Page 57 of The Soldier
The duchess listened to him spin and discard a half-dozen schemes and bribes before he arrived to the least interesting but most effective option of all.
“Do you suppose, Esther”—he tucked her hand back into his—“we should just ask?”
***
“I’ve decided Rose must stay with me,” St. Just informed her stepfather, who waited at the bottom of the front steps for his horse to be brought around. “You have John; you don’t need Rose, too.” He scooped his niece up into a tight hug then set her down near the traveling coach.
“You’ll not kidnap my daughter,” Guinevere Allen, Viscountess Amery said, coming out of the house with John in her arms. “His Grace tried that, St. Just. I frown upon it, and Douglas gets positively irrational.”
St. Just grinned. “I should like to witness that, but perhaps not inspire it.”
Gwen leaned up and kissed his cheek. “St. Just, thank you for keeping Douglas out of trouble these weeks. It’s a thankless task, I know, as he’s so naturally prone to mischief. Husband, mount up. Their Graces said their farewells indoors, and the aunts will not be out of bed for hours yet.”
Douglas assisted his wife and children into the coach and gave the driver leave to walk on, then waited for Sir Regis’s girth to be tightened.
“You might consider marriage, you know,” Douglas said as the horse was led over. “It solved a world of difficulties for me, and I do not refer to the financial.”
“Perhaps you just want to assign responsibility for worrying about me to someone else.”
“I will worry about you for as long as I damned well please,” Douglas muttered. “Behave yourself, and—”
“I know.” St. Just wrapped him a hug. “You love me, you are proud of me, and you will keep me in your prayers.”
“Right.” Douglas nodded, holding on for a moment before stepping back. “Glad to see you were paying attention.”
“Be off with you.” St. Just patted Sir Regis’s neck. “And my thanks for everything.” Douglas saluted with his crop, swung aboard, and trotted off, soon disappearing into the plume of dust raised by the coach.
St. Just sat on the steps, watching the dust drift away on the morning breeze. If nothing else, the past six weeks had brought a friend into his life. A truly dear, worthy friend, a man he would have served with gladly. It wasn’t like having a brother back, not Bart nor Victor, but it was a profound consolation nonetheless.
Valentine Windham appeared at the top of the steps, his sable hair tousled, his green eyes speculative. He sidled down the steps, hands in his pockets, his lean form moving with sleepy grace. He lowered himself to sit beside his brother and frowned.
“Damned quiet without the brat,” Val said.
“Rose stole your heart, too, did she?”
“She’s a lot like Victor. I don’t know how that should be, but she’s droll and quick and passionate, and he’s gone, but then there’s Rose. And sometimes, in a certain light, she has a look of him around her eyes.”
“And in the chin, too, I think. You miss him.”
“I miss him.” Val glanced up at the blue summer sky. “He rallied in the summers, at least when it was dry. I think the coal dust aggravated him, and the damp.”
“And the dying,” St. Just said. “The going by degrees and days and minutes.”
“Many times he said he envied Bart, a nice, quick, clean bullet. Alive and cussing one minute, gone to his reward the next. No quacks, no nurses, no long faces around the bed.”
“I miss Bart, too,” St. Just mused. “No chance to say good-bye, no time to say what needed to be said, no period of grace to bargain with God and find some balance with the whole thing.”
“Damned lousy,” Val said, sounding more desolate than peevish. He laid his head on his brother’s shoulder. “Promise me you won’t pull a stunt like either of them.”
“I promise. You?”
“Swear to God. Word of a Windham.”
They were silent a long moment, the late summer morning barely stirring around them.
“That’s why you beat the stuffings out of me, isn’t it?” St. Just glanced over at his baby brother. “You might kill me with your bare hands, but you weren’t going to let another brother be taken from you.”
“That, and I was only then beginning to realize Victor wasn’t ill, he wasdying, and he was fighting it hard not because he enjoyed being trapped in a miserable body, but because we trapped him with our grief. I told him to let go, but he wasn’t about to listen to me.”
