Not Quite a Husband (27 page)

Bryony’s last patient was none other than Captain Bartlett, who, after he led the charge, had been shot in the abdomen as he fought to retake the civil hospital outside the fort. As she operated on Captain Bartlett, she was dimly aware that another officer came into the surgery and watched her as she worked, but it did not occur to her to turn and look.

Only when she was done and Captain Bartlett moved to the injury ward did she remember the intruder.

“Surgeon-Captain Gibbs, ma’am,” the man introduced himself.

That
was the moment the war ended for Bryony. She shook the surgeon-captain’s hand with quite a bit more enthusiasm than she normally greeted strangers with and all but shoved over the records of
the recovering soldiers and camp followers and the death certificates she’d signed.

The surgeon-captain, an unsmiling man, toured the injury ward. At the end, he said solemnly, “Thank you, Mrs. Marsden. I will ask that the officers recommend you for a medal for your services.”

“Thank you but please don’t,” said Bryony in all sincerity. “That would be setting the bar too low. I but did what every surgeon would have done.”

They shook hands again. And she was free. She walked into the hot sun of an August day, feeling light as a dandelion puff, daring to loiter outside for the first time in a week and forever.

But the fort was crowded. Provisions and materiel rolled in the gates. The kitchen workers ran about in a frenzy, supplying everyone with tea and tiffin. And she was getting too many curious looks from all the men, Indian and British, for her comfort. So she abandoned her plan to stand in the open for as long as she could and removed to her quarters.

Leo was there, shrugging into his coat. She hurried to help him. “Your arm! Be careful.”

“My arm is quite fine. I can even do this. See.” He had her in a fierce embrace that quite crushed her breasts and squeezed every last molecule of air out of her. She could not get enough of it.

But eventually he let her go. “I have to go see the
general, or so I’ve been told—he wants to know about Dir. If it were any other man, I’d have told him to go bugger himself for keeping me from you. But since he and his troops rescued us, I am just going to ask him to hurry up with his questions instead.”

“Well then go and come back fast.”

He hugged her again and covered her face with kisses. “Take some rest, if you can in all this commotion. I’ll see if I can get us out of here today itself.”

She tried, but rest was out of the question. With every raised voice, alarm shot through her—and there were plenty of raised voices as the men inside the fort tried to make themselves heard above the din. Two times she ran to the door and had her hands on the knob before she realized that the war was finished, that there would be no more injured soldiers needing her attention.

So she packed instead—even if Leo couldn’t secure transport for them today, Surgeon-Captain Gibbs would still want his quarters back. Not that there was much to pack—they had brought little beyond the clothes on their backs. She did find one stocking of hers under the bed and a pen engraved with Leo’s name on the desk.

When she went to put the pen in his saddlebag, she noticed for the first time that it had been slashed through on one side. She shuddered, for a moment
slipping back to the terror of their desperate ride. And then it passed and she placed the pen in an interior pouch of the saddlebag where he kept his other pens.

The inside of the bag was largely empty except for a few notebooks, and one of them too had been slashed halfway through. She picked up that particular notebook and opened it. Several sheets that had been torn from the notebook fell out.

Those would be the letters he’d told her about. The first one was to his godfather.

The next letter, to his brothers, ran more or less along the same lines, with additional good-byes to numerous nieces and nephews and two postscripts.

There was another sheet of paper. Bryony hesitated. He’d told her the content of the first two letters, so presumably he would not mind her reading them. But he’d said nothing about a third letter. She was about to put it back without reading when she saw that it was addressed to
her
.

Leo’s voice drifted in from the shutters she’d left ajar.
Mrs. Marsden. As soon as possible. Thank you
.

She quickly put the letters back, came to her feet, and wiped the tears from her eyes.

“You are already done with the general?” she asked as he came in the door.

“No, I didn’t meet him yet. But there is a cable from Callista.”

“Callista? Here?”

“I think you’d better read it.”

Somehow her heart sank at his expression. She took the cable from him.

“Did I say I was going to kill her with my bare hands if anything happened to you? I think I am going to do it anyway,” Bryony said, grinding her teeth.

“No, I will not have you hang for her. I will see if I can have her committed to an asylum where she belongs,” said Leo, shaking his head in exasperation. “She fooled me. When I cabled a friend in London and asked about your father’s health, the response I got was that he was indeed housebound.”

“So you did check. I was beginning to wonder if you’d become excessively gullible.”

“I don’t trust a word Callista says, at least not where you are concerned. When you were in Germany, she once told me that as a result of treating your own melancholia, you were severely addicted to cocaine and injected yourself at least three times a day.”

“What?”

“And when you were in America, she reported that you fell in love with the husband of one of your colleagues and became so miserable that you attempted suicide.”

“She’s mad!”

“Mad to throw us together, that is for certain.”

“Well, shall we believe her this time?”

“The cable was sent from Lord Elgin’s office. So Charlie had to be involved. And for Charlie to be involved,
she must have gone to either Jeremy or Will. I’m inclined to believe her.”

The addition of shock to the mix of exhaustion and excitement was getting to be too much for Bryony. She sat down, the cable in hand, and tried to read it again. But the words only swam about.

She looked up at him. “I suppose I’ll have to go right away.”

“Yes. The road to Nowshera is crowded and the ponies for the tonga service are overworked. They say a trip now takes twenty hours. I have been promised an escort for you. Shall I help you get ready?”

“I’m ready,” she said slowly. “I was already packing before you came back.”

He pulled her out of her chair and hugged her close. “I’ll miss you.”

She hugged him back as fiercely as she dared. “Promise me you won’t do anything brave.”

“I will be the veriest coward. And I’ll come to London as soon as I can get away from here. That is, if you haven’t already left for San Francisco or Christchurch by the time I reach England.”

She kissed him. “No, I’ll be there. You were right. It’s time I stopped running away.”

I
t was always a shock to return to London, to the visibly sooty air, the grime-streaked houses, the poverty, and the sheer density of the population. But it was also the kind of shock that wore off fast. By the time the train pulled into the station Bryony had ceased to wonder how people managed to live in such collective squalor. And as the carriage drew up before her father’s house, she no longer even smelled the pervasive stench of horse droppings along the thoroughfares.

It was much more difficult to look upon her father’s face, the pale, papery skin, the thinning brows and lashes, the colorless and slack lips—especially slack on the side that had been paralyzed by the previous stroke—and realize that he was truly at death’s door. He’d had a second stroke mere hours before
Bryony arrived. She conferred with his physician. Geoffrey Asquith was not expected to recover. He was not even expected to last more than a week. But he was still alive.

He had been very well cared for. Her stepmother, with years of experience looking after her fragile sons, had hired two competent nurses and directed them well. Both he and the room were clean as a whistle, and one could hardly tell that there was a bedpan in use.

“Tea?” Callista asked.

Bryony shook her head.

At twenty-five, Callista still retained the gamine face she’d had since she was a child, with the same wide eyes, same high cheekbones, same slightly pinched nose. She’d been there on the platform of the train station, waiting, a slender, sparkling young woman in a straw hat the green ribbons of which fluttered in the wind and the steam. And Bryony’s heart had throbbed painfully: Such an uncanny resemblance she bore to her dead mother, as if Toddy had stepped out of the careful preserves of Bryony’s memory.

They had not said much on the carriage ride home. They were not close. They had never been close, even though they had once been the only two children in a large, rambling house.

Bryony had tried. After Toddy’s death, she’d poured all her love into Toddy’s baby. She’d imagined them as fellow shipwrecked passengers in the same lifeboat: sisters and best friends who would make their way together to safety and a new life.

But whereas Bryony yearned for human contact, Callista shrank away from it. She did not want to be kissed or stroked or cuddled. She did not want to be sung to. And when Bryony tried to read to her, she hid under draped tables and bedsteads, her fingers stuffed into her ears.

Bryony could not get her to talk. She could not interest Callista in any of the games and recreations that she and Toddy had enjoyed so immensely. There had even been times when Callista had turned around and scurried in the opposite direction when she’d seen Bryony coming.

Eventually she’d learned to leave Callista alone. And accepted that there was no one else in the lifeboat with her, that she must row herself across the endless sea of her childhood, and that she would be alone too when she finally reached that far shore.

It almost didn’t hurt very much when, at age five, Callista took instantly to both Mrs. Asquith and Mrs. Roundtree, their new governess, grew out of her shell, and became a happy, rambunctiously sociable girl.