He laughed, a bitter, hoarse sound. “As if being gifted with thousands of pounds to buy a lieutenancy is making one’s own way. And Jem’s connections ensured that I was promoted to captain as soon as humanly possible. I made my own way, all right.”
Frances’s hand shifted in his. “You cannot be blamed for taking advantage of… well, of your advantage. I am sure the army benefited from your good leadership.”
“You’re sure about that, are you?” Henry made himself look at her face. Her expression was worried, but her fingers tightened in his. A reassurance: she wasn’t going anywhere.
Yet.
He shook his head at her. “I had only the best of the army. The First Foot Guards. Very prestigious, you know. A fitting place for the son of an earl. We held the blockade at Bayonne for months. Over time, I earned the trust of the men who fought under me.”
He’d worked harder to earn that trust than he ever had for anything else. Despite his youth and inexperience, he had at least seen the need for that. Thus his trick of sprawling on the ground, as if nothing could scare him.
He was usually too exhausted to think of elegant phrases to inspire his men, and so he spoke plainly to them. He gave them his honesty and his own trust, and it had worked much better than if he had puffed himself off as the son of an earl. There would have been no point to such arrogance; a blue-blooded man could be killed just as easily as a red-blooded one.
Blood would tell, though. Henry’s certainly had.
A sigh tried to escape, but he swallowed it. “I did my best to deserve that trust for a time. But after Bonaparte abdicated, I grew soft during months of relative ease. I began to think there was nothing left of war but being feted and looking at art.”
“That was a wonderful time,” Frances murmured. “The festivities here went on for weeks. We never imagined Bonaparte would escape and rebuild his army.”
“None of us did either,” Henry said. He might have been able to return to England during those buoyant months of peace had he wanted to. Wellington had come back to London for a time, and honors had been heaped upon the great general. But Henry had preferred a Continental billeting. He’d been unsatisfied, feeling as though he hadn’t truly made his own way yet, and he wanted to explore further. Become an artist or a soldier or both.
Instead, he had become neither.
“Much of the cream of European society found one another during the months of Bonaparte’s exile,” Henry continued. “It was rather like the London season, only the balls were held in palazzos and châteaux instead of crowded Town mansions. I saw paintings I’d never dreamed I’d be able to view in person. I was sure once I returned to London—someday, whenever I wanted to be—I would be reborn as a painter, mysteriously able to recreate life in oils as they had.”
“Oh.” Frances pressed a hand to her mouth. Pity.
His fingers flexed in her other hand, wanting suddenly to escape. But he would finish, no matter how her expression changed. “‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’ Isn’t that how the poet Burns described our efforts? We tried to recreate the polite world in Europe, and it was our undoing. Perhaps you have heard of the ball thrown by the Duchess of Richmond?”
Frances shook her head. “It was very grand, I suppose?”
“Very grand, indeed. The duchess’s ballroom was long and low ceilinged, but you can imagine nothing loftier. All the best people were there. Wellington and nearly all of his officers. Several foreign princes. The pinnacle of the Belgian aristocracy. We waltzed and supped. I danced twice with Lady Georgiana, Richmond’s daughter, and she teased me about causing a scandal. It was a very great joke. By this time, I had almost forgotten what war was like.”
Henry could almost hear the duchess’s merry orchestra inviting him to dance. Strings, dainty and vibrant, and layered over them, the shouts of the lancers slaughtering his men. Only a few hours apart, he could never separate them now.
It was hard to believe it had taken place mere months before. It seemed ten years ago—or only a night.
He worked his fingers free from Frances’s hand and rose to pace around the room. “As the evening turned into night, we received the sudden news that Bonaparte was mustering for battle again. We left the ball at once and prepared to fight. Wellington chose to head the French off at Quatre Bras. I would have thought it a picturesque little country crossroads, I am sure, had I not been awake all night and marched twenty miles to reach it. At least I had put my boots on. Some men still wore their dancing pumps.”
“Good lord,” Frances breathed. “I am sorry.”
Henry trailed his fingers over the smooth plaster of the wall, rubbed the heavy patterned velvet of the window draperies between his fingertips.
“Do not be sorry for me, please.” Please. “It was no more than I signed on for and no more than anyone else would have been expected to do. But I had enjoyed the softness of peace, and I wasn’t ready to return to war. My head had been turned and my eyes were tired. I should have noticed what I’d been trained for three years to notice: tall crops that could hide enemy soldiers, tall old trees that could hide still more. I noticed none of that, and so I led my men into a trap.”
“What happened?”
He stared at a painting on the wall. A hunting scene. The men wore bright red coats, the color Henry’s uniform coat had been before the sun faded it to the color of a bloody brick. They wielded guns they looked delighted to use. They held the reins of sleek horses with bobbed tails, ready to spring over walls in pursuit of a small fox. Oh, what fun, to go hunting.
He turned, impatient with himself. “I didn’t see the lancers. There were so many; I don’t know how I could have missed them. I must have thought I was home again in England. I ordered my men forward as if we were marching in a parade, and they marched right into lancers instead.” He shut his eyes, but too well did they remember the sight of man after man, skewered. Horrible.
“I myself was fortunate,” he said with dark irony. “I was able to dodge them and take a few down before several Frenchmen ripped my musket from my hands while I tried to reload. The wrong choice again. I should have drawn my sword. They dislocated my shoulder; I must have looked dead as I fell. I might as well have been. I was not much of a threat to them after that. Nor was I any help, as my men died in the woods. We lost hundreds. Those that survived went on to fight at Waterloo. They were very brave.”
“As were you,” Frances said. Henry could not see her face; his eyes were fixed on the polish of his top boots. Not Hessians. He would never wear tasseled Hessians now, like a dandy pretending to be a soldier.
“I was passable at best. A dislocated shoulder is nothing out of the common way. But I was too tired to bear the pain until a surgeon came, so I asked one of my soldiers to fix it. He was more tired than I, poor fellow, and he pulled wrongly, and far too hard. I don’t know what happened. I only know it hurt terribly, as though my arm was being ripped off, and then it went numb. And it’s been numb ever since.”
How he would have loved to come home whole, covered in glory. But he had not. For a long time, he hadn’t even been sure whether he had really come home.
“You were at war, Henry,” Frances said at last. “Your soldiers knew the risks just as you did.”
Henry pressed on. “But they trusted me.”
“Then you must have been a good captain to them.”