Chapter Three #2
“Knew of him, ma’am. I was Ninth myself, but the Ninth and the 43rd shared a deal of Spain between them, and a deal of mud along with it.
” He ran his palm down the gelding’s leg and gentled the animal, his eyes on the work and not on her face.
She knew the courtesy of it, a man giving a widow somewhere to put her own eyes.
“Brave to a fault, the captain, by all they said. And sometimes the fault as much as the bravery.”
“That is the kindest honest word anyone has said of him in four years,” Elizabeth said. “Most people choose the bravery or the fault and leave the other off the account entirely.”
“I’ve buried men enough to know they come as a matched pair, ma’am.
The brave lads and the foolish ones are mostly the very same lads.
It is the careful ones who come home to their dinners.
” He set the hoof down. “You’ll forgive me.
I don’t often get the chance to say his name to a body who would care to hear it said. ”
“Say it as often as it pleases you. He has been a captain in a box on my mantelpiece for four years. It will do him a world of good to be a man in a stable yard for the length of an evening.”
That won her a look, and then the ghost of a soldier’s grin, there and gone again. “You talk like the camp, ma’am, begging your pardon for it.”
“I talk like four years of the camp. It does not wash out in one laundering.”
“No, it does not. There is a deal of us walking about England talking like a country we would as soon forget.” He gentled the horse. “They tell one tale of your captain still, ma’am, if you would not take it amiss to hear it.”
“I would like nothing in the world better,” she said.
“There was a powder wagon caught fire at a crossing, the mules screaming in the traces, and every man with sense in his head pulling away from it. Your captain ran the wrong way entirely. Cut the traces, walked the mules clear with the wheels alight behind him, and came out of it with no eyebrows and the better part of one glove gone. Laughed about it for a week after, by what they say.”
“That is Thomas entire,” Elizabeth said, and had to stop a moment over it. “He could never once pass a fire without running into the heart of it. It was the best of him and the worst, and at the last I think there was not much else left over.”
“Aye.” Briggs gentled the horse, though the animal no longer needed it. “In the end, ma’am, by the little I know of it, I would say it was the whole of him and all.”
“Were you there?” she asked. “When he fell?”
“No, ma’am. The Ninth was three miles off and thankful for it that day, by what reached us after.” He kept his eyes on the gelding. “I’ll not hand you a soldier’s tale and call it a fact. I don’t know the how of it, and the men who do are thin on the ground, or gone quiet, or both at once.”
“Every man I have ever asked has gone quiet on the how of it.” She heard her own voice go careful at the edges. “Four years, and not one of them will give me more than that he was brave. A brave death is a curtain people draw across the part they would sooner not describe to a widow.”
“It is meant as a kindness, ma’am, near always. The manner of a man’s dying is rarely the piece his widow is thought to want kept by her.”
“I am not most widows, Mr Briggs. I have laid out the dead with these two hands. I can bear the how of a thing. It is the curtain I have never learnt to bear.”
He weighed her for a moment. “Then you have come to the wrong county for plain answers, and I’ll tell you that much kindly. Up here a thing gets kept. It does not get told. You’ll have marked that already, I expect.”
“I am marking it by the hour,” she said.
“You mark a great deal, ma’am, for a governess, if you’ll let me say it.”
“It is the one wage they cannot dock me, Mr Briggs. Noticing costs a widow nothing, and it has kept me alive where the pay ran out.” She let the yard fill a silence for her, and then made the sort of talk meant to look as though it went nowhere.
“You would have known the other names, then. Holbrook. Renwick.”
“Major Renwick.” A shadow went over Briggs and left him plainer than before. “Aye. There is a man could stand himself between two friends and have them both served up for his breakfast. I would not have looked to hear that name spoken up in this corner of the country.”
“Is he the sort of man one hears of, in the end?” Elizabeth asked.
“He is the sort who arranges to be heard, ma’am, and arranges to be the last man talking when he is.
Keep clear of him, should he ever come round this way.
He collects a body’s troubles and lays them by against the day they will fetch him the best price.
” Briggs straightened from the horse’s leg.
“There. I have gone and frightened you, and you only stepped out for the air.”
“I have been frightened by professional men, Mr Briggs. An under-steward with a kind voice will have to try a great deal harder than that.” She let her eyes go to the house, to the lit windows, to the one room she knew was kept too warm against the night.
“May I put you a question a servant ought not to be asked? You are free to decline it, and I shall think no less of you.”
“You may put it. I have a long and honourable history of saying the wrong thing, ma’am. One more will not spoil the record.”
“His Grace. The fires, the fine tea, a piano tuned for nobody, the east room with its hearth kept burning all night. And now myself, engaged inside the hour and lodged like a guest in the house. Why does the man take such care of people he is not obliged to?”
Briggs was quiet a good while, gentling a horse that had long since settled. When he spoke, he chose the words the way a careful man crosses a stream, setting his weight on one stone before he trusts the next.
“His Grace has a conscience, ma’am. That will be the whole size of it, near enough.
” He laid it down gently, the way a man sets down a load he believes will ease the one beside him.
“Men die under a commander. Good men, brave ones, the sort that go forward when forward is the wrong way to be going. He remembers every last one of them, and there is not a thing on earth to be done for the dead, so a man like him does it instead for the living they leave behind. Your husband was his to lose, ma’am.
You are what was left. He will provision you to the end of your days and never once put a word to the why of it, for the why of it is a grave he stood over and helped to fill in. ”
“That makes a great deal of sense.” Her voice came out a good deal steadier than the inside of her.
The thing fit. The fine tea, the carefully tended fire, the guest chamber offered to a governess for a single night: all of it looked like the reckoning of a guilty man squaring an account he could never settle with the dead.
To be one line in his ledger, marked Mercer and paid down in firewood, was a colder comfort than she had bargained on, and she took it anyway, because the cold reading was the one she could afford to keep.
“More sense than anything has made since I came here.”
“It is no shame in him, ma’am, if that is where your worry lies. A conscience is the better half of a…”
Briggs stopped where he stood.
Elizabeth followed the line of his look. The Duke of Ravensmere stood at the corner of the stable wall, a dozen feet off, and he had been there long enough to see the two of them bent close over the gelding’s flank, her head near the under-steward’s.
He looked first at Briggs, then at her, then at the narrow space between them. For the half second before he mastered himself, there was nothing ducal in his face at all.
He had not been quite quick enough.