Page 63 of The Captive Duke
“Yes.” A telltale crease appeared between his golden brows. He was puzzling something out, possibly abouther. She spoke to distract him.
“Tell me about this Colonel St. Just.”
The duke blew out a considering breath. “He is both canny and kind, probably a soldier poet beneath all his Irish charm and ducal bluster. I traveled north with him when I left Toulouse. He’s the oldest of ten, and it informs his style of command.”
“Interesting. Aren’t most officers younger sons?”
“Many are. I think you will like him, and I know he will like you.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“Nothing,” he said, reaching over to pat her hand. “Not one thing.”
And then he fell silent, watching his silent daughter, and Gilly could do nothing but sit silently beside him, wondering what it meant when a man recalled a lady’s every word but refused to kiss her again.
“You are charming my countess,” Christian said, passing a brandy to St. Just. In civilian clothes, the colonel was handsomer than ever, and Christian was curiously glad to see him.
“Lady Greendale is charming me,” St. Just said, pausingbefore a pistol crossbow, the smallest in the Severn family collection. “My thanks for the libation. This little darling has to be quite venerable.”
He held his drink as he studied the weapon, a man who knew to savor the finer things, when another officer on leave might have tossed back his brandy at one go.
“That weapon is two hundred years old, at least.” And it still looked lethal as hell. “Her ladyship charms all in her ambit, including my daughter.” Though what had been amiss with the late earl of Greendale, that Gillian apparently hadn’t charmed him?
Christian poured himself a drink from the tray some thoughtful countess had sent up to the armory, half the amount he’d given St. Just.
St. Just turned his attention to a longbow, a weapon nearly as tall as the men who would have used it.
“If Lady Greendale is the reason your hands don’t shake, you’ve put on two stone of muscle, and your eyes no longer look like you recently took tea in hell’s family parlor, then I must consider her a friend.”
“She’s part of it.” Two stone? Well, perhaps one. One and a half. “A big part. She has the gift of domesticity, of creating a comforting sort of tranquillity.”
“My five sisters do that for me. Her Grace is not my mother, though for reasons known only to her, she loves me as if I were one of her own. The girls, though…they scold and hug and laugh and watch a fellow all the while, catching him at the odd moment and prying confidences from him.”
“And you love them for it?”
He moved on to another longbow, this one Welsh and supposedly a veteran of the Battle of Agincourt. Christian’s father had let him shoot it once, on his fifteenth birthday. His forearm had sported a fierce bruise for weeks.
“How can I not love such sisters?” St. Just asked. “You saw what I saw on the Peninsula. The officers’ wives, the laundresses, the cooks. They put up with the same deprivations the soldiers did, and complained a good deal less.”
Both men fell silent, while St. Just was polite enough to appear to savor his drink and Christian wondered why generations of Severns had kept these weapons in this high-ceilinged, carpeted stronghold, as if they were treasures rather than instruments of death.
“I dread going home, too, though,” St. Just said, apropos of nothing save perhaps his drink, the lateness of the hour, and the battered suit of armor standing guard in a corner.
“You do,” Christian said, “because you think the effort of holding the war inside you, and your family outside you, will defeat your reason. When you were campaigning, it was exactly the opposite. You carried your family in your heart, and the fighting went on around you. It’s…difficult, being a soldier, and also somebody’s son, somebody’s dear older brother.”
Somebody’s papa.
The proceeds from a sale of this old lot of death and destruction would feed a deal of puppies.
Or old soldiers.
“And as carefully as they teach us to shoot,” St. Just said, sighting down the stock of a cavalry crossbow, “as punctiliously as we look after our mounts and our gear and our weapons, they don’t teach us what to do with that difficulty of being two men housed in one body. I suspect it’s half the motivation for the battlefield heroics we saw time after time.”
Christian took the cranequin from him and replaced it on its brass wall hooks. “A wish to die rather than hold those two men in one body?”
“A deadly confusion, in any case, a fatal inability to suffer both peace and war in the same human being.”
St. Just had no visible scars, but watching him balance an ivory-handled dagger on his finger, carefully indifferent to the weapon’s nature, while minutely attentive to its craftsmanship, Christian endured an abrupt need to drag his guest from the armory.
