Page 58 of Miss Dignified
All this subterfuge and skulking about…
“There’s more, sir.”
“With you, there is always more, Brook.” None of it good.
“Her ladyship called on the solicitors again this morning.”
“Collecting funds, no doubt.” But then, would Lydia need funds if she had a housekeeper’s salary, lodging, and the usual allowance for candles, tea, and beer? Marcus longed to simpy talk to her, to hear her crisp, confident voice, to again catch a whiff of her rosy fragrance.
She’d been a protective big sister, and Marcus had looked forward to the day when he could be her protective adult brother. He’d bungled that as badly as he’d bungled everything else.
“If Lydia has asked Powell to search for me, then sooner or later he will find me,” Marcus said. “We’d best break ranks, Brook. Make up some tale of being coshed on the head after imbibing too freely. Contrive to look convincingly disheveled and suffer a few judicious lapses of memory.”
Brook peered at him. “You want me to lie to my own brother?”
If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.Excellent guidance from Marcus Aurelius, though impractical when a fellow wanted to live to draw another breath. The philosopher had also said that the best revenge was to never be like one’s enemy.
How did one apply that guidance when one was one’s own worst enemy? A conundrum for the ages.
“Bowen will want to believe what you tell him,” Marcus said, “and he’ll know enough to not ask awkward questions.”
“The captain will ask awkward questions. You can send me out waving a white flag, and if the captain is searching for you, he’ll only look that much harder when I try to bamboozle him.”
Meaning Powell would ask awkward questionsof Brook, and Brook, being human and half in awe of Powell, would eventually give something away. Marcus wanted to bang his head on the desk, but that would solve nothing.
“I need time to think.”
“You’ve had years to think, sir, and what you did wasn’t so very wrong. Stupid perhaps, though we all understand why you did it, but the war is over, and Powell isn’t the kind to—”
“Powell was and is the regimental conscience,” Marcus snapped, abruptly out of patience with Brook, Powell, Lydia, and life in general. “He of all people,of all officers, would not understand.” And Brook did not understand that one terribly bungled moment on a battlefield was not the worst of Marcus’s lapses of honor.
“Fine, then,” Brook said, “I will offer my brother a Banbury tale, which he will see through as easily as the captain does, but you need to know this, sir: I took up bodyguard duty where you are concerned because somebody was asking around about you before I supposedly went missing.”
Marcus’s annoyance congealed into dread. “Explain yourself.”
“The questions were casual and quiet, but they were aimed at finding men who reported to you directly. I decided somebody ought to keep an eye on you—why search out your direct reports, if not to eventually locate you? I was your batman, while Bowen served under Powell. I suspect whoever gave him such a beating simply got the wrong Private Brook.”
“I don’t like this.” The situation, which had been complicated before, was growing convoluted.
“I don’t like this at all. Somebody was nosing about and interrogating the men… about me?” Lydia wouldn’t have nosing-about connections in London, but Wesley or some of his unsavory friends might.
“So I hear, and I would like to discuss this with Bowen. He’s shrewd, and he may have heard things I haven’t.”
“Discuss it quietly and report back.”
“Bowen won’t lie to the captain, sir.”And neither will I.A reproach lay in Brook’s unspoken words. One did not have to cite Marcus Aurelius to know that truth was preferable to a lie.
“Then the captain learns that somebody was looking for me in low places and mistakenly tried to beat some answers out of an innocent party. My own sister is apparently trying to find me, as is—I suspect—Powell himself on her behalf.”
“Powell will find you,” Brook said. “Your best bet is to leave while you can.”
A disorderly retreat was the worst disgrace that could befall an officer. Better to be taken captive on the battlefield, best of all to fall in victorious battle.
Except that Marcus had never wanted to be an officer. He’d wanted to be a philosophical sort of peer, pondering eternal questions at length, while tending his acres and finding some pleasant female to while away the years with.
Those wants had died early one winter morning in Tremont’s vast deer park. Now Marcus wanted two things, the first being the courage to admit the wrongs he’d done and to atone for them as best he could. An impulse that honorable would surely get him killed, and he frankly dreaded to die on the end of a rope with a crowd gleefully jeering to see a peer hanged.
The second longing, the one so painful and constant he never spoke of it, was simply to see his mother again. To feel her embrace, to one last time behold the love in her eyes, even if that love was clouded with disappointment.
