Page 25 of Miss Dauntless
“I’m not sorry I told you,” Tremont said. “But you seem to think that marrying Merridew was an unforgivable offense on your part. That is simply not the case. We do the best we can, Mrs. Merridew, and one cannot control the results.”
Her expression remained unreadable, so Tremont blundered on. “My superior officer was ordering us into certain, stupid death on a battlefield where every able-bodied soldier had a contribution to make. He ignored the very clear direction we’d had from headquarters and was willing to sacrifice his men on the altar of military vanity. What I did was wrong, a violation of military decorum, a crime, et cetera and so forth, and yet, I would do it again.”
That speech settled something for Tremont. He’d pondered and considered and ruminated on the events at Waterloo until he was sick of the memory, but he’d never quite admitted to himself that he’d made the only possible choice.
“Your superior officer,” Mrs. Merridew said, “was begging for a bullet, and you are right: From a certain perspective, I needed marrying. There is that.”
A log fell on the andirons, sending a shower of sparks up the flue. In the ensuing quiet, Tremont reviewed Matilda’s words in his head to make sure he had the sense of them.
“I cannot argue with you about Dunacre,” he said slowly, “and the men have kept my confidence as well. Powell knows, as do my mother and sister. The memory troubles me far less than it used to.” And making this confession to Matilda had shoved the whole business even further from the central location in Tremont’s awareness that it had once occupied. “Would you marry the scoundrel again?”
Matilda took her time answering. “Yes, but I would have guarded my heart. I saw Harry as my savior, plucking me from the misery of the vicarage, preventing me from ruining my owngood name by escorting me into the ever-respectable bounds of holy matrimony.”
“Harry was escorting himself into possession of your settlement portion.”
She nodded. “He could not get the house—that is my dower house, essentially—but before he died, he was beginning to drop hints that the time had come to sell it. Harry spent every groat he could get his hands on, and the house was the last asset I had left to bequeath to my son.”
Tremont added some jam tarts to the plate that held her sandwiches. “Battle lines were being drawn?”
“Hard for a woman to draw battle lines, my lord, when she has no money of her own, her husband stands nigh half a foot taller than she, and he is willing to use a mere infant as a bargaining chip. Harry used to call me Miss Dauntless, but the name came to feel more like a taunt rather than a fond nickname.”
Tremont made himself ask the next question. He would rather remain in ignorance of the answer, but he did not want Matilda to be alone with the truth.
“Did he beat you?”
“He did not need to.”
While she munched on a sandwich, Tremont silently counted backward from ten in Latin. “Because of the boy.”
“For all your fine manners, you are a discerning man, my lord. I considered taking Tommie and running to my aunt many times after my uncle died, but the authorities would have forced Aunt to hand me and Tommie right back over to Harry.”
If a deserter turned himself in, his punishment was usually to be shipped to the thick of the fighting, or worse, to the tropics, where disease would kill him as surely as any French bayonet could. If he did not turn himself in, he faced death upon capture.Parallels between enlisted military service and marriage began to insinuate themselves into Tremont’s thoughts.
“We get into situations,” he said, “where our choices are among bad and worse options. Did you kill your husband?” Did he hope she had?
“I did not. The notion appealed in the same way that being Queen of England appeals. I had sense enough by then to see that impulsive behavior had landed me in nothing but trouble. I had also begun to develop some weapons of my own. Harry sought desperately to be regarded as respectable, and thus I attended services. The self-same Church of England that had been such a source of frustration in my youth became a means of checking Harry’s worst notions.”
“If you were to pay calls, then your domicile had to have sufficient furnishings that you could receive calls, and so forth. You needed food in the larder, an acceptable wardrobe.”
“Precisely. Harry had pawned every pearl brooch or nacre button I owned by then. If that man had worked half as hard at legitimate ventures as he worked at confidence games and swindles… but he did not, and most of his games came to naught. Everything about him was false, and as his lies piled atop one another, he needed to range farther afield. He was off to Oxford when he died, hatching some scheme to bilk university boys of their allowances.”
Matilda started on the second sandwich. For a woman who longed to gobble, her manners were exquisite.
“Harry was not in London when he died?”
“On the Oxford Road. Food poisoning, if I’m to believe what I was told. A jealous husband is another possibility. The innkeeper made the final arrangements and sent Harry home to me in a plain coffin. I still have the letter condoling me on my loss and requesting payment for expenses incurred. Early in my widowhood, I read that letter several times a day.”
“To make certain that you hadn’t imagined his passing.”
“I dwelled in that peculiar land between a nightmare and waking, the place where you reassure yourself that ‘it was only a dream,’ but your heart is pounding, and you cannot make your mouth form coherent words. Fortunately, I had Tommie, and that child demands constant supervision and regular meals.”
“He’s a wonderful boy. You must be very proud of him. Are you even a little bit proud of yourself? You should be.”
Matilda set aside the empty sandwich plate and took to blinking at the fire. “Damn you.”
Damn you.The only other person in the room was Tremont, and thus she cursed at him. A tear slipped down the curve of her cheek. Making a lady cry had to be at the top of the list of things a fellow didnotdo when trying to win her favor.
“Mrs. Merridew?” Tremont produced a handkerchief and dangled it before her. “Matilda?”
