To Taste Temptation (16 page)

“Did you?” Samuel asked softly.

“At the time, no.” Mr. Thornton looked grim now. “But there were so many circumstances that had to align correctly for us to have been attacked at that point, and the fact that the Indians numbered so many”—he shook his head—“the thing must have been planned by someone.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Jasper finally spoke. “We had meant to ask you if you were certain that MacDonald and Brown were dead.”

“MacDonald?” For a moment, Mr. Thornton looked confused; then he glanced quickly at the ladies and nodded. “Oh, of course. I see where your thoughts lie, but I’m afraid both men were quite dead. I helped bury them.”

Emeline pursed her lips, wondering for a moment what the men weren’t saying about MacDonald. She’d have to ask Samuel later, in private.

“Damn,” Jasper muttered. “If it’d been MacDonald, it would’ve wrapped this up neatly. Nevertheless, we have a few more questions to make of you.”

“Perhaps we should adjourn inside,” Samuel said. He held his arm out to his sister, but Rebecca ignored it and took Mr. Thornton’s instead. Samuel’s lips thinned.

Emeline hated to see him hurt. She laid her hand on Samuel’s sleeve. “What a good idea. I’d enjoy some tea.”

Samuel glanced from her eyes to her hand and back again. His brows rose almost imperceptibly. She tilted her chin at him. But the others were moving toward the back of the town house now.

“I don’t know if I can be of any use,” Mr. Thornton was saying ahead of them. “The man you really ought to talk to is Corporal Craddock.”

“Why is that?” Samuel called to him.

Mr. Thornton looked over his shoulder. “He gathered the wounded after Spinner’s Falls, after you’d...Well, you’d run into the woods. I guess you could say he was the officer in charge.”

Emeline felt Samuel’s arm stiffen under her fingers, but he didn’t say anything.

Jasper seemed not to have noticed that Mr. Thornton had nearly called Samuel a coward to his face. “Is he here in town?”

“No. I believe he retired to the country after the war. I could be wrong, of course; one hears so many things. But I think he’s in Sussex, near Portsmouth.”

Emeline thought she hid it well, but Samuel must’ve felt her start nonetheless.

“What is it?” he murmured without taking his eyes from the path ahead.

She hesitated. She’d just sorted her stack of invitations this morning, trying to determine the social events that would be best to attend in the upcoming month.

He looked at her, his brows drawn. “Tell me.”

Really, what choice did she have? It was almost as if the Fates had arranged the trap, and she was the unlucky hare that had run straight into it. Was there any point in struggling at all?

“We’ve been invited to the Hasselthorpe estate in Sussex.”

“What’s this?” Jasper had halted and turned.

“Lord and Lady Hasselthorpe, dear. Remember? They invited us weeks ago, and their house isn’t far from Portsmouth.”

“Damn me, you’re right.” The furrows next to Jasper’s nose and mouth stretched into arcs as he grinned. “What a stroke of luck! We can all go to this house party and then call on Craddock. That is...” He looked worriedly at Mr. Thornton. Rebecca and Samuel were easily included in the invitation as friends of Emeline’s. A bootmaker—even a very rich one—was a different matter.

But Mr. Thornton grinned and winked. “Never fear, I can continue our inquiries here in London whilst you talk to Craddock.”

And like that, Emeline knew that it was all decided. Her breath seemed to grow short as if her chest were being squeezed. Oh, they would argue and discuss the details back and forth, and she would need to petition Lady Hasselthorpe for invitations for the Hartleys, but in the end, it would all work out. She would be attending a house party with Samuel.

She looked up, knowing that he was watching her, and as her eyes met his warm coffee-brown ones, she wondered, Did he know what went on at house parties?

Now, of all the things in the world that the king loved, he loved his daughter most of all. He so doted on her that whenever she asked for a thing, he did his utmost to see that she received it. Which is why, when Princess Solace begged the king for permission to marry her own guard, instead of being a trifle tetchy as most royal parents might, he simply sighed and nodded. And that is how Iron Heart came to marry the most beautiful maiden in the land and a princess to boot....

—from
Iron Heart

“Will you be gone a
very
long time?” Daniel asked a week later.

He was lying on Emeline’s bed, head hanging off one end, both feet in the air, completely in the way of Harris, who was packing.

“Probably a fortnight,” Emeline said briskly. She sat at her pretty little dresser trying to decide which jewelry to bring to the Hasselthorpe house party.

“A fortnight is fourteen days. That’s a terrible long time.” Daniel swung a foot and got it tangled in the bed curtains.

“Lord Eddings!” Harris exclaimed.

Really, one ought not to miss one’s own offspring. She knew that. Many mothers of her rank hardly saw their children at all. Yet she hated leaving him. It was just so heart-wrenching to say good-bye.

“That will be all,” Emeline told her lady’s maid.

“But, my lady, I haven’t half finished.”

“I know.” Emeline smiled at Harris. “You’ve been working so hard, you must be in need of refreshment. Why don’t you take some tea in the kitchen?”

Harris pursed her lips, but she knew better than to contradict her mistress. She set down the pile of clothes she’d been holding and marched out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Emeline got up and went to the bed, shoving aside the mound of petticoats laid out on the surface to make a space. Then she sat, her back against the great oak headboard, her legs straight in front of her on the bed. “Come here.”

Daniel scrambled toward her like an eager puppy. “I don’t want you to go.”

He squirmed against her, smelling of little boy sweat, his knobby knees digging into her hip.

She stroked his blond curls. “I know, darling. But I shan’t be gone overlong, and I shall write you every day.”

More silent squirming. His face was hidden against her breast.

“Tante Cristelle will stay here with you,” Emeline whispered. “I don’t suppose you shall have any currant buns or sticky sweets or pies at all whilst I’m gone. You’ll have quite wasted away by the time I return and look like a stick boy and I shan’t recognize you.”

Breathy giggles came from her side until his blue eyes surfaced once again. “Silly. Tante will give me lots of sweets.”

Emeline feigned shock. “Do you think so? She’s very severe with me.”

“I’ll be fat when you come back.” He puffed out his cheeks to show her.

She laughed appreciatively.

“I can talk to Mr. Hartley, too,” he said.

Emeline blinked, startled. “I’m sorry, darling, but Mr. Hartley and his sister will be at the house party as well.”

Her son’s lower lip protruded.

“Have you been talking to Mr. Hartley often?”

He darted a look at her. “I talk to him over the wall, and sometimes I go to visit him in his garden. But I don’t bother him, really I don’t.”

Emeline was skeptical about this last. Right now, though, her mind was more taken up with the notion that Daniel and Samuel seemed to have formed a bond without her even knowing it. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the squirming imp beside her. “Can you sing me my song?” he asked in a small voice.

So she stroked his hair and sang “Billy Boy,” changing the name to Danny as she had since he was a baby, making it his song.

Oh, where have you been,

Danny Boy, Danny Boy?

Oh, where have you been,

Charming Danny?

And as she sang, Emeline wondered what the next fortnight would bring.

T
HE RENTED CARRIAGE
was not as well-sprung as Lady Emeline’s vehicle, and Sam was beginning to regret deciding to ride inside with Rebecca instead of renting a horse for himself. But he and Becca had hardly talked in the week since the disastrous Westerton ball, and he’d hoped that the enforced time together would break the spell.

So far, it hadn’t.

Rebecca sat across from him and stared out the window as if the view of hedges and fields were the most fascinating in the world. Her profile wasn’t a classic one, but it was very pleasing to him. Sometimes, when he caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, he’d have a flash of recognition. She looked a little like their mother.

Sam cleared his throat. “There’ll be a dance, I think.”

Becca turned and wrinkled her brow at him. “What?”

“I say, I think there’ll be a dance. At the house party.”

“Oh, yes?” She didn’t seem particularly interested.

He’d thought she’d be delighted. “I’m sorry I ruined the last one for you.”

She blew out a breath as if exasperated. “Why didn’t you tell me, Samuel?”

He stared at her a moment, trying to understand what she meant. Then a horrible chill crept through his belly. Surely she wasn’t talking about...“Tell you what?”

“You know.” Her lips crimped in her frustration. “You never talk to me; you never—”

“We’re talking right now.”

“But you’re not saying anything!” She spoke the words too loudly and then looked chagrined. “You never say anything, even when people make terrible accusations about you. Mr. Thornton came close to calling you a coward to your face when we were in the garden last week, and you never said a word to him. Why can’t you defend yourself at least?”

He felt his lip curl. “What people like Thornton say isn’t worth replying to.”

“So you’d rather remain silent and let yourself be condemned?”

He shook his head. There was no way to explain his actions to her.

“Samuel, I’m not those people. Even if you won’t justify yourself to them, you must talk to me. We are the only family we have left. Uncle Thomas is dead, and Father and Mother died before I could ever know them. Is it so wrong that I want to be closer to you? That I want to know what my brother faced in the war?”

It was his turn to stare out the window now, and he swallowed bile. There seemed to be the smell of men’s sweat in the close carriage, but he knew that it was his brain playing abominable tricks on him. “It isn’t easy to talk of war.”

“Yet I’ve heard other men do so,” she said softly. “Calvary officers bragging of charges and sailors talking of battles at sea.”

He frowned impatiently. “They’re not...”

“Not what?” She leaned forward over her knees as if she would will the words from him. “Tell me, Samuel.”

He held her gaze, although it caused him physical pain to do so. “The soldiers who have seen close action, the soldiers who have felt another man’s breath before taking it from him...” He closed his eyes. “Those soldiers hardly ever speak about it. It’s not something we want to remember. It hurts.”

There was a silence, and then she whispered, “Then what can you talk about? There must be something.”

He stared at her, and a rueful smile curved his lips at a memory. “The rain.”

“What?”

“When it rains on a march, there’s nowhere to hide. The men and their clothes and all the provisions get wet. The trail turns to mud beneath your boots, and the men begin to slip. And once one falls, it’s a rule, it seems, that half a dozen will fall next, their clothes and hair all over mud.”

“But surely you can pitch a tent when you stop for the night?”

“We can, but the tent will be wet as well by then and the ground underneath a sea of mud, and in the end, one wonders if it would be better to simply sleep in the open.”

She was smiling at him, and his heart lightened at the sight. “Poor Samuel! I never dreamed you spent so much time in the mud as a soldier. I always imagined you performing heroic feats.”

“My heroic feats mostly involved a kettle.”

“A kettle?”

He nodded, relaxing against the carriage seat now. “After a day’s march in the rain, our provisions were always wet, including the dry peas and meal.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Wet meal?”

“Wet and sticky. And sometimes we’d have to make it last another week, wet or no.”

“Wouldn’t it mold?”

“Very often. By the end of that week, the meal might be mostly green.”

“Oh.” She covered her nose as if she could smell the rotten meal. “What did you do?”

He leaned forward and whispered, “Ah, this is quite the secret. Many in the army wanted to know what I did with my little kettle.”

“You’re teasing now. Tell me what you did with a kettle that was so heroic.”

He shrugged modestly. “Only fed my entire camp with rotten meal. I found that if I rinsed the meal three times and then threw it in with a kettle full of water, it made a nice soup. Of course, it was better on the days I’d caught a rabbit or squirrel.”

“How absolutely awful,” his sister said.

“You did ask.” He grinned at her. She was talking to him, and he’d bore her to death with silly stories of army life if it made her happy.

“Samuel...”

“What, dear?” His heart squeezed at her uncertain expression. She was right; they were their only family left to each other. It was important that she not grow distant. “Tell me.”

She bit her lip, and he was reminded of how young she was. “Do you think they will converse with me, all these titled English ladies?”

He wished in that moment that he could smooth the way for her, make sure that she was never hurt for the rest of her life. But he could only tell the truth. “I think most will. There’s bound to be a girl or two who will have their noses in the air, but those are the sort who aren’t worth talking to, anyway.”

“Oh, I know. It’s just that I’m so nervous. I never seem to know what to do with my hands, and I wonder if my hair has been properly done.”

“You’ve that maid Lady Emeline found for you. I’ll be there and Lady Emeline as well. She at least will not let you go out with your hair improperly done. And I think you perfect in any case.”

She blushed, her cheeks tinting a delicate pink. “Do you really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I shall remember that my brother was the best rotten meal soup maker in His Majesty’s army, and I shall hold my head high.”

He laughed and she grinned back. The carriage bumped over something in the road, and Sam looked out the window to see that they were crossing a narrow stone bridge, the carriage’s sides nearly scraping the walls.

Rebecca’s gaze followed his. “Are we coming to a town?”

He pushed aside the curtain to peer farther ahead. “No.” He let the curtain drop and looked at her. “But it won’t be much longer now, I think.”

“Thank goodness. I am sore.” She shifted restlessly in her seat. “It’s a pity poor Mr. Thornton could not come.”

“I don’t think he minds.”

“But...” She wrinkled her brow. “It does seem hypocritical, doesn’t it? I mean, that he’s not been invited just because he makes boots? You’re in trade, too.”

“True.”

“In the Colonies, I don’t think we would make such a fine distinction.” She frowned down at her hands.

Sam was silent. The fact was, these kinds of distinctions between men’s rank bothered him as well.

“It seems so much harder, here in England, for a man to raise himself purely by merit alone.” Rebecca was nibbling her lip now, still staring down at her hands. “Even Mr. Thornton had his father’s business, small though it might have originally been. A man who hadn’t even that—who was perhaps a servant—could he ever become respectable?”

Sam narrowed his eyes, wondering if she was thinking of a particular servant. “Perhaps. With a bit of luck and—”

“But it’s not likely, is it?” She looked up.

“No,” he said softly. “It isn’t very likely that a man who labors as a servant will become a man of means in England. Most will live and die a servant.”

Her lips parted as if she would say something further. Then she closed them firmly and gazed out the window instead. They were silent again, but this time the silence was a companionable one. Sam closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat. He wondered sleepily just how much his sister’s questions were prompted by O’Hare the footman.

He dozed a bit, and when he next woke, the carriage was turning into an enormous drive.

“It’s very large, isn’t it?” Rebecca said in a small voice.

Sam had to agree. The Hasselthorpe home was more a rolling mansion. It squatted complacently at the end of the gravel drive, in the middle of a vast field of mown grass, all the better to reflect its glory. Several generations had obviously been at work on the gray stone structure. Here were gothic windows, there, Tudor chimneys; the different styles jumbled together only gave notice that the family that lived here had been in residence for centuries. In front, the drive circled and there were already four carriages there, depositing gentlemen and ladies of the ton.