The Banished Duke
Prologue
February 17, 1850
Rain whispered against the windows in a steady rhythm, the only sound piercing the silence that cloaked the estate. Firelight flickered in the hearth, casting long shadows on the stone walls. Duchess Claire Russell stood alone near the blaze, her delicate frame wrapped in a shawl, eyes fixed on the flames as memories stirred like embers in her chest.
Behind her, soft footsteps broke the stillness.
"When will Father return?"
Claire turned from the fire.
Benjamin stood in the doorway, tall now in a way that still startled her, his shoulders broadening past the frame of childhood. Twelve years old, and already his father's son — the same dark eyes, the same quiet way of watching a room before stepping into it. He was not afraid. He was not a child asking for comfort. He was a boy who had been counting the days.
She crossed the room and put both hands on his shoulders, the way Anthony would have done.
"Soon."
It was a lie she told for him, and perhaps for herself.
Benjamin held her gaze a moment longer than she expected. Then he nodded — once, the way his father always had — and turned back toward the corridor. She listened to his footsteps fade along the passage. He had not believed her. He had only chosen not to press.
Two months, and no word. No letter. Anthony was leading a campaign on the continent and that was the whole of what she knew, because that was his way — silence kept her safer than knowledge, he had always said, and he had never once been persuaded otherwise.
Tonight she would have given a great deal for knowledge.
The knock came a little before eleven.
The man on the step was young and soaked through, and the cloak he was pulling straight bore the insignia of the Crown. He bowed before he spoke.
"Your Grace. Sir Edmund Hamilton. Forgive the hour."
"My husband—"
"I have no news of the Duke himself. I am sorry." He did not come in until she stepped aside for him. "I have been sent ahead of a warrant."
The word went through her like cold water.
"A warrant."
"It will be at your gate by morning. I could not in conscience let it arrive before somebody had told you." Hamilton's jaw worked. "They are using the word treason, Your Grace. I do not know on what evidence and I was not permitted to ask. I know only that it has been signed."
"That is impossible."
"I have said so. It made no difference to anyone." He reached into his coat. "Before he vanished the Duke gave me this. He said it was for your eyes and no others."
The envelope was small and worn soft, sealed with Anthony's signet, creased the way a thing is creased when a man has carried it a long while against his chest.
"Take the boy and go tonight," Hamilton said. "That is the whole of my advice and I am aware it is worth very little."
"I will not run."
"No." Something tired moved across his face. "No, I did not imagine you would."
He bowed again, and went out into the rain, and did not wait to be dismissed.
Claire stood a long time with the letter in her hand before she broke the seal.
My dearest Claire,
I have made a grave mistake — one that shames me more than words can say. Not in honor. Not in duty. But in judgment.
In the months before I left, Earl Harrington came to me as a friend. He spoke of reform, of concerns at court, of men who feared the direction the Crown was taking. I listened. I believed him a patriot speaking honestly to another patriot, and I answered him honestly in return — about the campaign, about the council, about decisions I would not have made in their place.
Every word I gave him in confidence has been turned. My correspondence has been altered. Letters I wrote in trust read, in his hands, as plans of treason. The Countess has sworn before witnesses that I confided to her my intent to betray the Crown.
I was not a traitor, Claire. I was a fool. I believed an honest man's words could not be made into weapons.
I swear to you on our son's name that I never betrayed my country. I only trusted the wrong man.
I write this from a place I dare not name, and I do not know when I may return. But I will. Protect our son. Protect our name. I will come home and I will make this right.
Forever yours,
Anthony
The paper shook. She put her hand flat on the mantel to stop it and it did not stop.
She had been afraid since the knock. She had not been afraid like this. This was the fear of a woman who has just been shown the shape of the thing coming toward her house and has counted, in the same moment, exactly how many people stand between it and her son.
One. And she was standing at the fire in her shawl.
◆◆◆
Benjamin had left his door open a hand's width.
He had gone up when she sent him, and he had not gone to bed, and by the time the voices below had stopped he was sitting on the boards in the dark of the upper passage with his knees drawn up, listening to a house that had gone entirely quiet.
His mother's step came into the hall.
Then she said a name.
"Harrington." It came up the stairwell very clearly, because she had not meant anyone to hear it. "That snake. He will pay for it."
Benjamin did not move.
He did not know the name. He knew the sound of his mother's voice when it had something underneath it, and this was not crying, and it was not the voice she used for servants or for guests or for him. He turned the word over in the dark and put it somewhere, the way a boy does with a thing he does not understand and knows he is not meant to have.
Then the hall went quiet again, and after a while he went to bed.
◆◆◆
He woke to the front door coming off its hinges.
Afterward he could never put it in order. There were boots on the stair, a great many of them, moving fast. There was a lamp in his face and a hand in his hair and then a hand on his arm, and the cold of the passage stones through his nightshirt because nobody had let him find his boots. There was a man's voice above him saying something about the boy that was not addressed to the boy.
He remembered the banister going past his cheek.
He remembered his mother's voice from somewhere below him — not words, only his name, once, the way she said it when he had gone too near the water.
He shouted back. He was quite certain he shouted back, though he could not afterward remember making any sound at all.
Then there was the doorway, and the rain coming in level across the step, and the yard full of horses and lamps and men in the Queen's colors, and his mother being taken across it in front of him with her shawl gone and her hands held.
She turned her head as they put her into the carriage.
She found him across all that light and all those men, and her hand came up — not far, because they had hold of her, but up, reaching out over the yard toward him. Benjamin put his own hand out and there was a great deal of rain and forty feet of wet stone between them and neither of them lowered it.
She said something.
He could not hear it. The horses were going and the men were shouting and the rain was coming down on the roof of the porch above him, and not one sound of it reached him. But he watched her mouth, and he had watched that mouth his whole life, and he knew it the way he knew her step in a passage.
Do not be afraid, my love. All will be well. Mama will keep you safe.
Then the door was shut on her, and the lamps went past, and the carriage turned out of the yard.
Benjamin began to cry.
He did not decide to. It simply arrived, all of it at once, and he stood barefoot on the stones of his own house with his hand still half up in the air and wept in front of thirty men.
The one beside him looked down.
"Men do not weep, boy." He said it without any particular cruelty, which was somehow worse. "I imagine that is one thing your traitor of a father found the time to teach you."
"My father is a hero."
Something moved at the corner of the man's mouth.
"We shall see what he is."
Benjamin dragged his sleeve across his face, once, and put his arm back down at his side.
Then he lifted his head and looked at the man, and went on looking at him, and did not look away first.
Chapter 1
Twenty-Three Years Later — 1873
British Military Encampment, Northern Front
The scent of gunpowder still lingered in the morning mist as Captain Benjamin Russell tightened the buckles on his greatcoat. All those years at this front had dulled the world's colors, but this dawn — quiet and cold — felt final.
Behind him, the canvas flaps of the officer's tent stirred in the breeze. Around him the camp bustled with weary soldiers readying for their next orders. For once, he would not be among them.
He had already packed what little he owned. Maps. Journals. Medals he had never once displayed.
Boots crunched on the frozen ground. He turned to find Sergeant Moor crossing the yard with two younger soldiers in tow, hand already extended.
"Captain Sterling."
Benjamin took the hand. "Russell," he said. "My name is Russell."
Moor did not let go. "I know what your name is, sir. Every man in this camp knows what your name is. But to us, you will always be Captain Sterling."
Benjamin smiled.
"They taught us a maneuver at the depot," Moor went on. "The Sterling maneuver. Named for some colonel dead forty years before I was born. A tidy piece of work on paper and near useless in the field — half the men committed before you know whether the ground will hold." He released Benjamin's hand at last. "You took it apart. You rebuilt it. You made it into something that empties a ridge in under two minutes, and there are men on the other side of the world who go quiet when they hear it named."
He shrugged, as though the conclusion were obvious.
"The name stopped belonging to that colonel a long while ago, sir. It belongs to you. You earned it."
Benjamin was silent for a moment. The mist moved between them.
"That is a kind thing to say," he said finally. "But my father's name was Russell. And I intend to honor it. One way or another."
Something passed across Moor's face. Not disagreement. Understanding — and beneath it, worry.
"If I were in your position, sir," the sergeant said carefully, "I would answer to Sterling out there. Beyond this camp. It would open doors for you." He paused. "Russell will close them."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because I have spent twenty-three years being the other thing," Benjamin said. "No more hiding."
Moor studied him a moment. "Then I hope the country deserves it, sir."
"It does not." Benjamin got his hat. "Sergeant. Before I go. Twenty years, and not one man in this camp ever put my name in a letter or said it in a town."
"No, sir."
"I have never thanked anyone for it. I am not entirely certain it was a kindness." He held out his hand. "But it was done for me, and I know what it cost, and I am thanking you now."
Moor took the hand. "You will think on what I said, sir. About out there."
"I shall take your advice under consideration."
Moor studied him. Then he straightened, and the salute he gave was not the one owed to a departing officer. It was older than that, and it went deeper.
"Then God go with you, Captain Russell."
Corporal Dawes stepped forward, younger, his eyes earnest. "You led when no one else would, sir. Even when they spat on your name."
Benjamin inclined his head. "I did not fight for their opinion," he said. "I fought for the men beside me."
Others gathered as he crossed the yard. Quiet nods. Brief salutes. Handshakes that lasted a second longer than regulation allowed. No fanfare. No ceremony. Just the kind of farewell that mattered.
At the edge of the camp a carriage waited, wheels muddied from the night's rain. The driver, an older man named Hale, wrapped in a wool coat, tipped his hat.
"Where to, Captain?"
"London," Benjamin said. He paused with his hand on the door, eyes moving once across the horizon. The wind carried iron and smoke — a reminder of what he was leaving, and of what still waited for him.
"I am not your captain any longer," he added.
The driver offered a small, reverent smile. "You will always be my captain, sir."
Benjamin climbed in and closed the door. The carriage lurched forward.
◆◆◆
They had crossed at Dover on the evening packet, and by the time the road turned inland the light was long gone. The horses kept their steady pace through the dark. Hale, hunched under his coat on the box, had driven nights enough to know the sound of a wheel finding a rut and the sound of a horse going lame and the sound of a man who has forgotten how to breathe.
He knew this one too.
It came from inside the carriage. Not words. A sound lower than words, dragged out of somewhere below the ribs, and then a second one, sharper, that ended in a name he could not catch.
Hale pulled up.
He was down off the box and had the door open in four strides, and by then the Captain was already awake and sitting forward with his back against the far corner and the knife out of his coat, held low and turned in, the way a man holds a blade he means to use in a space too small to swing it.
Neither of them said anything.
Then Benjamin's hand opened, and the knife went back under his coat, and he pressed the heel of his palm hard against one eye.
"How long was I asleep?"
"Two hours, near enough."
"You should not have stopped."
"Horse wanted the rest," Hale said, which was a lie, and both of them knew it was a lie, and neither of them said so.
He did not ask what it had been. A man did not. If somebody wanted to tell you, he told you, and if he did not, you learned to drive with the sound of it behind your head and you thought about something else.
Benjamin looked out at the black hedgerows for a moment. His shirt was soaked through at the collar and the cold was already finding it.
"I will ride up front," he said.
◆◆◆
The night air was sharp enough to hurt. Benjamin sat with his coat open anyway, letting it take the sweat off him, and for a long while neither man spoke. The lamps threw two weak yellow circles onto the road ahead. Somewhere off to the left a dog was barking at nothing.
"What is in London, then?" Hale asked eventually. "If it is not rude to ask."
"What remains of my family."
Hale's eyebrows went up under the brim of his hat, and he took a moment to arrange the next part carefully.
"Begging your pardon, sir. But I had it that every relative you owned dropped you the day the verdict came down. That there was not one of them left who would put his name next to yours."
"That is correct."
"Then—"
"They are not relatives," Benjamin said. "Not by blood. Not by name." He watched the road. "Which is rather the point. Everyone bound to me by blood or by name ran. These two did not."
Hale chewed on that.
"Then I hope they are still of the same mind, sir. Twenty-three years is a long while for a person to stay brave about a thing." He said it gently, but he said it. "If they have thought better of it — if you knock and the door does not open—"
"It will open."
"You are very certain."
"I am."
Hale grunted, unconvinced, and let it go.
The road climbed. He worked the brake on the descent and said, without looking over, "In any case, I have orders."
Benjamin turned his head. "Orders?"
"General Aldric's, sir. See you to the door in London. Not the coast. The door." Hale flicked the reins. "And keep you breathing on the way, should it come to that."
Something moved across Benjamin's face that in better light might have been a smile.
"General," he said.
"Two years now."
"Of course he is." Benjamin sat back. "So he is behind it. Again."
"He is behind most things, sir. Quietly." Hale shrugged. "You will not have seen him at the yard this morning, I imagine."
"No."
"He was at the eastern picket at first light, inspecting a wall that has not fallen down in eleven years and did not require inspecting." Hale said it perfectly flatly. "Word is he could not be certain of himself. Some of the lads reckon he would have gone red about the eyes."
Benjamin laughed — an actual laugh, short and rough, the first one in some time.
"Not a chance in this world."
"That is what I said." Hale nodded at the dark. "But I have been wrong before."
They went a half mile without speaking. The hedges thinned and the country opened out and the stars came through where the cloud had torn.
"We will be there," Hale said, "when you need us. You have only to send. That is not the General talking, sir, that is the men." He shifted on the hard seat. "Same as the ones you are going to see, I should think. Not bound by blood. Not by name. But brothers all the same."
"We are," Benjamin said.
"Aye, Captain."
"I would die for my brothers."
"I know it, sir." Hale's mouth twitched under his moustache. "You have had a fair few goes at it. Never quite managed."
"Not for want of trying."
"That is precisely my complaint."
Benjamin was quiet a moment. Then: "You would do the same."
"I would," Hale agreed. "Which is how I know it is a stupid habit and neither of us will break it."
The wheels turned. The dog had stopped barking.
"Is this your way of telling me you will miss us, Captain?"
Benjamin looked out at the road going pale in front of the lamps, at the long dark country he had not stood on in twenty-three years, at the direction of London and everything waiting past it.
"Perhaps it is," he said.
They rode on. The sky ahead had begun to go grey at the bottom edge.
"Sir." Hale said it carefully, the way a man does when he has been turning something over for a while. "About these people we are going to."
"What about them?"
"Do not tell them who you are. Not at first." He kept his eyes on the road. "Ask them questions. Let them answer plain, not knowing who is asking. Then decide."
Benjamin turned to look at him.
"You want me to test them."
"I want you to be certain."
"They carried me on their hips," Benjamin said. "They fed me from their own plates when my father's kitchens were full of food. I do not want to test them. They have been tested enough for one lifetime." He shook his head. "I want to see whether they are well. That is all I came for."
"And if all those years have worn them down, sir? If they have a roof to keep and a magistrate to keep it from?" Hale shrugged, unbothered by the silence that followed. "Better to double check. Costs you nothing. It is what you always told us."
Benjamin was quiet for a long moment.
"I did say that," he admitted.
"You did, sir. Repeatedly. Usually while it was raining."
Benjamin let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Very well," he said. "We shall do it your way."
◆◆◆
They reached the outer lanes as the light was coming up.
It was a small stone house wedged between a chandler's and a shuttered baker's, the step swept, the window boxes empty for the season but tended. Somebody had painted the door within the last year or two. Benjamin stood in front of it with his hat in his hand and found that his heart was going harder than it had at any camp gate he had ever walked through.
Hale placed himself half a pace behind and to the left, where a man stands when he intends to be seen.
Benjamin knocked.
There was a long silence, then movement inside — slow, unhurried — and the sound of a bolt being worked. The door opened perhaps a hand's width.
Thomas Miller had gone thin at the shoulders in a way Benjamin had not been prepared for, and white through the whiskers, and he kept one hand on the latch. His eyes went first to Benjamin, then past him to Hale, and then to the carriage standing in the lane behind them, and Benjamin watched him take in the greatcoat and the boots and the size of the two men on his step and arrive at the conclusion that people of their sort had never once come to a door like his with good news.
"What is it you want?" His voice had gone tight. "It is barely light."
Benjamin made himself speak evenly.
"My man here tells me you once served in the household of the late Duke of Beaumont." He paused. "The traitor."
The word came out of his own mouth and cut him on the way through.
Something crossed the old man's face. He straightened, and some of the fear went out of him and was replaced by something older and more careful.
"I did," he said.
"You do not deny it."
"There is no sense denying what half this street already knows." The latch did not move under his hand. "I served him eleven years."
"And since?"
"Since, I have swept floors and mended what wanted mending, and paid what was owed, and troubled nobody." His chin came up. "If you have come to ask whether I have been sending letters or keeping company, the answer is no, and it has been no for twenty-three years, and you may write that down and take it to whoever sent you."
"Nobody sent me." Benjamin turned his hat once in his hands. "I am told something else about you as well. That you still speak well of the man. That even after the execution, you have never once spoken of him as a traitor."
The silence that came then was different.
Mr. Miller looked at him for a long moment. When he answered, his voice was quiet and it did not shake at all.
"I will forever respect the man who treated me better than he had any cause to." He said it the way another man might state his own name. "He had no reason on this earth to be decent to a servant. He was decent anyway. Whatever they say he did, and whatever they hanged him for — that part was true, and no court has ever been convened that can make it untrue."
He drew a breath.
"Now. I have said my piece, and I will not be saying it again, and I would like my breakfast."
He moved to shut the door.
Hale's boot went into the gap.
"Not so fast, sir."
And the old man came apart entirely.
"Get away from my house!" His voice cracked with the force of it, an old man's shout, ragged at the top. "All those years you people have been at us — the questions, the visits, the standing in the lane — and I have got nothing left for you, do you hear me, nothing, and you will take your boot out of my door and get off my step this instant or by God I will—"
"Thomas?"
The voice came from inside, down the passage. Quick footsteps behind it.
"Thomas, what in heaven is—"
She came up beside her husband with a cloth still in her hands, and she was speaking, and then she saw who was standing on her step and every word she had went out of her at once.
She stopped.
The cloth dropped and neither of them noticed it.
She looked at his face. Not at the coat, not at the height of him, not at the carriage in the lane. His face. She looked at it the way a person looks at a thing they have looked at ten thousand times and never once expected to find in front of them, and her hand came up and covered her mouth.
"Oh — oh, Your Grace —"
The word broke in the middle.
And then she was through the doorway and she had both arms around him, her face against his chest, gripping the front of his coat in two fists as though he might be taken out of the lane again if she loosened her hold, and she was weeping in a way that had no dignity in it whatsoever.
Benjamin stood absolutely still.
Twenty-three years of men who did not touch each other, of hands shaken at arm's length, of an entire life conducted at the distance a uniform sets between people. His arms did not seem to know where to go.
Then they did.
He put them around her, and bent his head over her gray one, and held on.
Beside them, Mr. Miller had not moved. He was staring at the two of them with his hand still on the latch, and Benjamin watched the understanding arrive in the old man's face by degrees — first confusion, then something like fear, and then the thing beneath both of them, coming up slowly like a face rising through water.
"Benjamin," he said.
Then, hoarsely: "You are alive."
His hand left the latch. He took his cap off — he had not been wearing one, and he took it off anyway, some old motion his body remembered better than he did — and he bowed. Low, and unsteady, and holding the doorframe to manage it.
"Welcome home, Your Grace."
Benjamin looked at the top of his bowed white head, and at Hale withdrawing his boot from the door and stepping quietly back into the lane, and at the woman still crying into his coat.
"I am sorry," he said. His voice did not come out as he intended. "For the questions."
"There is no need—"
"There is." Benjamin turned the hat once in his hands. "Twenty years I have checked a thing before I trusted it. Every door. Every man. Every road out of every camp I ever slept in. It kept me alive, and I have not yet learned how to stop doing it to people who never earned it." He made himself look at the old man properly. "You did not earn it."
Mr. Miller was quiet a moment.
"No," he agreed. "But I daresay I would have done the same, in your boots." He stood aside. "Come in out of the cold before your man freezes to that step."
"You had better come too," he said to Hale, and made a helpless gesture at the doorway that took in the house, the morning, the whole of it. "There is tea. You will want it after that."
"I appreciate the offer, sir," Hale said. "But somebody had best watch the carriage, and I find I have no wish at all to sit in the middle of this." He touched his hat to Mrs. Miller. "Ma'am."
And he went back down the step to the horses.
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.
Chapter 3
There was no room left in the garden and Amelia was putting things in it anyway.
She knelt at the edge with her sleeves pushed past her elbows, working a chamomile seedling into a gap that was not a gap so much as an act of optimism. The yarrow beside it had been strangled two seasons running and had grown thin and resentful about it. The feverfew was doing the strangling and would not be reasoned with.
"You are crowding them," Frederick said.
"I am aware."
"You crowded them last year."
"I am aware of that also." She pressed the soil down around the stem. "Last year I had nowhere else to put them. This year I have thought of somewhere."
Frederick, who had been managing the grounds at Whitfield since before she was born and had watched her arrive at this particular conclusion by degrees over most of a summer, did not look up from his shears.
"The south wall is for roses."
"Not the south wall."
"The orchard border goes to shade at two."
"Not the orchard."
"Then you will want the kitchen garden, and Mrs. Prentice will die on that ground, and I would rather not bury her."
Amelia sat back on her heels and looked east.
Past the hedge, past the lake with its sagging willow, the land rose to a ridge, and on the ridge sat a long dark house with ivy up its whole southern face and two upper windows gone entirely. She had been able to see the top of its walled garden since she was nine years old. She had never once set foot in it.
Frederick followed her eyes, and his hands went still.
"No," he said.
"You have not heard what I mean to say."
"I have heard it the last three times you did not say it."
"Then you have had ample opportunity to prepare an objection."
"I have one. It is short." He set the shears down on the barrow. "And when you are caught up there, my lady — what then?"
Amelia opened her mouth.
And stopped.
She had, she realized, planned every part of it except that one. She had planned which flowers and which aspect and what to plant first and how to carry water. She had not once planned what she would say to a man standing in front of her with his hands on his hips demanding to know what she thought she was doing on Crown land.
She sat back on her heels and worked at it.
"I would explain," she said slowly, "that the house has been standing empty since the year the Duke was hanged, and that in all that time not one person has come to claim it, or lock it, or spend a shilling on its roof. It has no owner. It has an absence of one."
"That will not sound as well aloud as it does in a garden."
"Then I would say that I am not proposing to take anything. I am proposing to put things in." She wiped her wrist across her forehead and left a streak of earth there. "There is a walled garden behind that house, south-facing, sheltered on three sides. Nothing has been taken out of that soil in all those years and nothing has been asked of it. Every leaf that has fallen in it is still lying where it fell. Frederick — do you know what that ground will be?"
Frederick did not answer that one.
"And I would say," she went on, gathering, "that Ashcombe has no physician nearer than London and that when there is a bad winter the people here get what I can grow and nothing else, and that at present I can grow it in a garden three feet by four."
"That is three arguments."
"I have six."
"You will not need six." Frederick picked up the shears again. "You will need one, and it will not be for a magistrate."
She looked up.
"And what of your father, my lady?"
Amelia's mouth closed.
"Ah," she said. "Well. There is a difficulty with that."
"There is."
"He would not permit it in a hundred years."
"He would not permit it in his lifetime." Frederick clipped a browned head off the rosemary and dropped it in the barrow. "Though I will say this. If you were to agree to marry a man of his choosing, I daresay he would let you plant things on the moon."
Amelia laughed — genuinely, startled out of her.
And then the sentence caught up with her, and the laugh went out of her face by stages, the way water goes out of a cloth.
"A man of his choosing," she said.
Frederick said nothing.
"What is any of it for, Frederick?" She was still kneeling in the dirt, and her voice had lost all its lightness. "The name. The land. The wealth. The tenants and the carriage and the nine hundred people in this town who take their hats off when I ride past. What is it for, if it does not buy me the one choice that matters — who I spend the whole of my life beside?"
"It was never meant to buy you that."
"Then it is a poor sort of fortune."
"It is the only sort there is." Frederick straightened, slowly, one hand at the small of his back. "We do not make the rules, my lady. We are born into a world where they are already standing, and we do our best to live inside them. That is all any of us have ever managed."
Amelia looked down at her hands.
"I wish things were otherwise," she said.
"So does everyone who has ever lived in a time they did not choose." He said it kindly. "But that is not ours to decide. All we may decide is what to do with the years we are given."
The gravel gave her father away before his voice did.
"Where is she?"
Amelia did not move. She had hidden until she was nineteen, and had eventually concluded it only meant being found later and more angrily.
Baron Whitfield came round the hedge with his coat open and his color high.
"You have missed Monsieur Girard again."
"I have."
"He came from London. He waited an hour and a quarter." He stopped in front of the garden and looked down at her — at the apron, the earth, the hair coming out of its pins. "And I find you here. On your knees. Where any man riding the lane may see you."
"Mrs. Cobb can climb her own stairs again," Amelia said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Mrs. Cobb. At the mill." She sat back on her heels. "She could not get up to her own bed in December. Her son was carrying her. I sent her meadowsweet in October and she has been walking on her own since the thaw, and she came to the gate a fortnight ago to tell me so." She held his eyes. "That is what these are for. That is what I was doing while Monsieur Girard sat in the music room."
Her father's jaw moved.
"There are physicians for that," he said. "There are apothecaries. There are men who have given their whole lives to the study of it, who have sat examinations, who have degrees—"
"There is not one of them in Ashcombe."
"Then she may send to London."
"On a miller's wage, in December, with a swollen knee." Amelia's voice stayed level. "You have told me since I was a child that this family's first duty is to the people on its land."
"It is." He said it sharply. "By making good decisions. By managing this estate so there is work and there are cottages with sound roofs and there is grain when the harvest fails. That is how you care for nine hundred people, Amelia. Not by growing weeds for swollen ankles." His hand cut the air. "You are clever enough to know the difference. Do not pretend to me that you do not."
"Then let us divide it," Amelia said. "You take the decisions. I shall take the swollen ankles."
The silence that came after that had a different quality.
"No," her father said.
"Father—"
"No." He was not shouting, and that was worse. "Your destiny is not tending plants. Your destiny is tending a family. You have blood in your veins that hundreds of years went into making, and it is worth something, and you will not spend it in a flowerbed."
Amelia rose to her feet.
"Worth something," she repeated. "For breeding. And for sitting at the head of another man's table so that his guests may admire what he acquired." She brushed her hands off, hard. "No, thank you."
"Like it or not, that is your part."
"It is not a part. It is a cage with a coat of arms on it."
"It is your life." The Baron's voice finally went up, and two crows came off the beech at the end of the walk. "Do you imagine I like mine? Do you imagine I chose it? There are a hundred things I do every month of my life because they must be done by a man in my position and not one of them because I woke wanting to do it. I raised you to be responsible. I taught you that a person of consequence makes sacrifices. And here you are, five and twenty, arguing with me about ankles."
"Sacrifice what, exactly?" Amelia's own voice had risen to meet his. "My happiness. My use. Every hour I might have spent being good at the one thing I am good at — sacrificed, for what? So that a room full of people I do not like can say that I followed the rules?"
"Yes."
It landed flat between them.
"Yes," her father said again, quieter. "Precisely that. Those rules exist for a reason, whether you care to hear it or not, and I will not stand by and watch you ruin your name for a principle you invented at twenty."
He drew a breath and set his shoulders, and when he spoke again it was in the voice he used for the estate books.
"Earl Somerset comes at eleven tomorrow. He is bringing his son. You will be at the table."
"Father—"
"You will go up now and change into something suited to your station, and you will not come down to that table with dirt on you."
He turned and went back up the path.
Frederick had withdrawn some way along the walk while it was happening, and had spent the duration examining a section of hedge that required no examination whatsoever. He came back now at an unhurried pace and stopped beside her.
"Come, my lady," he said. "I shall walk you up to your room."
"Of course you will."
She started up the path with her chin high and her hands filthy, and he fell in a half pace behind her, the way he had since she was six.
"And do you agree with him?"
"It is not for me to agree or disagree."
"That is not an answer, Frederick."
"No," he said. "It is not."
They walked a little way.
"It does not signify what I think, my lady. What signifies is that you are protected. Even from your own choices." He looked ahead of them at the house. "That is your father's will. And I am his man."
Amelia said nothing at all the rest of the way up.
◆◆◆
They came into Ashcombe after dark.
The lanes narrowed as they climbed, hedges rising black on either side, and the lamps threw their two weak circles out ahead of the horses and showed nothing but wet road and the wall of leaves. Benjamin sat forward with his hand on the doorframe and watched the country come.
He had not seen it in twenty-three years and he found he knew it anyway. The dip where the water always stood. The milestone with its face gone. The turn where the lane bent left around a stand of beech that his father had refused to have cut because his mother liked the sound they made.
The beeches were still there. Taller.
Then the road ran alongside a wall, and behind the wall a great expanse of lawn came open in the dark, and lights — three windows lit on the ground floor of a house set well back among its trees. Whitfield, that would be. He remembered a name and very little else.
A man was standing at the edge of the lawn where it met the lane.
He had a lantern down at his side and he was not working. He was simply standing, watching the carriage come up, and as it drew level Benjamin saw him properly for a moment in the lamplight — an older man, grey, weathered, with the particular stillness of somebody who has been waiting to see what a thing turns out to be.
Their eyes met.
The man did not nod. He did not look away either. He watched the carriage go past him and Benjamin turned in his seat and watched him back, and the last thing he saw before the hedge closed in was the lantern being lifted, slowly, to shoulder height — not in greeting. To see better.
Benjamin faced front again.
"That did not take long," he said.
"No, sir." Hale did not turn his head. "They will know at breakfast."
The gate of Russell Hall was open, because there was no longer a gate.
Two stone piers stood at the top of the drive with nothing between them but grass, and the ironwork lay flat in the nettles where it had come off its hinges and stayed. The drive itself was gone to turf. The carriage went up it almost silently and the horses did not like it and Hale had to speak to them twice.
At the top the limes had grown into each other over the track, and they went the last forty yards through a tunnel of dead branches that closed out the sky.
Then the trees opened, and the house was there.
Benjamin got down before the wheels had entirely stopped.
It stood black against a sky barely lighter than itself, and for a moment it was only a shape — long, low-shouldered, the roofline broken in two places against the stars. Then Hale swung the lamp round and the light went up the front of it and Benjamin saw what the years had done.
Ivy had taken the whole southern face. Not creeping — taken, a solid mass of it two feet deep, running up over the sills and into the window openings, and where it had reached the eaves it had gone in under them and pried the boards apart. The stonework beneath was black with wet.
Nine windows on the front. Four still had glass. The rest were open squares with the frames rotted soft, and one had lost its frame entirely and left a raw hole in the wall with the lintel sagging over it.
The steps had lifted. Grass in every joint, and at the foot of them a drift of dead leaves and rubbish two feet deep that had been accumulating since before he could grow a beard.
He walked up to the door.
The oak had gone silver-grey and split along the grain and there were black streaks running down from the hinges where the iron had wept rust for so many winters. Above it, cut into the stone, the crest was still there. Weather had eaten the fine work — the motto beneath was gone entirely, worn smooth — but the lion was legible, and Benjamin stood and looked up at it with the lamplight moving across it and did not say anything at all.
Somewhere off to the right, high up, something loose was moving in the wind. A slate, or a length of guttering. It knocked, and stopped, and knocked again.
He put his hand flat on the door.
The wood gave slightly under his palm, soft as cork, and he felt it and took his hand away.
"Twenty-three years," Hale said, behind him. "It is a wonder there is anything left standing."
"It is stone," Benjamin said. "Stone does not mind. It is the roof that matters and the roof has gone in two places." He looked up along the line of it. "West end first. That is why the ivy is worst on that side — the water has been coming down inside the wall for years and the ivy has been drinking it."
He turned around.
"Thank you," he said. "For the road, and for the rest of it."
Hale did not answer at once. He was looking past Benjamin's shoulder at the black doorway and the black windows and the ivy moving very slightly in the dark.
"Captain," he said. "I know we have slept in worse places than a house. I have slept in a ditch with three inches of water in it and been glad of the ditch." He shifted his grip on the lamp. "But are you certain you will sleep here? Tonight? Maybe we should go the local inn."
"Do not tell me my mother's house has put the wind up you."
"It has given me a chill I did not have an hour ago," Hale said, with dignity. "I would want my rifle to walk in there. I would want it in my hands and not on my shoulder."
Benjamin laughed.
"I shall be perfectly well." He clapped the man's arm. "Go on. You have got me here breathing, which was the whole of your orders, and I imagine the General will want to hear you say so. Your business is finished."
"Mm." Hale looked back down the drive, in the direction they had come, toward Whitfield. "After that fellow with the lantern, sir, I am not so sure it is."
"The gardener?"
"He did not look like a gardener. Who was standing at the lane at ten o'clock at night with a light, doing nothing at all, and had a good long look at our faces." Hale set his jaw. "I may have to come back this way. With one or two of the others. Let the town have a look at what it is dealing with."
"Hale."
"It has been known to settle an argument before it starts, sir."
"These are farmers and gentlemen," Benjamin said. "Not one man in this town has ever been shot at. They have threatening looks and, at the very best, sharp tongues. That is the whole of the arsenal."
Hale considered that, and then began — reluctantly — to grin.
"Aye," he said. "Now that you put it so, they ought to be the ones worrying."
"They ought."
"Still." The grin faded off him and something more careful came in behind it. "I would not go shouting your surname about for a while yet. Not until you have got the measure of the place."
"I shall take your advice under consideration."
"That is what you say when you have no intention of taking it whatsoever, sir. I have heard you say it to a colonel."
"Good night, Hale."
Hale snorted, and swung himself up, and turned the horses in the weeds with some difficulty. At the top of the drive he pulled up and looked back.
"Sir. You have only to send."
"I know it."
Then the carriage went down through the tunnel of limes, and the sound of it thinned out and was gone, and Benjamin was alone on the steps of his mother's house with the lamp Hale had left him and a slate knocking somewhere above in the dark.
He did not go inside.
He stood a while, and let his eyes get used to it, and then he walked round the side of the house instead, through knee-high grass that soaked him to the thigh in twenty paces.
The garden had not disappeared. That was the strange thing. It had simply gone on without anyone.
He could still see it. There was the line of the yew hedge his mother had planted the summer he turned six, and it was fifteen feet high now and had not been cut in a generation, and it had gone shaggy and enormous and had swallowed the gate that used to stand in it. There was the gravel walk, still there under the moss — he could feel it under his boots, a hardness in the wet ground running dead straight where nothing else ran straight.
There was the fountain. Dry. Full of leaves, with a young ash tree growing out of the basin, taller than he was.
He stopped at the corner of the terrace where the balustrade had come down and lay in pieces in the long grass, and he looked back at the black bulk of the house, and up at the broken roofline against the stars.
Roses. There had been roses along this wall. He had a memory of his mother out here at the end of a summer day with her sleeves pushed up and a basket at her feet, and his father standing on the terrace with a glass in his hand telling her that a duchess had a gardener for that, and his mother not answering, not even looking up, and his father giving it a minute and then setting the glass down and coming down the steps to hold the basket for her.
The roses were still along the wall. Six feet out from it now, a great thorny thicket gone entirely to briar, arching over into the grass and rooting where it touched.
Benjamin stood there a long time.
Then he set the lamp down on a fallen block of the balustrade and rolled his sleeves, and reached into the nearest of it, and began — carefully, one at a time, with no tools and no light to speak of and absolutely no reason to do it in the middle of the night — to pull the dead wood out.
He worked for perhaps a quarter of an hour. His hands were bleeding by the end of it and the pile he had made was pitifully small against the size of the thing.
He looked at what he had done. Then he looked up at the house.
"Right," he said.
He picked up the lamp and went inside.
◆◆◆
The house went quiet by half past nine, and by ten Amelia had the door closed and the lamp turned low and her sleeves pushed back.
Comfrey root, dried since August, going to a coarse grey meal under the pestle. It was slow work and it wanted a steady grinding pressure rather than force, and force was what she had felt like using since about eleven that morning.
The mortar had been her mother's. It was heavy marble and it moved on the tabletop if she was careless, and the sound it made when it moved was the sound of stone dragging on wood, and it carried.
She did not hear the footsteps until they were at her door.
Amelia was up before she had finished registering them. Lamp down. Mortar off the table and into the wooden box. The folded papers of dried root after it, the little jar of lard, the muslin, the spoon — all of it swept in together with no care for order, the lid on, the box under the bed and her foot pushing it back against the wall. The counterpane pulled straight. Her hands wiped hard on the inside of her apron and the apron off over her head and behind the screen.
The knock came.
She looked at the table. Bare. She looked at her hands. Grey in the creases, and nothing to be done about that.
"Come in."
Her father opened the door. He was in his dressing gown with a candle in his hand, and he looked older by candlelight than he did by day.
"You are awake."
"I am."
"I heard a noise." He glanced past her at the room. "A scraping. Some minutes ago, and then again just now."
"My drawer." Amelia gestured at the chest by the wall without looking at it. "Something has gone down behind it. I was trying to shift it out from the wall to reach whatever it is, and it is heavier than it looks."
Her father frowned at the chest.
"You ought not to be hauling furniture about at ten o'clock at night."
"I had rather hoped it would move."
"I shall have Frederick see to it tomorrow." He set the candle on the nightstand. "He will have it out in a minute and you will not put your back out doing it."
"Frederick always tries to help," Amelia said. "Even when he cannot alter the thing that wants altering."
The Baron looked at her for a moment.
"I see this morning is still with you."
"It is." She sat down on the edge of the bed. "It is with me because we have had it a dozen times, Father, and it ends in the same place every time. In a year or two years I shall be married to a man I did not choose, and everything I care for will be put down and left behind, for him."
Her father did not answer straight away. Then he pulled the chair out from the table and sat down in it, slowly, the way he sat when his hip was troubling him.
"My dear," he said. "What would you do, in my position?"
"I would let it come naturally."
"Naturally."
"As it does for other people. As it did for the Cobbs and the Hollises and everyone else in this county who is permitted to look at a person and decide for themselves." She spread her hands. "I would let my daughter live, and let her meet whom she met, and trust that she had sense."
"I understand you," he said. "I do. And I wish it were a thing I could give you." He turned the candlestick a little on the nightstand so the flame stood straight. "Our position provides a great deal. It also asks. I accepted what it asked of me a long while ago, and this is what it asks of you."
"I do not want a comfortable life," Amelia said. "I want a life that means something."
"I want both for you." He said it without heat, which made it harder to argue with. "Comfortable and meaningful. A house of your own. Children in it. A husband. Protected. Provided for. Loved, if there is any justice in the world at all."
"It sounds very well."
"It is very well."
"It is very well from the outside, Father." She looked up at him. "That is exactly what those marriages look like from the outside. You have sat at their tables. So have I. And most of them are rotten all the way through and everyone at the table knows it and passes the salt."
The Baron was quiet.
"Some of them are," he admitted. "Yes."
"Then—"
"And I would still rather that risk than the other one." He leaned forward, forearms on his knees. "Because here is what I know, and you do not yet, and I would spare you learning it the slow way. If I leave it to you — if I stand back and let it come naturally, as you say — then the years will go by, because they always do. And at thirty you will be considered difficult. At five and thirty you will be considered impossible. And the men who will still come to this door by then will not be the ones you would have had at twenty. They will be the debt-ridden and the second sons and the ones nobody else would take."
"Father—"
"And there is the other matter," he said, "which I will only say once, because you are my daughter and not my physician. A woman bearing her first child at older age is in danger. Real danger. I have buried people over it." His hand closed on his knee. "I will not have that. I will not stand at a graveside and know that I could have said something at five and twenty and chose to be delicate instead."
Amelia looked down at her hands.
"I feel your fear," she said at last. "I do. I am not deaf to it." She lifted her head. "But selling me to a man in the hope that he will one day love me is not a remedy. It is a wager, and I am the stake."
Her father surprised her by smiling.
"You put it well," he said. "You always did." He sat back. "Then let me tell you what I am actually wagering on, since you will have it plainly. I would sooner see you married to a powerful man who grows to love you — and he will grow to love you, because you are impossible not to, and because you will make him — than to a gentle one who adores you and cannot keep a roof over you. Love is a great deal. It is not a settlement. It does not pay a physician and it does not hold off a creditor."
"That is a very cold way to put it."
"It is a father's way to put it." Something in his face gave slightly. "I am sixty-one, Amelia. I do not know how many years are in front of me. Two, perhaps twenty. And when I am gone I want there to be a man standing where I am standing now, who will see to it that you are looked after. That is the whole of it. That is all I am trying to buy."
"Frederick will see to it."
"I know he will." The Baron's mouth twisted. "Frederick would walk into fire for you and I have known that since you were four years old. He is also sixty-eight, my dear, and his hands shake in the mornings, and he cannot hold this county off you when I am not here to stand behind him."
Amelia said nothing to that.
Her father rose, and picked up the candle.
"Earl Somerset dines with us tomorrow," he said. "He brings his son. I have never met the young man and I know very little of him, and it may well come to nothing at all."
"And if it does not come to nothing?"
"Then we shall have a conversation," he said, "and I shall listen to what you say in it. That is my promise and it is the only one I have got."
He stopped at the door.
"Do not shift that drawer," he said. "Frederick will have it out tomorrow."
"Good night, Father."
"Good night, my dear."
She sat where she was until his footsteps had gone from the passage and the stair.
Then she got up and went to the balcony doors and opened them, because the room smelled faintly and bitterly of comfrey and she was not entirely sure it had not smelled that way while he was sitting in it.
The night was cold and very clear. Frost coming. Below her the garden lay in silver and black, every flowerbed of it crowded to bursting, and beyond the hedge the land fell away to the lake and rose again to the ridge.
Amelia looked east, as she always did, without deciding to.
Russell Hall stood black against the stars.
And there was somebody in the garden.
She saw the movement first and understood it second — a shape crossing the pale ruin of the terrace, unhurried, moving along the line where the balustrade had come down. A man. Tall, by the look of him. He had a light with him but it was down at his side and it lit almost nothing, and he was not using it to see by; he was simply carrying it while he walked.
Amelia did not move.
Nobody went up there. Nobody had gone up there in her life. She had watched that hill through every season she could remember and it had never once had anything on it but weather.
The figure stopped.
For a long moment it stood perfectly still at the edge of the terrace. And then it turned, without any hurry at all, and faced west.
Toward Whitfield.
Toward the house.
Toward her window, where a lamp was burning behind her and she was standing in front of it in her nightdress against the light.
Amelia stepped back so fast she caught her heel on the threshold.
She got the doors shut and the catch across and stood with her back against them, and her heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her throat, and she made herself count to twenty before she moved.
Then she pulled the box out from under the bed, because the comfrey would spoil if she left it, and set the mortar back on the table and turned up the lamp.
Her hand was not quite steady on the pestle.
"Damn Frederick," she said aloud, to the empty room, "and damn his ghost stories."
She had been six years old when he told her that one. Six years old, and she had not slept for two nights, and she had believed every word of it for the better part of a decade.
Amelia ground the comfrey rather harder than the work required….
