Chapter Nine

He’d almost kissed her. That thought ran endless circuits in Stanley’s mind all that night and into the next morning. As he always did, he told himself he would think about it later, but his mind refused to be fobbed off.

She had stood so very close. He’d been enveloped in that unique scent of hers. Hearing that she had wanted a letter from him and had been disappointed not to receive one touched him deeply.

Her words notwithstanding, he could not have written. Before Waterloo, there had been nothing he could have shared. Afterward, there had been nothing left of him worth sharing.

The head of Philip’s stick was narrower than the one Stanley had been using, and therefore, the skin on his hand pulled more and the stretching was painful. The disfigured skin had broken across the joints of his hand. In the back of his mind, he knew infection, even amputation, remained a possibility.

He had not been back at Lampton Park twenty-four hours yet, and he already felt deucedly uncomfortable.

“You’ve come back to us whole,” Mater had said with such obvious relief and satisfaction when he had first arrived. His being whole was important to her—she saw it as an answer to her prayers. Stanley would not disillusion her.

She had not received any letters from him and had apparently decided he could make up for his oversight by sitting down for a cozy chat in which he would share all the details of his six-month sojourn. He’d extricated himself with a vague reply and a noncommittal suggested postponement.

Philip had issued an invitation for him to join Philip and Layton, whose estate bordered the Park, for their morning gallop. His refusal must have seemed out of character for a man who had made a career in a mounted unit of the army. But he knew the awkward picture he made attempting to mount a horse. There would be no avoiding questions—nor the expected answers—if he were to provide his brothers that spectacle.

For such an enormous house in which only two of the original seven brothers were currently residing, Lampton Park felt suffocatingly crowded. If the weather hadn’t turned nasty and wet, he would have walked down to the Trent in search of peace and quiet. As it was, he couldn’t seem to escape. Even the servants made a point of smiling at him, the butler and housekeeper asking after his health and expressing joy at his return.

After glancing through the door of the conservatory to make absolutely certain the large indoor garden was unoccupied, he hobbled to the wrought-iron bench beneath the far windows.

Blessed quiet. No questions or stares or need to attempt to look happy. Rain ran in vertical rivers down the walls of glass, the wind blowing the trees outside. He took a deep breath and silently watched nature relieve her tension. He’d wept enough the day he’d lost his leg to rival any English rainstorm. It hadn’t helped.

Pluck had told him later that during the amputation, when the pain had left him delirious, he’d cried out for Mater, had begged his father to make them stop, and had pleaded with everyone from the sawbones to Pluck himself to find Marjie—he had insisted he needed her with him. Someone, Pluck said, had pulled Marjie’s letters from Stanley’s satchel and had read them to him until he’d lost consciousness from the unendurable pain of it.

“At least ye shut yer mummer,” Pluck had said. “’Bout near had me weepin’ like a baby, ye did, crying fer yer mum like that. An’ hearin’ ye call for yer father was worse, seein’ as how all of us knew he was dead an’ had been since ye was a boy. I knowed ye was outta yer head then.”

He had told Stanley all of that less than a month after the amputation. They hadn’t spoken of it since. He’d been fitted for a counterfeit leg, had watched for infection, and had gone on as if nothing had happened. When the misery of it all became too much, he would take Marjie’s letters out and read them again, though they were memorized. Then he would return to soldiering, walking upright and unflinching into the purgatory that had become his life.

The rain continued to pour outside. He pulled from his pocket a folded sheet of parchment. The handwriting and seal were identical to the twenty-four others he had in his room. This letter was not worn at the folds or spotted with stains, the origins of which he refused to contemplate. It was crisp and unsullied and unopened.

He had very nearly broken the seal the night before but hadn’t been able to. He knew it was the last letter he would receive from her. So long as he remained at home, she wouldn’t write, and he entertained significant doubts that she would write to him once he left again. Lord Devereaux would not approve of her doing so. He hadn’t even wanted Stanley to attend the same ball as Marjie.

Once Stanley opened the final letter, that lifeline would be cut off. But he was drowning. Pluck would attack him with barrels of alcohol as soon as he saw the newly broken skin on his hand, and that would hurt like the devil. His family wasn’t likely to leave him be either. Eventually Marjie’s engagement would become official, and he would lose her despite never having had any real claim to her affection. He needed another letter the way so many of his fellow soldiers had come to depend on laudanum or alcohol to survive all they’d been through.

Stanley held the letter in his hand for a moment, simply looking at it. Not opening the blasted thing wasn’t going to change the fact that he wouldn’t receive any others.

He flipped it over. The Jonquil family seal pressed in deep red wax was affixed to the back. The seal Marjie had used had changed when she’d moved in with Philip and Sorrel. Somehow, he’d been under the impression it was merely a temporary arrangement, that she would be living with her mother again after the summer ended. He’d been so eager to read her letters he hadn’t bothered to contemplate the significance of her continued use of the Jonquil seal and not the Kendrick one. If he’d paid attention to that detail, her presence at Lampton House might not have caught him so off guard.

“So, Marjie,” Stanley whispered, slipping his finger under the seal. “This is to be your farewell.”

The hardened wax gave way without the slightest fight. Still, he hesitated. His eyes swung back to the rivulets of rain wiggling their way down the glass surrounding him. It was an appropriately dreary day.

The stiff parchment rustled as he unfolded it.

Dear Stanley,

She probably should not have addressed him by his Christian name—they were not actually brother and sister, and there was no understanding between them—but he had no intention of correcting the lapse. Let Lord Devereaux make an issue of it if he chose. He had never heard Marjie refer to her soon-to-be-fiancé so intimately.

I have missed you. That is not a very sophisticated way to open a letter, but there you have it. The weather is turning cold, and I find it horribly sad. I hope the sun is shining where you are.

Have you ever wished for something so fervently that when you opened your eyes you half expected to find your wish had been granted? That is how I feel about spring. I spend each winter wishing for the return of longer days and bright-green budding leaves. Mostly, though, I long for the flowers to return. The world is a far less dismal place when it is blooming.

A whisper of a smile touched his face. She wrote to him of flowers and spring. Was it any wonder her letters had become a soothing medicine to him?

Jason and Mariposa are now both away from Town, spending time with her family at Thornton Manor. While I do enjoy visiting with your brother and new sister-in-law, I regret most of all the loss of their butler’s company. Black was quite possibly my favorite butler of all time. Again, I am probably proving myself terribly unsophisticated, but I confess I enjoyed the short intervals I spent with him. He tries so very hard to be the perfect butler and succeeds only in being very earnestly unsuccessful. Jason and Mariposa would not replace him for the world, however. I do believe they have grown attached to him. How very unton of them! What shall we do, Stanley, with this very unfashionable family of yours?

He knew Marjie well enough to recognize the implied humor in her anecdote. The brother just older than he had recently married, and according to Marjie’s previous letters, Jason and his new bride had acquired a remarkably ragtag assortment of servants of whom they were inordinately fond. Had Marjie not been the very embodiment of honesty and had he not known Mariposa very well from the time he’d spent on the Continent, Stanley might not have believed it. Jason had ever been the overly proper, strictly civilized brother. Mariposa, it seemed, was good for Jason.

I fear there is little else to report. I have discussed with you the weather and gossiped quite horridly. All that remains is to comment upon the latest fashions, and we will have engaged in a very British conversation, indeed.

Except that only I have spoken. I shall do as always and imagine your replies, though I draw the line at actually speaking to myself. Poor Jane will think I have run mad should I begin doing that.

Please be safe, Stanley. Bask a moment in the sunshine of the Continent and think of me lonely amidst the fog and continuous drizzle of England. I have decided to no longer pester you for a reply—I am certain you have your reasons for not writing to me. I will simply continue to think of you and pray for you and miss you most acutely.

Yours, etc.,

Marjie

Expressing her desire to hear from him had ever been the closing thought in Marjie’s cherished missives. But it seemed she no longer intended to ask.

She had given up on him.

Unexpected footsteps broke the silence of the room. He refolded his letter and slid it carefully back inside his pocket. He would place it with the other letters when he was next in his room.

The swishing sound of skirts told Stanley the arrival was female. He did not hear the tapping of a walking stick, so the newcomer was not Sorrel. Mater wore the heavier fabrics common amongst ladies of her generation, and the sound was not quite the same as he remembered from his days of long walks with her after Father died. Either a maid had come in to tend to something or Marjie had just entered Stanley’s temporary sanctuary.

Thoughts of her upturned face inches from his own instantly filled his mind. She had stood there, a breath from him, with her eyes closed as if his touch had been as powerful for her as it had been for him. If only he’d been able to touch her face without the necessity of his gloves. He couldn’t very well have taken off one and not the other. Seeing his discolored, misshapen hand would have led to unanswerable questions and looks of revulsion or, worse yet, pity.

From around a row of bushes, Marjie came into view. He saw her before she saw him. For that brief moment, he studied her, memorized the sight of her. She was the very picture of fragile English beauty, with her golden hair piled on her head, her pale skin soft against the powder-blue of her simple gown. She had an unspoiled sweetness one seldom found in the population at large.

For perhaps the thousandth time, he cursed Napoleon to perdition for leaving exile. Stanley had been far from blameless before returning to the war, but he’d had fewer lives on his conscience, fewer faces that swam accusingly through his thoughts, fewer regrets.

Marjie must have sensed his presence; her eyes stole about the room for a fraction of a moment before settling on him. He braced himself. How would she react to him after their near kiss the night before? Would she be offended? Wary? She was nearly engaged, after all.

A brilliant smile lit her face. “Good afternoon, Stanley,” she said with every indication of pleasure at seeing him.

I hope the sun is shining where you are, she had written.

In that moment, it most certainly was.