Page 74 of The Captive Duke
“There’s always next year.” Her tactics wouldn’t deter him. Graves were part of a soldier’s life, after all.
She marched along beside him in silence, but it was a beautiful summer day, and Christian was content simply to bear her company. He’d grown accustomed to looking out his window and seeing her in the gardens, to listening for her footsteps coming to fetch him to the nursery, to seeing her across the candlelight at the evening meal.
“Is somebody tending Greendale’s grave?” he asked.
“That is not my concern. He would not allow me to garden while married to him. I’m not about to turn my skill in that regard to his benefit in death.”
She wasn’t an unkind woman—far from it—but her antipathy toward her late spouse was intense to the point of puzzling Christian.
“By rights, you should have hated Helene,” he said, hoping to turn the subject. “She had much that might have been yours.”
“A tiara?” She stopped while Christian opened the gate to the family plots. “I had my title, little good it did me.”
“Helene had a young man for a husband, one who sought to indulge her at least initially, and who left her in peace when the marriage foundered. She had children, a boy and a girl each, she had many friends andgallants, she had tremendous wealth, and staff to wait on her hand and foot… She had every reason to live.”
His countess preceded him through the gate, and he was relieved she didn’t respond to his last observation, or to the puzzlement in his tone.
“I’ll take the blanket,” she said, holding out a hand. He passed it to her from the top of the basket and watched while she spread it out, not near the headstones, but near the wall, where a bed of irises was going dormant after blooming profusely earlier in the year. Their scent had comforted him on more than one long, quiet evening.
“We’re to separate those?”
“It’s early,” she said, “but yes. They’ll do better for setting down some roots before winter comes, and in autumn, the Holland bulbs will demand lifting and separating. You needn’t bother to help.”
“I brought riding gloves.” He dropped to the blanket beside her and passed her one of his gloves, then put up his left hand. She held out the glove, though he’d developed the knack of putting on his own over the past few weeks.
“Your hand looks better,” she said, working the glove over his fingers. “The nails are growing in, the fingers not so bent.”
“The hand wants use. It hurts to use it, it hurts if I don’t use it, but at least then it has some strength and flexibility.” He got his right glove on by himself, because she was regarding him with an entirely too thoughtful frown.
Her ladyship gestured with a hand spade. “You start on that end. I’ll start on this one. They’re likely choked most tightly up against the wall.”
He had a momentary vision of bloody bodies all jumbled together at the base of some Spanish town’s siege walls while a hot wind whipped across an arid plain and flies buzzed in a malevolent cloud.
The Forlorn Hope they’d been called, the volunteers who had led the charge when the guns had breached the walls. For those who survived, it was a good chance at a field promotion, which meant a raise in pay, but it was near-certain death as well.
Still, volunteers had never been in short supply, and they’d broken every siege Wellington had put them to.
“Christian?”
He stared down at the hand spade she held out to him. “Woolgathering.”
“Go gently. The roots are tender.”
He knelt up, the better to get at the tangled roots and leaves, and started working back against the old stone wall surrounding the family plots. The roots erupted from the ground, a twisted, gnarled puzzle that seemed to him in want of a few good swats with the sharp side of a shovel.
“You have to be patient,” she said. “Think of them as ailing, in need of tender care.”
He sat back, rows and rows of stretchers in his mind’s eye, the groaning of the dying in his ears alongside the silence of the dead and nearly dead. And the stench…
Why today?Why the hell did these ghosts have to walk today?
“Was Helene truly prostrate with grief?” The question was out, a means of keeping his morbid imagination from dwelling on battle horrors.
“I was here,” the countess said, setting a dirty white root aside and using her gloved fingers to pry at another. “She’d brought herself nearly to exhaustion fretting over Evan. Easterbrook was very concerned for her.”
“She nursed Evan herself?”
While Christian battled an ache in his fingers, Gilly tugged the root from the choke hold of its neighbors. “She hadn’t the patience, but she fretted nonetheless, looked in on him constantly, spent a great deal of time trying to write to you and ask you to come home.”
