For Your Arms Only (25 page)

She pressed her hands to her temples. “Then who?”

“Let me see more.” Now Julia was as fevered as Cressida. She read rapidly through the next page, then another, and her face sagged in shock. “Good heavens.”

“What?”

She touched the page. “Castilian. Will Lacey married a Spanish girl while they were in Spain. It caused quite a furor in town because Priscilla Darrowby had set her cap for him before the war, and everyone knew old Mr. Lacey approved the match.”

They looked at each other. “And Will might have given Alec a letter,” Cressida said slowly. “Because they were such friends.”

Julia nodded. “He died at Waterloo. A great hero; Mr. Lacey received a letter from Wellington himself. But this…” She shook the translated pages. “This is Will Lacey, I’m sure of it. He was fair and could be priggish—or rather, he could seem so, even though he was just as much a devil as Alec. But…What if…Is it possible someone mistook Alec for Will?”

“You said the papers were found in Alec’s things.”

She watched the realization sink in. Julia, Alec’s sister, looked at her with dawning alarm. “Could—Could he have…?”

Cressida knew he could have. Her father could have seen an opportunity and seized it while the battlefield was still in disarray.
Everything was chaos after a battle
, echoed Alec’s words in her memory. The relief that Papa’s journal exonerated Alec was eclipsed by the confirmation that Papa had been responsible for those charges being made at all. She steeled herself and picked up the journal to read some more. The code had become almost as clear as English now, and she didn’t even have to write it down to know what it said. She was still turning pages when a knock sounded on the door, and Madame Wallace opened it.

“You are ready?”

“Yes,” she said hollowly. She couldn’t face Julia. “You are right. He writes of it here. My father put the letters in Alec’s effects to cast the blame for Nob’s treason onto him, and then bl-blackmailed Nob’s family with the truth.”

George Turner had been a blackmailer. Alec had seen that quickly enough in the journal account, and he thought Cressida did, too, even if she didn’t want to say it out loud. He could understand that, and even respect it. There was little to be gained by exposing a man now, when he might well be dead but was most certainly gone, particularly when it was someone she loved so dearly and the sins had occurred so long ago.

But Turner had also been a traitor, selling information to the enemy. A common sergeant couldn’t know much of interest to the French army, though. Turner had wanted more easy money, and in time he found a means to get it, in the form of a British officer in dire financial straits. Alec’s heart burned with fury as he remembered Turner’s account of coaxing the officer to relate intelligence, trifling items at first, then more and more important until finally the officer was writing directly to a French colonel, with Turner as the intermediary—collecting his fee along the way, of course. For money, Turner had sold out his fellow Englishmen, endangered his mates and the country they all fought to protect, and lured a decent man into dishonor and treason.

The only thing Alec didn’t know was how the blame had been diverted onto him.

He knew the road to The Grange well. As a boy he had traveled this path often, and even after all these years he could still do it in the dark. Cracks of lightning split the sky with increasing frequency, but the booming rolls of thunder were far-off rumbles. The stiff breeze stung his face, and Alec welcomed it. It went some small way toward cooling his temper, reminding him that revenge, no matter how long plotted or well-earned, was rarely satisfying. It wasn’t revenge he sought; nothing could bring back the years of his life or his lost reputation. It was justice, not just for himself but for everyone else mired in this tragedy.

The house was just as he remembered it. Alec’s eyes went by pure habit to the third window from the left on the upper story, where he used to toss pebbles and other items to Will. What rapscallions they had been, sneaking off to swim in the river or to run through the woods at night after long days indoors at lessons. Will had been his brother in spirit if not in flesh, his thirst for adventure matching Alec’s own. Will was just as adept as Alec at finding trouble, despite looking so solemn and innocent that many people thought Alec was the one responsible for leading Will astray. As soon as they were old enough, the two of them had bought commissions in the army, determined to see the world and escape stern, strict fathers at the same time. Alec’s father had been relieved to see him committed to something respectable, but Will’s father mightily disapproved of the whole enterprise, and let his son and heir know it. Alec could still see the somber farewell between Will and his father before they rode off to join their regiments. He had seen the tears spring into Mr. Lacey’s eyes when Will turned away to mount his horse, just as he had seen the scars the old man inflicted on Will’s back over the years.

He tied his horse to the paddock fence and walked up to the back door of the house, memories flooding him. How many times had he come this way, full of anticipation to see his friend? It caused a dull pain in his chest that he was here to confront a man about his son’s treason.

Alec straightened his shoulders. The dagger under his coat pressed against his ribs. He thought of Cressida, clinging to him with all her strength and begging him to stay, and her last whispered declaration of love. Then he opened the door and let himself in.

17 June 1815
Near the village of Waterloo, Belgium

T
hose who had fought with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula campaign claimed that great victories were often preceded by great storms crackling with thunder and lightning. In Wellington’s army, drenched and chilled to the bone by the rain that had started up the previous afternoon and proceeded to turn the Belgian hills and fields into oceans of mud, some were reassuring themselves that this storm was a sign of good fortune for His Grace. That might be true, and perhaps it did foretell another great triumph on the morrow, but at the moment, Major Alec Hayes would rather have been warm and dry.

He forged through the ankle-deep mud toward the squat little house where he was billeted for the night. There was nothing he could do for his men. They were managing as best they could, huddling under blankets thrown over their saddles and clinging to the stirrup leathers to stay upright and avoid being trampled. Cavalry always bore bad weather even harder than the infantry. Alec had gone among them, doing his best to raise spirits and morale, making certain they got their rations of gin, but now he had to get some rest himself. The morning promised the exhilaration and madness of battle, when he would need a calm, collected mind more than ever.

“Hayes! Hallo there, Major!”

He stopped and turned, swiping rain from his face and grinning as he saw William Lacey slogging through the storm. He and Will had been boyhood friends, growing up near the same town in Hertfordshire and purchasing commissions at the same time. Lacey was attached to the staff of Sir William Ponsonby, the brigade commander, and Alec hadn’t seen him for several days, not since the night of Lady Richmond’s ball just before the French pushed across the border. “Nice night for a stroll,” he called. “Care to stop in and have a drink?”

“If you’ve got anything, I’d drink it,” Lacey replied. He looked exhausted, his face drawn and gray. “The stronger the better.”

Alec pushed open the door of the farmhouse, but it was full. A group of junior officers were clustered around the fire, where a pot steamed. He grimaced; whatever was in the kettle didn’t smell appetizing in the least, not even to a man who hadn’t had a decent meal all day. Combined with the smell of drying wool, the air in the house was thick and sour. Instead Alec picked up an umbrella someone had left near the door and ducked back into the rain. He opened it, and Will stepped under it beside him to share the last of the brandy in his flask.

For a while they just watched the rain. When the brandy was gone, Will rummaged in his pockets and found some tobacco. Alec went into the house and got an ember, and they settled in for a smoke to warm themselves.

“It’s going to be a bloodbath,” Will said at last.

Alec blew out a puff of smoke that evaporated at once in the wet air. “Worse than usual, you think?”

His friend was quiet, then plucked the cigar from his mouth to gesture at the sodden darkness. “Somewhere over that ridge are thousands of Frenchmen who want to kill us all. They must know it’s old Boney’s great chance. If he can wipe out this army, what would stand in his way?”

Alec grunted, conceding the point. “He shan’t destroy the army, I don’t think. Wellington’s too cagey for that. He’ll fall back on Brussels and make another stand, and God help the Prussians if they don’t join him there.”

“They’re on the way to Wavre, if the French can’t get them first.”

“You’re awfully grim,” Alec said mildly. “I hold out hope we might crush them, instead of the other way around.”

Will shook his head. “I have a terrible premonition about this fight, Alec. No—that is not what I mean.” He paused, seemingly struggling for words. “I have not been as—as able an officer as I should have been.”

Alec glanced at him. “Nonsense. What the devil…?”

“I have felt my inadequacies weighing on me of late.” He was drawing hard on his cigar. “As though I’ve been blinded to them all my life and only now see what they cost me.”

“The lament of all married men.”

As hoped, Will smiled, but it quickly faded. “My poor wife. If I should die, who will take care of her? She shouldn’t have to suffer so, and now she’s with child.”

Will had married a Spanish beauty during the Peninsula campaign, but his father had not been pleased. From what Alec recalled of old Mr. Lacey, he wouldn’t be likely to take care of Isabella Lacey and her baby if anything happened to Will. Mrs. Lacey was in Brussels now, no doubt even more anxious about the impending battle than her husband. Alec had met her on a few occasions and thought old Lacey was a fool not to embrace her. He clapped Will on the shoulder. “I will care for her. You may depend on that, although I fully expect you to ride through this battle without a blemish, and have many children to vex you well into your old age, just as you and I have done for our fathers.”

Will’s shoulder twitched. “Thank you. You cannot know how that eases my mind. I have your word? Whatever may happen?”

Surprised, Alec looked away from the driving rain and into his friend’s face. “Do you even need to ask? You know I would.”

“Your word?” Will repeated. His eyes burned and the cigar trembled in his fingers. “Whatever happens?”

“Yes.” Alec wondered at Will’s feverish insistence, but then told himself not to judge too harshly; he didn’t know what went through a man’s mind the night before a battle when he had a wife and children to think of. He didn’t particularly care to think of his own death, but if it happened, his family would go along well enough without him. No one depended on him for home and happiness, and he didn’t depend on anyone for his. “I swear it.”

The tension went out of Will’s body and he leaned against the wall at their back. “I have a letter here…” He drew it from inside his coat. “To my father. Would you send it to him, after my death?”

It was customary to leave a letter for one’s family, to be sent if necessary. Many officers would be up most of the night writing them. Alec stared askance at Will, though, for the certainty of his phrasing. Not “if I should fall” but “after my death.” He took the letter and shoved it into his pocket. “Get some sleep, Lacey. You’re not going to die, not in this fight.”

Will’s smile was ghastly. “Perhaps not. But it would ease my mind…”

“Of course,” Alec muttered. Of course they both might die on the morrow, or a week hence, or in their sleep tonight. It was part of the army. “I regret I have no wife and child to leave to your tender care. Perhaps you can find someone to marry Julia, if I die and miss the chance of teasing her suitors.”

Will closed his eyes, smiled, and said nothing. For a long moment the only sound was the steady patter of the rain on the umbrella over their heads and the soft rush of the small river now flowing through the ditch that used to be a road. In the distance was a constant rumble, not of thunder but of wagons carrying supplies, artillery, and wounded. A man came sloshing through the mud toward them. “Captain Lacey, sir!”

He stiffened. “Yes?”

The man’s eyes were barely visible in the dark; every inch of him was spattered with mud. “You’re needed, sir. General Ponsonby sent for you.”

Will’s face relaxed, and he nodded before sending the man on his way. “Ponsonby’s concerned for his horse,” he said wryly, more like the Will of old. “He’s been set on purchasing another to spare his animal any injury but cannot seem to strike a bargain. Perhaps I shall sell him mine and make a tidy sum.”

Alec chuckled, and raised one hand in farewell as Will flicked the end of his cigar into the darkness. The glowing tip of it was extinguished before it hit the ground. “Godspeed, Will.”

His friend looked at him and touched the drooping brim of his hat in salute. “And to you, Alec.”

1820

B
ut I can’t help,” Cressida said for the fourth time. “I could tell Mr. Wallace the direction and stay behind, out of the way.”

“Nonsense.” True to Cressida’s suspicion, Madame Wallace was proving to be far more than she appeared. She wore a pair of loose dark trousers and a dark, close-fitting jacket. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight braid that snaked down her back. Cressida caught the gleam of a knife, strapped to her forearm, when lightning flashed. She stared at it in uneasy fascination, and wondered what she had gotten herself into. Madame had swept her into the waiting carriage, and now Mr. Wallace was driving them along at a perilous speed toward the Lacey home. “Tell me more. What did you read?”

Cressida shivered again. “My father was responsible for it all,” she said in a small voice. It was horrible to think, let alone say out loud. “He helped another officer commit treason, then he put the incriminating papers in Al—in Major Hayes’s belongings when it appeared the major had been killed in battle. And then he blackmailed old Mr. Lacey, taking money in exchange for keeping silent about the truth.”

“Then what has happened to your father?”

“I don’t know.” But she suspected. Mr. Lacey did not seem the type to be cowed and afraid, and blackmailers rarely met good ends. If Mr. Lacey hadn’t done Papa harm, someone else probably had.

Madame Wallace didn’t appear too concerned. She kept glancing out the window. The lightning was growing more frequent and brighter, and now the distant rumble of thunder rolled across the land. From the strength of the breeze that ruffled the carriage curtains, it was quite a storm coming. “What do you know of Lacey and his home?”

“Almost nothing.” She raised her hands when Madame sent her an irritated look. “I told you I couldn’t help! You ought to have brought Julia instead.”

“No,” Madame said. “You are the steadier one. Do not say you know little; tell me what you do know. You have met Mr. Lacey?”

Cressida took a deep breath and nodded. “Once. He’s an older gentleman, about my height and stooped; he walks with a cane. I don’t think he has any family still living, at least not at The Grange. There is a servant, a very large man named Morris, who attends him to church. That’s the only place I’ve ever met Mr. Lacey. He scowls at everything and everyone, and he practically gave my grandmother the cut direct. He called Alec a traitor to his face in front of all Marston at church one week.”

“And the house?”

“I have never seen it except from a distance. Julia said Alec and Will Lacey were bosom friends as lads, though, so he must know it well.”

“Well, that will have to suffice.” Madame lifted the curtain to peer out the window again, and again Cressida caught the gleam of the knife handle.

“May I ask…” she began timidly. “May I ask how you know Alec?”

Madame’s smile flashed in the dark carriage. “He has not told you; perhaps I should not.”

“Then what…who
are
you?”

Madame Wallace leaned forward. Cressida leaned forward, too. “I am not someone you should know too much about.”

Somehow Cressida agreed with this statement. It didn’t stop her from asking more questions, though. “Why do you have a knife strapped to your arm?”

Madame gave an elegant shrug. “I hope it might remain there all night.”

Meaning that Madame hoped not to draw it? “What are you planning to do?”

“I shall have a look around,” said Madame vaguely. “Alec may have no need of my help. He is quite capable, when pressed.”

Cressida kept looking at the knife. Madame seemed far too dainty and delicate to hurt anyone with it, small as it was. “Do you have a pistol, too?”

She laughed in genuine surprise. “Of course not. Far too much noise. I prefer a more subtle approach.” She leaned forward abruptly. “Ah, this is the house?”

The Grange, the Lacey estate, lay in the hollow below them, a rambling edifice from the days of the Tudors. Cressida nodded. Madame tapped on the side of the carriage, and they halted at once. Madame pushed open the door and leaped to the ground, moving up to talk to Mr. Wallace. Cressida leaned out the window, searching for any sign of Alec during the frequent lightning flashes. The grounds appeared to be deserted, and light glowed in only a pair of windows in the house. Thunder crackled more ominously now, and the wind was sending leaves swirling from the trees. The horses were just as spooked as she was, to judge from their stamping and snorting.

Mr. Wallace jumped down from his perch and waved Cressida forward. “You’ll have to hold the horses,” he said, raising his voice over a boom of thunder. “The storm’s put the fear of the devil into them.” He held out the reins, and she took them uncertainly. “Lead them down the road a bit, there’s a stand of trees. Just don’t stand too close, else the lightning might get you.” He laughed as he said it, looking remarkably jolly given the situation. Cressida scowled at him and he turned away, pulling up the collar of his coat to hide his grin.

“You will be fine,” Madame said to her. She patted Cressida’s arm. “Just wait here. Come no closer. We shall see to Alec.”

Cressida nodded, and the two of them spoke a moment before heading off toward the house. Within seconds they had melted into the shadows, and even the next flash of lightning didn’t reveal a trace of them.

The wind howled, and a shower of acorns fell from a nearby oak tree, bouncing off the carriage roof with dull little pops. The horses tried to rear up in alarm, nearly pulling Cressida off her feet. If she didn’t tie them up, they could take off and drag her along with them, or leave her behind entirely. She managed to urge them onward, to the bend in the road Mr. Wallace had pointed out, and tied the reins to a sturdy tree branch.

But she couldn’t see the house from here. Anxiously she paced along the road, finally slipping through the trees to peer into the darkness again. The lightning, when it came, was now almost as bright as day, but she couldn’t see a sign of anyone—not Madame Wallace, nor Mr. Wallace, nor Alec.

What was happening? Even though she had told Madame she ought to have stayed at Penford, she was practically shaking with the desire to see better, to know what was going on inside the house. Was Julia mistaken? Perhaps the journal hadn’t referred to Will Lacey at all. If they had come to the wrong house…She laughed out loud in despair. Madame and Mr. Wallace would be breaking into the wrong house, Alec would be off somewhere completely on his own, and she would be standing here in a thunderstorm with two terrified horses, biting her fingernails to the quick worrying about all of them.

She hadn’t even begun to comprehend her father’s actions. It was there in his own hand, baldly spelling out how he had persuaded Nob into treason and profited from it, then again from another man’s supposed death. She thought of all the times Papa had gone off and come home flush with cash—blood money, most likely. Perhaps that was why he had gone to see Lord Hastings; he had never given them a good explanation of how he knew a colonel. Bitterly Cressida wondered what secrets the colonel might have, and if Papa had held something over him, too. Had Papa met his end there, having gone too far, or perhaps here in the house in the hollow below her? The wind whipped through the trees where she stood, making the branches creak and moan as they swayed. It was a mourning sound, wrenching and sorrowful, and a tear leaked from her eye as she acknowledged that her beloved Papa, with his booming laugh and affectionate embraces and the way he always made them all smile, had been worse than a scoundrel; he had ruined other lives and lived on money wrung from other people’s guilt and shame. She had suspected for a while that he’d met his death, but for the first time, Cressida thought it might be a blessing if they never knew, if Papa just disappeared and was never heard from again.

The wind was rising. The interminable heat hadn’t abated when they left Penford, but she had snatched up a cloak out of habit. It was still in the carriage, and as the wind changed and became noticeably cooler, she shivered. No rain had fallen yet, but the air was thick with it. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, and turned to go back to the carriage. She should check on the horses, and the cloak would feel good. There was nothing to be seen in the darkness anyway. With any luck, Madame Wallace and Mr. Wallace would return soon, with Alec in tow, and they could go home.

She only made it three steps.