Did I feel better? Yes.
Had I hurt my head? Yes, that was why I wore a bandage.
Had I hurt my leg, then, too? Yes.
Did a Frenchy hurt me? Yes.
He offered to send his father to hurt the Frenchy in return. I thanked him, but said I would prefer we all just stayed home together for a time, for I had missed my brother, and would like to become acquainted with his son.
Why was my skin so brown? A soldier spends a great deal of time in the sun.
“That will do, Master Pokenose,” Lucien said, causing his son to giggle. Obediently, though, Charles ceased asking questions. He sat quietly while Lucien discussed plans for removing to the countryside. Quite against my will, I began to fall asleep. Charles brought this to his father’s attention, which brought a rich laugh from Lucien. “Indeed, youngster, you are right. We’ll let him rest for now.”
I murmured an apology, stirring awake as I felt a small hand take my own.
“Papa says you’re a great gun and we must help you to get better.”
“My recovery is assured, then,” I said, “but it is your papa who is the great gun.”
Over the next three years, I would come to believe more and more in the truth of that statement. Fibbens was made my valet, a job that for some months involved the added duties of attending an invalid. I came to value him greatly. As my physical strength returned, though, it was Lucien and his son who would not allow me to retreat from the world. Charles’s energetic encouragement and Lucien’s refusal to permit me to mope over my injuries kept me from falling into a fit of the dismals. Before long, I seldom thought so much of what I could not do, as what I could. Charles continued to delight me-I could not have been more attached to him if he had been my own boy.
On the night following Lucien’s funeral, recalling my brother’s life, I wondered how I would be able to comfort Charles over the days to come, when the numbness I felt now would undoubtedly wear off.
When Lucien’s horse, Fine Lad, had returned riderless to the stable just three days earlier, a large group of men searched frantically for him-servants, tenants, and neighbors. It was I who found Lucien. I had followed a route he often took through the woods when he rode for pleasure and discovered his motionless form along this path. He lay pale and bleeding beneath a shady tree-a thick, broken, bloodstained branch beside him. I did my best to staunch the wound on his head, and to keep him warm, even as I shouted for help.
All along the way back to the Abbey, the men who helped me carry him on a litter, and then to place him in a wagon, recounted several the strange riding accidents of which they had heard. It was their way, I realized later, of trying to make sense of what seemed impossible-that Lucien, an excellent horseman, would be so careless while riding among low-lying branches. I had the broken branch with me, though, to prove it, as much to myself as anyone. And I would show it to Lucien, and ask him what the devil he was about.
A fractured skull, the doctor said. Lucien never regained consciousness.
I knew the sort of blind rage that is the consort of our worst grief. I thought of burning the branch that had struck him. I thought of taking an ax to the tree, felling that which had felled him. I thought of shooting the horse.
I did none of these. Perhaps it was the horse’s name that cleared my mind: Fine Lad.
Charles needed me.
That single thought cooled my rage.
Lucien’s will made me Charles’s guardian and trustee. I knew he did not merely want me to keep Charles’s fortune safe, to simply be certain that he was sent to the best schools. I was to teach him what the Abbey meant to his family, what it meant to be the Earl of Rolingbroke, what he owed to his name, and owed to the memory of two good men who had held the same long list of titles before him. I had no fear that Charles would fail to be a credit to them-he was already so much his father’s son.
That evening, sitting before the fire, remembering Lucien, I knew that I would protect my young godson with my life. As the clock struck midnight, I vowed that I would do my damnedest to keep Lucien alive in his memory.
I had no sooner made this vow that the library door flew opened, startling me. Charles, pale and tearful, ran toward me, frantically calling my name. I opened my arms to him, taking him up on my lap, and waving away the small army of concerned servants whose grasps he had eluded.
As the door to the library closed again, I tried to soothe him. “What’s wrong, nipperkin?” I asked, thinking I already knew the answer.
“Papa’s alive again,” Charles sobbed.
“What?” I said, thinking I must have misheard him.
“Papa’s alive. But he was dead, and now he scares me.”
Was this some strange manifestation of a child’s grief, I wondered? “What do you mean, Charles?”
The boy shivered. “I mean, I saw him. His ghost.”
I sought an explanation. “You were sleeping-”
“It was not a dream!” he insisted, with a familiar obstinacy.
I hesitated, then asked, “Charles, have you been speaking to the Banes?” The odious family was here-the dowager, Henry, William, and Fanny. The Banes had insisted on sleeping in a different wing than the one they had last occupied, although Henry now pooh-poohed the ghost story, saying it was undoubtedly one of Lucien’s larks.
They had arrived, clearly, not so much for the funeral as for the reading of the will, and to say they were angry with its terms is to vastly understate the matter. Had William not intervened, the dowager, it seemed, would have been carried off on the spot by an apoplexy. “It is of no use, Mama,” he said. “You should have known how it would be.”
The dowager continued to bemoan her faithless nephew’s lack of consideration for his own family, but not quite so intensely. Nevertheless, there was enough ill-concealed venom among the Banes to recall to me my first encounter with them, and I made sure Charles was never left alone with them.
“No,” Charles said now. “I don’t like them.”
“You are a wise young man.”
“Then why don’t you believe me?”
“Did I say I did not believe you? Kindly refrain from making assumptions.”
“What are those?”
“Er-don’t believe you know something until you’re sure you do know it.”
He frowned as he puzzled this out, but he had stopped crying.
“Do you know, Charles-the more I think about this, the more I’m sure there is nothing to be frightened of here. Your father loved you very much, and would never harm you.”
“Yes,” he said, slowly. “And I have a great many things I should like to say to him, that I have been thinking of these past few days. But one can’t help but be frightened of ghosts, even good ghosts.”
“No one can blame you for feeling frightened. I’m glad you came to me. I promise I will protect you, Charles. Your father asked that of me, and I gave him my word that I would.”
He sat quietly with me for a time, lost in his own thoughts. He was past the age when he wanted to be carried or held, which gave me some idea of how terrified he was now. I was sure he had merely dreamed of Lucien, but I knew he did not believe this to be the case.
“Do you think he was trying to tell me something?” Charles asked.
“Perhaps he was,” I said.
“What?”
I reached for a packet of fragile papers lying on the small table next to us. “Let’s see if we can guess. When I was fighting in the Peninsula, and your father and I were far away from one another, he wrote these letters to me. Would you like me to read them to you?”
He nodded, and I chose one of the letters Lucien had written about him. He was pleased and laughed at Lucien’s comical descriptions of him as an infant, then asked me to read another. So we continued, until he suddenly said, “I smell smoke.”
“You have been listening to your Aunt Sophia.”