughly as he vanished the first time, and we would have spent our one advantage for nothing but the satisfaction of having asked him a question to his face.
" He turned at last. "Someone has protected that boy very effectively for a very long time.
I do not intend to lose him a second time through impatience. "
"Then how do we proceed?"