The Girl with the Make-Believe Husband

The colonel looked up from his desk, visibly startled by Edward’s furious bark.

“Captain Rokesby. What on earth is the matter?”

What was the matter? What was the matter? Edward fought to keep his fury under control. He’d stormed out of the Dutch bakery without his purchases, practically ran through the streets of New York to get here, to Colonel Stubbs’s office at the building currently being used as British headquarters. His hands were fisted, his blood was pounding through his brain like he’d been in battle, and by God, the only thing that was keeping him from assaulting his superior officer was the threat of a court-martial.

“You knew,” Edward said, his voice shaking with rage. “You knew about Thomas Harcourt.”

Stubbs stood slowly, and his skin flushed red under his whiskers. “To what, precisely, do you refer?”

“He went to Connecticut with me. Why the hell didn’t you say so?”

“I told you,” Stubbs said in a stiff voice, “I could not take the risk of influencing your memories.”

“That’s shite and you know it,” Edward spat. “Tell me the truth.”

“It is the truth,” Stubbs hissed, stalking around Edward to slam the door to his office shut. “Do you think I liked lying to your wife?”

“My wife,” Edward repeated. He had remembered that, too. He wouldn’t say that his memory was completely restored, but it was mostly all there, and he was fully certain that he had not participated in a proxy wedding ceremony. Nor had Thomas ever asked him to.

Edward couldn’t imagine what had led Cecilia to such a deception, but he could only deal with one cocked-up disaster at a time. His eyes landed on Stubbs’s with barely contained fury. “You have ten seconds to explain to me why you lied about Thomas Harcourt.”

“For the love of God, Rokesby,” the colonel said, raking his hand through his thinning hair, “I’m not a monster. The last thing I wanted was to give her false hope.”

Edward froze. “False hope?”

Stubbs stared at him. “You don’t know.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“I believe we have already ascertained that there is a lot I don’t know,” Edward said, his voice clipped with tightly wound emotion. “So please, enlighten me.”

“Captain Harcourt is dead,” the colonel said. He shook his head, and with honest sorrow said, “He took a shot to the gut. I’m sorry.”

“What?” Edward stumbled back, his legs somehow finding a chair for him to sink into. “How? When?”

“Back in March,” Stubbs said. He crossed the room and yanked open a cabinet, pulling out a decanter of brandy. “It wasn’t even a week after you left. He sent word to meet him up at New Rochelle.”

Edward watched the colonel’s unsteady hands as he sloshed amber liquid into two glasses. “Who went?”

“Just me.”

“You went alone,” Edward said, his tone making it clear that he found this difficult to believe.

Stubbs held forth a glass. “It was what had to be done.”

Edward exhaled as memories—strangely fresh and stale at the same time—unrolled through his mind. He and Thomas had gone to Connecticut together, entrusted with the task of assessing the viability of a naval attack on the waterfront. The command had come from Governor Tryon himself. He’d chosen Edward, he’d said, because he needed someone he could trust implicitly. Edward had chosen Thomas for the very same reason.

But the two of them had traveled together for only a few days before Thomas had headed back to New York with the information they’d gathered about Norwalk. Edward had continued east, toward New Haven.

And that was the last he’d seen of him.

Edward took the glass of brandy and downed it in a single shot.

Stubbs did the same, then said, “I take it this means you have recovered your memory.”

Edward gave him a sharp nod. The colonel would want to question him immediately, he knew that, but he would say nothing until he got some answers about Thomas. “Why did you have General Garth send a letter to his family that he was only wounded?”

“He was only wounded when we sent that,” the colonel replied. “He was shot twice, several days apart.”

“What?” Edward tried to make sense of this. “What the hell happened?”

Stubbs groaned and seemed to deflate as he leaned against his desk. “I couldn’t bring him back here. Not when I wasn’t sure of his loyalties.”

“Thomas Harcourt was no traitor,” Edward spat.

“There was no way to know that for certain,” Stubbs shot back. “What the hell was I supposed to think? I got up to New Rochelle, just as he’d specified, and then before he can say anything other than my name people start shooting at me.”

“At him,” Edward corrected. After all, Thomas was the one who’d been shot.

Stubbs downed his brandy—his second glass by now—and went back for another. “I don’t know who the hell they were shooting at. For all I know, I was the target and they missed. You know most of the colonials are an untrained rabble. Half can’t hit the side of the wall.”

Edward took a moment to absorb this. He knew in his bones that Thomas was no traitor, but he could see how Colonel Stubbs—who did not know him well—could have had doubts.

“Captain Harcourt was hit in the shoulder,” Stubbs said grimly. “The bullet went clean through. It wasn’t that hard to get the bleeding stopped, but he was in a lot of pain.”

Edward closed his eyes and took a breath, but it didn’t steady him. He’d seen far too many men with gunshot wounds.

“I took him to Dobbs Ferry,” Stubbs continued. “We have a small outpost near the river. It’s not quite behind enemy lines, but close.”

Edward knew Dobbs Ferry well. The British had used it as a rendezvous point ever since the Battle of White Plains nearly three years earlier. “What happened then?” he asked.

Colonel Stubbs looked at him with a flat expression. “I returned here.”

“You left him there,” Edward said disgustedly. What sort of man left a wounded soldier in the middle of the wilderness?

“He was not alone. I had three men guarding him.”

“You held him as a prisoner?”

“It was for his own safety as much as anything else. I didn’t know if we were keeping him from escaping, or keeping the rebels from killing him.” Stubbs eyed Edward with increasing impatience. “For God’s sake, Rokesby, I am not the enemy here.”

Edward held his tongue.

“He could not have made the trip back to New York in any case,” Stubbs said with a shake of his head. “He was in far too much pain.”

“You could have stayed.”

“No, I could not,” Stubbs retorted. “I had to return to headquarters. I was expected. No one even knew I’d slipped away. Believe me, as soon as I came up with an excuse I went back to fetch him. It was only two days.” He swallowed, and for the first time since Edward’s arrival, he actually went pale. “But when I got there, they were dead.”

“They?”

“Harcourt, the three men holding him. All of them.”

Edward looked at the glass in his hand. He’d forgotten he was holding it. He watched his hand as he set it down, almost as if this might somehow stem the shaking of his fingers. “What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Stubbs closed his eyes, his face replete with agonized memory as he whispered, “They’d all been shot.”

Bile rose up in Edward’s stomach. “Was it an execution?”

“No.” Stubbs shook his head. “There had been a fight.”

“Even Thomas? Wasn’t he under guard?”

“We had not bound him. It was clear that he had been fighting too, even with his injury. But . . .” Stubbs swallowed. Turned away.

“But what?”

“It was impossible to tell which side he’d been fighting for.”

“You knew him better than that,” Edward said in a low voice.