Kitabı oku: «The Tainted Love of a Captain»

Chapter 1

Gareth’s touch on Harry’s arm drew Harry’s attention away from his dog. ‘Is that not the woman we saw here yesterday?’

Harry looked across his shoulder and smiled. ‘I believe so.’

It was a blustery day and in the grey sky above seagulls called out as they played on the breeze, flying into it and then letting it sweep them back. The women’s skirts were blowing about their legs as they held onto the brims of their bonnets.

The dog barked because the stick had been lifted and not thrown yet. Harry looked at the waves and hurled the piece of driftwood he’d picked up to play their game. Ash turned and ran after it, all enthusiasm, inspired by the energy in the weather. A few minutes later the dog returned, with the stick in her mouth and her tail wagging violently Harry patted the Dalmatian’s head and took the stick from her mouth then hurled it into the sea again. The pebbles on the shore stirred with the movement of both the dog and the waves as Ash raced into the foaming water.

‘She is smiling broadly and my bet would be she is smiling at you.’

Harry glanced over his shoulder once more. The woman was speaking to her female companion, who from her appearance he would guess to be a maid. He looked at his friend. ‘Or you.’

‘No. Definitely you.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I have neither the looks nor the reputation that make women whisper.’

Harry laughed as Ash returned. ‘You have a scarlet coat with epaulettes, the uniform works wonders, Captain Morris,’ he mocked his friend, then took the stick from the dog’s mouth and threw it into the shallow part of the waves again. Ash followed it.

‘The woman could not be more obvious. She has not taken her eyes off you.’

‘Then perhaps it is some young miss who has heard of my reputation and sees a monster to point at.’

‘She is not looking at you in disdain.’

Harry smiled at his friend’s amusement. He did not care why the woman was looking at him. Let her look. Ash came back and Harry threw the stick a few more times as Gareth continually glanced back and recounted how the woman continued to watch while she walked back and forth, beside her maid, along the path at the head of the beach.

When he’d had enough of being observed, like a spider in a jar, Harry looked at Gareth and suggested it was time to return to their barracks in Preston. He had to get back anyway. He was on duty later.

Harry walked off the pebbly beach as Gareth sent one last smile in the unknown woman’s direction.

They walked to the inn, where they’d left their horses side by side.

Ash kept close to Harry’s horse as they rode back, nipping at the horse’s hind legs on occasion if she had a chance.

Harry dismounted. The brick paved yard in the centre of the barracks was a huge square and the stalls about it held several hundred horses. He led Obsidian into one of the giant stable blocks, to her stall. He took off her saddle before brushing the horse down, while Ash retired to the corner of the stable and watched.

When Harry walked out of the stall the dog followed.

Ash slept under the desk by Harry’s feet as Harry served his hours of duty through the night and in the morning when Harry tumbled on to the bed in his quarters, Ash climbed up and lay beside him. Harry fell asleep as he stroked the dog’s ear.

A deafening explosion rang in his ears and it resonated through his chest. Then there were screams of retaliation and the thunder created by a cavalry charge. Harry awoke and sat up. His nose and mouth burned with the smell and the acrid taste of gunpowder and his mind was plagued with the sight of wounded men, blood and death. It was a relief to be awake.

He stroked Ash’s neck and the dog licked his cheek. ‘You, scallywag, Ash.’ He rubbed her stomach as she rolled onto her back.

Ash had come from a litter his sister Mary’s husband had bred for his son to choose from. Harry was offered one of George’s spares. The offer had been the gift of more than a dog, though. Harry had needed something to make him smile and his sister had spotted his need and given him Ash. He’d accepted the gift for the kindness it was and chosen the runt of the litter, although Ash’s playful character had grown beyond the weak puppy he’d carried away tucked inside his coat.

The dog sat up and licked his face again. ‘Good day to you too, you silly animal, Ash.’

Ash’s name had come from Harry’s niece, Iris; Ash for the sake of the black dots on her white coat.

Having Ash to amuse and pet had helped still his mind. It had quietened the sudden, violent visions during the day. The impacts of fighting a farcical war without enough equipment, ammunition or food and medicine were cut deep into his mind and the scars opened up whenever he was idle. His nightmares were of the tents full of wounded men as often as they were of the battles. He’d seen more men lost to infection and fever than cannon fire or bullets.

He’d joined the army as an eager young man, keen to discover the thrills of the life of a soldier and leave the stifling safety of his family home behind. For years he’d lived carelessly, supported by them, with a casual disregard for anything but his own pleasure. He’d been a flippant young man, breaking all his righteous father’s rules, even when he’d first become a soldier. But that was not the man who had returned from the war. War had tainted him and his family had seen it. But good God, he did not even recognise the man he’d once been now. That innocent, foolish man was a stranger to him as much as this man had been a stranger to the family he had rebelled against for no other reason than to express his individuality.

‘Come along, let us go for a run.’ Harry shoved the dog off the bed, then climbed out of it himself. He washed and shaved, then picked up his dark-blue trousers and pulled them on. Next he put on his shirt, tucked it in and drew his braces up over his shoulders before putting on his black neckcloth. Lastly he slid his arms into his scarlet military coat. That last garment was the thing which defined him as a lancer, a cavalry man.

His fingers ran over the epaulette, which announced him as a captain, then brushed down the sleeve, knocking off any lint. He swept off the dust from his other sleeve and then secured the brass buttons in their regimental button holes, following an upward pattern. The routine of dressing each morning and returning himself to the man who was ready and prepared to fight, had become a ritual. He clothed his soul and his thoughts, hiding them to ensure they were never exposed.

He sighed out a breath. ‘Ash,’ he called the dog to his heel. They left his room together and walked to the stable to prepare Obsidian. The horse and the regiment were a family that understood him and they were his home now. The Crimea had set him apart from his family. The knowledge, the wounds in his head, were things he could never share with them, or his old friends. But everyone lived with such memories here.

Yet the dog had been a good thought of his sister’s. Ash was in his military family too. War may have set him apart, but his family still sought to reach out to the stranger they had found amongst them on his return. As his family could not look after him from a distance. Ash’s role was to watch him and lift his spirits when they were low.

Fifteen minutes later he was riding at a trot, with Ash beside the horse, as they travelled the two miles towards Brighton’s beach.

He could have ridden in another direction, but the sea always seemed to pull him towards it.

The taste of salt filled the air. He breathed it in and kept breathing slowly. It cleansed his senses of the haunting stale smells of the gunpowder and blood and the foul odours of death. He could see the sea in the distance through the avenue of houses.

He left Obsidian at the inn he regularly used for that purpose, then walked on with Ash, and a stick for Ash, ignoring the bustle of passing carriages and people in the busy street. Yes, the dog was a very good addition. Without Ash he would not have come to the beach each day. His visits to the beach had become his moments to escape—they would have felt like running away without Ash to entertain. With Ash these moments had become the sanctuary he ran to.

‘Fetch!’ he yelled as he walked out on to the pebbles and hurled the stick. Ash barked with loud excitement and her eyes followed the stick’s flight through the air.

Harry watched it too, isolating his thoughts and himself, shutting out his awareness of the bathing carts and those managing their occupants and the others walking on the beach, letting his thoughts slip out of the past and the echoes of the nightmare he’d dreamed.

He’d been invited to play cards with a retired colonel tonight. Colonel Hillier. He presumed because those playing believed he would bring money into the game, with a Duke for a brother. The truth was that he had already spent, or rather gambled away, most of the arrears of his allowance that had been given to him by his brother on his return to England. Equally, most of his pay that had built up during his months abroad had been lost at the tables.

But not all the money had been lost since his return; there had been many nights during the regiment’s progression towards the battlefields in the Crimea in which bets had been made and promissory notes written. Gambling on the outcome of a hand of cards had been the closest thing to freedom there.

The notes had all been called in and paid on his return and now he was poor until he received the next payment of his allowance from his ducal brother, or his next wage.

Laughter rang out behind him, in a woman’s tone, from the walkway along the head of the beach. The familiar sound pierced through the dustsheet he’d thrown across the world to separate himself from it.

He looked back.

The woman, who kept watching him, was there again. For the fifth day. With the same maid. He looked away, out to sea. He was not interested in any young misses. His life was not a life for an English wife.

Ash returned with the stick. Harry took it from her mouth and threw it again, ignoring the woman, despite her desire to obtain his attention as she spoke in an overly loud voice. He continued playing with Ash and disregarding her, as he had done every other day, until she ceased promenading back and forth.

Once she’d gone, he left the beach and walked to a coffee shop in the town. The coffee shop was close to the Royal Pavilion, with its bizarre Indian-style architecture. The Palace made him smile. It seemed to be laughing at its grandeur. Ash came inside with Harry and sat beneath the table as Harry drank the dark, bitter coffee. It gave him a renewed boost of energy. He and Ash walked back to the inn, collected Obsidian, then returned to the barracks.

He dined in the mess room with the other officers and then it was time to ride back into Brighton for this unknown retired colonel’s card party. His Lieutenant Colonel and two other officers Harry did not know particularly well, accompanied him, as they were also invited. Gareth had not been included, probably because he did not have wealthy origins.

Harry was the one who stepped up to the door of the tall terraced property and knocked.

The door was opened by a male servant, who held the door wide. Harry handed his hat over to the servant as he stepped in. Masculine laughter rang from a room off the square hall.

When Harry entered the room the laughter had come from, the other men were not in uniform, nor were they men Harry knew.

It was going to be an odd evening. He would rather have drunk and played cards with the officers who were his friends. But he had agreed to this; flattered by the invitation and out of a desire to play cards with a seriousness that would grasp the attention of his mind and silence other thoughts. His heart raced at the idea of holding the cards as he saw the money lying on the table and recalled the challenge of the game. He could also do with winning.

‘Colonel Hillier.’ Harry bowed to his host as the grey-haired, old, portly man acknowledged his new guests with a gesture of his hand. Chairs were pointed to at a strange semicircular table; it was half of a table, which stood before the fireplace and it had an open middle, presumably so it did not burn. Harry had never seen one like it before.

When Harry sat, the heat from the fire touched his legs. It was May and there had been the aftermath of the storm yesterday, yet it was not particularly cold, he was going to sweat in his coat. A contraption attached to the table bore a decanter; it swung on a runner, which meant it could be passed about without the need to be lifted. It was swung to those who had joined the table as a new hand of cards was dealt for each man and then passed along.

Relief filled Harry as he picked up the cards. This was a constant that had been with him since before the Crimea. He’d spent hours at card tables with his cousins during their dissolute years and the pleasure to be found in a card game had lasted throughout the war. When he’d returned, playing cards had provided a base for normality. He was once again in a place in which he could face reality.

But those he had previously played with, his cousins, were wed now and happily settled with their wives and children. Life had progressed without him. Everything had changed here. He was a soldier and nothing besides that now.

He looked at the cards he held and then at the faces of those about the table, trying to judge which men were his competition.

‘Charlotte!’ Colonel Hillier called.

Harry was aware of the woman walking into the room, but he did not look, his mind was on the cards and the game.

‘Bring my box of cigars, would you?’

‘Yes.’ It was a young woman’s voice that answered.

When she returned, a rose perfume scented the air. The perfume was very like the one his mother used. The scent increased in intensity as the woman came closer, circulating about the half table, holding out the open box of cigars as each man then helped himself.

When she reached Harry, he looked up. My God. The woman from the seashore. She had the most striking auburn hair, full of rioting curls, and she had remarkably large, beautiful hazel eyes that hinted at the colour of bracken in autumn. He had noticed neither thing from a distance, but then her hair had been beneath a bonnet.

‘Thank you.’ He took a cigar from the box.

She smiled at him as colour tinted her pale skin a deep pink while her eyes opened wider, as though she was also shocked to encounter him here.

His invitation had not been due to her, then; the thought had crossed his mind.

He looked back at his cards, but his thoughts and attention were now partly drawn to the woman.

When she finished handing out the cigars, she walked back about the men with matches to light their cigars. He watched her face when she lit a match for him. She looked only at the task, and yet when he sucked on the cigar, holding it to the match to draw the flame and light the end, he sensed her staring at him.

Did her father know that she walked with her maid along the shore each afternoon and watched him?

She left the room once her task was complete. But some of his thoughts remained with her even then. She was a very attractive woman. He had never really looked at her when he’d been on the beach. Yet his mind’s focus on her was involuntary; she was a young miss and he was not interested in such women. His mind, however, begged to differ on that point this evening.

She returned to the room five times to circulate with cigars or refill the decanter. All tasks a servant might have completed, but the Colonel called for his daughter to undertake them. Perhaps this odd collection of men had been invited not solely to play cards but to obtain a suitor for his daughter and this was his version of a shop window to sell her attributes.

Harry smiled as he won his fourth hand.

He leant back in his chair as the money on the table was passed along to him and his gaze clashed with the woman’s. Their gazes had met several times. She coloured and looked away.

If this card game had been played in a gentleman’s club, where the women were available, she would not be colouring as she met his gaze but looking alluringly and by now he would have beckoned her over and invited her to sit on his knee as he played, effectively claiming her for the night. Perhaps he would go in search of a woman after this. The escape that could be found in a bed with a woman had been the other constant surviving from his old life.

He did not seek a woman when he left the Colonel’s, richer by the grand sum of fifty pounds; the Colonel’s auburn-haired daughter was still too much on his mind. If he lay with a woman it would be the Colonel’s daughter in the bed in his mind and that felt sordid. Instead he returned to the barracks and climbed back into the narrow bed that he shared with Ash.

~

‘You have a letter, my friend.’

Harry awoke and sat up instantly, his hand reaching for his sword, which lay on the floor beside his bed. Instinct. But the instinct was overridden when he saw Gareth. ‘Must you walk in without knocking? One day I will not awake fully and your throat will be cut.’ Harry turned to sit on the edge of the bed. The letter was thrown on to the covers beside him.

Gareth merely laughed as Harry picked the letter up.

He expected it to be from a member of his family. All of his brothers and sisters wrote to him on occasion, along with his mother and father. Even his cousin and friend, Henry, had kept in contact and sent him amusing anecdotes while Harry had been away. But Harry did not recognise the writing and when he turned the letter over there was no imprint of a seal in the wax.

‘Do you want to come for a ride with me, for a proper gallop, without the dog?’ Gareth asked as Harry opened the letter.

Harry looked up. ‘Yes.’ It was Sunday and neither of them had any hours of duty.

‘I’ll give you forty minutes precisely,’ Gareth answered, before turning and walking out of Harry’s room.

Harry’s hand settled on Ash’s head and stroked behind the dog’s ear as he looked at his letter, which came from an unknown source.

Dear Captain Marlow,

I am so glad I have discovered your name. I have been longing to know it for three whole weeks and now I know it I can write to you.

I have seen you on the beach with your beautiful dog. It is charming the way you and she play your game of fetch.

The woman from the shore. The Colonel’s—very forward—auburn-haired daughter. She should surely not be writing to him.

I wonder, that is I hope, that you might be willing to walk with me along the seafront one day, perhaps today. I can be there at four. If you are going to the beach today? There is no need to write back, simply meet me if you can.

Yours sincerely,

Charlotte Cotton

Cotton… A frown pulled at his brow. It was not the retired Colonel’s surname. A step daughter then? Perhaps?

She was in Harry’s mind again, then, as he dressed. With her large, fascinating hazel eyes and her vivid hair.

He let Ash accompany him to the stables, then left the dog in Obsidian’s stall before leading the horse out into the middle of the huge stable block full of whinnying and neighing horses.

Gareth was waiting outside, sitting astride his horse. ‘Are you ready?’

‘I am,’ Harry answered as he mounted. The weather today was bright, warm sunshine.

They smiled at one another before they turned the horses. Then left the barracks at the pace of a trot, talking as they rode. They rode out to the hills at a canter before letting the animals have their heads in a gallop. It was as good for Harry as it was for Obsidian to feel the wind whipping at him as Obsidian cut through the stillness of the world at a raging gallop.

At the top of the cliffs they stopped and looked down, watching the sea.

Harry looked back towards Brighton and thought of the woman who would be waiting there for him at four. He had no intent to go, or rather, he might go to exercise Ash, but he would not communicate with the woman… He said aloud, ‘The woman on the shore—’

‘The one who has been watching you?’

‘Yes.’ Harry looked over at his friend as they walked their horses farther along the cliff path.

‘What about her?’

‘If you give me a chance I will tell you.’ Harry laughed, then continued. ‘I know who she is.’

‘You have spoken with her? When? What did she say?’

‘Last evening at Colonel Hillier’s. She is his daughter. Or perhaps his step-daughter. They do not have the same surname.’

Gareth broke into laughter that came from deep in his throat.

‘Why is that amusing?’ Harry charged.

His friend drew in a deep breath to quell his mirth. Then smiled broadly. ‘You fool, Harry. I never had you down as a naïve man.’

‘Naïve…’ Harry’s eyebrows lifted.

‘She is his mistress. Not his daughter.’ Gareth laughed again.

His mistress… Lord. He’d had no idea. He swallowed and looked ahead. ‘She did not behave like his mistress.’ He thought of how regularly her colour had heightened and how she had looked away. Yet the fact the Colonel had used her to serve them fitted Gareth’s definition.

‘I have not seen her so I did not recognise her on the beach, but I have heard the woman is an outstanding beauty. Everyone comments on her when they have been to Hillier’s.’

Something scratched along Harry’s spine, like a knife on stone. It was the word, ‘everyone’ that had stirred the sensation. The image in his head was something he did not want to picture. ‘She is beautiful.’ She was. Her auburn hair and her eyes seemed even more attractive now he knew she was a touchable, attainable woman, another man’s, but only because that man paid for her keep. Yet the thought of being able to touch her conjured up more images he did not want to see.

She had asked him to meet her. He wanted to do so now. Would it be wrong for him to speak with her?

He debated the question internally during their ride back to the barracks and as he brushed Obsidian down. He was undecided when he ate his luncheon and he remained undecided even after that. It was not until half past the hour of three that he made up his mind.

He would go and he would speak to her. He saddled Obsidian again and took Ash with him as he normally would. Having Ash beside the horse quietened his doubt. If he changed his mind he could just walk down to the waves.

He left Obsidian at the inn, then walked towards the sound of the sea. The noise of the water washing up on to the pebbles began to ease his soul and he could taste the salt in the air.

She was there, with her maid. They were on the path at the head of the beach, a few yards away. He crossed the street. She walked towards him and intercepted his path. ‘Captain Marlow!’ she called. ‘Well met!’ She spoke as though she had not written and he therefore presumed the maid did not know that this interchange had been orchestrated.

He bowed, slightly. ‘Miss Cotton.’ What was the etiquette for a man’s mistress? He knew how to behave with whores and with respectable women, but a mistress was somewhere in between. ‘Would you care to walk with me?’ He lifted his arm, in the way he might have offered his arm to one of his sisters or cousins.

The maid held back to walk a few paces behind them as Ash looked up at him with eyes that asked why he had not walked on to the pebbles. Harry clicked the fingers of his free hand and tapped his leg to tell Ash to stay at his side.

‘I like your dog. What is her name?’ Miss Cotton said loudly. He presumed for the benefit of the maid as much as for an answer.

‘Ash. She was named by my niece.’

She looked at him as though the fact that he might have a niece was a bizarre thought. ‘Oh.’

He smiled. Her colour had been high since the moment they had faced each other, but now it became even redder.